Month: July 2023

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of Amazon's Kuiper satellite processing facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. (credit: Amazon)

Within a few years, Amazon hopes to be building and launching up to 80 satellites per month to populate the company's Kuiper constellation, a $10 billion network that is similar to fleets already operated by SpaceX and OneWeb providing Internet connectivity around the world.

In the next six months, Amazon plans to begin production of operational Kuiper satellites at a new 172,000-square-foot factory in Kirkland, Washington. On Friday, officials from Amazon and the Florida government announced that a 100,000-square-foot facility under construction at NASA's Kennedy Space Center will serve as a satellite processing facility dedicated to the Kuiper program.

Inside this facility near the old space shuttle landing strip, engineers will mount Kuiper satellites onto huge orbital deployer mechanisms standing several stories tall, then encapsulate the structure inside the nose cones of their rockets. The fully integrated payload compartments will then move out to launch pads operated by United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin—the space company established by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a few miles away.

Enlarge / An Astranis satellite is seen in the company's factory. (credit: Astranis)

Astranis, a company seeking to provide Internet connectivity from geostationary space, said in May that its "Arcturus" satellite was successfully deployed following a launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

After taking control of the satellite, Astranis then began to send commands and update the flight software before raising Arcturus' orbit and slotting it into a geostationary position overlooking Alaska. Once there, the satellite linked up with an Internet gateway in Utah and communicated with multiple user terminals in Alaska.

Sometime after this, however, the satellite experienced what Astranis characterized as an abrupt anomaly with a supplier's component on the solar array drive assembly. In an update on Friday, Astranis co-founder John Gedmark explained that this assembly rotates to solar arrays to ensure they are always pointed at the Sun, allowing the spacecraft to remain fully powered at all times.

Enlarge / An Astranis satellite is seen in the company's factory. (credit: Astranis)

Astranis, a company seeking to provide Internet connectivity from geostationary space, said in May that its "Arcturus" satellite was successfully deployed following a launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

After taking control of the satellite, Astranis then began to send commands and update the flight software before raising Arcturus' orbit and slotting it into a geostationary position overlooking Alaska. Once there, the satellite linked up with an Internet gateway in Utah and communicated with multiple user terminals in Alaska.

Sometime after this, however, the satellite experienced what Astranis characterized as an abrupt anomaly with a supplier's component on the solar array drive assembly. In an update on Friday, Astranis co-founder John Gedmark explained that this assembly rotates to solar arrays to ensure they are always pointed at the Sun, allowing the spacecraft to remain fully powered at all times.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Organizations that have yet to patch a 9.8-severity vulnerability in network devices made by Zyxel have emerged as public nuisance No. 1 as a sizable number of them continue to be exploited and wrangled into botnets that wage DDoS attacks.

Zyxel patched the flaw on April 25. Five weeks later, Shadowserver, an organization that monitors Internet threats in real time, warned that many Zyxel firewalls and VPN servers had been compromised in attacks that showed no signs of stopping. The Shadowserver assessment at the time was: “If you have a vulnerable device exposed, assume compromise.”

On Wednesday—12 weeks since Zyxel delivered a patch and seven weeks since Shadowserver sounded the alarm—security firm Fortinet published research reporting a surge in exploit activity being carried out by multiple threat actors in recent weeks. As was the case with the active compromises Shadowserver reported, the attacks came overwhelmingly from variants based on Mirai, an open source application hackers use to identify and exploit common vulnerabilities in routers and other Internet of Things devices.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Organizations that have yet to patch a 9.8-severity vulnerability in network devices made by Zyxel have emerged as public nuisance No. 1 as a sizable number of them continue to be exploited and wrangled into botnets that wage DDoS attacks.

Zyxel patched the flaw on April 25. Five weeks later, Shadowserver, an organization that monitors Internet threats in real time, warned that many Zyxel firewalls and VPN servers had been compromised in attacks that showed no signs of stopping. The Shadowserver assessment at the time was: “If you have a vulnerable device exposed, assume compromise.”

On Wednesday—12 weeks since Zyxel delivered a patch and seven weeks since Shadowserver sounded the alarm—security firm Fortinet published research reporting a surge in exploit activity being carried out by multiple threat actors in recent weeks. As was the case with the active compromises Shadowserver reported, the attacks came overwhelmingly from variants based on Mirai, an open source application hackers use to identify and exploit common vulnerabilities in routers and other Internet of Things devices.

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  The Unitree Go 2. [credit: Unitree ]

If Boston Dynamic's $75,000 robot dog, Spot, is too rich for you, how about a stripped-down consumer version? The Chinese robotics company Unitree's latest robot dog is the Unitree Go 2, which starts at an incredible $1,600. After shipping and duty fees and all that, it'll cost more like $2,400, but that's still a bargain compared to an industrial robot.

Sometimes it's hard to tell if these upstart robotics companies are serious and have real products to sell, but we want to stress this is not Unitree's first robot dog. This is the company's third-generation consumer product, along with two models of beefier "industrial" bots that compete with Boston Dynamics.

Unitree Go 2 stands at just under 16 inches tall, is 27 inches from head to tail, and weighs 33 pounds. It has a camera, flashlight, and a constantly spinning 360-degree LiDAR sensor on the face. The robot has 12 motors—we're guessing that means three for each leg—making this a pretty agile robot able to deal with all sorts of uneven outdoor terrain and, like any good dog, do a ton of tricks. The Go2 has an 8000 mAh battery good for about "1–2" hours of runtime, along with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth for communication with the app. The base model has a top speed of 2.5 meters per second.