Author: peterjang73

Northrop Grumman and Firefly Aerospace are teaming up to build a new first stage for Northrop’s Antares rocket, as well as a new medium lift booster. The newly announced partnership means that Northrop will no longer have to rely on Russia and Ukraine for Antares, and will instead turn to building an all-American version for future launches.

“Through our collaboration, we will first develop a fully domestic version of our Antares rocket, the Antares 330, for Cygnus space station commercial resupply services,” Scott Lehr, vice president and general manager of launch and missile defense systems at Northrop Grumman, said in a statement on Monday.

The Antares 330 will be equipped with Firefly’s Miranda engines, as well as Firefly’s composites for the first stage’s structures and fuel tanks. As for Northrop, the company will provide upper-stage structures and the Castor 30XL motor, in addition to software, vehicle integration, and launch pad operations. The rocket’s new design is meant to enhance its payload capacity, according to the company.

Northrop’s Antares rocket, used for launching cargo missions to the International Space Station, was previously constructed in Ukraine and is equipped with Russian RD-181 engines. The fate of Antares had been in question since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February and the subsequent sanctions imposed on Russia by Western countries. In March, Russia halted its rocket engine supply to the U.S. in retaliation to the sanctions. “Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks,” former head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency Dmitry Rogozin was quoted as saying at the time.

Despite the Russian cutoff, Virginia-based Northrop Grumman possesses two engines it can use for its Antares rocket, the first of which is scheduled to launch in October and the second next year. To fill the gap between the last available engine and the new Antares model being built, Northrop has booked three SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches for its Cygnus spacecraft, Kurt Eberly, director of space launch programs at Northrop Grumman, told SpaceNews.

Aside from providing new engines for Antares, the new partnership also aims to build a new medium-lift launch vehicle, the details of which aren’t yet known. Texas-based Firefly Aerospace has yet to complete a successful launch of its own medium-lift vehicle, called Alpha. One of the rocket’s engines unexpectedly shut down shortly after its inaugural liftoff in September 2021, and Alpha ended up in flames.

That said, the company is understandably hopeful about its new relationship with Northrop. “Firefly prides itself on being a disrupter in the new space industry and collaborating with a proven space pioneer like Northrop Grumman will help us continue that disruption,” Peter Schumacher, interim CEO for Firefly, said in a statement.

More: NASA Reportedly Has ‘Contingencies’ Should Russia Suddenly Abandon the ISS

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK — Tesla, the electric car company run by billionaire Elon Musk, has been accused by a California state transportation regulator of falsely advertising its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features as providing autonomous vehicle control.

In complaints filed with the state Office of Administrative Hearings, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) said Tesla misled prospective customers with advertising that overstated how well its advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) worked.

Tesla “made or disseminated statements that are untrue or misleading, and not based on facts,” the DMV said in complaints dated July 28 and which it made public on Friday.

Vehicles equipped with Autopilot and Full Self-Driving technology “could not at the time of those advertisements, and cannot now, operate as autonomous vehicles,” the DMV added.

The DMV is seeking remedies that could include suspending Tesla’s license to sell vehicles in California and requiring the company to make restitution to drivers.

Tesla, which has disbanded its media relations department, did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.

The Los Angeles Times earlier reported the DMV complaints.

Tesla has said Autopilot “enables your car to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within its lane,” while Full-Self Driving also enables vehicles to obey traffic signals and make lane changes.

According to Tesla’s website, both technologies “require active driver supervision,” with a “fully attentive” driver whose hands are on the wheel, “and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”

But the DMV said Tesla’s disclaimer “contradicts the original untrue or misleading labels and claims, which is misleading, and does not cure the violation.”

California is Tesla’s largest U.S. market. The company sold 121,000 vehicles there in 2021, out of an estimated 352,000 sold nationwide.

Since 2016, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened 38 special investigations of crashes involving Tesla vehicles where ADAS systems were suspected of being used. Nineteen deaths were reported from those crashes, including a motorcyclist killed last month in Utah.

NHTSA had no immediate comment on the DMV complaints.

National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy in a Reuters interview last year said “there is zero comparison” between Tesla’s Autopilot and the tool used in aviation.

“Some manufacturers are going to do what they want to do to sell a car and it’s up the government to rein that in,” she said.

BEIJING — Baidu’s electric vehicle (EV) firm Jidu Auto will be one-generation ahead of Tesla in terms of autonomous driving technologies, Baidu chief executive Robin Li said in a statement on Monday.

“Our understanding of smart vehicles is that being electric is the semi-final while being intelligent is the final,” Li added.

Jidu aims to be to be able to deliver 800,000 of its “robot” cars in 2028, Jidu chief executive Joe Xia Yiping said in the statement.

Jidu also plans to deliver its second model for mass production in 2024, Xia said.

Jidu revealed its first “robot” concept car, which has no door handles and can be fully controlled via voice recognition, in June, with the plan to mass produce the model in 2023.

Besides equipping the car with autonomous driving software technology powered by Baidu, Jidu’s “robot” vehicles will have two lidars and 12 cameras. Lidars are detection systems, similar to radars, that use pulsed laser light rather than radio waves.

Tesla does not use lidar censors.

Baidu’s EV-making plan comes as tech companies around the world race to develop smart cars after Tesla’s success in commercializing EVs.

Smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp and Didi Global are among other Chinese tech giants pursuing automaking ambitions.

Mobile phones had only just started to get smart in 2002 as models like the Sony Ericsson P800 (yep, the two companies used to be good buds) introduced one of the earliest full-sized touchscreens with a numeric keypad that conveniently flipped out of the way so users had more room to poke around with a stylus. A mobile data connection on your cellular plan allowed these early smartphones to access a stripped down version of the internet wherever you roamed: which at first was mostly a novel distraction that was occasionally useful enough to justify the added cost.

As smartphone capabilities expanded, so did users’ demands for more reliable and speedier internet on the go. EDGE and 2G mobile data connections eventually led to 3G when using the internet on a mobile device finally felt fast enough to be useful, and a modern 5G connection promises data speeds that rival many home internet services, finally allowing many consumers to say goodbye to a tethered ISP altogether.

Broadband on the go has helped turn our smartphones and other mobile devices into full-fledged media players, navigation devices, online gaming systems, video phones, and even miniature live broadcast studios: all features that wouldn’t be possible without a high-speed internet connection. All you need to do is activate Airplane Mode on your smartphone to be reminded that most of its usefulness is tied to being able to access the internet everywhere.

Martin Shkreli—the notorious ex-pharmaceutical executive fresh from prison after his 2017 fraud conviction—announced his latest, eyebrow-raising venture this week: the creation of a blockchain-based Web3 drug discovery platform that traffics in his own cryptocurrency, MSI, aka Martin Shkreli Inu.

The platform, still in the early development phase, is called Druglike, according to a press release that circulated on July 25. Its goals are ostensibly lofty, but the details are extremely sketchy, and Shkreli’s intentions have already drawn skepticism. It’s also unclear whether the enterprise will run Shkreli afoul of his lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry, which stemmed from the abrupt and callous 4,000 percent price hike of a life-saving drug that made him infamous.

Shkreli, who is named as a cofounder of Druglike, says the platform aims to make early-stage drug discovery more affordable and accessible. “Druglike will remove barriers to early-stage drug discovery, increase innovation and allow a broader group of contributors to share the rewards,” Shkreli said in the press release. “Underserved and underfunded communities, such as those focused on rare diseases or in developing markets, will also benefit from access to these tools.”

Generally, early-stage drug development can sometimes involve virtual screens to identify potential drug candidates. In these cases, pharmaceutical scientists first identify a “target”—a specific compound or protein that plays a critical role in developing a disease or condition. Then researchers look for compounds or small molecules that could interfere with that target, sometimes binding or “docking” directly to the target in a way that keeps it from functioning. This can be done in physical labs using massive libraries of compounds in high-throughput chemical screens. But it can also be done virtually, using specialized software and a lot of computing power, which can be resource-intensive.

Concepts and Questions

That’s where Shkreli’s Druglike is imagined to come in. In a white paper posted on Druglike’s website, Shkreli-associated Jason Sommer lays out some concepts for how the company’s platform would work. Essentially, it would use a decentralized computing network of task providers, solvers, and validators that would run and optimize the virtual screening of drug candidates. The white paper draws similarities to FoldIt, an online puzzle game that essentially uses distributed computing and crowdsourcing to fold proteins and predict their structures.

But Druglike’s platform is touted as incorporating blockchain concepts and cryptocurrency transactions when users complete tasks, such as docking screens. For instance, the paper describes a “proof-of-optimization” concept as a “novel” blockchain-based verification step for screening work, similar to Bitcoin’s “proof-of-work” method.

“We propose a blockchain-based implementation of Proof-of-Optimization, where a distributed ledger stores records of which proof solutions belong to which Solvers. Smart contracts allow secure distribution of rewards to the Solver who owns the verified proof,” Sommer writes in the paper.

But, for now, the white paper only loosely describes these concepts, and it’s unclear how the cryptocurrency transactions will generate value. It’s also unclear how the project will be funded, though an online exchange suggested that the company could look for venture capital financing.

On Twitter, where Shkreli has been banned, he currently has an account as Enrique Hernandez @zkEnrique7. From there, Shkreli announced the company on July 25 and hosted a conversation regarding the project.

In that conversation, he scoffed at the idea that the platform would breach his lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry, saying that the project only involves developing software, not drugs. “Writing some code in Github and pressing ‘go’ does not make you a pharmaceutical company,” he said.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

In the US government’s ongoing campaign to protect data in the age of quantum computers, a new and powerful attack that used a single traditional computer to completely break a fourth-round candidate highlights the risks involved in standardizing the next generation of encryption algorithms.

Last month, the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, selected four post-quantum-computing encryption algorithms to replace algorithms like RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman, which are unable to withstand attacks from a quantum computer.

In the same move, NIST advanced four additional algorithms as potential replacements pending further testing in hopes one or more of them may also be suitable encryption alternatives in a post-quantum world. The new attack breaks SIKE, which is one of the latter four additional algorithms. The attack has no impact on the four PQC algorithms selected by NIST as approved standards, all of which rely on completely different mathematical techniques than SIKE.

Getting Totally SIKEd

SIKE—short for Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation—is now likely out of the running, thanks to research that was published over the weekend by researchers from the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography group at KU Leuven. The paper, titled “An Efficient Key Recovery Attack on SIDH (Preliminary Version),” described a technique that uses complex mathematics and a single traditional PC to recover the encryption keys protecting the SIKE-protected transactions. The entire process requires only about an hour’s time. The feat makes the researchers, Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru, eligible for a $50,000 reward from NIST.

“The newly uncovered weakness is clearly a major blow to SIKE,” David Jao, a professor at the University of Waterloo and co-inventor of SIKE, wrote in an email. “The attack is really unexpected.”

The advent of public-key encryption in the 1970s was a major breakthrough because it allowed parties who had never met to securely trade encrypted material that couldn’t be broken by an adversary. Public-key encryption relies on asymmetric keys, with one private key used to decrypt messages and a separate public key for encrypting. Users make their public key widely available. As long as their private key remains secret, the scheme remains secure.

In practice, public-key cryptography can often be unwieldy, so many systems rely on key encapsulation mechanisms, which allow parties who have never met before to jointly agree on a symmetric key over a public medium such as the internet. In contrast to symmetric-key algorithms, key encapsulation mechanisms in use today are easily broken by quantum computers. SIKE, before the new attack, was thought to avoid such vulnerabilities by using a complex mathematical construction known as a supersingular isogeny graph.

The cornerstone of SIKE is a protocol called SIDH, short for supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman. The research paper published over the weekend shows how SIDH is vulnerable to a theorem known as “glue-and-split” developed by mathematician Ernst Kani in 1997, as well as tools devised by fellow mathematicians Everett W. Howe, Franck Leprévost, and Bjorn Poonen in 2000. The new technique builds on what’s known as the “GPST adaptive attack,” described in a 2016 paper. The math behind the latest attack is guaranteed to be impenetrable to most non-mathematicians. Here’s about as close as you’re going to get:

“The attack exploits the fact that SIDH has auxiliary points and that the degree of the secret isogeny is known,” Steven Galbraith, a University of Auckland mathematics professor and the “G” in the GPST adaptive attack, explained in a short writeup on the new attack. “The auxiliary points in SIDH have always been an annoyance and a potential weakness, and they have been exploited for fault attacks, the GPST adaptive attack, torsion point attacks, etc.”