Mike Pence Announces US to Return to the Moon

Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday called for landing astronauts on the moon within five years, an accelerated pace that would aim to put Americans on the lunar south pole. Pence said NASA needs to achieve that goal "by any means necessary." Speaking at a meeting of the National Space Council in Huntsville, Alabama, he said NASA rockets and lunar landers will be replaced by private craft, if required. "It's time to redouble our effort," he said. "It can happen, but it will not happen unless we increase the pace." Now, the earliest possible landing on the moon by NASA isn't until 2028, Pence said. He acknowledged talent — and money — will be necessary to pull it off earlier.

Pence warned that if NASA can't put astronauts on the moon by 2024, "we need to change the organization, not the mission." The space agency must transform into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization, and must adopt an "all-hands-on-deck approach," he said. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine assured Pence that NASA will do everything possible to meet the deadline. Some outside experts were skeptical of the new timeline. This summer marks the 50th anniversary of the first manned moon landing. Since Apollo astronauts last walked on the moon in 1972, no country has made a serious attempt to send humans back to the lunar surface. For decades, NASA has flip-flopped between the moon and Mars, a victim of changing presidential administrations. More recently, President Barack Obama targeted Mars as astronauts' next big destination, while President Donald Trump has favored the moon.



Credits:
https://kmox.radio.com/articles/vice-president-mike-pence-called-landing-astronauts-moon

VanMoof Electric Bike Lock

“We can carry on building bigger and tougher locks,” says Taco Carlier, “or we can truly solve the problem of cycle theft by making bikes which are pointless to steal in the first place…” Taco, along with his brother Ties, co-founded the VanMoof bike brand in 2009 in Amsterdam. The ground-breaking machines which the siblings produce are definitely models you’d want to pinch. Their bikes have an unusual and eye-catching geometry. The top tube appears to be far too long for the frame and protrudes at both the back and the front. It’s a look that is not to everyone’s taste, but once you realise how clever these bikes are in every other respect, you’ll quickly begin to fall into line.

The brothers have taken a radical approach to the design of their bikes, so it stands to reason that when they applied their minds to security the results would be unexpected. Peace of mind comes in three phases. First is rider recognition. Bluetooth technology allows the bike to respond to you when you approach. It automatically unlocks the bike and disarms the theft-defence system. If this fails and someone tries to grab your bike from you, there is then also a “stealth” lock. It’s a tiny integrated system that immobilises the bike’s electric motor when you press a hidden button on the frame. If this also fails, there is then a tamper-detection setting. Anyone meddling with the bike will set off an earsplitting alarm after which it disables its own motor and flashes SOS with its lights. The message to thieves is pretty clear: this bike is way too much hassle to steal. I am sure there must be art masterpieces protected by far flimsier arrangements. Anyway, that’s not the end of it. If some enterprisingly light-fingered thief does outsmart all these measures, the app on your phone will follow an electrified tracking signal which VanMoof’s “Bike Hunters” will respond to. They will spring into action to recover the stolen bike and if they fail to find it within two weeks, VanMoof will replace it.



Credits:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jun/24/vanmoof-electrified-s2-ebike-anti-theft-subscription-city-bike-review

Facebook Has Stored Millions of Passwords in Plain Text

BY NOW, IT’S difficult to summarize all of Facebook’s privacy, misuse, and security missteps in one neat description. It just got even harder: On Thursday, following a report by Krebs on Security, Facebook acknowledged a bug in its password management systems that caused hundreds of millions of user passwords for Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram to be stored as plaintext in an internal platform. This means that thousands of Facebook employees could have searched for and found them. Krebs reports that the passwords stretched back to those created in 2012.

Organizations can store account passwords securely by scrambling them with a cryptographic process known as hashing before saving them to their servers. This way, even if someone compromises those passwords, they won't be able to read them, and a computer would find it difficult—even functionally impossible—to unscramble them. As a prominent company with billions of users, Facebook knows that it would be a jackpot for hackers, and invests heavily to avoid the liability and embarrassment of security mishaps. Unfortunately, though, one open window negates all the padlocks, bolts, and booby traps money can buy.

Facebook stored passwords in plain text, accessible by employees, report says from CNBC.


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AI Tools Could Legitimize "Fake News"

Last month, an A.I. startup backed by sometimes A.I. alarmist Elon Musk announced a new artificial intelligence they claimed was too dangerous to release to the public. While “only” a text generator, OpenAI’s GPT2 was reportedly capable of generating text so freakishly humanlike that it could convince people that it was, in fact, written by a real flesh and blood human being. To use GPT2, a user would only have to feed it the start of a document, before the algorithm would take over and complete it in a highly convincing manner. For instance, give it the opening paragraphs of a newspaper story and it would manufacture “quotes” and assorted other details.

Such tools are becoming increasingly common in the world of A.I. — and the world of fake news, too. The combination of machine intelligence and, perhaps, the distinctly human unintelligence that allows disinformation to spread could prove a dangerous mix. Fortunately, a new A.I. developed by researchers at MIT, IBM’s Watson A.I. Lab and Harvard University is here to help. And just like a Terminator designed to hunt other Terminators, this one — called GLTR — is uniquely qualified to spot bot impostors. As its creators explain in a blog post, text generation tools like GPT2 open up “paths for malicious actors to … generate fake reviews, comments or news articles to influence the public opinion. To prevent this from happening, we need to develop forensic techniques to detect automatically generated text.”



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Waiter Robot

Robots waiting tables are nothing new. Part of the reason they haven’t taken off, though, is because they’re clumsy and more than a little intimidating. But that’s changing fast, and the best evidence might reside in the remote, mountain-strewn nation of Nepal.At Naulo restaurant in downtown Kathmandu, Ginger and her two robot colleagues “converse” with customers and even tell jokes in English when prompted. Their hand-painted, rounded shapes and large, blinking, almost sympathetic eyes help assuage my unease as they take my order of chicken fingers and fries.

Ginger is the brainchild of Rabin Giri, 26, and his colleagues at Paaila Technology, an award-winning robotics and artificial intelligence startup formed by a group of college friends and engineers in 2016. The robots are more advanced than other iterations in the region: They communicate directly with the kitchen staff while using swarm intelligence and speech recognition to serve diners. When idle, they dock themselves against a nearby wall, allowing patrons to eat undisturbed. The debate around workplace robots is hugely divisive. Depending on where you stand, the speed at which AI is advancing is either exciting and valuable or utterly terrifying. Anyone who has seen conversations with Sophia, a Hong Kong–built social humanoid who’s left some of the world’s top interviewers speechless, will be both intrigued and worried by the prospect that the gap between man and machine is constantly shrinking.

Check out @AJEnglish’s Tweet:

Credits:
https://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/how-this-robotics-wizard-is-shaping-the-restaurants-of-tomorrow/91462

Waiter Robot

Check out @AJEnglish’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1067734852215148544?s=09

737 Max 8 Sensor

First introduced in West Germany as a short-hop commuter jet in the early Cold War, the Boeing 737-100 had folding metal stairs attached to the fuselage that passengers climbed to board before airports had jetways. Ground crews hand-lifted heavy luggage into the cargo holds in those days, long before motorized belt loaders were widely available. That low-to-the-ground design was a plus in 1968, but it has proved to be a constraint that engineers modernizing the 737 have had to work around ever since. The compromises required to push forward a more fuel-efficient version of the plane — with larger engines and altered aerodynamics — led to the complex flight control software system that is now under investigation in two fatal crashes over the last five months.

But the decision to continue modernizing the jet, rather than starting at some point with a clean design, resulted in engineering challenges that created unforeseen risks. “Boeing has to sit down and ask itself how long they can keep updating this airplane," said Douglas Moss, an instructor at USC's Viterbi Aviation Safety and Security Program, a former United Airlines captain, an attorney and a former Air Force test pilot. "We are getting to the point where legacy features are such a drag on the airplane that we have to go to a clean-sheet airplane." Few, if any, complex products designed in the 1960s are still manufactured today. The IBM 360 mainframe computer was put out to pasture decades ago. The Apollo spacecraft is revered history. The Buick Electra 225 is long gone. And Western Electric dial telephones are seen only in classic movies.



Credits:
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-fi-boeing-max-design-20190315-story.html

3D Print with light

At the University of Michigan, researchers have developed a new 3D printing method which is 100 times faster than normal. The paper published in the journal Science Advances described the new process; it promises faster and more efficient small-scale manufacturing by allowing very quick production of items. The researchers are using light to shape resins in a vat of liquid. Contrary to the conventional method which would be to 3D print an object by building up plastic filaments layer by layer, it is less time consuming.

3D printing has led to major savings by reducing the need to invest in moulds (which can cost more than $10,000) for relatively small manufacturing jobs. However, one inconvenience which remains is the production timescale which has not been able catch up to a typical one. As Timothy Scott, an associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan explained, you would need hundreds of machines if you were trying to produce at a decent pace. Instead, the new method of 3D printing is very quick. Their method solidifies the liquid resin using two lights to control where the resin is hardened and where it stays fluid.



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The World Wide Web Turns 30

Thirty years ago, an English software engineer submitted a "vague, but exciting" proposal to his boss about a system for managing information that would later be known as the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee was in his early 30s when he submitted the idea at work, a physics laboratory in Switzerland. He wasn't hired to create a worldwide communication system. He simply came up with the idea because he noticed inefficiencies at work. "I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it ... So finding out how things worked was really difficult," he said.

The anniversary event was held at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. This is the research center where Berners-Lee was working as a computer engineer when he developed his ideas for the World Wide Web. His proposal sought to create a way for computers across the world to communicate with each other. The British computer scientist, now 63, had the idea for the hypertext transfer protocol - the “http” in front of each website address. The “http” system enabled the sending and receiving of written information and small images through a software program that became the first web browser. This browser prepared the way for internet availability for large numbers of people through home computers.




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California Proposes "Data Dividend"

California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a “digital dividend” that would let consumers share in the billions of dollars made by technology companies in the most populous U.S. state. In his “State of the State” speech on Tuesday, Newsom said California is proud to be home to tech firms. But he said companies that make billions of dollars “collecting, curating, and monetizing our personal data have a duty to protect it. Consumers have a right to know and control how their data is being used.” He went further by suggesting the companies share some of those profits, joining other politicians calling for higher levies on the wealthy in U.S. society.

Newsom didn’t describe what form the dividend might take, although he said “we can do something bold in this space.” He also praised a tough California data-privacy law that will kick in next year. The world’s largest internet advertising companies, including Alphabet’s Google and Facebook are based in California. Google made more than $30 billion last year, while Facebook earned over $22 billion. Alphabet shares gave up some gains in New York trading, while Facebook turned negative, following Newsom’s comments. Representatives of the companies didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.


Credits:
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/02/14/newsom-calls-for-data-dividend-wants-users-to-profit-from-online-data/

Space X successfully Returns to Earth

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule returned safely to Earth early Friday, wrapping up its inaugural mission to the International Space Station and signaling that the U.S. may soon be able to ferry astronauts to and from space without relying on Russian spacecraft. The uncrewed capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, off the east coast of Florida, at 8:45 a.m. ET after spending almost a week at the space station. The spacecraft undocked from the orbiting outpost Friday at 2:32 a.m. ET to begin its descent.

Click here for the video.

Facebook's 2-Factor Authentication Has Privacy Flaws

On Facebook, two-factor authentication with phone numbers has a two-factored problem. First: The phone number you give to Facebook to help keep your account safe from potential hackers isn't just being used for security. A tweet thread from Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia, on Friday showed that people can find your profile from that same phone number, and you can't opt out of that setting. This comes almost a year after Facebook said it stopped allowing people to search for profiles by phone numbers, and about five months after Gizmodo found that the phone number being used for 2FA was also being provided to advertisers for targeted posts.

On Facebook, two-factor authentication with phone numbers has a two-factored problem. The tying of users' phone numbers with targeted advertising and searches puts security and privacy at odds, potentially driving people away from an important feature that protects accounts from takeovers. Facebook "can't credibly require 2FA for high-risk accounts without segmenting that from search & ads," Alex Stamos, Facebook's former chief information security officer said in a tweet on Saturday.



Credits:
https://www.cnet.com/news/facebooks-two-factor-authentication-with-phone-numbers-puts-security-and-privacy-at-odds/

Apollo 9 -- 50 Years Ago

Fifty years ago, 10 days in space pushed human spaceflight forward with spectacular, groundbreaking testing. On March 3, 1969, a Saturn V rocket launched three brave astronauts into low Earth orbit as part of Apollo 9, a mission on which the crew tested the spacecraft that would later land humans on the lunar surface. The second mission to be launched into orbit by a Saturn V rocket, Apollo 9 was the third crewed mission in the U.S. Apollo program. Apollo 9 saw the first flight of the command and service module (CSM) with the Apollo lunar module (LM). Aboard Apollo 9 was Cmdr. James McDivitt, command module pilot Dave Scott and LM pilot Rusty Schweickart.

Of all the groundbreaking testing completed during the mission, perhaps the most obviously critical for the lunar landing was the LM testing Schweickart did. Although it was the spacecraft's first test in outer space, Schweickart wasn't the least bit nervous, he told Space.com. The training and experiences he'd had as a fighter pilot were far more nerve-wracking, he said. "Not always, but certainly in my case and in the case of most of the people back then, you've been flying high-performance fighter jets around in situations which are, in some sense, more dangerous," he said. Schweickart also commended the extensive training he received at NASA, saying that because of this preparation, "I certainly never felt the least bit of fear or anxiety about coming out of it alive."



Credits:
https://www.space.com/apollo-9-nasa-50th-anniversary.html

Water Fall Swing

Towering steel swing set holding arrays of mechanical solenoids that create a water plane falling in the path of its riders. Formed from a tangent of ideas raised from the study of interactions of water as space, the swing is the first in a series that play with interaction in rides and installations. Riders pass through openings in a waterfall created by precisely monitoring their path via axel-housed encoders, creating the thrill of narrowly escaping obstacles. The swing is an interactive art piece and a collaborative project between Mike O'Toole, Andrew Ratcliff, Ian Charnas and Andrew Witte and a project of Dash 7 Design. The Waterfall Swing has traveled the world with installations across the United States, Austria, The Netherlands, and Australia.

The essence of the trick are the 273 solenoids valves on the top bar of the swing. Not only do they pour the water, but their computerized mechanisms keep track of the speed and the movement of the swing, in order to stop the water just when the people are going right under the bar. That way the wall of water forms a gap for the swing to go through. The thrill of getting caught in the rain must keep the adrenaline high! In designing their interactive installation, the team behind Waterfall Swing needed a highly reliable industrial computer to orchestrate the interplay between rider and waterfall. The swing would be set up at exhibits and festivals around the world and dependability was paramount. While the application may be unique, their desire for a computer that they could count on, no matter where it might be installed, is a requirement that we’ve become adept at accommodating.



Credits:
https://www.waterfallswing.com/about