Month: December 2020

Enlarge / An Atlas-Centaur rocket booster being assembled at a General Dynamics plant, circa 1962. (credit: NASA)

Fifty-four years ago, NASA launched the Surveyor 2, an uncrewed mission to explore the surface of the Moon. Alas, the spacecraft went into a tumble en route after a failed course-correction burn, and it slammed into the lunar surface at 2.7 kilometers per second. But the rocket booster used during its launch followed a different trajectory into space and has now begun orbiting the Earth. That's the conclusion of astronomers who have been studying 2020 SO, an unusual object first spotted this past August.

NASA's Surveyor program was designed to demonstrate the feasibility of launching, communicating with, controlling, and landing an uncrewed spacecraft on the Moon, thereby paving the way for later crewed missions. Surveyor 1, launched on May 30, 1966, was a resounding success, easily meeting its primary objectives, while also returning many images of the lunar surface and critical engineering data. So NASA's hopes were high for building on that success with the second mission. The intent was to land Surveyor 2 on the Moon just east of its predecessor to demonstrate the feasibility of an oblique approach and landing.

After a series of minor delays, Surveyor 2 launched successfully on September 20, 1966, at 7:31:59.8 EST. The launch vehicle was an Atlas-Centaur rocket using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as propellants. Once the Centaur's engines were shut down and the spacecraft had coasted for 66 seconds, Surveyor 2 departed from spent Centaur. The rocket expelled its residual propellants to set a safe distance between itself and the Surveyor 2, giving it a trajectory that would miss the Moon by a good 5,675 kilometers and send the rocket into a solar orbit. That Centaur rocket is what astronomers have confirmed to be 2020 SO.

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Google and Samsung want to work together on smart home compatibility. The two companies put out dueling press releases today, saying that Google Nest devices would work better with Samsung SmartThings, ending a war between the SmartThings community and Nest/Google/Alphabet that has been going on for years. Samsung says that "Google Nest devices, including thermostats, cameras and doorbells, will be "Works With SmartThings" (WWST) certified, allowing users to seamlessly control their smart homes through SmartThings." Nest has long been the most insular smart home company, and now it sounds like Nest devices are finally going to start playing nice with your other smart home devices.

Before Samsung bought it, SmartThings started life as a Kickstarter for a smart home hub. It was designed to be a great unifier of your smart home, and that thought process still mostly survives to this day, even under Samsung. Rather than pick a side in the smart home standards war (Zwave versus Zigbee), SmartThings just packed in both radios, along with Wi-Fi, with an aim to work with everything.

Besides supporting all the radios, SmartThings is also very open on the software side of things. Samsung offers users an IDE that can run custom code on the hub itself or in SmartThings cloud infrastructure. Anyone can write a "SmartApp"—a package that offers custom logic and even custom UI in the SmartThings app—or a "device handler," which lets anyone spin up support for new hardware. Users can load up the SmartThings Web dashboard and install whatever they want and even sync their installs to GitHub repositories for updates. You can also access your SmartThings devices outside of the official SmartThings clients through OAuth, leading to awesome third-party interfaces like the ActionTiles dashboard.

Enlarge / Workers removing a sign from a drive-through COVID-19 testing site in Orlando, Florida, in October 2020. (credit: Paul Hennessy | NurPhoto | Getty Images)

Police on Monday raided the Florida home of data scientist Rebekah Jones, who alleged in May that she was fired from her job collating COVID-19 data for the state because she refused to "manipulate" data to make the governor's agenda look more favorable.

"At 8:30 this morning, state police came into my house and took all my hardware and tech," Jones said in a Twitter thread on Monday afternoon. Her initial post included a 30-second video of armed officers pointing guns up a staircase and shouting for Jones' husband and children to come down before another officer shouted, "search warrant!" loudly to no one in particular.

"They pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids," Jones added. "They took my phone and the computer I use every day to post the case numbers in Florida, and school cases for the entire country. They took evidence of corruption at the state level."

Enlarge / The strobe effects flashing from those two LED arrays in Cyberpunk 2077 could cause seizures in epileptic gamers.

Epileptic gamers who are sensitive to flashing lights and strobing effects may need to take special care when playing Cyberpunk 2077 after its release later this week.

Game Informer Associate Editor Liana Ruppert wrote yesterday about her experience with a grand mal seizure while playing a pre-release version of the game. The seizure was triggered by the game's short introductory cutscene for the "braindance" interface. That scene features a device flashing bright, screen-filling red and white lights at the player in an increasing cadence before sending them into a virtual world to explore another character's memories.

With no way to skip this cutscene, Ruppert recommends that photosensitive players "look away completely or close their eyes" to avoid triggering a seizure whenever going into a braindance, which they're required to do at multiple points in the game's story.

Enlarge (credit: GE Healthcare)

Dozens of radiology products from GE Healthcare contain a critical vulnerability that threatens the networks of hospitals and other health providers that use the devices, officials from the US government and a private security firm said on Tuesday.

The devices—used for CT scans, MRIs, X-Rays, mammograms, ultrasounds, and positron emission tomography—use a default password to receive regular maintenance. The passwords are available to anyone who knows where on the Internet to look. A lack of proper access restrictions allows the devices to connect to malicious servers rather than only those designated by GE Healthcare. Attackers can exploit these shortcomings by abusing the maintenance protocols to access the devices. From there, the attackers can execute malicious code or view or modify patient data stored on the device or the hospital or healthcare provider servers.

Aggravating matters, customers can’t fix the vulnerability themselves. Instead, they must request that the GE Healthcare support team change the credentials. Customers who don’t make such a request will continue to rely on the default password. Eventually, the device manufacturer will provide patches and additional information.