A nerdy father of two, a husband of a beautiful and understanding wife, an engineer who loves anime and tinkering with PCs and games, but most of all, loves God.
The old science fiction fantasy of a flying car that both drives on the ground and flies in the air is unlikely to revolutionize daily commutes. Instead, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and aerospace companies dream of electric-powered aircraft that can take off vertically like helicopters but have the flight efficiency of airplanes. The German startup Lilium took a very public step forward in that direction by demonstrating the first electric-powered jet capable of vertical takeoff and la
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The main section of Fuchsia shows a profile picture, and tapping on it will reveal some power controls. Above this section are recent apps, and below is a Google Now-style suggestion panel.
There’s a tablet mode, too.
Tap on one of the cards for a full-screen app.
You can long press on one of the apps to drag them on top of each other. This will start a split screen more.
Here’s dragging in tablet mode.
Release and you’ll get a split-screen interface.
Split screen with three apps on a tablet.
Four apps on a tablet.
Here are three phone screens with a tab interface.
The suggestions panel also can bring up Fuchsia’s keyboard.
.” The OS first popped up in August last year, but back then it was just a command line. Now the mysterious project has a crazy new UI we can look at, so let’s dive in.
Unlike Android and Chrome OS, Fuchsia is not based on Linux—it uses a new, Google-developed microkernel called “Magenta.” With Fuchsia, Google would not only be dumping the Linux kernel, but also the GPL: the OS is licensed under a mix of BSD 3 clause, MIT, and Apache 2.0. Dumping Linux might come as a bit of a shock, but the Android ecosystem seems to have no desire to keep up with upstream Linux releases. Even the Google Pixel is still stuck on Linux Kernel 3.18, which was first released at the end of 2014.
Google’s documentation describes Magenta as targeting “modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of RAMÂ with arbitrary peripherals doing open-ended computation.” Google hasn’t made any public, official comments on why Fuchsia exists or what it is for, leaving us only to speculate. The “modern phone” shout out certainly sounds like something that could eventually compete with Android, but for now the OS is so early, it’s hard to tell.
Fuchsia is impossible to talk about without mentioning a hundred other related projects that also have code names. The interface and apps are written using Google’s Flutter SDK, a project that actually produces cross-platform code that runs on Android and iOS. Flutter apps are written in Dart, Google’s reboot of JavaScript which, on mobile, has a focus on high-performance, 120fps apps. It also has a Vulkan-based graphics renderer called “Escher” that lists “Volumetric soft shadows” as one of its features, which seems custom-built to run Google’s shadow-heavy “Material Design” interface guidelines.
Armadillo, the Fuchsia System UI
This all leads us to an interesting point right now: the Fuchsia interface is written with the Flutter SDK, which is cross-platform. This means that, right now, you can grab chunks of Fuchsia and run it on an Android device. Fuchsia first went public in August 2016, and but back then compiling it would get you nothing more than a command line. Thanks to Hotfix.net for pointing out that the Fuchsia System UI, called “Armadillo” is actually pretty interesting now.
It’s possible to download the source and compile Fuchsia’s System UI into an Android APK and install it on an Android device. It consists of a wild reimagining of a home screen along with a keyboard, a home button, and (kind of) a window manager. Nothing really “works”—it’s all a bunch of placeholder interfaces that don’t do anything. There’s also a great readme in the Fuchsia source that describes what the heck is going on.
The official Armadillo logo, clearly done by one of Google’s top artists.
The home screen is a giant vertically scrolling list. In the center you’ll see a (placeholder) profile picture, the date, a city name, and a battery icon. Above the are “Story” cards—basically Recent Apps—and below it is a scrolling list of suggestions, sort of like a Google Now placeholder. Leave the main screen and you’ll see a Fuchsia “home” button pop up on the bottom of the screen, which is just a single white circle.
The center profile picture can be tapped on, and here you’ll bring up a menu that’s a bit like Android’s Quick Settings. The top row of icons shows the battery and connectivity. Below that you’ll get sliders for volume and brightness, and icons for airplane mode, do not disturb, and auto rotate. You can interact with the buttons and sliders, but they won’t actually do anything on Android. Below that are buttons labeled “log out” and “more,” which don’t work at all.
Above the profile section are a bunch of cards labeled “Story [something].” The readme describes stories as “a set of apps and/or modules that work together for the user to achieve a goal.” That seems pretty close to a recent apps list, maybe (eventually) with some kind of grouping feature. Tapping on any card will load it as a full-screen interface, and since one is labeled “email,” it’s pretty obvious that these are apps. The list is sorted by “last opened” so the most recently-used cards will sit at the bottom of the list.
This list also has some window-management features. You can long press on a card and drag it around, and if you drop it on top of another app, it will trigger a split screen mode. The split screen system seems really capable, and probably needs to be reigned in a bit. Â You can do a 50/50 split vertically or horizontally. You can drag in a third app and 33/33/33 split horizontally or vertically, or a 50/50 split next to a full-height app, or a have a tab bar appear for the three full screen interfaces. You can drag in four apps and do a 75/25 split on one side of the screen and 25/75 on the other, and then you can keep dragging in apps until the whole thing crashes. Go back the story list and you’ll see your split screen layout is reflected in the card, too, which is nice.
The bottom “Google Now” panel starts with a search bar mockup. Tapping on it will bring up a keyboard, but this is not the Android system keyboard, and it is instead a custom Fuchsia interface. It has a new, dark theme, and things like long-pressing for symbols or settings do not work. Below that appears to be Google Now, which has several “suggestion” cards. They seem to be a little different than Google Now’s news, weather, and calendar suggestions though, with the docs saying “Conceptually a suggestion is a representation of an action the user can take to augment an existing story or to start a new one.” That almost makes it seem like an app launcher.
A long road ahead
With any new project at Google, it’s hard to know what the scale of the project will be. Is this a “20 percent” project that will be forgotten about in a year or something more important? Luckily, we have a direct statement from a Fuchsia developer on the matter. In the public Fuchsia IRC channel, Fuchsia developer Travis Geiselbrecht told the chat room the OS “isn’t a toy thing, it’s not a 20% project, it’s not a dumping ground of a dead thing that we don’t care about anymore.”
The Fuchsia logo.
Android was conceived in the days before the iPhone. It started as an OS for cameras, and then became a BlackBerry clone, before being quickly retooled after the iPhone unveiling. With Android, Google is still chained to decisions it made years ago, before it knew anything about managing a mobile OS that ships on billions of smartphones. I’d say the two biggest problems with Android right now are
Getting OS updates rolled out across the third-party hardware ecosystem
A lack of focus on smooth UI performance.
While there hasn’t been anything said about an update plan, the OS’s reliance on the Dart programming language means it has a focus on high-performance.
Fuchsia really seems like a project that asks “how would we design Android today, if we could start over?” It’s a brand-new, Google-developed kernel running a brand-new, Google-developed SDK that uses a brand-new, Google-developed programming language and it’s all geared to run Google’s Material Design interface as quickly as possible. Google gets to dump Linux and the GPL, it can dump Java and the problems it caused with Oracle, and Google can basically insulate itself from all of Android’s upstream projects and bring all the development in-house. Doing such a thing on the scale of Android today would be a massive project.
The hardest part might not even be developing the OS, but coming up with some kind of transition plan from Android, which has grown to be the world’s most popular operating system. The “cross platform” feature of the Flutter SDK sounds important for a transition plan. If Google could get developers to start writing apps in Flutter, it would be creating an app ecosystem that ran on iOS, Android, and, eventually, Fuchsia. Google has also shown that it is able and willing the make the Android Runtime work on non-Android platforms with Chrome OS, so if Google does choose to go through with a transition plan, perhaps it could port and entire Android stack over to Fuchsia as a stop-gap app solution.
Back in August when Fuchsia went public, Geiselbrecht told the Fuchsia IRC channel “The Magenta project [started] about 6 months ago now” which would be somewhere around February 2016. Android hung around inside Google for about five years before it launched on a real product. If Fuchsia follows a similar path, and everything goes well, maybe we can expect a consumer product sometime around 2020. Then again this is Google, so it could all be cancelled before it ever sees the light of day. Fuchsia has a long road ahead of it.
The Air Force’s secret X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle landed at NASA ‘s Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility Sunday, setting off a sonic boom that surprised residents.
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The Air Force’s secret X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle landed at NASA ‘s Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility Sunday, setting off a sonic boom that surprised residents.
Secretary of the Air Force Publi
The Air Force’s experimental X-37B space plane announced the end of its nearly two-year mission by creating a sonic boom on Sunday that surprised residents along Florida’s Space Coast. Officials have provided only vague details about the unmanned craft’s more than 700-day mission.
“Not much is known about the 30-foot-long robotic spacecraft or what it took to space,” as member station WMFE reports.
The X-37B is an “orbital test vehicle” that looks like a miniature space shuttle — it even used the old shuttle runway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center when it landed Sunday. To reach orbit, it rides on an Atlas V rocket.
This was the fourth mission for the reusable vehicle, and the first time it’s landed in Florida. Earlier trips have ended at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Sunday’s landing sparked a flurry of tweets and questions about the sonic boom, with The Orlando Sentinel reporting that before the landing, officials had refused to confirm rumors of a pending return to Florida. The Air Force announced the landing in a tweet — after it had occurred. By then, windows had been rattled and residents had been startled.
“But it wasn’t just Central Floridians who heard the spacecraft,” the paper says. “Reports came from as far away as Tampa and Fort Myers.”
Confirmation of the landing was met with relief in at least one household, as a resident tweeted, “CENTRAL FLORIDA HAD A SONIC BOOM IM NOT CRAZY.”
The space plane has been the object of frequent speculation about its potential military uses, particularly in either surveillance or some type of combat application, as NPR’s Scott Neuman reported in a roundup of theories about the craft back in 2014.
The Air Force says that the program includes the testing of many technologies, from guidance and control (Sunday’s landing was autonomous) to thermal protection and advanced propulsion systems. The craft is powered by gallium arsenide solar cells with lithium-ion batteries.
As WMFE’s Brendan Byrne writes:
“The space plane’s development began in 1999. NASA wanted to use the vehicle to repair satellites in orbit. When that proved to be too costly, the Department of Defense picked up the project as a part of its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 2006, the Air Force announced it would develop what is now the X-37B, and launched the experimental space plane for the first time in 2010.”
The craft is managed by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, which describes its mission as developing “combat support and weapon systems by leveraging defense-wide technology development efforts and existing operational capabilities.”
The Air Force’s public information about the craft focuses on its role in researching reusable space vehicles and establishing a “space test platform for the United States Air Force.”
Military space programs “are as big as NASA,” astrophysicist and astronomer Jonathan McDowell told NPR’s Here and Now back in 2015, when the X-37B left for its most recent mission.
At the time, McDowell said there are around 20 to 25 “full-fledged spy satellites or other really secret vehicles” that orbit the Earth.
The concept of militarizing space is one that’s still developing, McDowell said, noting the distinction between the use of satellites solely to support on-ground operations and their use to snoop on, and even interfere with, with other satellites.
Civilian satellite spotters are able to track the more than 5-ton X-37B as it orbits Earth. Fueling theories that it aids surveillance programs, trackers found that at least one earlier mission followed an orbit that took it over countries that included Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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While any self-respecting futurist foretells a world of electric driving, the engineers dedicated to making the internal combustion engine ever more efficient aren’t throwing in the oily towel.
Good thing, because electric cars remain years away from offering the affordability, performance, and practicality needed to truly displace conventional automobiles. Until that combination arrives, automakers will continue relying on the internal combustion engine. The challenge lies in keeping up with ever stricter emissions and fuel economy regulations in the US and Europe, while delivering the power and performance consumers demand.
Automakers have several ways of doing that, and industry supplier BorgWarner just developed another. It’s called the e-booster, and the company claims it could improve fuel efficiency by up to 10 percent without a corresponding drop in performance, by making turbochargers even more effective.
First, a word about turbochargers. They’re essentially a small turbine, driven by exhaust gasses, that forces more air into the combustion chamber. More oxygen means more power from the same amount of fuel. Voila, greater power without a decrease in fuel economy, which explains why automakers love them. Honeywell expects to see turbocharged engines in half of all cars sold worldwide by 2021.
Ah, but turbochargers have one key weakness: When you mash the pedal, it can take a few seconds for the engine to respond and the turbo to start spinning. Engineers call this delay lag, and it’s a drag. The e-booster eliminates it by augmenting the turbocharger. It’s driven by electricity, so it spins up to 70,000 rpm in just three-tenths of a second, providing a boost until the turbocharger gets up to speed. BorgWarner says the cantaloupe-sized device, combined with a standard turbocharger, improves torque by 85 percent at 1,500 rpm, and by 55 percent at 2,000 rpm.
On Friday, BorgWarner announced that Mercedes-Benz will introduce the e-booster on a 3.0-liter six-cylinder engine you’ll see under the hood of … well, no one’s saying just yet. CEO James Verrier says two more automakers have signed on, but he wouldn’t say who. He expects two-stage turbos to catch on quickly. “It’s gonna become relatively mainstream over the next five years,†he says.
The e-booster will hit the road in Mercedes-Benz’s M256 3-liter, 6-cylinder engine.Daimler
Rival supplier Delphi developed a similar solution it calls the e-charger, and Volvo experimented with using three turbochargers to eliminate lag. “There’s very little that’s new under the sun when it comes to most engine technologies,†says Stephen Ciatti, a mechanical engineer at Argonne National Laboratory. “What changes is our ability to either manufacture them cheaply and effectively … or the need for a more expensive approach to solving a problem when market demands or regulatory pressures don’t force it.â€
BorgWarner first toyed with this idea in the late 1990s, but decided the e-booster needed too much power, says Verrier. But the recent development of 48-volt electrical systems changed the picture. Providing four times the power of a traditional 12-volt system allows the adoption of all kinds of new technologies: active ride control, electric water pumps, heated seats, and so on. The e-booster requires 5 or 6 kilowatts, something a 48-volt system can supply.
So it may be a while before you’re riding around in an electric robo-car. Until then, you’re stuck with internal combustion. Thank the engineers who continue making it more efficient.
This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Super-high king tides hammered homes and roads in Marin County, California this past winter, and residents can expect worse as rising seas threaten to super-soak their lives. If nothing is done to adapt, highways and utility connections eight miles inland in the mostly rural Bay Area county could get doused within 15 years, on top of hundreds of buildings inundated closer to shore. Tens of thousands of residents could be affected.
So when Marin County wanted to invite the public into the process of planning for that hazardous future two years ago, officials decided to try something different. Enter “The Game of Floods,†a choose-your-own-hazard-mitigation romp created by a team of local public works engineers and planners. Climate change may have its winners and losers, but this game—which earned Marin County a national award for public outreach by the American Planning Association on Wednesday—focuses on the value of collaboration and small steps in the face of a huge challenge.
Designed to be played at a community meeting or workshop, the Game of Floods invites residents to play the role of planning commissioners weighing adaptation strategies against the very wet future of a hypothetical “Marin Island.†It’s a resource-management game, in the style of Settlers of Catan: There’s a hexagonal playing board with colorfully mapped flood zones; players choose community “assets†that they commit to protecting, such as a seabird colony, a parking lot, or an electrical sub-station.
A facilitator reads aloud a gloomy synopsis of sea-level rise’s impact on the island by 2050. Players think through strategies to accommodate, defend, or retreat from their chosen parcels, signaling their choices with some sweet stickers—a flood wall there, a zoning change there. A guide that outlines the costs, environmental trade-offs, and human impacts teaches them about the outcomes of their decisions. There aren’t individual victory points; the game is “won†after every player presents their visions to the rest of the group, which deliberates to choose the best overall strategy to protect the island. (Sorry, no “Longest Flood Wall†here.)
Team deliberation can be tough, says Alex Westhoff, a planner with the Marin County Community Development Agency, but it helps residents grasp what planners are tasked with when weighing decisions themselves. “It’s the first adaptation game I’m aware of,†he says. “People definitely appreciate a fun and engaging approach to learning about this.â€
“Fun†may not be the first word that comes to mind when planning for climate-change devastation. But Westhoff says the game succeeds in capturing players’ attention, because it transforms what can feel like an overwhelming reality—planet-wide sea-level rise—into a series of specific bite-sized actions.
After presenting it to West Marin workshop participants in 2015, county staffers took the game to a handful of conferences around California. It caught the attention of planners, universities, and preservation societies. Agencies in other flood-vulnerable states, as well as the EPA and FEMA, requested copies, too. By now, Westhoff estimates some 1,500 people have now played the game in workshops and classrooms around the U.S. With grant funding, the county is turning the game’s print-it-yourself materials into a formal box set available for purchase by libraries and schools.
Not only has the game helped expand awareness of community planning, feedback from players in Marin County may prove valuable as seeds of real-world adaptations. Westhoff says that many locals have showed their support through the game for nourishing eroded beaches with fresh sand and oyster habitats.
“It all boils down to getting a conversation started about a very important topic,†says Roberta Rewers, a senior communications coordinator for the APA. “It visualizes what could happen in a community, and it gets people thinking about how choices have impacts.â€
For hackers, scanning for an open “portâ€â€”a responsive, potentially vulnerable internet connection on a would-be victim’s machine—has long been one of the most basic ways to gain a foothold in a target company or agency. As it turns out, thanks to a few popular but rarely studied apps, plenty of smartphones have open ports, too. And those little-considered connections can just as easily give hackers access to tens of millions of Android devices.
A group of researchers from the University of Michigan identified hundreds of applications in Google Play that perform an unexpected trick: By essentially turning a phone into a server, they allow the owner to connect to that phone directly from their PC, just as they would to a web site or another internet service. But dozens of these apps leave open insecure ports on those smartphones. That could allow attackers to steal data, including contacts or photos, or even to install malware.
“Android has inherited this open port functionality from traditional computers, and many applications use open ports in a way that poses vulnerabilities,†says Yunhan Jia, one of the Michigan researchers who reported their findings at the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy. “If one of these vulnerable open port apps is installed, your phone can be fully taken control of by attackers.â€
Port of Call
To determine the full scope of the port problem, the Michigan researchers built a software tool they call OPAnalyzer (for Open Port Analyzer) that they used to scan the code of around 100,000 popular apps in the Google Play app store.
They found that 1,632 applications created open ports on smartphones, mostly intended to allow users to connect to them from PCs to send text messages, transfer files, or use the phone as a proxy to connect to the rest of the internet. Of those, they identified 410 as potentially having no protection or only weak protection—such as a hardcoded password that can be derived from the code and used by any hacker—meant to control who can access those open ports. And of that subset, they manually analyzed 57 that they confirmed left ports open and exploitable by any hacker on the same local Wi-Fi network, another app on the same device (even one with restricted privileges), or more disturbing, a script that runs in the victim’s browser when they merely visit a website.
And that may just be a partial list of exploits, says Zhiyun Qian, a computer scientist at the University of California at Riverside who has followed the Michigan researchers’ work. When a phone’s IP address is publicly visible on the internet—a situation that depends on whether the phone is connected to Wi-Fi and the user’s carrier—the attacker can simply scan for open ports from anywhere, and start attacking that vulnerable phone. In those cases, “this is completely, remotely exploitable,†says Qian. “It’s definitely serious.â€
Of the 57 apps they identified as the most vulnerable to the open port attacks, two struck the researchers as particularly dangerous. One app with more than 10 million downloads called Wifi File Transfer allows users to connect to an open port on their phone via Wi-Fi, and access files like photos, application data, and anything stored on the phone’s SD card. But Jia says that due to the app’s lack of any authentication like a password, an intruder who connects to that open port can also get full access to the same sensitive files. “That’s intended functionality for the user, but because of that poor authentication it allows anyone to do it,†Jia says.
The researchers also point to AirDroid, a similarly popular app with an eight-digit number of downloads, designed to allow users full control of their Android phone from their PC. Researchers found that AirDroid had an authentication flaw that also lets malicious intruders access ports. But in AirDroid’s case, that flaw only allowed for the hijacking of existing connections. To perform the attack, malware on the phone would likely have had to intercept the user’s attempt to establish that legitimate connection. And when the Michigan researchers say that AirDroid’s developers patched the problem quickly after being notified.
The developers behind Wifi File Transfer, by contrast, haven’t fixed their app’s security problem even after the researchers contacted them, Michigan’s Jia says. WIRED reached out several times to Smarter Droid, the company that makes the app, but didn’t get a response.
‘The User Can Do Nothing’
In the videos below, the researchers demonstrate attacks on two other apps, PhonePal and Virtual USB, both of which Jia says remain vulnerable. Neither has nearly as many downloads as Wifi File Transfer, however—Virtual USB has less than 50,000, and PhonePal has only a few hundred. Neither company responded to WIRED’s request for comment.
Aside from those four apps, the researchers’ full paper details analyses of half a dozen others—several of which are mostly popular in the Chinese market—that are also vulnerable to varying degrees to open port attacks. More than half the 1,632 apps that create open ports on phones have more than 500,000 downloads, the researchers found.
To test just how widespread the most vulnerable apps might be, they at one point even scanned their local university network and immediately found devices with open, potentially hackable ports. “That so many developers have made this mistake is already an alarming sign,†says UC Riverside’s Qian. “There will be other apps they haven’t looked at, or that other people build in the future that will have the same problem.â€
The notion that smartphone apps can open ports and leave them vulnerable has come to light before: In late 2015, the Chinese company Baidu revealed that a software development kit it had developed left open ports on devices where it was installed. Other major Chinese businesses, including Tencent and Qihoo, had already adopted the code, affecting more than 100 million users in total. After Baidu’s admission of the vulnerability the vulnerable apps all released security fixes.
Clearly, though, the problem of open ports in mobile devices persists. And the Michigan researchers suggest that fixing it will require developers to think twice before they open a gaping entry point in your device for remote hackers. “The user can do nothing. Google can do nothing,†says Jia. “The developer has to learn to use open ports correctly.â€
Of course, there actually is one thing you can do: Uninstall the vulnerable apps like Wifi File Transfer that the researchers name. You may lose the convenience of moving files to and from your mobile device at will. But you’ll lock out the unwelcome guests who’d use that convenient backdoor, too.
Advertisers have found ways to bombard us with promotions no matter what we’re doing: watching TV, checking social media, and even when streaming music. But the future of advertising could be even more invasive when the next public event you attend is full of flying video drones projecting inescapable video everywhere you look.
NTT Docomo, one of Japan’s largest wireless carriers, created this unique flying sphere that’s surrounded by eight curved LED strips that can spin at high speed while it’s flying. (As light and thin as LCD displays have become, they’re still relatively heavy for a battery-powered drone to hoist into the air.) This approach can create what is essentially a flying video screen with minimal weight to improve battery life and flight times. The design also allows the drone’s propellers to be hidden inside, so as not to obstruct images or videos being displayed.
The image resolution on this 35-inch-wide prototype is limited to just 144 x 136 pixels—lower resolution than even the Apple Watch’s tiny screen. So if you were hoping one of these drones could follow you around letting you binge on Netflix all day, you won’t have the best experience. But as the technology improves, eventually this flying video drone could reach HD resolutions, and maybe even 4K.
NTT Docomo developed the drone for the upcoming Niconico Chokaigi festival, which celebrates a popular Japanese video sharing site (imagine YouTube having its own version of Coachella) and the telco sees its creation being used at other events like concerts or sporting events as temporary signage, or as part of a larger audio-visual show.
Using overhead floating signs to help direct large crowds of people seems like a generally useful technology, but it’s not hard to imagine NTT Docomo’s cool tech might eventually just turn into flying billboards, reminding you of how much a ‘Share Everything’ plan could be saving you and your family. Go right this way to see your favorite artist… and also ENJOY COCA-COLA!
We’ve seen it happen before, as in the case of New York’s fancy new touchscreen subway maps, or the city’s countless payphones that have been turned into wi-fi hotspots. They both provide useful services but also serve as billboards for advertising. It just gets a lot harder to ignore the ads when they’re playing on a flying drone that’s swooping around your head like a pigeon.
