Blame It On The Sockets: Forensic Analysis Of The Arecibo Collapse

August 29, 2023 by Dan Maloney 58 Comments

Nearly three years after the rapid unplanned disassembly of the Arecibo radio telescope, we finally have a culprit in the collapse: bad sockets.

In case you somehow missed it, back in 2020 we started getting ominous reports that the cables supporting the 900-ton instrument platform above the 300-meter primary reflector of what was at the time the world’s largest radio telescope were slowly coming undone. From the first sign of problems in August, when the first broken cable smashed a hole in the reflector, to the failure of a second cable in November, it surely seemed like Arecibo’s days were numbered, and that it would fall victim to all the other bad luck we seemed to be rapidly accruing in that fateful year. The inevitable finally happened on December 1, when over-stressed cables on support tower four finally gave way, sending the platform on a graceful swing into the side of the natural depression that cradled the reflector, damaging the telescope beyond all hope of repair.

The long run-up to the telescope’s final act had a silver lining in that it provided engineers and scientists with a chance to carefully observe the failure in real-time. So there was no real mystery as to what happened, at least from a big-picture perspective. But one always wants to know the fine-scale details of such failures, a task which fell to forensic investigation firm Thornton Tomasetti. They enlisted the help of the Columbia University Strength of Materials lab, which sent pieces of the failed cable to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s High Flux Isotope reactor for neutron imaging, which is like an X-ray study but uses streams of neutrons that interact with the material’s nuclei rather than their electrons.

The full report (PDF) reveals five proximate causes for the collapse, chief of which is “[T]he manual and inconsistent splay of the wires during cable socketing,” which we take to mean that the individual strands of the cables were not spread out correctly before the molten zinc “spelter socket” was molded around them. The resulting shear stress caused the zinc to slowly flow around the cable strands, letting them slip out of the surrounding steel socket and — well, you can watch the rest below for yourself.

As is usually the case with such failures, there are multiple causes, all of which are covered in the 300+ page report. But being able to pin the bulk of the failure on a single, easily understood — and easily addressed — defect is comforting, in a way. It’s cold comfort to astronomers and Arecibo staff, perhaps, but at least it’s a lesson that might prevent future failures of cable-supported structures.

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Close-up of a magnetic tentacle robot next to a phantom bronchiole (Credit: University of Leeds)

The Healing Touch Of Magnetic Tentacles In Photothermal Lung Cancer Therapy

August 28, 2023 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Of the body’s organs, the lungs are among the trickiest to take a biopsy and treat cancer in, both due to how important they are, as well as due to their inaccessibility. The total respiratory surface within the average human lungs is about 50 to 75 square meters. Maneuvering any kind of instrument down the endless passages to reach a suspicious area, or a cancerous region to treat is nearly impossible. This has so far left much of the lungs inaccessible.

The standard of care for lung cancer is generally surgical: remove parts of the lung tissue. However, a proposed new method using magnetic tentacles may soon provide a more gentle approach, as described in Nature Engineering Communications by Giovanni Pittiglio and colleagues (press release).

The tentacles are made out of a silicone substrate with embedded magnets that allow for it to be steered using external magnetic sources. With an embedded laser fiber, the head of the tentacle can be guided to the target area, and the cancerous tissue sublimated using an external laser source. In experiments on cadavers with this system, the researchers found that they could enter 37% deeper into the lungs than with standard equipment. The procedure was also completed with less tissue displacement.

Considering the high fatality rate of lung cancers, the researchers hope that this approach could soon be turned into a viable therapy, as well as for other medical conditions where a gentle tentacle slithering into the patient’s body could effect treatments previously considered to be impossible.

Heading image: Close-up of a magnetic tentacle robot next to a phantom bronchiole (Credit: University of Leeds)

GTA 6 Hacker Found To Be Teen With Amazon Fire Stick In Small Town Hotel Room

August 26, 2023 by Jenny List 115 Comments

International cybercrime, as portrayed by the movies and mass media, is a high-stakes game of shadowy government agencies and state-sponsored hacking groups. Hollywood casting will wheel out a character in a black hoodie and shades, probably carrying a metallic briefcase as they board an executive jet.

These things aren’t supposed to happen in a cheap hotel room in your insignificant hometown, but the story of a British teen being nabbed leaking the closely guarded details of Grand Theft Auto 6 in a Travelodge room in Bicester, Oxfordshire brings the action from the global into the local for a Hackaday scribe. Bicester is a small town best known for a tacky outlet mall and as a commuter dormitory stop on the line to London Marylebone, it’s not exactly Vice City.

The teen in question is one [Arion Kurtaj], breathlessly reported by the BBC as part of the Lapsus$ gang, which is a sensationalist way of talking up a group of kids expert at computer infiltration but seemingly inept at being criminals. After compromising British telcos he was exposed by another group and nabbed by the authorities, before being moved to the hotel for his own safety.

Here the story becomes more interesting for Hackaday readers, because though denied access to a computer he purchased an Amazon Fire stick presumably at the Argos in the Sainsburys next door, and plugged it into the Travelodge TV. Using this he was able to access cloud services, we’re guessing a virtual Linux environment or similar, before continuing to compromise further organisations including Rockstar Games to leak that GTA 6 footage. He’s yet to be sentenced, but we’re guessing that he’ll continue to spend some time at His Majesty’s pleasure.

The moment of excitement in one’s hometown and the sensationalist reporting aside, we can’t help feeling sad that a teen with that level of talent evidently wasn’t given the support and encouragement by Oxfordshire’s education system necessary to put it to better use. Let’s hope when he’s older and wiser the teenage conviction won’t prevent him from having a useful career in the field.

Microsoft Discontinues Kinect, Again

August 26, 2023 by Donald Papp 17 Comments

The Kinect is a depth-sensing camera peripheral originally designed as a accessory for the Xbox gaming console, and it quickly found its way into hobbyist and research projects. After a second version, Microsoft abandoned the idea of using it as a motion sensor for gaming and it was discontinued. The technology did however end up evolving as a sensor into what eventually became the Azure Kinect DK (spelling out ‘developer kit’ presumably made the name too long.) Sadly, it also has now been discontinued.

The original Kinect was a pretty neat piece of hardware for the price, and a few years ago we noted that the newest version was considerably smaller and more capable. It had a depth sensor with selectable field of view for different applications, a high-resolution RGB video camera that integrated with the depth stream, integrated IMU and microphone array, and it worked to leverage machine learning for better processing and easy integration with Azure. It even provided a simple way to sync multiple units together for unified processing of a scene.

In many ways the Kinect gave us all a glimpse of the future because at the time, a depth-sensing camera with a synchronized video stream was just not a normal thing to get one’s hands on. It was also one of the first consumer hardware items to contain a microphone array, which allowed it to better record voices, localize them, and isolate them from other noise sources in a room. It led to many, many projects and we hope there are still more to come, because Microsoft might not be making them anymore, but they are licensing out the technology to companies who want to build similar devices.

This Week In Security: WinRAR, DNS Disco, And No Silver Bullets

August 25, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 1 Comment

So what does WinRAR, day trading, and Visual Basic have in common? If you guessed “elaborate malware campaign aimed at investment brokers”, then you win the Internet for the day. This work comes from Group-IB, another cybersecurity company with a research team. They were researching a malware known as DarkMe, and found an attack on WinRAR being used in the wild, using malicious ZIP files being spread on a series of web forums for traders.

Among the interesting tidbits of the story, apparently at least one of those forums locked down the users spreading the malicious files, and they promptly broke into the forum’s back-end and unlocked their accounts. The vulnerability itself is interesting, too. A rigged zip file is created with identically named image file and folder containing a script. The user tries to open the image, but because the zip is malformed, the WinRAR function gets confused and opens the script instead.

Based on a user’s story from one of those forums, it appears that the end goal was to break into the brokers’ trading accounts, and funnel money into attacker accounts. The one documented case only lost $2 worth of dogecoin.

There was one more vulnerability found in WinRAR, an issue when processing malicious recovery volumes. This can lead to code execution due to a memory access error. Both issues were fixed with release 6.23, so if you still have a WinRAR install kicking around, make sure it’s up to date! Continue reading “This Week In Security: WinRAR, DNS Disco, And No Silver Bullets” →

Smart Garbage Trucks Help With Street Maintenance

August 24, 2023 by Lewin Day 42 Comments

If you’ve ever had trouble with a footpath, bus stop, or other piece of urban infrastructure, you probably know the hassles of dealing with a local council. It can be incredibly difficult just to track down the right avenue to report issues, let alone get them sorted in a timely fashion.

In the suburban streets of one Australian city, though, that’s changing somewhat. New smart garbage trucks are becoming instruments of infrastructure surveillance, serving a dual purpose that could reshape urban management. Naturally, though, this new technology raises issues around ethics and privacy.

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India Makes History With Chandrayaan-3 Landing

August 24, 2023 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

Yesterday, the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft performed a powered soft-landing on the Moon, officially making India the fourth country to achieve a controlled descent to the lunar surface. Up to this point, only the United States, China, and the Soviet Union could boast successful landings on our nearest celestial neighbor.

What’s more, Chandrayaan-3 has positioned itself closer to the Moon’s south pole than any other mission in history. This area is of great interest to scientists, as there is evidence that deep craters in the polar region contain considerable deposits of frozen water. At the same time, the polar highlands receive almost constant sunlight, making it the perfect location to install solar arrays. These factors make the Moon’s south pole an ideal candidate for a future human outpost, and Chandrayaan-3 is just one of several robotic craft that will explore this area in the coming years.

But as is usually the case with space exploration, the success of Chandrayaan-3 didn’t come easy, or quickly. The ISRO started the Chandrayaan program in 2003, and launched the Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008. The craft successfully entered lunar orbit and surveyed the surface using a wide array of instruments, many of which were provided by foreign space agencies such as NASA and the ESA. In 2019 the far more ambitious Chandrayaan-2 mission was launched, which included a lander and small rover. While the orbiter component of Chandrayaan-2 was a complete success, the lander crashed into the Moon’s surface and was destroyed.

With Chandrayaan-3 now safely on the surface of the Moon, there’s much work to be done in the coming days. The planned mission lifetime for both the lander and rover is a single lunar day, which equals just about two weeks here on Earth. After that, the vehicles will be plunged into a long stretch of frigid darkness which they likely won’t survive.

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