If you’ve been searching for a PS5 these past months—convinced that the solution to the ennui of lockdown life lies in next-gen gaming—it’s likely that you’ve also made a new, hated enemy: retail bots.
For many, attempts to buy the console have followed the same sad pattern. A store, like Argos, Currys PC World, or GAME, announces it has new stock. Customers descend on the site—more than 160,000 at once, in the case of Currys—crashing it. When the virtual dust settles, the consoles are gone. Almost instantly, hundreds begin to appear on eBay for double the price. The culprits? Scalpers and their weapon of choice: retail bots. And the pandemic has created an ideal hunting ground.
There are three kinds of bots at work, explains Thomas Platt, head of ecommerce at Netacea, a cybersecurity company. The first, and most notorious, is called an AIO bot, or all-in-one bot. These move at an inhuman rate, scanning hundreds of websites every second to check if the PS5 is in stock. The instant an item drops, the bot will buy it and check out, faster than a human could ever type their details. These bots, explains Platt, will have multiple accounts loaded with multiple credit cards, so they can pick up large quantities of PS5s.
The two other common types of bot are similar. One will check to see if an item becomes available, then send the bot’s owner a text or notification; the other lets you pay a fee to get a checkout slot. “Or they’re pausing and holding that stock in rotation until they sell it,” says Platt. “That’s something we saw a lot in the ticket industry a while ago, and we see a lot in the airline industry, where you might hold the item, put it up for retail on another site, and as soon as you get a bid on it, you automatically purchase it.”
Scalping bots aren’t new. Online ticket scalping was outlawed in the UK in 2018, and “sneakerbots” drive a secondary retail market for rare trainers worth $2 billion. It’s been typical to see bots target big shopping events like Black Friday. Before the pandemic, they were growing in popularity as a result of the retail industry’s increasing reliance on hype and limited stocks. “We are seeing more and more hard sales recently, with limited stock,” says Benjamin Fabre, CTO of DataDome, a cybersecurity company.
But the pandemic has kicked these bots into overdrive, and it’s not just the result of more aggressive sales events and shopping being pushed online (you can’t, obviously, have a retail bot camp out in front of your local GAME store). Damaged supply chains have limited the stock of usually plentiful items, creating scarcity, and scarcity is what scalpers prey on. “We used to see niche groups of people targeting niche groups of things,” says Platt. “And now what we realize is they can target things that aren’t so niche, and they can make a lot of money. And that’s the real switch for us.”
From gym equipment to hot tubs to Magic the Gathering trading cards, the net has widened for these groups, which have grown into huge communities. “It’s spreading across the board,” says Jason Kent at Cequence Security, a cybersecurity software company. “The guys that worked on buying the most desirable shoes have realized that they can spread their knowledge, ability, and concepts to whatever.”
Data provided by Netacea showed that a botnet which used 300 compromised machines made 1 million attempts to buy PS5s over six hours, and that “cook communities” of would-be scalpers can reach up to 20,000 people. When Google searches for PS5 spike, so do those for scalper bots.
Gareth Dorrian, Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Space Science, University of Birmingham
Ian Whittaker, Senior Lecturer in Physics, Nottingham Trent University
No-one has visited the moon since 1972. But with the advent of commercial human spaceflight, the urge to return is resurgent and generating a new space race. Nasa has selected the private company SpaceX to be part of its commercial spaceflight operations, but the firm is also pursuing its own space exploration agenda.
To enable flights to the moon and beyond, both NASA and SpaceX are developing new heavy lift rockets: SpaceX’s Starship and Nasa’s Space Launch System.
But how do they differ and which one is more powerful?
Discover the story of how and why NASA was created, its greatest triumphs, darkest days, and of the times it exceeded all possible hopes. A tale of adventure, heroism and resourcefulness, learn of the space agency’s greatest achievements and how — over six decades — the organization has consistently and tirelessly devoted itself to its founding principle: that “activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all humankind”. View Deal
Starship
Rockets go through multiple stages to get into orbit. By discarding spent fuel tanks while in flight, the rocket becomes lighter and therefore easier to accelerate. Once in operation, SpaceX’s launch system will be comprised of two stages: the launch vehicle known as Super Heavy and the Starship.
Super Heavy is powered by the Raptor rocket engine, burning a combination of liquid methane and liquid oxygen. The basic principle of a liquid fuel rocket engine is that two propellants – a fuel such as kerosene and an oxidiser such as liquid oxygen – are brought together in a combustion chamber and ignited. The flame produces hot gas under high pressure which is expelled at high speed through the engine nozzle to produce thrust.
The rocket will provide 15 million pounds of thrust at launch, which is approximately twice as much as the rockets of the Apollo era. Atop the launcher sits the Starship, itself powered by another six Raptor engines and equipped with a large mission bay for accommodating satellites, compartments for up to 100 crew and even extra fuel tanks for refuelling in space, which is critical to long duration interplanetary human spaceflight.
Super Heavy separating from Starship. (Image credit: SpaceX)
The Starship is designed to operate both in the vacuum of space and within the atmospheres of Earth and Mars, using small moveable wings to glide to a desired landing zone.
Once over the landing area, the Starship flips into a vertical position and uses its on-board Raptor engines to make a powered descent and landing. It will have sufficient thrust to lift itself off the surface of Mars or the moon, overcoming the weaker gravity of these worlds, and return to Earth – again making a powered soft landing. The Starship and Super Heavy are both fully reusable and the entire system is designed to lift more than 100 tons of payload to the surface of the Moon or Mars.
The spacecraft is maturing rapidly. A recent test flight of the Starship prototype, the SN8, successfully demonstrated a number of the manoeuvres required to make this work. Unfortunately, there was a malfunction in one of the Raptor engines and the SN8 crashed on landing. Another test flight is expected in the coming days.
NASA’s Space Launch System
The Space Launch System (SLS) from Nasa will be taking the crown from the discontinued Saturn V as the most powerful rocket the agency has ever used. The current incarnation (SLS block 1) stands at almost 100 metres tall.
The SLS core stage, containing more than 3.3 million litres of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (equivalent to one-and-a-half Olympic size swimming pools), is powered by four RS-25 engines, three of which were used on the previous Space Shuttle. Their main difference from the Raptors is that they burn liquid hydrogen instead of methane.
Stages of the SLS. (Image credit: NASA)
The core stage of the rocket is augmented by two solid rocket boosters, attached to its sides, providing a total combined thrust of 8.2 million pounds at launch – about 5% more than the Saturn V at launch. This will lift the spacecraft to low Earth orbit. The upper stage is intended to lift the attached payload – the astronaut capsule – out of Earth’s orbit and is a smaller liquid fuel stage powered by a single RL-10 engine (already in use by ATLAS and DELTA rockets) which is smaller and lighter than the RS-25.
The Space Launch System will send the Orion crew capsule, which can support up to six crew for 21 days, to the Moon as part of the Artemis-1 mission – a task that current Nasa rockets are currently not capable of performing.
It is intended to have large acrylic windows so astronauts can watch the journey. It will also have its own engine and fuel supply, as well as secondary propulsion systems for returning to the Earth. Future space stations, such as the Lunar Gateway, will serve as a logistical hub, which may include refuelling.
The core stage and booster rockets are unlikely to be reusable (instead of landing they will drop in the ocean), so there is a higher cost with the SLS system, both in materials and environmentally. It is designed to evolve to larger stages capable of carrying crew or cargo weighing up to 120 tonnes, which is potentially more than Starship.
NASA’s SLS and SpaceX’s Starship, on the right, could both get us to the Moon and beyond. (Image credit: Ian Whittaker/NASA/SpaceX, Author provided)
A lot of the technology being used in SLS is so-called “legacy equipment” in that it is adapted from previous missions, cutting down the research and development time. However, earlier this month, a test fire of the SLS core stage was stopped a minute into the eight-minute test due to a suspected component failure. No significant damage occurred, and the SLS program manager, John Honeycutt, stated: “I don’t think we’re looking at a significant design change.”
And the winner is…
So which spacecraft likely to reach carry a crew to the moon first? Artemis 2 is planned as the first crewed mission using SLS to perform a flyby of the moon and is expected to launch in August 2023. Whereas SpaceX has no specific date planned for crewed launch, they are running #dearMoon – a project involving lunar space tourism planned for 2023. Musk has also stated that a crewed Martian mission could take place as early as 2024, also using Starship.
Ultimately it is a competition between an agency that has had years of testing and experience but is limited by a fluctuating taxpayer budget and administration policy changes, and a company relatively new to the game but which has already launched 109 Falcon 9 rockets with a 98% success rate and has a dedicated long-term cash flow.
Whoever reaches the moon first will inaugurate a new era of exploration of a world which still has much scientific value.
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