Top Republican lawmakers have asked Jensen Huang to appear before Congress to answer questions after it was reported that US intelligence officials believe Nvidia’s chief executive has been targeted by a Chinese spying operation.
The chairs of the House committees on China, foreign affairs, and intelligence wrote to Huang this week asking him to appear before a joint closed-door briefing for their committees on November 18.
“Recent reports raise significant national security concerns regarding the People’s Republic of China’s access to sensitive US technology and information,” representatives John Moolenaar, Brian Mast, and Rick Crawford wrote.
Elon’s Edsel is no more. Last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed on social media that his car company is ending its failed attempt to wrest control of the American pickup truck market. The Cybertruck will cease production in the middle of 2027, liberating that space in Tesla’s cavernous factory for other uses—more Cybercabs, most likely.
Musk first revealed the Cybertruck in late 2019, back when Tesla was still trading at a theoretically understandable price-to-earning ratio. The pickup's unusual angular shape owed more to low-res video game models than any concessions to practicality. At the time, Musk made fanciful claims that the truck would use a stainless steel monocoque construction, telling his audience that “the body and bed don’t do anything useful” on a normal truck. While some race cars use carbon-fiber monocoques for strength and lightness, making a pickup truck with a stainless steel monocoque chassis would only make sense if someone had an awful lot of stainless steel lying around and needed something to do with it all.
The truck was supposed to go on sale for less than $40,000, and Tesla made its usual stratospheric sales predictions that (had they been accurate) the bare metal EVs would be as ubiquitous as the Model 3 and Y.
Welcome to Edition 9.18 of the Rocket Report! Blue Origin packed a lot of news into one afternoon Thursday with the reveal of a new kick stage for the New Glenn rocket, a new rocket engine design, and the minor and widely expected delay for New Glenn's return-to-flight mission from December until January. The reconstruction of Blue Origin's wrecked launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, continues apace after a catastrophic explosion nearly six months ago. There's a lot of pent-up demand from NASA, Amazon, and the Space Force for Blue Origin to get New Glenn back in action.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
SpaceX vets work on water-fed propulsion. Three brothers who worked at SpaceX in the Falcon 9 era are now building satellites that run on water, a potentially harvestable resource on the Moon and found all over the Solar System, Ars reports. In late 2022, the three Carlisle brothers founded Argo Space to build infrastructure in space. Their vision was not just in-space transportation but also removing the need to use propellants from Earth to move around the heavens. Argo Space's satellites will use water not only as a propellant, but also as a coolant and radiation shield.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Blue Origin announced two significant upgrades to its New Glenn rocket on Thursday, reducing the cost of manufacturing the vehicle and expanding its capacity for payload delivery to geostationary orbit and the Moon.
With these upgrades, the company aims to eventually position New Glenn to launch more than 1,000 times a year.
"There has never been higher demand for launch, ever," Dave Limp, chief executive officer of Blue Origin, said during the UP.Summit conference at the Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida.
Devices running some configurations of Alpine Linux, and possibly other distributions, are affected by a decade-old vulnerability that allows attackers to log into devices with no password.
The vulnerability exists in the interaction between OpenSSH, the code library implementing SSH connections, and musl, a lightweight alternative to the libc library that, unlike most other Linux distributions, is used in Alpine. Further, OpenSSH using musl (pronounced muscle) must not use PAM (pluggable authentication modules), a framework that handles user authentication and account-access checks. Alpine is a lightweight, widely used Linux distribution. Other platforms may be affected if they use the same configurations.
One connection, works every time, needs no retries
There are two other conditions necessary for successful exploitation. First, a system must have at least one user account that’s accessible using a password that is hashed using the SHA256 or SHA512 functions. Second, the target system account must be configured to be passwordless, by way of specifying a "*" in the password field in /etc/shadow, the Linux file where password hashes are stored. Passwordless accounts are commonly used for accounts that use certificate-based authentication. This setting is common for certain types of accounts.
NASA has announced a new experimental aircraft, the X-70 Fractal, that will supposedly feature reconfigurable flight-control technology and a modular design for swapping in different payloads. But much remains unknown about the aircraft’s design and development timeline, even as NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said the X-plane could take flight within two years.
The mystery surrounding NASA’s newest X-plane was exemplified by the agency’s press release, including an apparently AI-generated image of the X-70, showing a dark silhouette vaguely resembling a military fighter jet obscured by smoke. The news was announced by Isaacman during the UP.Summit held at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on November 4.
“The X-70 Fractal gives NASA a crewed, high-performance platform to test advanced flight-control, maneuverability, and other cutting-edge technologies in real flight,” Isaacman said. “Its modular design and ability to rapidly swap internal and external payloads will keep our teams flying, learning, and moving quickly from one experiment to the next.”
ChatGPT allegedly helped a North Carolina woman, Cheryl Gates, craft a “personalized plan” to poison her husband, James, after fueling her delusions that he planned to divorce her and leave her with nothing.
A grand jury indicted Cheryl Gates on charges of attempted first-degree murder and food contamination in October. About a week prior, the accusations that ChatGPT was a co-conspirator in the attempted murder came in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco County Superior Court that was made public this week. In it, James Gates alleged that OpenAI and Sam Altman failed to employ technical safeguards to shut down Cheryl’s chats even after her queries became “obviously suspicious” and sought advice on how to execute and conceal a homicide.
At first, Cheryl told ChatGPT that she was researching poisoning out of fear that her husband might possibly try to kill her—framing her queries as “self-protection.” Coming to the rescue, ChatGPT did not terminate the conversation. Instead, it helped her “with specific instructions for the preparation, dosage, and administration of Oleander, including whether anti-nausea medicine would accelerate or inhibit death, whether it would show on an autopsy report, and whether it could be injected into a vein or muscle instead of being ingested in tea and have the same lethal effect,” the lawsuit said.
