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Enlarge / The solar sail used to accelerate the craft provides a large target for dust grains. (credit: Breakthrough Starshot)

Breakthrough Starshot is one of the more exciting scientific ideas that has popped up in the past decade, with its promise to deliver hardware to the nearest star in time for many people currently alive to see it. While the idea would work on paper as an extrapolation of existing technology, there are a lot of details that need to be thoroughly checked out, because it's possible that one of them could present a show-stopper.

There's a bit of good news there: Breakthrough Starshot is apparently funding the needed research to give its concept a thorough vetting. A recent posting to the arXiv describes a careful look at the odds of a spacecraft surviving an extended journey at the speeds planned for the trip. Overall, things look good, but a bit of shielding will be needed, and there's the potential for a catastrophic collision with a speck of dust.

The work, done by a team of four astronomers, focuses on one of the most basic issues: spacecraft survival. The goal of Breakthrough Starshot is to accelerate its craft to about 20 percent the speed of light. At that speed, even individual atoms can damage the vehicle, and a collision with a bit of dust could be catastrophic. So the team set out to quantify just how risky these collisions could be.

Enlarge / Jeff Williams works aboard the Space Station in April. (credit: NASA)

During his nearly year-long mission aboard the International Space Station, former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly garnered a large measure of attention for his Ironman feats, including setting a US record for the cumulative amount of time in space—520 days. Jeff Williams may be less well-known, but he will quietly become NASA’s new spaceflight Ironman on Wednesday morning.

Williams has reached 520 days after a Space Shuttle mission in 2000, two previous increments on the Space Station in 2006 and 2009, and he’s now nearing the end of his third mission to the Space Station. When he lands on September 6, Williams will have spent a cumulative 534 days in space, two weeks longer than Kelly’s total. (No NASA astronaut can equal the duration records of Russian cosmonauts. The all-time leader, Gennady Padalka, has spent 879 days in space over five missions).

In many ways, Williams' tenure at NASA has paralleled the development of the Space Station. After a decorated career as a test pilot, Williams was selected to become an astronaut in 1996, a time when the United States and Russia were in the formative stages of planning and developing the station as an international project. His first spaceflight, in May 2000, was just the third shuttle flight devoted to station construction. It helped pave the way for the first crews to live aboard the station, beginning in November, 2000. Williams is also the first NASA astronaut to spend three separate increments aboard the orbiting laboratory.

When Comcast brought its gigabit download cable service to Chicago last week, there was plenty of confusion about the price. Comcast initially said it would cost $140 a month, even though a $70 monthly price is available in other cities where Comcast has to compete against Google Fiber.

But after we published a story Friday, a Comcast spokesperson said the $70 offer was available in Chicago after all, contrary to what the company had said earlier that day. But there’s a difference between Comcast telling the media that a great deal is available and customers actually being able to sign up for it.

Comcast told us that customers interested in the offer should sign up at xfinity.com/gig. But when you follow the links, the only pricing listed is $300 a month for 2Gbps fiber Internet and $140 a month for 1Gbps download speeds (with 35Mbps uploads).

Samsung is apparently working on an Amazon Echo clone. A circular Bluetooth-speaker-and-microphone combo called the "Samsung Scoop" was spotted in the FCC database by Android fan site Ausdroid.

The Scoop looks a lot like a mini Amazon Echo—it's a squat little cylinder about 80mm in diameter. There's a speaker on top with Play/Pause and volume controls around the perimeter. On the side is a power button and a flap hiding a USB plug (it looks like Type C?) and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The Scoop is so compact that it's apparently going to be portable. Samsung gave it a big leathery carrying handle and—if the circuit board labeled "battery board" is any indication—a rechargeable battery.

What Samsung plans to do with the software on the Scoop is a bit of a mystery. The majority of the functionality in Samsung's smartphones comes from Android, but there's no established operating system for these Bluetooth voice command speakers. Will the Scoop run Samsung's Tizen OS? Like "S-Voice" on a Galaxy smartphone, we'll expect a Nuance-powered voice command system, but with Samsung shutting down its Milk Music service, we aren't expecting too many home-grown services on the Scoop. It will be starting from scratch in the app ecosystem, too. There's also the possibility that the Scoop is a "dumb" device and would rely on a tethered smartphone for the voice commands to work.

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Recently released code that exploits Cisco System firewalls and has been linked to the National Security Agency can work against a much larger number of models than many security experts previously thought.

An exploit dubbed ExtraBacon contains code that prevents it from working on newer versions of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), a line of firewalls that's widely used by corporations, government agencies, and other large organizations. When the exploit encounters 8.4(5) or newer versions of ASA, it returns an error message that prevents it from working. Now researchers say that with a nominal amount of work, they were able to modify ExtraBacon to make it work on a much newer version. The finding means that ExtraBacon poses a bigger threat than many security experts may have believed.

(credit: SilentSignal)

The newly modified exploit is the work of SilentSignal, a penetration testing firm located in Budapest, Hungary. In an e-mail, SilentSignal researcher Balint Varga-Perke wrote:

Enlarge / WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange prepares to speak from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy on February 5, 2016 in London, England. (credit: Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

Even as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sits trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, the WikiLeaks website continues to publish the secrets of various governments worldwide.

But that's not all it's publishing. A report today by the Associated Press highlights citizens who had "sensitive family, financial or identity records" published by the site.

"They published everything: my phone, address, name, details," said one Saudi man whose paternity dispute was revealed on documents published by the site. "If the family of my wife saw this... Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people."