Month: October 2018

We need tech to stand a chance of capping global warming at 1.5°C

This story was originally published on PopPhoto.com.

Sixty years ago NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) officially became NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and the early days of the space race began. The Apollo program launched a few years later in 1961. It’s purpose: get a human being to the moon and bring them back home safely.

These missions to the moon meant innumerable advances for the scientific community—and also some incredible imagery. Bill Anders ‘Earthrise’ photograph, which was snapped during Apollo 8, became one of the most iconic images ever taken, but there are plenty of other awe-inspiring images that were taken during these trips.

The Project Apollo Archive collects them all in one place and features images taken during all eleven of the manned-Apollo missions. The archive is extensive and includes a lot of images that would now be considered throwaway frames. A number of them are underexposed and out of focus, but if you are willing to dig you can find some incredible vintage shots from space—like the frames where you can see modified Hasselblad cameras strapped to the chests of astronauts.

Below, our favorite frames.

The Earth is expanding, satellite by satellite, every rocket launch carrying a piece of the planet’s crust into orbit. Should this incidental geoengineering venture continue, it will reshape our planet’s profile as seen across even interstellar distances—giving our smooth sphere a noticeable bulge.

If we’re puffing up our planet, other civilizations could be doing the same to theirs, producing a ring of satellites that we might be able to spot with telescopes we have today. That’s according to Hector Socas-Navarro, an astrophysicist at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain, who gave a talk on the topic at NASA’s Technosignatures Workshop in Houston last week. Scientists have long speculated that fantastical sun-sized structures might betray the presence of technological aliens, but while a mega-solar panel blocking a distant star is theoretically easy to spot, such notions remain squarely in the realm of science fiction. Thought experiments like Socas-Navarro’s, however, show that now, equipped with better telescopes than their predecessors, researchers are taking searches for planet-level changes more seriously.

Socas-Navarro realized that one planet-scale project in particular should have a specific and visible effect. Imagine a world something like Earth but a few hundred years ahead, technologically speaking. In this world, the alien military has launched GPS satellites to help with navigation. Alien NASA and alien Google have also launched countless weather and mapping satellites to deliver real-time feeds of the entire planet. Many of these satellites sit in special spots, geosynchronous and geostationary orbits, where they move in lockstep with their planet, letting them monitor the same area all the time. Fill in those special orbits and you get a thin cylinder ringing the planet, one that, when it passes between its star and an observer (like us), casts a slightly different shadow out into space than the naked planet would alone. When that shadow sweeps by the Earth, planet-hunting satellites like the aging Kepler and newly functional TESS could witness the alien star dimming in a specific way.

Socas-Navarro published preliminary simulations in The Astrophysical Journal in March showing what that dimming would look like to modern telescopes if we were to watch such an Earthlike planet about ten light-years away. A satellite ring as thin as ours would be too sparse to see, he concluded, but Kepler could spot one about a billion times denser—a radical, but not impossible change that we could pull off in 200 years if launches continue to grow at current rates.

Plenty of people are already studying these stellar flickers, searching for something similar: a planet with natural rings. “It makes for a tricky transit, a tricky shadow,” says Masataka Aizawa, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo who found one possible Saturn cousin in 2017. He agrees that the dimming from a dense satellite belt should look unique. Natural rings spread out equatorially like a record while geosynchronous orbits form a north to south tin-can shape with vanishingly thin walls (ours currently measures just 450 feet thick), and the two geometries should cast two distinct shadows. But he still considers the paper’s suggestion, which he calls “science fictional,” a long shot. “I saw almost all of the [dimming] curves in the Kepler data, and there is no such evidence in my study,” he said.

Whether satellite-loving aliens are out there or not, running more detailed simulations of how the dimming patterns of moons differ from those of rings and satellite swarms helps all exoplanet researchers, Socas-Navarro points out. “We have to make sure we don’t misinterpret something as interesting as aliens, that we don’t mistake [them] with a natural ring or a natural moon,” he says. “If you look deeply they are different.”

While the technosignatures workshop focused on listening, not talking, Socas-Navarro’s ideas also suggest a sweeping conclusion about the nature of the first contact between two species. For decades our radio receivers and telescopes have restricted our potential pen pals to what he colorfully dubs “big brothers”—civilizations with unthinkably advanced technology. These species would be capable of engineering feats such as literally moving stars around, but recent surveys for traces of “astroengineering” have come up short.

As humanity’s capacity to observe advances, the type of civilization we can detect grows closer in nature to our own. Socas-Navarro’s satellite ring is the mark of a moderately advanced civilization just centuries ahead of us, rather than millennia. And he’s not the only one thinking along those lines. Others have proposed looking for orbital mirrors that could warm or cool a planet, something we humans have recently discussed as a potential solution to our own changing climate.

Any thought experiment about alien civilizations has to start with the only civilization we know, and compared with the technologists of the 1960s, climate change has burdened modern researchers with a more nuanced understanding of how technology can destabilize a civilization. “We are facing global problems that we didn’t have before, like global warming,” Socas-Navarro says, “so there is motivation to start global scale projects.” Based on our current experience, it’s not a big jump to wonder whether other civilizations, if they exist, have faced similar challenges—and found technological solutions.

Over the last seventy years, our machines have developed from being able to observe a civilization that controls stars to one that controls merely its own planet. And in the not too distant future, Socas-Navarro predicts, the synthesis of next-gen telescopes with the developing field of astrobiology will bring us to another tipping point. “We are not far from the transition,” he told an interdisciplinary audience of astronomers, archeologists, and anthropologists in Houston on Thursday. “In the next few decades we will be able to see ourselves at interstellar distances, and then we will become big brothers.”

Since little brothers can most easily detect big brothers, the hypothesis suggests that contact will tend to occur between species with a sizeable technology gap. Such contact between human civilizations has not turned out well for the little brother historically, but Socas-Navarro sees one potential reason for optimism.

Based on humanity’s experience with rapid development, researchers speculate that a “sustainability filter” may stop more violent species from reaching technological maturity. Expansionists that fail to check their aggressive impulses may quickly overrun their environment, triggering a technology-resetting crash, or even outright extinction.

Our current struggle to find a balance with our ecosystem suggests we could be facing just such a filter. Climate change threatens to render swaths of the planet uninhabitable by the end of the century, a blow that would derail economic and technological development. Clearing this hurdle, and finding a way for seven to ten billion people to live comfortably yet sustainably, will require that we take an active hand in managing the planet’s climate and resources. Should we reach that point, we’d be able to keep launching satellites and engage in other planet-shaping activities that could be seen from afar. By the same logic, other highly visible civilizations are also more likely to be active curators of their planets.

“They will implement changes to their planet just as a gardener will change his garden,” Socas-Navarro says.

In such a universe, most instances of first contact would be between mature gardeners and those grappling with their own unruly gardens. The likely outcome of such contact, one hopes, would be a gardening lesson.

10:35pm ET Update: On Sunday night, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket took off as scheduled, and ascended into space. After about three minutes, the second stage carried its payload onward, toward a successful deployment of the SAOCOM 1A satellite into a Sun synchronous orbit.

After it separated from the second stage, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket arrested its forward movement, and began falling back toward Earth. It, too, found success in landing at a new site north of Los Angeles. This marked the first time a Falcon 9 rocket had landed on the West Coast, and was SpaceX’s 30th landing of a first stage overall.

Ars had photographer Trevor Mahlmann on site for the historic landing, and we will post his photographs after he collects his remote cameras.

Original post: The US Air Force has a message for residents of Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo counties—do not be alarmed on Sunday night around 7:30pm local time if you hear a loud noise. That’s just the sonic boom of a rocket’s first stage, returning from space, and landing for the first time ever at site along the West Coast of California.

On Sunday night, SpaceX is scheduled to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which is a couple of hours north of Los Angeles. While the company has landed several first stage boosters on a drone ship offshore from California, until now it has not attempted to land at a site along the coast. But now it has completed the “Landing Zone 4” facility and received the necessary federal approvals for rockets to make a vertical landing there.

For long time employees of the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company there must be some satisfaction in this. More than a decade ago, when SpaceX sought to begin launching its Falcon 1 rocket, the company asked the Air Force for permission to launch from Vandenberg. But the military and some of the companies using the facility to launch national security missions, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing, looked coolly upon the requests from SpaceX. Now SpaceX has built a landing zone on the former site of Space Launch Complex 4W, where Titan rockets built by Lockheed were previously launched.

We’ve all encountered security questions asking where we went to school, our favorite color or food, our first concert, and the ubiquitous “mother’s maiden name.” Imagine a world where on one screen you carefully chose Stanford, red, spaghetti and so on, and on the next you were shown ads for Italian restaurants, red shoes, and jobs for Stanford grads.

Seems like an insane violation, right? I mean, it stands to reason that we expect that the information we type to secure our online accounts and apps is private, safely guarded information.

Me giving Facebook my phone number for 2FA is not the same thing as me opting-in to advertiser messaging, but I bet that’s how it is spelled out in the terms of service… Wow. https://t.co/4ekfqT79G8

— Jeremy Vanderlan (@jvanderlan) September 26th, 2018

Not so, we learned this past week, when amid all the chaos of the news cycle we’re desperately trying to stay on top of, it came to light that Facebook admitted to handing over people’s phone numbers they provided for two-factor security purposes.

In response to the fact that no one knew about this, the company made it seem as though this practice was in a policy somewhere that people could’ve learned about and avoided but didn’t. “We are clear about how we use the information we collect,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to press, “including the contact information that people upload or add to their own accounts. You can manage and delete the contact information you’ve uploaded at any time.”

There is no part of Facebook’s own Data Use Policy that states the company uses information provided for security purposes under “Information We Collect,” nor does security information make an appearance in “How Do We Use This Information?” — neither does the section on security.

Facebook’s Data Use Policy security section only says, “We use the information we have to verify accounts and activity, combat harmful conduct, detect and prevent spam and other bad experiences, maintain the integrity of our Products, and promote safety and security on and off of Facebook Products.” That’s it.

To be absolutely clear, there’s nothing in Facebook’s documentation about making ad dollars off of your security info. Nor is there anything anywhere that told users their two-factor phone numbers provided for security went into a database for ad targeting. Not that it would make any of this OK at all if Facebook had come back to press saying, “Here’s our policy on doing whatever we want with things you gave us for protecting your own security.”

Facebook told press this nontransparent betrayal of trust is to make people’s experience better on the social network. If you don’t like it, now that it’s too late, it said your only option is to not use “phone number based 2FA.”

This is Facebook telling the public that if they don’t want their security information used for the purposes of advertisers stalking them, users should not use two-factor in a way that is (for many) the only way they know how.

This all came out when Gizmodo verified that Facebook has been taking our “shadow profile” information — secret dossiers it makes about us with info we don’t give the company and can’t see or control — and handing it to its unknown pool of, probably, poorly secured data dealers. But we expected that.

It flies right in the face of what the company’s security chief said back in January when infosec folks complained about giving Facebook their phone number for two-factor and then got SMS spammed with News Feed notifications via the number they provided. People who responded to these surprising and unwanted notifications found that their responses were being posted on Facebook.

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s CSO in 2016

“The last thing we want is for people to avoid helpful security features because they fear they will receive unrelated notifications,” wrote then CSO Alex Stamos. For those keeping track, he’s the same CSO who was active during the massive Facebook hack the company just admitted to, and he also ran Yahoo security during its record-setting breach of 500 million accounts. It’s probably important to keep track of such things. But I digress.

Until this past May, phone numbers were the only way Facebook users could add the extra layer of security to their accounts. During that rollout, Facebook’s Security Communications Manager Pete Voss would not tell Wired how many people two-factor on the social network. “I can just say that we’ve gotten the feedback that people want it to be easier, people do take security seriously,” he said.

Prior to that, in January Facebook added the two-factor option of security keys (like the Yubico) for users but still told them they’d need to hand over a phone number as well.

In a 2017 survey Duo Labs found that the use rate for two-factor was 28 percent, with most (85.8 percent) saying their preferred method was SMS (phone number) notification. At the Usenix Enigma 2018 security conference in California this past January, a Google engineer revealed that 10 percent of Gmail users have two-factor enabled. So we might estimate that perhaps out of every 10 people there are between one and three who use two-factor, with most of them preferring the default SMS method.

Now let’s look at a Facebook number: the 50 million people whose accounts we just found out were exposed in the company’s jaw-dropping 2017-2018 authentication token snatch and grab. So if even just one in 10 used 2FA and we used Duo’s 85 percent for guessing how many of those use SMS… 4.25 million Facebook users who thought they gave Facebook a phone number in good faith now risk being stalked by the company’s pet advertisers. I’m sure there were even more ad targets scooped into the mix when Facebook made 2FA mandatory for “some” Page managers in August.

This, however, cuts deep in the worlds of both security and the secured. Taking people’s security stuff and trading it (or maybe renting it, as Facebook is keen to avoid the word “selling”) is the infosec equivalent of poisoning a water supply. It establishes Facebook as a threat to the core principles of security. It is a betrayal of trust that left many in the security profession speechless with anger — and tech lawyers furiously disgusted. And worried. Very worried about what this means for everyone.

Plainly put, people will be discouraged from using 2FA, and this is a net loss for everyone. They’ll see things like “You Gave Facebook Your Number For Security. They Used It For Ads.” And despite the cautions of that article, people now know that big companies like Facebook are doing this unapologetically, and they will be safe in assuming that other companies do this as well.

We all know that humans are crap at making good passwords, that everything runs on passwords and that not enough people use password managers. Two-factor SMS is a tacked-on solution and it’s not the best, but it’s battle-tested as being something that reduces risk.

I mean, talk about undoing years of hard work convincing people to secure their accounts.

Images: Stephen Lam/Reuters (Zuckerberg); Brendan McDermid/Reuters (Alex Stamos); Motortion via Getty Images (phone in hand)

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

October 5, 2018 at 02:00PM

Over the past couple of weeks, Google has announced some pretty big changes to some of its apps and services, like Google Assistant, Google Maps, and the Google Feed, which is now called Discover. As we approach the weekend, a number of those changes are arriving on phones, according to so many of you readers.

For Google Assistant, Google announced just this week that Assistant is getting a bit of a makeover. That makeover includes more touch controls, bigger touch points, and a balancing of voice and physical interactivity. The new Assistant also lets you quickly swipe up as it listens to get into your updates for the day.

You can see just how that new Assistant UI looks above. As of today, it seems to be widely rolling out. Check for a Google App update on Google Play if you aren’t seeing it just yet.

For Google Maps (below), Google introduced music controls within the navigation UI and a new commute tab to help you better manage your daily to-and-from work route. We haven’t seen the commute tab yet, but the music support is there.

Currently, Maps has support for Google Play Music, Spotify, and Apple Music, so you can jump between tracks without ever leaving your navigation screen. For Spotify, users also have quick access to their library of songs, albums, podcasts, and playlists.

To turn on the new music controls in Google Maps, you’ll head into Maps, swipe out the side bar and go into Settings>Navigation Settings. From there, scroll all of the way to the bottom and toggle on “Show media playback controls.” Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to tap on the “Default media app” and choose the music service you use.

And finally, the new “Discover” feed has rolled out to most, but what users are finding is a dark theme or mode with supported launchers. If you own a Pixel or Pixel 2 and have the Google app enabled as a swipe to the left of your home screen, this Discover feed now pays attention to your phone’s theme. If you have the light Pixel theme applied, Discover will match that. If you have the dark theme selected, it’ll turn dark as you can see below.

Google Play Links: Google App | Google Maps

Cheers Brent, Derek, Randy, Mark, and everyone else!