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Elliot Page on Juno, Hollywood’s dark side and coming out twice
Sat, 10 Jun 2023 06:00:14 GMT
When the feelgood movie made him an Oscar-nominated star, the strain of hiding who he was almost forced him to quit acting. He explains how opening up about being gay, then trans, saved his life
Elliot Page’s memoir is called Pageboy. At its heart is the story of his transitioning from an Oscar-nominated actress, best known for the wonderful coming-of-age comedy drama Juno, to one of the world’s most high profile trans men. He writes, rather beautifully, about gender dysphoria, top surgery and finally finding himself. But the book is so much more than a tale of transition.
Pageboy is a modern-day Hollywood Babylon, written by a sensitive soul rather than a scandalmonger. Page depicts a film industry even more rancid than we may have suspected. This is a world where it’s not only the Harvey Weinsteins at the top of the pyramid who get to abuse the young and powerless – just about everybody seems to have a go. It’s a world where most people appear to be closeted in one way or another, a world where more acting is done off set than on.
Continue reading...No one wants to see the cast naked any more, so this TV follow-up shuns stripping for comic capers and cost-of-living tragedy. Even better, it actually gives plotlines to the female characters
Television shows that remake films tend to be exercises in pointless nostalgia. Do you remember the movies Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons and American Gigolo? Yes. Would you like to watch a weird cosplay version of them that goes on for 10 hours and confusingly reshuffles the plot? Um, not really. The Full Monty (from 14 June, Disney+) is the latest entrant in an already tired genre, but it has one up on most of the competition: all the core cast are in that sweet spot where they’re successful enough to be worth rehiring but not so famous they’ve turned the reboot down. That means there’s no need to rejig the story of redundant Sheffield steelworkers who, in 1997, found solace in hard times by forming a Chippendales-style male striptease troupe. We simply return to Sheffield 26 years later, to find the same characters, played by the same actors, living the same lives.
The film had it easy, plot-wise, in that it built towards that heartwarming climactic moment when a sextet of men showed the local community their penises. Those six appendages were the pegs on which were hung serious subtexts about the misery of life in a Thatcher-ravaged, deindustrialised northern England. A quarter of a century on, however, the prospect of the old boys windmilling their hosepipes in housewives’ faces would horrify everyone. So the new Full Monty is fully clothes-on.
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Animation has come a long way since 1900, when J. Stuart Blackton created The Enchanted Drawing, the earliest known animated film. The 90-second movie was created using stop-motion techniques, as flat characters, props, and backgrounds were drawn on an easel or made from paper.
Most modern animators rely on computer graphics and visualization techniques to create popular movies and TV shows like Finding Dory, Toy Story, and Paw Patrol. In the 1960s and ’70s, computer science pioneers David Evans and IEEE Life Member Ivan E. Sutherland led the development of many of the technologies animators now use. Their groundbreaking research, conducted at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, and at their company, Evans and Sutherland, helped jump-start the computer graphics industry.
A ceremony was held at the university on 24 March to recognize the computer graphics and visualization techniques with an IEEE Milestone. The IEEE Utah Section sponsored the nomination.
Computer graphics began in the 1950s with interactive games and visualization tools designed by the U.S. military to develop technologies for aviation, radar, and rocketry.
Evans and Sutherland, then computer science professors at the University of Utah, wanted to expand on the use of such tools by finding a way for computers to simulate objects and environments. In 1968 they founded Evans and Sutherland, locating the E&S headquarters in the university’s research park.
Many of today’s computer graphics luminaries—including Pixar cofounder Edwin Catmull, Adobe cofounder John Warnock, and Netscape founder Jim Clark, who also founded Silicon Graphics—got their start in the industry as E&S employees or as doctoral students working on research at the company’s facilities.
IEEE Milestone Dedication: Utah Computer Graphics youtu.be
While at E&S, the employees and students made fundamental contributions to computer graphics processes, says IEEE Fellow Christopher Johnson, a University of Utah computer science professor.
“David Evans, Ivan Sutherland, and their students and colleagues helped change the world,” Johnson says.
“The period from 1968 through 1978 was an extraordinary time for computer graphics,” adds Brian Berg, IEEE Region 6 history chair. “There was a rare confluence of faculty, students, staff, facilities, and resources to support research into computer vision algorithms and hardware that produced remarkable developments in computer graphics and visualization techniques. This research was responsible for the birth of much of continuous-tone computer graphics as we know it today.” Continuous-tone computer graphics have a virtually unlimited range of color and shades of gray.
Evans began his career in 1955 at Bendix—an aviation electronics company in Avon, Ohio—as manager of a project that aimed to develop an early personal computer. He left to join the University of California, Berkeley, as chair of its computer science department. He also headed Berkeley’s research for the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Project Agency (now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
In 1963 Evans became a principal investigator for ARPA’s Project Genie. He helped develop hardware techniques that enabled commercial use of time-shared computer systems.
In 1965 the University of Utah hired him to establish its computer science department after receiving an ARPA grant of US $5 million to investigate how the emerging field of computer graphics could play a role in the country’s technological competitiveness, according to Computer Graphics and Computer Animation.
In 1968 Evans asked Sutherland, a former colleague at Berkeley who was then an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard, to join him at the University of Utah, luring him with the promise of starting a company together. Sutherland was already famous in computer graphics circles, having created Sketchpad, the first computer-aided design program, for his Ph.D. thesis in 1963 at MIT.
The two founded E&S almost as soon as Sutherland arrived, and they began working on computer-based simulation systems.
The duo in 1969 developed the line-drawing system displays LDS-1 and LDS-2, the first graphics devices with a processing unit. They then built the E&S Picture System—the next generation of LDS displays.
Those workstations, as they were called, came to be used by most computer-generated-imagery production companies through the 1980s.
E&S also developed computer-based simulation systems for military and commercial training, including the CT5 and CT6 flight simulators.
In addition to hiring employees, E&S welcomed computer science doctoral students from the university to work on their research projects at the company.
“Almost every influential person in the modern computer-graphics community either passed through the University of Utah or came into contact with it in some way,” Robert Rivlin wrote in his book, The Algorithmic Image: Graphic Visions of the Computer Age.
One of the doctoral students was Henri Gouraud, who in 1971 developed an algorithm to simulate the differing effects of light and color across the surface of an object. The Gouraud shading method is still used by creators of video games and cartoons.
In 1974 Edwin Catmull, then also a doctoral student at the university, developed the principle of texture mapping, a method for adding complexity to a computer-generated surface. Catmull went on to help found Pixar in 1986 with computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith, an IEEE member. For his work in the industry, Catmull received the 2006 IEEE John von Neumann Medal.
Doctoral student Bui Tuong Phong in 1973 devised Phong shading, a modeling method that reflects light so computer-generated graphics can look shiny and plasticlike.
“As a group, the University of Utah contributed more to the field of knowledge in computer graphics than any of its contemporaries,” Berg wrote in the Milestone proposal. “That fact is made most apparent both in the widespread use of the techniques developed and in the body of awards the innovations garnered.” The awards include several scientific and technical Oscars, an Emmy, and many IEEE medals.
Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world.
The Milestone plaque displayed on a granite obelisk outside of the University of Utah’s Merrill engineering building reads:
In 1965 the University of Utah established a Center of Excellence for computer graphics research with Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funding. In 1968 two professors founded the pioneering graphics hardware company Evans & Sutherland; by 1978, fundamental rendering and visualization techniques disclosed in doctoral dissertations included the Warnock algorithm, Gouraud shading, the Catmull-Rom spline, and the Blinn-Phong reflection model. Alumni-founded companies include Atari, Silicon Graphics, Adobe, Pixar, and Netscape.
A group of researchers from NASA, MIT, and other institutions have achieved the fastest space-to-ground laser-communication link yet, doubling the record they set last year. With data rates of 200 gigabits per second, a satellite could transmit more than 2 terabytes of data—roughly as much as 1,000 high-definition movies—in a single 5-minute pass over a ground station.
“The implications are far-reaching because, put simply, more data means more discoveries,” says Jason Mitchell, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation program.
The new communications link was made possible with the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system orbiting about 530 kilometers above Earth’s surface. Launched into space last May, TBIRD achieved downlink rates of up to 100 Gb/s with a ground-based receiver in California by last June. This was 100 times as fast as the quickest Internet speeds in most cities, and more than 1,000 times as fast as radio links traditionally used for communications with satellites.
The fastest data networks on Earth typically rely on laser communications over fiber optics. However, a high-speed laser-based Internet does not exist yet for satellites. Instead, space agencies and commercial satellite operators most commonly use radio to communicate with objects in space. The infrared light that laser communications can employ has a much higher frequency than radio waves, enabling much higher data rates.
“There are satellites currently in orbit limited by the amount of data they are able to downlink, and this trend will only increase as more capable satellites are launched,” says Kat Riesing, an aerospace engineer and a staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on the TBIRD team. “Even a hyperspectral imager—HISUI on the International Space Station—has to send data back to Earth via storage drives on cargo ships due to limitations on downlink rates. TBIRD is a big enabler for missions that collect important data on Earth’s climate and resources, as well as astrophysics applications such as black hole imaging.”
MIT Lincoln Laboratory conceived TBIRD in 2014 as a low-cost, high-speed way to access data on spacecraft. A key way it reduced expenses was by using commercial, off-the-shelf components originally developed for terrestrial use. These include high-rate optical modems developed for fiber telecommunications and high-speed large-volume storage to hold data, Riesing says.
Located onboard NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 (PTD-3) satellite, TBIRD was carried into orbit on SpaceX’s Transporter-5 rideshare mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on 25 May 2022. The PTD-3 satellite is a roughly 12-kilogram CubeSat about the size of two stacked cereal boxes, and its TBIRD payload is no larger than the average tissue box. “Industry’s drive to small, low-power, high-data-rate optical transceivers enabled us to achieve a compact form factor suitable even for small satellites,” Mitchell says.
“There are satellites currently in orbit limited by the amount of data they are able to downlink, and this trend will only increase as more-capable satellites are launched.” —Kat Riesing, aerospace engineer, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
The development of TBIRD faced a number of challenges. To start with, terrestrial components are not designed to survive the rigors of launching to and operating in space. For example, during a thermal test simulating the extreme temperatures the devices might face in space, the fibers in the optical signal amplifier melted.
The problem was that, when used as originally intended, the atmosphere could help cool the amplifier through convection. When tested in a vacuum, simulating space, the heat that the amplifier generated was trapped. To solve the issue, the researchers worked with the amplifier’s vendor to modify it so that it released heat through conduction instead.
In addition, laser beams from space to Earth can experience distortion from atmospheric effects and weather conditions. This can cause power loss, and in turn data loss, for the beams.
To compensate, the scientists developed their own version of automatic repeat request (ARQ), a protocol for controlling errors in data transmission over a communications link. In this arrangement, the ground terminal uses a low-rate uplink signal to let the satellite know that it has to retransmit any block of data, or frame, that has been lost or damaged. The new protocol lets the ground station tell the satellite which frames it received correctly, so the satellite knows which ones to retransmit and not waste time sending data it doesn’t have to.
Another challenge the scientists faced stemmed from how lasers form in much narrower beams than radio transmissions. For successful data transmission, these beams must be aimed precisely at their receivers. This is often accomplished by mounting the laser on a gimbal. Due to TBIRD’s small size, however, it instead maneuvers the CubeSat carrying it to point it at the ground, using any error signals it receives to correct the satellite’s orientation. This gimbal-less strategy also helped further shrink TBIRD, making it cheaper to launch.
TBIRD’s architecture can support multiple channels through wavelength separation to enable higher data rates, Riesing says. This is how TBIRD accomplished a 200-Gb/s downlink on 28 April—by using two 100-Gb/s channels, she explains. “This can scale further on a future mission if the link is designed to support it,” Riesing notes.
“Put simply, more data means more discoveries.” —Jason Mitchell, aerospace engineer, NASA
The research team’s next step is to explore where to apply this technology in upcoming missions. “This technology is particularly useful for science missions where collecting a lot of data can provide significant benefits,” Riesing says. “One mission concept that is enabled by this is the Event Horizon Explorer mission, which will extend the exciting work of the Event Horizon Telescope in imaging black holes with even higher resolution.”
The scientists also want to explore how to extend this technology to different scenarios, such as geostationary orbit, Riesing says. Moreover, Mitchell says, they are looking at ways to push TBIRD’s capabilities as far away as the moon, in order to support future missions there. The rates under consideration are in the 1- to 5-Gb/s range, which “may not seem like much of an improvement, but remember the moon is roughly 400,000 km away from Earth, which is quite a long distance to cover,” Mitchell says.
The new technology may also find use in high-speed atmospheric data links on the ground. “For example, from building to building, or across inhospitable terrain, such as from mountaintop to mountaintop, where the cost of laying fiber systems could be exorbitant,” Riesing says.
On a gin-clear December day, I’m sitting under the plexiglass bubble of a radically new kind of aircraft. It’s a little past noon at the Byron Airport in northern California; in the distance, a jagged line of wind turbines atop rolling hills marks the Altamont Pass, blades spinning lazily. Above me, a cloudless blue sky beckons.
The aircraft, called BlackFly, is unlike anything else on the planet. Built by a Palo Alto, Calif., startup called Opener, it’s an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft with stubby wings fore and aft of the pilot, each with four motors and propellers. Visually, it’s as though an aerial speedster from a 1930s pulp sci-fi story has sprung from the page.
There are a couple of hundred startups designing or flying eVTOLs. But only a dozen or so are making tiny, technologically sophisticated machines whose primary purpose is to provide exhilarating but safe flying experiences to people after relatively minimal training. And in that group, Opener has jumped out to an early lead, having built dozens of aircraft at its facilities in Palo Alto and trained more than a score of people to fly them.
My own route to the cockpit of a BlackFly was relatively straightforward. I contacted the company’s CEO, Ken Karklin, in September 2022, pitched him on the idea of a story and video, and three months later I was flying one of his aircraft.
Well, sort of flying it. My brief flight was so highly automated that I was more passenger than pilot. Nevertheless, I spent about a day and a half before the flight being trained to fly the machine manually, so that I could take control if anything went wrong. For this training, I wore a virtual-reality headset and sat in a chair that tilted and gyrated to simulate flying maneuvers. To “fly” this simulation I manipulated a joystick that was identical to the one in the cockpit of a BlackFly. Opener’s chief operating officer, Kristina L. Menton, and engineer Wyatt Warner took turns patiently explaining the operations of the vehicle and giving me challenging tasks to complete, such as hovering and performing virtual landings in a vicious crosswind.
The BlackFly is entirely controlled by that joystick, which is equipped with a trigger and also topped by a thumb switch. To take off, I squeeze the trigger while simultaneously pushing forward on the switch. The machine leaps into the air with the sound of a million bees, and with a surge of giddy elation I am climbing skyward.
Much more so than an airplane or helicopter, the BlackFly taps into archetypal human yearnings for flight, the kind represented by magic carpets, the flying cars in “The Jetsons,” and even those Mountain Banshees in the movie “Avatar.” I’ve had several unusual experiences in aircraft, including flying on NASA’s zero-gravity-simulating “Vomit Comet,” and being whisked around in a BlackFly was definitely the most absorbing and delightful. Gazing out over the Altamont Pass from an altitude of about 60 meters, I had a feeling of joyous release—from Earth’s gravity and from earthly troubles.
For technical details about the BlackFly and to learn more about its origin, go here.
The BlackFly is also a likely harbinger of things to come. Most of the startups developing eVTOLs are building vehicles meant to carry several passengers on commercial runs of less than 50 kilometers. Although the plan is for these to be flown by pilots initially, most of the companies anticipate a day when the flights will be completely automated. So specialized aircraft such as the BlackFly—designed to be registered and operated as “ultralight” aircraft under aviation regulations—could provide mountains of invaluable data on highly and fully automated flying and perhaps even help familiarize people with the idea of flying without a pilot. Indeed, during my flight, dozens of sensors gathered gigabytes of data, to add to the large reservoir Opener has already collected during many hundreds of test flights so far.
As of late February 2023, Opener hadn’t yet announced a retail price or an official commercial release date for the aircraft, which has been under development and testing for more than a decade. I’ll be keeping an eye out for further news of the company. Long after my flight was over I was still savoring the experience, and hoping for another one.
Special thanks to IEEE.tv for collaborating on production of this video.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the most popular digital assets today, capturing the attention of cryptocurrency investors, whales and people from around the world. People find it amazing that some users spend thousands or millions of dollars on a single NFT-based image of a monkey or other token, but you can simply take a screenshot for free. So here we share some freuently asked question about NFTs.
NFT stands for non-fungible token, which is a cryptographic token on a blockchain with unique identification codes that distinguish it from other tokens. NFTs are unique and not interchangeable, which means no two NFTs are the same. NFTs can be a unique artwork, GIF, Images, videos, Audio album. in-game items, collectibles etc.
A blockchain is a distributed digital ledger that allows for the secure storage of data. By recording any kind of information—such as bank account transactions, the ownership of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), or Decentralized Finance (DeFi) smart contracts—in one place, and distributing it to many different computers, blockchains ensure that data can’t be manipulated without everyone in the system being aware.
The value of an NFT comes from its ability to be traded freely and securely on the blockchain, which is not possible with other current digital ownership solutionsThe NFT points to its location on the blockchain, but doesn’t necessarily contain the digital property. For example, if you replace one bitcoin with another, you will still have the same thing. If you buy a non-fungible item, such as a movie ticket, it is impossible to replace it with any other movie ticket because each ticket is unique to a specific time and place.
One of the unique characteristics of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is that they can be tokenised to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought, sold and traded on the blockchain.
As with crypto-currency, records of who owns what are stored on a ledger that is maintained by thousands of computers around the world. These records can’t be forged because the whole system operates on an open-source network.
NFTs also contain smart contracts—small computer programs that run on the blockchain—that give the artist, for example, a cut of any future sale of the token.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) aren't cryptocurrencies, but they do use blockchain technology. Many NFTs are based on Ethereum, where the blockchain serves as a ledger for all the transactions related to said NFT and the properties it represents.5) How to make an NFT?
Anyone can create an NFT. All you need is a digital wallet, some ethereum tokens and a connection to an NFT marketplace where you’ll be able to upload and sell your creations
When you purchase a stock in NFT, that purchase is recorded on the blockchain—the bitcoin ledger of transactions—and that entry acts as your proof of ownership.
The value of an NFT varies a lot based on the digital asset up for grabs. People use NFTs to trade and sell digital art, so when creating an NFT, you should consider the popularity of your digital artwork along with historical statistics.
In the year 2021, a digital artist called Pak created an artwork called The Merge. It was sold on the Nifty Gateway NFT market for $91.8 million.
Non-fungible tokens can be used in investment opportunities. One can purchase an NFT and resell it at a profit. Certain NFT marketplaces let sellers of NFTs keep a percentage of the profits from sales of the assets they create.
Many people want to buy NFTs because it lets them support the arts and own something cool from their favorite musicians, brands, and celebrities. NFTs also give artists an opportunity to program in continual royalties if someone buys their work. Galleries see this as a way to reach new buyers interested in art.
There are many places to buy digital assets, like opensea and their policies vary. On top shot, for instance, you sign up for a waitlist that can be thousands of people long. When a digital asset goes on sale, you are occasionally chosen to purchase it.
To mint an NFT token, you must pay some amount of gas fee to process the transaction on the Etherum blockchain, but you can mint your NFT on a different blockchain called Polygon to avoid paying gas fees. This option is available on OpenSea and this simply denotes that your NFT will only be able to trade using Polygon's blockchain and not Etherum's blockchain. Mintable allows you to mint NFTs for free without paying any gas fees.
The answer is no. Non-Fungible Tokens are minted on the blockchain using cryptocurrencies such as Etherum, Solana, Polygon, and so on. Once a Non-Fungible Token is minted, the transaction is recorded on the blockchain and the contract or license is awarded to whoever has that Non-Fungible Token in their wallet.
You can sell your work and creations by attaching a license to it on the blockchain, where its ownership can be transferred. This lets you get exposure without losing full ownership of your work. Some of the most successful projects include Cryptopunks, Bored Ape Yatch Club NFTs, SandBox, World of Women and so on. These NFT projects have gained popularity globally and are owned by celebrities and other successful entrepreneurs. Owning one of these NFTs gives you an automatic ticket to exclusive business meetings and life-changing connections.
That’s a wrap. Hope you guys found this article enlightening. I just answer some question with my limited knowledge about NFTs. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to drop them in the comment section below. Also I have a question for you, Is bitcoin an NFTs? let me know in The comment section below
Indictment accuses former president of risking national security, foreign relations, safety of US military and intelligence gathering
The US senate judiciary committee chairman, Dick Durbin, has said the investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith should be allowed to continue “without interference”.
In a statement on Friday, Durbin added that Donald Trump “should be afforded the due process protections that he is guaranteed by our constitution, just like any other American”.
I think before the sun sets today, the attorney general of the United States should be standing in front of the American people, should unseal this indictment, should provide the American people with all the facts and information here.
And the American people be able to judge for themselves whether this is just the latest incident of weaponization and politicization at the justice department or it’s something different.
Continue reading...Donald Trump’s latest charges are just the beginning of his legal woes, but Republicans are standing by their man.
The post How Many Indictments Does It Take to Bring Down a Cult Leader? appeared first on The Intercept.
The fight could influence whether Georgia stays blue in 2024’s Senate and presidential races.
The post No One Believes in Cop City. So Why Did Atlanta’s City Council Fund It? appeared first on The Intercept.
Rufo’s Documentary Foundation received an influx of untraceable money in 2021, as his national profile grew.
The post Funded by Dark Money, Chris Rufo’s Nonprofit Stokes the Far Right’s Culture War appeared first on The Intercept.
A prominent set of progressive leaders are coming to the defense of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, whose administration is facing a cascading series of struggles.
The post Group of Global Leftist Leaders Warns “Soft Coup” Is Underway in Colombia appeared first on The Intercept.
In an interview with The Intercept, the ousted Pakistani prime minister, just released from arrest, accuses the country’s military of deepening a political crisis.
The post Imran Khan: U.S. Was Manipulated by Pakistan Military Into Backing Overthrow appeared first on The Intercept.
Agatha Christie explains why Donald Trump is the first president to be indicted.
The post Trump’s Mistake Was Committing Small Crimes by Himself appeared first on The Intercept.
A growing number of countries are preparing to shift from using the U.S. dollar in trade, which could undermine the greenback’s global supremacy.
The post Monetary Blowback: How U.S. Wars, Sanctions, and Hegemony Are Threatening the Dollar’s Reserve Currency Dominance appeared first on The Intercept.
The definition conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. A new report details how it’s been used to justify punitive action against Palestine advocates in Europe.
The post Biden Embraces Antisemitism Definition That Has Upended Free Speech in Europe appeared first on The Intercept.
Democrats and Republicans have previously joined hands to support the invasion of Iraq, huge corporate tax cuts, and more.
The post The Debt Limit Bill: Yet Another Triumph for Bipartisanship appeared first on The Intercept.
Newspaper retains considerable influence among those who will shape the direction of Conservatives
Whoever buys the Daily Telegraph is not just purchasing a historic and profitable newspaper – they are acquiring direct access to Tory party members who will control the future direction of the Conservatives.
Paul Goodman, the editor of ConservativeHome, said the newspaper retained “considerable” influence among the approximately 160,000 card-carrying members of the party’s rank and file who vote in leadership elections and MP selections.
Continue reading...There’s no telling how many indictments he will collect before the election. And the sad fact is that his party doesn’t seem to care
Donald Trump announced his latest indictment last night in front of a painting of a guy literally twirling his moustache. “I am an innocent man,” the former president insisted, next to this cartoon shorthand for villainy. The oil painting in question is not so much an artwork as a lift-music version of an artwork, and seems to hang at Trump’s Bedminster golf club in New Jersey – which is the same place he buried his former wife Ivana, as all admirers of both exquisite taste and private-cemetery tax breaks may already know. Either way, Ivana’s there, right near the first tee. It’s what she would have wanted.
As for her surviving ex-husband, it’s fashionable to say that anything that would represent a catastrophic setback for any other human being is exactly what Trump would have wanted. By this metric, his indictment on federal charges for the first time, including under the Espionage Act, is an absolute gift and a triumph. He’ll use it to pull in fundraising, it’ll rally his base, it’ll make every Republican beta – which is to say, every Republican – feel they have to swear loyalty to him. Furthermore, it’s already got him right where he most loves to be: with everyone talking about him. And these are all reasonable points – or at least reasonable in a through-the-looking-glass way, given that to many outside observers the United States passed reason two or three election cycles ago. If only they could invade themselves to bring democracy.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
On Tuesday 13 June, Marina Hyde will join Gary Younge at a Guardian Live event in Brighton. Readers can join this event in person
What Just Happened?! by Marina Hyde (Guardian Faber, £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading...Whether to pardon January 6 convicts will be the most revealing question of the Republican primary.
The post Oath Keepers Leader Stewart Rhodes Says He’s a Political Prisoner. Republicans Are Listening. appeared first on The Intercept.
Ex-Serco chief Rupert Soames says financial support was for ‘friend’ and prospective MP Angus MacDonald
Rupert Soames, the grandson of the Conservative wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, has donated nearly £5,000 to a prospective Liberal Democrat MP.
Soames, who spent most of his career in the City, most recently running outsourcer Serco, gave £4,999 in financial support to the Liberal Democrats in March, according to official records released this week.
Continue reading...An astonishing picture emerges of the town’s demise from ‘premier business location’ to bankruptcy
In the autumn of 2020, the Tory leader of Woking council announced he was stepping down. In his valedictory speech, David Bittleston insisted Woking was not merely the best council in the country but was going places. “Ahead of us, this borough has an exciting future,” he declared.
Bittleston’s self-congratulatory boosterism was par for the course. He and the town’s municipal leaders were signed up to a grandiose high-rise vision that would transform the modest commuter town in leafy Surrey into a glittering modern city, Singapore-style economic hub and “premier global business location”.
Continue reading...Facing questions about Gail Gitcho’s work as a foreign agent, the GOP-affiliated Women’s Democracy Network scrubbed her from its site.
The post GOP Lobbyist Claimed to Be “Empowering Women” — but Worked for Saudi Theocracy’s LIV Golf appeared first on The Intercept.
The intelligence report described the demonstrations as a “violent far-left occupation” — a phrase copied directly from an article by Ngo a day earlier.
The post DHS Intel Report on Cop City Protesters Cribbed Far-Right Activist Andy Ngo appeared first on The Intercept.
Johnson’s departure from political life comes less than four years after he won an 80-seat general election majority
We’ve got a bit more from Ed Davey, who has accused Boris Johnson of having “a track record of deceit and lies”.
I never thought he was fit to be an MP, let alone prime minister. He has a track record of deceit and lies.
But I hope today is not just about Boris Johnson. I think it’s about the whole Conservative party who put him there in the first place.
I think there should actually be a general election.
I think the chaos and division in the Conservative party, the fact that they’re so out of touch on the cost of living, on the NHS, it means we’ve got to put the country out of its misery with these Conservatives.
Continue reading...From snap-election success and surviving Covid to sleaze, the ‘chumocracy’, police fines and finally quitting parliament
Continue reading...State-led public investment is needed to repair a decade of cuts. Labour should say so, not cleave to failed orthodoxies
The gap between the political narrative and life as experienced by the average voter is widening dramatically. The United Kingdom faces serious economic, environmental and social crises that will deepen without shifts in policy. Yet there is little sense of impending doom among the country’s politicians.
A decade of upheaval has produced not radical change, but a renewal of a failed consensus. This suits the Conservative party, which, after 13 years in power, offers the dead weight of bankrupt intellectual habits. However, Labour’s U-turn over one of its rare transformational policies, to spend £28bn a year from day one of being in office on green investment, leaves it looking pusillanimous and complacent about its poll lead.
Continue reading...Trump took steps to retain classified documents subpoenaed by the justice department, according to indictment
Donald Trump twice disclosed national security information in separate incidents in 2021 and took steps to retain classified documents that he knew he could not keep because they had been subpoenaed by the justice department, according to the sprawling 37-count indictment unsealed Friday.
The charging papers also revealed Trump hoarded materials of the highest sensitivity after he left the White House, including documents on US nuclear programs, potential military vulnerabilities of the US and allies, and plans for US retaliation in the event of an attack.
Continue reading...The would-be president and the US right look ready to side with Putin, and walk away from a fight the free world must win
The war for Ukraine gets darker and more terrifying, and now a new front has opened up many miles away – in a US Republican party whose biggest players are itching to abandon Ukraine to its fate.
Proof of the conflict’s deepening horror came this week, with the destruction on Tuesday of the Kakhovka dam in Russian-controlled Ukraine, releasing a body of water so massive it’s best imagined not as a reservoir but as a great lake. The result has been the flooding of a vast swath of terrain, forcing thousands to abandon their homes and flee for their lives. But the menaces unleashed by this act go further than the immediate and devastating effect on the people who live close by.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...President apologises for second time in a week as politics and media embroiled in #MeToo allegations
Taiwan’s ruling party has been rocked by a wave of sexual harassment allegations, as the country grapples with a #MeToo movement that has encompassed politics and the media.
On Tuesday, President Tsai Ing-wen apologised for the second time in a week in response to sexual harassment claims against senior staff in the Democratic Progressive party (DPP). “Our society as a whole must educate ourselves again. People in sexual harassment incidents are victims,” she wrote in a Facebook post.
Continue reading...After more than a decade of 80-hour working weeks, the member for Brighton Pavilion is standing down. What has she achieved as the only Green in the Commons? And does that feel like failure or success?
In the garden of a cafe in the middle of her Brighton Pavilion constituency, Caroline Lucas is eight hours into her bombshell day: the country’s only Green MP has just announced that she won’t stand again for election. She went from a squeaky, 1,200, didn’t-see-that-coming majority in 2010 to a don’t-bother-counting-them almost 20,000 majority in 2019, and has ascended to that very rare status with many of her constituents: it doesn’t matter whether or not you agree with her, you vote for her anyway. It would be rude not to: she works so hard and makes so much sense.
She has the very short hair of a person who doesn’t have time for hair, estimates that she works “75 or 80 hours a week” and looks harried but undefeated. I already knew she wasn’t going to stand again, obviously – that’s why I’m here. But I still can’t quite believe it, and keep opening my mouth to start a question that turns out to be nothing but “but”: “But you’re an institution … But your constituents love you … But you actually make things happen; who else is going to do that? … But there’s so much still to do.”
Continue reading...Some newspapers focus on former PM’s accusations in fiery resignation letter, while others point readers towards damning committee report
Boris Johnson’s departure from life as an MP ahead of the publication of the Partygate report plays out across Saturday’s front pages, which are filled with a mixture of acrimony, triumph and predictions of further “Tory bloodletting”.
The Guardian focuses on the reason for his decision to resign as MP, noting that the privileges committee found he misled parliament and recommended a lengthy suspension from the House of Commons. It finds a spot lower down for the reaction to Rishi Sunak approving Johnson’s honours list, regarded as rewarding those involved in the Partygate scandal.
Continue reading...Committee found former prime minister had misled the House of Commons and recommended lengthy suspension
Boris Johnson is standing down immediately as a Conservative MP after an investigation into the Partygate scandal found he misled parliament and recommended a lengthy suspension from the House of Commons.
The former prime minister angrily accused the investigation of trying to drive him out, and claimed there was a “witch-hunt under way, to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result”.
Continue reading...The ex-prime minister’s surprise resignation as an MP followed a collapse in his popularity that is likely to be terminal
When Boris Johnson sat down to draft his resignation statement after learning the privileges committee had concluded that he lied to MPs over Partygate, he was determined to leave his enemies – on both sides of the Commons – a clear message.
“It is very sad to be leaving parliament,” he wrote. “At least for now …” That he still harbours hopes of a comeback – despite the damage that he has done to his own reputation, the Conservative party brand and to the country more widely – should surprise nobody.
Continue reading...PM gives green light to list that also includes knighthood for Jacob Rees-Mogg and damehood for Priti Patel
Rishi Sunak has been accused of allowing Boris Johnson to hand out rewards to those involved in the Partygate scandal, including more than 40 honours and peerages for his closest allies at the time.
The prime minister faced criticism for approving the list despite police looking at fresh potential evidence of rule-breaking in Downing Street and Chequers during lockdown, as well as an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into whether Johnson misled the Commons.
Continue reading...Former PM says he is standing down as an MP and he has been driven out of parliament
Here is the full text of Boris Johnson’s resignation statement:
Johnson wrote:
I have received a letter from the privileges committee making it clear – much to my amazement – that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of parliament.
They have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons.
Continue reading...The ex-PM leaves parliament with a list evoking all that was wrong with his chaotic and damaging years in office
If nothing became Boris Johnson more than the manner of his leaving No 10, nothing says more about the political rot he accelerated than the honours list that trails behind him and his announcement on Friday night that he will quit parliament having been told he faces ignominious suspension.
To scan the list that was perhaps his final act in frontline politics is to relive the era of cronyism and maladministration that he inflicted on the country. It redefined the very idea of honours as a reward for public service, replacing it with the sort of cheap favour you bestow on friends by buying them a seaside hat or a round in the pub.
Hugh Muir is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...PM and Labour leader to set out views but experts say UK unlikely to become home of global regulator
Rishi Sunak will set out his views on artificial intelligence next week to an audience of technology industry insiders during a keynote speech at London Tech Week. Twenty-four hours later, Keir Starmer will do the same.
The prime minister and the Labour leader have a habit of speaking at the same venue within a day of each other – they did so at the beginning of the year when setting out their competing visions for the country from the same room at the Olympic Park in east London.
Continue reading...Political messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio breaks down the art of reframing the debate for progressives to win.
The post A Dmitri Rebuttal by Messaging Expert Anat Shenker-Osorio appeared first on The Intercept.
Opposition leaders have begun to plan for the end of the regime – and some believe it is now inevitable
Is Russia about to experience a period of dramatic political change? If so, can exiled democratic forces unite into a coherent bloc, and is there any way for them to force themselves on to the political scene?
Nearly 300 exiled Russian opposition politicians and activists gathered to discuss these questions in the European parliament earlier this week, the congress coming as news broke of the Nova Kakhovka dam destruction, the latest grim episode in Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
Continue reading...David Johnston blames resignation on ‘highly partisan atmosphere’ surrounding his investigation in China’s alleged election interference
A Canadian official appointed to investigate allegations that China attempted to subvert the country’s federal elections has abruptly resigned, blaming the “highly partisan atmosphere” surrounding his work.
David Johnston was appointed in March amid concerns that Justin Trudeau’s government had failed to respond adequately to the threat of foreign interference in the last two elections.
Continue reading...A raft of states are looking to restrict property purchases by citizens of U.S. adversaries like China and Iran. Democrats in Washington are pushing back.
The post U.S. Lawmakers Seek to Preempt State-Level Bans on Foreigners Buying Property appeared first on The Intercept.
Money will go to councils across Britain to help Ukrainians secure private rented housing and find work
A £150m fund to help Ukrainians into their own homes has been announced by the UK government.
More than 124,000 people have arrived in the UK under the Homes for Ukraine scheme since Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year.
Continue reading...More pain could follow the calamities of Wasps, Worcester and London Irish but the drive exists to fight for rugby’s future
Sometimes it is not the iceberg’s fault. Had the captains of some of English club rugby’s largest vessels been more focused on avoiding this season’s multiple shipwrecks they could easily have steered a more prudent course. Hindsight always helps but if your outgoings constantly exceed your income you are bound to sink eventually, as Worcester, Wasps and now London Irish can testify.
Most painful for those most deeply affected, perhaps, is that even the most myopic of lookouts could recognise this ever-present threat. Yet for whatever reason – arrogance, selfishness, greed, complacency, poor governance – the clubs and their governing body remained in thrall to the same old flawed model. Rich benefactor equals rugby success, right? Not if they ignore the basic tenets of sound business practice it won’t.
Continue reading...Having served a 22-month ban for failing a drugs test, the sprinter wants to make up for lost time after making a low-key return
Hidden in plain sight among the teenagers and pensioners who have paid their £14 entry fee to compete at the Lee Valley Sprint Night is a Team GB star who has not stepped onto the track since failing a drugs test at the Tokyo Olympics; a contrite athlete seeking a new beginning.
Cheered on by his close friend Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake – one of the British quartet who lost their Olympic 4x100 metres silver medal because of his actions – CJ Ujah does what for so long had been commonplace: he wins a race. Two, in fact.
Continue reading...Swift investment would make any Labour government a climate and economic leader – so why the dithering?
As wildfire smoke engulfs much of the east coast of the US and average global temperatures continue to rise, with the world imminently facing some of the hottest years on record, it would be an error of judgment for the Labour party to delay its green investment pledge. Doing so would not only be a mistake for our economy and the climate, but also threaten Labour’s electoral prospects, given strong public demand for bold action on this issue.
Together with its world-leading promise to end all new domestic oil and gas developments, the Labour party’s £28bn-a-year investment pledge to green industries marks the scale of climate ambition we need to see from a future British government. These commitments mark Labour out as a potential major climate leader and, like Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the investment pledge clearly demonstrates that the party is in tune with the economic realities of today’s world.
Rebecca Newsom is head of politics at Greenpeace
Continue reading...Exclusive: Natural England chair Tony Juniper says government must work quickly to reconcile farming and nature
England will not meet its biodiversity targets at current rates, the chair of Natural England has said, as he accused ministers of moving too slowly to regenerate nature.
Tony Juniper, who has been in post at the government’s nature quango since 2019, said ministers were not on track to meet species abundance targets, which have been criticised by wildlife charities as “embarrassingly poor”.
Continue reading...Finance minister says she was in contact with David Sharaz but did not know the full allegations or decide ‘to weaponise’ them
The finance minister, Katy Gallagher, has insisted she did not mislead parliament over her knowledge of Brittany Higgins’ rape allegation.
On Saturday she said that while she had been in contact with Higgins’ partner, David Sharaz, and was aware of some details of the story before it broke, she had not known the full allegations nor had she “made a decision to weaponise it”.
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Continue reading...Advertising blitz and Australia-wide public events will seek to reinvigorate support and shift attention from parliamentary arena
The yes campaign is gearing up for a fresh advertising blitz and will roll out a series of nationwide public events, in a bid to reinvigorate support for the Indigenous voice and shift attention away from the parliamentary arena.
The Yes23 campaign will hold large gatherings at the start of Naidoc Week, with leaders believing support will rise quickly once the voice debate shifts beyond Canberra.
Continue reading...Donald Trump is the first former president in US history to face federal criminal charges – is this a gamechanger or just another chapter in the drama?
He really might be going to prison.
Donald Trump just became the first former president in American history to face federal criminal charges.
Continue reading...The £28bn delay caps weeks of turmoil over Labour’s green ambitions, but if he’s serious about them, the leader will need to get used to it
A U-turn on the eve of a major policy announcement is not usually part of the plan for a government in waiting. Later this month the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, will set out his pitch on energy, jobs and net zero, hoping to place a green economy at the centre of his vision for revitalising the UK.
But with just weeks to go, his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, admitted on Friday that the key plank of that vision – the party’s much-heralded flagship commitment to spend £28bn a year on green investment – would be delayed. She blamed the economic mess being left by the Conservative party, and insisted the target would be met in the second half of a Labour parliament.
Continue reading...Exclusive: MP for Enfield Southgate and shadow Foreign Office minister is under investigation after complaint
One of Keir Starmer’s shadow ministers has had the Labour party whip suspended after a complaint about his conduct.
Bambos Charalambous, a shadow Foreign Office minister and MP for Enfield Southgate, is under investigation after a complaint was made against him.
Continue reading...The argument that markets will react badly to borrowing doesn’t wash – Rachel Reeves has to be open about using taxes
Today, Rachel Reeves announced that she is delaying plans to borrow £28bn a year for a green prosperity fund under a Labour government. There may be some influential people in the Labour party who never supported the plan in the first place – maybe because it looked so much like the 2019 manifesto. And now, perhaps as a result, we’re seeing any excuse being used to undermine it.
The argument being put forward is that the bond markets will react to Labour’s borrowing in the same way they responded to Liz Truss’s fantasy budget. This would make the necessary borrowing too expensive to deal with, and anyway, it’s impractical to spend on that scale in the early years of a government.
John McDonnell has been the Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington since 1997. He was shadow chancellor from 2015 to 2020
Continue reading...Jeremy Hunt hopes suspending energy profits levy if Brent crude falls below $71.40 a barrel will aid investment
Jeremy Hunt has handed the North Sea oil and gas industry a “get-out” clause from the windfall tax on fossil fuel profits if wholesale energy market prices fall back to normal levels.
The Treasury set out the change before a meeting with oil companies including Equinor, BP, Shell and Total in Aberdeen on Friday afternoon, after months of warnings from the North Sea industry that the windfall tax would threaten investment and jobs.
Continue reading...Paragon Solutions is yet another Israeli spyware company. Their product is called “Graphite,” and is a lot like NSO Group’s Pegasus. And Paragon is working with what seems to be US approval:
American approval, even if indirect, has been at the heart of Paragon’s strategy. The company sought a list of allied nations that the US wouldn’t object to seeing deploy Graphite. People with knowledge of the matter suggested 35 countries are on that list, though the exact nations involved could not be determined. Most were in the EU and some in Asia, the people said...
News about Khan, a former prime minister at the center of a political crisis roiling Pakistan, mostly disappeared from the country’s media.
The post In Secret Meeting, Pakistani Military Ordered Press to Stop Covering Imran Khan appeared first on The Intercept.
Former The Project host says the conversation was ‘out of context’ and was about the need for change within the Liberal party
Lisa Wilkinson has apologised to senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price after she made disparaging comments about the Indigenous senator in a leaked audio recording.
In the audio, the former The Project host appeared to mock the Coalition by raising questions regarding the validity of Price’s preselection to the National party and struggled to pronounce the senator’s name.
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Continue reading...
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please
send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
The industry standard for dangerous and routine autonomous inspections just got better, now with a brand-new set of features and hardware.
[ Boston Dynamics ]
For too long, dogs and vacuums have existed in a state of conflict. But Roomba robots are finally ready to make peace. To celebrate Pet Appreciation Week (4–10 June), iRobot is introducing T.R.E.A.T., an experimental prototype engineered to dispense dog treats on demand. Now dogs and vacuums can finally be friends.
[ T.R.E.A.T. ]
Legged robots have better adaptability in complex terrain, and wheeled robots move faster on flat surfaces. Unitree B-W, the ultimate speed all-rounder, combines the advantages of both types of two robots, and continues to bring new exploration and change to the industry.
[ Unitree ]
In this demonstration, Digit starts out knowing there is trash on the floor and that bins are used for recycling/trash. We use a voice command “Clean up this mess” to have Digit help us. Digit hears the command and uses a large language model to interpret how best to achieve the stated goal with its existing physical capabilities. At no point is Digit instructed on how to clean or what a mess is. This is an example of bridging the conversational nature of Chat GPT and other LLMs to generate real-world physical action.
[ Agility ]
Battery endurance represents a key challenge for long-term autonomy and long-range operations, especially in the case of aerial robots. In this paper, we propose AutoCharge, an autonomous charging solution for quadrotors that combines a portable ground station with a flexible, lightweight charging tether and is capable of universal, highly efficient, and robust charging.
[ ARPL NYU ]
BruBotics secured a place in the Guinness World Records! Together with the visitors of the Nerdland Festival, they created the longest chain of robots ever, which also respond to light. Vrije Universiteit Brussel/Imec professor Bram Vanderborght and his team, consisting of Ellen Roels, Gabriël Van De Velde, Hendrik Cools, and Niklas Steenackers, have worked hard on the project in recent months. They set their record with a chain of 334 self-designed robots. The BruBotics research group at VUB aims to bring robots closer to people with their record. “Our main objective was to introduce participants to robots in an interactive way,” says Vanderborght. “And we are proud that we have succeeded.”
[ VUB ]
Based in Italy, Comau is a leading robot manufacturer and global systems integrator. The company has been working with Intrinsic over the past several years to validate our platform technology and our developer product Flowstate through real-world use cases. In a new video case study, we go behind the scenes to explore and hear firsthand how Comau and Intrinsic are working together. Comau is using Intrinsic Flowstate to assemble the rigid components of a supermodule for a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV).
[ Intrinsic ]
Thanks, Scott!
GITAI has achieved a significant milestone with the successful demonstration of a GITAI, an inchworm-type robotic arm equipped with a tool-changer function, and a GITAI lunar robotic rover in a simulated regolith chamber, featuring a 7-ton regolith simulant (LHS-1E).
[ GITAI ]
Uhh, pinch points...?
[ Deep Robotics ]
Detect, fetch, and collect. A seemingly easy task is being tested to find the best strategy to collect samples on the Martian surface, some 290,000 million kilometers away from home. The Sample Transfer Arm will need to load the tubes from the Martian surface for delivery to Earth. ESA’s robotic arm will collect them from the Perseverance rover, and possibly others dropped by sample-recovery helicopters as a backup.
[ ESA ]
Wing’s AutoLoader for curbside pickup.
[ Wing ]
MIT Mechanical Engineering students in Professor Sangbae Kim’s class explore why certain physical traits have evolved in animals in the natural world. Then they extract those useful principles that are applicable to robotic systems to solve such challenges as manipulation and locomotion in novel and interesting ways.
[ MIT ]
I get that it’s slightly annoying that robot vacuums generally cannot clean stairs, but I’m not sure that it’s a problem actually worth solving.
https://gizmodo.com/migo-ascender-first-robot-vacu...
Also, the actual existence of this thing is super sketchy, and I wouldn’t give them any money just yet.
The fastest, tiniest, mouse-iest competition for how well robots can stick to smooth surfaces.
[ Veritasium ]
Art and language are pinnacles of human expressive achievement. This panel, part of the Stanford HAI Spring Symposium on 24 May 2023, offered conversations between artists and technologists about intersections in their work. Speakers included Ken Goldberg, professor of industrial engineering and operations research, University of California, Berkeley, and Sydney Skybetter, deputy dean of the College for Curriculum and Co-Curriculum and senior lecturer in theater arts and performance studies, Brown University. Moderated by Catie Cuan, Stanford University.
[ Stanford HAI ]
An ICRA 2023 Plenary from 90-year-old living legend Jasia Reichardt (who coined the term “uncanny valley” in 1978), linking robots with Turing, Fellini, Asimov, and Buddhism.
[ ICRA 2023 ]
Thanks, Ken!
Audio features Wilkinson seemingly mocking the Coalition by questioning the senator’s preselection and struggling to pronounce her name
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has been offered a private apology from Network Ten after audio was leaked of host Lisa Wilkinson making disparaging comments about the Indigenous senator.
In the leaked audio, reported by media outlets on Friday, Wilkinson appeared to mock the Coalition by raising questions regarding the validity of Price’s preselection to the National party and struggling to pronounce her name.
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Continue reading...Tesla Inc. TSLA is considering a major investment in Spain, according to a slew of recent reports, including by Reuters and Spanish business publication CincoDias. CincoDias cited sources as saying the investment would be a new “gigafactory” for an estimated 4.5 billion euros ($4.83 billion) investment in the Valencia area. Reuters reported that a Valencia government spokesperson confirmed meetings and conversations with an unnamed company about a large automotive investment, but declined to give more details. Chief Executive Elon Musk has said that Tesla would choose the location of its next production facility by the end of the year. A Spain plant would join Tesla’s four major plants in U.S. and factories in Germany and China. Shares of Tesla zoomed to their 11th straight session of gains on Friday, poised to end the week up more than 15%. The stock has doubled this year, compared with an advance of around 12% for the S&P 500 index. SPX
Market Pulse Stories are Rapid-fire, short news bursts on stocks and markets as they move. Visit MarketWatch.com for more information on this news.
Animation has come a long way since 1900, when J. Stuart Blackton created The Enchanted Drawing, the earliest known animated film. The 90-second movie was created using stop-motion techniques, as flat characters, props, and backgrounds were drawn on an easel or made from paper.
Most modern animators rely on computer graphics and visualization techniques to create popular movies and TV shows like Finding Dory, Toy Story, and Paw Patrol. In the 1960s and ’70s, computer science pioneers David Evans and IEEE Life Member Ivan E. Sutherland led the development of many of the technologies animators now use. Their groundbreaking research, conducted at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, and at their company, Evans and Sutherland, helped jump-start the computer graphics industry.
A ceremony was held at the university on 24 March to recognize the computer graphics and visualization techniques with an IEEE Milestone. The IEEE Utah Section sponsored the nomination.
Computer graphics began in the 1950s with interactive games and visualization tools designed by the U.S. military to develop technologies for aviation, radar, and rocketry.
Evans and Sutherland, then computer science professors at the University of Utah, wanted to expand on the use of such tools by finding a way for computers to simulate objects and environments. In 1968 they founded Evans and Sutherland, locating the E&S headquarters in the university’s research park.
Many of today’s computer graphics luminaries—including Pixar cofounder Edwin Catmull, Adobe cofounder John Warnock, and Netscape founder Jim Clark, who also founded Silicon Graphics—got their start in the industry as E&S employees or as doctoral students working on research at the company’s facilities.
IEEE Milestone Dedication: Utah Computer Graphics youtu.be
While at E&S, the employees and students made fundamental contributions to computer graphics processes, says IEEE Fellow Christopher Johnson, a University of Utah computer science professor.
“David Evans, Ivan Sutherland, and their students and colleagues helped change the world,” Johnson says.
“The period from 1968 through 1978 was an extraordinary time for computer graphics,” adds Brian Berg, IEEE Region 6 history chair. “There was a rare confluence of faculty, students, staff, facilities, and resources to support research into computer vision algorithms and hardware that produced remarkable developments in computer graphics and visualization techniques. This research was responsible for the birth of much of continuous-tone computer graphics as we know it today.” Continuous-tone computer graphics have a virtually unlimited range of color and shades of gray.
Evans began his career in 1955 at Bendix—an aviation electronics company in Avon, Ohio—as manager of a project that aimed to develop an early personal computer. He left to join the University of California, Berkeley, as chair of its computer science department. He also headed Berkeley’s research for the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Project Agency (now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
In 1963 Evans became a principal investigator for ARPA’s Project Genie. He helped develop hardware techniques that enabled commercial use of time-shared computer systems.
In 1965 the University of Utah hired him to establish its computer science department after receiving an ARPA grant of US $5 million to investigate how the emerging field of computer graphics could play a role in the country’s technological competitiveness, according to Computer Graphics and Computer Animation.
In 1968 Evans asked Sutherland, a former colleague at Berkeley who was then an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard, to join him at the University of Utah, luring him with the promise of starting a company together. Sutherland was already famous in computer graphics circles, having created Sketchpad, the first computer-aided design program, for his Ph.D. thesis in 1963 at MIT.
The two founded E&S almost as soon as Sutherland arrived, and they began working on computer-based simulation systems.
The duo in 1969 developed the line-drawing system displays LDS-1 and LDS-2, the first graphics devices with a processing unit. They then built the E&S Picture System—the next generation of LDS displays.
Those workstations, as they were called, came to be used by most computer-generated-imagery production companies through the 1980s.
E&S also developed computer-based simulation systems for military and commercial training, including the CT5 and CT6 flight simulators.
In addition to hiring employees, E&S welcomed computer science doctoral students from the university to work on their research projects at the company.
“Almost every influential person in the modern computer-graphics community either passed through the University of Utah or came into contact with it in some way,” Robert Rivlin wrote in his book, The Algorithmic Image: Graphic Visions of the Computer Age.
One of the doctoral students was Henri Gouraud, who in 1971 developed an algorithm to simulate the differing effects of light and color across the surface of an object. The Gouraud shading method is still used by creators of video games and cartoons.
In 1974 Edwin Catmull, then also a doctoral student at the university, developed the principle of texture mapping, a method for adding complexity to a computer-generated surface. Catmull went on to help found Pixar in 1986 with computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith, an IEEE member. For his work in the industry, Catmull received the 2006 IEEE John von Neumann Medal.
Doctoral student Bui Tuong Phong in 1973 devised Phong shading, a modeling method that reflects light so computer-generated graphics can look shiny and plasticlike.
“As a group, the University of Utah contributed more to the field of knowledge in computer graphics than any of its contemporaries,” Berg wrote in the Milestone proposal. “That fact is made most apparent both in the widespread use of the techniques developed and in the body of awards the innovations garnered.” The awards include several scientific and technical Oscars, an Emmy, and many IEEE medals.
Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world.
The Milestone plaque displayed on a granite obelisk outside of the University of Utah’s Merrill engineering building reads:
In 1965 the University of Utah established a Center of Excellence for computer graphics research with Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funding. In 1968 two professors founded the pioneering graphics hardware company Evans & Sutherland; by 1978, fundamental rendering and visualization techniques disclosed in doctoral dissertations included the Warnock algorithm, Gouraud shading, the Catmull-Rom spline, and the Blinn-Phong reflection model. Alumni-founded companies include Atari, Silicon Graphics, Adobe, Pixar, and Netscape.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. JPM Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon may be required to provide a new testimony as part of a lawsuit against the bank over dealings with the sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, as requested by Epstein’s lawyers, as CNBC reported. JPMorgan’s stock rose 0.3% toward a six-week high in midday trading Friday. The lawyers, who deposed Dimon last month, said the bank has “failed to expeditiously produce documents” from files of key witnesses and has “strategically withheld” documents, according to documents provided in the CNBC report. In late-May, Dimon had testified that he had never heard of Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes until the financier was arrested in 2019, a statement that some have disputed, as the Associated Press has reported.
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Far from helping customers by absorbing soaring food costs, supermarket chiefs and shareholders are enjoying a bonanza
In recent weeks, supermarket spin doctors have been rolling out chief executives to counter Unite research that revealed how UK supermarkets are profiteering at the expense of their customers. The latest in this long line of protesting CEOs was Simon Roberts, chief executive of Sainsbury’s. He was asked on the BBC if the supermarket had been guilty of profiteering: “Absolutely not” was his strident denial. That denial lost some of its credibility this week when Sainsbury’s announced that Simon Roberts’ earnings leaped 40% last year to nearly £5m.
And there we have it. Facts will out. Roberts’ bonanza bonuses are actually a boardroom reward for the delivery of bumper profits in recent years. How else to explain it? Britain’s CEOs are never done telling us that their skyscraper salaries are index-linked to their blinding achievements delivering for shareholders.
Sharon Graham is the general secretary of Unite
Continue reading...Shares of Fisker Inc. FSR rose 1.4% in premarket trading Friday, after the electric vehicle maker announced plans to enter the China market. The company said it plans to open a delivery center in 2023, and start deliveries of its Fisker Ocean sport-utility vehicle (SUV) in the first quarter of 2024. “After beginning deliveries in Europe and with first vehicles coming to our US customers on June 23, we are excited to move into the Chinese market later this year,” said Chief Executive Officer Henrik Fisker. “We expect China to be an important growth market for EVs in the future and believe our vehicles will be very appealing.” Fisker’s stock has dropped 21.6% year to date through Thursday, while the Global X Autonomous and Electric Vehicles exchange-traded fund FSR has run up 25.9% and the S&P 500 SPX has gained 11.8%.
Market Pulse Stories are Rapid-fire, short news bursts on stocks and markets as they move. Visit MarketWatch.com for more information on this news.
Prince Harry became one of the most senior royals ever to give evidence in an English court this week. Jim Waterson reports from the high court in London where tabloid phone hacking was back under the microscope
For Prince Harry’s entire life, he has been the subject of media stories and of special interest to tabloid newspapers. Everything from childhood injuries to his early relationships, his entry to and exit from a military career right up to his marriage and subsequent departure from official royal life. Many of those stories were written, he claims, with the aid of illegal practices such as phone hacking.
As Jim Waterson tells Nosheen Iqbal, Harry is also suing the publishers of the Sun and the Daily Mail, but this week he got his day in court against the Mirror group. Under cross examination, he made his case that reporters seemingly had access to information that could only have come from underhand methods. The Mirror group has admitted to hacking phones in the past but maintains that Harry’s was not one of them. Their case is that the information they printed was from sources close to the prince or already in the public domain.
Continue reading...
There’s a lot of risk in deploying new technology for cutting-edge computer chips. So Intel executives were understandably cautious in executing a plan that next year simultaneously introduces both a new transistor—RibbonFET—and a new way of powering it—PowerVia.
To take some of the risk out of this high-wire act, the company has built and tested processor cores composed of Intel’s current generation of transistors combined with PowerVia. The resulting cores saw more than a 6 percent frequency boost as well as more compact designs and 30 percent less power loss. Just as important, the tests proved that including backside power doesn’t make the chips more costly, less reliable, or more difficult to test for defects. Intel is presenting the details of these tests in Tokyo next week at the IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits.
“We wanted to make sure we could derisk…understand everything about PowerVia, and then go the next step and integrate with RibbonFET,” says Ben Sell, Intel’s vice president of technology development.
PowerVia is Intel’s version of a technology called backside power delivery. Today, chips are constructed with the transistors at the surface of the silicon and all the interconnects that power them and transmit their data signals built above them. Backside power removes all the power-delivering interconnects to beneath the silicon. This has two main effects. First, it leaves more room for the data interconnects above the silicon. And second, the power interconnects can be made larger and therefore less resistive.
Backside power delivery moves the power interconnects from above the silicon to below it.Intel
That combination improves performance in a few ways. First, with an easier path for power to flow, circuits on the CPU experience less voltage droop; in other words, there is a smaller transient fall in voltage when demand for current increases from, say, a large block of logic switching on. With less droop, transistors can be run faster.
Second, cores can be made more compact, decreasing the length of interconnects between logic cells, which speeds things up. When the standard logic cells that make up the processor core are laid out on the chip, interconnect congestion keeps them from packing together perfectly, leaving loads of blank space between the cells. With less congestion among the data interconnects, the cells fit together more tightly, with some portions up to 95 percent filled. Sell says that’s a double-digit improvement. What’s more, the lack of congestion allowed some of the smallest interconnects to spread out a bit, reducing parasitic capacitance that hinders performance.
The 6 percent gain from these advantages is about half what’s typically delivered when a chipmaker scales down transistors from one technology node to the next. PowerVia delivers it with no change to the transistors.
Making PowerVia-enabled chips requires several extra steps and leads to the unusual result that there is hardly any silicon left in the chip. Things start out pretty normal: The transistors, which in this case are FinFETs made using the Intel 4 process, are constructed at the surface of the silicon, as usual. The main difference is that a group of deep, narrow holes are also drilled and then filled in with metal. These nano-TSVs (for through-silicon vias) will be important later. From there, layers of interconnect are formed above the transistors to link them together into logic cells and larger circuits. So far, so regular.
Then the process takes a turn. A blank silicon wafer, called a carrier wafer, is bonded to the top of those interconnects and the whole thing is flipped over. Then the bottom of the original wafer (now on top) is polished away until the ends of the nano-TSVs are exposed. At that point, layers of comparatively chunky interconnects are built up to connect to the nano-TSVs and form the backside power delivery network. These interconnect layers terminate in the bond pads that will link the chip to the package and the rest of the computer.
The resulting chip is thus made up of a large layer of blank silicon for support, a layer of data interconnects, a vanishingly narrow layer of silicon transistors, and a layer of power interconnects.
It’s hard to spot the silicon in this PowerVia-enabled processor. (Hint: It’s the bit of white in the middle.) Most of the chip is made up of the signal interconnects above and the much chunkier power interconnects below the transistors. Intel
You might expect that having to build interconnects on both sides of the silicon would make the cost of the chip shoot up. But early on, Intel saw a reason why that would not be the case, says Sell. The smallest, most tightly packed layer of interconnects, called M0, are also the costliest to produce. They can require more than one pass through chipmaking’s most expensive step, extreme ultraviolet lithography. But with no power interconnects to get in the way, the lines in the M0 layer could be six nanometers further apart than they are today. That may not seem like much, but it means it takes less EUV effort to make them. For the process to be introduced next year and for its successor, “the cost savings we get from not scaling so aggressively more than offsets the additional cost from the backside power-delivery process,” Sell says.
If the plans for PowerVia were going to work, the technology had to meet certain criteria, most of which have to do with not making things worse: Despite existing in a much thinner layer of silicon, the transistors had to work just as well; the power delivery network had to be just as reliable as those built on the front side of the silicon; the heat generated in the silicon couldn’t get out of hand, despite the transistors being sandwiched between interconnect layers; and the ability to debug ICs and spot design defects can’t be hampered.
It took some doing to meet these criteria. For example, the power-interconnect process had to be tweaked to keep from affecting the transistors. And Intel had to set some design rules to keep thermal issues in line. It also had to come up with new methods to make debugging work.
On top of all that, Intel engineers had to ensure that the PowerVia chips’ yield—the fraction of good chips per wafer—was on target to reach high-volume manufacturing, even though these particular chips will never be sold. The goal here was for the yield of Intel 4 PowerVia chips to match those of Intel 4 chips from 9 months ago. PowerVia chips were always going to lag, because any improvements to Intel 4’s yield would take time to translate to the PowerVia experiments. “We did a bit better than that,” says Sell. PowerVia’s yield curve follows Intel 4’s by only 6 months.
With the process for PowerVia worked out, the only change Intel will have to make in order to complete its move from Intel 4 to the next node, called 20A, is to the transistor. RibbonFET, Intel’s take on nanosheet, or gate-all-around, transistors, will then slot in to the already established interconnect scheme.
If all goes well, and Sell says all is going well, the 20A process will be making the company’s Arrow Lake CPUs in 2024. The following technology generation, called 18A, is meant for both Intel products and foundry customers.
Success would put Intel ahead of TSMC and Samsung, in offering both nanosheet transistors and backside power. Samsung has already moved to a gate-all-around device, and it’s unclear when it will integrate backside power. TSMC is scheduled to offer gate-all-around devices in 2025, but it won’t be adding backside power delivery until at least 2026.
Sultan Al Jaber – Cop28 president and CEO of state oil firm – is ‘ally the climate movement needs’, posts say
An army of fake social media accounts on Twitter and the blogging site Medium have been promoting and defending the controversial hosting of a UN climate summit by the United Arab Emirates.
The president of the Cop28 climate talks is Sultan Al Jaber, who is also the chief executive of the state oil giant Adnoc, which has major net zero-busting expansion plans.
Continue reading...The UN has blamed the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on Russia. What impact will the flooding have on the war in Ukraine? Dan Sabbagh reports
In the early hours of Tuesday, the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine was destroyed. The breach of the dam left 42,000 people at immediate risk of flooding, and is a blow to Ukrainian food and water supplies.
Ukraine has accused Russia, which has been in control of the dam for more than a year, of mining and blowing up the structure. Volodymyr Zelenskiy described the incident as an ‘environmental bomb of mass destruction’.
Continue reading...Sam Altman, the founder of the revolutionary application Chat-GPT, is touring Europe with a message: AI is changing the world and there are big risks, but also big potential rewards
In a recent episode, the Guardian’s UK technology editor, Alex Hern, brought us an eye-opening conversation with Geoffrey Hinton, often known as the godfather of artificial intelligence. He raised the alarm that the technology was in danger of evolving faster than our ability to control it, to the extent it could become an existential threat.
Now Hern is back to present the other side of the growing debate on AI and to describe an encounter with another of the field’s leading thinkers, Sam Altman. He tells Michael Safi that Altman and Hinton agreed on one thing: AI could pose an enormous risk to the world. But from there they diverge – Altman believes those risks can be managed, regulated and ultimately harnessed towards a future where the health, education and societal benefits of artificial intelligence are truly transformative.
Continue reading...
The IEEE Board of Directors shapes the future direction of IEEE and is committed to ensuring IEEE remains a strong and vibrant organization—serving the needs of its members and the engineering and technology community worldwide—while fulfilling the IEEE mission of advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.
This article features IEEE Board of Directors members Jill Gostin, Stephanie White, and Yu Yuan.
Director and Vice President, Member and Geographic Activities
Jill Gostin, an IEEE senior member, is director and vice president of IEEE Member and Geographic Activities.Nathan Gostin
Gostin is a dedicated mathematician and community leader whose work centers around systems engineering, algorithm assessment, and software testing and evaluation, specifically related to sensor systems. She is a principal research scientist in applied research programs pertaining to sensors and electromagnetic applications.
Her current work focuses on open architecture sensor systems, which allow systems to reuse existing technologies, providing the flexibility to quickly refresh an existing component of the system or swap in new technologies. Gostin uses a model-based systems engineering approach to develop the open architecture and the associated standard. By providing a standard to define the interfaces between components of the system, modifications and innovations can be quickly and easily incorporated.
Gostin, an active IEEE volunteer, has served on the IEEE Future Directions Committee, on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society, and as vice president of finance for the IEEE Sensors Council, among many other IEEE roles. She believes in leading by example and says it is important to help others in advancing their career paths. Through the IEEE Computer Society, she was a representative to IEEE’s Women in Engineering program, which works to increase the representation of women in engineering disciplines. Gostin has also served as a STEM mentor to middle and high school math and science classes; and as a panelist for discussions on women in technology.
She has authored or co-authored multiple technical papers and has received multiple technical and service awards. In 2016, she was named Georgia’s Women in Technology Woman of the Year for mid-size businesses, an award recognizing women technology executives for their accomplishments as leaders in business, as visionaries of technology, and who make a difference in their community.
Director, Division X
IEEE Life Senior Member Stephanie White is director of IEEE Division X.William Pallack
White is an educator, technical leader, corporate manager, and entrepreneur. She is a pioneer in software and system requirements engineering—making significant and lasting contributions in the behavior modeling, requirements semantics, and requirements analysis fields, resulting in less costly and safer cyber-physical systems.
As a principal engineer of requirements and architecture, White was responsible for detecting errors in requirements on eight multi-million-dollar aircraft and space programs, producing higher quality specifications with lower cost and risk. Recognizing the need for verifiable methods that practicing engineers can use, she created scalable and practical modeling and analytic techniques based on formal methods. Her methods were used to ensure the correctness of aircraft and space programs.
Addressing the need for research in engineering systems where computer systems have an essential role, she founded the IEEE Technical Committee on Engineering of Computer-Based Systems in 1990. This area of research is now known as cyber-physical systems engineering.
White, a lifelong IEEE volunteer, has held many positions, including president of the IEEE Systems Council and vice president of technical activities for the IEEE Computer Society (also serving on its board of governors from 2006 to 2008). She wants to use her current position within IEEE to improve the return on members’ investment, broaden IEEE’s membership base, and advance technology for humanity.
Currently a senior professor emeritus, White has taught systems science, systems engineering, and computer science. She still participates in dissertation committees. White received the 2013 IEEE-USA Divisional Professional Leadership Award for inspiring women to study and work in the STEM fields and for leadership in diversity initiatives.
Director and President, IEEE Standards Association
An IEEE Senior Member, Yu Yuan is director and president of the IEEE Standards Association.Yu Yuan
Yuan is a scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. His work in consumer technology, multimedia, virtual reality, the Internet of Things, and digital transformation has significantly impacted industry and society. His current work focuses on developing technologies, infrastructures, ecosystems, and resources needed for massively multiplayer ultra-realistic virtual experiences.
Yuan also works on building an international metaverse incubation and collaboration platform, providing access to knowledge and resources for metaverse development. His efforts have empowered a new generation of innovators and creators to push the boundaries of digital experiences—enabling a new era of immersive, interconnected, and intelligent technologies.
Yuan has been an IEEE volunteer for many years. His service in IEEE standards activities at different levels (working groups, standards committees, and higher-level governance) has been widely appreciated by standards developers, individual members, and entity members around the world. As the current president of the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA), he plays a pivotal role in shaping global standards, fostering collaboration, and driving innovation in the technology sector. He believes that IEEE SA has the opportunity for significant growth and to become a stronger global influence. He is committed to encouraging, supporting, and protecting innovation in standards and the standards development process.
Yuan is also a member of the IEEE Consumer Technology Society and a member-at-large on the society’s board of governors. From 2015-2020, he led the IEEE Consumer Technology Society Standards Committee to grow the society’s standards activities from zero to a top-level among IEEE technical societies and councils. The committee received the 2019 IEEE SA Standards Committee Award for exceptional leadership in entity-based standards development and industry engagement in consumer technology.  | submitted by /u/Global_Informant [link] [comments] |
Britain’s health is a national scandal, not just because of the state of the NHS, but because the government refuses to take action on our diets
In April 1994, the CEOs of the US’s seven biggest tobacco companies swore on oath before a Senate committee that nicotine was “not addictive”. At the time it was estimated that 3,000 American children were being induced by said companies to start smoking every day.
Last Monday, the BBC’s Panorama programme came close to repeating that scene with Britain’s food manufacturers. The products at issue are ultra-processed foods (UPF). Their makers’ denial of the harm these products may cause is as adamant as those tobacco execs’ once was, and the consequences could be equally lethal.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...In 2013 and 2014, I wrote extensively about new revelations regarding NSA surveillance based on the documents provided by Edward Snowden. But I had a more personal involvement as well.
I wrote the essay below in September 2013. The New Yorker agreed to publish it, but the Guardian asked me not to. It was scared of UK law enforcement, and worried that this essay would reflect badly on it. And given that the UK police would raid its offices in July 2014, it had legitimate cause to be worried.
Now, ten years later, I offer this as a time capsule of what those early months of Snowden were like...
In February, Meta released its large language model: LLaMA. Unlike OpenAI and its ChatGPT, Meta didn’t just give the world a chat window to play with. Instead, it released the code into the open-source community, and shortly thereafter the model itself was leaked. Researchers and programmers immediately started modifying it, improving it, and getting it to do things no one else anticipated. And their results have been immediate, innovative, and an indication of how the future of this technology is going to play out. Training speeds have hugely increased, and the size of the models themselves has shrunk to the point that you can create and run them on a laptop. The world of AI research has dramatically changed...
Part of a brutal crackdown on dissent against the police training facility, the SWAT raid and charges against the protest bail fund are unprecedented.
The post Atlanta Police Arrest Organizers of Bail Fund for Cop City Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. This week, we’re featuring a special selection of videos from ICRA 2023! We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
Abstract: Near the limits of adhesion, the forces generated by a tire are nonlinear and intricately coupled. Efficient and accurate modeling in this region could improve safety, especially in emergency situations where high forces are required. To this end, we propose a novel family of tire force models based on neural ordinary differential equations and a neural-ExpTanh parameterization. These models are designed to satisfy physically insightful assumptions while also having sufficient fidelity to capture higher-order effects directly from vehicle state measurements. They are used as drop-in replacements for an analytical brush tire model in an existing nonlinear model predictive control framework. Experiments with a customized Toyota Supra show that scarce amounts of driving data—less than 3 minutes—is sufficient to achieve high-performance autonomous drifting on various trajectories with speeds up to 45 miles per hour. Comparisons with the benchmark model show a 4x improvement in tracking performance, smoother control inputs, and faster and more consistent computation time.
Abstract: Aerial-aquatic vehicles are capable of moving in the two most dominant fluids, making them more promising for a wide range of applications. We propose a prototype with special designs for propulsion and thruster configuration to cope with the vast differences in the fluid properties of water and air. For propulsion, the operating range is switched for the different mediums by the dual-speed propulsion unit, providing sufficient thrust and also ensuring output efficiency. For thruster configuration, thrust vectoring is realized by the rotation of the propulsion unit around the mount arm, thus enhancing the underwater maneuverability. This paper presents a quadrotor prototype of this concept and the design details and realization in practice.
Abstract: Falling cat problem is well-known where cats show their super aerial reorientation capability and can land safely. For their robotic counterparts, a similar falling quadruped robot problem has not been fully addressed, although achieving as safe a landing as the cats has been increasingly investigated. Unlike imposing the burden on landing control, we approach to safe landing of falling quadruped robots by effective flight phase control. Different from existing work like swinging legs and attaching reaction wheels or simple tails, we propose to deploy a 3-DoF morphable inertial tail on a medium-size quadruped robot. In the flight phase, the tail with its maximum length can self-right the body orientation in 3D effectively; before touchdown, the tail length can be retracted to about 1/4 of its maximum for impressing the tail’s side effect on landing. To enable aerial reorientation for safe landing in the quadruped robots, we design a control architecture that is verified in a high-fidelity physics simulation environment with different initial conditions. Experimental results on a customized flight-phase test platform with comparable inertial properties are provided and show the tail’s effectiveness on 3D body reorientation and its fast retractability before touchdown. An initial falling quadruped robot experiment is shown, where the robot Unitree A1 with the 3-DoF tail can land safely subject to non-negligible initial body angles.
Abstract: Achieving stable hopping has been a hallmark challenge in the field of dynamic legged locomotion. Controlled hopping is notably difficult due to extended periods of underactuation combined with very short ground phases wherein ground interactions must be modulated to regulate a global state. In this work, we explore the use of hybrid nonlinear model predictive control paired with a low-level feedback controller in a multirate hierarchy to achieve dynamically stable motions on a novel 3D hopping robot. In order to demonstrate richer behaviors on the manifold of rotations, both the planning and feedback layers must be designed in a geometrically consistent fashion; therefore, we develop the necessary tools to employ Lie group integrators and appropriate feedback controllers. We experimentally demonstrate stable 3D hopping on a novel robot, as well as trajectory tracking and flipping in simulation.
Abstract: Enlightened by the fast-running gait of mammals like cheetahs and wolves, we design and fabricate a single-actuated untethered compliant robot that is capable of galloping at a speed of 313 millimeters per second or 1.56 body lengths per second (BL/s), faster than most reported soft crawlers in mm/s and BL/s. An in-plane prestressed hair clip mechanism (HCM) made up of semirigid materials, i.e., plastics are used as the supporting chassis, the compliant spine, and the force amplifier of the robot at the same time, enabling the robot to be simple, rapid, and strong. With experiments, we find that the HCM robotic locomotion speed is linearly related to actuation frequencies and substrate friction differences except for concrete surfaces, that tethering slows down the crawler, and that asymmetric actuation creates a new galloping gait. This paper demonstrates the potential of HCM-based soft robots.
Abstract: In nature, living creatures show versatile behaviors. They can move on various terrains and perform impressive object manipulation/transportation using their legs. Inspired by their morphologies and control strategies, we have developed bioinspired robots and adaptive modular neural control. In this video, we demonstrate our five bioinspired robots in our robot zoo setup. Inchworm-inspired robots with two electromagnetic feet (Freelander-02 and AVIS) can adaptively crawl and balance on horizontal and vertical metal pipes. With special design, the Freelander-02 robot can adapt its posture to crawl underneath an obstacle, while the AVIS robot can step over a flange. A millipede-inspired robot with multiple body segments (Freelander-08) can proactively adapt its body joints to efficiently navigate on bump terrain. A dung beetle–inspired robot (ALPHA) can transport an object by grasping it with its hind legs and at the same time walk backward with the remaining legs like dung beetles. Finally, an insect-inspired robot (MORF), which is a hexapod robot platform, demonstrates typical insectlike gaits (slow wave and fast tripod gaits). In a nutshell, we believe that this bioinspired robot zoo demonstrates how the diverse and fascinating abilities of living creatures can serve as inspiration and principles for developing robotics technology capable of achieving multiple robotic functions and solving complex motor control problems in systems with many degrees of freedom.
Abstract: AngGo is a hands-free shared indoor smart mobility device for public use. AngGo is a personal mobility device that is suitable for the movement of passengers in huge indoor spaces such as convention centers or airports. The user can use both hands freely while riding the AngGo. Unlike existing mobility devices, the mobility device can be maneuvered using the feet and was designed to be as intuitive as possible. The word “AngGo” is pronounced like a Korean word meaning “sit down and move.” There are 6 ToF distance sensors around AngGo. Half of them are in the front part and the other half are in the rear part. In the autonomous mode, AngGo avoids obstacles based on the distance from each sensor. IR distance sensors are mounted under the footrest to measure the extent to which the footrest is moved forward or backward, and these data are used to control the rotational speed of motors. The user can control the speed and the direction of AngGo simultaneously. The spring in the footrest generates force feedback, so the user can recognize the amount of variation.
Abstract: Since the Renaissance, artists have created artworks using novel techniques and machines, deviating from conventional methods. The robotic drawing system is one of such creative attempts that involves not only the artistic nature but also scientific problems that need to be solved. Robotic drawing problems can be viewed as planning the robot’s drawing path that eventually leads to the art form. The robotic pen-art system imposes new challenges, unlike robotic painting, requiring the robot to maintain stable contact with the target drawing surface. This video showcases an autonomous robotic system that creates pen art on an arbitrary canvas surface without restricting its size or shape. Our system converts raster or vector images into piecewise-continuous paths depending on stylistic choices, such as TSP art or stroke-based drawing. Our system consists of multiple manipulators with mobility and performs stylistic drawing tasks. In order to create a more extensive pen art, the mobile manipulator setup finds a minimal number of discrete configurations for the mobile platform to cover the ample canvas space. The dual manipulator setup can generate multicolor pen art using adaptive three-finger grippers with a pen-tool-change mechanism. We demonstrate that our system can create visually pleasing and complicated pen art on various surfaces.
Abstract: We developed a novel “Smart Bartender” system, which can understand the intention of users just from the eye gaze and make some corresponding actions. Particularly, we believe that a cyber-barman who cannot feel our faces is not an intelligent one. We thus aim at building a novel cyber-barman by capturing and analyzing the intention of the customers on the fly. Technically, such a system enables the user to select a drink simply by staring at it. Then the robotic arm mounted with a camera will automatically grasp the target bottle and pour the liquid into the cup. To achieve this goal, we firstly adopt YOLO to detect candidate drinks. Then, the GazeNet is utilized to generate potential gaze center for grounding the target bottle that has minimum center-to-center distance. Finally, we use object pose estimation and path-planning algorithms to guide the robotic arm to grasp the target bottle and execute pouring. Our system integrated with the category-level object pose estimation enjoys powerful performance, generalizing to various unseen bottles and cups that are not used for training. We believe our system would not only reduce the intensive human labor in different service scenarios but also provide users with interactivity and enjoyment.
Abstract: The current state of robotics technology lacks a platform that can combine manipulation, aerial locomotion, and bipedal terrestrial locomotion. Therefore, we define aerial humanoid robotics as the outcome of platforms with these three capabilities. To implement aerial humanoid robotics on the humanoid robot iCub, we conduct research in different directions. This includes experimental research on jet turbines and codesign, which is necessary to implement aerial humanoid robotics on the real iCub. These activities aim to model and identify the jet turbines. We also investigate flight control of flying humanoid robots using Lyapunov-quadratic-programming-based control algorithms to regulate both the attitude and position of the robot. These algorithms work independently of the number of jet turbines installed on the robot and ensure satisfaction of physical constraints associated with the jet engines. In addition, we research computational fluid dynamics for aerodynamics modeling. Since the aerodynamics of a multibody system like a flying humanoid robot is complex, we use CFD simulations with Ansys to extract a simplified model for control design, as there is little space for closed-form expressions of aerodynamic effects.
Abstract: The goal of this research project (Consortium: Altatek GmbH, Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences OST, Faculty of Law University of Zurich) was the development of a multifunctional, autonomous single-axle robot with an electric drive. The robot is customized for agricultural applications in mountainous areas with steepest slopes. The intention is to relieve farmers from arduous and safety-critical work. Furthermore, the robot is developed as a modular platform that can be used for work in forestry, municipal, sports fields, and winter/snow applications. Robot features: Core feature is the patented center of gravity control. With a sliding wheel axle of 800 millimeters, hills up to a steepness of 35 degrees (70 percent) can be easily driven and a safe operation without tipping can be ensured. To make the robot more sustainable, electric drives and a 48-volt battery were equipped. To navigate in mountainous areas, several sensors are used. In difference to applications on flat areas, the position and gradient of the robot on the slope needs to be measured and considered in the path planning. A sensor system that detects possible obstacles and especially humans or animals which could be in the path of the robot is currently under development.
Abstract: Surf zones are challenging for walking robots if they cannot anchor to the substrate, especially at the transition between dry sand and waves. Crablike dactyl designs enable robots to achieve this anchoring behavior while still being lightweight enough to walk on dry sand. Our group has been developing a series of crablike robots to achieve the transition from walking on underwater surfaces to walking on dry land. Compared with the default forward-moving gait, we find that inward-pulling gaits and sideways walking increase efficiency in granular media. By using soft dactyls, robots can probe the ground to classify substrates, which can help modify gaits to better suit the environment and recognize hazardous conditions. Dactyls can also be used to securely grasp the object and dig in the substrate for installing cables, searching for buried objects, and collecting sediment samples. To simplify control and actuation, we developed a four-degrees-of-freedom Klann mechanism robot, which can climb onto an object and then grasp it. In addition, human interfaces will improve our ability to precisely control the robot for these types of tasks. In particular, the U.S. government has identified munitions retrieval as an environmental priority through their Strategic Environmental Research Development Program. Our goal is to support these efforts with new robots.
Abstract: Tasks involving locally unstable or discontinuous dynamics (such as bifurcations and collisions) remain challenging in robotics, because small variations in the environment can have a significant impact on task outcomes. For such tasks, learning a robust deterministic policy is difficult. We focus on structuring exploration with multiple stochastic policies based on a mixture of experts (MoE) policy representation that can be efficiently adapted. The MoE policy is composed of stochastic subpolicies that allow exploration of multiple distinct regions of the action space (or strategies) and a high- level selection policy to guide exploration toward the most promising regions. We develop a robot system to evaluate our approach in a real-world physical problem-solving domain. After training the MoE policy in simulation, online learning in the real world demonstrates efficient adaptation within just a few dozen attempts, with a minimal sim2real gap. Our results confirm that representing multiple strategies promotes efficient adaptation in new environments and strategies learned under different dynamics can still provide useful information about where to look for good strategies.
Abstract: This paper tackles the task of singulating and grasping paperlike deformable objects. We refer to such tasks as paper-flipping. In contrast to manipulating deformable objects that lack compression strength (such as shirts and ropes), minor variations in the physical properties of the paperlike deformable objects significantly impact the results, making manipulation highly challenging. Here, we present Flipbot, a novel solution for flipping paperlike deformable objects. Flipbot allows the robot to capture object physical properties by integrating exteroceptive and proprioceptive perceptions that are indispensable for manipulating deformable objects. Furthermore, by incorporating a proposed coarse-to-fine exploration process, the system is capable of learning the optimal control parameters for effective paper-flipping through proprioceptive and exteroceptive inputs. We deploy our method on a real-world robot with a soft gripper and learn in a self-supervised manner. The resulting policy demonstrates the effectiveness of Flipbot on paper-flipping tasks with various settings beyond the reach of prior studies, including but not limited to flipping pages throughout a book and emptying paper sheets in a box. The code is available here: https://robotll.github.io/Flipbot/
Abstract: Crochet is a textile craft that has resisted mechanization and industrialization except for a select number of one-off crochet machines. These machines are only capable of producing a limited subset of common crochet stitches. Crochet machines are not used in the textile industry, yet mass-produced crochet objects and clothes sold in stores like Target and Zara are almost certainly the products of crochet sweatshops. The popularity of crochet and the existence of crochet products in major chain stores shows that there is both a clear demand for this craft as well as a need for it to be produced in a more ethical way. In this paper, we present Croche-Matic, a radial crochet machine for generating three-dimensional cylindrical geometry. The Croche-Matic is designed based on Magic Ring technique, a method for hand-crocheting 3D cylindrical objects. The machine consists of nine mechanical axes that work in sequence to complete different types of crochet stitches, and includes a sensor component for measuring and regulating yarn tension within the mechanical system. Croche-Matic can complete the four main stitches used in Magic Ring technique. It has a success rate of 50.7 percent with single crochet stitches, and has demonstrated an ability to create three-dimensional objects.
Abstract: This letter presents the first design of a soft and lightweight UAV, entirely 3D-printed in flexible filament. The drone’s flexible arms are equipped with a tendon-actuated bending system, which is used for applications that require physical interaction with the environment. The flexibility of the UAV can be controlled during the additive manufacturing process by adjusting the infill rate ρTPU distribution. However, the increase inflexibility implies difficulties in controlling the UAV, as well as structural, aerodynamic, and aeroelastic effects. This article provides insight into the dynamics of the system and validates the flyability of the vehicle for densities as low as 6 percent. Within this range, quasi-static arm deformations can be considered; thus the autopilot is fed back through a static arm deflection model. At lower densities, strong nonlinear elastic dynamics appear, which translates to complex modeling, and it is suggested to switch to data-based approaches. Moreover, this work demonstrates the ability of the soft UAV to perform full-body perching, specifically landing and stabilizing on pipelines and irregular surfaces without the need for an auxiliary system.
Abstract: Cargo drones are designed to carry payloads with predefined shape, size, and/or mass. This lack of flexibility requires a fleet of diverse drones tailored to specific cargo dimensions. Here we propose a new reconfigurable drone based on a modular design that adapts to different cargo shapes, sizes, and mass. We also propose a method for the automatic generation of drone configurations and suitable parameters for the flight controller. The parcel becomes the drone’s body to which several individual propulsion modules are attached. We demonstrate the use of the reconfigurable hardware and the accompanying software by transporting parcels of different mass and sizes requiring various numbers and propulsion modules’ positioning. The experiments are conducted indoors (with a motion-capture system) and outdoors (with an RTK-GNSS sensor). The proposed design represents a cheaper and more versatile alternative to the solutions involving several drones for parcel transportation.
First-year college students are understandably frustrated when they can’t get into popular upper-level electives. But they usually just gripe. Paras Jha was an exception. Enraged that upper-class students were given priority to enroll in a computer-science elective at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Paras decided to crash the registration website so that no one could enroll.
On Wednesday night, 19 November 2014, at 10:00 p.m. EST—as the registration period for first-year students in spring courses had just opened—Paras launched his first distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. He had assembled an army of some 40,000 bots, primarily in Eastern Europe and China, and unleashed them on the Rutgers central authentication server. The botnet sent thousands of fraudulent requests to authenticate, overloading the server. Paras’s classmates could not get through to register.
The next semester Paras tried again. On 4 March 2015, he sent an email to the campus newspaper, The Daily Targum: “A while back you had an article that talked about the DDoS attacks on Rutgers. I’m the one who attacked the network.… I will be attacking the network once again at 8:15 pm EST.” Paras followed through on his threat, knocking the Rutgers network offline at precisely 8:15 p.m.
On 27 March, Paras unleashed another assault on Rutgers. This attack lasted four days and brought campus life to a standstill. Fifty thousand students, faculty, and staff had no computer access from campus.
On 29 April, Paras posted a message on Pastebin, a website popular with hackers for sending anonymous messages. “The Rutgers IT department is a joke,” he taunted. “This is the third time I have launched DDoS attacks against Rutgers, and every single time, the Rutgers infrastructure crumpled like a tin can under the heel of my boot.”
Paras was furious that Rutgers chose Incapsula, a small cybersecurity firm based in Massachusetts, as its DDoS-mitigation provider. He claimed that Rutgers chose the cheapest company. “Just to show you the poor quality of Incapsula’s network, I have gone ahead and decimated the Rutgers network (and parts of Incapsula), in the hopes that you will pick another provider that knows what they are doing.”
Paras’s fourth attack on the Rutgers network, taking place during finals, caused chaos and panic on campus. Paras reveled in his ability to shut down a major state university, but his ultimate objective was to force it to abandon Incapsula. Paras had started his own DDoS-mitigation service, ProTraf Solutions, and wanted Rutgers to pick ProTraf over Incapsula. And he wasn’t going to stop attacking his school until it switched.
Paras Jha was born and raised in Fanwood, a leafy suburb in central New Jersey. When Paras was in the third grade, a teacher recommended that he be evaluated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but his parents didn’t follow through.
As Paras progressed through elementary school, his struggles increased. Because he was so obviously intelligent, his teachers and parents attributed his lackluster performance to laziness and apathy. His perplexed parents pushed him even harder.
Paras sought refuge in computers. He taught himself how to code when he was 12 and was hooked. His parents happily indulged this passion, buying him a computer and providing him with unrestricted Internet access. But their indulgence led Paras to isolate himself further, as he spent all his time coding, gaming, and hanging out with his online friends.
Paras was particularly drawn to the online game Minecraft. In ninth grade, he graduated from playing Minecraft to hosting servers. It was in hosting game servers that he first encountered DDoS attacks.
Minecraft server administrators often hire DDoS services to knock rivals offline. As Paras learned more sophisticated DDoS attacks, he also studied DDoS defense. As he became proficient in mitigating attacks on Minecraft servers, he decided to create ProTraf Solutions.
Paras’s obsession with Minecraft attacks and defense, compounded by his untreated ADHD, led to an even greater retreat from family and school. His poor academic performance in high school frustrated and depressed him. His only solace was Japanese anime and the admiration he gained from the online community of Minecraft DDoS experts.
Paras’s struggles deteriorated into paralysis when he enrolled in Rutgers, studying for a B.S. in computer science. Without his mother’s help, he was unable to regulate the normal demands of living on his own. He could not manage his sleep, schedule, or study. Paras was also acutely lonely. So he immersed himself in hacking.
Paras and two hacker friends, Josiah White and Dalton Norman, decided to go after the kings of DDoS—a gang known as VDoS. The gang had been providing these services to the world for four years, which is an eternity in cybercrime. The decision to fight experienced cybercriminals may seem brave, but the trio were actually older than their rivals. The VDoS gang members had been only 14 years old when they started to offer DDoS services from Israel in 2012. These 19-year-old American teenagers would be going to battle against two 18-year-old Israeli teenagers. The war between the two teenage gangs would not only change the nature of malware. Their struggle for dominance in cyberspace would create a doomsday machine.
The Mirai botnet, with all its devastating potential, was not the product of an organized-crime or nation-state hacking group—it was put together by three teenage boys. They rented out their botnet to paying customers to do mischief with and used it to attack chosen targets of their own. But the full extent of the danger became apparent only later, after this team made the source code for their malware public. Then others used it to do greater harm: crashing Germany’s largest Internet service provider; attacking Dyn’s Domain Name System servers, making the Internet unusable for millions; and taking down all of Liberia’s Internet—to name a few examples.
The Mirai botnet exploited vulnerable Internet of Things devices, such as Web-connected video cameras, ones that supported Telnet, an outdated system for logging in remotely. Owners of these devices rarely updated their passwords, so they could be easily guessed using a strategy called a dictionary attack.
The first step in assembling a botnet was to scan random IP addresses looking for vulnerable IoT devices, ones whose passwords could be guessed. Once identified, the addresses of these devices were passed to a “loader,” which would put the malware on the vulnerable device. Infected devices located all over the world could then be used for distributed denial-of-service attacks, orchestrated by a command-and-control (C2) server. When not attacking a target, these bots would be enlisted to scan for more vulnerable devices to infect.
Botnet malware is useful for financially motivated crime because botmasters can tell the bots in their thrall to implant malware on vulnerable machines, send phishing emails, or engage in click fraud, in which botnets profit by directing bots to click pay-per-click ads. Botnets are also great DDoS weapons because they can be trained on a target and barrage it from all directions. One day in February 2000, for example, the hacker MafiaBoy knocked out Fifa.com, Amazon.com, Dell, E-Trade, eBay, CNN, as well as Yahoo, at the time the largest search engine on the Internet.
After taking so many major websites offline, MafiaBoy was deemed a national -security threat. President Clinton ordered a national manhunt to find him. In April 2000, MafiaBoy was arrested and charged, and in January 2001 he pled guilty to 58 charges of denial-of-service attacks. Law enforcement did not reveal MafiaBoy’s real name, as this national-security threat was 15 years old.
Both MafiaBoy and the VDoS crew were adolescent boys who crashed servers. But whereas MafiaBoy did it for the sport, VDoS did it for the money. Indeed, these teenage Israeli kids were pioneering tech entrepreneurs. They helped launch a new form of cybercrime: DDoS as a service. With it, anyone could now hack with the click of a button, no technical knowledge needed.
It might be surprising that DDoS providers could advertise openly on the Web. After all, DDoSing another website is illegal everywhere. To get around this, these “booter services” have long argued they perform a legitimate function: providing those who set up Web pages a means to stress test websites.
In theory, such services do play an important function. But only in theory. As a booter-service provider admitted to University of Cambridge researchers, “We do try to market these services towards a more legitimate user base, but we know where the money comes from.”
Paras dropped out of Rutgers in his sophomore year and, with his father’s encouragement, spent the next year focused on building ProTraf Solutions, his DDoS-mitigation business. And just like a mafia don running a protection racket, he had to make that protection needed. After launching four DDoS attacks his freshman year, he attacked Rutgers yet again in September 2015, still hoping that his former school would give up on Incapsula. Rutgers refused to budge.
ProTraf Solutions was failing, and Paras needed cash. In May 2016, Paras reached out to Josiah White. Like Paras, Josiah frequented Hack Forums. When he was 15, he developed major portions of Qbot, a botnet worm that at its height in 2014 had enslaved half a million computers. Now 18, Josiah switched sides and worked with his friend Paras at ProTraf doing DDoS mitigation.
The hacker’s command-and-control (C2) server orchestrates the actions of many geographically distributed bots (computers under its control). Those computers, which could be IoT devices like IP cameras, can be directed to overwhelm the victim’s servers with unwanted traffic, making them unable to respond to legitimate requests.
IEEE Spectrum
But Josiah soon returned to hacking and started working with Paras to take the Qbot malware, improve it, and build a bigger, more powerful DDoS botnet. Paras and Josiah then partnered with 19-year-old Dalton Norman. The trio turned into a well-oiled team: Dalton found the vulnerabilities; Josiah updated the botnet malware to exploit these vulnerabilities; and Paras wrote the C2—software for the command-and-control server—for controlling the botnet.
But the trio had competition. Two other DDoS gangs—Lizard Squad and VDoS—decided to band together to build a giant botnet. The collaboration, known as PoodleCorp, was successful. The amount of traffic that could be unleashed on a target from PoodleCorp’s botnet hit a record value of 400 gigabits per second, almost four times the rate that any previous botnet had achieved. They used their new weapon to attack banks in Brazil, U.S. government sites, and Minecraft servers. They achieved this firepower by hijacking 1,300 Web-connected cameras. Web cameras tend to have powerful processors and good connectivity, and they are rarely patched. So a botnet that harnesses video has enormous cannons at its disposal.
While PoodleCorp was on the rise, Paras, Josiah, and Dalton worked on a new weapon. By the beginning of August 2016, the trio had completed the first version of their botnet malware. Paras called the new code Mirai, after the anime series Mirai Nikki.
When Mirai was released, it spread like wildfire. In its first 20 hours, it infected 65,000 devices, doubling in size every 76 minutes. And Mirai had an unwitting ally in the botnet war then raging.
Up in Anchorage, Alaska, the FBI cyber unit was building a case against VDoS. The FBI was unaware of Mirai or its war with VDoS. The agents did not regularly read online boards such as Hack Forums. They did not know that the target of their investigation was being decimated. The FBI also did not realize that Mirai was ready to step into the void.
The head investigator in Anchorage was Special Agent Elliott Peterson. A former U.S. Marine, Peterson is a calm and self-assured agent with a buzz cut of red hair. At the age of 33, Peterson had returned to his native state of Alaska to prosecute cybercrime.
On 8 September 2016, the FBI’s Anchorage and New Haven cyber units teamed up and served a search warrant in Connecticut on the member of PoodleCorp who ran the C2 that controlled all its botnets. On the same day, the Israeli police arrested the VDoS founders in Israel. Suddenly, PoodleCorp was no more.
The Mirai group waited a couple of days to assess the battlefield. As far as they could tell, they were the only botnet left standing. And they were ready to use their new power. Mirai won the war because Israeli and American law enforcement arrested the masterminds behind PoodleCorp. But Mirai would have triumphed anyway, as it was ruthlessly efficient in taking control of Internet of Things devices and excluding competing malware.
A few weeks after the arrests of those behind VDoS, Special Agent Peterson found his next target: the Mirai botnet. In the Mirai case, we do not know the exact steps that Peterson’s team took in their investigation: Court orders in this case are currently “under seal,” meaning that the court deems them secret. But from public reporting, we know that Peterson’s team got its break in the usual way—from a Mirai victim: Brian Krebs, a cybersecurity reporter whose blog was DDoSed by the Mirai botnet on 25 September.
The FBI uncovered the IP address of the C2 and loading servers but did not know who had opened the accounts. Peterson’s team likely subpoenaed the hosting companies to learn the names, emails, cellphones, and payment methods of the account holders. With this information, it would seek court orders and then search warrants to acquire the content of the conspirators’ conversations.
Still, the hunt for the authors of the Mirai malware must have been a difficult one, given how clever these hackers were. For example, to evade detection Josiah didn’t just use a VPN. He hacked the home computer of a teenage boy in France and used his computer as the “exit node.” The orders for the botnet, therefore, came from this computer. Unfortunately for the owner, he was a big fan of Japanese anime and thus fit the profile of the hacker. The FBI and the French police discovered their mistake after they raided the boy’s house.
After wielding its power for two months, Paras dumped nearly the complete source code for Mirai on Hack Forums. “I made my money, there’s lots of eyes looking at IOT now, so it’s time to GTFO [Get The F*** Out],” Paras wrote. With that code dump, Paras had enabled anyone to build their own Mirai. And they did.
Dumping code is reckless, but not unusual. If the police find source code on a hacker’s devices, they can claim that they “downloaded it from the Internet.” Paras’s irresponsible disclosure was part of a false-flag operation meant to throw off the FBI, which had been gathering evidence indicating Paras’s involvement in Mirai and had contacted him to ask questions. Though he gave the agent a fabricated story, getting a text from the FBI probably terrified him.
Mirai had captured the attention of the cybersecurity community and of law enforcement. But not until after Mirai’s source code dropped would it capture the attention of the entire United States. The first attack after the dump was on 21 October, on Dyn, a company based in Manchester, N.H., that provides Domain Name System (DNS) resolution services for much of the East Coast of the United States.
Mike McQuade
It began at 7:07 a.m. EST with a series of 25-second attacks, thought to be tests of the botnet and Dyn’s infrastructure. Then came the sustained assaults: of one hour, and then five hours. Interestingly, Dyn was not the only target. Sony’s PlayStation video infrastructure was also hit. Because the torrents were so immense, many other websites were affected. Domains such as cnn.com, facebook.com, and nytimes.com wouldn’t work. For the vast majority of these users, the Internet became unusable. At 7:00 p.m., another 10-hour salvo hit Dyn and PlayStation.
Further investigations confirmed the point of the attack. Along with Dyn and PlayStation traffic, the botnet targeted Xbox Live and Nuclear Fallout game-hosting servers. Nation-states were not aiming to hack the upcoming U.S. elections. Someone was trying to boot players off their game servers. Once again—just like MafiaBoy, VDoS, Paras, Dalton, and Josiah—the attacker was a teenage boy, this time a 15-year-old in Northern Ireland named Aaron Sterritt.
Meanwhile, the Mirai trio left the DDoS business, just as Paras said. But Paras and Dalton did not give up on cybercrime. They just took up click fraud.
Click fraud was more lucrative than running a booter service. While Mirai was no longer as big as it had been, the botnet could nevertheless generate significant advertising revenue. Paras and Dalton earned as much money in one month from click fraud as they ever made with DDoS. By January 2017, they had earned over US $180,000, as opposed to a mere $14,000 from DDoSing.
Had Paras and his friends simply shut down their booter service and moved on to click fraud, the world would likely have forgotten about them. But by releasing the Mirai code, Paras created imitators. Dyn was the first major copycat attack, but many others followed. And due to the enormous damage these imitators wrought, law enforcement was intensely interested in the Mirai authors.
After collecting information tying Paras, Josiah, and Dalton to Mirai, the FBI quietly brought each up to Alaska. Peterson’s team showed the suspects its evidence and gave them the chance to cooperate. Given that the evidence was irrefutable, each folded.
Paras Jha was indicted twice, once in New Jersey for his attack on Rutgers, and once in Alaska for Mirai. Both indictments carried the same charge—one violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Paras faced up to 10 years in federal prison for his actions. Josiah and Dalton were only indicted in Alaska and so faced 5 years in prison.
The trio pled guilty. At the sentencing hearing held on 18 September 2018, in Anchorage, each of the defendants expressed remorse for his actions. Josiah White’s lawyer conveyed his client’s realization that Mirai was “a tremendous lapse in judgment.”
Unlike Josiah, Paras spoke directly to Judge Timothy Burgess in the courtroom. Paras began by accepting full responsibility for his actions and expressed his deep regret for the trouble he’d caused his family. He also apologized for the harm he’d caused businesses and, in particular, Rutgers, the faculty, and his fellow students.
The Department of Justice made the unusual decision not to ask for jail time. In its sentencing memo, the government noted “the divide between [the defendants’] online personas, where they were significant, well-known, and malicious actors in the DDoS criminal milieu and their comparatively mundane ‘real lives’ where they present as socially immature young men living with their parents in relative obscurity.” It recommended five years of probation and 2,500 hours of community service.
The government had one more request —for that community service “to include continued work with the FBI on cybercrime and cybersecurity matters.” Even before sentencing, Paras, Josiah, and Dalton had logged close to 1,000 hours helping the FBI hunt and shut down Mirai copycats. They contributed to more than a dozen law enforcement and research efforts. In one instance, the trio assisted in stopping a nation-state hacking group. They also helped the FBI prevent DDoS attacks aimed at disrupting Christmas-holiday shopping. Judge Burgess accepted the government’s recommendation, and the trio escaped jail time.
The most poignant moments in the hearing were Paras’s and Dalton’s singling out for praise the very person who caught them. “Two years ago, when I first met Special Agent Elliott Peterson,” Paras told the court, “I was an arrogant fool believing that somehow I was untouchable. When I met him in person for the second time, he told me something I will never forget: ‘You’re in a hole right now. It’s time you stop digging.’ ” Paras finished his remarks by thanking “my family, my friends, and Agent Peterson for helping me through this.”
This article appears in the June 2023 print issue as “Patch Me if You Can.”
Three days before astronauts left on Apollo 8, the first-ever flight around the moon, NASA’s safety chief, Jerome Lederer, gave a speech that was at once reassuring and chilling. Yes, he said, the United States’ moon program was safe and well-planned—but even so, “Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and one and one half million systems, subsystems, and assemblies. Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.”
The mission, in December 1968, was nearly flawless—a prelude to the Apollo 11 landing the next summer. But even today, half a century later, engineers wrestle with the sheer complexity of the machines they build to go to space. NASA’s Artemis I, its Space Launch System rocket mandated by Congress in 2010, endured a host of delays before it finally launched in November 2022. And Elon Musk’s SpaceX may be lauded for its engineering acumen, but it struggled for six years before its first successful flight into orbit.
Relativity envisions 3D-printing facilities someday on the Martian surface, fabricating much of what people from Earth would need to live there.
Is there a better way? An upstart company called Relativity Space is about to try one. Its Terran 1 rocket, the company says, has about a tenth as many parts as comparable launch vehicles do, because it is made through 3D printing. Instead of bending metal and milling and welding, engineers program a robot to deposit layers of metal alloy in place.
Relativity’s first rocket, the company says, is ready to go from launch complex 16 at Cape Canaveral, Fla. When it happens, the company says it will stream the liftoff on YouTube.
Artist’s concept of Relativity’s planned Terran R rocket. The company says it should be able to carry a 20,000-kilogram payload into low Earth orbit.Relativity
“Over 85 percent of the rocket by mass is 3D printed,” said Scott Van Vliet, Relativity’s head of software engineering. “And what’s really cool is not only are we reducing the amount of parts and labor that go into building one of these vehicles over time, but we’re also reducing the complexity, we’re reducing the chance of failure when you reduce the part count, and you streamline the build process.”
Relativity says it can put together a Terran rocket in two months, compared to two years for some conventionally built ones. The speed and cost of making a prototype—say, for wind-tunnel testing—are reduced because you tell the printer to make a scaled-down model. There is less waste because the process is additive. And if something needs to be modified, you reprogram the 3D printer instead of slow, expensive retooling.
Investors have noticed. The company says financial backers have included BlackRock, Y Combinator and the entrepreneur Mark Cuban.
“If you walk into any rocket factory today other than ours,” said Josh Brost, the company’s head of business development, “you still will see hundreds of thousands of parts coming from thousands of vendors, and still being assembled using lots of touch labor and lots of big-fix tools.”
Terran 1 Nose Cone Timelapse Check out this timelapse of our nose cone build for Terran 1. This milestone marks the first time we’ve created this unique shape ...
Terran 1, rated as capable of putting a 1,250-kilogram payload in low Earth orbit, is mainly intended as a test bed. Relativity has signed up a variety of future customers for satellite launches, but the first Terran 1 (“Terran” means “earthling”) will not carry a paying customer’s satellite. The first flight has been given the playful name “Good Luck, Have Fun”—GLHF for short. Eventually, if things are going well, Relativity will build a larger booster, called Terran R, which the company hopes will compete with the SpaceX Falcon 9 for launches of up to 20,000 kg. Relativity says the Terran R should be fully reusable, including the upper stage—something that other commercial launch companies have not accomplished. In current renderings, the rocket is, as the company puts it, “inspired by nature,” shaped to slice through the atmosphere as it ascends and comes back for recovery.
A number of Relativity’s top people came from Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, and, like Musk, they say their vision is a permanent presence on Mars. Brost calls it “the long-term North Star for us.” They say they can envision 3D-printing facilities someday on the Martian surface, fabricating much of what people from Earth would need to live there. “For that to happen,” says Brost, “you need to have manufacturing capabilities that are autonomous and incredibly flexible.”
Relativity’s fourth-generation Stargate 3D printer.Relativity
Just how Relativity will do all these things is a work in progress. The company says its 3D technology will help it work iteratively—finding mistakes as it goes, then correcting them as it prints the next rocket, and the next, and so on.
“In traditional manufacturing, you have to do a ton of work up front and have a lot of the design features done well ahead of time,” says Van Vliet. “You have to invest in fixed tooling that can often take years to build before you’ve actually developed an article for your launch vehicle. With 3D printing, additive manufacturing, we get to building something very, very quickly.”
The next step is to get the first rocket off the pad. Will it succeed? Brost says a key test will be getting through max q—the point of maximum dynamic pressure on the rocket as it accelerates through the atmosphere before the air around it thins out.
“If you look at history, at new space companies doing large rockets, there’s not a single one that’s done their first rocket on their first try. It would be quite an achievement if we were able to achieve orbit on our inaugural launch,” says Brost.
“I’ve been to many launches in my career,” he says, “and it never gets less exciting or nerve wracking to me.”
The new reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald comes as Australia is pressing the U.S. to end its attempt to prosecute Assange.
The post FBI Reopens Case Around Julian Assange, Despite Australian Pressure to End Prosecution appeared first on The Intercept.
Everyone is writing about an interagency and international report on Chinese hacking of US critical infrastructure.
Lots of interesting details about how the group, called Volt Typhoon, accesses target networks and evades detection.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
We’ve just relaunched the IEEE Robots Guide over at RobotsGuide.com, featuring new robots, new interactives, and a complete redesign from the ground up. Tell your friends, tell your family, and explore nearly 250 robots in pictures and videos and detailed facts and specs, with lots more on the way!
The qualities that make a knitted sweater comfortable and easy to wear are the same things that might allow robots to better interact with humans. RobotSweater, developed by a research team from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, is a machine-knitted textile “skin” that can sense contact and pressure.
RobotSweater’s knitted fabric consists of two layers of conductive yarn made with metallic fibers to conduct electricity. Sandwiched between the two is a net-like, lace-patterned layer. When pressure is applied to the fabric—say, from someone touching it—the conductive yarn closes a circuit and is read by the sensors. In their research, the team demonstrated that pushing on a companion robot outfitted in RobotSweater told it which way to move or what direction to turn its head. When used on a robot arm, RobotSweater allowed a push from a person’s hand to guide the arm’s movement, while grabbing the arm told it to open or close its gripper. In future research, the team wants to explore how to program reactions from the swipe or pinching motions used on a touchscreen.
[CMU]
DEEP Robotics Co. yesterday announced that it has launched the latest version of its Lite3 robotic dog in Europe. The system combines advanced mobility and an open modular structure to serve the education, research, and entertainment markets, said the Hangzhou, China–based company.
Lite3’s announced price is US $2,900. It ships in September.
Estimating terrain traversability in off-road environments requires reasoning about complex interaction dynamics between the robot and these terrains. We propose a method that learns to predict traversability costmaps by combining exteroceptive environmental information with proprioceptive terrain interaction feedback in a self-supervised manner. We validate our method in multiple short- and large-scale navigation tasks on a large, autonomous all-terrain vehicle (ATV) on challenging off-road terrains, and demonstrate ease of integration on a separate large ground robot.
This work will be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023) in London next week.
Thanks, Mateo!
Sheet Metal Workers’ Local Union 104 has introduced a training course on automating and innovating field layout with the Dusty Robotics FieldPrinter system.
Apptronik has half of its general-purpose robot ready to go!
The other half is still a work in progress, but here’s progress:
A spotted-lanternfly-murdering robot is my kind of murdering robot.
[FRC]
ANYmal is rated IP67 for water resistance, but this still terrifies me.
Check out the impressive ankle action on this humanoid walking over squishy terrain.
Wing’s progress can be charted along the increasingly dense environments in which we’ve been able to operate: from rural farms to lightly populated suburbs to more dense suburbs to large metropolitan areas like Brisbane, Australia; Helsinki, Finland; and the Dallas Fort Worth metro area in Texas. Earlier this month, we did a demonstration delivery at Coors Field–home of the Colorado Rockies–delivering beer (Coors of course) and peanuts to the field. Admittedly, it wasn’t on a game day, but there were 1,000 people in the stands enjoying the kickoff party for AUVSI’s annual autonomous systems conference.
[ Wing ]
Pollen Robotics’ team will be going to ICRA 2023 in London! Come and meet us there to try teleoperating Reachy by yourself and give us your feedback!
[ Pollen Robotics ]
The most efficient drone engine is no engine at all.
[ MAVLab ]
Is your robot spineless? Should it be? Let’s find out.
[ UPenn ]
Looks like we’re getting closer to that robot butler.
[ Prisma Lab ]
This episode of the Robot Brains podcast features Raff D’Andrea, from Kiva, Verity, and ETH Zurich.
[ Robot Brains ]
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
LATTICE is an undergrad project from Caltech that’s developing a modular robotic transportation system for the lunar surface that uses autonomous rovers to set up a sort of cable car system to haul things like ice out of deep craters to someplace more useful. The prototype is fully functional, and pretty cool to watch in action.
We’re told that the team will be targeting a full system demonstration deploying across a “crater” on Earth this time next year. As to what those quotes around “crater” mean, your guess is as good as mine.
[ Caltech ]
Thanks, Lucas!
Happy World Cocktail Day from Flexiv!
[ Flexiv ]
Here’s what Optimus has been up to lately.
As per usual, the robot is moderately interesting, but it’s probably best to mostly just ignore Musk.
[ Tesla ]
The INSECT tarsus-inspired compliant robotic grippER with soft adhesive pads (INSECTER) uses only one single electric actuator with a cable-driven mechanism. It can be easily controlled to perform a gripping motion akin to an insect tarsus (i.e., wrapping around the object) for handling various objects.
[ Paper ]
Thanks, Poramate!
Congratulations to ANYbotics on their $50 million Series B!
And from 10 years ago (!) at ICRA 2013, here is video I took of StarlETH, one of ANYmal’s ancestors.
[ ANYbotics ]
In this video we present results from the recent field-testing campaign of the DigiForest project at Evo, Finland. The DigiForest project started in September 2022 and runs up to February 2026. It brings together diverse partners working on aerial robots, walking robots, autonomous lightweight harvesters, as well as forestry decision makers and commercial companies with the goal to create a full data pipeline for digitized forestry.
[ DigiForest ]
The Robotics and Perception Group at UZH will be presenting some new work on agile autonomous high-speed flight through cluttered environments at ICRA 2023.
[ Paper ]
Robots who lift together, stay together.
[ Sanctuary AI ]
The next CYBATHLON competition, which will take place again in 2024, breaks down barriers between the public, people with disabilities, researchers and technology developers. The initiative promotes the inclusion and participation of people with disabilities and improves assistance systems for use in everyday life by the end users.
[ Cybathlon ]
As voters in Turkey prepare to go to the polls, anger over the government's response to the earthquakes in February is widespread. More than 50,000 people have died and millions more displaced. But its effects have been felt in a region that has already experienced years of discrimination under President Erdoğan.
Kurds are the biggest ethnic minority in Turkey, making up 15-20% of the population, but have had an increasingly fractured and marginalised relationship with the government. After decades of violence, it could be their vote that seals Erdoğan’s political fate.
The Guardian's video team joined Yeter Erel Tuma who works with children living in a Kurdish majority province. She has witnessed the civil unrest impacting families here, and now volunteers bringing aid to those devastated by the earthquakes.
Continue reading...
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To get started on Canva, you will need to create an account by providing your email address, Google, Facebook or Apple credentials. You will then choose your account type between student, teacher, small business, large company, non-profit, or personal. Based on your choice of account type, templates will be recommended to you.
You can sign up for a free trial of Canva Pro, or you can start with the free version to get a sense of whether it’s the right graphic design tool for your needs.
When you sign up for an account, Canva will suggest different post types to choose from. Based on the type of account you set up you'll be able to see templates categorized by the following categories: social media posts, documents, presentations, marketing, events, ads, launch your business, build your online brand, etc.
Start by choosing a template for your post or searching for something more specific. Search by social network name to see a list of post types on each network.
Next, you can choose a template. Choose from hundreds of templates that are ready to go, with customizable photos, text, and other elements.
You can start your design by choosing from a variety of ready-made templates, searching for a template matching your needs, or working with a blank template.
Inside the Canva designer, the Elements tab gives you access to lines and shapes, graphics, photos, videos, audio, charts, photo frames, and photo grids.The search box on the Elements tab lets you search everything on Canva.
To begin with, Canva has a large library of elements to choose from. To find them, be specific in your search query. You may also want to search in the following tabs to see various elements separately:
The Photos tab lets you search for and choose from millions of professional stock photos for your templates.
You can replace the photos in our templates to create a new look. This can also make the template more suited to your industry.
You can find photos on other stock photography sites like pexel, pixabay and many more or simply upload your own photos.
When you choose an image, Canva’s photo editing features let you adjust the photo’s settings (brightness, contrast, saturation, etc.), crop, or animate it.
When you subscribe to Canva Pro, you get access to a number of premium features, including the Background Remover. This feature allows you to remove the background from any stock photo in library or any image you upload.
The Text tab lets you add headings, normal text, and graphical text to your design.
When you click on text, you'll see options to adjust the font, font size, color, format, spacing, and text effects (like shadows).
Canva Pro subscribers can choose from a large library of fonts on the Brand Kit or the Styles tab. Enterprise-level controls ensure that visual content remains on-brand, no matter how many people are working on it.
Create an animated image or video by adding audio to capture user’s attention in social news feeds.
If you want to use audio from another stock site or your own audio tracks, you can upload them in the Uploads tab or from the more option.
Want to create your own videos? Choose from thousands of stock video clips. You’ll find videos that range upto 2 minutes
You can upload your own videos as well as videos from other stock sites in the Uploads tab.
Once you have chosen a video, you can use the editing features in Canva to trim the video, flip it, and adjust its transparency.
On the Background tab, you’ll find free stock photos to serve as backgrounds on your designs. Change out the background on a template to give it a more personal touch.
The Styles tab lets you quickly change the look and feel of your template with just a click. And if you have a Canva Pro subscription, you can upload your brand’s custom colors and fonts to ensure designs stay on brand.
If you have a Canva Pro subscription, you’ll have a Logos tab. Here, you can upload variations of your brand logo to use throughout your designs.
With Canva, you can also create your own logos. Note that you cannot trademark a logo with stock content in it.
With Canva, free users can download and share designs to multiple platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack and Tumblr.
Canva Pro subscribers can create multiple post formats from one design. For example, you can start by designing an Instagram post, and Canva's Magic Resizer can resize it for other networks, Stories, Reels, and other formats.
Canva Pro subscribers can also use Canva’s Content Planner to post content on eight different accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, and Tumblr.
Canva Pro allows you to work with your team on visual content. Designs can be created inside Canva, and then sent to your team members for approval. Everyone can make comments, edits, revisions, and keep track via the version history.
When it comes to printing your designs, Canva has you covered. With an extensive selection of printing options, they can turn your designs into anything from banners and wall art to mugs and t-shirts.
Canva Print is perfect for any business seeking to make a lasting impression. Create inspiring designs people will want to wear, keep, and share. Hand out custom business cards that leave a lasting impression on customers' minds.
The Canva app is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. The Canva app has earned a 4.9 out of five star rating from over 946.3K Apple users and a 4.5 out of five star rating from over 6,996,708 Google users.
In addition to mobile apps, you can use Canva’s integration with other Internet services to add images and text from sources like Google Maps, Emojis, photos from Google Drive and Dropbox, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Bitmojis, and other popular visual content elements.
In general, Canva is an excellent tool for those who need simple images for projects. If you are a graphic designer with experience, you will find Canva’s platform lacking in customization and advanced features – particularly vectors. But if you have little design experience, you will find Canva easier to use than advanced graphic design tools like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator for most projects. If you have any queries let me know in the comments section.
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Continue reading...On a gin-clear December day, I’m sitting under the plexiglass bubble of a radically new kind of aircraft. It’s a little past noon at the Byron Airport in northern California; in the distance, a jagged line of wind turbines atop rolling hills marks the Altamont Pass, blades spinning lazily. Above me, a cloudless blue sky beckons.
The aircraft, called BlackFly, is unlike anything else on the planet. Built by a Palo Alto, Calif., startup called Opener, it’s an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft with stubby wings fore and aft of the pilot, each with four motors and propellers. Visually, it’s as though an aerial speedster from a 1930s pulp sci-fi story has sprung from the page.
There are a couple of hundred startups designing or flying eVTOLs. But only a dozen or so are making tiny, technologically sophisticated machines whose primary purpose is to provide exhilarating but safe flying experiences to people after relatively minimal training. And in that group, Opener has jumped out to an early lead, having built dozens of aircraft at its facilities in Palo Alto and trained more than a score of people to fly them.
My own route to the cockpit of a BlackFly was relatively straightforward. I contacted the company’s CEO, Ken Karklin, in September 2022, pitched him on the idea of a story and video, and three months later I was flying one of his aircraft.
Well, sort of flying it. My brief flight was so highly automated that I was more passenger than pilot. Nevertheless, I spent about a day and a half before the flight being trained to fly the machine manually, so that I could take control if anything went wrong. For this training, I wore a virtual-reality headset and sat in a chair that tilted and gyrated to simulate flying maneuvers. To “fly” this simulation I manipulated a joystick that was identical to the one in the cockpit of a BlackFly. Opener’s chief operating officer, Kristina L. Menton, and engineer Wyatt Warner took turns patiently explaining the operations of the vehicle and giving me challenging tasks to complete, such as hovering and performing virtual landings in a vicious crosswind.
The BlackFly is entirely controlled by that joystick, which is equipped with a trigger and also topped by a thumb switch. To take off, I squeeze the trigger while simultaneously pushing forward on the switch. The machine leaps into the air with the sound of a million bees, and with a surge of giddy elation I am climbing skyward.
Much more so than an airplane or helicopter, the BlackFly taps into archetypal human yearnings for flight, the kind represented by magic carpets, the flying cars in “The Jetsons,” and even those Mountain Banshees in the movie “Avatar.” I’ve had several unusual experiences in aircraft, including flying on NASA’s zero-gravity-simulating “Vomit Comet,” and being whisked around in a BlackFly was definitely the most absorbing and delightful. Gazing out over the Altamont Pass from an altitude of about 60 meters, I had a feeling of joyous release—from Earth’s gravity and from earthly troubles.
For technical details about the BlackFly and to learn more about its origin, go here.
The BlackFly is also a likely harbinger of things to come. Most of the startups developing eVTOLs are building vehicles meant to carry several passengers on commercial runs of less than 50 kilometers. Although the plan is for these to be flown by pilots initially, most of the companies anticipate a day when the flights will be completely automated. So specialized aircraft such as the BlackFly—designed to be registered and operated as “ultralight” aircraft under aviation regulations—could provide mountains of invaluable data on highly and fully automated flying and perhaps even help familiarize people with the idea of flying without a pilot. Indeed, during my flight, dozens of sensors gathered gigabytes of data, to add to the large reservoir Opener has already collected during many hundreds of test flights so far.
As of late February 2023, Opener hadn’t yet announced a retail price or an official commercial release date for the aircraft, which has been under development and testing for more than a decade. I’ll be keeping an eye out for further news of the company. Long after my flight was over I was still savoring the experience, and hoping for another one.
Special thanks to IEEE.tv for collaborating on production of this video.
For about as long as engineers have talked about beaming solar power to Earth from space, they’ve had to caution that it was an idea unlikely to become real anytime soon. Elaborate designs for orbiting solar farms have circulated for decades—but since photovoltaic cells were inefficient, any arrays would need to be the size of cities. The plans got no closer to space than the upper shelves of libraries.
That’s beginning to change. Right now, in a sun-synchronous orbit about 525 kilometers overhead, there is a small experimental satellite called the Space Solar Power Demonstrator One (SSPD-1 for short). It was designed and built by a team at the California Institute of Technology, funded by donations from the California real estate developer Donald Bren, and launched on 3 January—among 113 other small payloads—on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
“To the best of our knowledge, this would be the first demonstration of actual power transfer in space, of wireless power transfer,” says Ali Hajimiri, a professor of electrical engineering at Caltech and a codirector of the program behind SSPD-1, the Space Solar Power Project.
The Caltech team is waiting for a go-ahead from the operators of a small space tug to which it is attached, providing guidance and attitude control. If all goes well, SSPD-1 will spend at least five to six months testing prototype components of possible future solar stations in space. In the next few weeks, the project managers hope to unfold a lightweight frame, called DOLCE (short for Deployable on-Orbit ultraLight Composite Experiment), on which parts of future solar arrays could be mounted. Another small assembly on the spacecraft contains samples of 32 different types of photovoltaic cells, intended to see which would be most efficient and robust. A third part of the vehicle contains a microwave transmitter, set up to prove that energy from the solar cells can be sent to a receiver. For this first experiment, the receivers are right there on board the spacecraft, but if it works, an obvious future step would be to send electricity via microwave to receivers on the ground.
Caltech’s Space Solar Power Demonstrator, shown orbiting Earth in this artist’s conception, was launched on 3 January.Caltech
One can dismiss the 50-kilogram SSPD-1 as yet another nonstarter, but a growing army of engineers and policymakers take solar energy from space seriously. Airbus, the European aerospace company, has been testing its own technology on the ground, and government agencies in China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States have all mounted small projects. “Recent technology and conceptual advances have made the concept both viable and economically competitive,” said Frazer-Nash, a British engineering consultancy, in a 2021 report to the U.K. government. Engineers working on the technology say microwave power transmissions would be safe, unlike ionizing radiation, which is harmful to people or other things in its path.
No single thing has happened to start this renaissance. Instead, say engineers, several advances are coming together.
For one thing, the cost of launching hardware into orbit keeps dropping, led by SpaceX and other, smaller companies such as Rocket Lab. SpaceX has a simplified calculator on its website, showing that if you want to launch a 50-kg satellite into sun-synchronous orbit, they’ll do it for US $275,000.
Meanwhile, photovoltaic technology has improved, step by step. Lightweight electronic components keep getting better and cheaper. And there is political pressure as well: Governments and major companies have made commitments to decarbonize in the battle against global climate change, committing to renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels.
Most solar power, at least for the foreseeable future, will be Earth-based, which will be cheaper and easier to maintain than anything anyone can launch into space. Proponents of space-based solar power say that for now, they see it as best used for specialty needs, such as remote outposts, places recovering from disasters, or even other space vehicles.
But Hajimiri says don’t underestimate the advantages of space, such as unfiltered sunlight that is far stronger than what reaches the ground and is uninterrupted by darkness or bad weather—if you can build an orbiting array light enough to be practical.
Most past designs, dictated by the technology of their times, included impossibly large truss structures to hold solar panels and wiring to route power to a central transmitter. The Caltech team would dispense with all that. An array would consist of thousands of independent tiles as small as 100 square centimeters, each with its own solar cells, transmitter, and avionics. They might be loosely connected, or they might even fly in formation.
Time-lapse images show the experimental DOLCE frame for an orbiting solar array being unfolded in a clean room.Caltech
“The analogy I like to use is that it’s like an army of ants instead of an elephant,” says Hajimiri. Transmission to receivers on the ground could be by phased array—microwave signals from the tiles synchronized so that they can be aimed with no moving parts. And the parts—the photovoltaic cells with their electronics—could perhaps be so lightweight that they’re flexible. New algorithms could keep their signals focused.
“That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about,” said Harry Atwater, a coleader of the Caltech project, as SSPD-1 was being planned. “Really gossamer-like, ultralight, the limits of mass-density deployable systems.”
If it works out, in 30 years maybe there could be orbiting solar power fleets, adding to the world’s energy mix. In other words, as a recent report from Frazer-Nash concluded, this is “a potential game changer.”
This article appears in the April 2023 print issue as “Trial Run for Orbiting Solar Array.”
If electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft do manage to revolutionize transportation, the date of 5 October 2011, may live on in aviation lore. That was the day when a retired mechanical engineer named Marcus Leng flew a home-built eVTOL across his front yard in Warkworth, Ont., Canada, startling his wife and several of his friends.
“So, take off, flew about 6 feet above the ground, pitched the aircraft towards my wife and the two couples that were there, who were behind automobiles for protection, and decided to do a skidding stop in front of them. Nobody had an idea that this was going to be happening,” recalls Leng.
But as he looked to set his craft down, he saw a wing starting to dig into his lawn. “Uh-oh, this is not good,” he thought. “The aircraft is going to spin out of control. But what instead happened was the propulsion systems revved up and down so rapidly that as the aircraft did that skidding turn, that wing corner just dragged along my lawn exactly in the direction I was holding the aircraft, and then came to a stable landing,” says Leng. At that point, he knew that such an aircraft was viable “because to have that sort of an interference in the aircraft and for the control systems to be able to control it was truly remarkable.”
It was the second time anyone, anywhere had ever flown an eVTOL aircraft.
Today, some 350 organizations in 48 countries are designing, building, or flying eVTOLs, according to the Vertical Flight Society. These companies are fueled by more than US $7 billion and perhaps as much as $10 billion in startup funding. And yet, 11 years after Leng’s flight, no eVTOLs have been delivered to customers or are being produced at commercial scale. None have even been certified by a civil aviation authority in the West, such as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration or the European Union Aviation Safety Agency.
But 2023 looks to be a pivotal year for eVTOLs. Several well-funded startups are expected to reach important early milestones in the certification process. And the company Leng founded, Opener, could beat all of them by making its first deliveries—which would also be the first for any maker of an eVTOL.
Today, some 350 organizations in 48 countries are designing, building, or flying eVTOLs, according to the Vertical Flight Society.
As of late October, the company had built at its facility in Palo Alto, Calif., roughly 70 aircraft—considerably more than are needed for simple testing and evaluation. It had flown more than 30 of them. And late in 2022, the company had begun training a group of operators on a state-of-the-art virtual-reality simulator system.
Opener’s highly unusual, single-seat flier is intended for personal use rather than transporting passengers, which makes it almost unique. Opener intends to have its aircraft classified as an “ultralight,” enabling it to bypass the rigorous certification required for commercial-transport and other aircraft types. The certification issue looms as a major unknown over the entire eVTOL enterprise, at least in the United States, because, as the blog Jetlaw.com noted last August, “the FAA has no clear timeline or direction on when it will finalize a permanent certification process for eVTOL.”
Opener’s strategy is not without risks, either. For one, there’s no guarantee that the FAA will ultimately agree that Opener’s aircraft, called BlackFly, qualifies as an ultralight. And not everyone is happy with this approach. “My concern is, these companies that are saying they can be ultralights and start flying around in public are putting at risk a $10 billion [eVTOL] industry,” says Mark Moore, founder and chief executive of Whisper Aero in Crossville, Tenn. “Because if they crash, people won’t know the difference” between the ultralights and the passenger eVTOLs, he adds. “To me, that’s unacceptable.” Previously, Moore led a team at NASA that designed a personal-use eVTOL and then served as engineering director at Uber’s Elevate initiative.
A BlackFly eVTOL took off on 1 October, 2022, at the Pacific Airshow in Huntington Beach, Calif. Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Opener’s aircraft is as singular as its business model. It’s a radically different kind of aircraft, and it sprang almost entirely from Leng’s fertile mind.
“As a kid,” he says, “I already envisioned what it would be like to have an aircraft that could seamlessly do a vertical takeoff, fly, and land again without any encumbrances whatsoever.” It was a vision that never left him, from a mechanical-engineering degree at the University of Toronto, management jobs in the aerospace industry, starting a company and making a pile of money by inventing a new kind of memory foam, and then retiring in 1996 at the age of 36.
The fundamental challenge to designing a vertical-takeoff aircraft is endowing it with both vertical lift and efficient forward cruising. Most eVTOL makers achieve this by physically tilting multiple large rotors from a vertical rotation axis, for takeoff, to a horizontal one, for cruising. But the mechanism for tilting the rotors must be extremely robust, and therefore it inevitably adds substantial complexity and weight. Such tilt-rotors also entail significant compromises and trade-offs in the size of the rotors and their placement relative to the wings.
Read about author Glenn Zorpette’s flight in a BlackFly here
Opener’s BlackFly ingeniously avoids having to make those trade-offs and compromises. It has two wings, one in front and one behind the pilot. Affixed to each wing are four motors and rotors—and these never change their orientation relative to the wings. Nor do the wings move relative to the fuselage. Instead, the entire aircraft rotates in the air to transition between vertical and horizontal flight.
To control the aircraft, the pilot moves a joystick, and those motions are instantly translated by redundant flight-control systems into commands that alter the relative thrust among the eight motor-propellers.
Visually, it’s an astounding aircraft, like something from a 1930s pulp sci-fi magazine. It’s also a triumph of engineering.
Leng says the journey started for him in 2008, when “I just serendipitously stumbled upon the fact that all the key technologies for making electric VTOL human flight practical were coming to a nexus.”
The journey that made Leng’s dream a reality kicked into high gear in 2014 when a chance meeting with investor Sebastian Thrun at an aviation conference led to Google cofounder Larry Page investing in Leng’s project.
Leng started in his basement in 2010, spending his own money on a mélange of home-built and commercially available components. The motors were commercial units that Leng modified himself, the motor controllers were German and off the shelf, the inertial-measurement unit was open source and based on an Arduino microcontroller. The batteries were modified model-aircraft lithium-polymer types.
“The main objective behind this was proof of concept,” he says.“I had to prove it to myself, because up until that point, they were just equations on a piece of paper. I had to get to the point where I knew that this could be practical.”
After his front-yard flight in 2011, there followed several years of refining and rebuilding all of the major components until they achieved the specifications Leng wanted. “Everything on BlackFly is from first principles,” he declares.
The motors started out generating 160 newtons (36 pounds) of static thrust. It was way too low. “I actually tried to purchase motors and motor controllers from companies that manufactured those, and I specifically asked them to customize those motors for me, by suggesting a number of changes,” he says. “I was told that, no, those changes won’t work.”
So he started designing his own brushless AC motors. “I did not want to design motors,” says Leng. “In the end, I was stunned at how much improvement we could make by just applying first principles to this motor design.”
Eleven years after Leng’s flight, no eVTOLs have been delivered to customers or are being produced at commercial scale.
To increase the power density, he had to address the tendency of a motor in an eVTOL to overheat at high thrust, especially during hover, when cooling airflow over the motor is minimal. He began by designing a system to force air through the motor. Then he began working on the rotor of the motor (not to be confused with the rotor wings that lift and propel the aircraft). This is the spinning part of a motor, which is typically a single piece of electrical steel. It’s an iron alloy with very high magnetic permeability.
By layering the steel of the rotor, Leng was able to greatly reduce its heat generation, because the thinner layers of steel limited the eddy currents in the steel that create heat. Less heat meant he could use higher-strength neodymium magnets, which would otherwise become demagnetized. Finally, he rearranged those magnets into a configuration called a Halbach array. In the end Leng’s motors were able to produce 609 newtons (137 lbs.) of thrust.
Overall, the 2-kilogram motors are capable of sustaining 20 kilowatts, for a power density of 10 kilowatts per kilogram, Leng says. It’s an extraordinary figure. One of the few motor manufacturers claiming a density in that range is H3X Technologies, which says its HPDM-250 clocks in at 12 kw/kg.
The brain of the BlackFly consists of three independent flight controllers, which calculate the aircraft’s orientation and position, based on readings from the inertial-measurement units, GPS receivers, and magnetometers. They also use pitot tubes to measure airspeed. The flight controllers continually cross-check their outputs to make sure they agree. They also feed instructions, based on the operator’s movement of the joystick, to the eight motor controllers (one for each motor).
Equipped with these sophisticated flight controllers, the fly-by-wire BlackFly is similar in that regard to the hobbyist drones that rely on processors and clever algorithms to avoid the tricky manipulations of sticks, levers, and pedals required to fly a traditional fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft.
That sophisticated, real-time control will allow a far larger number of people to consider purchasing a BlackFly when it becomes available. In late November, Opener had not disclosed a likely purchase price, but in the past the company had suggested that BlackFly would cost as much as a luxury SUV. So who might buy it? CEO Ken Karklin points to several distinct groups of potential buyers who have little in common other than wealth.
There are early tech adopters and also people who are already aviators and are “passionate about the future of electric flight, who love the idea of being able to have their own personal vertical-takeoff-and-landing, low-maintenance, clean aircraft that they can fly in rural and uncongested areas,” Karklin says. “One of them is a business owner. He has a plant that’s a 22-mile drive but would only be a 14-mile flight, and he wants to install charging infrastructure on either end and wants to use it to commute every day. We love that.”
Others are less certain about how, or even whether, this market segment will establish itself. “When it comes to personal-use eVTOLs, we are really struggling to see the business case,” says Sergio Cecutta, founder and partner at SMG Consulting, where he studies eVTOLs among other high-tech transportation topics. “I’m not saying they won’t sell. It’s how many will they sell?” He notes that Opener is not the only eVTOL maker pursuing a path to success through the ultralight or some other specialized FAA category. As of early November, the list included Alauda Aeronautics, Air, Alef, Bellwether Industries, Icon Aircraft, Jetson, Lift Aircraft, and Ryse Aero Technologies.
What makes Opener special? Both Karklin and Leng emphasize the value of all that surrounds the BlackFly aircraft. For example, there are virtual-reality-based simulators that they say enable them to fully train an operator in 10 to 15 hours. The aircraft themselves are heavily instrumented: “Every flight, literally, there’s over 1,000 parameters that are recorded, some of them at 1,000 hertz, some 100 Hz, 10 Hz, and 1 Hz,” says Leng. “All that information is stored on the aircraft and downloaded to our database at the end of the flight. When we go and make a software change, we can do what’s called regression testing by running that software using all the data from our previous flights. And we can compare the outputs against what the outputs were during any specific flight and can automatically confirm that the changes that we’ve made are without any issues. And we can also compare, to see if they make an improvement.”
Ed Lu, a former NASA astronaut and executive at Google, sits on Opener’s safety-review board. He says what impressed him most when he first met the BlackFly team was “the fact that they had based their entire development around testing. They had a wealth of flight data from flying this vehicle in a drone mode, an unmanned mode.” Having all that data was key. “They could make their decisions based not on analysis, but after real-world operations,” Lu says, adding that he is particularly impressed by Opener’s ability to manage all the flight data. “It allows them to keep track of every aircraft, what sensors are in which aircraft, which versions of code, all the way down to the flights, to what happened in each flight, to videos of what’s happening.” Lu thinks this will be a huge advantage once the aircraft is released into the “real” world.
Karklin declines to comment on whether an ultralight approval, which is governed by what the FAA designates “ Part 103,” might be an opening move toward an FAA type certification in the future. “This is step one for us, and we are going to be very, very focused on personal air vehicles for recreational and fun purposes for the foreseeable future,” he says. “But we’ve also got a working technology stack here and an aircraft architecture that has considerable utility beyond the realm of Part-103 [ultralight] aircraft, both for crewed and uncrewed applications.” Asked what his immediate goals are, Karklin responds without hesitating. “We will be the first eVTOL company, we believe, in serial production, with a small but steadily growing revenue and order book, and with a growing installed base of cloud-connected aircraft that with every flight push all the telemetry, all the flight behavior, all the component behavior, all the operator-behavior data representing all of this up to the cloud, to be ingested by our back office, and processed. And that provides us a lot of opportunity.”
This article appears in the January 2023 print issue as “Finally, an eVTOL You Can Buy Soonish.”
Top Tech 2023: A Special Report
Preview exciting technical developments for the coming year.
Can This Company Dominate Green Hydrogen?
Fortescue will need more electricity-generating capacity than France.
Pathfinder 1 could herald a new era for zeppelins
A New Way to Speed Up Computing
Blue microLEDs bring optical fiber to the processor.
The Personal-Use eVTOL Is (Almost) Here
Opener’s BlackFly is a pulp-fiction fever dream with wings.
Baidu Will Make an Autonomous EV
Its partnership with Geely aims at full self-driving mode.
China Builds New Breeder Reactors
The power plants could also make weapons-grade plutonium.
Economics Drives a Ray-Gun Resurgence
Lasers should be cheap enough to use against drones.
A Cryptocurrency for the Masses or a Universal ID?
What Worldcoin’s killer app will be is not yet clear.
The company’s Condor chip will boast more than 1,000 qubits.
Vagus-nerve stimulation promises to help treat autoimmune disorders.
New satellites can connect directly to your phone.
The E.U.’s first exascale supercomputer will be built in Germany.
A dozen more tech milestones to watch for in 2023.
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