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Golden Spike Company announces plan for commercial lunar space expeditions

Apollo 17: Last on the Moon. Photo: NASA . An announcement of note this morning about The Golden Spike Company, a new private space travel venture, backed by private investors. Their tag line? “Extend Your Reach.” Snip from today’s press release: On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 17, the last human exploration of the Moon, Former Apollo Flight Director and NASA Johnson Space Center Director, Gerry Griffin, and planetary scientist and former NASA science chief, Dr. Alan Stern, today unveiled “The Golden Spike Company” – the first company planning to offer routine exploration expeditions to the surface of the Moon. At the National Press Club announcement this afternoon, Dr. Stern, Golden Spike’s President and CEO, and Mr. Griffin, chairman of Golden Spike’s board of directors, introduced other members of Golden Spike’s leadership team and detailed the company’s intentions to make complete lunar surface expeditions available by the end of the decade. Their board of directors (PDF) is an interesting hodgepodge, and includes Newt Gingrich, Esther Dyson, and the set designer for the movie Star Trek. The company says it plans to “maximize use of existing rockets” and market the resulting system to “nations, individuals, and corporations with lunar exploration objectives and ambitions,” promising “prices that are a fraction of any lunar program ever conceived until now.” A tall order, to be certain. Those I’ve spoken to in the space biz are skeptical, but of the mind that the more entrepreneurial efforts and private sector innovation we see in the Space space, the better. More background on the company in a Wired News article from a few days ago, and from this New Scientist piece back in November. The company is registered as a business in Colorado, where medical marijuana was just made legal. COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT. Here’s more from today’s press release from Golden Spike: This approach, capitalizing on available rockets and emerging commercial-crew spacecraft, dramatically lowers costs to create a market for human lunar exploration. Golden Spike estimates the cost for a two-person lunar surface mission will start at $1.4 billion. This price point enables human lunar expeditions at similar cost as what some national space programs are already spending on robotic science at the Moon. Dr. Stern and Mr. Griffin described Golden Spike’s “head start” architecture that has been two years in the making and vetted by teams of experts, including former space shuttle commander Jeffrey Ashby, former Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale, and Peter Banks, a member of the National Academy of Engineering. It has also been accepted for publication in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AIAA) Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, a leading aerospace technical journal. All of this will be available on Golden Spike’s website , launching sometime today. From 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. (EST) today, Thursday, December 6, 2012, company executives will host a press conference in DC at the National Press Club.

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Golden Spike Company announces plan for commercial lunar space expeditions

Ani Surabhi’s Biomimetic ‘Kranium’ Corrugated Bicycle Helmet Is Stronger, Lighter Than Traditional EPS

We first saw Anirudha Surabhi ‘s “Kranium” bicycle helmet shortly after he presented his graduation project at the Royal College of Art. Two years and £20,000 (courtesy of a James Dyson grant) later, the “Kranium” will finally be available to savvy cyclists in Europe. Surabhi, who goes by Ani for short, essentially designed the helmet from scratch: “the revolutionary Kranium liner is based on the corrugated structure found in the woodpecker and it is this structure, which provides the right amount of crumple zone to absorb impact energy.” Expanded polystyrene (EPS) helmets are proven to protect your head only 20% of the time. The Kranium liner has proven to absorb 3 times the amount of impact energy during collision. At the same time, it is 15% lighter than Polystyrene helmets. EPS helmets are made from petroleum based products where are the Kranium liner is made from recycled paper. They have been tested at several test labs across the globe, including TUV in Germany and HPE in the UK. They have been developed for mass production and will be available in the market in December 2012. As Ani explains in the must-see video (below), the project originated in his final year at the Royal College of Art, when he had the misfortune of falling off his bike and cracking the helmet which he was wearing at the time. The rest, as they say, is history: Having suffered minor concussions, I decided to take this as a design challenge and create the safest helmet on the planet. Looking into nature, the woodpecker is one of the only animal which experiences the same kind of impact on a regular basis. In fact, it strikes the tree ten times a second and closes its eyes every time so that they don’t pop out, which means a monumental amount of energy that goes through its head. (more…)

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Ani Surabhi’s Biomimetic ‘Kranium’ Corrugated Bicycle Helmet Is Stronger, Lighter Than Traditional EPS

How Windows tech support scammers walked right into a trap set by the feds

Aurich Lawson Three weeks ago, Jack Friedman got a call from a man with an Indian accent claiming to be from the Windows technical team at Microsoft. Friedman, a Florida resident who is my friend Elliot’s grandfather, was told by “Nathan James” from Windows that he needed to renew his software protection license to keep his computer running smoothly. “He said I had a problem with my Microsoft system,” Friedman told me. “He said they had a deal for $99, they would straighten out my computer and it will be like brand new.” Friedman’s three-year-old Windows Vista computer was running a bit slow, as many PCs do. Friedman is often suspicious of unsolicited calls, but after talking with Nathan on the phone and exchanging e-mails, he says, “I figured he was a legitimate guy.” Friedman handed over his Capital One credit card number, and the “technician” used remote PC support software to root around his computer for a while, supposedly fixing whatever was wrong with it. “I could see my arrow going all over the place and clicking different things on my computer,” Friedman said. But that $99 Capital One credit card charge turned into a $495 wire transfer. Then Bank of America’s fraud department called Friedman, and said, “somebody is trying to get into your account.” Whoever it was had entered the wrong password multiple times, and as a precaution Friedman’s checking account was shut down. Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How Windows tech support scammers walked right into a trap set by the feds

Bloomberg: Blockbuster to sell phones at brick-and-mortar locations

If the sight of remaining Blockbuster stores shocks you, brace yourself for another surprise: they could soon be selling smartphones alongside your 80s comedies. Dish Networks may have dashed its dreams of turning Blockbuster into a Netflix competitor, but according to a pair of Bloomberg sources, the firm will be pushing the veteran video rental chain into the smartphone retail arena. Blockbuster has already been peddling handsets online, but it’s said the sales will be extending to the chain’s roughly 850 remaining brick-and-mortar locations. According to the outlet, Dish CEO Charlie Ergen has planned on charging Blockbuster with smartphone sales since picking the company up last year . Bloomberg also notes that the move could signal Dish Network’s entry into offering mobile phone service, a la AT&T and Verizon — it’s sure gaining the spectrum to do so. Sure, the move might take the video store in an odd direction, but its not as if you won’t be able to watch movies on your Blockbuster-bought smartphone. [Image Credit: Josh Smith, Flickr ] Filed under: Cellphones , Mobile Comments Via: Gizmodo , The Verge Source: Bloomberg

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Bloomberg: Blockbuster to sell phones at brick-and-mortar locations

How to Run Windows XP for Free in Windows 8

Microsoft gave Windows 7 users a way to run older applications via Windows XP Mode. With Windows 8, however, that mode is no longer officially supported, and if you want to run Windows XP in a virtual machine, you need the license for it. Lifehacker reader Miloš, however, has found a workaround. More »

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How to Run Windows XP for Free in Windows 8

Sophisticated botnet steals more than $47M by infecting PCs and phones

Behold—the Eurograbber, visualized. Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock A new version of the Zeus trojan—a longtime favorite of criminals conducting online financial fraud—has been used in attacks on over 30,000 electronic banking customers in Europe, infecting both their personal computers and smartphones. The sophisticated attack is designed to circumvent banks’ use of two-factor authentication for transactions by intercepting messages sent by the bank to victims’ mobile phones. The malware and botnet system, dubbed “Eurograbber” by security researchers from Check Point Software and Versafe, was first detected in Italy earlier this year. It has since spread throughout Europe. Eurograbber is responsible for more than $47 million in fraudulent transfers from victims’ bank accounts, stealing amounts from individual victims that range from 500 Euros (about $650) to 25,000 Euros (about $32,000), according to a report published Wednesday (PDF) . The malware attack begins when a victim clicks on a malicious link, possibly sent as part of a phishing attack. Clicking on the link directs them to a site that attempts to download one or more trojans: customized versions of Zeus and its SpyEye and CarBerp variants that allow attackers to record Web visits and then inject HTML and JavaScript into the victim’s browser. The next time the victim visits their bank website, the trojans capture their credentials and launch a JavaScript that spoofs a request for a “security upgrade” from the site, offering to protect their mobile device from attack. The JavaScript captures their phone number and their mobile operating system information—which are used in the second level of Eurograbber’s attack. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sophisticated botnet steals more than $47M by infecting PCs and phones

New 25-GPU Monster Devours Strong Passwords In Minutes

chicksdaddy writes “A presentation at the Passwords^12 Conference in Oslo, Norway (slides), has moved the goalposts on password cracking yet again. Speaking on Monday, researcher Jeremi Gosney (a.k.a epixoip) demonstrated a rig that leveraged the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) framework and a technology known as Virtual Open Cluster (VCL) to run the HashCat password cracking program across a cluster of five, 4U servers equipped with 25 AMD Radeon GPUs communicating at 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps over Infiniband switched fabric. Gosney’s system elevates password cracking to the next level, and effectively renders even the strongest passwords protected with weaker encryption algorithms, like Microsoft’s LM and NTLM, obsolete. In a test, the researcher’s system was able to generate 348 billion NTLM password hash checks per second. That renders even the most secure password vulnerable to compute-intensive brute force and wordlist (or dictionary) attacks. A 14 character Windows XP password hashed using LM for example, would fall in just six minutes, said Per Thorsheim, organizer of the Passwords^12 Conference. For some context: In June, Poul-Henning Kamp, creator of the md5crypt() function used by FreeBSD and other, Linux-based operating systems, was forced to acknowledge that the hashing function is no longer suitable for production use — a victim of GPU-powered systems that could perform ‘close to 1 million checks per second on COTS (commercial off the shelf) GPU hardware,’ he wrote. Gosney’s cluster cranks out more than 77 million brute force attempts per second against MD5crypt.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New 25-GPU Monster Devours Strong Passwords In Minutes

Windows Phone now home to 120k apps, downloads and dev revenue rising post-WP8

Windows Phone 8 is a roaring success! That is if you ask the platform’s Senior Director, Todd Brix, who tweeted today that developer revenues and downloads have doubled since its launch in November. While this sounds all good, what does it really mean? Back in June, the former Windows Phone Marketplace surpassed 100,000 published apps . To further gauge the platform’s progress, Nokia recently announced that the Windows Phone Store now has over 120,000 apps, with 46 of the top 50 iOS and Android applications being available for WP8. While today’s vague declaration of success didn’t reveal any specific numbers, a 20 percent software increase in under six months is definitely something to smile about. As much as we’d like to slap Microsoft a high-five, we’ll have to save our jubilation until we get a little something more concrete — hopefully a set of official statistics will Surface sooner than later. Filed under: Software , Mobile , Microsoft Comments Source: Todd Brix (Twitter) , Nokia

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Windows Phone now home to 120k apps, downloads and dev revenue rising post-WP8

Fiber Optic Spanner (Wrench) Developed

xclr8r writes “A technique to use fiber optics to adjust microscopic particles has been developed. ‘Rather than an actual physical device that wraps around a cell or other microscopic particle to apply rotational force, the spanner (the British term for a wrench) is created when two laser beams — emitted by a pair of optical fibers — strike opposite sides of the microscopic object, trapping and holding it in place. By slightly offsetting the fibers, the beams can impart a small twisting force, causing the object to rotate in place. It is possible to create rotation along any axis and in any direction, depending on the positioning of the fibers.’ Applications of this technology can be used in a number of ways, including cancer research. This technology could be used to actually manipulate DNA. Associate Professor of Physics Samarendra Mohanty states that macroscale applications are a possibility, including ‘direct conversion of solar energy to mechanical energy,’ or possibly using it to ‘simulate an environment in which photons radiated from the sun could propel the reflective motors in solar sails, a promising future technology for deep-space travel.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fiber Optic Spanner (Wrench) Developed