Month: May 2022

Enlarge / Planetary scientist Paul Byrne created this compilation of NASA images showing the InSight spacecraft on its 10th day on Mars, and the lander 1,201 days later. (credit: Paul Byrne/Twitter/NASA)

Anyone planning to move to Mars should probably account for dust. Lots of dust.

Earlier this month NASA announced that it would soon have to cease science operations on its Mars InSight lander due to diminishing power levels from the vehicle's dust-cloaked solar panels. The spacecraft, which landed on the red planet in November 2018 to study seismic activity, simply cannot produce enough power to operate normally.

InSight has detected more than 1,300 marsquakes, NASA scientists say, including a relatively powerful magnitude 5 quake on May 4. This was the largest marsquake detected to date, and at the upper limit of what scientists hoped to observe. This seismic activity has allowed scientists to tease out details about the inner structure of the red planet.

Enlarge (credit: Service NSW)

In late 2019, the government of New South Wales in Australia rolled out digital driver's licenses. The new licenses allowed people to use their iPhone or Android device to show proof of identity and age during roadside police checks or at bars, stores, hotels, and other venues. ServiceNSW, as the government body is usually referred to, promised it would “provide additional levels of security and protection against identity fraud, compared to the plastic [driver's license]” citizens had used for decades.

Now, 30 months later, security researchers have shown that it’s trivial for just about anyone to forge fake identities using the digital driver's licenses, or DDLs. The technique allows people under drinking age to change their date of birth and for fraudsters to forge fake identities. The process takes well under an hour, doesn’t require any special hardware or expensive software, and will generate fake IDs that pass inspection using the electronic verification system used by police and participating venues. All of this, despite assurances that security was a key priority for the newly created DDL system.

“To be clear, we do believe that if the Digital Driver's Licence was improved by implementing a more secure design, then the above statement made on behalf of ServiceNSW would indeed be true, and we would agree that the Digital Driver's Licence would provide additional levels of security against fraud compared to the plastic driver's licence,” Noah Farmer, the researcher who identified the flaws, wrote in a post published last week.