SpaceX Payload Fairing Survives Despite Missing Recovery Net by ‘a Few Hundred Meters’
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Early today, a Falcon 9 rocket delivered the PAZ radio communications satellite, along with a pair of SpaceX-owned internet satellites, to low-Earth orbit. It was an otherwise routine launch and deployment, save for the attempt to recover the rocket’s payload fairing—a feat that’s never been tried before.
Normally, SpaceX tries to recover the first stage booster after a launch, but not today. This was the booster’s second launch, with the first one occurring back in August 2017, when it delivered Taiwan’s Formosat-5 satellite to low-Earth orbit. But in its effort to reuse as much of a rocket as possible, SpaceX attempted to recover one-half of the rocket’s payload fairing—a cone-like structure that protects satellites, equipment, food, and apparently Telsa Roadsters as they make their way to orbit and beyond.
After deploying today’s cargo, the payload fairing fell back through Earth’s atmosphere at nearly 10,000 km/h, or Mach 8, before a parafoil slowed down its descent, according to Teslarati. The idea was to catch the fairing out at sea in a net carried by a recovery vessel known as Mr. Steven. Things didn’t go quite as planned, but it wasn’t a disaster. “Missed by a few hundred meters, but fairing landed intact in water. Should be able catch it with slightly bigger chutes to slow down descent,” explained SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in a tweet.
Looking at pictures of the half-fairing taken from the recovery ship, it doesn’t look worse for wear, and it doesn’t appear to have been damaged when it hit the water. Assuming it’s okay (a big unknown—it may very well have irrevocable structural damage), it’ll be the first time in history that a rocket fairing has been successfully recovered.
The carbon-fiber fairing, which is built in-house by SpaceX, can be used on both the Falcon 9 and the new, more powerful Falcon Heavy. It consists of two half-cones, which together extend 17 feet (5.2 meters) wide and 43 feet (13.1 meters) high. These things aren’t cheap, costing $3 million per half—hence the motivation for recovery and reuse.
“The analogy I use with my team is, ‘guys imagine we had six million dollars on a pallet of cash,’” Musk said at the ISS Research and Design conference in Washington D.C back in July 2017. “Six million dollars is falling through the sky. Would we try to catch it?’”
The answer appears to be yes, though next time with a bigger net.
In related news, the twin internet satellites known as Microsat 2a and 2b have been re-christened Tintin A and B. The satellites, the first two components of a planned, massive space-based internet communications network, were successfully deployed this morning and are communicating with Earth stations. The duo will attempt to transmit the words “hello world” early tomorrow once they pass over Los Angeles.
Report: Google to Soon Launch ARCore Framework for 3rd-Party Development
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According to a report from Variety, Google will launch the ARCore framework at this year’s MWC, allowing 3rd-party developers to more easily bring augmented reality (AR) apps to the Android platform.
As of right now, if you want to experience any sort of AR on your Android device, you’re best equipped with a Pixel phone from Google, coupled with the latest ARCore app and Star Wars sticker pack. And don’t forget, Pokemon GO also has a touch of AR when trying to catch pocket monsters, but we all disabled that jank, right?
With the release of the framework, developers should have access to all of the development tools they will need to create immersive and exciting apps. You know, access to all of a phone’s sensors, cameras, and all that is needed for AR.
It’s funny that we’ve been discussing AR for such a long time, but it doesn’t have much of an audience on Android at this moment. It’s quite clear that companies like Google and Samsung have focused more on virtual reality (VR) ahead of AR, but now we could see an explosion of AR experiences come to Android. It’s been a long road, but maybe soon we’ll be playing tabletop games sorta like the one Apple showcased during last year’s WWDC.
100-mile-range electric delivery van could beat diesel in lifetime cost
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Electric van company Workhorse announced today that it will provide 50 custom-made all-electric vans with 100 miles of range to UPS for a price lower than that of comparable off-the-shelf diesel vans, without subsidies.
Getting cost-competitive with diesel vans in acquisition price is a big step, especially because total cost of ownership (TCO) is expected to be lower on electric vehicles. That means the Workhorse vans could be significantly cheaper than comparable vans over time.
TCO is generally lower on electric vehicles because fewer moving parts means less maintenance and, as long as filling up a tank with gasoline costs more than charging up a car on electricity, electric vehicle owners can expect to save over the lifetime of the vehicle. But electric vehicle upfront cost tends to be higher than that of a traditional vehicle because lithium-ion batteries are relatively expensive.
Workhorse CEO Steve Burns told Ars in an email that his vans have reached cost-parity with off-the-shelf diesel trucks in part by making the battery pack lighter. “The initial cost parity plus the fuel and maintenance savings of our trucks vs. a diesel over the lifetime of the truck are substantial,” Burns said.
Workhorse, which has been focused on building electric vans since 2015, sources the battery cells from Panasonic (the company that has partnered with Tesla to run the Gigafactory) and assembles the battery packs in-house.
The partnership with UPS is also quite interesting. Per the terms of the agreement, UPS will test the vans in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Atlanta through 2019. Then, according to a UPS press release, “UPS and Workhorse will fine-tune the design in time to deploy a larger fleet in 2019 and beyond.”
UPS hopes that, after the second rollout, it can make the electric van a “standard selection” when the company needs to add to its fleet. UPS says it currently has about 35,000 comparable diesel or gas vans. We can assume that, as those are lost to attrition, all-electric could be a viable option for many situations.
UPS has been in headlines lately due to its aggressive moves towards alternative-fuel vehicles. The company signed a deal with Daimler in September for a number of Fuso eCanter trucks with a range of 62 miles, which would primarily be used in making short-run deliveries around city-centers. Given that electric trucks are much quieter and emit less local pollution than standard gas or diesel trucks, they’re especially equipped to operate in dense urban areas.
UPS has also put money down for 125 Tesla Semis, which the company says is the largest pre-order to date. Those semis won’t be ready for the market until at least 2019, however. In the meantime, UPS has ambitious goals to hit: it has promised to make alternative fuel or advanced technology vehicles a quarter of its vehicle purchases by 2020, and it has promised to make a quarter of the electricity it uses renewable by then as well.
Car companies are preparing to sell driver data to the highest bidder
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The confluence of the technology and automotive industries has given us mobility. It’s not a great name, conjuring images of people riding rascal scooters in big box stores or those weird blue invalid carriages that the government handed out in the UK back in the last century. But in this case, it’s meant as a catch-all to cover a few related trends: autonomous driving, ride-hailing, and connected cars. The last of these is what I’m here to discuss today. Specifically, the results of a pair of surveys: one that looks at consumer attitudes and awareness of connected cars and another that polled industry people.
Love ’em or hate ’em, connected cars are here to stay
Connected cars are booming. On Tuesday, Chetan Sharma Consulting revealed that 2017 saw more new cars added to cellular networks than new cellphones. In particular, it noted that AT&T has been adding a million or more new cars to its network each quarter for the last 11 quarters. While Chetan Sharma didn’t break out numbers for other service providers, it also revealed that Verizon is set to make at least $1 billion from IoT and telematics. And previous research from Gartner suggested that, this year, 98 percent of new cars will be equipped with embedded modems.
OEMs aren’t just connecting cars for the fun of it; the idea is to actually improve their customers’ experience with the cars. But right now, we’re still missing an actual killer app—and to be honest, data on how many customers renew those cell contracts for their vehicles. A survey out this week from Solace that polled 1,500 connected car owners found that they still don’t really trust the technology.
For instance, nearly 40 percent said that they would not trust their car to “automatically react to driving conditions”—the example given is automatically braking. And that number is actually greater when you just look at drivers aged 18-25; 46 percent of them wouldn’t trust such features, compared to 33 percent aged 65 or over. I should note that “connected car” as used here is a pretty wide bucket, similar to the one used in Esurance’s recent survey on distracted driving. That’s notable because the features that most drivers—almost 49 percent—say they would rely on are safety sensors like blindspot monitoring, which don’t require any external connectivity and can be found on plenty of cars without 4G LTE.
Wait, is this thing recording?
But the bit of Solace’s survey I found most interesting was the widespread ignorance regarding data collection. Only 38 percent of connected car drivers knew that their cars could store personal identifiable information about them, with 48 percent unaware this was the case. And that’s important because that PII is being viewed as a goldmine.
Ben Volkow, CEO of Otonomo, told me that, by 2020, bundling and selling data from connected cars will be a massive new revenue stream for the OEMs, on the order of billions of dollars a year. Car companies will bundle data together—for example, a fuel bundle might include the odometer reading, fuel level, oil level, tire pressures if available, and battery charge.
“[The fuel companies] want to offer you more than fuel,” Volkow said. “Many times, the fuel stations are also interested in anonymized data—why do some people always stop, do they take whatever’s available or a specific brand, places to build new stations, and so on.”
What’s more, unlike selling cars, selling data is a high-margin business—between 80- and 90-percent profit. “A big part of the investment is already done,” he said. “The databases are built, SIMs and modems are in the cars; they’ve crossed the Rubicon.”
Otonomo is there to help the OEMs do that—it provides the car companies with a way to do accounting and clearing for data sharing, and it has more than 2 million vehicles on its platform right now. For instance, data protection laws vary wildly around the world—they’re minimal here in the US but much stricter in Europe.
“We check where the car is based with the OEM and where data is going. Based on those parameters, we tell the OEM what they can share openly, anonymized, encrypted, or not share at all. It’s a way for the OEM to make sure they stay in compliance. We work with a team of lawyers that specialize in privacy (in Europe) with regulations like Safe Harbor,” he said.
Volkow thinks that drivers will be happy to share this data, as long as they get some value out of it, like free servicing or micropayments per mile traveled. But he also thinks consumer education is vital. “People tend to be more demanding when it comes to cars; they don’t think of them as the same as mobile devices. You have to convince them there’s a benefit,” he told me.
Fail to do that, and it might be costly. Another survey published this month—this time by Foley and Lardner LLP—queried industry professionals about the business and legal issues that could affect the development of connected cars. By far the greatest concerns to the growth of these connected vehicles were—you guessed it—privacy and cybersecurity.
Is that light at the end of the tunnel?
Encouragingly, my travels over the last year or so have revealed that the auto industry is finally taking this stuff a lot more seriously. In the past, questions about security would be met with boilerplate “we don’t discuss that” replies.
But now there’s an Automotive Information Sharing and Analysis Center for evaluating threats, and OEMs are adding layers of security like anomaly detection and firewalls to their vehicles so that infotainment systems can’t actually give someone control over safety-critical functions. General Motors even let me meet its Red Team, and the company has put cybersecurity on the same level as other safety risks in the design and development of new vehicles.
But I also think we’ve got a way to go yet. Absent the high-profile Jeep hacking of a few years ago, done by some security researchers, there has yet to be an actual malicious actor exploiting connected vehicles. And just about every exploit I’ve read about has required physical access to a vehicle. So it’s not an issue that the average driver even thinks about—obviously here at Ars the audience is a lot more aware. Going forward, there are a few things I think should happen.
First, customers need to start demanding to know about the privacy and security policies that come with connected cars. With regard to data brokerage, it should be very clear what data is and isn’t collected and to whom it gets sold. And consent is key—it’s completely feasible for me to tell my car I’m OK with it sharing data with the OEM but no one else, or I could be fine sharing specific attributes with my insurance company but not to unrelated third parties. This has to be transparent, and I ought to be able to change those settings whenever I want.
What’s more, if a car company is going to monetize my data, I’d better not be paying a monthly bandwidth bill for the privilege. Just like I’m not Facebook’s customer, I wouldn’t be the customer in this transaction either. And finally, connected cars will need to come with some kind of hard-wired privacy switch. After all, privacy concerns with regard to connected vehicles are often equated to cellphones, which almost all of us carry around everywhere. But it’s trivial to put my phone into airplane mode—it ought to be the same for my car.
SpaceX Completes Successful Launch, Narrowly Misses Catching $6 Million Nose Cone
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As part of his "rocket reusability" ethos, Elon Musk had hoped to use a giant net on a boat to catch the rocket’s protective covering. It turns out it’s hard to catch stuff falling from space.
Over the past five years, Mondrea Hasty has had officers come to his house multiple times to arrest him, had his mugshot taken, and been handcuffed during a routine traffic stop. His 10-year-old daughter now cries when she sees a person in a police uniform, fearing they could be coming for her father.
The reason for all this? An outstanding vet bill of $89.89.
Thousands of people like Hasty are arrested or jailed for consumer debts each year, from unpaid medical bills to student loans, exhuming the disturbing practice of “debtor’s prison” from the 19th century and bringing it to modern times. Private debt collectors are weaponizing the courts, getting judges to issue arrest warrants for people who don’t appear in court to discuss the unpaid bills.
In a damning new report titled “A Pound of Flesh: The Criminalization of Private Debt,” the ACLU documents how tens of thousands of these arrest warrants are issued for debtors annually, sometimes for debt as little as $28. In an analysis of over 1,000 cases in 26 states, the ACLU found over 200 people jailed for medical debt in Idaho over six years at the behest of one collections agency; a Washington attorney specializing in debt collection who has gotten arrest warrants issued for over 200 people since 2010; and horrifying individual cases of arrested debtors. A person lucky enough to live through an illness might go to jail as a result:
One Indiana woman, a mother of three, was jailed for missing hearings over medical bills for her cancer treatment. She was physically unable to climb the stairs to the women’s section of the jail, so she was held in a men’s mental health unit with glass walls that exposed her to the male prisoners, even when she used the toilet. She says she was denied medicine and feminine hygiene products, and “trauma-inducing” behavior, including one man who wiped his feces on the wall of their shared cell.
The ACLU found that debtor’s prisons in some cases are in de facto operation:
“Once arrested, debtors may languish in jail for days until they can arrange to pay the bail. In some cases, people were jailed for as long as two weeks. Judges sometimes set bail at the exact amount of the judgment. And the bail money is often turned over to the debt collector or creditor as payment against the judgment.”
Mondrea Hasty’s case is typical: a small debt that was dragged out over five years and resulted in multiple encounters with law enforcement. Hasty’s nightmare began in December 2012 when his home in Maryland burned down. The single father of three didn’t have renter’s insurance so the family lost everything. They found temporary housing, but their dog, an American bull mix that Hasty had given to his twin daughters on their birthday, couldn’t stay with them, so a friend took him in. Unused to being in a new yard that didn’t have a fence, the dog rushed into the road one day and was hit by a car.
Hasty rushed him to a vet who patched him up for $600, half of which Hasty paid then and half of which he agreed to pay within six months. Despite struggling with the loss of his home and belongings, he managed to pay another $200 in installments but when it came time for his final payment, his father got sick and needed financial assistance.
“My father is going to take priority over a vet bill,” said Hasty by phone.
The vet’s office sent several notices to Hasty about the less than $100 that still needed to be paid, with a last warning sent in June 2013. Hasty talked to the vet’s office and said he would pay, but in July, the vet handed the bill over to a lawyer named Daniel Rosendale to collect. And thus Hasty joined the estimated 77 million Americans whose debts have been turned over to private collection agencies.
(I found that tracking these people down is difficult. I reached out repeatedly to dozens of people in Maryland who had small debts that had led to arrest warrants. Only Hasty responded and was willing to talk. People hounded by debt collectors for years tend to make themselves hard to find.)
Deanna Laguna, the practice manager at Veterinary Medical Center, where Hasty took his dog, wasn’t there at the time this all started, but consulted the clinic’s notes regarding Hasty’s case. She said the clinic doesn’t usually bother with anything less than $100, and noticed something strange in Hasty’s file: “Oddly enough, there was a charge put on his account and backdated,” she said. When the clinic handed the bill over to a lawyer, it was for $104.57, according to the clinic’s records, perhaps due to the addition of interest.
Daniel Rosendale is a general practice lawyer, who handles divorce cases, custody battles, and traffic tickets. Rosendale also handles all of the debt cases for Veterinary Medical Center. He’s handled 19 other cases for them, and has gotten arrest warrants issued for some, but not all, of the other debtors. In September 2013, he filed a lawsuit against Hasty, for $89.89 plus $19.46 in interest, in small claims court. Hasty got a summons to appear in court, but his bad luck continued: He had a stroke and missed the court date.
Hasty, infuriated by the mounting debt notices, told me he gathered $89.89 in coins and single dollar bills and took it to the vet, dropped it on their front desk, and told the receptionist that he wanted to be left alone.
“I know. I’m an asshole. But I was annoyed,” Hasty said. “The old lady there was giving me an attitude and saying basically, ‘This is what I expect from black people.’”
Laguna says the Veterinary Medical Center has no record of that payment. Though the case continues for Hasty, it was marked as “deactivated” in the clinic’s system years ago.
“I don’t know what his particular situation was,” said Laguna. “But generally, if the client attempts to settle with us, that’s financially disadvantageous for us because we’d owe the collections agency for their time.”
That’s one of the big problems once debt is turned over to a lawyer or private company. They can buy the debt for pennies on the dollar and then tack on their own fees on top of the original debt, so the debtor’s bills quickly escalate.
After Hasty missed his first court hearing, another court summons was sent, but it went to his old address, where the fire had happened. When Hasty didn’t attend the hearing, the judge cited him for “failure to appear” and issued a body attachment, which meant that officers should arrest him and bring him in.
Two sheriff’s officers came to his house and served him with papers, but told him he could go to court himself the next day. He went to court and explained they had the wrong address for him.
Then he got another court summons, but couldn’t attend that day. And he was informed that the bill was now over $500, primarily as a result of attorney fees.
On a Saturday morning in 2014, 10 minutes after he’d gotten home from working a night shift at his job managing a homeless shelter, two officers came to the door and said they were there to arrest him. They handcuffed him in front of his children, took him to the sheriff’s department where they handcuffed him to a rail and left him for an hour. Then they took his mugshot and brought him before a magistrate and they agreed to a court date.
Hasty appeared in court that time, and the lawyer informed him that he planned to garnish his wages. Hasty said he was living check-to-check and needed the money to feed his kids, but he says the lawyer said that didn’t matter.
“The money was paid, they just didn’t want to accept it in the form it was given,” Hasty told me, exasperated. (Because Hasty manages the homeless shelter he works at, he says he was able to simply refuse to garnish his own wages.)
Debt affects many Americans—one in three Americans have a debt that’s been turned over to a private collection agency, according to the Urban Institute, making the debt collection business an $11 billion annual industry. But it disproportionately affects communities of color, residents of which are more likely to have court judgments against them and, once targeted with a body attachment, more likely to have an encounter with the police leading to their arrest.
Having a body attachment in your file means that any encounter with law enforcement is complicated and can escalate quickly. The ACLU found one case where a debtor “was Tasered and bitten by a police dog in the course of his arrest.” At one point, while Hasty was driving his kids home, a police officer pulled him over, saying his taillight was broken. When the officer pulled up his file, the arrest warrant came up, meaning Hasty was handcuffed in front of his kids once again. The kids got upset and the officer let Hasty go, telling him he needed to go to the station first thing in the morning.
Daniel Rosendale, the lawyer pursuing Hasty’s debt, told me by email that he couldn’t discuss the case, but disputed the premise that people are being incarcerated over debts.
“If a particular Defendant does not cooperate, the Plaintiff can ask for the court’s assistance via a court order to encourage the Defendant to comply with lawful requests for information,” Rosendale wrote by email, emphasizing that warrants are issued because a defendant hasn’t shown up for a court date. “The arrest is not for the debt, but for the Defendant’s defiance of the court’s order(s).”
But as the ACLU notes, “for debtors, this technical distinction matters little.” The ACLU’s major recommendation in its report is that states pass legislation prohibiting courts from issuing body attachments or arrest warrants in debt collection cases.
Hasty’s most recent court date came in December, five years after he first took his dog to the vet. The judge set the total judgment against Hasty at $213.80, and Hasty agreed to have his wages at the homeless center garnished so this nightmare could end. Hasty, though, says that over $700 has been garnished from his wages, augmented with additional fees from Rosendale.
Jennifer Turner, the author of the ACLU report, said she encountered a number of cases where the final amount a debtor pays is much higher than the judgment.
“What started as a $200 bill can mushroom into much more, with the addition of post-judgment interest and attorney fees,” she said by phone. “The court is just rubber-stamping whatever the debt collector asks for. It’s like the wild west in these lower courts. Judges aren’t doing their due diligence to make sure people’s rights are protected.”
Meanwhile, the dog whose vet bill started all this for Mondrea Hasty has since died.
“My kids want to get another pet but I’ve refused,” said Hasty. “I never want to take an animal to the vet again.”
YouTuber Terrormink upcycled an old scanner, hard drive, and CD-ROM drive with some Meccano parts and an Arduino to run the whole thing. The printer itself isn’t easy on the eyes, but there’s a lovely aesthetic to the pointillist images it creates. What isn’t quite as lovely is the incessant tapping sound that’s more grating than even the loudest of dot-matrix-printers of the ‘80s.