Samsung develops the first 1TB storage chip for phones

https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/30/samsung-first-1tb-storage-phones/

In the future, Samsung’s phones will have a whopping one terabyte storage capacity… and that time might come sooner than you expect. The tech giant has started mass producing what it says is the industry’s first one terabyte embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) technology for smartphones. It will give the company’s mobile devices PC-like storage without the need for large-capacity micoSD cards. It’ll be incredibly useful if you use your phone to take tons of photos and HD videos — Samsung says it’s enough to store 260 10-minute videos in 4K UHD.

"The 1TB eUFS is expected to play a critical role in bringing a more notebook-like user experience to the next generation of mobile devices," said Cheol Choi, EVP of Memory Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics. As ZDNet notes, Samsung’s upcoming flagship devices, such as the S10, will most likely come with a 1TB option thanks to its new eUFS technology. After all, Samsung started mass producing its 512GB storage technology back in December 2017 and then debuted it with its new phones early on in the following year.

In addition to offering massive storage, the new eUFS was also designed to be faster than typical SSDs, microSDs and previous revisions of the technology. It has a 1,000-megabyte-per-second sequential read speed, twice that of the usual SSD and faster than its 512GB predecessor. Despite all those, Samsung says it’ll come in the same package size as its 512GB flash memory, so it won’t have to make its big phones even bigger.

Source: Samsung

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

January 30, 2019 at 02:57AM

This Israeli Company Will Soon Launch the World’s First Private Moon Lander

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/?p=31306

To the Moon
SpaceIL, a privately funded non-profit organization from Israel and the government-owned corporation Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) will soon launch for the lunar surface with a digital time capsule on board. If successful, it will mark not only the first Israeli craft to land on the moon, but the first-ever private moon lander, as well.
The non-profit organization announced in a statement in December of 2018 that their spacecraft, manufactured by IAI and named Beresheet (th

via Discover Main Feed http://bit.ly/1dqgCKa

January 29, 2019 at 03:38PM

Two Chinese Private Space Companies Will Launch into Orbit This Year

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/?p=31364

Chinese Space Launch
Two Chinese private space companies are on the verge of attempting their first orbital launches, according to the space industry newssite SpaceNews. Companies OneSpace and iSpace aim to successfully complete orbital launches within the first half of 2019. The success of these launches would solidify the progress made by China’s growing private space sector.
Beijing-based OneSpace plans to launch their 62-foot-tall (19 meters) OS-M rocket as soon as late March. The four

via Discover Main Feed http://bit.ly/1dqgCKa

January 29, 2019 at 05:48PM

Major utility implicated in more than a dozen wildfires files for bankruptcy

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1447747

PG&E transmission tower surrounded by fire.
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Fire burns around PG&E transmission towers on Monday, November 12, 2018, east of Pulga, Calif. The first report of the deadly Camp Fire was made near here.

On Tuesday morning, California utility Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (PDF), citing billions of dollars in potential damages and fines stemming from liability in several 2017 and 2018 wildfires.

The utility noted in its Tuesday filing that it has secured $5.5 billion in debtor-in-possession financing to continue operating while it restructures. PG&E serves 16 million customers, primarily in northern California.

PG&E announced that it would file for bankruptcy earlier this month, as investigations into some of California’s deadliest wildfires pointed to sparks from PG&E’s transmission equipment as the causes of more than a dozen fires over the last two years. Investigators have implicated PG&E in 18 wildfires that occurred during October 2017, according to The Wall Street Journal. The fires “burned nearly 200,000 acres, destroyed 3,256 structures, and killed 22 people,” the WSJ noted.

Investigators are still looking into whether PG&E’s equipment sparked the deadly Camp Fire that ripped through northern California last fall, killing 86 people. Late last week, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection announced (PDF) that PG&E was not responsible for the deadly October 2017 Tubbs Fire, which killed 23 people. That fire, the department said, was caused by a “private electrical system adjacent to a residential structure.”

Still, despite not being held responsible for the Tubbs Fire, PG&E says it could be on the hook for more than $30 billion in damages and fines related to California’s wildfires. Climate change has exacerbated wildfires in California, and the state allows fire victims to bring lawsuits against utilities whose equipment sparks a wildfire, even if that utility hasn’t been found negligent.

Starting the fire

On Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported that California’s utility companies—including PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric—had caused more than 2,000 fires between June 2014 and the end of 2017.

The damage caused by each fire ranged in size from just a few meters to thousands of acres. The data came from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which noted that, just because a utility’s equipment sparks a fire, the utility is not necessarily negligent in its maintenance of the equipment.

But the sheer volume of the number of wildfires that are caused by electrical equipment suggests that better regulation is needed. “Lacking the manpower and sophisticated technology necessary to monitor more than 250,000 miles of power lines across the state, regulators rely on something of an honor system, with utilities responsible for ensuring all trees and vegetation are cut back far enough from electrical equipment before the onset of dry, high-fire danger conditions,” the LA Times writes. The CPUC has a team of just 19 people to conduct safety audits and investigate wildfires.

Some lawmakers are reportedly considering making safety guidelines for high-power transmission lines more explicit, and others have suggested appointing a safety representative within the state government to oversee the utilities. The CPUC has requested funding for 13 more positions to conduct utility-line safety audits. California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom, has recently signed an executive order directing the state to partner with private companies to roll out improved fire-detection technology throughout the state.

Fallout from PG&E’s bankruptcy

As the utility attempts to restructure, it looks poised to try to get out of or change several renewable-energy power purchase agreements (PPAs), according to the company’s filing on Tuesday.

PG&E argued that it has signed hundreds of contracts for renewable energy and storage (equivalent to 7.78 gigawatts of renewable contracts and 540 megawatts of storage) at high, early adopter prices. Now it wants to break those contracts and replace them with the cheaper solar, wind, and storage prices that currently prevail in the market.

“The Utility’s entrance into these PPAs has financed the building of thousands of megawatts of renewable energy generation resources and, in so doing, contributed to significant price reductions for renewable energy resources currently available in the market,” PG&E wrote.

“As a result, many of the Utility’s agreements to procure renewable energy resources… obligate the Debtors at rates that are significantly higher rates than are currently available in the renewable resources market,” the utility continued. “On the contrary, other load serving entities, i.e., the Debtors’ competitors, are able to procure required renewable energy resources at those lower rates.”

Wholesale power provider NextEra has petitioned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to prevent PG&E from trying to change its renewable contracts. FERC has said it will look into the matter concurrently with the bankruptcy court.

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

January 29, 2019 at 01:32PM

US indicts Huawei for stealing T-Mobile robot arm, selling US tech to Iran

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1447517


A woman walks toward a sidewalk while a hat obscures part of her face.
Enlarge /

Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies Co., leaves her home while out on bail in Vancouver on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2019.

US prosecutors unsealed a pair of indictments against Huawei on Monday, escalating the Trump administration’s battle with the Chinese smartphone giant. One of the indictments also names Meng Wanzhou—Huawei’s chief financial officer and the daughter of the company’s founder—and accuses her and the company of selling US technology to Iran in violation of US sanctions laws.

The other indictment charges Huawei with stealing cell phone testing technology from T-Mobile. And Huawei is accused of stealing the technology in the most literal sense: according to the indictment, a Huawei employee entered a T-Mobile testing lab, put a proprietary robot arm into his laptop bag, and walked out. The heist was the final step in Huawei’s increasingly aggressive efforts to learn how T-Mobile’s smartphone testing system works.

US prosecutors argue that the two indictments reveal a culture of deception at the Chinese smartphone giant.

“Huawei and its senior executives repeatedly refused to respect the laws of the United States and standard international business practices,” said FBI Director Christopher A. Wray. So the US government has taken the extraordinary step of filing not one but two indictments against a major Chinese company.

The great testing-robot-arm heist

To ensure the quality of smartphones it resold to customers, T-Mobile developed a robot called “Tappy.” It had a mechanical “finger” that could simulate hours of real-world use. The robot was designed to catch flaws in new smartphones before they were sold to customers, helping T-Mobile to raise customer satisfaction levels and reduce returns. Smartphone vendors like Huawei were given access to a lab containing robots they could use to test their own smartphones.

According to the indictment, Huawei desperately wanted a testing robot of its own—both to help it pass T-Mobile’s tests and to test phones they sold to other carriers around the world. T-Mobile had granted a handful of specific Huawei USA employees access to the testing lab under strict non-disclosure agreements. In mid-2012, people from Huawei China began to pressure these employees to gather more information about how T-Mobile’s phones work.

At first, these efforts were limited to asking T-Mobile employees for more information about the robot. But by January 2013, T-Mobile had grown tired of Huawei employees badgering them for details about how Tappy worked.

“We CAN’T ask TMO any questions about the robot,” one US Huawei employee wrote in an email back to headquarters. “TMO is VERY angry about the questions that we asked. Sorry we can’t delivery any more information to you.” By April, T-Mobile was threatening to ban Huawei employees from the lab if they didn’t stop asking questions about the robot.

Rather than backing off, Huawei allegedly escalated its industrial-espionage efforts. Huawei allegedly flew an engineer from China to Seattle, where the testing laboratory was located, to personally inspect the T-Mobile robot. The T-Mobile-cleared employees helped the engineer sneak into T-Mobile’s lab. A T-Mobile employee discovered that he was in the lab and told him to leave.

Undeterred, they returned to the lab the next day. Once again, the authorized Huawei employees allegedly used their badges to grant access to the Chinese engineer. The engineer “took numerous unauthorized photographs of Tappy and otherwise gathered technical information about the robot.” Once again, a T-Mobile employee discovered what was going on and ordered the group to leave.

A furious T-Mobile banned most Huawei personnel from its lab, allowing a single employee to continue testing Huawei phones that were already slated for release by T-Mobile. A couple of weeks later, that employee stole the arm from one of the T-Mobile robots from the lab.

“As he was preparing to leave the laboratory,” the employee “surreptitiously placed one of the Tappy robot arms into his laptop bag and secretly removed it from the laboratory,” the indictment charges.

Overnight, according to prosecutors, the Chinese engineer performed a detailed technical analysis of the robot arm and took a lot of photographs. “Some of the photographs depicted the precise width of certain parts of the robot arm by showing a measuring device next to the parts,” the indictment says.

The employee returned the robot arm the next morning, saying he had taken it home by accident. T-Mobile wasn’t impressed and banned all Huawei personnel from its lab.

Huawei became worried that this incident could anger T-Mobile and ruin Huawei’s hopes of breaking into the lucrative US market—T-Mobile had been the first major US carrier to start selling Huawei’s phones. So the indictment charges that Huawei went to great lengths to mislead T-Mobile about what happened.

Huawei allegedly had a bonus program for stolen secrets

Huawei allegedly conducted a fraudulent “internal investigation” and then wrote a report claiming that the thefts of secrets had been carried out by “two individuals who acted on their own” and who “violated our company’s policies and thus were both terminated for cause.” In reality, prosecutors say, many people at Huawei knew about and supported the employees’ actions.

Prosecutors say that one Huawei program illustrates just how deep Huawei’s culture of stealing secrets went. In July 2013, “Huawei China launched a formal policy instituting a bonus program to reward employees who stole confidential information from competitors,” the indictment states. “Under the policy, Huawei established a formal schedule for rewarding employees for stealing information from competitors based on the confidential value of the information obtained.” The policy “emphasized that no employees would be punished for taking actions in accordance with the policy.”

Obviously, the existence of this program could become awkward for Huawei’s US subsidiary, which was trying to convince T-Mobile that the Seattle lab incident had been an isolated one. So a Huawei USA official sent out an email to all employees acknowledging that employees may have felt they were “being encouraged and could possibly earn a monetary award for collecting confidential information regarding our competitors.”

The email acknowledged that “in some foreign countries and regions, such a directive and award program may be normal and within the usual course of business in that region.” However, the official wrote, “here in the USA, we do not condone [or] engage in such activities, and such behavior is expressly prohibited by company policies.”

Federal prosecutors say that a wealth of internal emails shows that this was nonsense—that Huawei’s US subsidiary actively participated in efforts to steal secrets about T-Mobile’s testing robots.

Huawei’s CFO allegedly lied to US banks about Huawei’s activities in Iran

Prosecutors unsealed a second indictment alongside the one alleging theft of T-Mobile’s robot trade secrets. This one accused Huawei—and specifically CFO Meng—of lying to Western financial institutions about Huawei’s dealings in Iran.

US law prohibits US companies from selling technology to Iran, and it also prohibits companies in third-party countries like China from re-selling US-made technology to Iran. Companies that flout that ban risk losing access to US-made technology altogether—a punishment the Trump administration briefly imposed on another Chinese smartphone giant, ZTE, over similar issues.

US financial institutions are also not supposed to provide service to companies doing illicit business in Iran. So when Reuters reported that Huawei was selling technology to Iran via a shell company in 2012, it put Huawei’s Western banking partners in an awkward position. In June 2013, Meng met with one financial executive at a bank that was doing business with Huawei.

According to prosecutors, she lied about Huawei’s dealings in Iran. She claimed that Huawei was complying with US law and denied that the shell company—on whose board she sat—had been created to evade US sanctions. She visited the US in early 2014 and made similar claims, according to talking points obtained by US prosecutors. Prosecutors say that Meng’s lies convinced the bank to continue doing business with Huawei.

These and related charges are apparently at the core of the US effort to extradite Meng, who was seized while she was changing planes in Vancouver. She is now under house arrest in Canada, and the Canadian government has faced pressure from China to free her. After Meng’s arrest, China seized two Canadians on charges related to national security. The Chinese government claimed that these actions had nothing to do with Meng’s arrest—but that’s a little hard to believe.

Correction: My headline initially said Huawei was indicted for stealing a robot, rather than a robot arm.

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

January 28, 2019 at 06:36PM

Trump Administration Begins Production Of A New Nuclear Weapon

https://www.npr.org/2019/01/28/689510716/trump-administration-begins-production-of-a-new-nuclear-weapon?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news


The new weapon is designed to be launched on a ballistic missile fired from a submarine.

Petty Officer 1st Class Ronald Gutridge/Commander, Submarine Group Nine


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Petty Officer 1st Class Ronald Gutridge/Commander, Submarine Group Nine

The new weapon is designed to be launched on a ballistic missile fired from a submarine.

Petty Officer 1st Class Ronald Gutridge/Commander, Submarine Group Nine

The U.S. Department of Energy has started production on a new, low-yield nuclear weapon designed to counter Russia.

The National Nuclear Security Administration says production of the weapon, known as the W76-2, has begun at its Pantex Plant in the Texas Panhandle. The fact that the weapon was under production was first shared in an e-mail to the Exchange Monitor, an industry trade magazine, and independently confirmed by NPR.

The weapon is a variant of the Navy’s primary submarine-launched nuclear weapon, the W76-1. That warhead is a “strategic weapon,” meaning it makes a very big boom. The W76-1 is believed to have a yield of around 100 kilotons, according to Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, an arms control advocacy group. By contrast, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of about 15 kilotons.

The Energy Department would not provide details about the W76-2, but it’s believed to have a yield of around 5 to 7 kilotons, Kristensen says. That smaller yield is probably created by removing or disabling the secondary stage of the W76-1. The secondary is designed to deliver a large thermonuclear blast triggered by a much smaller nuclear weapon known as the primary. Removing or disabling the secondary while leaving the primary would, in effect, create a smaller weapon.

Last year the Trump administration made the case for the development of a smaller nuclear weapon that could be launched from a submarine. In a document known as the Nuclear Posture Review, the administration claimed that Russia believed its own, smaller nuclear weapons could give it an advantage in a conflict. By using small, tactical nuclear weapons, the thinking goes, Russia could essentially scare NATO into halting a military operation. “[Moscow] mistakenly assesses that the threat of nuclear escalation or actual first use of nuclear weapons would serve to ‘de-escalate’ a conflict on terms favorable to Russia,” the document says.

New, smaller warheads will help balance Russian forces, the report claims. “It will raise the nuclear threshold and help ensure that potential adversaries perceive no possible advantage in limited nuclear escalation, making nuclear employment less likely.”

However, Kristensen worries the new warhead could actually make nuclear war far more likely. For one thing, he says, the W76-2 will be launched on the same Trident missile used to launch the much larger W76-1. “It’s not like the Russians are going to be sitting there saying, ‘Well, let’s wait to see this one detonate first. Oh, it’s a small mushroom cloud! Well, in that case…'”

And even if they did wait, he says, it would not change the fact that the U.S. would have used a nuclear weapon, however small, in a conflict. “A nuke is a nuke,” he says. “Once it’s used, the gloves are off.”

The National Nuclear Security Administration says its first production unit of the new weapon is underway. It is on track to deliver a small number of weapons to the Navy by October of this year.

via NPR Topics: News https://n.pr/2m0CM10

January 28, 2019 at 04:55PM