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NRO chief: “You can’t hide” from our new swarm of SpaceX-built spy satellites
“A satellite is always coming over an area within a given reasonable amount of time.”
The director of the National Reconnaissance Office has a message for US adversaries around the world.
“You can’t hide, because we’re constantly looking,” said Chris Scolese, a longtime NASA engineer who took the helm of the US government’s spy satellite agency in 2019.
The NRO is taking advantage of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite assembly line to build a network of at least 100 satellites, and perhaps many more, to monitor adversaries around the world. So far, more than 80 of these SpaceX-made spacecraft, each a little less than a ton in mass, have launched on four Falcon 9 rockets. There are more to come.
Kia says its new EV camper concept is the “ideal escape pod”
Kia has given an electric SUV and an EV van the off-road treatment.
Whenever we write about electric vans, the comments reveal a growing but pent-up demand for a camper version. Well, it seems that those vibes are being felt at Kia. It has created a pair of concepts for the automotive trade show SEMA, which got underway in Las Vegas today.
One of the two concepts will look more familiar—the EV9 ADVNTR is based on the popular electric three-row SUV. But the other is the PV5 WKNDR, a rugged off-road camper based on a forthcoming Kia electric van platform.
The EV9 ADVNTR makes good use of the existing EV9’s angular design, with new sections filled in with protective cladding. There’s a suspension lift and all-terrain tires, plus a roof rack, to distinguish it from lesser EV9s, but otherwise it’s relatively stock.
Ever heard of “Llady Gaga”? Universal files piracy suit over alleged knockoffs.
Universal sues Believe, a music distributor in over 50 countries.
Universal Music Group yesterday sued a music firm that allegedly distributes pirated songs on popular streaming services under misspelled versions of popular artists’ names—such as “Kendrik Laamar,” “Arriana Gramde,” “Jutin Biber,” and “Llady Gaga.” The UMG Recordings lawsuit against the French company Believe and its US-based subsidiary, TuneCore, alleges that “Believe is fully aware that its business model is fueled by rampant piracy” and “turned a blind eye to the fact that its music catalog was rife with copyright infringing sound recordings.”
Believe is a publicly traded company with about 2,020 employees in over 50 countries and reported $518 million (474.1 million euros) in revenue in the first half of 2024. Believe says its “mission is to develop independent artists and labels in the digital world.”
UMG alleges that Believe achieved “dramatic growth and profitability in recent years by operating as a hub for the distribution of infringing copies of the world’s most popular copyrighted recordings.” Believe has licensing deals with online platforms “including TikTok, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram and hundreds of others,” the lawsuit said.
Driving the biggest, least-efficient electric car: the Hummer EV SUV
Here’s what I learned daily-driving the gargantuan electric vehicle.
GMC’s Hummers have always been divisive. After getting hold of the rights to a civilian version of the US military vehicle in 1999, the company set about designing new, smaller vehicles to create an entire range. The ungainly H2 and H3 followed, both SUVs playing to the sensibilities of a country grappling with its warlike nature. By 2010, the Hummer brand was dead and laid dormant until someone had the bright idea to revive it for the electric vehicle generation. We drove the pickup version of that new Hummer in 2022, now it’s time for the $104,650 Hummer EV SUV.
I’ll admit I was worried that the Hummer EV wasn’t going to fit in my parking space. This is an extremely large vehicle, one that’s classified as a class 3 medium-duty truck—hence the yellow lights atop the roof. In fact, at 196.8 inches (5,000 mm) long, it’s actually slightly shorter than the pickup version, although that length doesn’t count the big spare tire hanging off the back.
Credit:
Jonathan Gitlin
Credit:
Jonathan Gitlin
Its 86.5-inch (2,196 mm) width just about fit between the lines, although it was a tight squeeze to try to open a door and climb up into the Hummer if my neighbor was parked as well. And climb up you do—there’s 10.2 inches (259 mm) of ground clearance even in the suspension’s normal setting, and the overall height is a towering 77.8 inches (1,976 mm). There is an entry mode that drops the car on its air springs by a couple of inches, but only if you remember to engage the feature when you park.
After 31 cargo missions, NASA finds Dragon still has some new tricks
Typically, most of the ISS propulsion comes from the Russian segment of the space station.
A Cargo Dragon spacecraft docked to the International Space Station on Tuesday morning, less than a day after lifting off from Florida.
As space missions go, this one was fairly routine, ferrying about 6,000 pounds (2,700 kg) of cargo and science experiments to the space station. Over the course of nearly a dozen years, this was the 31st cargo supply mission that SpaceX has flown for NASA to the orbiting laboratory.
However, there is one characteristic of this flight that may prove significant for NASA and the future of the space station. As early as Friday, NASA and SpaceX have scheduled a “reboost and attitude control demonstration,” during which the Dragon spacecraft will use some of the thrusters at the base of the capsule. This is the first time the Dragon spacecraft will be used to move the space station.
Boeing strike ends after workers vote to accept “life-changing” wage increase
Workers vow to restore Boeing’s iconic legacy as costly strike ends.
More than 33,000 Boeing workers reached a tentative agreement Monday night to end a weekslong strike that quickly became one of the costliest strikes in recent history—estimated to have cost the US economy more than $9.6 billion.
Through their unions, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Districts 751 and W24, workers in Washington state, Oregon, and California had previously rejected two inadequate Boeing offers while the company lost hundreds of millions daily. Negotiations had stalled until US Secretary of Labor Julie Su stepped in, IAM said in a press release, helping to restart talks and get to a deal that 59 percent of workers could agree on.
Under the proposed deal, workers will receive a 43 percent wage increase over four years, as well as a $12,000 bonus they can choose to receive in their paycheck, as a 401(k) contribution, or a combination of both. Additionally, Boeing agreed to match 401(k) contributions up to 8 percent.
Metal Slug Tactics gives turn-based strategy a hyper-stylized shot of adrenaline
It’s a little rogue-lite, it’s a bit ’90s arcade, and it’s surprisingly deep.
Metal Slug Tactics pushes hard on the boundaries of the vaunted run-and-gun arcade series. You can run when it’s your character’s turn, but it’s a certain number of tiles. You can gun, but not rapidly, and only after considering the most optimal target and tools.
Is this just Into the Breach with classic-era SNK artwork and aesthetics? Kind of, and you’re welcome.
As a true fan once wrote, Metal Slug games are about “crazy vehicles, amusing enemies and levels, and some of the best sprite art you’ll ever see in gaming.” To my eyes, you’re getting a whole bunch of that in Tactics. Turn-based, grid-mapped tactics have a natural tendency to feel slow and to strip characters down to chess pieces that can do two or three things. Here, the characters and villains cannot stop rocking their bodies, the guns and explosions and scimitars go off big, and the exaggerated-just-enough artwork keeps everything locked into an action-movie mood.
Hundreds of code libraries posted to NPM try to install malware on dev machines
These are not the the developer tools you think they are.
An ongoing attack is uploading hundreds of malicious packages to the open source node package manager (NPM) repository in an attempt to infect the devices of developers who rely on code libraries there, researchers said.
The malicious packages have names that are similar to legitimate ones for the Puppeteer and Bignum.js code libraries and for various libraries for working with cryptocurrency. The campaign, which was active at the time this post was going live on Ars, was reported by researchers from the security firm Phylum. The discovery comes on the heels of a similar campaign a few weeks ago targeting developers using forks of the Ethers.js library.
Beware of the supply chain attack
“Out of necessity, malware authors have had to endeavor to find more novel ways to hide intent and to obfuscate remote servers under their control,” Phylum researchers wrote. “This is, once again, a persistent reminder that supply chain attacks are alive and well.”
Facebook, Nvidia push SCOTUS to limit “nuisance” investor suits after scandals
Facebook, Nvidia ask SCOTUS to narrow legal paths to retrieve investor losses.
The Supreme Court will soon weigh two cases that could potentially make it harder for misled investors to sue Big Tech companies after major scandals.
One case involves one of the largest tech scandals of all time, the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach. In 2019, Facebook agreed to pay “more than $5 billion in civil penalties to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it had misled its users and investors over the privacy and security of user data on its platform,” a Supreme Court filing said.
The other case involves an allegation that Nvidia intentionally hid how much of its 2017–2018 GPU demand was due to a volatile cryptocurrency boom and not Nvidia’s core gaming business—allegedly misleading investors ahead of a crypto crash. After the bust, Nvidia suddenly had to slash half a billion dollars from its earnings projection, and market experts later estimated that the firm had understated its crypto-related revenue by more than a billion. In 2022, Nvidia paid a $5.5 million SEC penalty over the inadequate disclosures that one SEC chief said “deprived investors of critical information to evaluate the company’s business in a key market.”
New Zemeckis film used AI to de-age Tom Hanks and Robin Wright
Time-hopping film Here used AI trained on every Tom Hanks movie to make him appear young again.
On Friday, TriStar Pictures released Here, a $50 million Robert Zemeckis-directed film that used real-time generative AI face transformation techniques to portray actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright across a 60-year age span, marking one of Hollywood’s first full-length features built around AI-powered visual effects.
The film adapts a 2014 graphic novel set primarily in a New Jersey living room across multiple time periods. Rather than cast different actors for various ages, the production used AI to modify Hanks’ and Wright’s appearances throughout.
The de-aging technology comes from Metaphysic, a visual effects company that creates real-time face swapping and aging effects. During filming, the crew watched two monitors simultaneously: one showing the actors’ actual appearances and another displaying them at whatever age the scene required.