Month: February 2018

Enlarge / The B1032.2 booster is not dead yet. (credit: Elon Musk/SpaceX/Twitter)

On Wednesday evening, a couple of hours after the Falcon 9 rocket had successfully deployed a satellite into geostationary transfer orbit, SpaceX founder Elon Musk shared a rather amazing photo on Twitter. "This rocket was meant to test very high retrothrust landing in water so it didn’t hurt the droneship, but amazingly it has survived," he wrote. "We will try to tow it back to shore." In other words, a rocket that SpaceX had thought would be lost after it made an experimental, high-thrust landing somehow survived after hitting the ocean.

This was amazing for a couple of reasons. First of all, when the first stage of a rocket hits water after a launch, it typically explodes. (This can be seen in some of the early water landing attempts shown in a blooper reel released by the company). A rocket should not survive impact because it will rupture the relatively thin aluminum-lithium alloy tanks that separate fuel and oxidizer. These tanks are built to withstand the axial force of a vertical launch, but not a crash into the ocean.

In this case, that did not happen. Perhaps the rocket descended such that the engines and lower end of the booster were submerged, before the 40-meter tall first stage tipped over—gently. Hopefully, at some point, SpaceX will release video from the on-board camera or other assets in the Atlantic Ocean that observed the landing on Wednesday evening.

Even the smallest details of Stranger Things get a delightful amount of tech attention. (video link)

Warning: This post contains references to Stranger Things 2. You can read our review of season one or episodes 1-3, episodes 4-6, and episodes 7-9 of season two elsewhere on the site.

Stranger Things' recent second season not only (successfully) returned in the face of more hype; the show had more resources to account for, too. Variety reported the budget increased by at least 25 percent, taking Stranger Things from surprise hit into prestige drama budget territory.

While some of that certainly helped shape another iconic '80s soundtrack, Stranger Things 2 ultimately delivered more overall spectacle. More characters visited the Upside Down, demogorgons suddenly ran in packs and appeared in their adolescent forms, and our heroes got to have one final action movie-quality sequence to shut everything down in the end.

Enlarge / Evil angry robot . Render on blackbackground (credit: Kirillm / Getty Images)

The tools used by security researchers, penetration testers, and "red teams" often spark controversy because they package together and automate attacks to a degree that makes some uncomfortable—and often, those tools end up getting folded into the kits of those with less noble pursuits.  AutoSploit, a new tool released by a "cyber security enthusiast" has done more than spark controversy, however, by combining two well-known tools into an automatic hunting and hacking machine—in much the same way people already could with an hour or two of copy-pasting scripts together.

Malicious parties have weaponized scanning utilities, network commands, and security tools with various forms of automation before. By "stress testing" tools such as "Low-orbit Ion Cannon" (LOIC), High Orbit Ion Cannon (written in RealBasic!) and the Lizard Squad’s stresser site powered by hacked Wi-Fi routers, they took exploits known well to security pros and turned them into political and economic weapons. The Mirai botnet did the same with Internet of Things devices, building a self-spreading attack tool based on well-documented vulnerabilities in connected devices.

AutoSploit is slightly more sophisticated, but only because it leverages two popular, well-supported security tools. "As the name might suggest," its author wrote on the tool's GitHub page, "AutoSploit attempts to automate the exploitation of remote hosts." To do that, the Python script uses command line interfaces and text files to extract data from the Shodan database, which is a search engine that taps into scan data on millions of Internet-connected systems. AutoSploit then runs shell commands to execute the Metasploit penetration testing framework.

The beloved Cassini, which fired its thrusters one last time last September, is just one of many things we've left out in space. (video link)

In the past 60 years, humans have left a lot of stuff on other worlds or floating in space. We’ve landed (or crashed) spacecraft on Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, and Titan. Along with the hundreds of objects in orbit around Earth, the Moon, and Mars, those spacecraft provide a physical record of human activity that could outlast some of the most ancient ruins here on Earth.

“There's stuff in orbit, particularly in middle to high orbits, that's up there for thousands or even millions of years,” said Flinders University space archaeologist Alice Gorman.

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

This week, we learned that the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether Apple took actions that violated securities laws when it throttled certain iPhones' performance without informing investors or users. This follows previous reports of class action lawsuits on behalf of consumers as well as public officials from both the United States and France calling for answers.

Consumers and many members of the press have been outraged. Some have gone so far as to accuse Apple of throttling the phones to make them obsolete more quickly so consumers would have to upgrade, and they insist that users should have been able to choose whether their phones did this or not. Other critics have simply said Apple should have at least been more transparent about the throttling.

It’s easy to poke holes in the theory that Apple implemented throttling to drive quicker adoption of new phones (which we'll get into shortly). Whether most users should have been given the choice is debatable. But Apple definitely should have been more transparent.