Rivian Scores $1.3 Billion Investment
December 24th, 2019Via: Reuters:
Electric vehicle startup Rivian said on Monday it closed a $1.3 billion investment round led by T. Rowe Price and including existing investors Amazon.com and Ford Motor Co.
The investment round, which also included BlackRock Inc, is the fourth this year for Rivian and positions the Plymouth, Michigan-based company as one of the better-financed players in a crowded EV manufacturing market where Tesla Inc is the most established player.
Anonymous Story About a “School” that Borders Denver International Airport
December 24th, 2019Via: Reddit:
But the craziest job I had there was a Waterproofing job for a “school”. It wasn’t actually on DIA property, but was on the Eastern edge of the property, just outside it. It was ran by the Corp of Engineers. Which in itself was odd, being that it was supposed to be a school not on a base.
The part that really made me start asking questions was what we were doing. Our crew was tasked with waterproofing the foundation… Which was 3 stories underground. There was only one story above ground. Being as we had to make sure the concrete was water tight, I saw every square inch of the foundation.
We started the job in winter and had to bury our work as we went. It was a tedious affair of painting, slapping on some peel and stick, and tracking down the diggers to move dirt when we were done with a section.
Every piece of the foundation was at a minimum 3ft thick with countless layers of steel rebar. For those who don’t know, that’s nuke proof specs. Some areas were a solid 8-10ft thick.
It gets weirder. In the front section of the building were giant bay door holes. The size to fit semi trucks and large military vehicles.
That’s pretty much the extent of my observations. Large Bay doors, nuke proof specs, 3 stories underground, at the edge of DIA property, ran by the Corps of Engineers. Very peculiar.
Our crew took to using finger quotation marks when talking about “The school”. It was an ongoing inside joke with us. If that helps elaborate on how obviously weird the whole thing was.
After we left the waterproofing aspect I never returned to that job, as I transferred across the country to a different Union. But I often wonder of the true intentions behind what we put in the ground.
‘My Business Card Runs Linux’
December 24th, 2019Via: thirtythreeforty:
This is the finished product. It is a complete, minimal ARM computer running my customized Linux firmware built with Buildroot.
It has a USB port in the corner. If you plug it into a computer, it boots in about 6 seconds and shows up over USB as a flash drive and a virtual serial port that you can use to log into the card’s shell. The flash drive has a README file, a copy of my résumé, and some of my photography. The shell has several games and Unix classics such as fortune and rogue, a small 2048, and a small MicroPython interpreter.
All this is accomplished on a very small 8MB flash chip. The bootloader fits in 256KB, the kernel is 1.6MB, and the whole root filesystem is 2.4MB. So, there’s plenty of space for the virtual flash drive. It also includes a writable home directory, on the off chance that anyone creates something they want to keep. This is also saved on the flash chip, which is properly wear leveled with UBI.
The whole thing costs under $3. It’s cheap enough to give away. If you get one from me, I’m probably trying to impress you.
NSA’s Backdoor Key from Lotus-Notes
December 23rd, 2019Via: Cypherspace:
Before the US crypto export regulations were finally disolved the export version of Lotus Notes used to include a key escrow / backdoor feature called differential cryptography. The idea was that they got permission to export 64 bit crypto if 24 of those bits were encrypted for the NSA’s public key. The NSA would then only have the small matter of brute-forcing the remaining 40 bits to get the plaintext, and everyone else would get a not-that-great 64 bit key space (which probably already back then NSA would have had the compute power to brute force also, only at higher cost).
Anyway as clearly inside the application somewhere would be an NSA public key that the NSA had the private key for, I tried reverse engineering it to get the public key.
In doing this I discovered that the NSA public key had an organizational name of “MiniTruth”, and a common name of “Big Brother”. Specifically what I saw in my debugger late one night, which was spooky for a short moment was:
O=MiniTruth CN=Big Brother
Literary note: for those who have not read Orwell’s prescient “1984” the Ministry of Truth was the agency who’s job was propaganda and suppression of truths that did not suit the malignant fictional future government in the book, and “Big Brother” was the evil shadowy leader of this government.
Cancers Strike Veterans Who Deployed to Uzbek Base Where Black Goo Oozed, Ponds Glowed
December 22nd, 2019Via: McClatchy:
U.S. special operations forces who deployed to a military site in Uzbekistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks found pond water that glowed green, black goo oozing from the ground and signs warning “radiation hazard.”
Karshi-Khanabad, known as K2, was an old Soviet base leased by the United States from the Uzbek government just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks because it was a few hundred miles from al Qaeda and Taliban targets in northern Afghanistan.
The base became a critical hub in the early days of the war to provide airdrops, medical evacuation and airstrike support to U.S. ground forces in Afghanistan.
But K2 was contaminated with chemical weapons remnants, radioactive processed uranium and other hazards, according to documents obtained by McClatchy.
At least 61 of the men and women who served at K2 had been diagnosed with cancer or died from the disease, according to a 2015 Army study on the base. But that number may not include the special operations forces deployed to K2, who were likely not counted due to the secrecy of their missions, the study reported.
Invisible Ink Embeds Immunization Records Into a Child’s Skin, “The Team Eventually Wants to Inject Sensors”
December 22nd, 2019Via: Scientific American:
Keeping track of vaccinations remains a major challenge in the developing world, and even in many developed countries, paperwork gets lost, and parents forget whether their child is up to date. Now a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers has developed a novel way to address this problem: embedding the record directly into the skin.
Along with the vaccine, a child would be injected with a bit of dye that is invisible to the naked eye but easily seen with a special cell-phone filter, combined with an app that shines near-infrared light onto the skin. The dye would be expected to last up to five years, according to tests on pig and rat skin and human skin in a dish.
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The work was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…
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The researchers hope to add more detailed information to the dots, such as the date of vaccination. Along with them, the team eventually wants to inject sensors that could also potentially be used to track aspects of health such as insulin levels in diabetics, Jaklenec says.
Giant Surveillance Balloons Are Lurking at the Edge of Space
December 22nd, 2019Via: Ars Technica:
It’s a brisk December morning at Spaceport Tucson, America’s premiere (only?) dedicated launch pad for stratospheric balloons, and a small army of technicians in reflective vests is milling around on the concrete and thawing out after a long, cold night. Nearby, a white metal tripod the size of a smart car is tethered to two dozen solar panels and hundreds of feet of clear plastic that stretches across the pad.
This alien-looking contraption is referred to as a “stratollite,” a portmanteau of “stratospheric satellite,” operated by a company called World View Enterprises. It’s a finely honed surveillance device outfitted with a suite of sensors and a camera sensitive enough to detect people standing on the ground from the edge of space. The stratollite travels by virtue of two balloons, one filled with helium to provide lift, and the other with pressurized air, which functions as a steering system.
Wrangler Riggs Workwear Men’s Short Sleeve Pocket T-Shirt
December 22nd, 2019Are you tired of poorly made, tight fitting, negligee thin t-shirts?
I have finally found a high quality heavy weight t-shirt: Wrangler Riggs Workwear T-shirt.
Imagine the nicest t-shirt you have ever had, maybe from 20 or 30 years ago, and now try to imagine it even better. Much better. Not only is this Wrangler Riggs t-shirt made out of extremely heavy 7oz cotton, it fits the way t-shirts used to fit; loose, with plenty of room to move. The workmanship is far beyond anything else I’ve ever seen. It also features vented side seams, a taped neck seam and a hidden utility loop to keep a pen (or something similar) secure in the pocket.
Yes, this Wrangler Riggs t-shirt is much more expensive than a commodity t-shirt, but there’s no comparison. I’m going to stock up on these, because you know what will happen with something this good: It won’t be around for long.
Boeing’s Starliner Enters Wrong Orbit, Won’t Dock with ISS
December 20th, 2019Via: Daily Mail:
Boeing’s new Starliner capsule won’t dock with the International Space Station on Saturday after launching into the wrong orbit just minutes after blasting off on its first test flight.
NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said it burned more fuel than anticipated to maintain control which ‘precluded a space station rendezvous’.
The Starliner capsule went off course into the wrong orbit just minutes after blasting off on its first test flight – a crucial dress rehearsal for next year’s inaugural launch with astronauts.
Apple Has Secret Team Working on Satellites to Beam Data to Devices
December 20th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. has a secret team working on satellites and related wireless technology, striving to find new ways to beam data such as internet connectivity directly to its devices, according to people familiar with the work.
The Cupertino, California-based iPhone maker has about a dozen engineers from the aerospace, satellite and antenna design industries working on the project with the goal of deploying their results within five years, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal company efforts. Work on the project is still early and could be abandoned, the people said, and a clear direction and use for satellites hasn’t been finalized. Still, Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has shown interest in the project, indicating it’s a company priority.
