Day: June 26, 2021

There’s no shortage of vintage car restoration videos on YouTube, but baremetalHW doesn’t focus on classic Mustangs or GTOs. Their painstaking restorations instead bring vintage Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Tonka, and other toy cars back to life. At the start of each video the toys often look like they’ve been salvaged from a garbage dump, but by the end, through an often complicated multi-step restoration process that can often take weeks to complete for vehicles just a few inches long, the final results look better than when kids first tore these packaged toys open decades ago. It also doesn’t hurt that each of these videos features some of the most soothing narration you’ll find anywhere online.

In what looks to be a bigger push into the secured messaging space, Amazon’s AWS has just announced that it is acquiring Wickr.

Founded in 2011, Wickr’s core service is based around providing enterprise end-to-end encryption for messaging, teleconferencing, and file transfer, with Wicker also claiming the distinction of Wickr RAM being “the only collaboration service with full functionality to meet all security criteria outlined” by the NSA.

Even though AWS provides hosting capability for all manner of cloud services, AWS is a relatively small player in the messaging space with AWS’s only other similar offering being Chime, which is another meeting and video conferencing tool available as part of AWS’s growing portfolio of business services, though Chime does not support E2E encryption.

While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, TechCrunch says via Pitchbook that Wickr had raised $60 million in funding, and even with an outsized valuation, AWS’s acquisition of Wickr represents a drop in the bucket compared to AWS’s revenue of around $45 billion in 2020.

In AWS’s announcement post, AWS VP and chief information security officer Stephen Schmidt said AWS will begin offering Wickr’s services to AWS customers “immediately,” though Schmidt did not provide any guidance on how the acquisition of Wickr will impact Chime or other AWS services going forward.

That said, with Wickr’s claims about having encrypted communication that meets government guidelines, I wouldn’t be surprised if AWS plans to use Wickr to help win contracts to handle military communication in the future. Currently, Wickr services are broken up into several categories including solutions for the military, government services, state and local government, and enterprise.

In addition to providing secure collaboration tools allowing companies to share encrypted messages or files within their organization, Wickr also supports self-destructing messages that automatically delete themselves after a specified length of time.

An upgraded FAA operators license now allows Virgin Galactic to include paying customers on its space flights, in what is a major milestone for the company and also the nascent space tourism sector.

The space tourism industry is starting to heat up.

Blue Origin will attempt its first crewed launch of the New Shepard rocket in July, with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the winner of a $28 million auction on board for the ride. Bezos is poised to beat his rivals in the emerging cold war of billionaires trying to get to space before the other guy, but today’s news—that Virgin Galactic has secured an upgraded license to fly paying customers to space—means Richard Branson might actually be the first among them to see the curvature of Earth from suborbital space.

Virgin Galactic’s previous operators license, which dates back to 2016, authorized the company to include “non-deployed scientific, experimental, or inert payloads” on its flights. Paying customers were verboten, at least until Virgin Galactic was able to “verify the integrated performance of a vehicle’s hardware and any software in an operational flight environment,” according to FAA regulations. The verification process also needed to include flight testing, a requirement, along with others, that Virgin Galactic has successfully met.

In a statement, Virgin Galactic claims this is the first license to be issued by the FAA that allows a “spaceline to fly customers to space.” This comes as a surprise, given Blue Origin’s plans to do the same in July, so we reached out to them to inquire about their licensing status.

“We are progressing through our nominal timeline and established plan with the FAA, with expected timing aligned to our flight on July 20,” explained a Blue Origin spokesperson in an email.

That appears to be corporate-speak for not yet having FAA permission, but regardless, this is obviously a huge deal for Virgin Galactic, which kickstarted the project back in 2004, and the space tourism industry in general. News of the upgraded license saw the company’s share value jump by as much as 15%, as Bloomberg reported.

Virgin Galactic has had a painful journey to this achievement. In 2014, VSS Enterprise, a SpaceShipTwo test vehicle, crashed during a flight test, killing co-pilot Michael Alsbury and seriously injuring pilot Peter Siebold.

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo flight system doesn’t work like conventional rockets, which launch vertically from the ground. Instead, a spaceplane is lifted to high altitudes by a four-engine carrier. Once at heights of around 8.1 miles (13.1 kilometers), the spaceplane releases from the carrier and fires its rocket engines, taking it and its passengers to altitudes slightly in excess of 60 miles (95 km). The spaceplane stays in suborbit for several minutes, after which time it glides back to the spaceport, where it lands on a runway.

During its most recent flight test on May 22, VSS Unity reached an altitude of 55.5 miles (89.3 km) and a maximum speed of Mach 3. The FAA recognizes the boundary of space at 50 miles (80 km) above Earth, which is good enough for Virgin Galactic. This falls below the Karman Line, which recognizes space as beginning 62 miles (100 km) above the surface. Some might quibble, therefore, that Virgin Galactic’s vehicles aren’t actually reaching space. You can read more on this contentious subject in a post I wrote back in 2018, “Historic Virgin Galactic flight reminds us that space is just a concept, man.”

Speaking of the May 22 test flight, it actually went exceptionally well, and it paved the way for the FAA upgrade. It was the company’s third crewed flight, and its first from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Recent upgrades to the system worked properly, and the flight was able to include revenue-generating research experiments for NASA.

The newly upgraded license and the successful test on May 22 “give us confidence as we proceed toward our first fully crewed test flight this summer,” Michael Colglazier, Virgin Galactic CEO, said in a statement.

The date of that test flight, and two other scheduled flights, have not been disclosed, but speculation is already emerging that Branson could take part in the first flight and that it’ll happen before Jeff Bezos climbs into his New Shepard rocket. Nothing is confirmed, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Someone is using cracked copies of top video game titles to install crypto-mining malware on PCs belonging to hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting victims—a ploy that’s netted the criminals a hefty $2 million so far.

Researchers at Avast this week said newly discovered malware dubbed Crackonosh had been detected in pirated copies of PC games such as Grand Theft Auto V and NBA 2K19.

Crackonosh does not immediately go to work once the infected game is installed. Like many viruses, it takes a beat to avoid raising suspicion and catch its victims off guard. A malicious process is triggered after a handful of restarts, which forces the system into safe mode, rendering any security tools inert and easily deleted.

“Crackonosh installs itself by replacing critical Windows system files and abusing the Windows Safe mode to impair system defenses,” wrote Avast malware analyst Daniel Bene. “This malware further protects itself by disabling security software, operating system updates and employs other anti-analysis techniques to prevent discovery, making it very difficult to detect and remove.”

Avast disclosed Thursday, in fact, that it had discovered Crackonosh after hearing reports from redditors about its own antivirus software mysteriously being deleted.

Crackonosh’s main purpose is the installation of XMRig, a CPU/GPU miner. More than 222,000 infections have been detected so far, equally more than $2 million in mined Monero, a popular cryptocurrency—a clear demonstration of this attack’s profitability. The earliest infections date back to June 2018, researchers say.

Beneš said the spread of malicious coin miners would never cease as long cracked software remained widely in circulation.

“The key take-away from this is that you really can’t get something for nothing,” Beneš said, “and when you try to steal software, odds are someone is trying to steal from you.”

On Thursday, a 12-story beachside condo building just north of Miami Beach collapsed, killing at least four people with almost 160 still missing. It could be a scary sign for the future, particularly as sea level rise undermines the very foundation that South Florida sits on.

Long before the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside crashed, the building started sinking. An April 2020 study found that the area showed signs of land subsidence—sinking brought on by natural occurrences like sinkholes and exacerbated by human activities like extracting fossil fuels and groundwater. The study’s authors told USA Today that back in the 1990s, the building was descending at a rate of 0.08 inches (2 millimeters) per year, though it’s not clear that that necessarily contributed to its horrific collapse.

Officials are just beginning their investigation into what caused the building’s devastating crash. It will take more data to suss out what happened and the role, if any, subsidence played.

“At this point, any hypothesis is not more than a simple speculation,” Henry O. Briceño, a professor at Florida International University who studies water quality and geology, wrote in an email. “We should wait for the engineers to collect and analyze the information.”

But though the specifics of the crash are still under investigation, it’s been clear for decades that sea level rise and subsidence threaten infrastructure—and people—in South Florida. And the time to address those risks is now, particularly with what the next few decades hold for the region. Sea level rise is expected to accelerate. A report released last year found that Miami “faces the largest risk of any major coastal city in the world” because of the sheer amount of expensive real estate and people living in such a fragile place. An estimated $3.5 trillion of real estate is at risk of inundation by the 2070s, according to the report. Those buildings, though, are ill-equipped for rising seas.

“While it is too early to determine the cause, it is definitely not too early to worry about how building and other infrastructure will be impacted as the flooding from sea-level rise worsens, and whether there is a plan to modify and sustain these buildings or whether they should ultimately be abandoned and removed,” Andrea Dutton, a geoscientist at the University of Madison Wisconsin and former associate professor of geology at the University of Florida, wrote in an email.

Buildings in Surfside and Miami Beach are constructed atop reclaimed wetland. Underpinning them is porous limestone, which forms the region’s geological base. As rising seas encroach on the area—whether from storm surge or increasingly common sunny day floods—brackish, corrosive groundwater can get pushed up through the limestone, causing problems for structures.

“If seawater penetrates a column and reaches the rebar, it will oxidize and the products would increase the volume, creating stresses which in turn could crack the concrete,” said Briceño, noting inspectors probing the Surfside collapse “will have to check if something like that happened.”

Whether or not these factors were a factor, though, they could certainly threaten infrastructure in the future.

“Structures will be subjected to conditions for which they were not designed, like being under seawater permanently,” said Briceño. “Concrete mixes are prepared for what they are supposed to withstand according to design, both, mechanically and chemically.”

Tragically, the Champlain tower was due for a 40-year inspection soon, which could have shown it was at risk of falling in. With such dire threats afoot, officials may have to consider holding such inspections more often. Dutton feared it may even be time to start moving people and infrastructure out of Surfside altogether, a fate that some areas are also already considering due to rising seas.

“One of my concerns is that urban hardscape will become flooded without a plan to remove such infrastructure, and then our coastlines will just become a pile of concrete, metal, and glass rubble,” she said.