Day: September 3, 2021

It’s been 50 years since the patent for the airbag was filed. Now, the humble safety equipment has been turned into a fashion statement by Mercedes-Benz. The supplemental restraint devices can now be worn as jackets, bags, and what can only be described as a huge, puffy shower cap.

To create the clothing, Mercedes collaborated with Heron Preston, described as a fashion designer, sustainability advocate and DJ. Preston used recycled airbags to create the outfits, adding patterns and color that evoke automotive safety. Some of the pieces, for example, contain the red, orange, and black markings and text found on crash test cars and dummies, such as the circles divided into contrasting color quarters. Come to think of it, they look quite similar to the logo of another German automaker.

The airbag was patented in October 1971. Mercedes claims to be the first car company to employ the safety device 10 years later, with the 1981 S-Class. Indeed, some of the photos in the fashion shoot by Thibaut Grevet include a W126 500 SEL safety car painted in contrasting silvers, blacks, and oranges. A new S-Class painted in a similar color scheme is posed next to it as well.

As for the clothes themselves, we’re clearly not the target demo. While we can see the usefulness and conversation-piece factor in an airbag bag, for instance, we’re clearly not cool enough to pull off an inflated hoodie that makes you look like you’re about to clear a contaminated site of radiation, or a junior officer aboard the Spaceball One. If you can, though, these one-off pieces will be available on internet hypebeast trading post Goat starting September 10. Before that happens, though, they’ll be shown Sept. 6-8 at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Berlin.

As the Perseverance rover drilled into a rock on Wednesday to collect a sample from Jezero Crater on Mars, Justin Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, felt both nervous and excited. He has the honor of serving as the “sample shepherd,” leading the effort from millions of miles away, but the pressure’s on. “These samples not only will allow us to understand the geology of the crater, but also minerals likely related to the history of water there,” he said yesterday.

But first, the rover had to actually capture a chunk of rock in a test tube-sized container. An initial attempt in early August had come up empty. That first rock, nicknamed “Roubion,” simply crumbled to dust as the drill bored into it, and none of those bits made it into the container.

Simon can now breathe a sigh of relief. Perseverance’s second try, with a different rock, appears to have successfully extracted a Martian core slightly thicker than a pencil.

“We got that image of just a spectacular-looking core, a fantastic-looking cylinder, broken off cleanly. It looks geologically very interesting, something scientists of the future will enjoy working on,” says Ken Farley, a Caltech geochemist and project scientist of the Perseverance mission, which is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

But the analysis of the new sample is going to take a while, because NASA scientists haven’t been able to get clear photographs due to low lighting conditions, which makes the images tough to interpret. To add more drama for the scientists, when Perseverance did a “percuss-to-ingest” procedure—shaking the sample to make sure the tube’s not overfilled, which would make the system jam when it’s stored—one image appeared to show an empty sample tube. (They’re pretty sure they got the sample, but they’re going to try taking more images in better light over the next couple days.)

Perseverance’s first drill attempt, which essentially pulverized the sample, wasn’t a complete failure, as it yielded evidence suggesting the rock had been weathered, worn down by a river flowing into the lake crater billions of years ago. “It always had been possible that this lake was a transient event, like maybe a comet, rich in water, hit Mars and made lakes, and then it boiled away or froze within tens of years. But that would not produce the weathering we see,” said Farley in an interview earlier this week.

Since that rock was too powdery, the scientists then piloted the rover to a new area, looking for a different kind of rock to sample, using the Ingenuity copter to scout ahead. Perseverance trundled slightly to the west, where on a ridgeline the researchers found a larger, boulder-like rock, which they nicknamed “Rochette,” and which seemed less likely to disintegrate when the rover deployed its tools on it. “It looks like a rock that, if you could throw it, would clank down on the ground. A good, healthy rock,” Farley said.

Before each sampling attempt, Perseverance performs reconnaissance by snapping a bunch of photos of a candidate rock. Last weekend, it also performed an abrasion test to see if Rochette was durable enough to sample. The rover is equipped with a rotary percussive drill (with extra drill bits) that both spins and hammers into the rock. This tool helps clear away dust and chip through the weathered outer layer. The abrasion was spectacularly successful, according to Farley, so the scientists decided to go ahead with grabbing a sample. Perseverance extended its 7-foot-long robotic arm, fired up the drill, and carefully extracted a core sample. Then it rotated the arm’s “hand” so that the sample tube could be inspected.

On the Friday heading into Memorial Day weekend this year, it was meat processing giant JBS. On the Friday before the Fourth of July, it was an IT management software company and, by extension, over a thousand businesses of varying size. It remains to be seen whether Labor Day will see a high-profile ransomware meltdown as well, but one thing is clear: Hackers love holidays.

Really, ransomware hackers love regular weekends, too. But a long one? When everyone’s off carousing with family and friends and studiously avoiding anything remotely office-related? That’s the good stuff. And while the trend isn’t new, a joint warning issued this week by the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency underscores how serious the threat has become.

The appeal to attackers is pretty straightforward. Ransomware can take time to propagate throughout a network, as hackers work to escalate privileges for maximum control over the most systems. The longer it takes for anyone to notice, the more damage they can do. “Generally speaking, the threat actors deploy their ransomware when there is less likelihood of people being around to start pulling plugs,” says Brett Callow, threat analyst at antivirus company Emsisoft. “The less chance of the attack being detected and interrupted.”

Even if it is caught relatively soon, many of the people in charge of dealing with it are potentially poolside, or at the very least harder to get ahold of than they would be on a normal Tuesday afternoon. “Intuitively, it makes sense that defenders may be less attentive during holidays, in large part because of decrease in staff,” says Katie Nickels, director of intelligence at security firm Red Canary. “If a major incident occurs during a holiday, it may be more difficult for defenders to bring in necessary personnel to respond quickly.”

It’s those major incidents that likely caught the FBI and CISA’s attention; in addition to the JBS and Kaseya incidents, the devastating Colonial Pipeline attack took place over Mother’s Day weekend. (Not a three-day weekend, but still timed for maximal inconvenience.) The agencies said they don’t have any “specific threat reporting” that a similar attack will take place over Labor Day weekend, but it shouldn’t come as any sort of surprise if one does.

It’s important to remember also that ransomware is a constant threat, and for every headline-grabbing gasoline shortage there are dozens of small businesses at any given time scrambling to send bitcoins to cybercriminals. Victims reported 2,474 ransomware incidents to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2020, a 20 percent increase over the previous year. Hacker demands tripled in that same timeframe, according to IC3 data. Those attacks weren’t all concentrated around three-day weekends and Hallmark holidays.

In fact, as CISA and the FBI acknowledge, weekends generally tend to be popular with crooks. Callow notes that submissions to ID Ransomware—a service created by security researcher Michael Gillespie that lets you upload ransom notes or encrypted files to figure out what exactly hit you—tend to spike on Mondays, when victims have returned to their offices to find their data encrypted.

Strategic timing on the part of hackers takes other forms, as well. Attacks against schools drop precipitously in the late spring and summer, Callow says, because there’s much less urgency associated with recovery then. When they stole $81 million from Bangladesh Bank, North Korea’s Lazarus Group timed the heist to take advantage not only of differences between Bangladeshi and US weekends—in the former, it’s Friday and Saturday—but also the Lunar New Year, a holiday throughout much of Asia.

New reports have claimed that Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles will be added to the Nintendo Switch Online library soon. The news first broke this week on the Nate the Hate podcast during a discussion on potential handheld games coming to the Switch as part of its online subscription offerings, which were then further corroborated by Nintendo Life and Eurogamer’s sources.

Switch Online currently has a library of over 80 NES games and 50 SNES games, with numbers varying depending on the region in which the service is available. Nintendo Switch Online launched in 2018, and September 2021 marks the third anniversary of the subscription service which began life by offering a small number of NES games originally.

In the years since then, NES and SNES games have slowly trickled out of Nintendo’s vault and onto the Switch. Back in 2019, a data mine discovered the existence of not only SNES games before they were officially announced but also the presence of other emulators that were hidden behind codenames such as Kachikachi and Canoe.

The last time Game Boy games were available on a Nintendo system was during the 3DS era through the virtual console, which allowed for dozens of Nintendo’s greatest handheld hits to find a second life on its dual-screen system.

Several Pokemon games, The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey King Land were just some of the games added to that library during the Nintendo 3DS’s run.

GameSpot has contacted Nintendo for further comment, and we’ll update the story when we receive a response.

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