Month: August 2024

Enlarge / The Orion spacecraft for the Artemis II mission, comprising its crew and service modules, was lifted into a vacuum test chamber at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 4, 2024. (credit: NASA/Amanda Stevenson)

NASA would like to start stacking the Space Launch System rocket for the Artemis II mission—the first human flight around the Moon since 1972—sometime next month, but the agency's exploration chief says the milestone could be delayed as engineers continue studying the readiness of the Orion spacecraft's heat shield.

The heat shield, already installed at the base of the Orion spacecraft, will take the brunt of the heating when the capsule blazes through Earth's atmosphere at the end of the 10-day mission. On the Artemis I test flight in late 2022, NASA sent an Orion spacecraft to the Moon and back without a crew aboard. The only significant blemish on the test flight was a finding that charred chunks of the heat shield unexpectedly stripped away from the capsule during reentry as temperatures increased to nearly 5,000° Fahrenheit (2,760° Celsius).

The spacecraft safely splashed down, and if any astronauts had been aboard, they would have been fine. However, the inspections of the recovered spacecraft showed divots of heat shield material were missing. The heat shield material, called Avcoat, is designed to erode away in a controlled manner during reentry. Instead, fragments fell off the heat shield that left cavities resembling potholes.

Enlarge / So I'm not stuck on Xbox, eh? (credit: Bethesda)

Bethesda's Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is the latest game from a Microsoft subsidiary that will make its way to the PlayStation 5. The game will hit Sony's console in the spring of 2025, Microsoft announced yesterday, months after a planned December launch on Xbox Series S/X and Windows.

In an interview with YouTube channel Xbox On, Microsoft's Phil Spencer expanded on that decision, implying that multiplatform releases for Microsoft gaming properties were important to the Xbox division's bottom line. "We run a business," he said, "It's definitely true inside of Microsoft the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery that we have to give back to the company, because we get a level of support from the company that's just amazing in what we're able to go do."

Amid massive layoffs that have hit Xbox and other gaming companies in recent months, Spencer noted that there's "a lot of pressure on the [game] industry" these days. "[The industry] has been growing for a long, long time and now people are looking for ways to grow," he said. "And I think that us, as fans, as players of games, we just have to anticipate there's going to be more change in how some of the traditional ways that games were built and distributed [ars] going to change... for all of us."

Enlarge / Would you like a streaming subscription with that? (credit: Getty)

Look out, Peacock. There's reportedly a new video streaming service that's avian-themed.

The fast-food chain Chick-fil-A plans to launch a video streaming service, Deadline reported today, citing anonymous sources. The streaming service is expected to focus on “family-friendly” content and include original TV shows, the publication said.

Chick-fil-A declined to comment on Deadline’s report.

Enlarge / President Joe Biden leaving the White House on August 16, 2024, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Anna Moneymaker )

A phone company agreed to pay a $1 million fine for transmitting spoofed robocalls in which a deepfake of President Joe Biden's voice urged New Hampshire residents not to vote. Lingo Telecom, which is based in Texas, agreed to a settlement with the Federal Communications Commission, the agency announced today.

Lingo Telecom "will pay a $1 million civil penalty and implement a historic compliance plan—the first of its kind secured by the FCC—that will require strict adherence to the FCC's STIR/SHAKEN Caller ID authentication rules," the FCC said. The settlement includes "requirements that the company abide by 'Know Your Customer' (KYC) and 'Know Your Upstream Provider' (KYUP) principles" that focus on vetting call traffic to ensure it is trustworthy, and "requirements that the company more thoroughly verify the accuracy of the information provided by its customers and upstream providers."

The calls made before New Hampshire's presidential primary in January were orchestrated by Steve Kramer, a Democratic consultant who was working for a candidate running against Biden. Kramer was indicted on charges of voter suppression and impersonation of a candidate, and the FCC proposed a $6 million fine for Kramer. The calls inaccurately displayed a phone number associated with a prominent New Hampshire political operative.

The FGS Braunschweig is a German naval corvette made for stealthy littoral (shoreline) operations, but the Braunschweig ditched the stealth completely while transiting up the Thames this week on a training mission to London. Instead, the ship turned out its enlisted men to stand on deck in light blue shirts and dark pants while the boat blasted a recording of "The Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme)" from Star Wars as it floated past Tower Bridge.

Coming eight decades after Londoners lived through the German "blitz" in World War II and then spent years waiting for a German naval invasion that never materialized, playing the Big Bad Guy's theme from Star Wars films was certainly a bold choice. But a German naval spokesperson assured the BBC that the music had "no deeper message" and added that it was not some sort of commentary from the German naval staff. Rather, the boat's commander "can choose the music freely."

The little spectacle did show two things. One—assuming this was, in fact, a joke—it put the lie to the old stereotype that the Germans have no sense of humor, a stereotype which has led to the production of actual BBC headlines like "Why people think Germans aren't funny."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Phishers are using a novel technique to trick iOS and Android users into installing malicious apps that bypass safety guardrails built by both Apple and Google to prevent unauthorized apps.

Both mobile operating systems employ mechanisms designed to help users steer clear of apps that steal their personal information, passwords, or other sensitive data. iOS bars the installation of all apps other than those available in its App Store, an approach widely known as the Walled Garden. Android, meanwhile, is set by default to allow only apps available in Google Play. Sideloading—or the installation of apps from other markets—must be manually allowed, something Google warns against.

When native apps aren’t

Phishing campaigns making the rounds over the past nine months are using previously unseen ways to workaround these protections. The objective is to trick targets into installing a malicious app that masquerades as an official one from the targets’ bank. Once installed, the malicious app steals account credentials and sends them to the attacker in real time over Telegram.

Enlarge / The Wow! signal, represented as "6EQUJ5," was discovered in 1977 by astronomer Jerry Ehman. (credit: Public domain)

An unusually bright burst of radio waves—dubbed the Wow! signal—discovered in the 1970s has baffled astronomers ever since, given the tantalizing possibility that it just might be from an alien civilization trying to communicate with us. A team of astronomers think they might have a better explanation, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv: clouds of atomic hydrogen that essentially act like a naturally occurring galactic maser, emitting a beam of intense microwave radiation when zapped by a flare from a passing magnetar.

As previously reported, the Wow! signal was detected on August 18, 1977, by The Ohio State University Radio Observatory, known as “Big Ear.” Astronomy professor Jerry Ehman was analyzing Big Ear data in the form of printouts that, to the untrained eye, looked like someone had simply smashed the number row of a typewriter with a preference for lower digits. Numbers and letters in the Big Ear data indicated, essentially, the intensity of the electromagnetic signal picked up by the telescope over time, starting at ones and moving up to letters in the double digits (A was 10, B was 11, and so on). Most of the page was covered in ones and twos, with a stray six or seven sprinkled in.

But that day, Ehman found an anomaly: 6EQUJ5 (sometimes misinterpreted as a message encoded in the radio signal). This signal had started out at an intensity of six—already an outlier on the page—climbed to E, then Q, peaked at U—the highest power signal Big Ear had ever seen—then decreased again. Ehman circled the sequence in red pen and wrote “Wow!” next to it. The signal appeared to be coming from the direction of the Sagittarius constellation, and the entire signal lasted for about 72 seconds. Alas, SETI researchers have never been able to detect the so-called “Wow! Signal” again, despite many tries with radio telescopes around the world.

Enlarge / The Recall feature provides a timeline of screenshots and a searchable database of text, thoroughly tracking everything about a person's PC usage. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft will begin sending a revised version of its controversial Recall feature to Windows Insider PCs beginning in October, according to an update published today to the company's original blog post about the Recall controversy. The company didn't elaborate further on specific changes it's making to Recall beyond what it already announced in June.

For those unfamiliar, Recall is a Windows service that runs in the background on compatible PCs, continuously taking screenshots of user activity, scanning those screenshots with optical character recognition (OCR), and saving the OCR text and the screenshots to a giant searchable database on your PC. The goal, according to Microsoft, is to help users retrace their steps and dig up information about things they had used their PCs to find or do in the past.

The problem was that other users on the same PC, or attackers with physical or remote access to your PC, could easily access, view, and export those screenshots and the OCR database since none of the information was encrypted at rest or protected in any substantive way.