Month: August 2018

Tesla's Model 3 page in July 2018.

Tesla expects to be "cashflow positive every quarter from here on out, absent paying down a big loan," said Elon Musk on a financial call on Wednesday.

The CEO came to the call contrite, apologizing to analysts that he had snapped at on last quarter's call and offering subdued analysis for the quarter ahead. “Sorry if I sound a little tired I’ve been working like crazy in the body shop lately,” Musk said.

Tesla published its Q2 2018 financial statement this afternoon, and it was a mixed bag for investors. The company lost more money than it was expected to lose, but Tesla has finally hit the promised 5,000 Model 3s per week number this quarter. As a result, Tesla is slightly up in after-hours trading.

Enlarge / An artist's view of the Starliner spacecraft en route to the International Space Station. (credit: Boeing)

On Wednesday, Boeing's John Mulholland, who manages the company's commercial crew program, provided an update on Boeing's development of its Starliner spacecraft. And, as was widely expected, the company moved its schedule to the right.

Now, instead of August 2018, Boeing will target the end of this year (or early 2019) for an uncrewed, orbital flight test of its Starliner vehicle. And the first flight of the spacecraft with astronauts aboard, which had been set for November 2018, will slip to mid-2019, Mulholland said. He added that NASA is working toward these dates as well, and he said that the company believes they are realistic.

Problems can always occur during the test phase of a spacecraft, of course. "There are certainly potential risks in front of us as we move through the remaining test program," Mulholland said. "There is always, by its nature, the risk of discovery." The biggest risk will come during the finalization of the test program and the discovery of new items that must be addressed before flight. "These development programs are hard," he said. "Especially for human spacecraft."

Enlarge / An artist's approximation of what an in-car Tesla game might look like. Remember, steer into the Nazis. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Scrutiny over Tesla autodriving issues apparently hasn't dissuaded the car maker's CEO from suggesting potentially unsafe products—and for once, we don't mean The Boring Company's $500 flamethrowers.

On Wednesday, Elon Musk used his Twitter account to officially solicit applications from video game developers to work at Tesla—specifically, on games that would be played exclusively within Tesla cars. The below tweet suggests an augmented-reality take on gaming, thanks to its vague call to combine "touch screen, phone, & car irl [in real life]."

Musk followed that up by asking interested game makers to "send examples of prior work" that emphasize "max playability & creativity." When one Twitter follower suggested that Musk talk to Bioshock series creator Ken Levine, Musk simply replied, "Bioshock is amazing."

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)

The US Department of Justice said Wednesday that it has filed criminal charges against three men believed to be central to the FIN7 hacking group.

According to indictments unsealed in federal court in Seattle, prosecutors say that Dmytro Federov, 44, Fedir Hladyr, 33, and Andrii Kolpakov, 30, hacked into "thousands of computer systems and stole millions of customer credit and debit card numbers, which the group used or sold for profit."

The suspects are believed to have hit companies across 47 states and the District of Columbia to steal "more than 15 million customer card records."

Enlarge / A researcher working with slices of human brains. (credit: Getty | Barcroft Media)

A boy who had large parts of the right side of his brain removed due to a slow-growing tumor made a nearly full recovery in the three years after his surgery, with other areas of his brain compensating for the loss, researchers reveal this week in Cell Reports.

Their case study highlights the brain’s tremendous ability to adapt to such losses and will help researchers better understand how, exactly, parts of the brain can accommodate such losses, the researchers write.

The boy, identified as UD in the case study, was a healthy, normal kid—up until he suddenly suffered a seizure at age four. He subsequently developed intractable epilepsy due to the tumor. When he was nearly seven years old, his parents and doctors made the tough decision to surgically remove the mass. That also meant removing the entire right side of his occipital lobe and part of his temporal lobe on his right side. Together, the extracted sections accounted for a third of the right hemisphere of UD’s brain.

Enlarge (credit: Misaochan)

A newly disclosed breach that stole password data and private messages is teaching Reddit officials a lesson that security professionals have known for years: two-factor authentication (2FA) that uses SMS or phone calls isn’t much better than no 2FA at all.

In a post published Wednesday, Reddit said an attacker breached several employee accounts in mid-June. The attacker then accessed a complete copy of backup data spanning from the site’s launch in 2005 to May 2007. The data included cryptographically salted and hashed password data from that period, along with corresponding user names, email addresses, and all user content, including private messages. The attacker also obtained email digests that were sent between June 3 and June 17 of this year. Those digests included usernames and their associated email address, along with Reddit-suggested posts from safe-for-work subreddits users were subscribed to.

Wednesday’s post said that the breached employee accounts were protected by 2FA, which typically requires people to take an extra step beyond entering a password when accessing an account from a new computer. In most cases, the extra step is the entering of a one-time password (OTP) that’s sent to or generated by a mobile phone. More secure yet, the 2FA is in the form of a cryptographic token sent by a security key attached to a device logging in. The 2FA protecting the Reddit accounts, however, relied on OTPs sent through SMS messages, despite reports over the years (such as this one) that make it amply clear they are susceptible to interception.

Enlarge / A 0.03 carat blue diamond analyzed for this study. The visible black specks are minerals trapped inside the diamond. (credit: Evan M. Smith/© 2018 GIA)

Diamonds have a lot going on. Besides their sought-after clarity, extreme hardness, and entanglement in civil wars, diamonds tell unique geologic stories. Contrary to the convenient idea that they are born from a magical transformation of compressed coal, diamonds actually form deep within the Earth and blast to the surface in unusually rapid volcanic eruptions.

What a jeweler might call an “impurity” in a diamond, a geologist calls an “inclusion.” These bits of other minerals trapped inside can tell you where that diamond came from and what it was like down there. In a new study of rare blue diamonds (like the famous Hope Diamond), a team led by Evan Smith of the Gemological Institute of America discovered that they appear to form at exceptional depths—yet are tinted blue by boron from ancient oceans.

Feeling blue

Only about 0.02 percent of diamonds are blue, making them a rarity among rarities. They’ve been found around the world, though, in volcanic deposits as old as 1.2 billion years and as young as 90 million. The weird thing about them is that the boron that turns them blue is exceedingly rare down in the Earth’s mantle and much more common in the Earth’s crust.