In 1974, Stephen Hawking made one of his most famous predictions: that black holes eventually evaporate entirely.
According to Hawking’s theory, black holes are not perfectly “black” but instead actually emit particles. This radiation, Hawking believed, could eventually siphon enough energy and mass away from black holes to make them disappear. The theory is widely assumed to be true but was once thought nearly impossible to prove.
For the first time, however, physicists have shown this elusive Hawking radiation — at least in a lab. Though Hawking radiation is too faint to be detected in space by our current instruments, physicists have now seen this radiation in a black hole analog created using sound waves and some of the coldest, strangest matter in the universe. [9 Ideas About Black Holes That Will Blow Your Mind]
Pairs of particles
Black holes exert such an incredibly powerful gravitational force that even a photon, which travels at the speed of light, could not escape. While the vacuum of space is generally thought of as empty, the uncertainty of quantum mechanics dictates that a vacuum is instead teeming with virtual particles that flit in and out of existence in matter-antimatter pairs. (Antimatter particles have the same mass as their matter counterparts, but opposite electrical charge.)
Normally, after a pair of virtual particles appears, they immediately annihilate each other. Next to a black hole, however, the extreme forces of gravity instead pull the particles apart, with one particle absorbed by the black hole as the other shoots off into space. The absorbed particle has negative energy, which reduces the black hole’s energy and mass. Swallow enough of these virtual particles, and the black hole eventually evaporates. The escaping particle becomes known as Hawking radiation.
This radiation is weak enough that it’s impossible right now for us to observe it in space, but physicists have thought up very creative ways to measure it in a lab.
A waterfall event horizon
Physicist Jeff Steinhauer and his colleagues at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa used an extremely cold gas called a Bose-Einstein condensate to model the event horizon of a black hole, the invisible boundary beyond which nothing can escape. In a flowing stream of this gas, they placed a cliff, creating a “waterfall” of gas; when the gas flowed over the waterfall, it turned enough potential energy into kinetic energy to flow faster than the speed of sound.
Instead of matter and antimatter particles, the researchers used pairs of phonons, or quantum sound waves, in the gas flow. The phonon on the slow side could travel against the flow of the gas, away from the waterfall, while the phonon on the fast side could not, trapped by the “black hole” of supersonic gas.
“It’s like if you were trying to swim against a current that was going faster than you could swim,” Steinhauer told Live Science. “You’d feel like you were going forward, but you were really going back. And that’s analogous to a photon in a black hole trying to get out of the black hole but being pulled by gravity the wrong way.”
Hawking predicted that the radiation of emitted particles would be in a continuous spectrum of wavelengths and energies. He also said that it could be described by a single temperature that was dependent only on the mass of the black hole. The recent experiment confirmed both of these predictions in the sonic black hole.
“These experiments are a tour de force,” Renaud Parentani, a theoretical physicist at Laboratoire de Physique Théorique of Paris-Sud University, told Live Science. Parentani also studies analog black holes but from a theoretical angle; he was not involved in the new study. “It’s a very precise experiment. From the experimental side, Jeff [Steinhauer] is really, at the moment, the world-leading expert of using cold atoms to probe black hole physics.”
Parentani, however, emphasized that this study is “one step along a long process.” In particular, this study did not show the phonon pairs being correlated on the quantum level, which is another important aspect of Hawking’s predictions.
“The story will continue,” said Parentani. “It is not at all the end.”
NASA’s Apollo 10 lunar module, or “Snoopy,” above the Moon on May 22, 1969.Image: NASA
A discarded Apollo 10 lunar module known as “Snoopy” has been drifting in space for the past 50 years, its location a complete mystery. Now, after a meticulous eight-year search, a team of astronomers suspect they’ve finally found it.
On May 22, 1969, just two months before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their famous walk, NASA’s Apollo 10 mission performed an important preparatory exercise some 47,400 feet above the Moon.
During this dress rehearsal for the Moon landing, astronauts Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan spent some time in a lunar module, nicknamed Snoopy, as fellow astronaut John Young waited in the command module, appropriately dubbed Charlie Brown. The lunar module got its name because it was going to “snoop” around the future lunar landing site.
Prior to launch, NASA astronaut Thomas Stafford touches Snoopy’s nose for good luck. Image: NASA
After the docking maneuver, the astronauts re-joined Young in the command module and headed back to Earth, but Snoopy never made it home, or to the lunar surface for that matter. Instead, the lunar lander was flung into an orbit around the Sun, never to be heard of again—until now. Possibly.
As reported in Sky News, a team of astronomers say they’re “98% certain” they’ve located Snoopy’s position in space. The news was disclosed by Nick Howes, a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, to an audience attending the recent Cheltenham Science Festival in the United Kingdom.
Howes began the search for Snoopy back in 2011. Over the past eight years, his team has sifted through radar data gathered by multiple observatories. Howes told Gizmodo in a Twitter direct message that his team “trawled through lots of data” with help from Asteroid Zoo members. Back in 2015, the team thought they had detected Snoopy, but object Wt1190f, as it was called, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, at which time it was identified as the trans-lunar injection stage of the 1998 Lunar Prospector mission.
The object-in-question was finally picked up by the Mount Lemmon Sky Survey team in January 2018. It “quickly became obvious that the size and orbit were very much like the calculations we made in 2011 and 2012 for Snoopy,” Howes told Gizmodo. To make the discovery, Howes said his team used online orbital calculators such as AGI’s Systems Tool Kit (STK) to determine the object’s orbit.
Speaking to Sky News, Howes said “we can’t be 100% sure” this object is Snoopy. For that, we’ll need to get “really close to it and get a detailed radar profile.” As to when that might happen, Howe told Gizmodo that it won’t be any time soon.
“Right now [it’s] heading away from us” and it’s “due to come back around 18 years from now,” he said. The object is currently at magnitude 29.5 in terms of its brightness, which means it’s impossible to image with most telescopes, he added.
Should the object eventually be confirmed as Snoopy, Howes said we should try to intercept and image it. He thought SpaceX CEO Elon Musk might be a good candidate for such a mission. As to whether we should scoop up Snoopy, “that’s an interesting question,” he said, “as the cost would be high versus the science return,” adding that “it’s a similar argument I guess to the one Bob Ballard faced in the 80s when looking for the Titanic.”
Howes is right to say it’s an “interesting question” as to whether we should retrieve Snoopy, if that’s what the object really is. But to be fair, this historical relic is doing nothing for nobody out there in the depths of space. My preference is that we go get it and put it in a museum for all to see. It would be an expensive proposition, no doubt, but also pretty cool.
The earliest reliably dated photograph of people, taken by Louis Daguerre one spring morning in 1838.
Public domain
Daguerreotypes are one of the earliest forms of photography, producing images on silver plates that look subtly different, depending on viewing angle. For instance they can appear positive or negative, or the colors can shift from bluish to brownish-red tones. Now an interdisciplinary team of scientists has discovered that these unusual optical effects are due to the presence of metallic nanoparticles in the plates. They described their findings in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Co-author Alejandro Manjavacas—now at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque—was a postdoc at Rice University, which boasts one of the top nanophotonics research groups in the US. That’s where he met his co-author, Andrea Schlather, who ended up in the scientific research department at the Metropolitan Museum of New York. The Met has a valuable collection of daguerreotypes, and her new colleagues were keen to find better methods for preserving these valuable artifacts.
Schlather contacted Manjavacas and suggested this might be a great place to apply their combined expertise in nanoplasmonics—a field dedicated to detailing how nanoparticles interact with light. Think of it this way: light is an optical oscillation made up of photons. Sound is a mechanical oscillation made up of quasiparticles known as phonons. And plasma (ionized gas, the fourth fundamental state of matter) oscillations consist of plasmons.Surface plasmons play a critical role in determining the optical properties of metals in particular.
All photography dates back to an ancient optical effect known as the camera obscura, in which inverted images of external scenes or objects form on a white surface within a darkened chamber. A pinhole camera works much the same way. But nobody could figure out how to fix those ephemeral images for posterity, although 18th-century novelist Charles-Francois Tiphaigne de la Roche envisioned a world in his novel, Giphantie, where it was possible to do so by coating a canvas with a wet, sticky substance, and then letting it dry in the dark to preserve the captured image. He wasn’t that far off the mark. By the end of the 1700s, scientists had realized that silver chloride and silver nitrate would darken when exposed to light, a photochemical effect that would soon make photography possible.
Examples of a gilded (left) and unglued (right) daguerreotype created in 1844 by Joseph-Philabert Girault de Prangey.
A. Schlather et al.
Nicephore Niepce is now widely credited with taking the first still photograph in July of 1827, using a material that hardened when exposed to light to capture the image. But it took a full eight hours of exposure, and the image was temporary. Louis Daguerre built on Niepce’s work, figuring out how to reduce exposure times and fix the images by immersing the photographic plates in a salt solution. Introduced in 1839, his “daguerreotypes” were all the rage for several decades—Abraham Lincoln and Emily Dickinson were among the luminaries whose portraits were captured this way, along with the transit of Venus and the horrors of the American Civil War.
The basic process involved polishing a silver-plated copper substrate until it shone like a mirror and then treating it with fumes to make it light sensitive. The plate would be inserted into the camera and exposed for however long was necessary to capture the desired latent image. Fumes of mercury vapor would reveal the image, and the plate would be rinsed and dried to reverse the light sensitivity before placing it under glass to preserve it for posterity.
For their experiments, Manjavacas and Schlather figured a good place to start was to gain a better understanding of what is going on microscopically at the nanoscale with this process. Of course, 19th-century daguerreotypes are very fragile and highly valuable, so it wasn’t possible to conduct the kind of experiments required on the originals. “We needed something where we could literally break pieces apart,” said Manjavacas.
“Daguerreotypes rely on light scattering by metallic nanoparticles to create an image that projects off a reflective silver substrate.”
So they brought in co-author Michael Robinson, one of the top daguerreotype artists in the world, who wrote his PhD thesis on the techniques and aesthetics of this type of photography. Robinson was able to fabricate original daguerreotypes in strict accordance with 19th-century techniques, so experiments could be done without worrying about damaging period photographs. They tested their experimental findings with computer simulations of the electromagnetic effects.
Daguerreotypes are made with polished silver plates, and the salt added in the latter stages of processing contains gold atoms. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the researchers found metallic nanoparticles. The size and shape of those nanoparticles influence the optical properties of the final product because they determine which wavelengths of light are scattered off the surface and which are absorbed, yielding different hues. Specifically, the scattering spectrum showed a narrow blue peak in the UV range, and a broader red peak. This is why a daguerreotype will have a bluish tone when viewed from above, and shift to brownish-red hues as the viewing angle increases. And no two daguerreotypes are exactly the same.
“Daguerreotypes, unlike other types of photograph, rely on light scattering by metallic nanoparticles to create an image that projects off a reflective silver substrate,” the authors wrote. “The balance between the light scattered by the nanostructure and the spectacular reflection on the substrate creates the bright and dark tones, respectively, with the behavior of the midtones depending on the density of the nanostructures.”
Scattering intensity diagrams for nanoparticles of varying size and shape.
A. Schlather et al.
Viewing angle dependence of the daguerreotype image.
A. Schlather et al.
It’s a similar phenomenon to the one responsible for the shifting colors of a famous Roman drinking goblet. Dating back to around 400 CE and made of dichroic glass, the Lycurgus Cup is notable for exhibiting different colors depending on the light. (It gets its name from the scene depicted on its surface, of King Lycurgus of Thrace.) Light it from the front, and the cup looks green; light it from behind, and the color changes to a deep red. Exactly why this occurred was a mystery until 2007, when a team of scientists discovered the color shifts were due to the presence of nanoparticles in the glass—the result of Roman artisans adding finely ground gold and silver into the mix. Those nanoparticles change how the electrons in the cup vibrate in response to light so that the color one sees shifts with the observer’s vantage point.
“The Romans knew that if they added salt when they melted the silicon (sand) to make the glass, those salts contain gold atoms,” said Manjavacas. “In the melting process, those atoms aggregate and produce nanoparticles, and that’s how they got the colors. That’s how any stained glass is made.” It’s similar to how the precise lattice-like structure of photonic crystals produces iridescent colors in nature, like the wings of butterflies, or opals.
Like the Lycurgus Cup, the unusual color properties of 19th-century daguerreotypes are the result of the scattering properties of nanoparticles, according to Manjavacas. There is a key difference, however: the nanoparticles are embedded into the glass of the cup, whereas with a daguerreotype, they are sitting on top of a substrate, adding some reflection that does not occur with an artifact like the Lycurgus Cup. “In our case, the scattering of the particles has a strong dependence on the substrate,” said Manjavacas.
The team also discovered that if they coated the surface of the daguerreotype with a layer of gold, the colors shifted more to the red side of the spectrum. That’s in keeping with a 19th-century trick called “gilding,” in which the photographer would apply a solution of gold salt to the image to achieve warmer tones and sharper contrast.
Plasmonic nanoparticles (gold, silver, and platinum, most notably) are “tunable,” because one can alter their size and shape to tweak the optical properties of the metallic material. That’s a highly desirable feature for all kinds of practical applications. Schlather’s interest, of course, lies in developing better preservation methods for 19th-century daguerreotypes. If, for instance, an analysis reveals the nanoparticles in a given artifact are growing larger, it might be because of the UV light used in the display. A museum can correct for that to ensure its collection doesn’t deteriorate further.
Manjavacas is also interested in developing novel color printing technologies, such as using the plasmonic properties of aluminum nanorods to make color filters for flat panel displays—or to create anti-counterfeit watermarks on currency, since the nano aspect makes it possible to create pixels as small as one micron. “In this sense, daguerreotypes can be considered the first realization of plasmonic color printing,” the authors wrote. “Indeed, novel proposals for the fabrication of these devices resemble daguerreotypes.”
Like the previous Rowhammer-based attacks, the new data-pilfering RAMBleed technique exploits the ever-shrinking dimensions of DRAM chips that store data a computer needs to carry out various tasks. Rowhammer attacks work by rapidly accessing—or hammering—physical rows inside vulnerable chips in ways that cause bits in neighboring rows to flip, meaning 1s turn to 0s and vice versa. The attacks work because as capacitors become closer together, they more quickly leak the electrical charges that store the bits. At one time, these bit flips were little more than an exotic crashing phenomenon that was known to be triggered only by cosmic rays. But when induced with surgical precision, as researchers have demonstrated over the past four years, Rowhammer can have potentially serious effects on the security of the devices that use the vulnerable chips.
A new side channel
RAMBleed takes Rowhammer in a new direction. Rather than using bit flips to alter sensitive data, the new technique exploits the hardware bug to extract sensitive data stored in memory regions that are off-limits to attackers. The attacks require only that the exploit hammers memory locations the exploit code already has permission to access. What’s more, the data extraction can work even when DRAM protected by error correcting code detects and reverses a malicious bit flip.
Besides opening a previously unknown side channel that allows attackers to deduce sensitive data, the attack also introduces new ways unprivileged exploit code can cause cryptographic keys or other secret data to load into the select DRAM rows that are susceptible to extraction. By combining the memory massaging techniques with this new side-channel attack, the researchers—from the University of Michigan, Graz University of Technology, and the University of Adelaide and Data61—were able to extract an RSA 2048-bit signing key from an OpenSSH server using only user-level permissions. In a research paper published on Tuesday, the researchers wrote:
Previous research mostly considers Rowhammer as a threat to data integrity, allowing an unprivileged attacker to modify data without accessing it. With RAMBleed, however, we show that Rowhammer effects also have implications on data confidentiality, allowing an unprivileged attacker to leverage Rowhammer-induced bit flips in order to read the value of neighboring bits. Furthermore, as not every bit in DRAM can be flipped via Rowhammer, we also present novel memory massaging techniques that aim to locate and subsequently exploit Rowhammer flippable bits. This enables the attacker to read otherwise inaccessible information such as secret key bits. Finally, as our techniques only require the attacker to allocate and deallocate memory and to measure instruction timings, RAMBleed allows an unprivileged attacker to read secret data using the default configuration of many systems (e.g., Ubuntu Linux), without requiring any special configurations (e.g., access to pagemap, huge pages, or memory deduplication).
While RAMBleed represents a new threat that hardware and software engineers will be forced to protect against, it seems unlikely that exploits will be carried out in real-world attacks any time soon. That’s because, like most other Rowhammer-based attacks, RAMBleed requires a fair amount of overhead and at least some luck. For determined attackers in the field today, there may be more reliable attacks that achieve the same purpose. While ordinary users shouldn’t panic, RAMBleed and the previous attacks it builds on poses a longer-term threat, especially for users of low-cost commodity hardware.
How it works
The key extraction requires that attackers first locate flippable bits in the memory of a targeted computer. This phase required the researchers to spend 34 hours to locate the 84,000 bit flips required to extract the SSH key. The non-trivial investment of time and resources required to template the memory is partly offset by the fact that it can be carried out ahead of time, with only user permissions, and without the need to interact with the SSH app or its secrets or with any other targeted application or its secrets. After the researchers filtered out bits that were useless in extracting the key, they ended up with about 4,200 bits.
RAMBleed then uses a special memory massing technique to cause the SSH key to load into memory locations that have the potential to expose their contents. The goal was to achieve a layout similar to the one shown in the left figure below, which correspond to the 8KiB pages needed for two Rowhammer variations. The first uses double-sided accesses and the second single-sided accesses. While RAMBleed works best in the double-sided version, due to noise from other system activity, the memory configuration sometimes results in a single sided-case (right version in the below figure).
Page layout for extracting a victim’s secret. Each cell represents a 4 KiB page, meaning that each row represents an 8 KiB row in a DRAM bank. The attacker repeatedly accesses her row activation pages A0 and A2, activating the top and bottom rows. She then extracts corresponding bits in page S by observing bit flips in the sampling page A1.
Kwong et al.
With that in place, RAMBleed hammers the A0 and A2 activation pages shown in the figure. The attack was able to recover 68 percent of the targeted SSH key, or about 4,200 key bits, at a rate of 0.31 bit per second, and with an accuracy rate of 82%. In an email, Andrew Kwong, one of the University of Michigan researchers who wrote the paper, explained:
It takes us almost four hours to complete the reading phase. We actually don’t need the key to remain in memory for any long period of time; OpenSSH will allocate a new page containing the key every time the attacker makes an SSH connection to the victim. If we make two connections in parallel, there are then two copies of the key in memory, which we then use for hammering and to read a single bit. We then close those SSH connections, so that there are no copies of the key in memory. We repeat this process to read each bit. Thus, the key is only in memory for ~3 seconds at a time, and we can force the victim to bring the key back into memory by making an SSH connection. We carried out our attack on an Ubuntu installation with default settings, without any special configurations.
The researchers then ran the recovered bits through the Heninger-Shacham algorithm, which allows the recovery of RSA keys from partial information. The result: the researchers were able to achieve complete key recovery
The Rowhammer-enabled side-channel exploits a physical phenomenon in DRAM chips wherein the likelihood of bit flips depends on the values of bits immediately above and below it. That is, bits tend to flip to the same value of the bits in adjacent rows.
“The main observation behind RAMBleed is that bit flips depend not only on the bit’s orientation, i.e., whether it flips from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1, but also on the values of neighboring bits,” the researchers reported in their paper. “Specifically, true bits tend to flip from 1 to 0 when the bits above and below them are 0, but not when the bits above and below them are 1. Similarly, anti bits tend to flip from 0 to 1 when the bits above and below them are 1, but not when the bits above and below them are 0.”
RAMBleed works by hammering the activation memory rows (A0 and A2 in the figure displayed above) of carefully arranged memory contents. The resulting bit flips allow the researchers to deduce the values of the secret bits. Repeating this procedure with bit flips at various offsets in the page allows the researchers to recover enough bits to construct the full key.
ECC is not an absolute defense
The researchers said RAMBleed is able to bypass ECC, or error-correcting code protections, built into some types of DRAM chips. When corrections occur, they happen in a predictable way that first corrects the error and then passes the corrected value to the software. This opens a timing side channel that allows the researchers to determine if a single-bit error occurred. The researchers then adjusted RAMBleed to account for ECC.
“With ECC, we cannot observe the flips directly,” the researchers wrote. “Instead we use the timing side channel and look for long read latencies. As such latencies occur only due to Rowhammer-induced flips, they can be used to reveal the value of the secret bit.”
RAMBleed was able to successfully read bits stored in ECC memory with a 73% accuracy at a rate of 0.64 bit per second.
The key recovery made possible by RAMBleed is fundamentally different from a Rowhammer technique unveiled two years ago that allowed one virtual machine to
. In the 2016 attack, the researchers used Rowhammer-induced bit flips to make the public key much weaker than it was before. The researches then factored the key to obtain the corresponding private key. RAMBleed, by contrast, reads the key from memory.
In an advisory, officials with Intel confirmed that the vulnerability, a part of which is tracked as CVE-2019-0174, “may allow partial information disclosure via local access.” The advisory assigned a Common Vulnerability Scoring System of 3.8 to the vulnerability out of a maximum of 10.
“Partial physical address information potentially disclosed through exploitation of this vulnerability does not contain user secrets, but could potentially be utilized to enhance unrelated attack methods,” the advisory stated. It went on to recommend people follow established practices for side-channel resistance and mitigations for timing side channels against cryptographic implementations.
The statement also advises using DRAM that’s resistant to Rowhammer attacks. That generally includes using DDR4 chips that offer ECC or a feature known as targeted row refresh. This advice is helpful, but it’s not the last word for two reasons. First, RAMBleed can bypass ECC protections. Second targeted row refresh isn’t an automatic defense against Rowhammer.
“TRR makes it more difficult to find bit flips,” Kwong, the University of Michigan researcher, wrote in an email. “Not all DDR4 has TRR enabled, and implementations vary substantially by vendor, so it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how much safer TRR is against Rowhammer. TRR’s susceptibility to RAMBleed is an open research question.”
Kwong also offered a clarification to Intel’s statement that CVE-2019-0174 “may allow partial information disclosure via local access.” Because the CVE tracks only the technique for uncovering the low 21 bits of a physical address, the statement is referring only to that, not the overall RAMBleed effect, the researcher told Ars.
As noted earlier, the immediate real-world threat that RAMBleed—and most other Rowhammer attacks, for that matter—poses to most end users is relatively low. That’s because attackers have a variety of less complicated and more tested methods that arguably could achieve most of the same results. That said, Rowhammer-based attacks including RAMBleed could in the years to come become a more serious risk, particularly in lower-cost devices if engineers don’t study the underlying bug and devise effective means for fixing, or at least mitigating, it.
“By uncovering another channel for Rowhammer based exploitation,” the researchers wrote, “we have highlighted the need to further explore and understand the complete capabilities of Rowhammer.”
Aurora, the developer of self-driving technology run by a trio of industry veterans, has signed a partnership with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, to figure out how to build its “Driver” into FCA’s commercial vehicles. By “Driver,” Aurora means its full self-driving system, all the hardware and software it uses to guide a vehicle through the world. And though everything else about the announcement remains vague, it points to an open-ended strategy on Aurora’s part.
Alex Davies covers autonomous vehicles and other transportation machines for WIRED.
The two companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, or say when or how Aurora’s autonomous tech might make its way into those vehicles. FCA’s lineup of commercial vehicles includes cargo vans and Ram pickup trucks that use huge diesel engines to haul six tons or more, used by businesses to move goods and materials, around cities and construction sites; that offers Aurora a way into the logistics business.
Aurora was founded in late 2016 by Chris Urmson, Sterling Anderson, and Drew Bagnell, formerly of Google, Tesla, and Uber respectively. CEO Urmson harps on the value of experience, knowing what sorts of approaches work, and which don’t.
Aurora, which already works with VW, Hyundai, and Byton, will now explore how to build its self-driving tech into Fiat Chrysler commercial vehicles like the 2019 Ram 5500.
FCA US LLC
That experience, apparently, says to be very open about choosing partners. Aurora has similar, ongoing deals with Volkswagen, Hyundai, and electric vehicle startup Byton. It has built its system into a variety of vehicles, including sedans, SUVs, and a semi-truck.
For its part, FCA provides the hybrid Pacifica minivans that Waymo uses for testing and its Arizona ride-hail service. This sort of cooperation is majorly helpful for the self-driving developers. Instead of hacking into car computers and sticking their sensors on roof racks, they can more seamlessly integrate both software and hardware into their robotic chariots. It’s less obvious what the automakers get from the deal; it’s worth noting that the companies with which Aurora has partnered don’t have especially robust in-house autonomous operations.
What’s striking about this deal, adding commercial vans and small trucks to its quiver, is that it further expands the fields in which Aurora is working to deploy its technology. Competitors like Waymo, Uber, Ford, and GM have focused on robotifying the ride-hail business, and offering their own taxi-like services. Several smaller, newer outfits have devoted themselves to long-haul trucking, and plan to retrofit semis with their gizmos. (Waymo also dabbles in trucking; Uber used to.) Zoox and Nuro are creating entirely new vehicles, purpose-built for ride-hail and local deliveries, respectively.
In one sense, Aurora wants to generalize. It is open to working its self-driving technology into any kind of vehicle, for any purpose. From another perspective, it’s a specialist. While its competitors are working to manufacture their own vehicles and run their own logistical operations, it remains focused on its “Driver” system.
While you could read that openness as a lack of direction, it might be the right way forward here. For all the hype around the business of self-driving—a space Intel has predicted could add $7 trillion to the world’s economy by 2050—no one’s making money yet. It’s not yet clear whether trucking startups can please their investors without taking the serious step of releasing the driver from the cab (all operations to date have kept a human in the driver’s seat). The ongoing struggles of Uber and Lyft highlight how hard it is to make money off of ride-hail. So for now, Aurora is staying open minded, ready to move in any direction that looks promising. And whatever comes of this FCA deal, it’ll be just one bet among many.
Apple’s music ID app Shazam has always been a handy tool to have on your phone, but it has one small inconvenience – it can only identify music which is either played through your device’s internal speakers or picked up by its microphone.
But, as The Verge reports, the app has now been updated to detect music played through your headphones as well.
When you turn on the Pop-up Shazam feature, it adds a persistent notification to your Android notification drawer. You can hit the notification to bring up a floating Shazam icon which sits on top of your apps such as YouTube or a browser. When you tap the floating icon, it’ll show you details relating to the current track.
For now, the feature is only available in the latest Android version of the app, and isn’t available on iOS – even though Apple bought Shazam last year. This is likely because iOS doesn’t allow background apps to monitor audio coming from foreground apps for security reasons.
Facebook has suspended Natural News from posting on the social media platform where it has amassed almost 3 million followers. Natural News, which pushes wild conspiracy theories and once published an injectable DIY homeopathic “vaccine” for Ebola, had already been banned from Twitter and YouTube. The site was also blacklisted by Google in 2017.
The Daily Beast first reported the Facebook suspension on Sunday, though it’s not clear if the move is permanent. Founder Mike Adams, who calls himself the Health Ranger, called the Facebook suspension an “online ethnic cleansing” that’s being carried out by people who are hoping to “enslave humanity and create Hell on Earth.” Adams also called for military action against the social media companies.
“The techno-fascists, including Wikipedia, have decided that no speech that questions any official narrative will be allowed on any platform,” Adams wrote on his website Sunday. “Anyone who questions the safety of toxic vaccines, 5G cell towers, geoengineering, chemotherapy or glyphosate weed killer chemicals is now maliciously attacked, smeared and de-platformed.”
Adams published a graphic on his website with the title “Enemies of Humanity” that includes photos of genocidal dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini next to tech CEOs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. Facebook did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment about the suspension.
Adams, who claims to be a “food scientist,” also published a nearly hour-long rant on the video platform Brighteon complaining about the Facebook suspension and saying that President Donald Trump should use “the military, if necessary, to occupy and dismantle the tech giants.”
“The tech giants are the modern fascists. They are more dangerous than Adolf Hitler in terms of their long term threat to humanity. How many humans will be subjected to genocide? How many humans will be murdered by abortion policies?” Adams asked. “How many children will be killed by vaccines? How many people will be harmed by 5G cell networks or geoengineering of the atmosphere?”
Natural News is ostensibly about alternative health information but the website also promotes far right politics on issues like abortion and climate change, as well as overall support for President Trump.
As the Daily Beast points out, Natural News had more followers than conspiracy theory website InfoWars at its peak. InfoWars, run by Alex Jones, was recently banned from Facebook as well, along with other far right figures like former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopolous, neo-Nazi Paul Nehlen, anti-Muslim online personality Laura Loomer, and InfoWars contributor Paul Joseph Watson.
Adams, like many other figures on the far right, sees the fight against leftists as part of a general fight against the media at large, which he says is engaging in “journo-terrorism.” Adams has previously written articles against Gizmodo that have contained claims our writers are paid by Monsanto. Needless to say, Gizmodo writers are not paid by Monsanto.
“These criminals like Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Cook are un-elected, subject to zero transparency and offer no mechanism for due process whereby channels who are banned might defend themselves against unfair, dishonest smears or fake news attacks run by left-wing journo-terrorism hacks,” Adams wrote.
“In essence, the entire internet is now run by the most lawless evil war criminals imaginable, and they have zero respect for human rights, human dignity or free speech.”
Aside from Natural News, Adams reportedly owns over 50 different websites including vaccines.news, campusinsanity.com, and libtards.news.
And while it seems absurd to call on President Trump to use the military against tech companies, the president has been very vocal about what he considers bias against conservatives. Trump even sent out a tweet yesterday on the topic, complete with his bizarre punctuation.
“Twitter should let the banned Conservative Voices back onto their platform, without restriction. It’s called Freedom of Speech, remember. You are making a Giant Mistake!” President Trump tweeted.
The president’s tweet about Twitter bias was his pinned tweet as of this morning but he didn’t address Natural News directly. Strangely, it seems like it’s only a matter of time. We do know how Trump is skeptical about this whole “science,” thing, after all. And he’s previously signaled that he believes vaccines cause autism.
So while Trump hasn’t gone to bat for Natural News yet, they really do seem like a match made in heaven. And we can’t put it past Trump to use the military for unnecessary purposes. Trump is the guy who ordered the military down to the U.S.-Mexico border as part of his “national emergency,” after all. But so far those troops are mostly just painting fences. Let’s just hope it stays peaceful down there and Trump doesn’t order those troops to turn around for San Francisco or Cupertino.
