Month: May 2020

Enlarge / A view into the maw of SN4, showing a single Raptor engine mounted inside. (credit: SpaceX)

For the first-time, a full-scale prototype of SpaceX's Starship vehicle lit its engine on Tuesday evening. After ignition, it appeared that the Raptor rocket engine burned for about 4 seconds. At the end of this test at the South Texas Launch Site, the vehicle still stood. About 90 minutes after the test, SpaceX founder and chief engineer Elon Musk confirmed the test firing was good, saying, "Starship SN4 passed static fire."

Tuesday night's test, which took place at 8:57pm CT local time in Texas (01:57 UTC Wednesday), occurred eight days after a successful pressurization test of this Starship prototype, known as SN4. Engineers will now review the data before possibly performing another static fire test, or a small hop. Ultimately, if this vehicle survives additional testing, it may make a 150-meter hop above the scrubby Texas lowlands.

This test also took place less than a week after NASA awarded SpaceX a $135 million contract to develop Starship as a Lunar Lander—a vehicle for carrying cargo and crew from lunar orbit down to the surface, and back. Although Starship is the most ambitious of three landers NASA is considering as part of its Artemis Program, it is also the only one actively testing full-scale prototypes.

Enlarge / Inside a Tesla. (credit: Steve Jurvetson / Flickr)

Tesla infotainment systems are a marvel to behold. Among other things, they display Netflix or Youtube videos, run Spotify, connect to Wi-Fi, and of course store phone numbers of contacts. But those benefits require storing heaps of personal information that an amateur researcher found can reveal owners’ most sensitive data.

The researcher, who described himself as a “Tesla tinkerer that's curious about how things work,” recently gained access to 13 Tesla MCUs—short for media control units—that were removed from electric vehicles during repairs and refurbishments. Each one of the devices stored a trove of sensitive information despite being retired. Examples included phonebooks from connected cell phones, call logs containing hundreds of entries, recent calendar entries, Spotify and W-Fi passwords stored in plaintext, locations for home, work, and all places navigated to, and session cookies that allowed access to Netflix and YouTube (and attached Gmail accounts).

All 13 of the devices showed that their last location was at a Tesla service center, an indication that they were removed by an authorized Tesla technician. Tesla service stations remove MCUs for several reasons. Most commonly, it’s to replace a faulty device or to upgrade to a newer, more advanced device model that improves the vehicle autopilot.

Enlarge / MAY 4, 2020: A health worker handles a blood sample on the first day of a free COVID-19 antibody testing event. (credit: Getty | Barcroft Media)

After a gush of bogus coronavirus blood tests, the US Food and Drug Administration announced Monday that test makers must submit data within 10 days showing that their tests actually work—or risk getting purged from the market.

The new requirement updates a lax policy the FDA announced March 16, which prioritized providing “regulatory flexibility” to allow these blood tests—aka serology tests—to hit the market quickly during the pandemic. That flexibility came at the expense of normal scientific vetting that ensures those tests meet standards for accuracy and reliability.

“In mid-March, it was critical for the FDA to provide regulatory flexibility for serology test developers, given the nature of this public health emergency... However, flexibility never meant we would allow fraud,” the FDA wrote in a policy update Monday. “We unfortunately see unscrupulous actors marketing fraudulent test kits and using the pandemic as an opportunity to take advantage of Americans’ anxiety.”

Enlarge / California attorney general Xavier Becerra. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

California's attorney general—as well as attorneys from three of the state's largest cities—have sued Uber and Lyft, accusing the companies of violating the labor rights of thousands of drivers. The plaintiffs argue that state law requires Uber and Lyft to treat their drivers as employees, which would make them eligible for minimum wage protections, overtime pay, expense reimbursements, and other benefits they don't currently receive.

The legal status of ride-hail drivers has been a controversial issue for years. We've written about several legal cases over proper driver classification. But so far, those lawsuits have been filed by individual drivers. Uber and Lyft have effectively neutered many of the lawsuits by forcing them into arbitration, denying them class-action status in the process. These lawsuits by individual drivers simply weren't big enough to make a real impact on Uber and Lyft's overall business.

A lawsuit from the state of California is a totally different scenario. Attorney General Xavier Becerra and the city attorneys of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego have enough combined legal resources for a fair fight against the ride-hailing giants. And if Uber and Lyft lose, they could not only owe hundreds of millions of dollars in back wages and other costs, they could also be forced to fundamentally rethink how they do business in the most populous US state.