Month: May 2019

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  The twice-flown booster last used during the CRS-13 mission will go on display at Space Center Houston this summer. [credit: SpaceX ]

Ten days before Christmas 2017, a Falcon 9 rocket blasted a Dragon spacecraft into orbit. The first stage then performed a series of engine burns and landed safely along the Florida coastline. The core has remained in storage since then.

Absent a costly, time-consuming renovation, this "full-thrust" Falcon 9 rocket will never fly into space again. SpaceX prefers to re-fly its newer "Block 5" version of the Falcon 9, which incorporated reuse lessons learned from earlier flights like the ones this rocket core had made. This rocket's job, therefore, was seemingly done.

But William Harris, the president and chief executive of Space Center Houston, thought he knew of a way rockets like this one could still serve the aerospace enterprise, albeit in a different way. Although such a Falcon 9 rocket would no longer fire its engines, it could still inflame the enthusiasm of young people.

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  Jeff Bezos, owner of Blue Origin, spoke Thursday during an unveiling of his Blue Moon lunar lander. [credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images ]

WASHINGTON D.C.—The world's richest person, Jeff Bezos, unveiled his sweeping vision for humanity on Thursday afternoon in a Washington D.C. ballroom. With the lights dimmed, Bezos spoke on stage for an hour, outlining plans for his rocket company, Blue Origin, and how it will pave the way to space for future generations.

We have seen bits and pieces of Bezos' vision to use the resources of space to save Earth and make it a garden for humans before. But this is the first time he has he stitched it together in such a comprehensive and radical narrative, starting with reusable rockets and ending with gargantuan, cylindrical habitats in space where millions of people could live. This was the moment when Bezos finally pulled back the curtain, in totality, to reveal his true ambitions for spaceflight. This is where he would like to see future generations one day live.

His speech felt akin to the talk SpaceX founder Elon Musk delivered at an international space conference in 2016. Mexico City is where Musk first unveiled a design for a super-large rocket and starship, as well as his plans for millions of humans to live on Mars and make a vibrant world there.

Enlarge (credit: FBI.gov)

Federal prosecutors have indicted a Chinese national they say carried out sophisticated network intrusions on four US companies, including one on health insurer Anthem that stole personal information belonging to close to 80 million people.

Fujie Wang—a 32-year-old resident of Shenzhen, China, who sometimes used the first name Dennis—was part of a hacking group that gained entry to Anthem and three other unnamed companies, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday. Along with other members of the group, he carried out the hacks using spear-phishing emails that lured employees of the companies to malicious websites. The websites, in turn, installed backdoors on the employees’ computers. The defendants allegedly used the compromised computers to penetrate the networks.

In some cases, the indictment alleged, the hackers would wait months before identifying and harvesting sensitive data stored on the networks, presumably to prevent calling attention to the breaches. The series of intrusions spanned from February 2014 to January 2015. Two of the three unnamed US companies were in the technology and basic materials industries. The third provided communications services.

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  It's back! Again! [credit: Square Enix ]

Sony's latest promotional video for future PlayStation games (dubbed "State of Play") concluded with a surprise peek at a long-awaited game: Final Fantasy VII Remake. In bad news, the Thursday trailer was clearly limited by publisher Square Enix's intent to save a bigger reveal for "June," possibly timed for the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo.

But in good news, the project, announced nearly four years ago, finally looks like an honest-to-goodness video game. At last, we can begin guessing what its final version might possibly look and play like.

The most apparent thing from the trailer, embedded below, is an active battle system that looks largely similar to that found in Final Fantasy XV and the wider Kingdom Hearts series. (We got a tease of this in a late-2015 trailer.) A low-angled camera sits behind whichever character is being controlled, and each fighter gets two immediate action buttons, along with a shortcut to a larger menu. (That menu wasn't toggled in today's one-minute video.)

(credit: Pixabay)

Websites running the Drupal, Joomla, or Typo3 content-management systems are vulnerable to attacks that could possibly execute malicious code until administrators install just-released patches, developers and security researchers warned.

The vulnerability resides in the PharStreamWrapper, a PHP component developed and open-sourced by CMS maker Typo3. Indexed as CVE-2019-11831, the flaw stems from a path-traversal bug that allows hackers to swap a site's legitimate phar archive with a malicious one. A phar archive is used to distribute a complete PHP application or library in a single file, in much the way a Java archive file bundles many Java files into a single file.

In an advisory published Wednesday, Drupal developers rated the severity of the vulnerability affecting their CMS as moderately critical. That's well below the highly critical rating of a recent Drupal vulnerability and earlier remote-execution flaws that took on the name "Drupalgeddon." Still, the vulnerability represents enough of a risk that administrators should patch it as soon as possible.

Enlarge / The Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant is seen in the early morning hours March 28, 2011, in Middletown, Penn. (credit: Jeff Fusco/Getty Images)

On Wednesday, power company Exelon said that it would be closing the single reactor that it operates on Three Mile Island by September 30.

Three Mile Island (TMI) is notorious for its role as the site of the United States' first commercial power plant accident in 1979. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was not able to correlate the accident to any deaths or ill health effects in the Middletown, Penn., area, but the threat galvanized environmentalists against nuclear power and led to sweeping regulatory reforms in throughout the nation.

TMI-1, the 819 megawatt (MW) reactor that Exelon owns, was not affected by the 1979 accident. Exelon says it has been operating the reactor at a loss.