Piling Up
SpaceX has launched about 775 Starlink satellites so far but plans to have 42,000 by the time the constellation is complete. At a three percent failure rate — assuming it stays consistent — that amounts to 1,260 immobilized satellites waiting to smash into other stuff in space.
“I would say their failure rate is not egregious,” McDowell told Business Insider. “It’s not worse than anybody else’s failure rates. The concern is that even a normal failure rate in such a huge constellation is going to end up with a lot of bad space junk.”
Interesting…
The new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is a gaming powerhouse, but that’s not all it can do. According to the makers of a popular password recovery application, the RTX 3090 is also good at brute-forcing passwords. That’s great if you forget an important password, but that’s probably not why people are using such tools. The latest Nvidia cards could make cracking someone else’s files almost trivially easy.
The RTX 3090 is Nvidia’s latest top-of-the-line GPU with a GA102 graphics processor sporting 10,496 cores and 24GB of GDDR6X memory. It is monstrously, obscenely powerful by today’s gaming standards, and comes with a correspondingly high price of $1,500, give or take a few hundred depending on supply. With a focus on high core counts, GPUs are also great for parallel computing. That’s why you couldn’t even buy a GPU for several months when Bitcoin was at its peak. In the same vein, GPUs are very good at cracking passwords.
Passcovery recently updated to add support for RTX cards like the 3090, and it vastly increased the speed of brute force attacks. In the past, it wasn’t practical to guess every possible password until you hit on the right one — computers just weren’t fast enough. However, a GPU can do that quickly enough to find passwords in certain instances. With v20.09 of the Passcovery suite, a relatively modest GTX 1060 can go from 3.4 million guesses per second to 669 million per second. This version of the software added support for RTX 3000-series cards, which might be a problem for your weak passwords. The RTX 3090 is almost seven times faster in GPU compute benchmarks than the 1060 — that’s a lot of guesses per second.
The video could be the first visual evidence that China is actively testing an air-launched hypersonic weapon.
From Ted.com.
Biodiversity is the key to life on Earth and reviving our damaged planet, says ecologist Thomas Crowther. Sharing the inside story of his headline-making research on reforestation, which led to the UN’s viral Trillion Trees Campaign, Crowther introduces Restor: an expansive, informative platform built to enable anyone, anywhere to help restore the biodiversity of Earth’s ecosystems.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
Scientists have measured the shortest unit of time ever, the time it takes for a particle of light to cross a hydrogen molecule.
Solar panel recycling.
America’s largest solar panel maker is also the world’s largest recycler of panels, with their program recovering 95% of materials for reuse.
This week on Cosmic Controversy
Posted in space
I’m excited to welcome Clive Neal, a professor of planetary geology at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and an expert on lunar science and the Apollo Moon rock samples. A former Chair of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, Neal will talk about why the Moon is so crucial to our understanding of the inner solar system. Please stay tuned!