ReHacked vol. 250: Boeing 737 MAX 9, South Pole Adventure, Austerity Is an Antidemocratic Strategy to Boost Capital and more
Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9
United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections - The Air Current
Air safety reporting by The Air Current is provided without a subscription as a public service. United Airlines has found loose bolts and other parts on 737 Max 9 plug doors as it inspects its fleet of Boeing jets following the Friday rapid depressurization aboard an Alaska Airlines jet of the same make, according to three people familiar with the findings.
The discrepant bolts and other parts on the plug doors have been found on at least five aircraft, one of the people told The Air Current.
A Boeing representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration declined to comment on the United findings, and pointed to the agency’s earlier statements.
Loss of Alaska cockpit recording rekindles industry safety debate
The cockpit voice recorder data on the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet which lost a panel mid-flight on Friday was overwritten, U.S. authorities said, renewing attention on long-standing safety calls for longer in-flight recordings.
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chair Jennifer Homendy said on Sunday no data was available on the cockpit voice recorder because it was not retrieved within two hours - when recording restarts, erasing previous data.
The U.S. requires cockpit voice recorders to log two hours of data versus 25 hours in Europe for planes made after 2021.
The industry has been wrestling with the length of cockpit recordings since the disappearance of a Malaysian jet in 2014.
Updates on Grounding of Boeing 737 MAX 9 Aircraft | Federal Aviation Administration
Every Boeing 737-9 Max with a plug door will remain grounded until the FAA finds each can safely return to operation. To begin this process, Boeing must provide instructions to operators for inspections and maintenance. Boeing offered an initial version of instructions yesterday which they are now revising because of feedback received in response. Upon receiving the revised version of instructions from Boeing the FAA will conduct a thorough review.
US regulator grounds 737 Max 9 until it receives further data from Boeing
The move to review the oversight programme, where Boeing’s own employees certify aircraft safety on behalf of the Federal Aviation Administration, was prompted by the grounding of some 737 Max 9s following the mid-air incident over Oregon last Friday. The so-called “organisation designation authorisation” earlier came under scrutiny when two Boeing 737 Max 8s crashed in 2018 and 2019.
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Ancestry piles on more fees, including new "AncestryDNA Plus" for formerly free features – EasyGenie #privacy
Ancestry.com has hit new lows in the past month, with a slew of price increases and new fees. The biggest change: the removal of formerly free features that came with AncestryDNA test kits, which will be replaced with a new paid offering called AncestryDNA Plus. I’m going to outline the new Ancestry fees and price changes, and offer some advice about next steps for those who have tested their DNA at Ancestry.
Norway to allow mining waste to be dumped in fjords | Norway | The Guardian #nature #environment #economy
Norway is to allow mining waste to be dumped in its fjords after the government won a court case against environmental organisations trying to block the plan.
After a 15-year dispute, the private company Nordic Mining has been given the go-ahead to dispose of 170m tonnes of mining waste at the bottom of the Førde fjord, which critics say will threaten marine life and put biodiversity at risk.
Norway joins only two other countries – Papua New Guinea and Turkey – that still grant new licences for marine waste disposal.
An LG washing machine owner and self-confessed fintech geek has asked the Twitterverse why his smart home appliance ate an average of 3.66GB of data daily. Concerned about the washer’s internet addiction, Johnie forced the device to go cold turkey and block the device using his router UI. Had the LG washer been hacked, hijacked, or otherwise tampered with over the net – or was this average data consumption for a smart appliance like this?
OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare” #ai #copyrights
OpenAI this week quietly deleted language expressly prohibiting the use of its technology for military purposes from its usage policy, which seeks to dictate how powerful and immensely popular tools like ChatGPT can be used.
Up until January 10, OpenAI’s “usage policies” page included a ban on “activity that has high risk of physical harm, including,” specifically, “weapons development” and “military and warfare.” That plainly worded prohibition against military applications would seemingly rule out any official, and extremely lucrative, use by the Department of Defense or any other state military. The new policy retains an injunction not to “use our service to harm yourself or others” and gives “develop or use weapons” as an example, but the blanket ban on “military and warfare” use has vanished.
Getting things done (in small increments) #productivity
- Make progress every day.
- Always know what the next thing to do is.
- Pay attention to feedback loops.
- For bigger things, make a plan and keep a log.
- Block distractions.
How I built a fully offline smart home, and why you should too #technology #diy #security #privacy
"An offline smart home is private, less expensive, and yours forever."
If those two reasons aren’t enough, you can sometimes also save a few bucks going the offline route. Instead of paying a premium for smart coffee makers or washing machines, you can retrofit almost any existing appliance with smart plugs and switches. Those can often be controlled without an internet connection, making them much more reliable than manufacturer ecosystems.
WikiHouse - opensource sustainable house #diy
Bitwarden has announced that all users can now log in to their web vaults using a passkey instead of the standard username and password pairs.
There are some interesting technical details in the article that I hadn't read before, namely that deriving an encryption key from passkeys to encrypt user data is not possible, because the third party would receive a different value for each authentication. But encrypting user data requires a single, static key that remains the same across different authentication sessions. That's why there is an extension to the standard, called the PRF WebAuthn extension, which allows you to create a fixed value key. TIL. --Dieter Van der Stock (The Security Newsletter)
Liberal Visions and Boring Machines: The Early History of the Channel Tunnel – The Public Domain Review #history #engineering #longread
More than a century before the Eurostar and LeShuttle, a group of engineers and statesmen dreamed (and fretted) about connecting Britain to France with an underwater tunnel. Peter Keeling drills into the history of this submarine link, and finds a still-relevant story about the cosmopolitan hopes and isolationist panic surrounding liberal internationalism.
For centuries, the Channel was Britain's bulwark against foreign invasion. The vicious weather was given a divine interpretation as the “protestant wind” which sunk the Spanish Armada in 1588. But this was a double-edged sword: merchant shipping was as vulnerable as Phillip II’s great fleet. With the industrial era came peace and increased trade, and by the early nineteenth century the UK was the largest producer of manufactured goods in the world. Improvements in shipping and port facilities greatly facilitated trade, but the logistical problem of transferring goods from ship to shore remained. Unsurprisingly, faced with this issue, thoughts began to turn toward methods of avoiding the water altogether. In 1785, the trip was first made by balloon, but the first aeroplane would not follow until 1909. In 1851, a telegraph wire linked London and Paris directly. Might it be possible for a railway to follow? Many engineers believed it was: they proposed a tunnel, joining the roads and railways of Britain to those of mainland Europe.
Dutch Engineer Used Water Pump to Get Billion-Dollar Stuxnet Malware Into Iranian Nuclear Facility: Report - SecurityWeek #security #history
A Dutch engineer recruited by the country’s intelligence services used a water pump to deploy the now-infamous Stuxnet malware in an Iranian nuclear facility, according to a two-year investigation conducted by Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant.
Stuxnet, whose existence came to light in 2010, is widely believed to be the work of the United States and Israel, its goal being to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program by compromising industrial control systems (ICS) associated with nuclear centrifuges. The malware, which had worm capabilities, is said to have infected hundreds of thousands of devices and caused physical damage to hundreds of machines.
De Volkskrant’s investigation, which involved interviews with dozens of people, found that the AIVD, the general intelligence and security service of the Netherlands, the Dutch equivalent of the CIA, recruited Erik van Sabben, a then 36-year-old Dutch national working at a heavy transport company in Dubai.
South Pole Adventure #interesting #longread
From the arrival until departure (feel free to dig the archives, WARNING: The Rabbit hole!)
Austerity Is an Antidemocratic Strategy to Boost Capital #economy #society #history #books #longread
Capitalism gave rise to a value system that teaches us to find meaning in our work; yet millions are employed in low-paying, soul-crushing jobs. And while modern capitalism promises — and is indeed fully capable of providing — broad-based prosperity, the system, via the state, routinely promotes and enforces austerity policies aimed at compelling people to work harder for lower pay and less job security. Output per worker increases year by year because of improvements in technology, but the austerity evangelists insist that if we want capitalism to continue to bestow its blessings on humanity, workers must accept lower living standards and the social safety net needs to be dismantled.
In The Capital Order, Clara Mattei brings to light the fascinating story of how austerity became a crucial weapon of class warfare. In this major contribution to the political and intellectual history of modern capitalism, Mattei traces the roots of neoliberalism to the political reaction against the militant working-class movements that emerged in Europe after World War I.
Card Games and Tile Games from around the World #fun
#engineering #energy #longread
#security
With an upbeat pling my console alerted me that my script had finished running, to be precise it was searching for exposed Firebase credentials on any of the hundreds of recent AI startups.
This was achieved through a public list of sites using the .ai TLD and parsing the site data (and any referenced .js bundles) for references to common Firebase initialisation variables.
Why does a remote car key work when held to your head/body? - Physics Stack Exchange #interesting #engineering
The Ugliest Airplane: An Appreciation | Air & Space Magazine| Smithsonian Magazine #aviation #history
It is one of the most bizarre looking aircraft ever to reach production. Its conception occurred in Australia, its gestation in New Zealand, and its growth and maturation back in Australia. This geography, and unfettered thinking about the TransAvia AirTruk’s mission, drove the airplane’s unusual appearance.
In the mid-1950s, the largely agricultural country of New Zealand found itself in need of new aircraft for “topdressing”—spreading soil enhancers and fertilizers by air—what we on this side of the world call “cropdusting.” The old airplanes they had inherited from the British Commonwealth, mostly converted de Havilland Tiger Moths and Piper Cub-like Austers, were wearing out. A few new American designs were imported, but currency restrictions of the day made them very expensive. New Zealanders needed a locally built airplane specifically designed for the job and sold for an affordable price.
DARPA Moves Forward on X-65 Technology Demonstrator #engineering #aviation
DARPA has selected Aurora Flight Sciences to build a full-scale X-plane to demonstrate the viability of using active flow control (AFC) actuators for primary flight control. The award is Phase 3 of the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program.
In December 1903, the Wright brothers flew the world’s first fully controllable aircraft, which used wing warping to successfully achieve flight. Virtually every aircraft since then has used a system of movable, external control surfaces for flight control.
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