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Watch This Human Inkjet Printer Create a Portrait in 300 Hours With 3 Million Hand-Drawn Dots
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There are a lot of reasons to be impressed with David Bayo’s beautiful Astrée portrait created using a painstaking stipple technique. But what’s more staggering to me than hand-drawing 3 million individual dots is somehow finding enough spare time to dedicate 300 hours to a single work of art. I can’t even find the…
Tech
via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com
February 15, 2018 at 02:42PM
Trump Keeps Loophole That Allows Trucks To Vastly Exceed Emission Standards
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Here’s a familiar tale if you’ve followed the current administration in the White House. Former President Barack Obama tried to close an absurd loophole in federal law that would allow certain trucks to vastly (and we mean vastly) exceed emission standards. Current President Donald Trump—thanks to political gamesmanship and potentially shoddy academic work—is keeping the loophole alive.
That’s according to a whopper of a story from The New York Times today, which focuses on the sale of the trucks, known as “gliders,” because—as the Times puts it—“they are manufactured without engines and are later retrofitted with the rebuilt ones.” The loophole has been condemned from a vast array of businesses, including Volvo, trucking company Navistar, and UPS:
Gliders are popular among small trucking companies and individual truck owners, who say they cannot afford to buy or operate vehicles with new engines and modern emissions controls.
The trucks, which Fitzgerald claims burn less fuel per mile and are cheaper to repair, have been on the market since at least the 1970s. But after the federal government moved to force improvements in truck emissions, with standards that were first enacted during the Clinton administration and took full effect by 2010, gliders became a way for trucking companies to legally skirt the rules.
The trucks are cheaper to operate, the Times reports, but they “spew 40 to 55 times the air pollution of other new trucks, according to federal estimates, including toxins blamed for asthma, lung cancer and a range of other ailments.”
One major player in the market is a company called Fitzgerald Glider Kits, and Fitzgerald welcomed Trump with open arms during his 2016 presidential campaign. The company even sells “Make Trucks Great Again” hats, the Times notes. But of course.
So what changed? The sort of swampy, insider-y Washington-type stuff that Trump championed so vociferously against during his campaign.
The Fitzgerald family, it turns out, is politically connected. They’re friends with EPA-hater-turned-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Republican congresswoman Diane Black of Tennessee, and Tennessee Technological University.
The University, according to the Times, produced a story which actually minimized pollution problems associated with gliders. How interesting.
The funder of the study? Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald had not only paid for the study, which has roiled the faculty at Tennessee Tech and is the subject of an internal investigation, but it had also offered to build a new research center for the university on land owned by the company. And in the six weeks before Mr. Pruitt announced in November that he would grant the exemption, Fitzgerald business entities, executives and family members contributed at least $225,000 to Ms. Black’s campaign for governor, campaign disclosure records show.
What’s the upshot? In total, the EPA estimates that “over the life of every 10,000 trucks without modern emissions systems, up to 1,600 Americans would die prematurely, and thousands more would suffer a variety of ailments including bronchitis and heart attacks, particularly in cities with air pollution associated with diesel-powered trains, ships and power plants.”
Superb.
Fitzgerald’s owner, meanwhile, thinks the policy’s fantastic, telling the Times: “I don’t know why anyone would want to kill all these jobs. It does not make any sense.” Maybe he’ll get an idea after reading this piece? Maybe?
Tech
via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com
February 15, 2018 at 12:24PM
Airbus’ Vahana Makes Its First Flight—And Now Must Defeat Bureaucracy
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At 8:52 on the morning of January 31, eight buzzing rotors lifted a black bubble of an aircraft off the ground for the first time. About 20 feet from nose to tail and the same from wingtip to wingtip, Vahana spent 53 seconds aloft, under its own power and autonomous control. It reached a height of 16 feet, looming over the runway at Oregon’s Pendleton UAS Test Range like a gigantisized quadcopter drone.
The flight may not sound like much, but the team from Airbus’ Silicon Valley outpost, A^3, and aerospace experts say such flights of experimental aircraft mark the start of a fundamental change in the way we get around.
“The revolution of aviation we see today is comparable to the jet age,” says Jim Gregory, director of the Aerospace Research Center at The Ohio State University.
Alpha One, as this prototype is dubbed, is a full-scale demonstrator of a single-person, vertical take-off and landing aircraft. The idea behind this thing and its many competitors is to remake the way we fly. Instead of piling dozens or hundreds of people into big jets that fly back and forth between airports, these little VTOL aircraft would work much like personal cars, taking a few people (or just one) on short trips in and around cities, making full use of the third dimension to blast traffic jams into the past. (This is why we dig the term “flying car”—even if the things don’t drive on the ground, they serve the function of a car, and they fly.)
Thirty Vahana engineers worked for two years to make their aircraft ready for its January flight. Just after sunrise, about half a dozen people crowded into the control room to watch. “I remember holding my breath for what felt like an eternity, my heart rate must have gone up two or three times,” says project lead Zach Lovering. When the vehicle safely touched down again, it was hugs and cheers all around. “Light aircraft are a bit of a special creature, they require every system to function appropriately to even get off the ground, let alone land safely,” Lovering says—meaning this test was make or break.
A hallmark moment to be sure, but now the Vahana team faces a challenge more beguiling than making this funky thing fly: convincing the bureaucrats to let it loose in American skies.
It’s the job of the Federal Aviation Administration to keep us safe when we fly, and that includes keeping a tight grip over what kinds of machines can be used in commercial service. Right now, Airbus’ Vahana is so different from existing aircraft—it blends aspects of planes and helicopters—the FAA doesn’t have a classification for it. That’s why FAA representatives were in Oregon for the test flight, watching over the engineers’ shoulders. They’re the folks anyone hoping to lift you up and over traffic needs to impress, and everyone moving into this new airspace knows it.
Before it can get to the fun stuff, the Vahana team must work with the FAA to figure out how to get its new aircraft design certified.
A^3
“The next challenge beyond the vehicle design is the way in which any designer or the wider ecosystem can push toward satisfying the certification and regulatory procedures required to enable scaled manufacturing,” Uber wrote in a 2016 white paper that spelled out its plan to launch air taxi networks in Dubai and Dallas as soon as 2020.
And speed is important, if companies want to play a dominant role in a new network of flying cars. Chinese company Ehang is already flying people in its giant drone. Given that some of them are local government officials (according to a video released by the company) it has the support of that country’s administration, which could prove a major advantage in getting to market.
The traditional route to an airworthiness certificate can take years, and that’s for the kind of aircraft the FAA knows intimately. The test and certification program for Boeing’s 787 was supposed to take nine months, that ended up being a year and a half. The process includes thousands of hours in the air, pushing the flight envelope, operating in extreme conditions, including different weather, heavy loads, and simulations of engine or other failures.
Before it can get to all that fun stuff, the Vahana team must work with the FAA to figure out how to get its new aircraft design certified. So it’s a good thing the agency recognizes the problem, and is working to modernize its rules. The most likely route to certification is finding flexibility in the fixed wing (as opposed to rotorcraft) category. In December 2016, the FAA released a rewrite of Part 23, its standards for light aircraft, removing the very rigid design requirements for planes, and replacing them with more creative ways to prove safety, based on rules the community of builders decides on together, with feds’ approval. The point of the process is to get around rules that, for example, insist on doing such and such for liquid fuel storage—in vehicles powered by batteries and motors. The European Aviation Safety Agency is introducing similarly flexible guidelines, to help outfits like Vahana’s German rival, Lilium.
For now, flying car developers start by applying to the FAA for an experimental aircraft certificate. “That’s a relatively quick process,” says Gregory, who’s writing a book on flight testing. Drone and truck builder Workhorse did just that for its electric octocopter SureFly. (It scrubbed its planned demo flight at CES in Las Vegas in January due to bad weather.) An experimental certificate gives engineers permission to fly their aircraft, but not to carry paying passengers.
For Vahana, the certification process in the US is already underway. “You submit a bunch of paperwork,” says Lovering. Then there are meetings, and the witnesses at the first flight. The next step is getting a type certificate, where the FAA says, OK, this vehicle system is definitely airworthy—go for it. That’s much harder. Expect more meetings, and many more test flights.
Still, the progress Vahana and others have made in this new field count as serious progress in a field that has long been slow to embrace change, governed by an FAA that prefers the safety of well-known systems over new technologies.
Meanwhile, the Vahana team is already moving ahead to more—and more impressive—test flights, aiming to prove their built-in safety features work. The next of many milestones for all the companies in the effort to make flying cars real.
Tech
via Wired Top Stories http://ift.tt/2uc60ci
February 15, 2018 at 07:12AM
Goodreads Can Tell You When Ebooks Go on Sale
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You can get sale alerts for all the books on your Goodreads “want to read” list. Whenever one of them is discounted on Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Google Play, or Kobo, you’ll get an email. (This only works for ebooks, not physical copies.)
Go to your account settings and click “Deals.” Select “Deals from my Want to Read shelf.” You can also get collections of deals according to author, genre, or popularity, but that can clutter your inbox. With these settings, you’ll just get alerts for the books you explicitly want to buy. I have 157 books on my reading list, and one goes on sale every two or three weeks. It’s so convenient it feels like cheating.
The deals are extreme: I grabbed Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith for two bucks, A People’s History of the United States for four, and A Wizard of Earthsea for three. Books this cheap might be bad for the industry! But at these coffee-sized prices, you can afford to buy twice as many.
Tech
via Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com
February 15, 2018 at 09:04AM
Researchers Find New Ways to Exploit Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities in Modern CPUs
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In the past few weeks, the entire information security industry has grown very anxious about Meltdown and Spectre, two classes of exploits that can be used to manipulate vulnerabilities in the way many varieties of modern processors (but especially Intel ones) handle a performance-improving technique called speculative execution and extract hidden system data. While numerous platforms have rushed to roll out patches, and Meltdown appears to be less of an issue than Spectre, it’s still unclear just how badly this situation could go.
Unfortunately, per the Register, researchers are already coming up with ways to exploit the vulnerabilities that go beyond the proof-of-concept stage. A new paper from Princeton University and Nvidia researchers titled “MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime: Automatically-Synthesized Attacks Exploiting Invalidation-Based Coherence Protocols” has worked out yet more complex methods to use the vulnerabilities to extract some of the most sensitive user information on a system. In short, they trick multi-core systems into leaking data stored across more than one processor memory cache, per the Register:
The MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime variants are based on cache invalidation protocols and utilize timing attack techniques known as Prime+Probe and Flush+Reload, which provide insight into how the victim is using cache memory.
“In the context of Spectre and Meltdown, leveraging coherence invalidations enables a Prime+Probe attack to achieve the same level of precision as a Flush+Reload attack and leak the same type of information,” the paper explained. “By exploiting cache invalidations, MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime – two variants of Meltdown and Spectre, respectively – can leak victim memory at the same granularity as Meltdown and Spectre while using a Prime+Probe timing side-channel.”
The new attacks differ from the proof-of-concept methods revealed in the original research on Meltdown and Spectre, the researchers wrote, because while those methods simply pollute the cache during speculation, the newer attacks are “caused by write requests being sent out speculatively in a system that uses an invalidation-based coherence protocol.” Compromised information might include things like passwords, which attackers could potentially use to seize control of the targeted system.
There’s good news, namely that MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime are likely resolved by the same patches that developers are releasing to resolve the original bugs. But the researchers also noted that hardware designers will need to design around the newly discovered attack methods.
Though Intel’s stock has recovered following the fiasco, numerous commentators called out the company as well as Apple and AMD for a lack of transparency regarding how vulnerable their processors remain and the rumored performance hits that may have resulted from patches. Though the impact on most uses of consumer-grade hardware appeared to be minimal, enterprise systems like servers may have taken a massive performance hit. Additionally, Linux systems may experience significant overhead as a result of patches that require extensive reworks of the way affected processors handle data. Intel has expanded its bug bounty program to offer hundreds of thousands to researchers who discover further flaws related to the exploits, per Engadget.
Tech
via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com
February 14, 2018 at 08:12PM
Over 130 Top White House Officials Didn’t Have Full Security Clearance
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Over 130 people working in the executive branch didn’t have full security clearances as of last November, NBC reported Wednesday evening, including senior advisers like Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and White House counsel Don McGahn. A whopping 34 of those people began working for the government on Jan. 20, 2017—the day Trump was sworn in—and were still operating under an interim clearance some 10 months later in November.
And forty-seven of those 130 work in positions that report directly to the president; it’s “unclear” whether any of those employees have received permanent clearance in the months since, NBC said.
Some of the esteemed offices employing those with interim clearances include the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Trade Representative, the White House executive residence, and the National Security Council.
From NBC:
?White House counsel Don McGahn, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah, [had] only interim clearances to access the most sensitive government information, according to the documents. Each of them had obtained permanent clearances to access top-secret materials, a lower clearance that would prevent access to information, for example, in the president’s daily intelligence brief.
Legal experts said the lack of a permanent security clearance does not mean there is something problematic in an individual’s background. Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, said during congressional testimony earlier this week that he would recommend minimal access to classified documents to anyone without a permanent security clearance.
“But if you do that, it has to be a specific interim with controlled access and limited access, and that has to be clear right from the beginning,” Coats said. “You can’t just say an interim allows me to do anything.”
Some of those received interim “top secret” and “sensitive compartmended information (SCI)” clearances, NBC also reported. As CNN noted earlier Wednesday, the intelligence permissions granted to those with interim versus permanent clearance “requires those with full permanent clearances to remain vigilant about what information is shared with those still operating on an interim basis.” Let’s take a guess at how vigilant the executive has been about toeing those boundaries, shall we?
Tech
via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com
February 14, 2018 at 09:30PM
119,000 Passports and Photo IDs of FedEx Customers Found on Unsecured Amazon Server
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Thousands of FedEx customers were exposed after the company left scanned passports, drivers licenses, and other documentation on a publicly accessible Amazon S3 server.
The scanned IDs originated from countries all over the world, including the United States, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, and several European countries. The IDs were attached to forms that included several pieces of personal information, including names, home addresses, phone numbers, and zip codes.
The server, discovered by researchers at the Kromtech Security Center, was secured as of Tuesday.
According to Kromtech, the server belonged to Bongo International LLC, a company that aided customers in performing shipping calculations and currency conversations, among other services. Bongo was purchased by FedEx in 2014 and renamed FedEx Cross-Border International a little over a year later. The service was discontinued in April 2017.
“After a preliminary investigation, we can confirm that some archived Bongo International account information located on a server hosted by a third-party, public cloud provider is secure,” said FedEx in a statement to Gizmodo. “The data was part of a service that was discontinued after our acquisition of Bongo.”
FedEx added there’s “no indication” of the data being “misappropriated.” Its investigation into the matter is ongoing.
According to Kromtech, more than 119,000 scanned documents were discovered on the server. As the documents were dated within the 2009-2012 range, its unclear if FedEx was aware of the server’s existence when it purchased Bongo in 2014, the company said.
Bob Diachenko, Kromtech’s head of communications, said that essentially anyone who might’ve used Bongo’s services between 2009 and 2012 may have had their identity compromised. It’s possible the data has been exposed online for several years, he said.
“This case highlights just how important it is to audit digital assets when a company acquires another and to ensure that customer data is secured and properly stored before, during, and after the sale,” Kromtech said in a statement. “During the integration or migration phase is usually the best time to identify any security and data privacy risks.”
Tech
via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com
February 15, 2018 at 11:06AM