Month: January 2020

There’s a Kenny Chesney song that goes “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” (tractor being a euphemism, based on the lyrics). And sexy is the vibe the Japanese masters at Kubota have gone for in the video, above, showing off their new X Cross concept with a tractor strip tease that reveals its futuristic form and intriguing treads. Modern as it looks, it still retains a few Kubota design cues, though even the traditional safety-orange livery has become a more sophisticated metal-flake tangerine.

Seen as a still image in the light of day, though, devoid of the video’s dramatic lighting and satin sheet, you might mistake the Kubota X for a dreadnaught dispatched by Skynet. Part of the reason for that reaction might be the absence of a seat, steering wheel or other human artifacts.

The X tractor is a design exercise meant to tackle a problem with farming in Japan that’s like one we have here in the United States. With farmers aging out, and far fewer in the next generation replacing them, there’s a labor shortage. So the dwindling numbers who carry on the noble work of growing our food are having to take on more and more acreage. 

To mark the company’s 130th anniversary, Kubota designers revealed the X this month at an exhibition in Kyoto, and it’s a machine they hope will help take up the slack. Farmers in recent years have increasingly been using advanced technology to plant, spray, cultivate and harvest more efficiently. That’s a direction Kubota’s been headed since it established its AgriRobo series in 2017. The AgriRobo-equipped machines still look like a modern-day Kubota and can be operated by a farmer onboard, but they can also be commanded by remote control and can accomplish some tasks on their own. The X tractor takes things a step further: It has nowhere for a farmer to ride even if he wanted to.

But Kubota sees this as more than self-driving. The X concept as envisioned will use artificial intelligence to do some of the actual science of farming, for example by consulting weather forecasts and historical data, or evaluating plant growth — and then making its own decisions about what needs doing, and when. Imagine waking up in the morning and looking out the window to discover that your tractor has rushed off to finish planting because it decided there’s rain on the way.

Instead of diesel, the Kubota X is electrically powered. Though, because it’s a Kubota, presumably it’s still comfortable crawling through a flooded rice paddy up to where its exhaust manifold would’ve been. No particulars were revealed about power output or its expected run time on a charge. Its treads can shape-shift to match the conditions, increasing the contact patch or lowering the center of gravity, or raising the tractor body to clear crops in the field. And with motors at all four crawlers, it can turn on a yen.

One thing Kubota didn’t explain was whether, or how, the X would attach its own implements, and whether it would cuss like a human farmer at that chore.

Final note: Fifty years ago, Kubota similarly displayed a concept, the “Dream Tractor,” in 1970 at the Japan World Expo in Osaka, and it resurfaced that image along with the reveal of the X. Groovy as it is, tractors didn’t exactly evolve in this direction:

Related Video:

Rocket Lab just launched its first payload for the United States’ spysat agency — and attempted another big step toward rocket reusability in the process.

One of Rocket Lab’s two-stage Electron boosters lifted off from the company’s New Zealand launch site today (Jan. 30) at 8:22 p.m. EST (0122 GMT and 2:22 p.m. local New Zealand time on Jan. 31), carrying the NROL-151 payload for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

The latest report on the progress of the US Defense Department’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is due out soon from the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s director for operational test and evaluation (DOT&E), Robert Behler.

Last year’s report was full of bad news. And based on Bloomberg Government’s Tony Capaccio’s early access to the new report, we know much of that bad news is still bad news. In fact, the only real good news is that there are no new major flaws in the $428 billion aircraft program reported by Behler’s team.

But the bad is still bad. For starters, the Air Force version of the F-35 can’t hit what it shoots its gun at.

There are a total of 13 Category 1 “must fix” issues still unresolved with the F-35 that stand between the program and final production. And even as the long list of less critical problems is addressed, new ones keep popping up. “Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies,” Behler wrote in the report viewed by Bloomberg, “new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number.” And “many significant” issues remain to be addressed, he noted.

The report does not include data from the current round of combat testing, so even more problems may soon be added to the list.

ALIS doesn’t live here anymore

One of the major sources of problems with the F-35 program is the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS)—the software that drives maintenance and logistics for each F-35 aircraft. ALIS is supposed to intelligently drive the flow of maintenance parts, guide support crews in scheduling maintenance, and ensure the right parts get stuck in the right places. Aircraft health and maintenance action information is sent by the ALIS software in each aircraft out to the entire distributed logistical support network.

But ALIS has had some problems—including the fact that the software was not complete when Lockheed Martin began shipping aircraft, and each group of the 490 aircraft already delivered arrived with one of six different versions of the software. All of them will require extensive software retrofits when the seventh is complete, along with the other 510 or so that are expected to have been delivered worldwide by that point.

There are still 873 specific problems in ALIS and other F-35 software (down from 917 in 2018).

And those have been a contributor to the F-35 fleet’s poor reliability. According to OT&E, the overall fleet of F-35s fell far short of being 80-percent “mission capable”—meaning that they could be used in at least one type of combat mission. The Navy’s F-35C fleet “suffered from a particularly poor” mission-capable rate, the OT&E team stated.

In addition to just functional software problems, the OT&E office also reported that cybersecurity issues that had been identified in previous reports on the F-35 program had still not been resolved.

Do you even shoot, bro

While the Navy and Marine Corps versions of the F-35 may have more availability problems than the relatively less-complex Air Force F-35A, they can do at least one thing better: hit what they’re shooting at.

The F-35B and F-35C have externally mounted guns, while the Air Force’s 25-millimeter cannon is mounted internally. Problems with the alignment of the gun’s mount, and the fact that the mount occasionally cracks after the gun has fired, have made the accuracy of the gun “unacceptable,” according to test officials, and have made the Air Force restrict use of the gun. While the F-35 program office has worked on improvements of the gun mount for the F-35A, these have not yet been tested.

But none of this is really slowing down acquisition of the F-35—now the most expensive DOD weapons program in history. Considering that the F-35 was originally supposed to be the “low” in the “high-low mix“—with the F-22 being the more capable aircraft—the huge cost overruns and flaws make the F-35 look increasingly like the world’s most expensive lemon.

The Maze ransomware ring has taken extortion to new heights by publicly posting breached data on the Internet—and threatening full dumps of stolen data if the ring’s “customers” don’t pay for their files to be unencrypted. But the group appears to be making one exception: the City of Pensacola, which was hit by Maze ransomware in December.

On the group’s website, the administrator of Maze’s ransomware operations posted:

We are going to make a gift to City of Pensacola: we will not publish leaked private data, but we publish the list of leak data and hosts to proof [sic], that we did it, we really hacked City of Pensacola.

Just before Christmas, the Maze operators had posted 2GB of data from the city’s systems, claiming it was only 10 percent of what had been stolen from systems before the attackers launched their ransomware attack. But the files were then removed, with only directory data, computer names, and IP addresses left on the site as proof of compromise. Based on the Maze site, 28 servers were hit by the attack.

Others have not been so lucky. The Italian foods company Fratelli Beretta had all the data exfiltrated from 53 systems (a total of 3GB) posted online by Maze. And more recent victims have had smaller dumps posted. Stockdale Radiology, a radiology clinic in Bakersfield, California, had screenshots of affected systems and data from the clinic’s fax server posted—including patient data transmitted from another MRI clinic. Ars reached out to Stockdale Radiology for comment but got no response.

About 25 other victims are listed on Maze’s site, with smaller “proof” data sets posted that include customer information. Victims include:

• Busch’s Inc., a grocery market chain in Michigan
• BST & Co., a certified public accountancy firm in Albany
• Lakeland Community College in Kirkland, Ohio
• The social media and public relations unit of Orlando-based company Massey Services

According to Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow, one recent dump of a Canadian company’s data included employee “names, home addresses, social insurance numbers, tax forms, earnings details, health insurance numbers, banking information, drug test results, etc.”. The company failed to notify employees of the breach.

None of these breaches have been reported publicly by their victims. “The lack of disclosure obviously means that customers/clients/vendors/partners do not know that their data is now in the hands of cybercriminals and can be downloaded by anybody with an Internet connection,” Callow told Ars. “And that means they do not know that they should set up credit monitoring, notify their financial institution, be on the lookout for scams or spear phishing attempts.”

The Maze crew is not the only ransomware operation now using stolen data as additional leverage to get victims to pay up. The REvil/Sodinokibi ransomware ring has also threatened to reveal data of victims who don’t pay, including the travelers’ financial service provider Travelex. And other attackers may also be stealing data and using it in much more subtle ways to extort their victims.