Planet Aardvark

October 17, 2019

• Centauri Dreams Artificial Singularity Power: A Basis for Developing and Detecting Advanced Spacefaring Civilizations

  Could an advanced civilization create artificial black holes? If so, the possibilities for power generation and interstellar flight would be profound. Imagine cold worlds rendered habitable by tiny artificial ‘suns.’ Robert Zubrin, who has become a regular contributor to Centauri Dreams, considers the consequences of black hole engines in the essay below. Dr. Zubrin is an aerospace engineer and founder of the Mars Society, as well as being the president of Pioneer Astronautics. His latest book, The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility, was recently published by Prometheus Books. As Zubrin notes, generating energy through artificial singularities would leave a potential SETI signal whose detectability is analyzed here, a signature unlike any we’ve examined before.

  by Robert Zubrin

  Abstract

  Artificial Singularity Power (ASP) engines generate energy through the evaporation of modest sized (10⁸-10¹¹ kg) black holes created through artificial means. This paper discusses the design and potential advantages of such systems for powering large space colonies, terraforming planets, and propelling starships. The possibility of detecting advanced extraterrestrial civilizations via the optical signature of ASP systems is examined. Speculation as to possible cosmological consequences of widespread employment of ASP engines is considered.

  Introduction

  

  According to a theory advanced by Stephen Hawking [1] in 1974, black holes evaporate at a rate given by:

  t_ev = (5120π)t_P(m/m_P)³ (1)

  where t_ev is the time it takes for the black hole to evaporate, t_P is the Planck time (5.39e-44 s), m is the mass of the black hole in kilograms, and m_P is the Planck mass (2.18e-8 kg) [2]

  Hawking considered the case of black holes formed by the collapse of stars, which need to be at least ~3 solar masses to occur naturally. For such a black hole, equation 1 yields an evaporation time of 5e68 years, far longer than the expected life of the universe. In fact, evaporation would never happen, because the black hole would gain energy, and thus mass, by drawing in cosmic background radiation at a rate faster than its own insignificant rate of radiated power.

  However it can be seen from examining equation (1) that the evaporation rate goes inversely with the cube of singularity, which means that the emitted power (=mc²/t_ev) goes inverse with the square of the mass. Thus if the singularity could be made small enough, very large amounts of power could theoretically be produced.

  This possibility was quickly grasped by science fiction writers, and such propulsion systems were included by Arthur C. Clarke in his 1976 novel Imperial Earth [3] and Charles Sheffield in his 1978 short story “Killing Vector.” [4]

  Such systems did not receive serious technical analysis however, until 2009, when it was examined by Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland, both then of Kansas State University, in their seminal paper “Are Black Hole Starships Possible?” [5]

  In their paper, Crane and Westmoreland focused on the idea of using small artificial black holes powerful enough to drive a starship to interstellar-class velocities yet long-lived enough to last the voyage. They identified a “sweet spot” for such “Black Hole Starships” (BHS) with masses on the order of 2×10⁹ kg, which they said would have lifetimes on order of 130 years, yet yield power of about 13,700 TW. They proposed to use some kind of parabolic reflector to reflect this radiation, resulting in a photon rocket. The ideal thrust T of a rocket with jet power P and exhaust velocity v is given by:

  T = 2P/v (2)

  So with T = 13,700 TW and v=c = 3e8 m/s, the thrust would be 8.6e7 N. Assuming that the payload spacecraft had a mass of 1e9 kg, this would accelerate the ship at a rate of a=8.6e7/3e9 = 2.8e-2 m/s². Accelerating at this rate, such a ship would reach about 30% the speed of light in 100 years.

  There are a number of problems with this scheme. In the first place, the claimed acceleration is on the low side. Furthermore their math appears to be incorrect. A 2e9 kg singularity would only generate about 270 TW, or 1/50th as much as their estimate, reducing thrust by a factor of 50 (although it would last about 20,000 years). These problems could be readily remedied, however, by using a smaller singularity and a smaller ship. For example a singularity with a mass of 2e8 kg would produce a power of 26,900 TW. Assuming a ship with a mass of 1e8 kg, an acceleration of 0.6 m/s² could be achieved, allowing 60% the speed of light to be achieved in 10 years. The singularity would only have a lifetime of 21 years. However it could be maintained by being constantly fed mass at a rate of about 0.33 kg/s.

  A bigger problem is that a 1e9 kg singularity would produce radiation with a characteristic temperature of 9 GeV, increasing in inverse proportion to the singularity mass. So for example a 1e8 kg singularity would produce gamma rays with energies of 90 GeV (i.e. for Temperature, T, in electron volts, T = 9e18/m.) There is no known way to reflect such high energy photons. So at this point the parabolic reflector required for the black hole starship photon engine is science fiction.

  Yet another problem is the manufacture of the black hole. Crane and Westmoreland suggest that it could be done using converging gamma ray lasers. To make a 1e9 kg unit, they suggested a “high-efficiency square solar panel a few hundred km on each side, in a circular orbit about the sun at a distance of 1,000,000 km” to provide the necessary energy. A rough calculation indicates the implied power of this system from this specification is on the order of 10⁶ TW, or about 100,000 times the current rate used by human civilization. As an alternative construction technique, they also suggest accelerating large masses to relativistic velocities and then colliding them. The density of these masses would be multiplied both by relativistic mass increase and length contraction. However the energy required to do this would still equal the combined masses times the speed of light squared. While this technique would eliminate the need for giant gamma ray lasers, the same huge power requirement would still present itself.

  In what follows, we will examine possible solutions for the above identified problems.

  Advanced Singularity Engines

  In MKS units, equation (1) can be rewritten as:

  t_ev = 8.37e-15 m³ (3)

  This implies that the power, P, in Watts, emitted by the singularity is given by:

  P = 1.08e33/m² (4)

  The results of these two equations are shown in Fig. 1.

  

  Fig 1. Power and Lifetime of ASP Engines as a Function of Singularity Mass

  No credible concept is available to enable a lightweight parabolic reflector of the sort needed to enable the Black Hole Starship. But we can propose a powerful and potentially very useful system by dropping the requirement for starship-relevant thrust to weight ratios. Instead let us consider the use of ASP engines to create an artificial sun.

  Consider a 1e8 kg ASP engine. As shown in Fig 1, it would produce a power of 1.08e8 Gigawatts. Such an engine, if left along, would only have a lifetime of 2.65 years, but it could be maintained by a constant feed of about 3 kg/s of mass. We can’t reflect its radiation, but we can absorb it with a sufficiently thick material screen. So let’s surround it with a spherical shell of graphite with a radius of 40 km and a thickness of 1.5 m. At a distance of 40 km, the intensity of the radiation will be about 5 MW/m², which the graphite sphere can radiate into space with a black body temperature of 3000 K. This is about the same temperature as the surface of a type M red dwarf star. We estimate that graphite has an attenuation length for high energy gamma rays of about 15 cm, so that 1.5 m of graphite (equivalent shielding to 5 m of water or half the Earth’s atmosphere) will attenuate the gamma radiation by ten factors of e, or 20,000. The light will then radiate out further, dropping in intensity with the square of the distance, reaching typical Earth sunlight intensities of 1 kW/m² at a distance of about 3000 km from the center.

  The mass of the artificial star will be about 10¹⁴ kg (that’s the mass of the graphite shell, compared to which the singularity is insignificant.). As large as this is, however, it is still tiny compared to that of a planet, or even the Earth’s Moon (which is 7.35e22 kg). So, no planet would orbit such a little star. Instead, if we wanted to terraform a cold world, we would put the mini-star in orbit around it.

  The preferable orbital altitude of the ASP mini-star of 3000 km altitude in the above cited example was dictated by the power level of the singularity. Such a unit would be sufficient to provide all the light and heat necessary to terraform an otherwise sunless planet the size of Mars. Lower power units incorporating larger singularities but much smaller graphite shells are also feasible. (Shell mass is proportional to system power.) These are illustrated in Table 1.

  

  The high-powered units listed in Table 1 with singularity masses in the 1e8 to 1e9 kg range are suitable to serve as mini-suns orbiting planets, moons or asteroids, with the characteristic radius of such terraforming candidates being about the same as the indicated orbital altitude. The larger units, with lower power and singularity masses above 1e10 kg are more appropriate for space colonies.

  Consider an ASP mini-sun with a singularity mass of 3.16e10 kg positioned in the center of a cylinder with a radius of 10 km and a length of 20 km. The cylinder is rotating at a rate of 0.0316 radians per second, which provides it with 1 g or artificial gravity. Let’s say the cylinder is made of material with an areal density of 1000 kg per square meter. In this case it will experience an outward pressure of 10⁴ pascals, or about 1.47 psi, due to outward acceleration. If the cylinder were made of solid Kevlar (density = 1000 kg/m³) it would be about 1 m thick. So the hoop stress on it would be 1.47*(10,000)/1 = 14,700 psi, which is less than a tenth the yield stress of Kevlar. Or put another way, 10 cm of Kevlar would do the job of carrying the hoop stress, and the rest of mass load could be anything, including habitations. If the whole interior of the cylinder were covered with photovoltaic panels with an efficiency of 10 percent, 100 GWe of power would be available for use of the inhabitants of the space colony, which would have an area of 1,256 square kilometers. The mini-sun powering it would have a lifetime of 84 million years, without refueling. Much larger space colonies (i.e, with radii over ~100 km) would not be possible however, unless stronger materials become available, as the hoop stress would become too great.

  Both of these approaches seem potentially viable in principle. However we note that the space colony approach cited requires a singularity some 300 times more massive than the approach of putting a 1e8 kg mini-sun in orbit around a planet, which yields 4π(3000)² = 100 million square kilometers of habitable area, or about 80,000 times as much land. Furthermore, the planet comes with vast supplies of matter of every type, whereas the space colony needs to import everything.

  Building Singularities

  Reducing the size of the required singularity by a factor of 10 from 1e9 to 1e8 kg improves feasibility of the ASP concept somewhat, but we need to do much better. Fortunately there is a way to do so.

  If we examine equation (3), we can see that the expected lifetime of a 1000 kg singularity would be about 8.37 x 10^-6 s. In this amount of time, light can travel about 250 m. and an object traveling at half the speed of light 125 m. If a sphere with a radius of 125 m were filled with steel it would contain about 8 x 10¹⁰ kg, or about 100 times what we need for our 1e8 kg ASP singularity. In fact, it turns out that if the initial singularity is as small as about 200 kg, and fired into a mass of steel, it will gain mass much faster than it losses it, and eventually grow into a singularity as massive as the steel provided.

  By using this technique we can reduce the amount of energy required to form the required singularity by about 7 orders of magnitude compared to Crane and Westmoreland’s estimate. So instead of needing a 10⁶ TW system, a 100 GW gamma ray laser array might do the trick. Alternatively, accelerating two 200 kg masses to near light speed would require 3.6e7 TJ, or 10,000 TW-hours of energy. This is about the energy humanity currently uses in 20 days. We still don’t know how to do it, but reducing the scale of the required operation by a factor of 10 million certainly helps.

  ASP Starships

  We now return to the subject of ASP starships. In the absence of a gamma ray reflector, we are left with using solid material to absorb the gamma rays and other energetic particles and re-radiate their energy as heat. (Using magnetic fields to try to contain and reflect GeV-class charged particles that form a portion of the Hawking radiation won’t work because the required fields would be too strong and too extensive, and the magnets to generate them would be exposed to massive heating by gamma radiation.)

  Fortunately, we don’t need to absorb all the radiation in the absorber/reflector, we only need to absorb enough to get it hot. So let’s say that we position a graphite hemispherical screen to one side of a 1e8 kg ASP singularity, but instead of making it 1.5 m thick, we make it 0.75 mm thick. At that thickness it will only absorb about 5 percent of the radiation that hits it, the rest will pass right through. So we have 5e6 GW of useful energy, which we want to reduce to 5 MW/m² in order for the graphite to be kept at ~3000 K where it can survive. The radius will be about 9 km, and the mass of the graphite hemisphere will be about 6e8 kg. A thin solar sail like parabolic reflector with an area 50 times as great and the carbon hemisphere but a thickness 1/500th (i.e. 1.5 microns) as great would be positioned in front of the hemisphere, adding another 0.6 e8 kg to the system, which then plus the singularity and the 1e8 kg ship might be 7.6e8 kg in all. Thrust will be 0.67e8 N, so the ship would accelerate at a speed of 0.67/7.6 = 0.09 m/s², allowing it to reach 10 percent the speed of light in about 11 years.

  Going much faster would become increasingly difficult, because using only 5% of the energy of the singularity mass would give the system an effective exhaust velocity of about 0.22 c. Higher efficiencies might be possible if a significant fraction of the Hawking radiation came off as charged particles, allowing a thin thermal screen to capture a larger fraction of the total available energy. In this case, effective exhaust velocity would go as c times the square root of the achieved energy efficiency. But sticking with our 5% efficiency, if we wanted to reach 0.22 c we could, but we would require a mass ratio of 2.7, meaning we would need about 1.5e9 kg of propellant to feed into the ASP engine, whose mass would decrease our average acceleration by about a factor of two over the burn, meaning we would take about 40 years to reach 20 percent the speed of light.

  Detecting ET

  The above analysis suggests that if ASP technology is possible, using it to terraform cold planets with orbital mini-suns will be the preferred approach. Orbiting (possibly isolated) cold worlds at distances of thousands of kilometers, and possessing 3000 K type M red dwarf star spectra, potentially with gamma radiation in excess of normal stellar expectations, it is possible that such objects could be detectable.

  Indeed, one of the primary reasons to speculate on the design of ASP engines right now is to try to identify their likely signature. We are far away from being able to build such things. But the human race is only a few hundred thousand years old, and human civilization is just a few thousand years. In 1905 the revolutionary HMS Dreadnought was launched, displacing 18,000 tons. Today ships 5 times that size are common. So it is hardly unthinkable that in a century or two we will have spacecraft in the million ton (10⁹ kg) class. Advanced extraterrestrial civilizations may have reached our current technological level millions or even billions of years ago. So they have had plenty of time to develop every conceivable technology. If we can think it, they can build it, and if doing so would offer them major advantages, they probably have. Thus, looking for large energetic artifacts such as Dyson Spheres [6], starships [7,8], or terraformed planets [9] is potentially a promising way to carry out the SETI search, as unlike radio SETI, it requires no mutual understanding of communication conventions. Given the capabilities the ASP technology would offer any species seeking to expand it prospects by illuminating and terraforming numerous new worlds, such systems may actually be quite common.

  ASP starships are also feasible and might be detectable as well. However the durations of starship flights would be measured in decades or centuries, while terraformed worlds could be perpetual. Furthermore, once settled, trade between solar systems could much more readily be accomplished by the exchange of intellectual property via radio than by physical transport. As a result, the amount of flight traffic will be limited. In addition, there could be opportunities for employment of many ASP terraforming engines within a single solar system. For example, within our own solar system there are seven worlds of planetary size (Mars, Ceres, Ganymede, Calisto, Titan, Triton, and Pluto) whose terraforming could be enhanced or enabled by ASP systems, not to mention hundreds of smaller but still considerable moons and asteroids, and potentially thousands of artificial space colonies as well. Therefore the number of ASP terraforming engines in operation in the universe at any one time most likely far exceeds those being used for starship propulsion. It would therefore appear advantageous to focus the ASP SETI search effort on such systems.

  Proxima Centauri is a type M red dwarf with a surface temperature of 3000 K. It therefore has a black body spectrum similar to that of the 3000 K graphite shell of our proposed ASP mini-sun discussed above. The difference however is that it has about 1 million times the power, so that an ASP engine placed 4.2 light years (Proxima Centauri’s distance) from Earth would have the visual brightness as a star like Proxima Centauri positioned 4,200 light years away. Put another way, Proxima Centauri has a visual magnitude of 11. It takes 5 magnitudes to equal a 100 fold drop in power, so our ASP engine would have a visual magnitude of 26 at 4.2 light years, and magnitude 31 at 42 light years. The limit of optical detection of the Hubble Space Telescope is magnitude 31. So HST would be able to see our proposed ASP engine out to a distance of about 50 light years, within which there are some 1,500 stellar systems.

  Consequently ASP engines may already have been imaged by Hubble, appearing on photographs as unremarkable dim objects assumed to be far away. These should be subjected to study to see if any of them exhibit parallax. If they do, this would show that they are actually nearby objects of much lower power than stars. Further evidence of artificial origin could be provided if they were found to exhibit a periodic Doppler shift, as would occur if they were in orbit around a planetary body. An anomalous gamma ray signature could be present as well.

  I suggest we have a look.

  Cosmological Implications

  One of the great mysteries of science is why the laws of the universe are so friendly to life. Indeed, it can be readily shown that if any one of most of the twenty or so apparently arbitrary fundamental constants of nature differed from their actual value by even a small amount, life would be impossible [9]. Some have attempted to answer this conundrum by claiming that there is nothing to be explained because there are an infinite number of universes; we just happen to live in the odd one where life is possible. This multiverse theory answer is absurd, as it could just as well be used to avoid explaining anything. For example take the questions, why did the Titanic sink/it snow heavily last winter/the sun rise this morning/the moon form/the chicken cross the road? These can all also be answered by saying “no reason, it other universes they didn’t.” The Anthropic Principle reply, to the effect of “clearly they had to, or you wouldn’t be asking the question” is equally useless.

  Clearly a better explanation is required. One attempt at such an actual causal theory was put forth circa 1992 by physicist Lee Smolin [10], who says that daughter universes are formed by black holes created within mother universes. This has a ring of truth to it, because a universe, like a black hole, is something that you can’t leave. Well, says Smolin, in that case, since black holes are formed from collapsed stars, the universes that have the most stars will have the most progeny. So to have progeny a universe must have physical laws that allow for the creation of stars. This would narrow the permissible range of the fundamental constants by quite a bit. Furthermore, let’s say that daughter universes have physical laws that are close to, but slightly varied from that of their mother universes. In that case, a kind of statistical natural selection would occur, overwhelmingly favoring the prevalence of star-friendly physical laws as one generation of universes follows another.

  But the laws of the universe don’t merely favor stars, they favor life, which certainly requires stars, but also planets, water, organic and redox chemistry, and a whole lot more. Smolin’s theory gets us physical laws friendly to stars. How do we get to life?

  Reviewing an early draft of Smolin’s book in 1994, Crane offered the suggestion [11] that if advanced civilizations make black holes, they also make universes, and therefore universes that create advanced civilizations would have much more progeny than those that merely make stars. Thus the black hole origin theory would explain why the laws of the universe are not only friendly to life, but the development of intelligence and advanced technology as well. Universes creates life because life creates universes. This result is consistent with complexity theory, which holds that if A is necessary to B, then B has a role in causing A.

  These are very interesting speculations. So let us ask, what would we see if our universe was created as a Smolin black hole, and how might we differentiate between a natural star collapse or ASP engine origin? From the above discussion, it should be clear that if someone created an ASP engine, it would be advantageous for them to initially create a small singularity, then grow it to its design size by adding mass at a faster rate than it evaporates, and then, once it reaches its design size, maintain it by continuing to add mass at a constant rate equal to the evaporation rate. In contrast, if it were formed via the natural collapse of a star it would start out with a given amount of mass that would remain fixed thereafter.

  So let’s say our universe is, as Smolin says, a black hole. Available astronomical observations show that it is expanding, at a velocity that appears to be close to the speed of light. Certainly the observable universe is expanding at the speed of light.

  Now a black hole has an escape velocity equal to the speed of light. So for such a universe

  c²/2 = GM/R (5)

  Where G is the universal gravitational constant, c is the speed of light in vacuum, M is the mass of the universe, and R is the radius of the universe.

  If we assume that G and c are constant, R is expanding at the speed of light, and τ is the age of the universe, then:

  R = cτ (6)

  Combining (5) and (6), we have.

  M/τ = (Rc²/2G)(c/R) = c³/2G (7)

  This implies that the mass of such a universe would be growing at a constant rate. Contrary to the classic Hoyle continuous creation theory, however, which postulated that mass creation would lead to a steady state universe featuring constant density for all eternity, this universe would have a big bang event with density decreasing afterwards inversely with the square of time.

  Now the Planck mass, m_p, is given by:

  m_p = (hc/2πG)^½ (8)

  And the Planck time, t_p, is given by:

  t_p = (hG/2πc5)^½ (9)

  If we divide equation (8) by equation (9) we find:

  m_p/t_p = c³/G (10)

  If we compare equation (10) to equation (7) we see that:

  M/τ = ½(m_p/t_p) (11)

  So the rate at which the mass of such a universe would increase equals exactly ½ Planck mass per Planck time.

  Comparison with Observational Astronomy

  In MKS units, G = 6.674e-11, c= 3e+8, so:

  M/τ= c³/2G = 2.02277 e+35 kg/s. (12)

  For comparison, the mass of the Sun is 1.989+30 kg. So this is saying that the mass of the universe would be increasing at a rate of about 100,000 Suns per second.

  Our universe is believed to be about 13 billion years, or 4e+17 seconds old. The Milky Way galaxy has a mass of about 1 trillion Suns. So this is saying that the mass of the universe should be about 40 billion Milky Way galaxies. Astronomers estimate that there are 100 to 200 billion galaxies, but most are smaller than the Milky Way. So this number is in general agreement with what we see.

  According to this estimate, the total mass of the universe M, is given by:

  M = (2e+35)(4e+17) = 8e+52 kg. (13)

  This number is well known. It is the critical mass required to make our universe “flat.” It should be clear, however, that when the universe was half as old, with half its current diameter, this number would have needed to be half as great. Therefore, if the criteria is that such a universe mass always be critical for flatness, and not just critical right now, then its mass must be increasing linearly with time.

  These are very curious results. Black holes, the expanding universe, and the constancy of the speed of light are results of relativity theory. Planck masses and Planck times relate to quantum mechanics. Observational astronomy provides data from telescopes. It is striking that these three separate approaches to knowledge should provide convergent results.

  This analysis does require that mass be continually added to the universe at a constant rate, exactly as would occur in the case of an ASP engine during steady-state operation. It differs however in that in an ASP engine, the total mass only increases during the singularity’s buildup period. During steady state operation mass addition would be balanced by mass evaporation. How these processes would appear to the inhabitants of an ASP universe is unclear. Also unclear is how the inhabitants of any Smolinian black hole universe could perceive it as rapidly expanding. Perhaps the distance, mass, time, and other metrics inside a black hole universe could be very different from those of its parent universe, allowing it to appear vast and expanding to its inhabitants while looking small and finite to outside observers. One possibility is that space inside a black hole is transformed, in a three dimensional manner analogous to a ω = 1/z transformation in the complex plane, so that the point at the center becomes a sphere at infinity. In this case mass coming into the singularity universe from its perimeter would appear to the singularity’s inhabitants as matter/energy radiating outward from its center.

  Is there a model that can reconcile all the observations of modern astronomy with those that would be obtained by observers inside either a natural black hole or ASP universe? Speculation on this matter by scientists and science fiction writers with the required physics background would be welcome [13].

  Conclusions

  We find that ASP engines appear to be theoretically possible, and could offer great benefits to advanced spacefaring civilizations. Particularly interesting is their potential use as artificial suns to enable terraforming of unlimited numbers of cold worlds. ASP engines could also be used to enable interstellar colonization missions. However the number of ASP terraforming engines in operation in the universe at any one time most likely far exceeds those being used for starship propulsion. Such engines would have optical signatures similar to M-dwarfs, but would differ in that they would be much smaller in power than any natural M star, and hence have to be much closer to exhibit the same apparent luminosity. In addition they would move in orbit around a planetary body, thereby displaying a periodic Doppler shift, and could have an anomalous additional gamma ray component to their spectra. An ASP engine of the type discussed would be detectable by the Hubble Space Telescope at distances as much as 50 light years, within which there are approximately 1,500 stellar systems. Their images may therefore already be present in libraries of telescopic images as unremarkable dim objects, whose artificial nature would be indicated if they were found to display parallax. It is therefore recommended that such a study be implemented.

  As for cosmological implications, the combination of the attractiveness of ASP engines with Smolinian natural selection theory does provide a potential causal mechanism that could explain the fine tuning of the universe for life. Whether our own universe could have been created in such a manner remains a subject for further investigation.

  References

  1. Hawking, S. W. (1974). “Black hole explosions?” Nature 248(5443): 30–31. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1974Natur.248…30H/abstract

  2. Hawking Radiation, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation accessed September 22, 2019.

  3. Arthur C. Clarke, Imperial Earth, Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, New York, 1976.

  4. Charles Sheffield, “Killing Vector,” in Galaxy, March 1978.

  5. Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland, “Are Black Hole Starships Possible?” 2009, 2019. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803.pdf accessed September 24.

  6. Freeman Dyson, “The Search for Extraterrestrial Technology,” in Selected Papers of Freeman Dyson with Commentary, Providence, American Mathematical Society. Pp. 557-571, 1996.

  7. Robert Zubrin, “Detection of Extraterrestrial Civilizations via the Spectral Signature of Advanced Interstellar Spacecraft,” in Progress in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life: Proceedings of the 1993 Bioastronomy Symposium, Santa Cruz, CA, August 16-20 1993.

  8. Crane, “Searching for Extraterrestrial Civilizations Using Gamma Ray Telescopes,” available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09985.

  9. Robert Zubrin, The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, 2019.

  10. Paul Davies, The Accidental Universe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982

  11. Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, Oxford University Press, NY, 1997.

  12. Louis Crane, “Possible Implications of the Quantum Theory of Gravity: An Introduction to the Meduso-Anthropic principle,” 1994. https://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/9402/9402104v1.pdf

  13. I provided a light hearted explanation in my science fiction satire The Holy Land (Polaris Books, 2003) where the advanced extraterrestrial priestess (3rd Class) Aurora mocks the theory of the expanding universe held by the Earthling Hamilton. “Don’t be ridiculous. The universe isn’t expanding. That’s obviously physically impossible. It only appears to be expanding because everything in it is shrinking. What silly ideas you Earthlings have.” In a more serious vein, the late physicist Robert Forward worked out what life might be like on a neutron star in his extraordinary novel Dragon’s Egg (Ballantine Books, 1980.) A similar effort to describe life on the inside of a black hole universe could be well worthwhile. Any takers?

  Robert Zubrin
  Pioneer Astronautics
  11111 W. 8th Ave, unit A
  Lakewood, CO 80215
  Zubrin@aol.com

  

  

  
• The Atlantic: In Focus Fall Is in the Air: Images of the Season (28 photos)

  Autumn truly is the best season. The autumnal equinox took place a few weeks ago, marking the end of summer and the start of fall across the Northern Hemisphere. Now it is the season of harvests, festivals, migrations, winter preparations, and, of course, spectacular foliage. Across the North, people are beginning to feel a crisp chill in the evening air, leaves are splashing mountainsides with bright color, apples and pumpkins are being gathered, and animals are on the move. Collected here are some early images from this year, maybe more to follow in the weeks to come.

  

  
• Ed Yong A Hidden World of Strange Starfish-Like Creatures in the Abyss

  Earlier this year, a Belgian company planned to drop a giant underwater Roomba from the side of a ship, in search of treasure. The 27-ton machine was to be deployed into the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), where the miles-deep seafloor is spotted with dark, fist-size nodules of manganese and other valuable metals. There, the machine would sweep across the sand and, luck willing, suck up nodules, in a test run for mining operations to come.

  Perhaps it was just as well that luck was not willing, and a technical failure scuppered the trial. A team of scientists led by Magdalini Christodoulou of the German Centre for Marine Biodiversity Research has now shown that the bottom of the CCZ is home to a hidden world of strange and ancient creatures that evolved in the dark of the deep and that have only just come to light. If mining companies are allowed to dredge the CCZ’s floor for minerals in the next abyssal gold rush, this unique ecosystem could be threatened.

  Christodoulou and her colleagues learned about that ecosystem through six expeditions into the CCZ and two into another potential mining site, near Peru. On each voyage, the team deployed remotely piloted submersibles and viewed the ocean floor through the vehicles’ cameras. And what they saw, largely, were brittle stars.

  Related to starfish but less well known, brittle stars are actually more diverse and more abundant. Their basic form is that of a skinny starfish: five slender arms around a distinct central disk. Among the many species of brittle stars found around the world, some look like pinwheels, or pipe cleaners stuck to a drinks coaster, or a quintet of centipedes wriggling out of a hockey puck. Instead of a central brain, they have a ring of nerves that circumscribes the disk and connects to spokes running down the arms. The arms can flash green or blue, and even self-amputate while glowing to distract predators. If that happens, brittle stars can instantly adjust their movements to compensate for the missing limb—an ability that has inspired the design of adaptable robots.

  [Read: A troubling discovery in the deepest ocean trenches]

  They can be surprisingly mobile, zipping around, digging, and even fighting. They move on hydraulic tube feet on the underside of their arms, which also taste with each step. In the middle of those arms is the somewhat disturbing mouth, which consists of five triangular, tooth-edged plates and which also doubles as an anus. Brittle stars usually feed by scavenging or sieving food from the water, but larger ones can grab shrimp and squid. And as the starfish expert Christopher Mah has noted, one species can even trap fish by raising its disk off the ground, waiting for its prey to swim underneath, twisting its body to close the arms into a helical prison, and gradually lowering its mouth onto the incarcerated animal.

  Against their own predators, they defend themselves with armor. When dead and dried, they fall into pieces—hence the name. But in life, their arms are covered in sturdy plates of calcite. To these, some brittle stars add thorns; sometimes the plates are covered in tiny, hair-thin bumps. Scientists once took these bumps for lenses that focus light onto underlying light sensors, turning the entire animal into a compound eye. Recent studies have disproved that idea: The light sensors lie between the bumps, not beneath them. The animal’s whole body still acts as a rudimentary eye, but the bumps aren’t involved and their purpose is still unknown. They do darken during the day as pigment rises to their tops, so perhaps they act like an array of tiny sunglasses.

  While most brittle stars reproduce by ejecting sperm and eggs into the water, some can also reproduce by tearing themselves in two. Others raise their young inside themselves, packing them into the central disk like socks in a well-organized drawer.

  These varied lifestyles have served them well. Brittle stars have been around for almost half a billion years, and have survived several mass extinctions. Today they live throughout the oceans, in coral reefs, in Antarctica, on hydrothermal vents, on the bodies of jellyfish, on other brittle stars, and even in the abyss—the layer of ocean that’s deeper than 2.5 miles (or 4,000 meters). That underworld can be “brittle star paradise,” writes Tim O’Hara from Museums Victoria in Australia, who was part of the new study.

  In its surveys, the team found 42 species, most of which had never been seen before. Several belong to entirely new lineages, and perhaps a new family—a group of brittle stars that’s only distantly related to those that have been cataloged. “It’s thought that in the abyssal plain you don’t get a lot of biodiversity, but there are all these species that look very different,” Christodoulou says. “They’re beautiful.”

  [Read: A starfish-killing disease is remaking the oceans]

  For perspective, about 2,000 brittle-star species have been identified, and the team increased that tally by about 2 percent, by exploring a football field’s worth of seafloor. What else awaits? “That the relatively small number of samples collected to date, representing an extremely minute fraction of the CCZ and Peru Basin, should reveal so much diversity within the brittle stars is exciting,” says Cindy Lee Van Dover, a deep-sea biologist at Duke University. That variety will doubtless be mirrored in other animal groups that are less visible.

  Three of the new brittle-star lineages that the team discovered don’t even exist in surface waters, and have been living and evolving in the deep for more than 70 million years. This contradicts the long-standing idea that the deepest ocean is simply an evolutionary sink—a retirement home for shallower species. The brittle stars reveal that it’s also a place where new species are born, independently of what occurs on the surface. The abyss is both cradle and crucible.

  Most of the brittle stars were found among or upon the CCZ’s manganese nodules, perhaps because they are “the only hard substrate on which that kind of animal can live,” says Sabine Stöhr, a brittle-star expert at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. The nodules “create a more varied environment, which in turn allows a more varied fauna to evolve.” It is unfortunate, then, that those same life-creating nodules have attracted the attention of prospectors.

  In international waters, all deep-sea mining must be licensed by the International Seabed Authority, the Jamaica-based body that is writing a code for mineral exploitation in the high seas. No such operations have begun, but 29 exploratory licenses have been issued to state-sponsored companies that want to trial mining technology like the failed nodule-collecting robot. There’s so much wealth on the ocean floor—including minerals necessary for making cellphones and other modern technologies—that Christodoulou thinks mining is all but inevitable. “We can’t prevent it, but we can try to do it in the most sustainable way,” she says.

  At minimum, that means better understanding what exists in the deep, and what stands to be destroyed. Food is scarce so far from the ocean’s surface, so “deep-sea species often have low population densities, and are easily eradicated,” Stöhr says. Life may be diverse down there, but it is slow to grow. In a recent study, Ann Vanreusel of Ghent University in Belgium looked at nodule-rich parts of the CCZ that were subject to experimental mining simulations up to four decades ago and found that they have thus far failed to recover.

  “Building sufficient knowledge to gain some reasonable certainty about the environmental impacts of mining will take much longer than it will take to develop mining tools,” Van Dover adds. It doesn’t help that the abyss is hard and expensive to reach, and that few scientists are trained to study it. Van Dover and others have called for the International Seabed Authority to proactively set up no-mining zones in 30 to 50 percent of the prospective areas, in the same way that fishing is verboten in marine reserves. “If we get the ecology wrong or if we misjudge the environmental impacts of mining, we may not be able to fix the harm,” she says. “A precautionary approach is essential.”

• The Free Range QRP DX-er (KY6R) Ghouliani!

  

  Happy Halloween

• Oshpark High-Speed PCB Design with Bil Herd

  

  Bil Herd gave some great advise on high-speed PCB design last month during a Hackaday Hackchat.  You can read the transcript here:

  High-Speed PCB Design with Bil Herd

  Printed circuits have become so commoditized that we seldom think much about design details. EDA software makes it easy to forget about the subtleties and nuances that make themselves painfully obvious once your design comes back from the fab and doesn’t work quite the way you thought it would.

  PCB design only gets more difficult the faster your circuit needs to go, and that’s where a depth of practical design experience can come in handy. Bil Herd, the legendary design engineer who worked on the Commodore C128 and Plus4/264 computers and many designs since then, knows a thing or two in this space, and he’s going to stop by the Hack Chat to talk about it. This is your chance to pick the brain of someone with a wealth of real-world experience in high-speed PCB design. Come along to find out what kind of design mistakes are waiting to make your day miserable, and which ones can be safely ignored. Spoiler alert: square corners probably don’t matter.

• Space and stuff idk Photo
  
  
  
• Bruce Schneier Using Machine Learning to Detect IP Hijacking

  This is interesting research:

  In a BGP hijack, a malicious actor convinces nearby networks that the best path to reach a specific IP address is through their network. That's unfortunately not very hard to do, since BGP itself doesn't have any security procedures for validating that a message is actually coming from the place it says it's coming from.

  [...]

  To better pinpoint serial attacks, the group first pulled data from several years' worth of network operator mailing lists, as well as historical BGP data taken every five minutes from the global routing table. From that, they observed particular qualities of malicious actors and then trained a machine-learning model to automatically identify such behaviors.

  The system flagged networks that had several key characteristics, particularly with respect to the nature of the specific blocks of IP addresses they use:

  • Volatile changes in activity: Hijackers' address blocks seem to disappear much faster than those of legitimate networks. The average duration of a flagged network's prefix was under 50 days, compared to almost two years for legitimate networks.

  • Multiple address blocks: Serial hijackers tend to advertise many more blocks of IP addresses, also known as "network prefixes."

  • IP addresses in multiple countries: Most networks don't have foreign IP addresses. In contrast, for the networks that serial hijackers advertised that they had, they were much more likely to be registered in different countries and continents.

  Note that this is much more likely to detect criminal attacks than nation-state activities. But it's still good work.

  Academic paper.

• The Free Range QRP DX-er (KY6R) My Collins Gold Dust Twins Found Me

  

  The Collins Gold Dust Twins warm up the shack

  I wasn’t looking for the Collins Gold Dust Twins – I wanted a National SW-3 regenerative receiver – that’s it.

  

  Collins KWS-1 Transmitter and Power Supply – very rare

  Only 1500 of the KWS-1 transmitters were made, and the US Army or Air Force destroyed half of them.

  

  The Collins 75A4 Receiver is a classic, but not as rare as the matching KWS-1 transmitter

  While searching for the National SW-3 (which I finally did find a great restored model with extra coils), first the Collins 75A4 receiver “fell into my lap” followed several months later by a KWS-1 which needed some work. We are coming up on me having these for a year now.

  A month or so ago, just for laughs, I posted a For Sale ad on QRZ.com and my local DX Chat group channel, and I did get one offer for the Receiver. At that point I realized that owning the Gold Dust Twins was mostly a “Can I get this 1950’s station up and running?” challenge, once I did get them working, I have listened to the receiver quite a bit – but haven’t used the transmitter for all but 3 QSO’s.

  Since I don’t need to sell them to buy something else (I looked at the Elecraft K4 but have gone 100% solar charged – battery QRP with a KX-3 since), and so I am not in the market for any more ham radio gear. If and when the “KX-4” comes out – or something new and unexpected (doubtfully the ICOM IC-705 with NO ATU). I really love the KX-3 especially because of the Win4K3 Suite software – and it reminds me that a built in scope on a rig is just extra cost and too small a screen to usually be of any use.

  I’m relaxed again regarding the Gold Dust Twins – and am happy that they are in the shack – even though the rig that gets the most use is the KX-3 followed by the IC-7300. I’ve gone simple with my Ham gear, but still enjoy it even as “casually” as I have become.

• KimStanleyRobinson.info Unearthed! The Lost Mars Interview
  

  (Pictured: a plan of Village Homes, Davis, California)

  Sometimes there are surprises that come to you all the way from 1994! John J. Vester, long-time KSR reader and an acquaintance of his, contacted the website with an interview done in 1994 that never did find a home. At that time, Stan was fresh off of the publication of Green Mars and deep in writing Blue Mars, so we get a rare glimpse into his mindset at that time -- "a sort of time capsule of the time he was working on the trilogy" -- but also a retrospective on his early career, personal life events and interests that shaped him as an artist, and insights on novels such as The Gold Coast or The Memory of Whiteness. A lengthy and excellent piece altogether.

  John was kind enough to provide a new introduction to his interview for its new home here at the KSR.info archival website. So, no less than 25 years later, here is this "lost interview": "The Mars/California Connection: Kim Stanley Robinson Off the Edge of the Map"!

  An excerpt that could very well be from today:

  Social thinker Robinson sees scientists as important to the work of improving our global situation. Science is very powerful in our society, he notes, elevated in some ways to god-like power—making the scientist god-like. What advice does he have for real scientists? "I think they ought to become much more politicized and try to seize control of their own work. Most scientists today are not in fact choosing their own goals, but goals are being chosen for them. And yet they are uniquely powerful. They could say 'That will go,' or 'That won't go,' or they could say, 'That might go but it's not worth doing,' or they could even say, 'That might go but it's completely trivial, and what is important to do is this and we're going to do this, and what are you going to do to me?' I think scientists could become a political activist force for good. I think they should all become utopians. That's what I would tell them: become utopians!"

  Of course, reader and visitor, should you be in a similar situation and are trying to find a home for anything related to KSR, this website could be of help.

   

  Meanwhile, the Marooned! on Mars podcast with Matt & Hilary soldiers on after having wrapped up its in-depth coverage of the Mars trilogy, and looks into the apocrypha of The Martians!

   

  In other news:

  • Surely you have heard of the Green New Deal by now, a concept making waves in both USA and Europe? The Intercept brought together US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and writer/activist Naomi Klein to make this inspiring video blending historical fact, KSR-like fiction and visual art: "A Message From the Future". And, appropiately, in its promotion a quote from KSR is used! "The future isn’t cast into one inevitable course. On the contrary, we could cause the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, or we could create a prosperous civilization, sustainable over the long haul. Either is possible starting from now."
  • 50 years of Apollo 11! The short story The Lunatics was included in the Lunar SF short story collection "The Eagle Has Landed", by Night Shade Books.
  • Folio Society has published a beautiful illustrated deluxe edition of Philip K. Dick's UBIK, with an introduction by KSR.

   

  Looking for something to read? Looking at blurbs, KSR recommends:

  • "Walkaway: A Novel" by Cory Doctorow. KSR said: "Cory Doctorow is one of our most important science fiction writers, because he’s also a public intellectual in the old style: he brings the news and explains it, making clearer the confusions of our wild current moment. His fiction is always the heart of his work, and this is his best book yet, describing vividly the revolutionary beginnings of a new way of being. In a world full of easy dystopias, he writes the hard utopia, and what do you know, his utopia is both more thought-provoking and more fun." (incidentally, I highly recommend it too!)
  • "The Girls With Kaleidoscope Eyes: Analog Stories for a Digital Age" by Howard V. Hendrix (cached). KSR said: "Howard Hendrix here demonstrates his imagination, versatility, and heart, in story after story. He has a gift for combining the latest news from the sciences with permanent truths of human nature to make fictions that are quirky and memorable. Highly recommended."
  • "Codename Prague" by D. Harlan Wilson. KSR said: "This novel is from the wild edge of science fiction, in the tradition of Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch—fast, smart, funny, and full of a scarily plausible vision of just how weird things could get if we take our biological fate into our own hands."
  • "What’s the Worst That Could Happen? A rational response to the climate change debate" by Greg Craven. KSR said: "This is a tremendous book and well worth anyone’s time to read. It very clearly and concisely covers all the important points not only about the climate change situation in our moment, but how we think and decide about important issues. Anyone who enjoyed Craven’s YouTube triumph “The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See” will enjoy unpacking that experience in this book, and for people running into Craven for the first time, you’re in for a treat-he is funny as well as well as exceptionally clear, and wise."

   

  Some reviews, new or freshly discovered:

  • Red Moon: Terence Blake; The Westmorland Gazette; Winnipeg Free Press
  • New York 2140: Dissent Magazine; Stuff; Walter Bitner
  • Green Earth: Portrait of the Dumbass
  • Aurora: El callejon de las historias (Spanish)
  • Blue Mars: Patheos
• The Free Range QRP DX-er (KY6R) At The Bus Stop

  

  The scene at my bus stop on the way home

  Orinda is an “oasis” of sorts – tucked in the hills and where a sea of houses cannot be built. There are big cities just over a set of hills to the West of me (Oakland and then San Francisco), and then there is Walnut Creek to the East of me – a very nice town – and much bigger than Orinda or Lafayette.

  

  We did in fact get clouds today – and it really looked and felt like a Fall day

  The clouds made for a very “dreamy” light at the end of the day. Colors and outlines of trees and other plants came alive – usually they are shrouded in a dark shadow when it is very sunny out, and so as I got off the bus today (my bike was in the shop getting a tune up), I was very glad that I decided to bring my camera with me today.

  

  Elm trees right at the bus stop

  Since our Colorado trip – I have rekindled my love of photography, and wow – the Lumix GX-85 with a Prime 20mm lens is a stunning camera. I opted for the 16 mp 4/3rds senor because the camera came with Leica designed lenses for half what the camera went a few years back when it was new. It was basically a sort of liquidation price.

  

  Fall colors on my trees in the front yard

  The “bokeh” from the 1.7 20mm lens is stunning. This isn’t the best example, but I’ll continue to post some really out of this world examples. It actually blows me away – and reminds me that sensor size of megapixels are fine – but the lens is where its at.

  The real story here isn’t the gear as much as just carrying a camera with me today was a great thing – the clouds created a light that I could not have experienced if I were in a car commuting to work. In fact, this means I can have little photographic adventures any day that I carry my camera with me.

  The earth doesn’t stand still – keep your eyes open.

• Krebs on Security When Card Shops Play Dirty, Consumers Win

  Cybercrime forums have been abuzz this week over news that BriansClub — one of the underground’s largest shops for stolen credit and debit cards — has been hacked, and its inventory of 26 million cards shared with security contacts in the banking industry. Now it appears this brazen heist may have been the result of one of BriansClub’s longtime competitors trying to knock out a rival.

  

  And advertisement for BriansClub that for years has used my name and likeness to peddle stolen cards.

  Last month, KrebsOnSecurity was contacted by an anonymous source who said he had the full database of 26M cards stolen from BriansClub, a carding site that has long used this author’s name and likeness in its advertising. The stolen database included cards added to the site between mid-2015 and August 2019.

  This was a major event in the underground, as experts estimate the total number of stolen cards leaked from BriansClub represent almost 30 percent of the cards on the black market today.

  The purloined database revealed BriansClub sold roughly 9.1 million stolen credit cards, earning the site and its resellers a cool $126 million in sales over four years.

  In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, the administrator of BriansClub acknowledged that the data center serving his site had been hacked earlier in the year (BriansClub claims this happened in February), but insisted that all of the cards stolen by the hacker had been removed from BriansClub store inventories.

  However, as I noted in Tuesday’s story, multiple sources confirmed they were able to find plenty of card data included in the leaked database that was still being offered for sale at BriansClub.

  Perhaps inevitably, the admin of BriansClub took to the cybercrime forums this week to defend his business and reputation, re-stating his claim that all cards included in the leaked dump had been cleared from store shelves.

  

  The administrator of BriansClub, who’s appropriated the name and likeness of Yours Truly for his advertising, fights to keep his business alive.

  Meanwhile, some of BriansClub’s competitors gloated about the break-in. According to the administrator of Verified, one of the longest running Russian language cybercrime forums, the hack of BriansClub was perpetrated by a fairly established ne’er-do-well who uses the nickname “MrGreen” and runs a competing card shop by the same name.

  The Verified site admin said MrGreen had been banned from the forum, and added that “sending anything to Krebs is the lowest of all lows” among accomplished and self-respecting cybercriminals. I’ll take that as a compliment.

  This would hardly be the first time some cybercriminal has used me to take down one of his rivals. In most cases, I’m less interested in the drama and more keen on validating the data and getting it into the proper hands to do some good.

  That said, if the remainder of BriansClub’s competitors want to use me to take down the rest of the carding market, I’m totally fine with that.

  

  The BriansClub admin, defending the honor of his stolen cards shop after a major breach.

October 16, 2019

• Frontier Development Lab Space Science & Astrobiology Division Seminar Series

  N245 Conference Room 215

  Thursday, October 17, 2019 – 3:00 PM

  Deep Learning for Heliophysics

  Mark Cheung & Brad Neuberg
  Lockheed-Martin

  ---

  Abstract: NASA's Heliophysics division operates a fleet of spacecraft, the so-called Heliophysics System Observatory, to monitor the Sun's activity and how its changes drive space weather in interplanetary space and in the near-Earth environment. We'll present case studies of how a number of challenging problems encountered in Heliophysics can be tackled using deep learning. These include: (1) mega-Kelvin thermometry of the Sun's corona by using a deep neural network to solve a compressed sensing problem, (2) auto-calibration of solar EUV telescopes, and (3) virtual instruments to enhance the scientific return of scientific payloads. The work in this presentation was made possible by NASA's Frontier Development Lab, a public-private partnership between the agency and industry partners (including the SETI Institute, NVIDIA, IBM, Intel, kx & Lockheed Martin), whose mission is to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate space science and exploration.

   

  Mark Cheung bio:

  Dr. Mark Cheung is a Staff Physicist at Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Lab and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. As Principal Investigator (PI) for the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA; http://aia.lmsal.com) onboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory mission, PI for NASA's Heliophysics Grand Challenges Research grant, and mentor for NASA’s Frontier Development Lab, he leads teams of scientists and engineers who operate space telescopes, perform data mining and data analysis on terabyte- and petabyte-scale data archives, develop massively parallel numerical simulation codes, and apply machine learning techniques for scientific discovery and space exploration. In 2017 he was the recipient of the Karen Harvey Prize awarded by the American Astronomical Society. Committed to STE(A)M education and outreach, he has appeared in television documentaries and given public lectures in venues such as Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

   

  Brad Neuberg bio:

  Brad Neuberg is a a full stack machine learning engineer, with 15+ years experience across startups, open source, and companies like Google and Dropbox. At NASA's Frontier Development Lab (FDL), he applies neural nets to such problems as satellite auto-calibration; image encoder/decoders for virtual telescopes; using GANs for scientifically useful embeddings; etc. Before NASA FDL, he was on the Machine Learning team at Dropbox, doing R&D to ship ML-powered products to millions of users. Recent work at Dropbox included launching features that automatically run advanced deep learning models on billions of images; creating an industry leading OCR pipeline with deep learning; and doing R&D for ML-powered features like meeting assistants and intelligent file systems.

• Loren Grush Lawmaker who helps fund NASA questions the agency’s need to get to the Moon by 2024
  

  An influential member of Congress has expressed doubt over NASA’s ambitious plans to put humans on the Moon by 2024, arguing that 2028 might be a safer time frame for the next lunar landing. The concern seemingly spells trouble for NASA’s Artemis program, which may now be in jeopardy of not receiving the funding it needs from lawmakers.

  In a hearing on Wednesday, Rep. José Serrano (D-NY), chairman of the House subcommittee that appropriates funds for NASA, cited the potential astronomical cost of the space agency’s lunar program. He claimed that some experts have estimated that it could cost more than $25 billion over the next five years, and that money will be hard to justify, especially since many other government programs are in need...

  Continue reading…

• Centauri Dreams Remembering Alexei Leonov (1934-2019)

  The Russian space agency Roscosmos, as most of you know, has announced the death of cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who died last Friday at Moscow’s Burdenko Hospital following a long illness. He was 85.

  If handling stress under extreme conditions is a prerequisite for someone who is going to the Moon, Leonov had already proven his mettle when the Soviet Union chose him as the man to pilot its lunar lander to the surface. The failure of the N-1 rocket put an end to that plan, but Leonov will always be associated with the 1965 mission aboard Voskhod 2 shared with Pavel Belyayev. This was the spacewalk mission, conducted successfully before NASA could manage the feat 10 weeks later.

  

  Image: A man and his art. Alexei Leonov was as attracted to drawing and painting as he was to flying, creating some work while in orbit. Credit: Roscosmos.

  The problems Leonov had with his bulky spacesuit as it ballooned out of shape are widely known, making his re-entry into the capsule a dicey affair, though one he managed with skilful use of a bleed valve in the suit’s lining. But consider everything else that went wrong: The charge fired to remove the airlock caused Voskhod 2 to tumble, while oxygen levels in the cabin began to rise and took several hours to correct.

  Add to this the failure of the automated re-entry system, and the tangled separation of the orbital module from the landing capsule, caused by a communications cable that had failed to separate. It was the heat of re-entry itself that finally burned through the cable and allowed the landing module to bring both cosmonauts home. Then they landed so far downrange from their intended target that two days passed before they could be reached in a taiga forest in the Ural Mountains.

  

  Image: Alexei Leonov in 1965. Credit: Associated Press.

  This was indeed the kind of man the Soviet Union would have liked to place on the Moon ahead of the Apollo astronauts, but it was not to be. Leonov, who went on to be given the title of Chief Cosmonaut, is also remembered for the Soyuz he piloted and docked with an Apollo capsule in 1975 in the Apollo Soyuz Test Project, which was the first mission conducted jointly between the US and the Soviet Union. A self-taught artist, Leonov created what as far as I know is humanity’s first artwork in space when he did a colored pencil drawing of a sunrise as seen from Voskhod 2.

  Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey included recordings of Leonov’s breathing in space, a great move by a great director, but the later 2010 (directed not by Kubrick but Peter Hyams) would provoke an official response. Twice made Hero of the Soviet Union, but later suspected of disloyalty to the government, Leonov had been brought before the Central Committee of the Communist Party to explain the fact that the spaceship named ‘Leonov’ in the film (nice touch by Clarke) had been filled with Soviet dissidents. Leonov is said to have responded that the committee “was not worth the nail on Arthur C. Clarke’s little finger.”

  A quote from Leonov’s Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race (Thomas Dunne Books, 2004), written with NASA astronaut David Scott, may be the best way to end as we consider how close this man came to being first on the Moon. The time is early 1966, and Soviet Luna probes had completed a series of missions in lunar orbit. Leonov recalls:

  I was undergoing intensive training for a lunar mission by this time. In order to focus attention and resources our cosmonaut corps had been divided into two groups. One group, which included Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov, was training to fly our latest spacecraft — Soyuz — in Earth orbit…

  The second group, of which I was commander, was training for circumlunar missions in a modified version of Soyuz known as the L-1, or Zond, and also for lunar-landing missions in another modified Soyuz known as the L-3. Vasily Mishin’s cautious plan called for three circumlunar missions to be carried out with three different two-man crews, one of which would then be chosen to make the first lunar landing.

  The initial plan was for me to command the first circumlunar mission, together with Oleg Makarov, in June or July 1967. We then expected to be able to accomplish the first Moon landing — ahead of the Americans — in September 1968.

  Alternate histories are fascinating to consider. But no matter which timeline we dwell in, Alexei Leonov was a courageous, generous man who carried the spirit of that insanely adventurous era. It’s a spirit we can strive to recover.

  

  

  
• Space and stuff idk High (Like 240,000 Miles) Fashion: What Astronauts Wear to the Moon

  nasa:

  

  We call it a spacesuit, almost as if it’s something an astronaut pulls out of the closet. It’s more accurate to think of it as an astronaut’s personal spacecraft: self-contained and functional, with a design focused on letting astronauts work safely in space. Just as we’ve been able to improve rockets, satellites and data systems over 60 years, we’ve made great improvements to spacesuits.

  

  When the first woman and next man step foot on the Moon in 2024, they will be wearing the next generation of spacesuit, called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU for short. The new suit can be used under different conditions for various tasks, including walking, driving rovers or collecting samples. The design will also allow the suits to be used for spacewalks on the space station, or Gateway – our upcoming spaceship that will orbit the Moon. Future missions to Mars can build on the core suit technologies with additional upgrades for use in the Martian atmosphere and greater gravity.

  60 Years of Improvements

  

  Even before we had astronauts, pilots were using pressurized suits to fly at high speeds at altitudes where the air was too thin to breathe. Our first spacesuits – shown here worn by the first NASA astronauts in 1959 – were variations of the suit used by Navy test pilots.

  

  The Gemini spacesuit – shown here in a photo of astronaut Ed White making the first American spacewalk in 1965  – added a line that could connect the astronaut to the spacecraft for oxygen, and which also served as a tether when they left the capsule for a spacewalk.

  

  The Apollo astronauts had to completely separate themselves from the lunar module, so we added a portable life support unit, which the astronauts carried on their backs. The photo above shows the life support system on the suit of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin as he deploys lunar experiments in 1969.

  Though the bulky suits weren’t exactly easy to maneuver, astronauts still managed to get their jobs done and enjoy themselves doing it.

  A Great Moment in Spacesuit History: Singing on the Moon

  What, you wouldn’t sing if you were on the moon?

  Different Suits for Different Functions

  

  We have used different suits for different purposes. During the Space Shuttle program, astronauts inside the shuttle wore these orange “pumpkin” suits, which were designed to be worn within the cabin. 

  

  On spacewalks, special suits – made to be worn only outside the spacecraft – provided high mobility, more flexibility and life support as the astronauts worked in zero gravity.

  

  During construction of the International Space Station, we should have issued a hard hat and a pair of steel-toed boots with each suit. Astronauts conducted more than 200 spacewalks as part of building the station, which took place from 1998 until 2011. Above, an astronaut at the end of the shuttle’s robotic arm is maneuvered back into the shuttle’s payload bay with a failed pump during the shuttle’s final flight in 2011.

  #MissionAccomplished

  

  Spacesuits are rarely the story themselves, but they make it possible for our astronauts to get their jobs done, even when they have to improvise. In the picture above, astronauts on a 1992 space shuttle mission are conducting a spacewalk they hadn’t originally planned on. The crew was originally supposed to use a specially designed grab bar to capture the INTELSAT VI satellite. Two attempts to use the grab bar on two-person spacewalks failed, so we improvised a plan to add a third spacewalker and have all three go outside and literally grab the satellite.

  Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

  Not calling out John Glenn and Deke Slayton wearing fake boots huh?

• The Atlantic: In Focus Winners of Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2019 (15 photos)

  The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, founded in 1965, is an annual international showcase of the best in nature photography. This year, the contest attracted more than 48,000 entries from 100 countries. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. The owners and sponsors have once again been kind enough to share the following 15 winning images from this year’s competition. The museum’s website has images from previous years and more information about the current contest and exhibition. Captions are provided by the photographers and WPY organizers, and are lightly edited for style.

  

  
• DragonflyBSD Blog Pick your dsynth compression

  It’s now possible to pick which sort of compression you want to use for dsynth packages – xz is the default, but you can go gzip for speed.

• Mozilla Hacks (watch for Iodide articles) Developing cross-browser extensions with web-ext 3.2.0

  The web-ext tool was created at Mozilla to help you build browser extensions faster and more easily. Although our first launch focused on support for desktop Firefox, followed by Firefox for Android, our vision was always to support cross-browser development once we shipped Firefox support.

  With the 3.2.0 release, you can use web-ext to truly build cross-browser extensions! Here is an example of developing an extension in Google Chrome using the run command:

  $ web-ext run -t chromium

  What’s even better is you can run your extension in both Firefox and Chrome at the same time:

  $ web-ext run -t firefox-desktop -t chromium

  As you’d expect, you can develop in any other Chromium-based browser such as Brave, Microsoft Edge, Opera or Vivaldi. Here’s an example of developing in Opera:

  $ web-ext run -t chromium --chromium-binary /usr/bin/opera

  Firefox’s WebExtensions API has always strived for Chrome API compatibility but several improvements have resulted in subtle differences, like how WebExtensions APIs always return promises. Mozilla already offers the webextensions-polyfill library to normalize promises and other things across both browser platforms.

  And now, we are excited to offer a robust development solution for cross-browser extensions! Once you give it a try, let us know if you run into issues or have ideas for improvement.

  Here is an example of launching an extension in Firefox and Chrome then editing a CSS file in the extension source to show off the automatic reloading feature.

   

  Other new features in web-ext 3.2.0

  Chromium browser support isn’t the only nice new feature. Thanks to parse-json 5.0.0, the parsing errors on the extension manifest and locale files will now include a code frame. This will make it a lot easier to track down and fix mistakes.

  

  The post Developing cross-browser extensions with web-ext 3.2.0 appeared first on Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog.

• Loren Grush Virgin Galactic shows off the suits its customers will wear during joyrides to space
  Photo by Steven Counts / Virgin Galactic

  This morning, space tourism venture Virgin Galactic showed off a line of custom Under Armour-designed flight suits that the company’s customers will wear on their short trips to suborbital space.

  Dancers showed off the suits’ flexibility inside an indoor skydiving chamber in Yonkers, New York on Tuesday. During the presentation, Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson also unveiled his own custom suit. Branson’s jacket features his face on the inner lining — naturally, made up of tiny spaceplanes.

  The Under Armour suits are comprised of multiple items, including a base layer, footwear, and outerwear. To complete the ensemble, customers will also get a training suit as well as a limited edition jacket to commemorate their flight. All of...

  Continue reading…

• Planet Labs Blog What is Agile Aerospace? Learn Planet’s Approach

  Agile aerospace is a philosophy of spacecraft development that encourages rapid iteration, where the aim is to make small improvements to every spacecraft design instead of exhaustively trying to perfect each one on the first try. The goal of this approach is to continue to optimize spacecraft architecture through an evolution of capabilities.

  At Planet, this means frequently releasing new spacecraft designs, testing them in space, and making changes based on the results. We’ve taken an agile aerospace approach since 2012, and have completed 14 major iterations of the Dove spacecraft design with new generations being released at a steady rate.

  Getting our first satellites into space quickly—even if they were far from perfect—enabled us to step through the regulatory and launch integration processes, develop our constellation management software, and learn some hard lessons about the challenges of space optical systems before changes became too costly.  We were able to bring prospective customers into the loop as well, and received feedback on actual imagery captured by our early satellites that guided our engineering focus in subsequent years.

  While we’ve reaped the benefits of this philosophy, it’s worth noting that it does not make sense to apply it to just any project.  Taking an agile aerospace approach imposes constraints on how a spacecraft is designed, manufactured, and operated, and we’ve found that it goes hand in hand with a large constellation approach to realizing a mission.

  

  Rapid iteration and testing in space are key to agile aerospace, but are simply not feasible unless the individual satellites are inexpensive to both manufacture and launch.  Launches are often shared between satellites from multiple companies, and to keep costs low, satellites must be small and lightweight. To do that, we miniaturize traditional satellite parts to fit inside our shoebox-sized sats—so while our satellites are smaller, they still possess much of the functionality of larger satellites. They should also be available to purchase on short notice, as it’s not possible to build a new spacecraft in three months if the parts take a year to acquire (as is typical with aerospace-grade components).

  Fortunately, the consumer electronics industry has been driving the development of highly capable, inexpensive, miniaturized, and fairly reliable components for decades.  Adoption of these commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) parts in lieu of larger, more expensive, less capable aerospace-grade components has enabled us to develop a satellite that’s inexpensive to both manufacture and launch in a short time frame.

  All that said, agile aerospace has its own set of challenges. In a highly miniaturized design there is likely no room for redundancy, meaning that if a single critical component fails there is typically not a spare to take its place, which often results in the need to retire the satellite from imaging. This, coupled with the somewhat lower reliability of COTS components relative to their aerospace-grade counterparts, means that the individual satellites are going to be less reliable and possess a shorter lifetime than, say, a $500M bus-sized NASA spacecraft.

  So then the question becomes, how do we still manage to meet high standards of image quality and coverage?

  While our sats aren’t as reliable as traditional, larger satellites, we fly them as part of a large constellation that creates redundancy across the fleet, removing any risk to reliability. We invest heavily in developing intelligent constellation management software that can detect and react to problems with individual satellites, and reposition them as needed to fill in gaps in coverage. The end result is a constellation that reliably produces a continuous stream of high quality Earth imagery. It’s composed of around 100 spacecrafts that are continually being retired and safely de-orbited—being replaced with the latest versions as they’re released using the most up-to-date technology possible.

  “[At Planet,] we take a more hands-on testing approach [to aerospace], which is quite different from the rest of the aerospace sector, which takes a hardcore analytical approach to finding problems and risks in satellite design,” Marshall explained in his 2015 talk at Stanford University. “[Traditional] satellites have done a tremendous service in helping us to understand the planet so far … But if you want to put 150 satellites into space, this model doesn’t really work.”

  Planet continues to help drive innovation in the field of aerospace and in New Space—a new movement encompassing the emerging private spaceflight industry. 

  Watch Will Marshall’s Stanford University talk to learn more about agile aerospace and how Planet is helping to pioneer a new aerospace movement: 

• Oshpark Getting to Blinky with KiCad 5

  

  Want to learn to design circuit boards in KiCad?

  Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics has updated the wonderful Getting to Blinky tutorial series for KiCad 5:
• WB3GCK No-Name CW Paddles

  Once a day, I receive an email from eBay showing the latest listings for CW keys. In one of those emails, a small and inexpensive set of 3D-printed paddles caught grabbed my attention. My curiosity got the better of me, and I ordered some.

  The primary reason for my interest was the size. I normally use Palm Mini paddles attached to a clipboard, when I’m out operating portable. The eBay listing offered paddles that were a bit smaller than my Palm Mini paddles. The Palm paddles are no longer available (much to my chagrin), so I was curious if these cheap paddles might be a viable alternative. Given the low price (around $15, shipping included), I had no delusions that the no-name paddles would be as good, though.

  The paddles are “unbranded” and listed on eBay under the awkward title, “Cw key automatic key short wave automatic key double paddle radio report NEW.” There are numerous listings for these paddles. Most of them ship from Hong Kong but there are some U.S.-based sources. Some are available in kit form.

  They are available in 3 sizes. The two larger paddles have magnetic bases. I bought the smallest one (3x8x2 cm), which had the potential to work with my clipboard setup. They are intended for two-handed operation but I figured I could improvise some sort of magnetic base for them.  

  

  As mentioned earlier, they are 3D-printed. The seller cautions: “Can’t work in high temperature environment!” The term, “high temperature,” is undefined. I’m sure I would start to wilt in the heat long before the paddles.

  It took a couple of weeks to receive my paddles from Hong Kong. Besides the paddles, the package contained a 3-foot patch cable with 3.5mm stereo plugs. There was no documentation but none was needed. 

  

  Out of the box, I found the contact spacing to be much wider than I’m accustomed to. Fortunately, the paddles have access holes on each side to adjust the spacing. A few tweaks with a Phillips screwdriver got the spacing closer to my liking.  

  It was easy to fashion a magnetic base. Using some two-sided foam mounting tape, I added two strong magnets to the bottom of the paddles. The magnets didn’t line up exactly with the washers on my clipboard but they held pretty well. 

  You’re probably wondering how they work. Well, they are about what you’d expect from $15 paddles. For sure, they lack the solid, precise feel of my more expensive Palm paddles. The paddle arms have what I call, “vertical slop.” By that I mean you can wiggle them up and down. Also, the paddles’ contacts aren’t the greatest. They are just the threaded ends of two machine screws contacting the threads of a vertically-mounted machine screw. 

  With the “vertical slop” and the rough contacts, you don’t always get clean contact closure. To me, it feels like the contacts sometimes “scratch” when they close. The left paddle also sticks occasionally. At higher speeds (20+WPM), they can be challenging. That said, I am able to coax decent-sounding code out of them at moderate speeds—if I’m careful.

  As they say, you get what you pay for. These paddles won’t be replacing my Palm Mini paddles anytime soon. They don’t have the smooth, quality feel of my Palm paddles—or any other paddles I own. Not by a long shot. I concede, however, that comparing these $15 paddles to more expensive products is not entirely fair.

  CW keys and paddles are always subject to personal preferences; however, if you are on a limited budget, these paddles might work for you. It certainly won’t cost you a lot to find out. 

  73, Craig WB3GCK

  [Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in these products whatsoever.]

• Arxiv Review What makes a city great? A new way to look at urban data will give us clues.
  Urban planning is more art than science. But data mining and visualization on a massive scale are set to change that.
• The Free Range QRP DX-er (KY6R) Winter Weather Patterns are on the Way

  

  I woke up to find some lightning crashes on the radio

  

  The cause is the unstable air behind what is our usual Winter weather pattern that descends from Alaska

  We usually get one rain storm in October, and usually its about an inch or so. Then it can be fairly dry again until about the end of November. It varies, but that’s a good bet anyway. Its way too early to tell what the rainy season will be like – it can be anything on any year.

  

  NOAA predicts that we will be somewhat below our normal rainfall for most of the rest of the month

  Why does this matter? Besides hoping that we don’t have any more “Diablo winds”, I also like to have an idea of what my cycling to BART will be like – will I get rained on? Will I need to take the bus instead of riding my bike?

  Without a car, its important to know what the weather will be like. Luckily, the BUS goes right to and from BART from a block or so away from my house – so I am always covered regardless of weather.

• XKCD Percent Milkfat
  
• VE3CLQ New Antenna
  I decided to put up a second HF antenna the other day as the 80m OCF I have up in the air will not tune on 15m at all.  Now, I know there's not much action on 15m these days....but one can always hope.
  
  It's up in a tree that hangs over my back deck, and the radials are partly on the deck and partly on the lawn.  I built it with used 18 gauge speaker wire that was originally used for my 148' longwire that I took down last year.
  
  After googling a number of different antennas I settled on the following:
  
  

  

  
  

  So far it has worked great and I have had excellent signal reports from all the stations I have talked to.  It tunes up quickly on every band from 80m up to 6m with the FT-950's built in ATU.  That ATU is no good for mis-matches greater than 3.1 to 1.   

  
  

  Next weekend is the NY State QSO Party, that will be it's first big test.
• Basic Instructions How to Debunk a Frightening Myth
  

  It’s also hard to buy enough ice to fill a tub without raising suspicion. Seriously. If the cashier doesn’t give you trouble, the other hotel guests who see you hauling all of that ice in will almost certainly complain to the lobby about the wild party you’re preparing. I’d bet if any perpetrators have been caught in the act of harvesting kidneys in a hotel, it was by police officers who showed up hoping to nab some under-aged drinkers.

  As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

• Planet Labs Blog The Sun Sets on a Successful Day at Explore 19

  At Planet, our motto is, “See change. Change the world,” and we certainly saw and heard some Earth-shaking conversations and talks at the Explore 19 conference today. In his opening keynote, Planet CEO Will Marshall made a series of exciting announcements, like how our Next-Generation Dove satellites will deliver more spectral bands, and that our SkySats can now deliver 50 cm data. And in our product keynote session, Planet Chief Strategy Officer Robbie Schingler, along with other Planeteers, announced a series of exciting updates for Planet’s products, including a new ordering experience, an innovative tasking capability, and new plugins that can strengthen GIS workflows through Planet integrations.

  Author, conservationist and Emmy-nominated host and producer Phillipe Cousteau dove deeply into the declining health of our oceans and coral reefs, explaining how Planet’s data is crucial to helping humankind make better decisions about protecting the Earth in the future.

  “Planet’s technology is truly revolutionary because it gives us that opportunity, for the first time, to actually monitor the health of the planet in real time,” Cousteau said during his guest keynote speech. “While it may be easy to imagine we are beyond the point of no return, my main message today is that there is hope.”

  Soon after, we listened to Planet co-founder and CSO Robbie Schingler have a fireside chat with The Honorable Sue Gordon, former deputy director of National Intelligence. They talked through many of the challenges that our Earth faces: like the need for transparency, trust in our institutions, the emergence of commercial satellite capabilities that were once only in the purview of governments, and how geospatial data forces us to face the facts.

  “What’s remarkable about geospatial data is that it just is,” Gordon said. “There are other sources of data that are open to interpretation … but [geospatial data] is a fact and you must deal with it.”

  She added that we have to act based on the data Planet provides, because it’s not enough to just know the facts. “We have to do,” she said. “We don’t just want to know.”

  Middlebury Institute professor and nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis was on a thought-provoking panel about “always-on” Earth Observation (EO), which delved into how organizations are leveraging advancements in satellite imagery and associated datasets to shed light on happenings across the world. And investigative journalist Christoph Koettl of the New York Times and Allison Puccioni of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University discussed how this wealth of data can empower people to promote greater transparency throughout our world.

  At the customer keynote panel, we saw industry experts come together to discuss trends in EO and what they mean for the future of a variety of verticals–from agriculture to government to analytics to energy.

  And Governor Gavin Newsom even stopped by in the afternoon to discuss how important it is for government leaders to act immediately to address global challenges, and how the immediacy of Planet’s data can be fundamentally useful for that purpose.

  “What frustrates you also frustrates folks in positions like mine … receiving some report that says everything we kind of already knew, but with old data that doesn’t meet the moment. And then [that data] collects dust, generates a headline–maybe a task force–and we meet to collect another annual report that does the same,” Newsom said. “What I love about [Planet] is that it’s promoting the ability to, in [near-real] time, at 10:30 every morning, collect data and make real what that data holds and what it promises.”

  We thank everyone who attended the conference today and all those who continue to explore the many uses of Planet’s data in the days to come.

  Are you using our data in an exciting and innovative way? We want to know about it! Feel free to reach out to us directly during Explore 19 by talking to a Planeteer, or send us an email at marketing@planet.com.

October 15, 2019

• Roger Rivester - Astronomy sketches and notes M71 – Globular Cluster In Sagitta – Observer’s Challenge Object – September 2019

  SEPTEMBER 2019 OBSERVERS CHALLENGE – M-071

  6-inch reflector:  Pencil sketch, using a blank 5 x 8 notecard, with the colors inverted.  Roger Ivester

  

   

   

• Loren Grush NASA unveils future Moon spacesuits that should be ready by 2024
  Photo by Loren Grush / The Verge

  Today, NASA unveiled its designs for future spacesuits that astronauts will wear during trips to the lunar surface. The suits are still in development, but NASA claims they’ll be ready to keep astronauts alive in space by 2024 — the space agency’s deadline to return humans to the Moon.

  Known as the xEMU, this next generation spacesuit builds on the design of suits already worn by astronauts on the International Space Station. These new ensembles are upgraded so that astronauts wearing them can live and work on the Moon. During a demonstration at NASA headquarters on Tuesday, a spacesuit engineer showed off the flexibility of the suit, proving it can twist and bend at the waist, unlike suits of the past. The suit’s legs are also pliable,...

  Continue reading…

• Or Emacs (abo-abo) Ivy 0.13.0 is out

  Intro

  Ivy is a completion method that's similar to Ido, but with emphasis on simplicity and customizability.

  Overview

  The current release constitutes of 183 commits and 3 months of progress since 0.12.0. Many issues ranging from #2153 to #2278 were fixed. The number of people who contributed code as grown to form 148 to 160. Thanks, everyone!

  Details on changes

  Changelog.org has been a part of the repository since 0.6.0, you can get the details of the current and past changes:

  • in org-mode
  • in HTML

  Highlights

  Many improvements are incremental and don't require any extra code to enable. I'll go over a few selected features that require a bit of information to make a good use of them.

  New bindings

  • counsel-find-file
    • ~~ to move to the local home directory from remote or /sudo::.
    • / RET ~ achieves the same thing, but is longer.
    • M-o R calls find-file-read-only.
  • counsel-git-grep
    • C-x C-d to switch the current directory.
  • swiper-isearch
    • M-o w to copy the current line and go back to where you started.

  New features

  counsel-package

  The idea of counsel-package is to install and remove packages with a single binding:

  (global-set-key (kbd "C-c P") 'counsel-package)
  

  But if the package contents weren't up to date, a separate M-x package-refresh-contents had to be triggered, which was an annoying overhead. Now counsel-package will look at the time stamps of the appropriate archive-contents files, and call package-refresh-contents if the timestamp is outdated by more than 4 hours.

  counsel-M-x

  Some commands are intended to be called only via their key binding. Make them disappear from counsel-M-x like this:

  (put 'counsel-find-symbol 'no-counsel-M-x t)
  

  counsel-rg

  The default setting of ivy-case-fold-search-default is 'auto, which means:

  • the input "emacs" matches "emacs", "EMACS", and "Emacs"
  • the input "Emacs" matches only "Emacs"

  This now also applies to counsel-rg: Ivy will pass the -i flag to ripgrep appropriately, based on ivy-case-fold-search-default. You should remove the -S flag from counsel-rg-base-command if you customized it.

  ivy-update-candidates

  This is a new API for asynchronous calls. To use it, pass to ivy-read: :dynamic-collection t, and a collection function that takes a user input string, starts some asynchronous process based on that input, and returns 0. The 0 return result tells Ivy that no candidates were returned; instead, ivy-update-candidates is used in the async callback.

  See counsel-google for a reference implementation.

  ivy-use-virtual-buffers

  You can now choose between: recent files, or bookmarks, or both, or none. Don't forget that counsel-set-variable makes it very easy to set customization options.

  New Commands

  I have put these separately so they don't get lost in the crowd. Be sure to try them out.

  • counsel-buffer-or-recentf - list buffers visiting files (highlighted) then the recentf file list.
  • counsel-fonts - show a list of all supported font families for a particular frame.
  • counsel-google - asynchronously query the Google predictive search API.
  • counsel-major - switch major-mode.
  • counsel-slime-repl-history - browse SLIME REPL history.

  Outro

  Again, thanks to all the contributors. Happy hacking!

  PS. Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay and Patreon!

  I am now also on Github sponsors, which is an interesting new effort by Github. The cool thing is that's more integrated with Github, there are less transaction fees, and Github matches every donation for up to $5000 for a whole year. Please consider joining there, since every $1 per month that you donate is doubled by Github.

• Astro Bob Hubble Gets A Look At Interstellar Comet Borisov And Finds A Familiar Face

  

  A lot of us were hoping the Hubble would turn its eye on the interstellar visitor currently passing through our solar system for the first really clear view. On October 12, astronomers did just that, focusing the instrument’s 94-inch mirror on comet 2I/Borisov. I can’t help it, but the comet looks as chubby and round as a newborn baby. I wouldn’t go so far as saying it’s cuddly, but you know what I mean. But appearances are deceptive. This gassy fuzzball has probably been around for billions of years and only recently came knocking at our door.

  In the photo we see a tiny, bright central “nucleus” centered in a round, fuzzy glow when extends back to form a short tail. The actual nucleus, an irregularly shaped object made of dust-impregnated ice, is estimated to be several miles across or between 1.4 and 6.6 kilometers. We can’t see it directly because it’s hidden by dust released when ice is vaporized in the warm sunlight.

  

  Since the object was first discovered in August by Russian amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov, astronomers have been busy training telescopes and spectrographs on it. A spectrograph splits up the comet’s light into something resembling a bar code of light that astronomers can read to determine its composition. That’s how we know 2I/Borisov is giving off cyanide gas. Whoa, you say! No worries. Many comets do, and in that regard this exotic traveler resembles a typical solar system comet dropping sunward from the Oort Cloud, a distant repository of comets at the edge of our solar system.

  Comets spew dust, water vapor, carbon dioxide, cyanide, ammonia and all sorts of stuff as they’re worked over by our relentless sun. Borisov also has a slightly reddish color, also in line with the color of distant solar system comets. On December 8, the comet will pass perihelion when it will be closest to the sun at a distance of twice Earth’s distance from the sun. That puts it out near the inner edge of the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter.

  There’s a small possibility (about 10 percent) that Comet Borisov might break apart around the time of perihelion. We’ll just have to wait and see. Right now it’s still very faint, only around magnitude 16, which is too faint for most amateur telescopes. I’m hoping it will brighten up just enough to put it within visual range of my scope. And your scope, too!

  I think we all expected a comet visiting from a different solar system would somehow be radically different from one of our own — and for all I know we may yet find some amazing dissimilarities. But if you think about it, it makes sense because the universe shares so many of the same materials. Mostly hydrogen and helium with a dashes of heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, silicon and the others. We see stars with compositions nearly identical to the sun and exoplanets with atmospheres like our own giant planets Jupiter and Saturn. Under the right conditions, which appear to be duplicated at least in broad outline across the light years, we should expect to find familiar materials and “faces.” Maybe even life will play out that way.

  

  Also dropping today is my new book Urban Legends from Space in which there are no fewer than three chapters on comets. They terrified our ancestors and still terrify a minority of people today. That’s why I devote time to explaining their nature and utter lack of evil intent.

  I’m very excited because I think you’ll enjoy and be entertained by the book. It should now be in your local Barnes & Noble store starting today. And of course you can always order it online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Indiebound .

  If you’re in the Duluth, Minn. area this Saturday (Oct. 19) I’ll be signing books and doing a short presentation at the local Barnes & Noble store from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Do come by — I’d love to meet you!

• Planet Labs Blog Product Developments Revealed at Explore 19

  In the Product Vision Keynote session, Planet Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Robbie Schingler, alongside Planet product managers, picked up where the opening session left off and introduced even more exciting product announcements. Here’s the breakdown:

  Planet Monitoring

  To help customers get access to the latest and greatest Next-Generation PlanetScope imagery, we have streamlined how customers download and access data. Our new ordering experience, available later this month, allows bulk downloads of our imagery rather than requiring customers to download individual assets, increasing efficiency and reducing costs. It also supports raster operations like band math and top of atmospheric reflectance, as well as direct delivery of the images to their cloud platforms of choice.

  Planet Tasking

  In addition to 50 cm SkySat imagery, we introduced new capabilities to get customers high-resolution data faster. On stage, we announced SkySat Fast-Track, a new capability, available today, which expedites the publication of a panchromatic (black and white) image within 2 to 3 hours after the data is downlinked from the ground station.

  With faster delivery, tactical decisions can be made for emergency management and disaster operations worldwide. This Fast-track capability is a foundational building block for 3D data, useful for volumetric analysis, deforestation monitoring, and right-of-way management for electric utilities.

  To put the power of tasking into the hands of our customers, we announced a new Tasking API and Tasking Dashboard. Generally available in late 2019, Flexible Tasking customers will be able to autonomously create, manage, and modify their tasking orders without a human in the loop. This is ideal for customers who need flexibility for where they task or need to task ad-hoc, and those who want orders with shorter turnaround time and have the technical chops to implement an area of interest.

  Integrations

  This past summer, we released the ArcGIS Pro add-on for Esri—allowing customers to easily access, view, and download Planet Basemaps from within their workflow. Now, with the next version of our Planet ArcGIS Pro Add-in, released later this year, users can unlock the power of high-cadence and high-resolution imagery by bringing PlanetScope and SkySat imagery into their workflows. Customers will be able to easily discover, stream, and download Planet imagery, perform seamless remote sensing analyses, compare imagery and other geospatial data, build models, and explore geo-statistical analysis and machine learning.

  Planet is launching an integration with QGIS, the leading open source GIS platform. To be released before the year’s end, Planet QGIS users will be able to access, view, and download high-cadence and high-resolution PlanetScope and SkySat as well as imagery from the leading free satellite sensors like LandSat and Sentinel, all within their QGIS workflows. Users can leverage the rich geospatial capabilities of QGIS to perform remote sensing and spatial analysis on Planet imagery, compare it with other geospatial data, and create high-quality visualizations.

  Learn more and get early access to beta product releases by signing up here. If you want to learn more about Planet’s major product announcements from Explore— including 5 and 8 band Next Generation PlanetScope, 50cm high resolution SkySat imagery, global analytic feeds, and automated change detection—check out this morning’s recap.

• The Atlantic: In Focus Scenes From the Aftermath of Typhoon Hagibis in Japan (28 photos)

  More than 100,000 rescue workers are still combing through flooded and damaged areas of central Japan after it was struck by Typhoon Hagibis, the most powerful storm to hit the area in more than 60 years. Local authorities are blaming this weekend’s typhoon for more than 70 deaths so far, with a dozen residents still listed as missing. Hagibis brought high winds and heavy rainfall, which damaged structures, collapsed dikes, flooded rivers and low-lying areas, and triggered more than 100 landslides. Gathered here are some of the images of the damage and immediate recovery work taking place.

  

  
• Planet Labs Blog Planet Announces More Spectral Bands, 50cm Resolution, Global Analytics, and Change Detection

  This morning at our Explore 19 conference, Planet co-founder and CEO Will Marshall unveiled the latest product announcements that customers can look forward to in the next year.

  Planet Monitoring

  Will announced new capabilities for Next-Generation PlanetScope, our flagship monitoring solution powered by the latest iteration of our Dove satellite called SuperDove. New sensors are enabling higher image quality with sharper, more vibrant colors and accurate surface reflectance values for advanced algorithms and time-series analysis.

  Next-Generation PlanetScope is interoperable with publicly available imagery, like Copernicus Sentinel-2, empowering customers to utilize PlanetScope data with other sensors to enhance their analyses with higher spatial and temporal resolution.

  Currently, PlanetScope imagery has four spectral bands (red, green, blue, and near-infrared). Next, Planet will add more spectral bands to enable new applications and use cases. On stage, Will discussed details about the Next Generation Planetscope, which includes 4-band, 5-band and 8-band PlanetScope imagery powered by SuperDove. Customers can get access to this new 4-band PlanetScope imagery as part of an Early Access Program later in 2019, with 5-band and 8-band imagery made available in early 2020.

  Planet Tasking – 50 cm SkySat

  Will saved the best for last and introduced Planet’s highest resolution yet: 50cm SkySat imagery.

  Planet is building this future capability by lowering the orbit of an existing SkySat and improving image processing to deliver 50 cm data. This new data will open up a wide array of applications in energy, mining, finance, and security, which require ultra-fine resolution to distinguish objects and features.

  Planet aims to make this 50 cm imagery available to customers in the first half of 2020.

  Planet Analytic Feeds

  Planet’s Analytic Feeds are now generally available, allowing any customer to enhance their imagery products by adding Road Detection, Building Detection, or Vessel Detection Feeds. Planet Analytic Feeds use computer vision to automatically identify features of interest in Planet Basemaps and PlanetScope scenes.

  For beta release at the end of this year, Change Detection Feeds let customers automatically detect change at global scale and rapid frequency—an unmatched capability. Customers can  efficiently locate where change has occurred to help focus where they spend their time, or to tip higher-resolution imagery, like SkySat, to get a closer look. Change Detection Feeds represent the next phase of our analytic capabilities, helping customers focus their resources on where change has recently occurred.

  Planet Orbit

  To help bring these new product capabilities to market, Will announced Planet Orbit, the revamp of our partner program that helps fuel customer success. Planet Orbit provides partners access to geospatial data unavailable elsewhere in the commercial market, and helps them to grow their business through trainings, tools, joint market activities, strategic collaboration, and more.

  Be sure to check our blog and social media platforms during Explore 19 for continued news and product updates. Learn more and get early access to beta product releases by signing up here.

• The Free Range QRP DX-er (KY6R) Ham Radio Station Contingency Planning

  

  When the power went out, my UrbanBeam was useless as a multi band antenna

  During our PG&E “emergency” (when they shut power off for a day and a half for windy dry conditions), two pieces of ham gear became useless – my Array Solutions Ratpack antenna switch and my UrbanBeam.

  Since I will use solar charged batteries instead of a generator, I will need to conserve power usage. Sure, I could purchase 3 more batteries, and devote one to the switch and two to supply the 24 volts the SteppIR needs, but instead, I’d rather think about a better solution.

  

  Turns out, turning my UrbanBeam into a wire beam will be the answer.

  Luckily, I had the UrbanBeam set to 40M, so it was still 100% useful. I also have the Diamond 80/40 inverted vee. I simply bypassed the antenna switch with a barrel connector.

  

  One thing that all of this does is gives me a good excuse to get the AB-577 up 65′ and add those last two sections. Ive been watching the antenna during breezes, and it seems like there is no problem.

  Without the SteppIR motors, as a wire beam, the antenna would be about 20 pounds max, or basically “featherweight”.

  I’m willing to take a chance of getting the antenna up higher because if and when the UrbanBeam craps out I’ll turn it into a 40 / 20M wire beam.

  In other words, I am no longer worrying about equipment failure.

  I guess the point here is to plan what to do when power goes out or where your gear fails. I tried to avoid purchasing a SteppIR, but try to design an antenna that works well on 40 – 6M – what SteppIR has done is a real feat for sure.

  I certainly don’t have an “UrbanBeam Death Wish”, but I do expect there will be a day when one motor craps out. It could be 10 years, which is what I have heard is the life cycle of these motors, but in any case, if and when something goes awry, I can either replace the motor as a Plan B or turn it into a wire beam as a Plan C.

  I like playing these mental games and thinking ahead of time. It frees me up from worry, and turns a potential bad situation into an opportunity to be creative before it even happens.

  It’s a good game to play ….

• Oshpark Finishing the IN-9/IN-13 Nixie Tube Driver for the Raspberry Pi (Part 2)

  

  Mark Smith writes on the Surf ‘n Circuits blog about a Nixie Tube project:

  Finishing the IN-9/IN-13 Nixie Tube Driver for the Raspberry Pi (Part 2)

  Rarely during product development do you get it correct on the first design iteration. Something always goes wrong or just isn’t perfect. However, like trying for a hole-in-one on a par 3, you always try for perfection but expect to need a few extra strokes. So, while I almost hit a hole in one in the first version of the Nixie Tube HAT (Part 1), a few improvements were required. In this blog, I describe the few improvements found from Part 1 and complete the design to reach stage 6 of the surfncircuits defined development flow. As with the other projects in the blog, the complete design files in Kicad, schematics, layout, BOM, are available at GitHub for use in your own projects. You can build it yourself and the PCB can also be ordered directly from Oshpark.

• Bruce Schneier Cracking the Passwords of Early Internet Pioneers

  Lots of them weren't very good:

  BSD co-inventor Dennis Ritchie, for instance, used "dmac" (his middle name was MacAlistair); Stephen R. Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell command line interpreter, chose "bourne"; Eric Schmidt, an early developer of Unix software and now the executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, relied on "wendy!!!" (the name of his wife); and Stuart Feldman, author of Unix automation tool make and the first Fortran compiler, used "axolotl" (the name of a Mexican salamander).

  Weakest of all was the password for Unix contributor Brian W. Kernighan: "/.,/.," representing a three-character string repeated twice using adjacent keys on a QWERTY keyboard. (None of the passwords included the quotation marks.)

  I don't remember any of my early passwords, but they probably weren't much better.

• Mozilla Hacks (watch for Iodide articles) Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector

  The Firefox DevTools team and our contributors were hard at work over the summer, getting Firefox 70 jam-packed with improvements. We are especially excited about our new WebSocket inspection feature, because you told us in feedback how important it would be for your daily work. The WebSocket inspector will be released in Firefox 71, but is ready for you to use in Firefox Developer Edition now.

  To use the inspector now, download Firefox Developer Edition, open DevTools’ Network panel to find the Messages tab. Then, keep reading to learn more about WebSockets and the tricks that the new panel has up its sleeve.

  But first, big thanks to Heng Yeow Tan, the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student who’s responsible for the implementation.

  A Primer on WebSockets

  We use the WebSocket (WS) API to create a persistent connection between a client and server. Because the API sends and receives data at any time, it is used mainly in applications requiring real-time communication.

  Although it is possible to work directly with the WS API, some existing libraries come in handy and help save time. These libraries can help with connection failures, proxies, authentication and authorization, scalability, and much more. The WS inspector in Firefox DevTools currently supports Socket.IO and SockJS, but more support is in the works.

  Want to learn more about how to set up WebSocket for your client applications? Head over to MDN’s guides. In the meantime, let’s dive into the new feature.

  Getting started with the WebSocket Inspector

  The WebSocket Inspector is part of the existing Network panel UI in DevTools. It’s already possible to filter the content for opened WS connections in this panel, but till now there was no chance to see the actual data transferred through WS frames.

  The following screenshot shows the WS filter in action. Only the 101 request (WebSocket Protocol Handshake) is visible. The response code indicates that the server is switching to WS connection.

  

  Clicking on the 101 request opens the familiar sidebar, showing details about the selected HTTP request. In addition, the UI now offers a fresh new Messages panel that can be used to inspect WS frames sent and received through the selected WS connection.

  

  The live-updated table shows data for sent (green arrow) and received (red arrow) WS frames. Each frame expands on click, so you can inspect the formatted data.

  To focus on specific messages, frames can be filtered free text.

  

  The Data and Time columns are visible by default, but you can customize the interface to see more columns by right-clicking on the header.

  

  Selecting a frame in the list shows a preview at the bottom of the Messages panel.

  

  The inspector currently supports the following WS protocols – and we have more planned:

  • • Plain JSON
    • Socket.IO
    • SockJS
    • Coming soon
      • SignalR
      • WAMP

  Payload based on those protocols is parsed and displayed as an expandable tree for easy inspection. Of course, you can still see the raw data (as sent over the wire) as well.

  

  Use the pause/resume button in the Network panel toolbar to stop intercepting WS traffic. This allows you to capture only the frames that you are interested in.

  

  What’s next for the WebSockets inspector

  We wanted to release this initial feature set quickly to let you use it. We have a few things that we are still working on for upcoming releases:

  • Binary payload viewer
  • Indicating closed connections
  • More protocols like SignalR and WAMP (and making it extensible)
  • Exporting WS frames (as part of HAR)
  • See our backlog for more of what’s coming

  We would love your feedback on the new WebSocket Inspector, which is available now in Firefox Developer Edition 70. It will be released in Firefox 71, to include some of your feedback and bugfixes. If you haven’t had a chance yet, install and open Developer Edition, then follow along with this post to master WebSocket debugging.

  The post Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector appeared first on Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog.

• DragonflyBSD Blog SeMiBUG meeting, tonight

  SeMiBUG meets tonight, 7 PM, Altair Engineering.  Go, if you are near.

  (not sure about capitalization on semibug…)

• Krebs on Security “BriansClub” Hack Rescues 26M Stolen Cards

  “BriansClub,” one of the largest underground stores for buying stolen credit card data, has itself been hacked. The data stolen from BriansClub encompasses more than 26 million credit and debit card records taken from hacked online and brick-and-mortar retailers over the past four years, including almost eight million records uploaded to the shop in 2019 alone.

  

  An ad for BriansClub has been using my name and likeness for years to peddle millions of stolen credit cards.

  Last month, KrebsOnSecurity was contacted by a source who shared a plain text file containing what was claimed to be the full database of cards for sale both currently and historically through BriansClub[.]at, a thriving fraud bazaar named after this author. Imitating my site, likeness and namesake, BriansClub even dubiously claims a copyright with a reference at the bottom of each page: “Š 2019 Crabs on Security.”

  Multiple people who reviewed the database shared by my source confirmed that the same credit card records also could be found in a more redacted form simply by searching the BriansClub Web site with a valid, properly-funded account.

  All of the card data stolen from BriansClub was shared with multiple sources who work closely with financial institutions to identify and monitor or reissue cards that show up for sale in the cybercrime underground.

  The leaked data shows that in 2015, BriansClub added just 1.7 million card records for sale. But business would pick up in each of the years that followed: In 2016, BriansClub uploaded 2.89 million stolen cards; 2017 saw some 4.9 million cards added; 2018 brought in 9.2 million more.

  Between January and August 2019 (when this database snapshot was apparently taken), BriansClub added roughly 7.6 million cards.

  Most of what’s on offer at BriansClub are “dumps,” strings of ones and zeros that — when encoded onto anything with a magnetic stripe the size of a credit card — can be used by thieves to purchase electronics, gift cards and other high-priced items at big box stores.

  As shown in the table below (taken from this story), many federal hacking prosecutions involving stolen credit cards will for sentencing purposes value each stolen card record at $500, which is intended to represent the average loss per compromised cardholder.

  

  The black market value, impact to consumers and banks, and liability associated with different types of card fraud.

  STOLEN BACK FAIR AND SQUARE

  An extensive analysis of the database indicates BriansClub holds approximately $414 million worth of stolen credit cards for sale, based on the pricing tiers listed on the site. That’s according to an analysis by Flashpoint, a security intelligence firm based in New York City.

  Allison Nixon, the company’s director of security research, said the data suggests that between 2015 and August 2019, BriansClub sold roughly 9.1 million stolen credit cards, earning the site $126 million in sales (all sales are transacted in bitcoin).

  If we take just the 9.1 million cards that were confirmed sold through BriansClub, we’re talking about more than $4 billion in likely losses at the $500 average loss per card figure from the Justice Department.

  Also, it seems likely the total number of stolen credit cards for sale on BriansClub and related sites vastly exceeds the number of criminals who will buy such data. Shame on them for not investing more in marketing!

  There’s no easy way to tell how many of the 26 million or so cards for sale at BriansClub are still valid, but the closest approximation of that — how many unsold cards have expiration dates in the future — indicates more than 14 million of them could still be valid.

  The archive also reveals the proprietor(s) of BriansClub frequently uploaded new batches of stolen cards — some just a few thousand records, and others tens of thousands.

  That’s because like many other carding sites, BriansClub mostly resells cards stolen by other cybercriminals — known as resellers or affiliates — who earn a percentage from each sale. It’s not yet clear how that revenue is shared in this case, but perhaps this information will be revealed in further analysis of the purloined database.

  BRIANS CHAT

  In a message titled “Your site is hacked,’ KrebsOnSecurity requested comment from BriansClub via the “Support Tickets” page on the carding shop’s site, informing its operators that all of their card data had been shared with the card-issuing banks.

  I was surprised and delighted to receive a polite reply a few hours later from the site’s administrator (“admin”):

  “No. I’m the real Brian Krebs here

  Correct subject would be the data center was hacked.

  Will get in touch with you on jabber. Should I mention that all information affected by the data-center breach has been since taken off sales, so no worries about the issuing banks.”

  Flashpoint’s Nixon said a spot check comparison between the stolen card database and the card data advertised at BriansClub suggests the administrator is not being truthful in his claims of having removed the leaked stolen card data from his online shop.

  The admin hasn’t yet responded to follow-up questions, such as why BriansClub chose to use my name and likeness to peddle millions of stolen credit cards.

  Almost certainly, at least part of the appeal is that my surname means “crab” (or cancer), and crab is Russian hacker slang for “carder,” a person who engages in credit card fraud.

  

  Many of the cards for sale on BriansClub are not visible to all customers. Those who wish to see the “best” cards in the shop need to maintain certain minimum balances, as shown in this screenshot.

  HACKING BACK?

  Nixon said breaches of criminal website databases often lead not just to prevented cybercrimes, but also to arrests and prosecutions.

  “When people talk about ‘hacking back,’ they’re talking about stuff like this,” Nixon said. “As long as our government is hacking into all these foreign government resources, they should be hacking into these carding sites as well. There’s a lot of attention being paid to this data now and people are remediating and working on it.”

  By way of example on hacking back, she pointed to the 2016 breach of vDOS — at the time the largest and most powerful service for knocking Web sites offline in large-scale cyberattacks.

  Soon after vDOS’s database was stolen and leaked to this author, its two main proprietors were arrested. Also, the database added to evidence of criminal activity for several other individuals who were persons of interest in unrelated cybercrime investigations, Nixon said.

  “When vDOS got breached, that basically reopened cases that were cold because [the leak of the vDOS database] supplied the final piece of evidence needed,” she said.

  THE TARGET BREACH OF THE UNDERGROUND?

  After many hours spent poring over this data, it became clear I needed some perspective on the scope and impact of this breach. As a major event in the cybercrime underground, was it somehow the reverse analog of the Target breach — which negatively impacted tens of millions of consumers and greatly enriched a large number of bad guys? Or was it more prosaic, like a Jimmy Johns-sized debacle?

  For that insight, I spoke with Gemini Advisory, a New York-based company that works with financial institutions to monitor dozens of underground markets trafficking in stolen card data.

  Andrei Barysevich, co-founder and CEO at Gemini, said the breach at BriansClub is certainly significant, given that Gemini currently tracks a total of 87 million credit and debit card records for sale across the cybercrime underground.

  Gemini is monitoring most underground stores that peddle stolen card data — including such heavy hitters as Joker’s Stash, Trump’s Dumps, and BriansDump.

  Contrary to popular belief, when these shops sell a stolen credit card record, that record is then removed from the inventory of items for sale. This allows companies like Gemini to determine roughly how many new cards are put up for sale and how many have sold.

  Barysevich said the loss of so many valid cards may well impact how other carding stores compete and price their products.

  “With over 78% of the illicit trade of stolen cards attributed to only a dozen of dark web markets, a breach of this magnitude will undoubtedly disturb the underground trade in the short term,” he said. “However, since the demand for stolen credit cards is on the rise, other vendors will undoubtedly attempt to capitalize on the disappearance of the top player.”

  Liked this story and want to learn more about how carding shops operate? Check out Peek Inside a Professional Carding Shop.

• The Free Range QRP DX-er (KY6R) Mother Nature Bats Last

  

  Will rain soon be on its way to the West Coast? This system is falling apart – but does look like a seasonal change is in the works

  After our recent “Diablo Winds”, most people are looking forward to the return of the rainy season. We have no rain from about the second half of May until October – where we usually get one storm, then it goes back to dry until about Thanksgiving time. We also hardly ever get lightning – something most Hams have to worry about.

  Last year we received more rain than usual, and the aquifers around my area filled so much that the creeks did not get as dry as they usually do – several have been flowing with more water than usual at this time of the year. Its always really hard to tell what kind of year we will have rain wise until the first few storms in December happen. If they are big – that usually sets the stage.

  Unrelated to weather – last night we had a 4.5 Earthquake – it shook the house in a sharp bang and just a few things fell off a bookshelf. The epicenter was about 10 miles from my QTH. It was strong enough to wake me up. It rolled through very fast – like a freight train that is right next to a house.

  Besides the “Trump Daily Horror Show”, its a slow news day here in Orinda.

• The Free Range QRP DX-er (KY6R) Have We Passed “Peak DX”?

  

  Is it just me – or does it seem like we are past the “heyday” of DXing?

  It must have been that 2016 was quite the incredible year – there were 5 Top 10 DXCC activations. That felt like the “grand finale” of a fireworks show. Since then, the number of activations – especially rare or ultra rare seem down in number.

  One thing that does seem likely – is that the “run of the mill’ activity in the CW DX portions of the bands seem to be on the wane. The FT8 frequencies are always humming like a bee hive. So it could be that MY idea of DX-ing is CW.

  But we have had several mega DXpedition leaders “retire” and some go SK. Then there has been the costly run up and ultimate failure to activate Bouvet – by 2 different teams.

  To me, it seems like “attrition” is the operative word when it comes to DXing and DXpeditions.

October 14, 2019

• The Wakes I Leave In spite of the rain…

  

  …she did come out… and is now on wheels…

• DragonflyBSD Blog The Digest and TeleVideo

  Thanks to Erik Blomberg and the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, I now know the Digest has reached a whole new operating system: CP/M.  This entertains me.

  

  (It’s the Digest being browsed in text mode on a TeleVideo TS-803, if you can’t see the screen well enough.)

• Loren Grush Next year, new space missions will test technologies to fix busted satellites in orbit
  An artistic rendering of Northrop Grumman’s MEV 1 satellite attached to Intelsat 901. | Image: Northrop Grumman / Space Logistics Services

  Next year, the long-held dream of repairing satellites already in orbit around Earth will come a little closer to reality. Two new missions — from military contractor Northrop Grumman and a startup called Astroscale — will send spacecraft into orbit to rendezvous with other vehicles zooming around Earth to see if it’s possible for two satellites to delicately meet up with each other in space. If successful, these missions could mark a big first step toward cleaning up Earth orbit and making it a more sustainable place.

  Northrop Grumman and Astroscale are trying to prove out a concept known as satellite servicing, which isn’t an option for satellite operators right now. Whenever an operator launches a satellite into orbit, there’s really...

  Continue reading…

• Bruce Schneier I Have a New Book: We Have Root

  I just published my third collection of essays: We Have Root. This book covers essays from 2013 to 2017. (The first two are Schneier on Security and Carry On.)

  There is nothing in this book is that is not available for free on my website; but if you'd like these essays in an easy-to-carry paperback book format, you can order a signed copy here. External vendor links, including for ebook versions, here.
  

• Planet Labs Blog Introducing Planet Orbit: Planet’s New Partner Program

  Today we’re happy to announce the launch of Planet Orbit—Planet’s new partner program—which provides customers with a trusted partner ecosystem and unique data set. The program allows partners to gain access to geospatial data not otherwise available in the commercial market, create powerful solutions and differentiate their business.

  “Planet is positioned to transform a variety of industries through our unique dataset, providing insights to our customers at a speed never before possible,” says John Atkinson, vice president of Channel Sales at Planet. “Unlike traditional satellite imagery service providers who focus strictly on resellers, Planet Orbit works with a range of partners who offer last-mile solutions that leverage our platform’s robust APIs, PlanetScope daily imagery, and high resolution SkySat tasking. Planet Orbit partners are disrupting their industries, and moving ahead of their competitors, while setting themselves up for long-term growth in the market.”

  Planet Orbit is designed to enable our partners to build market competencies in Planet products and verticals. By introducing Gold and Platinum levels, our customers get access to Planet-certified partners with specific domain expertise. As partners commit to Planet’s business, Planet fuels their success through a variety of benefits, including:

  • A new Planet Orbit portal that acts as a one stop shop to learn, manage, and grow our partner’s Planet-based business—including a new deal registration process
  • Partner Enablement, which provides the training, tools, and certifications they need to grow their business
  • Access to an exclusive community of innovators and opportunities for strategic collaboration
  • For Gold and Platinum partners, we offer dedicated Partner Business Managers, lead distribution, and joint marketing activities—like webinars, live events, and marketing campaigns

  “At Kayrros, we have brought together the biggest group of satellite imagery specialists in Europe and have been able to provide clients with an unprecedented level of insight and accuracy, unthinkable even a few years ago,” says Antoine Rostand, founder and CEO of Kayrros. “This partnership with Planet and their Stereo SkySat imagery allows us to build on that, particularly in the exciting area of 3D mapping.”

  At Planet, we are focused on expanding our world class partner ecosystem to drive the use of Planet data and services. Over the next few months we will be expanding our ecosystem while working with our existing Planet Orbit partners to drive growth. Planet is investing heavily in our partnership program, and it’s exciting to see our partners literally changing the world with the solutions they are developing.

  To learn more about how to partner with Planet, come join us at our Global Partner Summit being held at Explore 19, Planet’s first-ever user conference. The conference will take place on October 15 and 16 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Event registration and details can be found here. In the meantime, reach out to us via email at partners@planet.com.

• Bruce Schneier Factoring 2048-bit Numbers Using 20 Million Qubits

  This theoretical paper shows how to factor 2048-bit RSA moduli with a 20-million qubit quantum computer in eight hours. It's interesting work, but I don't want overstate the risk.

  We know from Shor's Algorithm that both factoring and discrete logs are easy to solve on a large, working quantum computer. Both of those are currently beyond our technological abilities. We barely have quantum computers with 50 to 100 qubits. Extending this requires advances not only in the number of qubits we can work with, but in making the system stable enough to read any answers. You'll hear this called "error rate" or "coherence" -- this paper talks about "noise."

  Advances are hard. At this point, we don't know if they're "send a man to the moon" hard or "faster-than-light travel" hard. If I were guessing, I would say they're the former, but still harder than we can accomplish with our current understanding of physics and technology.

  I write about all this generally, and in detail, here. (Short summary: Our work on quantum-resistant algorithms is outpacing our work on quantum computers, so we'll be fine in the short run. But future theoretical work on quantum computing could easily change what "quantum resistant" means, so it's possible that public-key cryptography will simply not be possible in the long run. That's not terrible, though; we have a lot of good scalable secret-key systems that do much the same things.)

• Oshpark Hackaday Connected World Contest: Four Top Winners Announced

  

  We love seeing the astonishing array of projects large and small entered into Hackaday contests which push the boundaries of what is possible. Our latest has been the Connected World contest which was announced back in June, and today we’re pleased to bring you its four top winners.

  via Connected World Contest: Four Top Winners Announced — Hackaday

• The Free Range QRP DX-er (KY6R) Solar Cycle 24: How Low Can We Go?

  

  A flat lined Solar Cycle 24 – from https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-cycle-progression

  Gee, I guess the bottom of the cycle could go on longer than I had first thought. Its OK because 40M is still quite good – and the noise level in the wee hours of the morning is a low S6 – which means I do have a relatively quiet QTH. I do get some RF hash from the neighborhood, but only for certain hours – usually when people are binge watching mind numbing TV. I killed my TV more than 12 years ago and have never missed it. I also got rid of my car, and don’t miss it a bit. A young woman at the hardware store was very impressed that I get around on my bike. Its nice to see young people who value such things – if I had to do it all over again – there are just a few things I would do differently – and I would have gotten rid of my car years earlier. Funny how easy it is to live without something that used to be a way of life. In fact, I will go as far as saying by getting rid of these “modern conveniences” – it has forced me to see things around me that I would just take for granted. But as always, I digress.

  

  New Solar Charging arrangement at KY6R  soon to be properly mounted

  I initially thought using a solar charged battery for my QRP pursuit would result in less noise, but I’m not so sure, and the real reason to do this is to get used to not always having electricity – in fact, getting my pinkie toe in the “living off grid” pool.

  

  Aspens turning color in our recent Colorado – Utah and Nevada trip

  Its funny, but the Fall Colors have everything to do with the sun and photosynthesis. I don’t know what it is – but seeing the Fall colors is one of the most relaxing, satisfying feelings that I have ever experienced. It doesn’t matter whether the tree or bush or shrub is landscape planted or natural / native. To me, its the magic of the change, the weather and the sights and smells of Autumn. Lately, there is a sort of toasted smell out side – of the fallen leaves getting dried out. Ironically, that also means its a dangerous time when the “Diablo winds” kick up – but I am hoping that we are over that for this year. My guess is they might return one more time. Southern California – with their “Santa Ana winds” is experiencing their rough fire season right now. Soon the rainy season will be here, but just this fleeting moment in time is a highlight of the entire year.

  

  Black cats and witches . . . 

  

  Trick or Treat! She is missing her Crystal Ball!

  I’ll take the Halloween Treats with such nice weather and fall colors – and leave the high fire danger and Diablo Winds for another time. If I only had a crystal ball, a lucky rabbits foot – or whatever else I could use to predict or better yet – influence the future.

  

  A bike stop along Moraga Way to take pictures of the changing fall leaves

  Now what was this blog post about? Oh yeah – the Solar Cycle. Hey – its all about the sun, so I suppose I have been in a dream state all weekend – a trance even. I didn’t even need to go to a yoga class to get “in the zone” . . .

  Ohmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

   

   

• XKCD Faculty:Student Ratio
  
• WV0H Hiatus
  I got to looking at my blog stats the other day and noticed I only posted one post in 2018 and none in 2019. Well, I guess I have been busy with Ham Radio related stuff and probably have way more things to talk about than I have time to write but there is one topic that's at the top of my list...Antennas! My new favorite portable antenna, more specifically.
  
  

  Paradigm Shift

  I have a friend that is limited to temporary antennas at his home QTH and that has forced him to explore smaller more efficient, albeit temporary antenna solutions. He settled on vertical ground-plane antennas crafted from BuddiPole parts and 2 elevated radials. He crafted a large air-loaded coil out of some #12 bare copper wire to make a high Q base loading coil for the lower bands. Long story short, he has had great success using a seemingly "low gain" antenna. Well, low gain, in terms of a dipole anyway. 

  Antenna Gain

  My thoughts have always been why would you trade 6 dB of antenna gain for a 0dBi antenna (at best)! Yet he continues to crank in contacts and doesn't pay any attention to what is supposed to work. Band conditions as of late have left me wondering if I have been approaching this all wrong. Case and point, I was sitting in the park with my Park Portable Doublet setup on 20m and was listening to a local ham up in the mountains working DX like it was rolling in to him. I could not hear even a peep from any of his callers. Europe to him was like locals to me, but they were in Europe! The only thing I could think of was his location (up high in the mountains) and maybe vertical polarization as I know he uses an End Fed Halfwave, at least on 20m. This got me thinking of take-off angle.

  Take Off Angle

  Oh boy! Here we go again. The great debate of what angle is needed for what distance is nothing new and when you have too many variables confounding the set up, it's hard to tell where you are squirting your RF, especially with varying ground conditions and terrain. His Eu QSO-a-thon convinced me that I need to re-examine the need to know where your RF is going and concern myself less with maximizing every last dB of gain in a particular direction. This leads me back to my paradigm shift, low antenna gain (by 6dB) doesn't mean no QSOs. It just means that the RF is delivered to different places and different angles...gain. I found this presentation that Contest University put on at Dayton in 2018.

  
  

  https://www.contestuniversity.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2.-W3LPL-How-to-Improve-your-Transmitting-Antennas-for-Very-Low-Solar-Activity-2018.pdf

  
  

  The main take away here is low angle of radiation is where the DX is (as it's always been). There will probably be very few 20m Colorado to east coast QSOs above 20 degrees take-off angle at distances greater than 700 miles.

  5 to 15 Degrees on 20m?

  Wait. What? 5 to 15 degrees? How in the world am I going to get my PPD to radiate down that low?The answer is by getting it up 130 feet! Well, I can't do that so this has forced me to investigate other antenna designs that can radiate more, down lower. Enter vertical polarization for portable ops.

  Vertical Polarization

  Much of my understanding regarding antennas is what I have learned by playing with EZNEC modeling and reading volumes of publications. But something has always bothered me about the modeling results I have obtained using NEC-2 and EZNEC. In my poking around the Internet I came across a QEX article regarding interactions with ground using vertical and horizontal polarization but modeled with different software.

  
  

  http://www.arrl.org/files/file/QEX_Next_Issue/2016/March-April2016/Zavrel.pdf

  
  

  In my EZNEC modeling experience, vertical polarization produces zero fields at ground level due to what is in my understanding, the limitations of EZNEC and how the NEC-2 calculation engine handles ground calculations. This QEX article notices the same thing (first paragraph on page 19) where the NEC-2 engine falls apart the author's computational results show a very different picture with respect to pattern shape at or near the horizon for vertical antennas. See Figure 8. As the author notes, there appears to be radiation from a source at or near the ground where there is no antenna! The fields "near" the antenna appear to be coming from the antenna but as you progress out and away you see they take on a shape as if there was an antenna radiating them close to the ground. Even though there is a 1.5 wavelength gap from the bottom of the antenna to the ground. This is nuts!

  A Little Bit of Height 

  As noted in Figure 8, there is radiation form what appears to be an antenna that isn't there. This got me rethinking the use of verticals as a viable solution for portable ops. One difference. Get it up off the ground a little bit, even a couple of feet is doable. It can only help with loss near a lossy ground dielectric and pattern shape/filling in radiation to lower angles.

  The Radial Problem

  If you have ever deployed a BuddiStick or other current fed vertical you know how much of a pain radials are. At least for me. The BuddiStick really only needs one elevated radial to work but then you have a pattern that is not omni-directional. Put up 2 elevated radials and you have a nice omni pattern but now have 2 elevated radials to dance around. (I can't even think of placing them on the ground and is still in the way; a trip hazard).

  No Radial Solution

  But wait, what about an end fed solution to rid the radials? Can it be done? The final answer is yes. But you have to use an effective transformation solution that will decouple the end of the wire. Up to this point (like last year) I had no positive things to say about the state of High Impedance transformers currently designed and employed in end fed situations. Loss figures aside they all suffer from the same problem, inadequate isolation. There is no good design out there that sufficiently removes antenna currents from the feedline to effectively isolate the end of an EF wire and your rig or coax. The problem and some discussion by John Huggins, KX4O, is found here:

  
  

  https://www.hamradio.me/antennas/of-fields-and-feedpoints.html

  Design Goals

  So what have we determined at this point? #1 I want a no radial solution that will work all the bands with no tuner...Heard that one before...

  #2 have a decent pattern from low angle to high angle without switching out wires, traps or coils. Tall order to be sure but not unobtainable.

  #3 be easily deployable with PPD-like setup times.

  
  

  In the following weeks/months I will post more about how I arrived at my final solution. Enter the 60-10m end fed wire that can be deployed to accomodate low angle or high angle radiation by only changing the length without using jumpers, traps, coils, just one 100 foot continuous piece of #26 (19/38) PTFE wire wound on an aluminum chalk line reel capacitively coupled at the feed/reel end to a 3003 ohm unun. It can be deployed as a halfwave vertical for 40-10m with a 36 foot pole. It can be deployed as an inverted L for 10-60m, inverted U on 20-10m using "the proper lengths" and shorter installed heights and still retain a majority of low angle radiation.
  
  

  

  
  

  

  
  

  
  

  

  
  

  More to come.

  
  

  73

  Myron WVĂ˜H
• VE7SAR (Surrey Amateur Radio Club) Double Your Range! A Counterpoise For Your Hand-held
  
  

  
  

  A Communicator Reprise

  September 2015

  
  

  The counterpoise (sometimes referred to as a ‘Tiger-Tail’) is typically used in antenna systems for radio transmitters where a good earth ground connection cannot be constructed. In this application, it is simply a 19-inch length of common wire attached to the ground of your hand-held transceiver antenna terminal.

  
  

  

  
  

  In the photo it is attached to a ring terminal with sufficient diameter to fit under the antenna. Alternatively, it can also be stripped of insulation and simply be wrapped around the antenna base, as long as it makes a good electrical contact.

  
  

  It is very effective in extending the range of a portable transceiver in that it provides the 'missing' half of the dipole antenna for 2m or 70cm operation. In order to keep antennas short and manageable, radio manufacturers coil the antenna wire into a rubber covered spring—half the antenna. The transceiver body is the other half, but is not very effective from an RF perspective. Those little rubber antennas can have a very high SWR, power reflected back to your radio rather than radiating out. The counterpoise, left hanging straight down beside the radio on receive and transmit provides a much more efficient solution.

  
  

  Try it with a weak station, you’ll surely notice the difference.

  
  

  ~ John VE7TI

  
  

  
  
• Basic Instructions How to Get to the Root Cause of Your Irritation
  

  When you work in a place that operates under a ridiculous and byzantine system, there’s a great deal of power in being the person that understands that system. I have, on two occasions, been around when such a system was replaced with a new, much simpler, easier to learn system, and I have seen the people who understood the old system fight tooth and nail to prevent the new system from being implemented.

  Of course, they couldn’t really explain why the new system wasn’t as good, but they’d never really been able to explain the old system at all, so that didn’t trouble them much.

  As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

• The Free Range QRP DX-er (KY6R) Autumn, Glorious Autumn in Northern California

  

  This weekend was the most beautiful of the entire year – and we are only just starting Fall here in NCAL

  I grew up near the Delaware Water Gap on the Jersey Side – in Newton, NJ. Fall colors were superb, but alas – the Fall season was very short – it seemed to only last 4 – 6 weeks, and then either a big rain or the cold weather would come in – and we went from glorious Fall to Winter. It got grey pretty quickly. Snow was actually a treat – it kept the scene interesting. The East Coast Peaks out about now. My giant Chinese Pistachio tree is days away from bursting out in a neon Orange. I’ll post photos then. We don’t hit our peak here for a couple weeks – maybe the beginning on November.

  

  Orchard Nursery in Lafayette has the best Autumn happenings going on

  

  Quite the cool and even creepy gourd . . . 

  

  The Spooky Ghost Circus is underway here in Lamorinda

  

  Happy Black Cats – 50% off even . . . 

  

  We are only just getting started – stay tuned – some amazing Fall colors are on their way

   

October 13, 2019

• The Free Range QRP DX-er (KY6R) Solar QRP Station at KY6R

  

  20W solar panel with PWM charge controller and 12v 7 ah battery

  One of the good parts of the blackout this week was that it finally got me to get on the stick with solar powered Ham Radio. With the KX-3, I can easily switch to a solar charged battery and get my station “off the grid”. Well – at least the radio, anyway.

  These items were purchased on Amazon:

  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00W813E4I/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003S1RQ2S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NPDWZJ7/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s02?ie=UTF8&psc=1

  Its great – I can see what the solar panel is putting out, and the charge-controller ensures that the battery is charged correctly, and of you add a load it regulates that as well. Today I set it up just to see what was happening at each device, and I used my Fluke DVM as a load – to see how the Charge – Controller read out jived with the DVM.

  I just have to create a power wire that goes from the battery to my Anderson Powerpole DC distribution panel.

   

• A Few Throughs on Cryptographic Engineering (Matthew Green) How safe is Apple’s Safe Browsing?

  This morning brings new and exciting news from the land of Apple. It appears that, at least on iOS 13, Apple is sharing some portion of your web browsing history with the Chinese conglomerate Tencent. This is being done as part of Apple’s “Fraudulent Website Warning”, which uses the Google-developed Safe Browsing technology as the back end. This feature appears to be “on” by default in iOS Safari, meaning that millions of users could potentially be affected.

  

  As is the standard for this sort of news, Apple hasn’t provided much — well, any — detail on whose browsing history this will affect, or what sort of privacy mechanisms are in place to protect its users. The changes probably affect only Chinese-localized users (see Github commits, courtesy Eric Romang), although it’s difficult to know for certain. However, it’s notable that Apple’s warning appears on U.S.-registered iPhones.

  Regardless of which users are affected, Apple hasn’t said much about the privacy implications of shifting Safe Browsing to use Tencent’s servers. Since we lack concrete information, the best we can do is talk a bit about the technology and its implications. That’s what I’m going to do below.

  What is “Safe Browsing”, and is it actually safe?

  Several years ago Google noticed that web users tended to blunder into malicious sites as they browsed the web. This included phishing pages, as well as sites that attempted to push malware at users. Google also realized that, due to its unique vantage point, it had the most comprehensive list of those sites. Surely this could be deployed to protect users.

  The result was Google’s “safe browsing”. In the earliest version, this was simply an API at Google that would allow your browser to ask Google about the safety of any URL you visited. Since Google’s servers received the full URL, as well as your IP address (and possibly a tracking cookie to prevent denial of service), this first API was kind of a privacy nightmare. (This API still exists, and is supported today as the “Lookup API“.)

  To address these concerns, Google quickly came up with a safer approach to, um, “safe browsing”. The new approach was called the “Update API”, and it works like this:

  1. Google first computes the SHA256 hash of each unsafe URL in its database, and truncates each hash down to a 32-bit prefix to save space.
  2. Google sends the database of truncated hashes down to your browser.
  3. Each time you visit a URL, your browser hashes it and checks if its 32-bit prefix is contained in your local database.
  4. If the prefix is found in the browser’s local copy, your browser now sends the prefix to Google’s servers, which ship back a list of all full 256-bit hashes of the matching  URLs, so your browser can check for an exact match.

  At each of these requests, Google’s servers see your IP address, as well as other identifying information such as database state. It’s also possible that Google may drop a cookie into your browser during some of these requests. The Safe Browsing API doesn’t say much about this today, but Ashkan Soltani noted this was happening back in 2012.

  It goes without saying that Lookup API is a privacy disaster. The “Update API” is much more private: in principle, Google should only learn the 32-bit hashes of some browsing requests. Moreover, those truncated 32-bit hashes won’t precisely reveal the identity of the URL you’re accessing, since there are likely to be many collisions in such a short identifier. This provides a form of k-anonymity.

  The weakness in this approach is that it only provides some privacy. The typical user won’t just visit a single URL, they’ll browse thousands of URLs over time. This means a malicious provider will have many “bites at the apple” (no pun intended) in order to de-anonymize that user. A user who browses many related websites — say, these websites — will gradually leak details about their browsing history to the provider, assuming the provider is malicious and can link the requests. (Updated to add: There has been some academic research on such threats.)

  And this is why it’s so important to know who your provider actually is.

  What does this mean for Apple and Tencent?

  That’s ultimately the question we should all be asking.

  The problem is that Safe Browsing “update API” has never been exactly “safe”. Its purpose was never to provide total privacy to users, but rather to degrade the quality of browsing data that providers collect. Within the threat model of Google, we (as a privacy-focused community) largely concluded that protecting users from malicious sites was worth the risk. That’s because, while Google certainly has the brainpower to extract a signal from the noisy Safe Browsing results, it seemed unlikely that they would bother. (Or at least, we hoped that someone would blow the whistle if they tried.)

  But Tencent isn’t Google. While they may be just as trustworthy, we deserve to be informed about this kind of change and to make choices about it. At very least, users should learn about these changes before Apple pushes the feature into production, and thus asks millions of their customers to trust them.

  We shouldn’t have to read the fine print

  When Apple wants to advertise a major privacy feature, they’re damned good at it. As an example:  this past summer the company announced the release of the privacy-preserving “Find My” feature at WWDC, to widespread acclaim. They’ve also been happy to claim credit for their work on encryption, including technology such as iCloud Keychain.

  But lately there’s been a troubling silence out of Cupertino, mostly related to the company’s interactions with China. Two years ago, the company moved much of iCloud server infrastructure into mainland China, for default use by Chinese users. It seems that Apple had no choice in this, since the move was mandated by Chinese law. But their silence was deafening. Did the move involve transferring key servers for end-to-end encryption? Would non-Chinese users be affected? Reporters had to drag the answers out of the company, and we still don’t know many of them.

  In the Safe Browsing change we have another example of Apple making significant modifications to its privacy infrastructure, largely without publicity or announcement. We have learn about this stuff from the fine print. This approach to privacy issues does users around the world a disservice.

  It increasingly feels like Apple is two different companies: one that puts the freedom of its users first, and another that treats its users very differently. Maybe Apple feels it can navigate this split personality disorder and still maintain its integrity.

  I very much doubt it will work.

   

• DragonflyBSD Blog Lazy Reading for 2019/10/13

  A mix of complaints, history, and odd technical items.  The usual!

  • Unsung Beauty of Analog Devices Datasheets.  (via)
  • Managing passwords using ed and gpg2.  Because: no tempfile.
  • Adding redirection to the gopher protocol.
  • How Long Will Unbreakable Commercial Encryption Last?  Readers of a certain age will remember how PGP was briefly export controlled; also remember that history rhymes.  (via)
  • How my application ran away and called home from Redmond.  (Thanks, Heiko Kuhrt)
  • Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast about audio.  (via)
  • The tiniest FatMac.  (really a console and an emulator, but that’s fine.)
  • Thoughts on (and pics of) the original Macintosh User Manual.  (via)
  • 93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs.  This is not the throwaway joke it sounds like.  (via)
  • ChessBoss – enhancing physical chessboards with computer vision.  Chessboards are natural placemarkers.  (via)
  • Wackaging, a trend I hope will end.  (via)
  • The Fantasy of Opting Out.  (via)
  • Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2019.  (via)
  • James Mickens’ Tenure Announcement.  It is exactly as wonderful as you would think.  (via)
• The Free Range QRP DX-er (KY6R) Indian Summer in Northern California

  

  The stunning autumn colors and weather in is full force in Northern California

  It was quite the week – but we woke to just a stunning day here near San Francisco. The air is clear, the skies are blue, the sun is warm but with that fantastic coolness in the air that makes the combination “luscious”.

  

  Under the “big top” at Orchard Nursery in Lafayette, California

  After a day of great exercise riding our bikes – we stopped in at Orchard Nursery in Lafayette – a “must see” place at Halloween time.

  

  Classic Fall scene

  We bought a Nyssum Salvatica tree – or Tupelo – which makes this our third in our front yard.

  

  The theme at Orchard was a sort of “spooky circus”, and it was really great fun

  

  The Apple Harvest is in . . .

  

  Cool cats ready for Trick or Treating . . . 

  

  They had a golf game with pumpkin pie – very funny . . . 

  

  The leaves steal the show . . . 

  

  Ahhhh – tobacco sunburst – the color of that mandolin that just might end up in my hands . . . 

  

  Yes, I even have decorated my bike with this cool pumpkin skull blinky light ornament . . . 

  

  This guy really cracked me up

  

  Special effects!

  

  Our solar charged Halloween lights that actually helped us a lot during the Blackout

  

  A summer “whirlygig” gets its last sun and shadows . . . 

  The seasons have changed now – and there is no looking back. While we get that PITA “Diablo Winds” weather for a week or so in October, they pass and then we have a solid month or two of heaven. I’m hoping we are past the “changing winds” and marching towards Winter. I look forward to our rainy season – but for now – I’m really enjoying this “Indian Summer”.