Russian Nuclear Scientists Connect Airgapped Supercomputer to Internet to Mine Cryptocurrencies
February 9th, 2018*har*
Via: BBC:
Russian security officers have arrested several scientists working at a top-secret Russian nuclear warhead facility for allegedly mining crypto-currencies.
The suspects had tried to use one of Russia’s most powerful supercomputers to mine Bitcoins, media reports say.
The Federal Nuclear Centre in Sarov, western Russia, is a restricted area.
The centre’s press service said: “There has been an unsanctioned attempt to use computer facilities for private purposes including so-called mining.”
The supercomputer was not supposed to be connected to the internet – to prevent intrusion – and once the scientists attempted to do so, the nuclear centre’s security department was alerted. They were handed over to the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian news service Mash says.
“As far as we are aware, a criminal case has been launched against them,” the press service told Interfax news agency.
Stimulus Puts U.S. Debt On An Upward Trajectory
February 9th, 2018Via: AFP:
As part of a pledge to “Make America Great Again,” President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers are pursuing aggressive economic stimulus while slashing taxes at the same time.
The result, budget analysts say, is likely to be swelling debts and deficits for the world’s largest borrower.
America’s budget deficit was already on an upward trajectory, thanks to an aging population and rising health costs. But it is now poised to take off.
After December’s sweeping tax cuts, which are expected to cut federal revenues by $1.5 trillion over ten years, the budget deal Trump signed Friday calls for an additional $300 billion in defense spending over two years.
The White House and lawmakers have also huddled over a $1.5 trillion plan to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure, with perhaps several hundred billion in taxpayer funds contributed in a possible public-private partnership.
U.S. Army Now Holding Drills With Ground Robots That Shoot
February 9th, 2018Via: DefenseOne:
In a historic first, the Army conducted a live fire exercise with a remote-controlled ground combat vehicle armed with a .50-caliber machine gun. It plans to conduct more exercises with more heavily armed ground robots within the next couple of years.
The demonstration was part of the annual Northern Strike exercise, which took place last July and August at Michigan’s Camp Grayling. Primarily geared toward reserve units, this year’s event debuted an unmanned, heavily armed M113 armored personnel carrier. The driver and the weapons operator followed behind in a slightly larger M577 command post vehicle.
Related: The Marines Are Building Robotic War Balls
People Fleeing Bay Area
February 9th, 2018Via: CBS:
The number of people packing up and moving out of the Bay Area just hit its highest level in more than a decade.
Carole Dabak spent 40 years living in San Jose and now she’s part of the mass exodus that is showing no signs of slowing down.
The retired engineer’s packing up and calling it quits about to move to the state of Tennessee.
“I loved it here when I first got here. I really loved it here. But it’s just not the same,” Dabak said.
Of course people come and go from the Bay Area all the time, but for the first time in a long time, more people are leaving the Bay Area than are coming in. And the number one place in the country for out-migration is now, right here.
Russell Hancock with Joint Venture Silicon Valley said, “Silicon Valley has been this place that is growing. And it was mostly due to people relocating here and relocating from other parts of the world. That’s changing.”
Joint Venture Silicon Valley’s own study of the out-migration says workers are moving to Sacramento, Austin, and Portland due to a number of factors. But topping the list is the high cost of housing.
Mad Max Violence Stalks Venezuela’s Lawless Roads
February 9th, 2018Via: Reuters:
It’s midnight on one of the most dangerous roads in Latin America and Venezuelan trucker Humberto Aguilar hurtles through the darkness with 20 tons of vegetables freshly harvested from the Andes for sale in the capital Caracas.
When he set off at sunset from the town of La Grita in western Venezuela on his 900-km (560-mile) journey, Aguilar knew he was taking his life in his hands.
With hunger widespread amid a fifth year of painful economic implosion under President Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela has seen a frightening surge in attacks on increasingly lawless roads.
Just a few days earlier, Aguilar said he sat terrified when hundreds of looters swarmed a stationary convoy, overwhelming drivers by sheer numbers. They carted off milk, rice and sugar from other trucks but left his less-prized vegetables alone.
“Every time I say goodbye to my family, I entrust myself to God and the Virgin,” said the 36-year-old trucker.
Trump Wants a ‘Grand Military Parade’ in Washington
February 6th, 2018
Via: CNBC:
At the urging of President Donald Trump, the Pentagon is moving forward on planning for “a grand military parade later this year showcasing the might of America’s armed forces,” the Washington Post reported Tuesday.
The paper said the cost of the parade “could run in the millions” given the cost to ship tanks and other hardware to Washington.
In September, Trump met with French President Emmanuel Macron and remarked how he enjoyed watching France’s Bastille Day military parade in Paris.
“It was a tremendous day, and to a large extent because of what I witnessed, we may do something like that on July 4th in Washington down Pennsylvania Avenue,” Trump said in September. “We’re going to have to try to top it, but we have a lot of planes going over and a lot of military might, and it was really a beautiful thing to see, and representatives from different wars and different uniforms.”
According to the Post, Trump also made his views on holding the U.S. military parade known to top defense officials during a Jan. 18 defense briefing in the “tank” — a Pentagon secure room. The paper said that discussion ultimately “marked a tipping point,” citing two unnamed officials briefed on the planning.
“The marching orders were: I want a parade like the one in France,” the paper said, quoting an unnamed military official. “This is being worked at the highest levels of the military.”
The last major military parade held in Washington was in 1991 to mark victory in Operation Desert Storm, the first Persian Gulf War. It reportedly cost about $8 million and involved thousands of troops who fought in the war, nearly a dozen bands, a fleet of missiles, tanks and the flyover of more than 100 aircraft.
SpaceX Launches Falcon Heavy Rocket on Historic Maiden Voyage
February 6th, 2018Update: Astronomers Spot Musk’s Roadster
Via: Virtual Telescope:
The car was about as bright as magnitude 15.5, requiring a large (more than 16? – 400 mm in diameter) to be seen visually.
Below is a video, obtained with 54 images taken back to back, from 11:12 to 12:15 UT, 8 Feb. 2018.
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Update: Was Roadster Spectacle and Subsequent Final Burn a Demonstration for the Pentagon?
Ok, now we’re getting somewhere. Couple more category ticks: [???] and War.
Via: Robert Walker:
No, it wasn’t left in that orbit which was a temporary holding orbit. Immediately after the launch it was in a temporary orbit with maximum altitude 7,000 km, then five hours later they did a final burn to put it on an interplanetary orbit out to beyond the orbit of Mars. They could have done that right away without going into the orbit at all – but as a requirement for future military launches, apparently they had to prove that their final stage could withstand spending a long time in the Van Allen belts. That’s why they deliberately kept it going through the Van Allen belts over and over for five hours before sending the payload into its interplanetary orbit.
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Update: What Is Powering the Communications Package on the Roadster Payload?
On Live Views of Starman, there’s a video feed from the Roadster hurtling through space. Within a few seconds of watching that with my jaw hanging slack, I wondered, “What’s powering the coms package on that thing?”
At first, I wondered if it was the battery pack from the Roadster itself. But if it’s using the car’s battery, how long would that last at -270C?
I wasn’t able to find anything out about this. Can anyone help me out here?
Update: Email From “A Source That Works At A Rocket Company”
He asked not to be identified, so I’ve removed his name and his employer:
Hi Kevin,
I’d be happy to explain how the Falcon Heavy launch worked and answer any questions you have.
The basic idea of how the batteries don’t freeze is that they are in the sunlight (so long as they’re not in the shadow of the earth), and the whole stage is on what’s called a “barbeque roll” rotation with a period of 1-2 minutes. That roll keeps the sun-facing side of the vehicle from getting too hot, and the space-facing side from getting too cold. Deep space is the temperature of the microwave background radiation, which is 2.7 Kelvin, and the Sun is of course around 5800 K (but it doesn’t take up half the sky, only as much area as the moon approximately). When you time-average those two exposures together, the result is approximately room temperature. This is the same reason that the Earth is also approximately at room temperature
As far as I know, there has never been a rocket 2nd stage which included solar panels; they all run on batteries. So you get a fixed amount of time before the batteries run out. Sputnik 1 had batteries to last something like 4 days. Rocket 2nd stages tend to have batteries good for roughly 3 hours, unless you need to do a longer mission profile such as a direct insertion to geostationary orbit. In that case, it takes the stage about six hours to climb up from low Earth orbit to the geostationary belt which is roughly six Earth radii up (quite far out there!). So for a direct GEO mission, you need to add on extra batteries for the 2nd stage so it can stay alive and do its final burn six hours later. That six hour number is dictated solely by the mass & radius of the Earth, Newton’s gravitational constant, and the rotation rate of the Earth. The characteristics of the rocket have nothing to do with it (unless I suppose you took a faster but less fuel-efficient route by blasting yourself up faster, but nobody does that).
During that six hour coast phase, the vehicle gets to experience a ton of trapped solar particles bouncing around in the Earth’s magnetic field, also known as the Van Allen belts. The radiation levels are much much higher than down in low orbit where for instance the ISS resides, and they are actually also generally higher than the radiation levels once you get up into the operational GEO orbit. The electronics controlling the 2nd stage have to be designed to withstand that onslaught in a way that they don’t have to be designed for for a regular LEO or GTO insertion mission profile.
Just for reference, it doesn’t take all that much power to send down the live video stream you saw yesterday. I haven’t looked up the FCC filings (which are public!), but on some previous missions they have used a 20 watt transmitter operating near 2200 MHz for video. That power level and frequency are quite sufficient even for going further away from the Earth’s surface like they did yesterday; all you need is a bigger dish on the ground to pick it up. Remember, NASA picked up live video from the Moon in 1969 using a 70 meter dish. Probably yesterday SpaceX was using something like a 15 meter dish. They didn’t have to go install it themselves, either, there are plenty of dishes already in existence that are available to rent for missions like this.
Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like explained.
Follow up email:
Also,
“Also, the livestream from the car cut out after about 4 hours 40 minutes. So it probably used up the car’s battery, and or some other battery, to keep itself warm and to send the video stream back to Earth, and that’s all she wrote.”
There are two possible reasons they cut off the video stream. #1, the payload was actually on its way back down so they went out of range of their round stations. I haven’t checked the orbital mechanics to verify whether or not this was a contributing factor. #2, I think they wanted to cut the feed before the (still risky) 3rd ignition of the 2nd stage, in case it went poorly. Interestingly, there were visual sightings from Los Angeles of what turned out to be that 3rd burn, propelling the vehicle on its Earth-escape trajectory.
I suspect they still had enough battery to keep the video downlink going, and assuming they did record that data, perhaps they’ll leak some of it out in the future now that they know the vehicle didn’t fail during that 3rd burn
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Via: space.com:
The first Falcon Heavy rocket built by the private spaceflight company SpaceX soared on its maiden voyage today (Feb. 6) — a historic test flight that also sent a car toward Mars and included two confirmed booster landings.
Billed as the world’s most powerful booster since NASA’s Saturn V, the Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from Launch Pad 39A here at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) — the same site used by NASA’s Apollo moon missions and space shuttles — at 3:45 p.m. EST (2045GMT).
“I’m really excited about today,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told reporters after the launch. “I’m really proud of the SpaceX team. They’ve done an incredible job of creating the most advanced rocket in the world, and the biggest rocket in the world.”
Standing 23 stories tall, the Falcon Heavy rocket is SpaceX’s largest rocket yet. Its first stage is powered by three core boosters based on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, with 27 engines (nine per booster) firing in unison to produce about 5 million lbs. of thrust (22,819 kilonewtons) at liftoff. While SpaceX hoped all three boosters would return to Earth and land, the center core missed its mark – a minor hiccup in an otherwise successful launch, Musk said.
Satire: FBI Warns Republican Memo Could Undermine Faith In Massive, Unaccountable Government Secret Agencies
February 6th, 2018Via: The Onion:
“If we take away the people’s faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that’s left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons.” At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating constitutional rights.
Research Credit: Eileen
EHANG 184 AAV Manned Flight Tests
February 6th, 2018Via: Ehang:
China Deploys Experimental Railgun Aboard Warship
February 5th, 2018Via: news.com.au:
WANT to win a war? Build a better gun. Now China appears to have taken a huge stride ahead of the United States with the first experimental deployment of a new ‘supergun’ aboard a warship.
The first images began circulating on the internet last week.
They showed a Chinese amphibious assault ship — usually used to deploy troops and tanks on a beach — fitted with an enormous cannon on its bows.
Overnight, Beijing’s official mouthpieceThe People’s Daily Online published an article reporting speculation the unusually large single-barrelled weapon was an electromagnetic rail gun.
