On An Aging Space Station, Air Leaks Become Routine

March 11, 2024 by Tom Nardi 41 Comments

Anyone who’s ever owned an older car will know the feeling: the nagging worry at the back of your mind that today might be the day that something important actually stops working. Oh, it’s not the little problems that bother you: the rips in the seats, the buzz out of the rear speakers, and that slow oil leak that might have annoyed you at first, but eventually just blend into the background. So long as the car starts and can get you from point A to B, you can accept the sub-optimal performance that inevitably comes with age. Someday the day will come when you can no longer ignore the mounting issues and you’ll have to get a new vehicle, but today isn’t that day.

Looking at developments over the last few years one could argue that the International Space Station, while quite a bit more advanced and costly than the old beater parked in your driveway, is entering a similar phase of its lifecycle. The first modules of the sprawling orbital complex were launched all the way back in 1998, and had a design lifetime of just 15 years. But with no major failures and the Station’s overall condition remaining stable, both NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency have agreed to several mission extensions. The current agreement will see crews living and working aboard the Station until 2030, but as recently as January, NASA and Roscosmos officials were quoted as saying a further extension isn’t out of the question.

Still, there’s no debating that the ISS isn’t in the same shape it was when construction was formally completed in 2011. A perfect case in point: the fact that the rate of air leaking out of the Russian side of the complex has recently doubled is being treated as little more than a minor annoyance, as mission planners know what the problem is and how to minimize the impact is has on Station operations.

Continue reading “On An Aging Space Station, Air Leaks Become Routine” →

Hackaday Links: March 10, 2024

March 10, 2024 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

We all know that we’re living in a surveillance state that would make Orwell himself shake his head, but it looks like at least one company in this space has gone a little rogue. According to reports, AI surveillance start-up Flock <<insert gratuitous “What the Flock?” joke here>> has installed at least 200 of its car-tracking cameras on public roads in South Carolina alone. That’s a serious whoopsie, especially since it’s illegal to install anything on state infrastructure without permission, which it appears Flock failed to obtain. South Carolina authorities are making a good show of being outraged about this, but it sort of rings hollow to us, especially since Flock now claims that 70% of the population (of the USA, we presume) is covered by their technology. Also, police departments across the country are in love with Flock’s service, which lets them accurately track the movements of potential suspects, which of course is everyone. No word on whether Flock will have to remove the rogue cameras, but we’re not holding our breath.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: March 10, 2024” →

Retro Gadgets: Pay TV In The 1960s

March 8, 2024 by Al Williams 18 Comments

These days, paying for TV programming is a fact of life. You pay your cable company or some streaming service and the only question is do you want Apple TV and Hulu or would you rather switch one out for NetFlix? But back in the 1960s, paying for TV seemed unthinkable and was quite controversial. Cable TV systems were rare, and the airwaves were a public resource, so allowing someone to charge to watch TV on the public airwaves was hard to imagine. That was the backdrop behind the Telemeter — an early attempt to monetize TV programming that was more like a pay phone than a modern streaming service.

[Lothar Stern] wrote about the device in the November 1959 issue of Popular Mechanics (see page 220). The device looked like a radio that sat on top of your TV. It added a whopping three pay-TV channels, and inside was a coin box, and — no kidding — a tape punch or recorder. These three channels were carried from a Telemeter studio over what appears to be a dedicated cable strung on existing phone poles.

Of course, TVs with coin boxes were nothing new. But those TVs were found in public places, airports, and hotels. The money was simply to turn the TV on for a set amount of time. This was different. A set-top box unscrambled channels delivered over a dedicated cable. Seems like old hat today, but a revolutionary idea in 1959.

Continue reading “Retro Gadgets: Pay TV In The 1960s” →

This Week In Security: Blame The Feds, Emergency Patches, And The DMA

March 8, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett No comments

The temptation to “take the money and run” was apparently too much for the leadership of the AlphV ransomware crime ring. You may have heard of this group as being behind the breach of Change Healthcare, and causing payment problems for nearly the entire US Healthcare system. And that hack seems to be key to what’s happened this week.

It’s known that a $22 million payment made it through the bitcoin maze to the AlphV wallet on the 1st. It’s believed that this is a payment from Change Healthcare to recover ransomed files. An important detail here is that AlphV is a ransomware-as-a-service provider, and the actual hacking is done by “affiliates”, who use that service, and AlphV handles the infrastructure, maintaining the actual malware, and serving as a payment processor. That last one is key here.

A couple days after that big payment landed in the AlphV account, a seizure notice went up on the AlphV TOR site, claiming that it had been taken down by the FBI and associated agencies. There was something a bit odd about it, though. See, the FBI did seize the AlphV Tor site back in December. The seizure notice this time was an exact copy, as if someone had just done a “save page as”, and posted the copy.

There is precedent for a ransomware group to close up shop and disappear after hitting a big score. The disruption AlphV enabled in the US health care system painted a big target on them, and it didn’t take a tactical genius to realize it might be good to lay low for a while. Pocketing the entire $22 million ransom probably didn’t hurt either. The particularly nasty part is that the affiliate that actually pulled off the attack still claims to have four terabytes of sensitive data, and no incentive to not release it online. It’s not even entirely clear that Change Healthcare actually received a decryption key for their data. You do not want to deal with these people.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Blame The Feds, Emergency Patches, And The DMA” →

Stacking Solar Cells Is A Neat Trick To Maximise Efficiency

March 7, 2024 by Lewin Day 51 Comments

Solar power is already cheap and effective, and it’s taking on a larger role in supplying energy needs all over the world. The thing about humanity, though, is that we always want more! Too much, you say? It’s never enough!

The problem is that the sun only outputs so much energy per unit of area on Earth, and solar cells can only be so efficient thanks to some fundamental physical limits. However, there’s a way to get around that—with the magic of tandem solar cells!

Continue reading “Stacking Solar Cells Is A Neat Trick To Maximise Efficiency” →

The 1970s Computer: A Slice Of Computing

March 6, 2024 by Al Williams 44 Comments

What do the HP-1000 and the DEC VAX 11/730 have in common with the video games Tempest and Battlezone? More than you might think. All of those machines, along with many others from that time period, used AM2900-family bit slice CPUs.

The bit slice CPU was a very successful product that could only have existed in the 1970s. Today, if you need a computer system, there are many CPUs and even entire systems on a chip to choose from. You can also get many small board-level systems that would probably do anything you want. In the 1960s, you had no choices at all. You built circuit boards with gates on the using transistors, tubes, relays, or — maybe — small-scale IC gates. Then you wired the boards up.

It didn’t take a genius to realize that it would be great to offer people a CPU chip like you can get today. The problem is the semiconductor technology of the day wouldn’t allow it — at least, not with any significant amount of resources. For example, the Motorola MC14500B from 1977 was a one-bit microprocessor, and while that had its uses, it wasn’t for everyone or everything.

The Answer

The answer was to produce as much of a CPU as possible in a chip and make provisions to use multiple chips together to build the CPU. That’s exactly what AMD did with the AM2900 family. If you think about it, what is a CPU? Sure, there are variations, but at the core, there’s a place to store instructions, a place to store data, some way to pick instructions, and a way to operate on data (like an ALU — arithmetic logic unit). Instructions move data from one place to another and set the state of things like I/O devices, ALU operations, and the like.

Continue reading “The 1970s Computer: A Slice Of Computing” →

Dial-Up Is Still, Just Barely, A Thing

March 6, 2024 by Lewin Day 93 Comments

In an era dominated by broadband and wireless cellular networks, it might come as a surprise to many that dial-up internet services still exist in the United States. This persistence is not a mere relic of nostalgia — but a testament to the diverse and uneven nature of internet infrastructure across the country.

Yes, dial-up internet, with those screechy, crackly tones, remains a useful tool in areas where modern, high-speed internet services are either unaffordable or unavailable. Subscriber numbers are tiny, but some plough on and access the Internet by the old ways, not the new.

Continue reading “Dial-Up Is Still, Just Barely, A Thing” →