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Why Bezos’ rocket is unprecedented—and worth taking seriously

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, founder and Chief Executive of Amazon.com, in May, (credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images) We can say this much for Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and Blue Origin—he does not lack ambition. First Bezos founded an online bookstore that became the largest retailer in the western world, and now he plans to self-fund a New Glenn rocket that is nearly as tall as the Saturn V launch vehicle and more than half as powerful. As wild as Bezos’ idea sounds, Blue Origin might be able to get the job done. And if Bezos and Blue Origin can fly their massive orbital rocket in the next three to four years, it would be a remarkable, unprecedented achievement in a number of ways that could radically remake spaceflight. Proof of concept First, a few words about why this might really be viable. It is true that all Blue Origin has flown so far is a propulsion module, powered by a single BE-3 engine, and a capsule on a suborbital flight. The company’s New Shepard spacecraft is designed to carry six passengers on 10- to 15-minute hops up to about 100km before bringing them back down to Earth. This is not dissimilar to the first Mercury flights in the early 1960s, hence the moniker New Shepard, named after pioneering astronaut Alan Shepard. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why Bezos’ rocket is unprecedented—and worth taking seriously

Samsung loses $26 billion of market value after Note 7 recall

Samsung was having a great year , thanks to the S7 and S7 Edge, enticing investors to toss their money into the pool. Unfortunately, the rest of 2016 hasn’t been going according to Samsung’s forecast. The Korean chaebol has lost a whopping $26 billion (with a B) of its market value since it announced the Galaxy Note 7 recall, according to financial data provider Factset. Its shares apparently dropped 6.9 percent between the Korean Exchange’s close on Friday (September 9th) and Monday, and its stock is currently priced at a bit above $1, 300. That’s the lowest it’s been in months, although as you can see in the graph below the fold, the company has recovered a bit since yesterday. Since around 2.5 million devices were shipped before the recall started, it might have alarmed investors and made them question Samsung’s future in the mobile business. Perhaps in an effort to assuage their fears, the company announced on Monday that Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee will officially take over his father’s role as the company’s chief. Samsung expected to maintain its high-end smartphone sales in the second half of 2016 with the Note 7’s release. And it probably would have succeeded — we called the latest in the series the “best phone Samsung has ever made.” However, the corporation had to issue a recall after reports came out that some units’ batteries were faulty, making them prone to overheating and exploding. There are now over 70 reported cases of Note 7 devices overheating in the US alone. The government even stepped in and asked people to stop using their phones until they get safe replacements scheduled to come out on September 19th. Ordinary consumers have become so wary of the device, tech analyst Rod Enderle told Inquisitr that the company might have to announce the Note 7’s successor ahead of time in order to bounce back. Source: Quartz

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Samsung loses $26 billion of market value after Note 7 recall

This Is Why Your Credit Card Transactions Take So Long to Clear

When you swipe a credit or debit card at the store, your done with the transaction instantly. So why can’t your account statement keep up? If you’ve wondered why it takes so long for purchases to show up on your credit card statement or withdraw from a bank, it’s because of a long, complicated process behind the scenes. Read more…

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This Is Why Your Credit Card Transactions Take So Long to Clear

Hands-on: Blue Hydra can expose the all-too-unhidden world of Bluetooth

The SENA UD100 Bluetooth adapter, plus a slightly larger antenna, allows Blue Hydra to peer deep into the Bluetooth world. Sean Gallagher My new neighbor was using AirDrop to move some files from his phone to his iMac. I hadn’t introduced myself yet, but I already knew his name. Meanwhile, someone with a Pebble watch was walking past, and someone named “Johnny B” was idling at the stoplight at the corner in their Volkswagen Beetle, following directions from their Garmin Nuvi. Another person was using an Apple Pencil with their iPad at a nearby shop. And someone just turned on their Samsung smart television. I knew all this because each person advertised their presence wirelessly, either over “classic” Bluetooth or the newer Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) protocol—and I was running an open source tool called Blue Hydra , a project from the team at Pwnie Express . Blue Hydra is intended to give security professionals a way of tracking the presence of traditional Bluetooth, BTLE devices, and BTLE “iBeacon” proximity sensors. But it can also be connected to other tools to provide alerts on the presence of particular devices. Despite their “Low Energy” moniker, BTLE devices are constantly polling the world even while in “sleep” mode. And while they use randomized media access control (MAC) addresses, they advertise other data that is unique to each device, including a universally unique identifier (UUID). As a result, if you can tie a specific UUID to a device by other means, you can track the device and its owner. By using the Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI), you can get a sense of how far away they are. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hands-on: Blue Hydra can expose the all-too-unhidden world of Bluetooth

A Very Detailed Dissection of a Frame From DOOM

DOOM 2016 “cleverly re-uses old data computed in the previous frames…1331 draw calls, 132 textures and 50 render targets, ” according to a new article which takes a very detailed look at the process of rendering one 16-millisecond frame. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: The game released earlier this year uses the Vulkan API to push graphics quality and performance at new levels. The article sheds light on rendering techniques, mega-textures, reflection computation… all the aspects of a modern game engine. Some of the information came from “The Devil is in the Details, ” a July presentation at the SIGGRAPH 2016 conferences on graphics by Tiago Sousa, id’s lead renderer programmer, and senior engine programmer Jean Geffroy. (And there’s also more resources at the end of the article, including a July interview with five id programmers by Digital Foundry.) “Historically id Software is known for open-sourcing their engines after a few years, which often leads to nice remakes and breakdowns, ” the article notes. “Whether this will stand true with id Tech 6 remains to be seen but we don’t necessarily need the source code to appreciate the nice graphics techniques implemented in the engine.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A Very Detailed Dissection of a Frame From DOOM

Build a Wi-Fi Walkie Talkie-Like Device With a Raspberry Pi

Walkie talkies are awesome, but what’s even more awesome is one you build yourself. DIYer Daniel Chote’s kids wanted a pair of walkie talkies, so he built the closest thing possible with a Raspberry Pi. Read more…

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Build a Wi-Fi Walkie Talkie-Like Device With a Raspberry Pi

Top Russian anti-corruption official had $120M in cash in his apartment

Dmitry Zakharchenko, the deputy head of the Energy Industry Department of the General Administration of Economic Security and Combating the Corruption, also had €2m in cash. (more…)

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Top Russian anti-corruption official had $120M in cash in his apartment

Confirmed: Mysterious ancient Maya book, Grolier Codex, is genuine

A page from the Grolier Codex, now confirmed by an international team of scholars to be the oldest bound book found in the Americas. In a rare reversal, archaeologists have determined that a Maya book written almost 900 years ago is genuine–after decades of believing it was fake. The Grolier Codex was so named because it was first displayed in 1971 at the book lovers’ Grolier Club in New York City. Archaeologist Michael Coe, who arranged the 1971 showing, later described its rather questionable history in a book . It was acquired in a spectacularly scammy way in 1966 by a Mexican collector named Josué Sáenz. Coe says that Sáenz told him that a group of unknown men offered to sell the book to him, along with a few other items found “in a dry cave” near the foothills of the Sierra de Chiapas. They would only sell it if Sáenz agreed never to tell anyone or show the book. The collector, intrigued, took a plane to a remote airstrip with two experts, who declared the codex fake. But Sáenz went with his gut and bought the codex. After allowing Coe to display it in New York, he gave it to the Mexican government. There were a number of good reasons to believe the Grolier Codex was fake–beyond the sketchy way Sáenz procured it. Unlike three other Maya Codex finds, it had writing on only one side of each of its 10 pages. Plus, some of the pages appear to have been cut relatively recently. There are odd discrepancies in the book’s calendar system, hinting that a forger might have been trying to imitate a calendar he saw in another Maya artifact. The drawings are also unusual for a Maya document, combining styles of the Mesoamerican Mixtec people with Toltec attire. The Toltec were often hailed by the Aztecs as ancestors, and their art shares many similarities with late Maya art. Though carbon dating placed the Codex’s bark pages during the late Maya period, it was not unknown for looters to find blank pages in ancient Maya caches and cover them in fake hieroglyphs to make them more valuable. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Confirmed: Mysterious ancient Maya book, Grolier Codex, is genuine

Malware Infects 70% of Seagate Central NAS Drives, Earns $86,400

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: A new malware family has infected over 70% of all Seagate Central NAS devices connected to the Internet. The malware, named Miner-C or PhotoMiner, uses these hard-drives as an intermediary point to infect connected PCs and install software that mines for the Monero cryptocurrency… The crooks made over $86, 000 from Monero mining so far. The hard drives are easy to infect because Seagate does not allow users to delete or deactivate a certain “shared” folder when the device is exposed to the Internet. Over 5, 000 Seagate Central NAS devices are currently infected. Researchers estimates the malware is now responsible for 2.5% of all mining activity for the Monero cryptocurrency, according to the article. “The quandary is that Seagate Central owners have no way to protect their device. Turning off the remote access NAS feature can prevent the infection, but also means they lose the ability to access the device from a remote location, one of the reasons they purchased the hard drive in the first place.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Malware Infects 70% of Seagate Central NAS Drives, Earns $86,400

New Research Reveals Hundreds of Undiscovered Black Holes

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: New research by the University of Surrey published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has shone light on a globular cluster of stars that could host several hundred black holes, a phenomenon that until recently was thought impossible. Globular clusters are spherical collections of stars which orbit around a galactic center such as our Milky-way galaxy. Using advanced computer simulations, the team at the University of Surrey were able to see the un-see-able by mapping a globular cluster known as NGC 6101, from which the existence of black holes within the system was deduced. These black holes are a few times larger than the Sun, and form in the gravitational collapse of massive stars at the end of their lives. It was previously thought that these black holes would almost all be expelled from their parent cluster due to the effects of supernova explosion, during the death of a star. It is only as recently as 2013 that astrophysicists found individual black holes in globular clusters via rare phenomena in which a companion star donates material to the black hole. This work, which was supported by the European Research Council (ERC), has shown that in NGC 6101 there could be several hundred black holes, overturning old theories as to how black holes form. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Research Reveals Hundreds of Undiscovered Black Holes