Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) is likely to be NASA's next administrator. (credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

NASA may finally be close to getting some clarity about its leadership during the Trump administration. On Tuesday, NASA Watch reported that the President will nominate US Representative Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), as administrator and Aerojet Rocketdyne Vice President John Schumacher as deputy administrator. Both men have been rumored to be nominated for these posts in recent weeks, but there have been no official confirmations as yet.

Two sources familiar with Washington, DC, space politics confirmed the choices to Ars, but one of them offered a caveat. "I have heard same from multiple sources, but this is Trump world," one DC-based source said. A formal announcement has been in the works for September, but a date and location have not yet been set. A NASA spokeswoman did not reply to a query from Ars on Tuesday evening.

John Logsdon, a noted space historian and author of several books, including After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program, said he has been hearing the same names. "Appointing Jim Bridenstine and John Schumacher as the top two NASA officials is an intriguing and potentially very productive move," Logsdon told Ars, via e-mail. "Bridenstine, for several years, has been conceptualizing what is needed for, as he suggests, an 'American Space Renaissance' and has been testing his ideas with multiple audiences. Schumacher is a Washington space community veteran, with years of both senior NASA and space industry executive experience. Together, they can bring both fresh ideas and a sense of political and policy realism to the space agency."

Shaun Bridges was captured by CCTV security cameras, leaving a Secret Service field office in 2015 with a large bag. The government said the bag may have contained hard drives with keys needed to access his Bitstamp wallet. (credit: US Attorney’s Office San Francisco)

SAN FRANCISCO—Former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges pleaded guilty on Tuesday to new counts of money laundering and related forfeiture.

In May 2015, Bridges was sentenced to 71 months after he stole money from Silk Road dealers while investigating Silk Road, a now-defunct Tor-hidden underground website.

Over a year ago, federal authorities strongly suggested in court filings that, in 2015, after Bridges had left the Secret Service and after he had already signed his first guilty plea, he had illegally transferred to himself over 1,600 bitcoins. Those bitcoins had previously been seized by federal authorities from Bitstamp, a European Bitcoin exchange, which later challenged the seizure.

Enlarge (credit: Money - Savings)

A 32-year-old American man accused of using an eBay account for fake computer-printer transactions to raise funds for a US terror plot pleaded guilty to federal terrorism-related charges Tuesday.

Mohamed Elshinawy, whom the government said pledged allegiance to ISIS, told the authorities that the up to $8,700 he received via PayPal was to be used for "operational purposes" (PDF) in the US, like conducting a terror attack. However, he also told the authorities, according to court documents, that he was just ripping off overseas ISIS operatives and had no intention of carrying out an attack in the US.

Elshinawy

The FBI said in court documents that the authorities began investigating the Maryland man in 2015 after he received a $1,000 Western Union money transfer from Egypt.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images)

A US-based solar-panel components maker called Suniva filed a petition with the International Trade Commission (ITC) this spring, alleging unfair trade practices after the company declared bankruptcy. It was later joined in its petition by SolarWorld America, another US-based solar cell manufacturer. Today, the two companies pleaded their case (PDF) in front of the ITC and are asking for tariffs to be placed on solar-panel materials imported to the US.

Specifically, “the petition seeks a 40-cent-per-watt duty on imported cells and a 78-cent-per-watt floor price for imported modules,” according to E&E News. Panels and their components have been plummeting in price, and Suniva and SolarWorld say this is mainly due to cheap imports from China and Southeast Asia. The tariffs they seek would apply to solar panel components imported to the US from anywhere in the world, however.

“Quite simply, we need the commission’s help to save solar manufacturing in the United States,” Jürgen Stein, chief executive of SolarWorld Americas, said in testimony before the commission, according to The Washington Post. “Relief under Section 201 is our last hope.”

Some of my tabs.

If your browser is a catastrophe of tabs as mine is—I currently have six Chrome windows across three monitors with more than 100 tabs open, because tabs are the new bookmarks—then this thing I just discovered may be life-changing. (Though it's certainly not new.)

We all know that you can tear a tab off the tab bar to drag it into a new window (or drag it into a different tab bar to move it from window to window). What if I told you that you can use the standard selection modifiers—ctrl-click for multiple non-contiguous tabs, shift-click for multiple contiguous tabs—to tear off entire groups of related tabs in a single action?

Because believe it or not, you can.

Enlarge / A Kaby Lake desktop CPU, not that you can tell the difference in a press shot. This is built using Intel's 14nm+ process. (credit: Intel)

Intel has given an unusual insight into the road ahead for its mainstream desktop and laptop processors, confirming the existence of a new processor family called Ice Lake.

Once upon a time, the company planned to follow up Skylake, built on a 14nm process, with Cannon Lake, built on a 10nm process and shipping in late 2016. But that plan was derailed. The 14nm process took longer than expected to bed down and start working properly. Our understanding is that Intel moved engineers that were developing 10nm to help with fixing 14nm. This had a few knock-on effects. First, it required Intel to produce additional designs built on 14nm: last year's Kaby Lake uses the second-generation 14nm+ process, and this year's Coffee Lake will use a third-generation 14nm++ process.

Second, it delayed 10nm. 10nm parts aren't now expected until 2018, when Cannon Lake finally materializes. The newly confirmed Ice Lake will use a second-generation 10nm process, 10nm+.