Month: August 2019

Enlarge / Castleton Tower in Utah's Moab National Park is a top rock-climbing destinations. (credit: Public domain)

Scientists at the University of Utah have made the first detailed seismic measurements of a pillar-shaped sandstone formation in Moab National Park known as Castleton Tower. The structure vibrates at two key resonant frequencies, according to a new paper in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. That means it's likely to withstand earthquakes of low to moderate magnitudes. The methodology the Utah team developed can also be applied to other natural rock structures to determine how vulnerable they are to seismic and other similar activity.

"We often view such grand and prominent landforms as permanent features of our landscape, when in reality, they are continuously moving and evolving," said co-author Riley Finnegan, a graduate student at the University of Utah. "Because nothing is truly static, there is always energy propagating throughout the earth, which serves as a constant vibration source for the rock."

The research team has an entire Web page devoted to its seismic recordings of the natural resonances (vibrations) that come out of the Utah arches. The arches are the impressive red rock formations dotted about Castle Valley, about 10 miles from the town of Moab, and the team has sped up the recordings into audible sound. Those structures can bend, sway, and shake in response to any number of factors: wind gusts, distant seismic tremors, thermal stresses, local traffic, and so forth. The arches often amplify the energy passing through them if the frequencies are just right. Understanding those dynamics is crucial to being able to predict how the structures will respond in the event of an earthquake or similar disruption. Yet there haven't been many ongoing efforts to do so over the years, despite a great deal of research on manmade civil structures.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chin Leong Teoh | EyeEm)

The cable industry is fighting an attempt to require deployment of robocall-detection technology.

Some phone providers have already begun deploying the technology in question, which is called SHAKEN/STIR. The technology authenticates callers with digital certificates to prevent spoofing of Caller ID numbers. But Charter—the lobby group that represents Comcast and other cable companies—wants to make sure the Federal Communications Commission doesn't impose any deadlines on the rollout.

The FCC in June proposed to require implementation of SHAKEN/STIR "if major voice service providers fail to meet an end-of-2019 deadline for voluntary implementation." The commission also sought public comment on the proposal. Consumer Reports and other consumer advocacy groups subsequently asked the FCC for a requirement that major phone providers implement SHAKEN/STIR at no extra charge to consumers by June 2020.

Enlarge / Anthony Levandowski, then-VP of engineering at Uber, in 2016. Levandowski co-founded self-driving truck startup Otto and then led Uber's self-driving technology efforts before being fired in 2017. (credit: ANGELO MERENDINO/AFP/Getty Images)

A former engineer for Google's Waymo self-driving car division has been indicted on more than 30 criminal counts alleging he stole or tried to steal trade secrets from his former employer.

Anthony Levandowski "knowingly stole, and without authorization appropriated" trade secrets belonging to Google relating to lidar technology used for autonomous vehicles, the US Attorney for the Northern District of California said in an indictment (PDF) unsealed today.

Levandowski began working for Google in 2007 and, at the time of his sudden departure in 2016, was in charge of the company's lidar engineering team. Following his resignation from the company, he launched a self-driving trucking startup called Otto, which he sold a few months later to Uber for $680 million.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto | Getty Images)

The perils of Google Play are once again on display with the discovery of an app with 100 million downloads that contained a malicious component that downloaded secret payloads onto infected Android devices.

Throughout most of its life, CamScanner was a legitimate app that provided useful functions for scanning and managing documents, researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab said on Tuesday. To make money, the developers displayed ads and offered in-app purchases.

Then, at some point things changed. The app was updated to add an advertising library that contained a malicious module. This component was what’s known as a “Trojan dropper,” meaning it regularly downloaded encrypted code from a developer-designated server at https://abc.abcdserver[.]com and then decrypted and executed it on infected devices. The module, which Kaspersky Lab researchers named Trojan-Dropper.AndroidOS.Necro.n, could download and execute whatever the developers wanted at any time. The researchers said that they have previously found Trojan-Dropper.AndroidOS.Necro.n lurking inside apps that are preinstalled on some phones sold in China.

Enlarge / Street flooding in Jakarta in 2013. (credit: Seika / Flickr)

Yesterday, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced a plan to move the country’s capital from Jakarta to a new location in Borneo. The reason? Jakarta is bursting at the seams—and sinking.

Different sections of the city—home to 10 million people within an urban area of 30 million—are subsiding at different rates, but most fall in the range of 3 to 10 centimeters every year. Over the years, that has added up to as much as four meters of surface elevation change. This has wreaked havoc on building foundations and other infrastructure. And as Jakarta sits on the coast, where a number of small rivers meet the sea, the flooding hazard is also real. (The fact that sea level is rising doesn’t help.) That includes high-tide seawater flooding but also stormwater flooding as rain captured by the sprawling city’s pavement struggles to drain seaward.

Why the instability? Jakarta is a case of humans doing the wrong things in just the right place. River sediments deposited at the coast in places like this are naturally somewhat compressible. (It’s possible the bedrock beneath is moving a little bit and contributing, as well.) The actual weight of all the buildings and other construction at the surface is acting to compact the sediment a little, not unlike tamping down loose sand or soil in your yard. The biggest factor, though, is excessive groundwater pumping.