Month: April 2019

Enlarge (credit: Michal Fludra/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

On April 6, the Global Positioning System will reach the end of an era—or more correctly, an epoch. That’s when the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) clock used by the satellite navigation system will reach the limit for its 10-bit “week number” (WN) counter and flip back to 0000000000.

GPS time is linked to the official UTC clock time provided by the US Naval Observatory. But the GPS version of the clock tracks the date by counting the number of weeks since the beginning of the current GPS “epoch”—August 21, 1999. So as the clock reaches midnight tonight on the prime meridian, the GPS calendar will suddenly become 20 years out of date.

This should not come as a surprise for most newer GPS navigation systems. There’s been plenty of warning—GPS went through a similar flip once before. And the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center issued a warning in April 2018 that this rollover was coming, as it will every 1,024 weeks—until the modernization of the GPS constellation is complete, and then the WN counter will be increased in size to 13 bits.

Enlarge / A Terran 1 rocket taking off from Cape Canaveral, Fla. (credit: Relativity Space)

The ambitious rocket company Relativity announced its first customer on Friday, the global satellite operator Telesat. The contract for flights on the Terran 1 rocket includes "multiple" launches, but Relativity chief executive Tim Ellis said he could not provide additional details.

"This is a monumental contract for Relativity," Ellis told Ars in an interview. Although this is the first contract the company has chosen to announce, he said, Relativity has signed other binding deals earlier. 

Relativity considers this a huge win because it offers another validation of its—and really, this is not an exaggeration—revolutionary approach to launch. The company aspires to use large 3D printers to manufacture nearly the entirety of a rocket, thereby automating the process and taking another step toward low-cost, launch-on-demand service. It's one thing for a private company to build a new rocket to launch small satellites, it's another to try and remake the manufacturing process as well.

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  A Lamborghini that can do it all? [credit: Jim Resnick ]

From time to time, Lamborghini does the unexpected. Not so much recently—many expected a new SUV from the Italian exotic automaker—but Lamborghini stunned automobiledom in the 1960s and 1970s. The original Miura sports car blueprints were initially thought by some to be for a race car, not a street car. Then, the Countach rewrote the exotic car design book and instantly became holy.

The next shocker was the LM002, a huge four-wheel-drive off-roading beast that actually began life in "LM001" phase as a proposal for a light-duty military vehicle. When not even one government nibbled at the thought of a military off-roader designed and built by an Italian company famous for temperamental exotic cars, Lamborghini had a major rethink and built highly revised LM002s from 1986 through 1993 for public sale. Most went to the very wealthy.

But more recently, as Lamborghini plays nice with its Porsche, Bentley, and Audi siblings and discovers the opportunities of platform sharing, the brand has also grown in its thinking and execution. Lamborghinis are now—deep breath—just about reliable enough to be used everyday. Couple this with the fact that more than half of Porsche's sales now come from SUVs, and it indicates there's room in the market for the Urus, the Lamborghini of SUVs.

Enlarge / A post from one cybercrime group deleted by Facebook. (credit: Cisco Talos)

Add spam, phishing, and payment-card fraud to the scourges Facebook helps foster. The company is already under the microscope for the role it plays in spreading disinformation promoting white nationalism, conspiracy theories, and opposition to life-saving vaccinations. Now, a report published Friday says Facebook also helps criminals peddle a variety of cybercrime services.

Over the past few months, researchers with Cisco’s Talos security group compiled a list of 74 Facebook groups whose members promised to carry out a variety of unethical, if not outright illegal, activities. Some groups acted as bazaars for the buying, selling, or trading of stolen payment-card data and hacked account credentials. Others served as forums for selling spamming and phishing tools. In all, about 385,000 users were members.

According to the Talos report: