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.
It looks like those rumors of Amazon convenience stores were true. The online shopping giant unveiled Amazon Go today, its spin on brick and mortar retail. It uses computer vision, a whole bunch of sensors and deep learning to let you walk into a store, sign in with an Amazon Go app, fill up your bags and leave without stopping for a checkout line. Amazon is calling it a "Just Walk Out Shopping" experience, a self-descriptive name if there ever was one. The company is starting out with a large store in Seattle, but it’s clearly meant to serve as a model for other locations and retail stores.
For now, the Amazon Go store is only open to the company’s employees, but you can sign up to be alerted when it’s available to all. In many ways, it’s exactly how I would imagine Amazon’s approach to physical retail: incredibly convenient and potentially disruptive. While the company’s technology looks like it can effectively tell when you add and remove items from your "cart," I’m more curious about how it would prevent people without the Amazon Go from entering the store. And potentially even more damning, what would a store like this mean for retail jobs?
Donald Trump’s incoming administration might be going full steam ahead in returning to fossil fuels, but the clean energy sector might have other ideas. Nikola Motor Company has just unveiled a huge class 8 truck (as big as they get) that’s powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, claiming it will have an operational range of as much as 1,200 miles (1,900km) when it’s released in 2020.
The Nikola One, which is designed for long-haul good transport across a large landmass, will according to its creators be able to travel between 800 and 1,200 miles on a single tank of fuel, while delivering over 1,000 horsepower and 2,000 foot-pounds of torque.
If these claims are true, it will provide nearly double the power of the current generation of diesel-powered semis/articulated lorries.
It runs on a fully-electric drivetrain powered by high-density lithium batteries, which are charged on the go by a hydrogen fuel cell. Of course, its horizons are currently limited by a severe lack of hydrogen fuelling stations, so Nikola—which, like Tesla, is named for the Serbian-American scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla—will also be constructing a network of 364 hydrogen fuelling stations “across the US and Canada,” starting in 2018.
The price of the fuel will be included in the cost of leasing the trucks, as will servicing and warranty, though there’s no word yet how much that lease will actually cost. To date, NMC says it has accepted reservations totalling “nearly three billion dollars” in future orders.
At yesterday’s launch in Salt Lake City, Utah, Nikola’s founder and CEO Trevor Milton described the Nikola One as “the most advanced semi-truck ever built.” Amongst its innovations are a smart dashboard which, he claimed, would be able to pick out the most cost-efficient route for drivers. Also included inside the vehicle’s enormous cab will one one or two full-size beds, a 40-inch curved 4K TV with Apple TV, Wi-Fi, and 4G LTE connectivity, and a refrigerator, freezer, and microwave.
The first 5,000 or so trucks will be built by a the trucking giant Fitzgerald, but Milton hopes to have a location for its planned “world-class advanced manufacturing facility” sorted by mid-2017. His plans—which also involve eventually producing up to 50,000 units per year—are incredibly ambitious.
Nikola will be competing with Tesla, after Elon Musk announced in August in his second “master plan” blog that his firm would also be producing an articulated truck. He wrote a short paragraph suggesting he’d announce the Tesla semi next year, with little additional detail.
Over the last few years we’ve tested some of the first hydrogen fuel cell vehicles—the Toyota Mirai and the Riversample Rasa—and found them quite proficient, though still clearly ahead of their time until hydrogen refuelling infrastructure exists.
Virgin Spaceship Unity glides for the first time after being released from Virgin Mothership Eve over the Mojave Desert on December 3, 2016.
Virgin Galactic
VSS Unity touches down after flying freely for the first time.
Virgin Galactic
Another glide shot, above Mojave, Calif.
Virgin Galactic
Sir Richard Branson and George Whitesides congratulate Chief Pilot Dave Mackay and Test Pilot Mark Stucky after the successful glide flight.
Virgin Galactic
All smiles in Mojave after a difficult two years.
Virgin Galactic
Earlier this year, in September, the VMS Eve carries VSS Unity for its first captive-carry flight over Mojave.
Virgin Galactic
Virgin Spaceship Unity and Virgin Mothership Eve take to the skies on its first captive carry flight on 8th September 2016.
Virgin Galactic
Virgin Spaceship Unity and Virgin Mothership Eve take to the skies on its first captive carry flight on 8th September 2016.
Virgin Galactic
It has been a long road back from a fatal 2014 accident for Virgin Galactic, the splashy spaceship company founded by Sir Richard Branson to bring the masses into space. After its VSS Enterprise crashed into the Mojave Desert during a test flight, killing vehicle co-pilot Michael Alsbury, the company has had to redesign some key safety systems and rebuild its spacecraft. It revealed the VSS Unity in February.
Since then Virgin Galactic has completed a series of ground tests and mating to the “mothership” aircraft, Eve. Following captive carry tests in September, the company performed its first glide test on Saturday, when VSS Unity was released at an altitude of about 15km. The spacecraft reached a velocity of mach 0.6 during its 10-minute descent back to the ground in California. It then made a safe landing at test facilities in Mojave.
According to the company, a preliminary review of the data as well as feedback from the two pilots, Mark Stucky and Dave Mackay, indicates that Saturday’s flight went well. However Virgin Galactic engineers will perform a full review of the data and vehicle’s performance before clearing the way for additional tests, and eventually powered flights, likely sometime in 2017.
Prior to its catastrophic accident in 2014 the VSS Enterprise had made 55 test flights, reaching a maximum altitude of 22 kilometers during powered missions. The VSS Unity has the same basic airframe and propulsion systems as Enterprise, but has a modified feather locking system, which is used to aid in the descent of the spacecraft. During the fatal flight on Oct. 31, 2014, Alsbury prematurely deployed the system while still making a powered ascent. Unity now includes a mechanical pin to prevent the feather lever from moving when the vehicle is flying in an unsafe flight regime.
Additional challenges await as Unity moves higher into the Earth’s atmosphere during its test program. When the spacecraft makes powered flights in the upper atmosphere, engineers will carefully observe how the vehicle’s rocket motor dissipates heat from the rear of the spacecraft, and how it behaves when breaking the sound barrier both during ascent and descent. Company officials have said they will fly passengers—there will be room for six customers on a flight in addition to two crew members—only when they are confident they can safely do so.
In the two years since Virgin’s accident, the market for space tourism has changed. One competitor, XCOR, has slowed development of its suborbital Lynx spacecraft. However Blue Origin has made significant strides, flying its New Shepard rocket and spacecraft into suborbital space half a dozen times. Blue Origin says it is on schedule to begin offering private rides into space by 2018.
The current Air Force One fleet has been in service for 26 years. The new ones won’t arrive until 2024—if a Trump administration doesn’t cancel them entirely.
US AIr Force
This morning, President-Elect Donald Trump lambasted the ongoing program to build a new presidential aircraft in a post to Twitter, calling for its cancellation:
Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!
The Air Force One replacement contract, awarded in February 2016 to Boeing, is for a single 747-8 aircraft equipped for the chief executive’s travel and communications. The current pair of VC-25A aircraft that serve as Air Force One—two heavily modified Boeing 747-200B jetliners—are the last of their kind, and have been in service since 1990. There are no 747-200 aircraft in commercial service anywhere in the world, making logistic support for them expensive. “Parts obsolescence, diminishing manufacturing sources, and increased down times for maintenance are existing challenges that will increase until a new aircraft is fielded,†Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James said of the existing aircraft when the Boeing contract was announced.
The 747-8 has a longer range, greater maximum take-off weight, and higher top airspeed than the 747-200 that it is intended to replace, as well as better fuel efficiency and lower carbon dioxide emissions. Capable of Mach 0.855, according to Boeing, the 747-8 is the fastest commercial jet in the world. However, the modifications required for a presidential aircraft are extensive. The VC-25A version of the 747-200 is capable of in-flight refueling, carries a full communications suite, and is “self-sufficient” at airports (having its own self-deploying “air stairs” and baggage handling equipment).
The initial contract award in February was for $25.8 million, with the total cost estimated by the Air Force to be as much as $1.65 billion over the full development, construction, and testing cycle. But the new Boeing aircraft aren’t expected to enter service until 2024—nearly a full two presidential terms from now.
Ars contacted Boeing and Air Force officials for comment. An Air Force spokesperson said that the service was gathering numbers on the program for a response, and a Boeing representative said that a response would be forthcoming. This story will be updated as those details become available.
For the first time in a century, the US Supreme Court has weighed in how much design patents are worth. The answer: not nearly as much as Apple thinks.
The 8-0 opinion (PDF) is a rebuke to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which held that the relevant “article of manufacture” for calculating damages was—in fact, had to be—the entire smartphone. That meant even though Apple’s patents covered only certain design elements, it was entitled to $399 million in lost profits damages.
In an opinion authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court rejected that approach, finding that the statutory term “article of manufacture” could mean either a whole product or just one component of a product.
“Reading ‘article of manufacture’ in §289 to cover only an end product sold to a consumer gives too narrow a meaning to the phrase,” writes Sotomayor.
The damage numbers in this case, the first of two mammoth Apple v. Samsung trials, have shifted over time. In 2012, the first Apple v. Samsung trial ended with a jury slapping Samsung with a $1.05 billion verdict for infringing Apple patents and trademarks. After appeals, the trademark damages were thrown out, with $548 million in damages remaining, based entirely on patent infringement. With this Supreme Court case, Samsung was looking to get back most of that money—the $399 million that’s based on three design patents.
The patents at issue are D618,677 (a black rectangle with rounded corners, shown above), D593,087 (with bezel on surrounding rim), and D604,305 (a colorful grid of 16 icons.)
The Supreme Court declined to rule on exactly what should be the “article of manufacture” in the case, saying that issue wasn’t sufficiently briefed—an suggestion made by the US Solicitor General during oral arguments.
The case will go back down to the Federal Circuit, which will recalculate the damages using the Supreme Court’s criteria. However, today’s ruling is narrow enough that the appeals court could come still come up with a high number—or even the same number. The Supreme Court said only that they can’t assume the whole product is the damages base, but Sotomayor’s opinion acknowledges that it could be appropriate in some cases.
That seems unlikely to happen, however. Even though it’s a narrow opinion, it’s a sign that the Supreme Court is seeing overreach here, and it is going to expect a smaller number. The Federal Circuit will not want another high court rebuke to add to its growing list.
A website bot as it distributes CVV guesses over multiple sites.
Thieves can guess your secret Visa payment card data in as little as six seconds, according to researchers in the UK. Bad actors can use browser bots to distribute guesses across hundreds of legitimate online merchants.
The attack starts out with a card’s 16-digit number, which can be obtained in a variety of ways. Attackers can buy numbers on black-market websites, often for less than $1 apiece, or use a smartphone equipped with a near-field communication reader to skim them. The numbers can also be inferred by combining your first six digits—which are based on the card brand, issuing bank, and card type—with a verification formula known as the Luhn Algorithm. Once an attacker has a valid 16-digit number, four seconds is all they need to learn the expiration date and the three-digit card-verification value that most sites use to verify the validity of a credit card. Even when sites go a step further by adding the card holder’s billing address to the process, the technique can correctly guess the information in about six seconds.
The technique relies on Web bots that spread random guesses across almost 400 e-commerce sites that accept credit card payments. Of those, 26 sites use only two fields to verify cards, while an additional 291 sites use three fields. Because different sites rely on different fields, the bots are able to enter intelligent guesses into the user field of multiple sites until the bots hit on the right ones. Once the correct expiration date is obtained for a given card—typically banks issue cards that are valid for up to 60 months—the bots use a similar process to obtain the CVV number. In other cases, when sites allow the bots to obtain the CVV first—a process that can never require more than 1,000 guesses—the bots then work to obtain the expiration date and, if required, the billing address.
“We came to an important observation that the difference in security solutions of various websites introduces a practically exploitable vulnerability in the overall payment system,” researchers from New Castle University in the UK wrote an a research paper titled Does the Online Card Payment Landscape Unwittingly Facilitate Fraud?. “An attacker can exploit these differences to build a distributed guessing attack which generates usable card payment details (card number, expiry date, card verification value, and postal address) one field at a time.” The researchers continued:
Each generated field can be used in succession to generate the next field by using a different merchant’s website. Moreover, if individual merchants were trying to improve their security by adding more payment fields to be verified on their site, they potentially inadvertently weaken the whole system by creating an opportunity to guess the value of another field, as explained later in the article.
In an effort to make online purchases as easy as possible, many websites allow prospective customers to make as many as 50, and in some cases an unlimited number, of incorrect guesses. Even in cases where the number is lower, the bots can still succeed by spreading the guesses over a large number of sites. Surprisingly, Visa—the world’s biggest payment card service—didn’t employ any system-wide mechanism for detecting the mass guessing attack. The Newcastle University researchers said that Visa competitor MasterCard, on the other hand, did detect the distributed mass guesses and shut down the attacks before they could succeed.
One of the tasks the bots carried out was to create a fake account that could charge a credit card belonging to the researchers and transfer the balance to a contact in India.
The researchers wrote:
Within minutes, we received a confirmation e-mail for the order made, and our contact confirmed the pick-up of the money. The time it took from the process of creating an account to collecting the money at the destination was only 27 minutes, which is short enough to avoid the bank reversing the payment.
The researchers said they contacted the 40 biggest websites used in the guessing attack to notify them of the findings. As a result, some sites have already changed some of their verification procedures. While that’s a good start, a better solution would be for Visa to implement the type of Internet-wide alert system used by MasterCard and for online merchants to standardize the verification process.
The findings provide another good reason for people to closely scrutinize credit card bills each month for fraudulent purchases. It’s also a good idea to use a single non-Visa credit card for all online purchases and to keep the spending limit on that card as low as possible.
The Army Corps of Engineers has decided to deny the easement for the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the National Congress of American Indians said in a statement Sunday.
The decision would essentially halt the construction of the oil pipeline right above the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and it also comes as demonstrators across the country flocked to North Dakota in protest.
“Our prayers have been answered,” NCAI President Brian Cladoosby said in a statement. “This isn’t over, but it is enormously good news. All tribal peoples have prayed from the beginning for a peaceful solution, and this puts us back on track.”
The Army Corps of Engineers and Department of the Interior did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
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