Russia’s Newest Weather Satellite May Have Been Killed By Space Junk

December 27, 2019 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

For humans and satellites alike, making a living in space is hard. First, there’s the problem of surviving the brief but energetic and failure-prone ride there, after which you get to alternately roast and freeze as you zip around the planet at 20 times the speed of sound. The latter fact is made all the more dangerous by the swarm of space debris, both natural and man-made, that whizzes away up there along with you, waiting to cause an accident.

One such accident has apparently led to the early demise of a Russian weather satellite. Just a few months after launch, Meteor-M 2-2 suffered a sudden orbital anomaly (link to Russian story; English translation). Analysis of the data makes it pretty clear what happened: the satellite was struck by something, and despite some ground-controller heroics which appear to have stabilized the spacecraft, the odds are that Meteor-M 2-2 will eventually succumb to its wounds.

Continue reading “Russia’s Newest Weather Satellite May Have Been Killed By Space Junk” →

Apple HomeKit Accessory Development Kit Gets More Accessible

December 27, 2019 by Kerry Scharfglass 6 Comments

Every tech monopoly has their own proprietary smart home standard; how better to lock in your customers than to literally build a particular solution into their homes? Among the these players Apple is traditionally regarded as the most secretive, a title it has earned with decades of closed standards and proprietary solutions. This reputation is becoming progressively less deserved when it comes to HomeKit, their smart home gadget connectivity solution. In 2017 they took a big step forward and removed the need for a separate authentication chip in order to interact with HomeKit. Last week they took another and released a big chunk of their HomeKit Accessory Development Kit (ADK) as well. If you’re surprised not to have heard sooner, that might be because it was combined the the even bigger news about Apple, Amazon, the Zigbee Alliance, and more working together on more open, interoperable home IoT standards. Check back in 2030 to see how that is shaping up.

“The HomeKit ADK implements key components of the HomeKit Accessory Protocol (HAP), which embodies the core principles Apple brings to smart home technology: security, privacy, and reliability.”
– A descriptive gem from the README

Apple’s previous loosening-of-restrictions allowed people to begin building devices which could interact natively with their iOS devices without requiring a specific Apple-sold “auth chip” to authenticate them. This meant existing commercial devices could become HomeKit enabled with an OTA, and hobbyists could interact in sanctioned, non-hacky ways. Part of this was a release of the (non-commercial) HomeKit specification itself, which is available here (with Apple developer sign in, and license agreement).

Despite many breathless mentions in the press release it’s hard to tell what the ADK actually is. The README and documentation directory are devoid of answers, but spelunking through the rest of the GitHub repo gives us an idea. It consists of two primary parts, the HomeKit Accessory Protocol itself and the Platform Abstraction Layer. Together the HAP implements HomeKit itself, and the PAL is the wrapper that lets you plug it into a new system. It’s quite a meaty piece of software; the HAP’s main header is a grueling 4500 lines long, and it doesn’t take much searching to find some fear-inspiring 50 line preprocessor macros. This is a great start, but frankly we think it will take significantly more documentation to make the ADK accessible to all.

If it wasn’t obvious, most of the tools above are carefully licensed by Apple and intended for non-commercial use. While we absolutely appreciate the chance to get our hands on interfaces like this, we’re sure many will quibble over if this really counts as “open source” or not (it’s licensed as Apache 2.0). We’ll leave that for you in the comments.

Think You Know CURL? Care To Prove It?

December 27, 2019 by Donald Papp 5 Comments

Do you happen to remember a browser-based game “You Can’t JavaScript Under Pressure”? It presented coding tasks of ever-increasing difficulty and challenged the player to complete them as quickly as possible. Inspired by that game, [Ben Cox] re-implemented it as You Can’t cURL Under Pressure!

In it, the user is challenged in their knowledge of how to use the ubiquitous curl in a variety of different ways. Perhaps this doesn’t sound terribly daunting, especially if your knowledge of curl is limited to knowing it is a command-line tool to fetch something from a web server. But curl has a staggering number of features. The man page is over 4500 lines in length. The software’s main site offers a (free) 250+ page guide on how to use curl and libcurl. Reflecting on this is exactly what led [Ben] to create his challenge.

It’s a wonderful piece of work, but things get really interesting once [Ben] starts talking about the infrastructure behind it all. At its core the game works by giving the user a problem and a virtual machine, and catching outgoing HTTP calls to see whether they look correct. If the outgoing HTTP call is the right solution for the problem, terminate the current VM and start up the next one with the next problem. He’s put a lot of work into getting suitable VMs up and running quickly, securely, and properly isolated. The code can be found on the project’s GitHub repository for those who want a closer look.

But that’s not all. [Ben] says that in the past he’s had a bad habit of presenting interactive features in his blog posts that can’t keep up with sudden demand. So to address that, the system auto-scales as needed with a small Linux cluster; small brick-sized PCs are started and shut down automatically to meet demand. Hey, the only thing cooler than a functioning cluster is a cluster doing an actual job, like this one that detects NSFW images.