Tag: technology

MORPHEUS SPACE LAUNCHING FIRST-EVER MASS PRODUCTION FACILITY FOR FIELD EMISSION ELECTRIC PROPULSION SYSTEMS

German propulsion company Morpheus Space has officially opened the world’s first-ever facility designed to mass produce its second-generation field emission electric propulsion (FEEP) system, the GO-2. Dubbed “Reoladed,” the Dresden-based facility will immediately begin production of 100 units of the GO-2, a potentially breakthrough system that uses liquid metal as a propellant.

In an email to The Debrief, company executives explained the growing need for a facility like Reloaded that can quickly and efficiently produce systems like the GO-2, which would provide satellite operators with extended mobility throughout the entire mission.

“One of the biggest problems satellite operators face today is the limited supply of available propulsion systems. We intend to sufficiently scale production of GO-2 to match this growing demand,” explained Morpheus Space President Kevin Lausten. “By offering a more affordable and readily available propulsion system able to facilitate all necessary maneuvers from initial orbit to de-orbit, the GO-2 marks an important leap for the industry.”

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NASA built a Moon rover but can’t afford to get it to the launch pad

NASA has spent $450 million designing and building a first-of-its-kind robot to drive into eternally dark craters at the Moon’s south pole, but the agency announced Wednesday it will cancel the rover due to delays and cost overruns.

“NASA intends to discontinue the VIPER mission,” said Nicky Fox, head of the agency’s science mission directorate. “Decisions like this are never easy, and we haven’t made this one, in any way, lightly. In this case, the projected remaining expenses for VIPER would have resulted in either having to cancel or disrupt many other missions in our Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) line.”

NASA has terminated science missions after development delays and cost overruns before, but it’s rare to cancel a mission with a spacecraft that is already built.

The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission was supposed to be a robotic scout for NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface in the next few years. VIPER was originally planned to launch in late 2023 and was slated to fly to the Moon aboard a commercial lander provided by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, which won a contract from NASA in 2020 to deliver the VIPER rover to the lunar surface. Astrobotic is one of 14 companies in the pool of contractors for NASA’s CLPS program, with the goal of transporting government-sponsored science payloads to the Moon.

But VIPER has been delayed at least two years—the most recent schedule projected a launch in September 2025—causing its cost to grow from $433 million to more than $609 million. The ballooning costs automatically triggered a NASA review to determine whether to proceed with the mission or cancel it. Ultimately, officials said they determined NASA couldn’t pay the extra costs for VIPER without affecting other Moon missions.

“Therefore, we’ve made the decision to forego this particular mission, the VIPER mission, in order to be able to sustain the entire program,” Fox said.

“We’re disappointed,” said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic. “It’s certainly difficult news… VIPER has been a great team to work with, and we’re disappointed we won’t get the chance to fly them to the Moon.”

NASA said it will consider “expressions of interest” submitted by US industry and international partners by August 1 for use of the existing VIPER rover at no cost to the government. If NASA can’t find anyone to take over VIPER who can pay to get it to the Moon, the agency plans to disassemble the rover and harvest instruments and components for future lunar missions.

Scientists were dismayed by VIPER’s cancellation.

“It’s absurd, to be honest with you,” said Clive Neal, a planetary geologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It made no sense to me in terms of the economics. You’re canceling a mission that is complete, built, ready to go. It’s in the middle of testing.”

“This is a bad mistake,” wrote Phil Metzger, a planetary physicist at the University of Central Florida, in a post on X. “This was the premier mission to measure lateral and vertical variations of lunar ice in the soil. It would have been revolutionary. Other missions don’t replace what is lost here.”

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REAL LIFE TRACTOR BEAMS? GAME-CHANGING NEW TECHNOLOGY COULD LEAD TO NON-INVASIVE MEDICAL PROCEDURES

Tractor beams, a technology once relegated to science fiction, could soon become a practical reality with the help of recent advancements in metasurface research.

Under development by researchers with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS), the new technology represents “an important first step in the development of metasurface-enabled tractor beams,” which the TMOS team says will be capable of reeling in particles using rays of light.

The science fiction counterparts to this emergent real-life technology have been depicted in films that include Star Wars, where such previously imaginary devices are used to prevent objects such as spacecraft from moving or evading capture.

While real-life tractor beams are still far from matching the power of their fictional analogs, the TMOS researchers say their development of the game-changing new technology draws inspiration from such once-imaginary concepts.

“This work opens new possibilities for using light to exert forces on tiny objects,” said Ken Crozier, the Chief Investigator of the recent research.

MAKING TRACTOR BEAMS A REALITY

The team, led by researchers at the University of Melbourne, reports the creation of a solenoid beam that relies on a special silicon metasurface to generate it.

Solenoid beams have been developed in the past, although these earlier designs mostly rely on devices known as special light modulators, or SLMs. The size of these devices has imposed a limiting factor on their potential use, particularly in handheld applications.

In the team’s new research, outlined in a study that recently appeared in ACS Photonics, they describe the special metasurface developed for their tractor beam technology as an extremely thin (about 1/2000 of a millimeter) layer of nanopatterned silicon, which they believe may one day help to facilitate handheld devices that will allow surgeons to conduct non-invasive biopsies on patients, which would result in less damage to surrounding tissues than current methods.

At the heart of the technology is the understanding that forces exerted by beams of light have the effect of displacing particles, which are moved further from the light source with their passage. However, past research has shown that solenoid beams can draw particles toward their light source, similar to how the grooves in a drill allow the material it cuts into to be pulled upward.

The TMOS researchers say their beam has a few significant advantages over past designs, allowing it to be more flexible and capable of functioning without any need for an SLM. Additionally, its size makes it far more useful in practical, handheld designs while also requiring less power than existing varieties.

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The coincidences inside IT historical crash

Well, as most of you are aware, since I repeat myself occasionally, I try very hard to stick to quality, over quantity but reserve the right to publish different types of articles/e-mails. But also to increase the frequency if the necessity arises, not the case so far, but here this is a reminder of that. Also, the fog of “war” applies here.


In the rare case you live under Linux-based life or use Linux in your enterprise/workplace, or macOS, earlier today we the world suffered what is easily the biggest IT crash in history. You can grasp an idea of the extension by looking at the graph below.

Ironically enough the culprit is also in the image. CrowStrike, a cyber-security company. In fact one of the largest, and biggest single points of failure, cybersec companies on the entire planet. So what happened ?

In simple words, CrowdStrike sent an automated update to all its clients, and its client list is absurdly large. Airports, hospitals, chain stores, banks, innumerable tech companies, automation companies, automotive companies, and other fields of modern human activity in many countries – odds are they may use CrowdStrike.

Their software acts very “deep” into any system that uses it, thus this faulty software update created a loop in any system or server using Windows. Until a few hours ago, this could only be fixed physically, by an IT tech or a knowledgeable person either the faulty archive. This event will billions of dollars in economic damage, and second and third-order effects none of us can predict.

If this was just a fuck up, that is fine, disastrous of course, but “fine”, but I will assume malice. And I messaged a few experts, and read a few hundred messages from InfoSec Twitter, and the sentiment was the same. If this was done maliciously by a threat actor, this leaves us with only two options, given the absurd level of sophistication to pull this off.

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CROWDSTRIKE GLOBAL OUTAGE: No accident

A technical breakdown of the root cause of the world’s biggest IT fuck up is out. If it’s correct, we believe no one should consider this an accident.

Here’s a short, non technical explanation.

Windows contains fundamental programs called drivers that are required for the operating system to work. They are pretty low level software that load in the boot sequence and whenever needed. Users don’t directly interact with them and they don’t appear in Task Manager’s easy view. The user is kept away from them. Drivers have powerful system privileges and access. If essential drivers don’t load, work or are corrupt, Windows can completely crash. That can look like the blue screen of death BSOD.

CrowdStrike make a security software product, Falcon, that is a Windows driver that loads during boot up. The update mechanism for Falcon is within Windows. Users don’t get a direct say. CrowdStrike released an update to the globe that contained a direct, guaranteed fatal coding error.

The coding error in C++ language is fatal because it makes the program try to access a non existent part of the machine’s memory. No machine anywhere will have this memory address. When this access attempt happens, a fatal error results that causes the program to crash. When that program crashes, Windows crashes.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon was intrinsic to Windows boot up, so once a crash happened the machine could never be booted up again until Falcon was literally deleted from the machine’s boot sequence. This requires manual access to the machine in many, many cases. Remote fixing isn’t possible, so “the fix” is very high labour and access. That’s an insanely expensive fix. Literally dudes going to each machine and manually doing the fix over and over.

The above is absolutely fucking insane.

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AI Mass Surveillance at Paris Olympics Will Continue Even After Games End

The 2024 Paris Olympics is drawing the eyes of the world as thousands of athletes and support personnel and hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe converge in France.

It’s not just the eyes of the world that will be watching. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems will be watching, too.

Government and private companies will be using advanced AI tools and other surveillance tech to conduct pervasive and persistent surveillance before, during and after the Games.

The Olympic world stage and international crowds pose increased security risks so significant that in recent years authorities and critics have described the Olympics as the “world’s largest security operations outside of war.”

The French government, hand in hand with the private tech sector, has harnessed that legitimate need for increased security as grounds to deploy technologically advanced surveillance and data-gathering tools.

Its surveillance plans to meet those risks, including the controversial use of experimental AI video surveillance, are so extensive that the country had to change its laws to make the planned surveillance legal.

The plan goes beyond new AI video surveillance systems. According to news reports, the prime minister’s office has negotiated a provisional decree that is classified to permit the government to significantly ramp up traditional, surreptitious surveillance and information-gathering tools for the duration of the Games.

These include wiretapping; collecting geolocation, communications and computer data; and capturing greater amounts of visual and audio data.

I am a law professor and attorney, and I research, teach and write about privacy, artificial intelligence and surveillance. I also provide legal and policy guidance on these subjects to legislators and others.

Increased security risks can and do require increased surveillance. This year, France has faced concerns about its Olympic security capabilities and credible threats around public sporting events.

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NASA SCIENTIST SAYS PATENTED ‘EXODUS EFFECT’ PROPELLANTLESS PROPULSION DRIVE THAT DEFIES PHYSICS IS READY TO GO TO SPACE

A patented experimental propellantless propulsion drive is finally ready to go to space, according to its inventor, a veteran NASA scientist with decades of expertise in electrostatics.

Dr. Charles Buhler, the technology’s creator, says the propulsion system may represent a working version of Quantized Inertia, a theory first proposed by University of Plymouth professor Mike McCulloch. The proposition has been subjected to criticism from mainstream scientists in the past because it seemingly violates Newton’s third law of motion.

The controversial technology, which The Debrief covered in April, is privately owned by Exodus Propulsion Technologies and is not affiliated with NASA.

After almost a decade of research, design, and testing, Buhler says he and his team are confident they have verified the force, one his team calls the Exodus Effect(TM), in “nearly every way conceivable on Earth.” The final step required to officially demonstrate the validity of their discovery is to send the propulsion drive unit into space.

“We’ve done everything we could have in vacuum chambers here on Earth. We’ve tested it every which way you can, but the real validation is to have this thing move in space,” Buhler told The Debrief in a lengthy interview. “That’s the bottom line.”

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Google Plans New Content-Scanning Censorship Tech

Earlier in the year, Google filed an application to patent new methods, systems, and media for what the giant calls “identifying videos containing objectionable content” that are uploaded to a social site or video service.

For example, YouTube – though the filing doesn’t explicitly name this platform.

The patent application, which has just been published this month, is somewhat different from other automated “methods and systems” Google and other giants, notably Microsoft, already have to power their censorship apparatus; with this one, the focus is more on how AI can be added to the mix.

More and more often, various countries are introducing censorship laws where the speed at which content is removed or accounts blocked is a major requirement made of social media companies. Google could have this in mind when the patent’s purpose is said to be to improve on detecting objectionable content quickly, “for potential removal.”

No surprise here, but what should be the key question – namely, what is considered as “objectionable content” – is less of a definition and more a list that can be further expanded, variously interpreted, etc., and the list includes such items as violence, pornography, objectionable language, animal abuse, and then the cherry on top – “and/or any other type of objectionable content.”

The filing details how Google’s new system works, and we equally unsurprisingly learn that AI here means machine learning (ML) and neural networks. This technology is supposed to mimic the human brain but comes down to a series of equations, differentiated from ordinary algorithms by “learning” about what an image (or a video in this case) is, pixel by pixel.

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JUST IN: Trump Would-Be Assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks Had Two Cell Phones and 3 Encrypted Accounts Overseas

Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks had two cell phones and used three encrypted accounts overseas to communicate.

The FBI found Crooks’ second cell phone at his home with only 27 contacts, The Daily Mail reported.

Congressman Mike Waltz told Fox News host Jesse Watters that according to an FBI briefing, Crooks had multiple encrypted accounts and said more will come out Monday.

Rep. Waltz said the Trump shooter had the overseas accounts at the same time we heard about the Iranian assassination plot against Trump.

Jesse Watters asked if the two are connected (they aren’t).

The Intel agencies leaked an Iranian assassination plot story to CNN to throw chaos in the camp and distract from Saturday’s Secret Service failures.

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Danger: Artificial Intelligence Data Centers Are Overwhelming The Global Electrical Grid

The artificial intelligence boom has had such a profound effect on big tech companies that their energy consumption, and with it their carbon emissions, have surged.

The spectacular success of large language models such as ChatGPT has helped fuel this growth in energy demand. At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries require about 10 times the electricity of traditional Google queries, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research firm. Emerging AI capabilities such as audio and video generation are likely to add to this energy demand.

The energy needs of AI are shifting the calculus of energy companies. They’re now exploring previously untenable options, such as restarting a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant that has been dormant since the infamous disaster in 1979.

Data centers have had continuous growth for decades, but the magnitude of growth in the still-young era of large language models has been exceptional. AI requires a lot more computational and data storage resources than the pre-AI rate of data center growth could provide.Data storage has becoming an increasingly concerning problem for electrical grids over the years. With the fast rise of artificial intelligence and its demands, experts warn many grids are already near capacity.

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