Month: October 2020

Enlarge / Anti-Satellite Weapons from Mission Shakti are displayed during Republic Day Parade on January 26, 2020 in New Delhi, India. (credit: Ramesh Pathania/Mint via Getty Images)

The creation of the U.S. Space Force has conjured up all manner of fanciful notions about combat in space. Will military satellites act like X-wings and Tie Fighters, zipping around and shooting at one another? Or perhaps will larger ships akin to the USS Enterprise fire photon torpedoes at enemy warbirds?

Hardly. But even those with more realistic expectations for what could happen if nations went to war in space—perhaps satellites using orbital kinetic weapons to attack other satellites?—may not fully appreciate the physics of space combat. That's the conclusion of a new report that investigates what is physically and practically possible when it comes to space combat.

Published by The Aerospace Corporation, The Physics of Space War: How Orbital Dynamics Constrain Space-to-Space Engagements lays out several basic concepts that are likely to govern any space combat for the foreseeable future. All suggest battles will need to be planned far in advance.

Enlarge / The Secretlab Omega (left) made a better first impression, but Anda Fnatic (right) won me over in the end. (credit: Secretlab / Anda)

One of the most important accessories of every home office frequently gets overlooked: the chair. With this year's COVID-19-related social distancing and mandatory remote work, many of us are spending a lot more time behind a desk at home than before—and without the right chair, that extra time can translate into discomfort or outright back pain.

I've never had much luck with "cheap" office chairs—a $350 mid-back office chair frequently turns into a throne of pain without sufficient extended breaks to get up and move around. Trendy Aeron chairs provide somewhat better ergonomic support for extended periods of seated work—but their $1,100 and up price tag is a little hard to swallow for many of us. This leaves the home office worker's secret weapon—the gaming chair.

It has been my experience that you get more—and more comfortable—chair for your money when you shop for gaming chairs. They're designed for maximum comfort and ergonomic support for long seating periods, and they're generally designed to support larger and heavier people than office chairs are as well. And they need to do it within a reasonable budget.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Some 9,000 devices—mostly running Android, but also the Linux and Darwin operating Systems—have been corralled into the Interplanetary Storm, the name given to a botnet whose chief purpose is creating a for-profit proxy service, likely for anonymous Internet use.

The finding is based on several pieces of evidence collected by researchers from security provider Bitdefender. The core piece of evidence is a series of six specialized nodes that are part of the management infrastructure. They include a:

• proxy backend that pings other nodes to prove its availability
• proxy checker that connects to a bot proxy
• manager that issues scanning and brute-forcing commands
• backend interface responsible for hosting a Web API
• node that uses cryptography keys to authenticate other devices and sign authorized messages
• development node used for development purposes

Keeping it on the down-low

Together, these nodes “are responsible for checking for node availability, connecting to proxy nodes, hosting the web API service, signing authorized messages, and even testing the malware in its development phase,” Bitdefender researchers wrote in a report published on Thursday. “Along with other development choices, this leads us to believe that the botnet is used as a proxy network, potentially offered as an anonymization service.”

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  The Microsoft Surface Duo. It's very big. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

After one of the strangest run-ups to launch in smartphone history, the Microsoft Surface Duo is here. Microsoft's first-ever Android phone (sorry, we're not counting the Nokia X) was announced and demoed an entire year before its release, hinting at what a long and winding road the Surface Duo took from inception to shipping. The hardware apparently dates back to plans to revitalize Windows for phones, but after that plan fell through, the hardware was upcycled into the most head-scratching Android phone of the year.

The Surface Duo sales pitch is that foldable display technology isn't ready yet, so try this best-we-can-do-right-now version that features two rigid, 5.6-inch OLED displays attached together with a 360 hinge. Microsoft is calling this a "productivity" device thanks to it having the side-by-side app capability of a tablet-style foldable smartphone without any of the janky display technology. Microsoft's website also says the Duo was designed to "inspire people to rethink how they want to use the device in their pocket," indicating that the company definitely sees this as a primary device.

I bring up Microsoft's sales pitch because, boy, is the Surface Duo bad at doing the things Microsoft says it's supposed to be good at. The phone feels like it was made without any respect to ergonomics, hand size, pocket-size, or anything that makes a good Android phone. It has crippling productivity problems that negate any benefit you could get from the two-screen design, it's extremely awkward in day-to-day use, and it's very buggy. The phone is missing a whole host of features you would expect for the stratospheric $1400 asking price, and even the hardware that is here seems like it's a least a year old.