Dominique Luchart's Blog, page 674
March 20, 2021
As videos from court hearings on Zoom go viral, a look at the debate over the privacy of citizens in those videos and judicial transparency on the internet (Gita Jackson/VICE)
The post As videos from court hearings on Zoom go viral, a look at the debate over the privacy of citizens in those videos and judicial transparency on the internet (Gita Jackson/VICE) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
After Citigroup erroneously sent $900M to lenders using Oracle’s Flexcube, some are calling for simplified business software UX to match consumer-facing design (Ann-Marie Alcántara/Wall Street Journal)
March 19, 2021
Apple and Epic’s top execs plan to testify live and in person this May in the Fortnite app store trial,
It’s hard to believe it’s only been seven months since Apple booted Fortnite off the App Store and Epic Games sprung its antitrust trap, but you won’t have to wait much longer before the behind-the-scenes legal machinations give way to courtroom drama — and, it seems, until Apple and Epic’s top executives take the stand.
In a legal filing Friday evening, Apple revealed that CEO Tim Cook, SVP Craig Federighi, and former marketing chief and current App Store boss Phil Schiller intend to testify live and in person in the courtroom, among many other tentative witnesses. Epic Games’ CEO Tim Sweeney and VP Mark Rein should be there as well, plus Facebook’s VP of gaming, a Microsoft VP of Xbox business development, and quite a number of directors on both sides.
Schiller is expected to spend the most time on the witness stand by far at an estimated 11 hours of examination and cross-examination, which makes sense. Not only has he been in charge of the App Store that’s at the center of the case, but some of his emails and the emails of his subordinates have been under scrutiny — both for this case and in the big tech antitrust hearing last year, one which ended with the House Judiciary Committee concluding that “Apple exerts monopoly power in the mobile app store market.”
Apple says its executives “look forward to sharing with the court”:
Our senior executives look forward to sharing with the court the very positive impact the App Store has had on innovation, economies across the world and the customer experience over the last 12 years. We feel confident the case will prove that Epic purposefully breached its agreement solely to increase its revenues, which is what resulted in their removal from the App Store. By doing that, Epic circumvented the security features of the App Store in a way that would lead to reduced competition and put consumers’ privacy and data security at tremendous risk.
The trial should tentatively begin May 3rd, and is expected to run several weeks.
You can find the full list of tentative witnesses and those who’ll be tentatively deposed below.
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Facebook’s decision to crack down on NYU’s Ad Observer highlights the increasingly fraught dynamic between tech companies and academics (Issie Lapowsky/Protocol)
The post Facebook’s decision to crack down on NYU’s Ad Observer highlights the increasingly fraught dynamic between tech companies and academics (Issie Lapowsky/Protocol) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
Interview with CEO of SkySilk, the hosting company that helped bring Parler online, who says he did it to spite tech giants like Amazon who abuse their might (Bobby Allyn/NPR)
The post Interview with CEO of SkySilk, the hosting company that helped bring Parler online, who says he did it to spite tech giants like Amazon who abuse their might (Bobby Allyn/NPR) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
Weee!, an online grocer specializing in Hispanic and Asian foods, has raised $315M Series D led by DST Global, source says at a $2.8B valuation (Bloomberg)
The post Weee!, an online grocer specializing in Hispanic and Asian foods, has raised $315M Series D led by DST Global, source says at a $2.8B valuation (Bloomberg) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.
Glynn Lunney, NASA flight director who led from ‘trench’ to the moon, dies at 84, ,
An engineer who was involved from the start in NASA’s efforts to launch the first astronauts into space and who later led Mission Control through some of its most challenging and triumphant hours, flight director Glynn S. Lunney has died at the age of 84.
Lunney’s death on Friday (March 19) was confirmed by NASA. A family friend said that Lunney died after a long illness.
“Glynn was the right person for the right time in history,” Mark Geyer, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a statement. “His unique leadership and remarkably quick intellect were critical to the success of some of the most iconic accomplishments in human spaceflight.”
“While he was one of the most famous NASA alumni, he was also one of the most humble people I have ever worked with. He was very supportive of the NASA team and was so gracious in the way he shared his wisdom with us,” said Geyer.
Lunar legacy: 45 Apollo moon mission photos
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Official NASA portrait of Glynn Lunney when he was serving as the U.S. technical director for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. (Image credit: NASA)Lunney was working for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) as a co-op student in 1958, when he was recruited by the newly formed NASA at the age of 22. The youngest member of the Space Task Group, he and his colleagues at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, were charged with figuring out how to send the first astronauts into space.
Initially, Lunney was assigned to develop the simulated missions that were used to train other flight controllers. His position for the early Project Mercury flights was at a remote tracking station.
“I was at the Bermuda station,” he said in a 1999 NASA oral history interview. “Bermuda is 800 miles [1,300 km] or so out in the ocean away from Florida, where we launched [the missions], and the place where the vehicle went into orbit was about halfway in between.”
“Since this was at the very horizon from the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] and going out of sight, there was some question about how well we could know whether the vehicle was in orbit or not. So I started off as a flight dynamics officer at the control center in Bermuda, and I was there for a number of the flights — both unmanned and manned.”
After the 1962 launch of John Glenn on the first U.S. crewed mission to orbit Earth, Lunney worked the final three original astronaut missions from the Mercury Control Center in Florida, before becoming chief of the flight dynamics branch.
“We had a wonderful collection of characters,” Lunney said. “We called the front row the ‘trench.’ I don’t know who came up with that early on or what it even came from, but we called the front row the ‘trench,’ and the three console operators that were involved in that saw themselves as a team that was controlling all of the trajectory aspects, orbital mechanics aspects, of the flight.”
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Standing at the flight director’s console, viewing the Gemini 10 flight display in the Mission Control Center on July 18, 1966, are Glynn Lunney, prime flight director (second from left) with mission director William Schneider, Christopher Kraft, Manned Spacecraft Center director of flight operations; and Gemini program manager Charles Mathews. (Image credit: NASA)In 1964, as the Gemini program was getting underway, Lunney was selected to become a flight director. One of the first four people to lead Mission Control, Lunney led the “Black team.” (Each flight director chose a color: Chris Kraft, John Hodge and Gene Kranz chose red, blue and white, respectively.) After overseeing Apollo test flights, Lunney led his first shifts in the Mission Operations Control Room in the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (today, Johnson Space Center) for the Gemini 9 mission in 1966.
“So I came back, and several of us … were the primary players, primary flight director team that operated on the last number of Gemini spacecraft when our senior leadership, represented by [Kraft], went over to start getting ready for Apollo,” Lunney said. “The things that we got to do in Gemini really prepared the total operations team — the people in the control center, the astronauts and then the engineering team that supported that — that whole team of people came together doing the Gemini program and we did almost everything you could do in Earth orbit.”
As NASA’s focus turned to the moon, “Black Flight” led shifts for the first Apollo mission, Apollo 7; the first mission to orbit the moon, Apollo 8 (and, at around the same time, Lunney was named chief of the flight director’s office); the dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing, Apollo 10; and then the historic first landing, Apollo 11, during which he oversaw the ascent from the moon and rendezvous with the command module in lunar orbit.
Related: NASA’s historic Apollo 11 moon landing in pictures
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Glynn Lunney, “Black Flight,” seen during the Apollo 13 mission in April 1970. Lunney called Apollo 13 the best of his career. (Image credit: NASA)“Great time. I was — how old was I? I was 32, I guess, at the time we landed on the moon. I’d been doing this for eight years or so before that time, but — yes, I was kind of young at the time. We were all fired up, of course, the whole time, but events like that just supercharged that sense of energy and excitement about it. It was really powerful. Great stuff,” he said.
It was his next mission as flight director, though, that Lunney called the best of his career.
Lunney and his team were just about to come on console for the evening shift on April 13, 1970, when the Apollo 13 crew radioed, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
“For me, I felt that the Black Team shift immediately after the explosion and for the next 14 hours was the best piece of operations work I ever did or could hope to do,” Lunney said in his oral history. “It posed a continuous demand for the best decisions often without hard data and mostly on the basis of judgment, in the face of the most severe in-flight emergency faced thus far in manned spaceflight.”
“We built a quarter-million mile space highway, paved by one decision, one choice, and one innovation at a time — repeated constantly over almost four days to bring the crew safely home. This space highway guided the crippled ship back to planet Earth, where people from all continents were bonded in support of these three explorers-in-peril,” he said. “It was an inspiring and emotional feeling, reminding us once again of our common humanity. I have always been so very proud to have been part of this Apollo 13 team, delivering our best when it was really needed.”
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Former NASA flight director Glynn Lunney speaks to students in the historic Apollo Mission Control Center in July 2015. (Image credit: NASA)Lunney led his final shifts as a flight director during the Apollo 14 and Apollo 15 missions, before moving into management, serving as the technical assistant for Apollo to the director of flight operations and then becoming the technical director for the U.S. side of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project that was jointly flown with the Soviet Union in 1975.
Then, after heading up payload integration for the space shuttle, Lunney reported to NASA Headquarters in Washington, to serve as deputy associate administrator for spaceflight and acting associate administrator for space transportation operations. Lunney then returned to Houston to become shuttle program manager before retiring from NASA in 1985.
Glynn Stephen Lunney was born in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, on Nov. 27, 1936. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Detroit in 1958, when he saw his first drawing of what would become the Mercury capsule, igniting his desire to join NASA.
After his 27 years at the space agency, Lunney went to work for Rockwell, overseeing the division of the company building Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. He then worked on the space station before returning to the shuttle, becoming vice president and program manager for United Space Alliance (USA), a company equally owned by Rockwell (later, Boeing) and Lockheed Martin, that supported NASA’s spaceflight operations contract.
For his service to the U.S. space program, Lunney was honored with the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, NASA Exceptional Service Medal and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom as a member of the Apollo 13 mission control team. In 2005, Lunney was bestowed the National Space Trophy from the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement Foundation.
Lunney is a co-author of the 2011 book, “From the Trench of Mission Control to the Craters of the Moon,” which he wrote with his fellow members of the Gemini and Apollo-era flight dynamics branch.
Lunney was portrayed on screen by actor Marc McClure in the 1995 feature film “Apollo 13” and by actor Jackson Pace in the National Geographic series “The Right Stuff” for Disney+. Lunney appeared as himself in the 2017 feature-length documentary, “Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo.”
Lunney is survived by his wife of 61 years, Marilyn Kurtz, and their four children, Jennifer; Glynn, Jr., Shawn and Bryan. The latter, Bryan, is NASA’s first second-generation flight director.
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Lenders in India are using coercive loan apps that block features and shut down smartphones of customers who fall behind on payments (Nilesh Christopher/Rest of World)
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‘Anti-capitalist’ Verkada hacker charged by US government with attacks on dozens of companies,
A Swiss computer hacker named Till Kottmann has been charged by the US government with multiple accounts of wire fraud, conspiracy, and identity theft. The indictment accuses Kottmann and co-conspirators of hacking “dozens of companies and government entities,” and posting private data and source code belonging to more than 100 firms online.
The 21-year-old Kottmann, who uses they / them pronouns and is better known as Tillie, was most recently connected to the security breach of US firm Verkada, which exposed footage from more than 150,000 of the companies’ surveillance cameras. But the charges filed this week date back to 2019, with Kottmann and associates accused of targeting online code repositories (known as “gits”) belonging to major private and public sector entities, ripping their contents and sharing them to a website they founded and maintained named git.rip.
Git.rip has since been seized by the FBI, but previously shared code and data belonging to numerous companies including Microsoft, Intel, Nissan, Nintendo, Disney, AMD, Qualcomm, Motorola, Adobe, Lenovo, Roblox, and many others (though no firms are explicitly named in the indictment). The exact nature of this data varied in each case. A rip of hundreds of code repositories maintained by German automaker Daimler AG contained the source code for valuable smart car components, for example, while a breach of Nintendo’s systems (which Kottmann said did not originate from them directly but which they reshared through a Telegram channel) offered gamers rare insight into unreleased features from old games.
In interviews about earlier breaches, Kottmann noted repeatedly that the data they found was usually exposed by companies’ own poor security standards. “I often just hunt for interesting GitLab instances, mostly with just simple Google dorks, when I’m bored, and I keep being amazed by how little thought seems to go into the security settings,” Kottmann told ZDNet in May 2020. (“Google dorks” or “Google dorking” refers to the use of advanced search strings to find vulnerabilities on public servers using Google.)
In the case of the Verkada breach, Kottmann and their associates reportedly found “super admin” credentials that gave them unfettered access to the company’s systems that were “publicly exposed on the internet.” These logins allowed the hackers to look through the live feeds of more than 150,000 internet-connected cameras. These cameras were installed in various facilities including prisons, hospitals, warehouses, and Tesla factories.
Kottmann said they were motivated by a hacktivist spirit: wanting to expose the poor security work of corporations before malicious actors could cause greater damage. Kottmann told BleedingComputer last June that they didn’t always contact companies before exposing their data, but that they attempted to prevent direct harm. “I try to do my best to prevent any major things resulting directly from my releases,” they said.
After the Verkada breach, Kottmann told Bloomberg their reasons for hacking were “lots of curiosity, fighting for freedom of information and against intellectual property, a huge dose of anti-capitalism, a hint of anarchism — and it’s also just too much fun not to do it.”
The US government, not surprisingly, takes a dimmer view of these activities. “Stealing credentials and data, and publishing source code and proprietary and sensitive information on the web is not protected speech — it is theft and fraud,” Acting U.S. Attorney Tessa M. Gorman said in a press statement. “These actions can increase vulnerabilities for everyone from large corporations to individual consumers. Wrapping oneself in an allegedly altruistic motive does not remove the criminal stench from such intrusion, theft, and fraud.”
The indictment includes as evidence, numerous tweets and messages sent by Kottmann using handles including @deletescape and @antiproprietary. These include a tweet sent on May 17, 2020 saying “i love helping companies open source their code;” messages to an unnamed associate soliciting “access to any confidential info, documents, binaries or source code;” and tweets sent on October 21 in which Kottmann said that “stealing and releasing” corporate data was “the morally correct thing to do.”
Kottmann is currently located in Lucerne, Switzerland, where their premises were recently raided by Swiss authorities and their devices seized. Whether or not they will be extradited to the US is unclear. Bloomberg reports that Kottmann has retained the services of Zurich lawyer Marcel Bosonnet, who previously represented Edward Snowden. The charges against Kottmann carry up to 20 year prison sentences.
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On This Day in Space! March 19, 1964: Ionospheric satellite fails to reach orbit, ,
On March 19, 1964, NASA unsuccessfully attempted to launch a satellite called Beacon Explorer-A on a mission to study the ionosphere. This is a region in Earth’s upper atmosphere where radiation from the sun strips the electrons off atoms and molecules, creating a layer of ions and free electrons.
Beacon Explorer-A was supposed to go count all those free electrons using a radio beacon, but it never reached orbit after it launched. After a smooth liftoff from Cape Kennedy, something went wrong with the Delta rocket’s third stage. The third burn was supposed to last 40 seconds, but the engines cut off after 22 seconds.
Beacon Explorer-A re-entered Earth’s atmosphere somewhere over the south Atlantic Ocean, and it was destroyed.
Catch up on our entire “On This Day In Space” series on YouTube with this playlist.
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