Month: July 2016

In this conceptual image, eight SuperDraco thrusters fire as a Dragon spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere at supersonic speeds. (credit: SpaceX)

In April, when SpaceX announced an ambitious mission to land an uncrewed Dragon spacecraft on Mars by 2018, one of the biggest questions was how much the private rocket company would spend on this venture. Now we have a ballpark estimate: $300 million.

During a meeting of NASA's Advisory Council Tuesday, one of the agency's deputy associate administrators, Jim Reuter, provided an overview of NASA’s agreement with SpaceX, SpaceNews reports. NASA estimated that it would spend about $32 million on the mission, with SpaceX spending about 10 times as much.

The agency and the company have a Space Act agreement that bars the transfer of funds, but the agreement will allow NASA to assist SpaceX with some technical advice. NASA can also gather critical information about the Martian atmosphere and get tips on how to slow a large spacecraft descending toward the planet's surface. It's also likely that NASA, with its assets in orbit around Mars, will help facilitate communication between the Red Dragon and Earth.

(credit: amalthya)

A bug in the Telegram Messager app logged anything its users pasted into their chats in its syslog on macOS, even if they had opted for the end-to-end encrypted "secret" mode.

The vulnerability was spotted earlier this month by Russian infosec operative Kirill Firsov, who directly and publicly challenged Telegram's flamboyant founder and chief Pavel Durov about the app's latest security flaw.

Official #Telegram for MacOS logs every pasted message to syslog, even in secret chats. @durov what's going on? pic.twitter.com/MvbWguAkT0

— Kirill Firsov (@k_firsov) July 23, 2016

In an angry reply, Durov admitted that the vuln existed, but insisted it "applies only to texts that were copy-pasted from clipboard, and such texts are open to all other Mac apps anyway."

(credit: Noah Coffey)

A Florida judge has decided in favor of a bitcoin vendor charged with violating local money-laundering laws, because, she found, the cryptocurrency is not money as defined under state law.

“The Florida Legislature may choose to adopt statutes regulating virtual currency in the future,” Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Teresa Mary Pooler wrote in her Monday opinion. “At this time, however, attempting to fit the sale of bitcoin into a statutory scheme regulating money services businesses is like fitting a square peg in a round hole.”

According to her eight-page opinion, a Miami police detective began investigating local bitcoin sales in the area in 2013 after learning more about it from a local and federal task force led by the Secret Service. Detective Ricardo Arias then started looking at postings on localbitcoins.com, a website where people can arrange in-person bitcoin sales for cash, often anonymously. One vendor, “Michelhack,” offered 24-hour availability and only wanted to meet in public places, which Arias thought might be suspicious.

US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap of the Eastern District of Texas hears more patent cases than any other federal judge. Last year, he installed a set of controversial rules for those cases, leading to rare public criticism. Changes to Gilstrap's order (Word file), dated last week, suggest some of those rules have been withdrawn.

Section 101 of the US patent laws is what the Supreme Court has deemed bans overly abstract patents. Since the high court decided Alice v. CLS Bank in 2014, Section 101 has become more important, since courts have been reading it as banning many software patents that recite basic processes.

Last year, the patent rules for Gilstrap's court held that defendants seeking to file a motion under Section 101 "may do so only upon a grant of leave from the Court after a showing of good cause, which shall be presented through the letter briefing process."

An iOS app called Summer of Darkness was released earlier this summer, just in time for the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. What few people remember is that Shelley wrote Frankenstein during a terrifying summer in the Swiss Alps, after a massive volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia caused weather across the globe to turn grim and cold. Many Europeans believed this disaster-induced climate change meant the world was ending. Summer of Darkness recreates this historical moment with daily updates from the writings of four famous authors who traveled together that summer.

Shelley spent the apocalyptic months between May and September touring the Swiss Alps. She was joined by a group of literary friends, including poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who would soon become her husband, as well as writer John Polidari. Spurred by a writing challenge from Byron and the terrible weather, the group wrote ghost stories. Two of those stories, Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidari's Vampyr, gave birth to new genres of popular fiction. Meanwhile, Byron and Percy wrote poetry together in a blaze of productivity kindled by their new friendship.

Summer of Darkness offers a fascinating look at the lives of these writers, as well as the events that inspired their creativity that year. The app was built by designer Andrew Sempere and author Anindita Basu Sempere, an American couple who have been living in Switzerland for many years, surrounded by the same landscapes that Shelley and her friends saw two centuries ago. As you read snippets of letters, poems, memoirs, and stories by the group, the app provides beautifully rendered maps to show where exactly each person was as the summer unfolded. Brief flashes of rain and lightning illuminate the screen behind the text, providing a delightful but non-invasive hint of atmosphere. You receive updates to unlock material as the summer unfolds in real time, and if you download the app now you can consume all the past updates in one glorious binge. New updates continue into September.