The transit authority (RIPTA) was hacked. Now the ACLU is questioning why thousands of people with no relationship to RIPTA had their personal information leaked.
A team of engineers from the University of California San Diego has unveiled a prototype four-legged soft robot that doesn’t need any electronics to work. The robot only needs a constant source of pressurized air for all its functions, including its controls and locomotion systems.
Most soft robots are powered by pressurized air and are controlled by electronic circuits. This approach works, but it requires complex components, like valves and pumps driven by actuators, which do not always fit inside the robot’s body.
Continue reading “A four-legged soft robot that doesn’t need any electronics to work” »
Having launched 31 orbital Falcon 9 missions and four suborbital Starship tests, 2021 was the most active year for SpaceX to date. These launches included a number of new reuse records, including flying a booster for the eleventh time, flying the same booster twice in under a month, flying a fairing half for the fifth time, and setting a turnaround record for Dragon.
Falcon 9 Boosters
2021 brought only two new Falcon 9s into the fleet: B1067 and B1069, which first flew on the CRS-22 and CRS-24 missions, respectively. All of the other 29 Falcon 9 missions were flown on flight-proven boosters. These flights included the first eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh flight of a first stage, meeting and surpassing CEO Elon Musk’s stated goal to fly a Falcon 9 first stage 10 times without major refurbishment.
We see that text data is ubiquitous in nature. There is a lot of text present in different forms such as posts, books, articles, and blogs. What is more interesting is the fact that there is a subset of Artificial Intelligence called Natural Language Processing (NLP) that would convert text into a form that could be used for machine learning. I know that sounds a lot but getting to know the details and the proper implementation of machine learning algorithms could ensure that one learns the important tools in the process.
Since the r e are newer and better libraries being created to be used for machine learning purposes, it would make sense to learn some of the state-of-the-art tools that could be used for predictions. I’ve recently come across a challenge on Kaggle about predicting the difficulty of the text.
The output variable, the difficulty of the text, is converted into a form that is continuous in nature. This makes the target variable continuous. Therefore, various regression techniques must be used for predicting the difficulty of the text. Since the text is ubiquitous in nature, applying the right processing mechanisms and predictions would be really valuable, especially for companies that receive feedback and reviews in the form of text.
TealBook, a startup that leverages AI to update and maintain a database of supply chain data, has raised $50 million in capital.
An almost perfect way to stealthily store malware.
Korean researchers have detected a vulnerability in SSDs that allows malware to plant itself directly in an SSD’s empty over-provisioning partition. As reported by BleepingComputer, this allows the malware to be nearly invincible to security countermeasures.
Over-provisioning is a feature included in all modern SSDs that improves the lifespan and performance of the SSD’s built-in NAND storage. Over-provisioning in essentially just empty storage space. But, it gives the SSD a chance to ensure that data is evenly distributed between all the NAND cells by shuffling data to the over-provisioning pool when needed.
Continue reading “New Malware Uses SSD Over-Provisioning to Bypass Security Measures” »
Unfortunately, some of the data is lost forever. 🧐
#engineering
A routine backup procedure meant to safeguard data of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan went awry and deleted 77 terabytes of data, Gizmodo reported. The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, first came to light on the 16th, and affected as many as 14 research groups at the university.
The Navy’s costliest warship finally has all the elevators needed to lift bombs from below its deck so it can deploy on its first operational patrol — more than four and a half years after delivery.
The service has announced that the 11th and final Advanced Weapons Elevator is in place on the $13.3 billion USS Gerald R. Ford and the aircraft carrier is ready for training and operations.
“This is a significant milestone for the Navy, ship and her crew,” Rear Admiral James Downey, the Navy’s program executive officer for aircraft carriers, said in a statement. “We now have the entire system to operate and train with.” He said the service and the prime contractor, Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc., used “hundreds of craftsmen, technicians and engineers, working around the clock —through multiple underway and holiday periods — to get these advanced systems on line and operational.”
