An app containing the researchers’ rooting exploit requires no user permissions and doesn’t rely on any vulnerability in Android to work. Instead, their attack exploits a hardware vulnerability, using a Rowhammer exploit that alters crucial bits of data in a way that completely roots name brand Android devices from LG, Motorola, Samsung, OnePlus, and possibly other manufacturers.
Category: Uncategorized
Trump Bunker
The final ignominy for a Republican Party brought low by Trump is that its own digital efforts may undermine its future. The data operation in which Priebus and the RNC invested so heavily has fed into Project Alamo, helping Parscale build Trump’s base. “They brought to the table this movement and people who were willing to donate and activate, and we brought to the table a 4-year investment and said we can process that for you. That willingness to embrace what the RNC built allowed them to harness that movement.” If the election results cause the party to fracture, Trump will be better positioned than the RNC to reach this mass of voters because he’ll own the list himself—and Priebus, after all he’s endured, will become just the latest to invest with Trump and wind up poorer for the experience.
30 days to Mars
ProjectRho has round trip space mission times based on 3 types of rocket missions and 3 levels of constant acceleration. Constant acceleration could be achieved with an antimatter catalyzed fusion propulsion system like Positron Dynamics is developing
15 days 1 way to Mars with a constant 0.01 G acceleration and deceleration.
6 days 1 way to Mars with a constant 0.1G acceleration and deceleration.
2 days 1 way to Mars with a constant 1G acceleration and deceleration.
2022-02-19: It is also possible to get to Mars in 45 with Laser Thermal Propulsion: A Earth-based Laser heats up onboard propellant. This has very promising characteristics:
For lower velocity missions within the solar system, coupling the laser to the spacecraft via a reaction mass (i.e., propellant) is a more efficient way to use the delivered power than reflecting it off a lightsail. Reflecting light only transfers a tiny bit of the photon’s energy to the spacecraft, but absorbing the photon’s energy and putting it into a reaction mass results in greater energy transfer. The greater power that can be delivered results in greater thrust, so a more intense propulsive maneuver can be performed nearer to Earth. The closer to Earth the propulsive burn is, the smaller the laser array needs to be in order to keep the beam focused on the spacecraft, making it more feasible as a near-term demonstration of directed energy propulsion. The scaled-up version of our design (Mission Mars 2a) intended for crewed missions used a 40-ton spacecraft derived from the Orion capsule and European Service Module. The greater payload requires a more powerful (4 GW) laser to effectuate the same 45-day transit to Mars, but the laser array occupies the same 10-m footprint on earth.
The other mission we considered was a cargo mission (Mission Mars 2b). Robert Zubrin often makes the point that—even if advanced propulsion capable of high thrust and high specific impulse was available—he would still opt for a 6-month free-return trajectory and use the enhanced propulsion capability to bring more payload. So, the Mars 2b mission uses the performance of laser thermal propulsion to maximize the amount of cargo that could be brought to Mars with a Hohmann-like transfer, and shows that the payload could be increased by a 10x over what a Centaur upper stage—with the same mass of propellant—could throw to Mars.
Street view Player
The google maps streetview player will take in either a starting point and end point, or a provided file of a route and provide a playthrough of the google streetview images that are available.
40 shipwrecks
The Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project wasn’t looking for shipwrecks. Its brief is to survey the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea for data about the rise water levels after the last Ice Age 20 ka ago. To accomplish this aim, marine archaeologists have been scanning the seabed using cutting edge Remotely Operated Vehicles that can detect land surfaces underneath what is now the Black Sea but in prehistory were on dry land. They’ve also taken core samples, laser scanned and filmed the sea bed both in video and with high resolution 3D photogrammetry. A felicitous but entirely unplanned side-effect of this exceptionally thorough geophysical survey is the discovery of more than 40 historic shipwrecks, including ancient Byzantine, medieval and Ottoman ships. Some of them may even be the first of their kind ever found, previously known only from documentary sources. Such a large, varied group of shipwrecks from different periods will give archaeologists a whole new understanding of trade and maritime links between towns on the coast of the Black Sea.
this is unprecedented, and very awesome
Didi
it is wrong to obsess on uber. didi is way bigger.
“We do 20m rides per day, 3x everyone else, globally, added together.” — Didi Chuxing President Jean Liu at WSJ.D Live. “In September, we are greater than $20b run rate for annual gross bookings.”
London Customs
london is super by the book. see also:
London Is Still Paying Rent to the Queen on a Property Leased in 1211. In a small annual ceremony the city hands over an axe, a knife, 6 horseshoes, and 61 nails.
Constellation Park
earning your keep after you die
Imagine the Manhattan Bridge twinkling from underneath with 100s of small pods filled with decaying biomass – the final resting place of many former New Yorkers, shining like stars in an otherwise dark sky. There, you might lay flowers near a pod containing the remains of a loved one, until decomposition finishes its course and all that remains is a container to keep as a remembrance. This is the vision that is Constellation Park, a shiny new cemetery proposed by DeathLab, a trans-disciplinary research and design space at Columbia University.
$11 Potato chip
Sweetish brewery St. Erik’s has created the world’s most expensive potato chips. The luxurious black box designed by St. Erik’s contains just 5 individual potato chips, each made by hand by a chef, using 5 special Nordic ingredients – Matsutake mushroom picked from pine forests in northern Sweden, truffle seaweed from the waters around the Faroe Islands, Crown Dill hand-picked on the Bjäre Peninsula, Leksand Onion grown on the outskirt of the small Swedish town of Leksand and India Pale Ale Wort, the same kind used to make St. Erik’s Pale Ale beer. The potatoes themselves, are also special. They apparently come “from the potato hillside in Ammarnäs, a steep, stony slope in a south-facing location where almond potatoes are cultivated in very limited numbers. The slope is difficult for modern agricultural machines to access, which means that all potatoes are planted and harvested by hand.”
Maxwell’s Demon
As far back as 1867, physicist James Clerk Maxwell described a hypothetical way to violate the Second Law: if a small theoretical being sat at the door between the hot and cold rooms and only let through particles traveling at a certain speed. This theoretical imp is called “Maxwell’s demon.”
“Although the violation is only on the local scale, the implications are far-reaching. This provides us a platform for the practical realization of a quantum Maxwell’s demon, which could make possible a local quantum perpetual motion machine.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 