Il Centro nazionale giapponese per gli affari dei consumatori ha raccomandato la pianificazione dell’eredità digitale per rendere più semplice per i propri cari la gestione degli account e degli abbonamenti dei cittadini dopo la loro morte. Questa iniziativa è nata a causa di numerosi casi in cui i parenti hanno incontrato difficoltà nel cancellare gli abbonamenti a causa della mancanza di accesso ai conti del defunto.

Il Centro suggerisce quattro passaggi per ridurre al minimo tali difficoltà:

1. nominare una persona di fiducia per la gestione dei dati digitali (nei servizi che supportano questo)
2. assicurati che i tuoi cari abbiano accesso ai tuoi dispositivi annotando login, password e codici PIN chiave;
3. creare una lista con l’intero elenco degli abbonamenti completati;
4. inserire tutte le informazioni di cui sopra nel testamento.

Con la crescente popolarità degli smartphone e dei servizi online, la necessità di tale pianificazione diventa sempre più urgente. I parenti affrontano problemi nel chiudere conti o annullare abbonamenti, il che porta a spese indesiderate.

Una soluzione potrebbe essere rappresentata da applicazioni che funzionano in modalità “interruttore a uomo morto”. Questi servizi inviano dati agli individui selezionati se l’utente non ha effettuato l’accesso all’account per un lungo periodo.

Inoltre, Meta offre la possibilità di nominare un cosiddetto “custode” (Legacy Contact) – l’erede dei poteri dell’utente, che sarà in grado di gestire l’account dopo la conferma ufficiale della morte del proprietario. Tali funzioni facilitano notevolmente molti processi per i parenti che stanno già vivendo un forte stress. Gli esperti sottolineano che disporre di dati preparati in anticipo aiuta a evitare difficoltà finanziarie ed emotive.

L’idea della pianificazione digitale non solo aiuta a organizzare la propria eredità, ma apre anche nuove opportunità per gli imprenditori che creano tali servizi. Prima o poi, la maggior parte dei siti e dei servizi sarà in grado di fornire tale funzionalità, e l’unica domanda che resta è se il nostro patrimonio digitale si trasformerà in un archivio ordinato o rimarrà un’eco caotica del passato che giace da qualche parte su Internet.

L'articolo Eredità digitale: chi gestirà i tuoi abbonamenti Netflix quando sarai nell’aldilà? proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

With the rapidly evolving situation surrounding the Redbox vending machines still out in the wild, it’s about time somebody put together a Wiki to keep it all straight.

The unredbox wiki has information on the various different hardware revisions that Redbox put out into the wild, from the regular outdoor machines to the weird indoor blue variant. The site also has breakdowns on individual components. For example, it covers the computers inside the machines, built by Dell, Lenovo, and Premio, and bits and pieces like the DVD carousel and the modems used inside.

Basically, if you’re working with these machines and you don’t have a manual, this resource could help you out. As could the neat video below that shows the internals of a Redbox machine during the reloading process.

Whatever you do, though, don’t steal the kiosks. There’s folks handling that already, you’re not allowed to just walk up and haul them away. Check out our earlier coverage of people that are still out there renting from these machines, too.

youtube.com/embed/X7XRjBMUoh0?…

hackaday.com/2024/11/21/theres…

The SR-71 with its blended wing body design. (Photo by Tech. Sgt. Michael Haggerty, US Air Force, 1988)
Ask someone to picture an airplane and they’re likely to think of what is essentially a tube with wings and a stabilizing tail tacked onto one end of said tube. Yet it is also no secret that the lift produced by such a tube is rather poor, even if they’re straightforward for loading cargo (static and self-loading) into them and for deciding where to put in windows. Over the decades a number of alternative airplane designs have been developed, with some of them also ending up being produced. Here most people are probably quite familiar with the US Air Force’s B-2 Spirit bomber and its characteristic flying wing design, while blended wing body (BWB) maintains a somewhat distinctive fuselage, as with for example the B-1 Lancer.

Outside of military airplanes BWBs are a pretty rare sight. Within the world of passenger airplanes the tube-with-wings pattern that the first ever passenger airplanes adopted has persisted with the newest designs, making it often tricky to distinguish one airplane from another. This could soon change, however, with a strong interest within the industry for passenger-oriented BWBs. The reason for this are the significant boosts in efficiency, quieter performance and more internal (useful) volume, which makes airline operators very happy, but which may also benefit passengers.

With that said, how close are we truly to the first BWB passenger airplane delivery to an airline?

Heavier Than Air Aerodynamics

Wright Flyer II flying circles in 1904 (Photo by the Wright brothers)
When regarding the first ever airplanes to make a successful powered flight, in particular the Wright Flyer, it’s notable where the focus was put in the design. The Wright Flyer doesn’t have much of a fuselage, but is mostly wing, along with some means for control by changing the shape of the wings (wing warping) in addition to the dual elevators and rudders. As an early attempt at controlled (powered) flight, it rather mimicked the way that birds control their flight by changing the shape of their wings.

As airplane designs evolved and saw explosive growth throughout World War I with practically weekly new designs, we saw the appearance of the now familiar design with a distinct fuselage and control scheme including wing-mounted ailerons and similar methods. Bi- and tri-planes gave way to monoplanes, and especially for passenger jets the tube fuselage ended up being extremely useful as a way to add more internal capacity by lengthening said tube or widen it (so-called wide-body jets).

Despite experiments with early BWBs such as the 1924 Westland Dreadnought prototype, 1938’s Miles M.30, 1944’s McDonnell XP-67 interceptor and Canadian Burnelli CBY-3, only these last two saw significant usage, albeit with the XP-67 failing US Army trials. The single CBY-3 airplane that was built did see significant use as a commercial airliner until its retirement in 1964 after which it was restored and moved into the collection of the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, Connecticut.

With seemingly an endless string of failures and one quite unremarkable non-military airplane resulting from BWB research by the 1960s, one might be excused for thinking that the BWB advantages are mostly hot air. Here the designs that began to appear by the 1970s began to turn heads, however.

Trade-offs

A B-2 Spirit from Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., flies over an undisclosed location in the U.S. Pacific Command area of operations. (Credit: Senior Airman Joel Pfiester)
The advantages of blending the wings into the body are obvious: it first of all reduces the wetting surface (i.e. the wetting aspect ratio), meaning that there’s less of the airplane’s structure interacting with the atmosphere and thus less drag. Second, it makes it possible to turn more or all of the fuselage into part of the airfoil, and thus have it too generate lift. The disadvantages mostly lie in that it makes controlling the airplane more complex as you abandon the inherent aerodynamic stability of a tube. The more extreme examples of this issue are found in both flying wings and lifting body design.

A flying wing design such as the Northrop B-2 Spirit bomber is a purely fly-by-wire design, as only the lightning-fast reflexes of a computerized system can keep what is ultimately an inherently unstable aerodynamic shape stable. This is an approach which was pioneered for a large part in the Lockheed F-117 airplane, which got referred to in such loving terms as for example ‘the flying brick’ due to its rather poor aerodynamic properties.

The move from a tube to a blended wing design can be likened to creating arrows that abandon the cylindrical shape for a blended fletching design: you lose the natural stability (and radar cross-section) that comes with a cylinder-with-fletching. This is of course great if you are designing an agile jet fighter that has to pull off dramatic course changes, or a long-distance (stealth) bomber, but less great if you’re designing a passenger airplane. In a naturally risk-averse industry like commercial aviation, this has kept airplane designs roughly as exciting and innovative as when the Boeing 737 first rolled off the production line, with mostly incremental tweaks and improvements, including to the engines.

End Of The Road

Airbus MAVERIC sub-scale model (Credit: Airbus, 2019)
Within the limitations of the tube-with-wings design incredible feats of optimizations have been performed over the decades, with each successive generation being a bit more efficient and their engines more quiet and easier on fuel consumption. New gains within these same limitations are however becoming increasingly harder and more expensive, while a commercial BWB jet liner could see multi-digit percentage fuel savings, increase space for cargo and passengers, while reducing the noise produced by the engines. All with just the first generation of such passenger airplanes.

Most of the fuel savings come simply from the reduced wetting area, and a boost to the airfoil ratio. Together with the ability to move the position of the engines and other tweaks, there is nothing about a passenger BWB airplane that’s truly groundbreaking or revolutionary. The main challenge will be to create an airplane that will both please organizations like the FAA and its international equivalents, and appeal to passengers. Here we have a number of startups and incumbents vying for the limelight, including Nautilus with its Horizon airplane, JetZero and Airbus, as well as NASA research projects like the N3-X BWB.

Of these efforts, the Airbus MAVERIC BWB is a scale model UAV that Airbus used to test and validate the basic BWB design, until 2020 to help design its next-generation airplanes. The Nautilus Horizon is roughly at this level too, with the 2016-founded company working towards building a first full-scale prototype. Meanwhile JetZero got picked by the US Air Force to work on BWB designs for cargo and in-air refueling tankers, which has them cooperating with Northrop Grumman on a full-scale model to demonstrate that is the direction that the US Air Force would want to move into.

Suffice it to say that tapping into the US defense budget is not a bad way to finance a startup, with the know-how and experiences translating into commercial cargo and passenger BWB airplanes. Currently the JetZero Pathfinder 1:8 scale model is test flying at Edwards Air Force Base, with JetZero hoping to have a passenger airplane in service by 2030.

New Skies

Passenger BWB airplanes would be both something very new and exciting, but also very old-school. In a way it would see the commercial aviation market hesitantly abandon the designs that it has been perfecting roughly since Douglas DC-3 propeller airplanes roamed the skies in the 1930s. From new construction methods, new materials, jet engines instead of propellers, to big boosts in efficiency and automation, today’s commercial aviation is both alien and very familiar to that of the 1930s and 1950s.

Even as military airplanes began to morph into new shapes and experiment with pushing every single envelope they could find, commercial aviation became more concerned with not spending money while being dragged by regulators into an era of increased safety and efficiency even as leg space and carry-on luggage size decreased. Now it would seem that, perhaps ironically, the only way forward for commercial aviation is to look at designs that have long since been adopted by air forces.

While for cargo variants of commercial BWB airplanes the question of seating arrangements and windows aren’t very relevant, perhaps the biggest fight will be over how to partition up the much larger inner volume for self-loading freight (i.e. passengers), as SLF is rather partial to having access to a window, an aisle, as much leg space as possible and other such critter comforts. In this 2020 article about the Airbus MAVERIC scale model some sci-fi renders of potential interiors are shown, but as the first BWB passenger airplanes get shown off by the airlines that ordered them, there will surely be very strong opinions by the peanut gallery about whether flying tubes or BWB airplanes are ‘better’.

One thing is certain, however, with the current crisis enveloping Boeing and their lagging behind on fulfilling new airplane orders, if there ever was a decade ripe for big shifts in commercial aviation, this one might just be it. For now all we can do is strap ourselves in and see where things will be in six years or so from now.

Featured image: Rendering of a JetZero blended wing body aircraft with US Air Force markings. (Credit: US Air Force)

hackaday.com/2024/11/21/blende…

È stato scoperto il ransomware Helldown che penetra nelle reti aziendali attraverso le vulnerabilità dei firewall Zyxel. Helldown è stato descritto per la prima volta dagli analisti di Cyfirma nell’estate del 2024 e in ottobre i ricercatori di Cyberint hanno parlato del suo lavoro.

Ora gli esperti Sekoia, che hanno studiato i recenti attacchi di Helldown, hanno dedicato un rapporto anche alla nuova minaccia. Secondo loro, questo ransomware non è uno dei principali attori nel “mercato” dell’estorsione, ma sta rapidamente guadagnando slancio e sul sito web degli aggressori compaiono messaggi su nuove vittime.

All’inizio di novembre 2024 sul sito web degli aggressori sono state pubblicate informazioni su 31 vittime. La maggior parte delle vittime erano piccole e medie imprese degli Stati Uniti e dei paesi europei. Ora il loro numero è sceso a 28, il che potrebbe indicare che alcune delle vittime hanno pagato un riscatto agli hacker.

È noto che la variante Linux del ransomware prende di mira i file VMware e contiene codice per elencare e spegnere le macchine virtuali, oltre a crittografare le immagini. Tuttavia questa funzionalità è abilitata solo parzialmente poiché il malware è ancora in fase di sviluppo.

La versione di Helldown per Windows, secondo gli esperti Sekoia, si basa sulle fonti trapelate del ransomware LockBit 3 e presenta anche somiglianze con i malware Darkrace e Donex. Tuttavia, sulla base dei dati disponibili, non è stato possibile stabilire collegamenti esatti tra queste famiglie di malware.

Allo stesso tempo, gli esperti scrivono che il ransomware non sembra particolarmente avanzato. Ad esempio, utilizza file batch per completare le attività, il che significa che questa funzionalità non è integrata nel malware stesso.

Va inoltre notato che gli operatori di Helldown non sono troppo selettivi quando si tratta di furto di dati e pubblicano immediatamente grandi dump sul loro sito Web (in un caso la perdita ha raggiunto 431 GB).

Sulla base di questi dati, gli esperti Sekoia suggeriscono che Helldown può sfruttare la vulnerabilità CVE-2024-42057 associata all’iniezione di comandi nella VPN IPSec. Questo bug consente a un utente malintenzionato non autenticato di eseguire comandi inviando un nome utente falso (l’attacco avrà successo solo se il dispositivo è configurato per l’autenticazione PSK basata sull’utente e il nome utente è più lungo di 28 caratteri).

La vulnerabilità è stata risolta nella versione firmware 5.39 all’inizio di settembre di quest’anno. Poiché i dettagli sullo sfruttamento del problema non sono ancora stati resi pubblici, i ricercatori ritengono che gli autori di Helldown potrebbero avere accesso a exploit privati ​​di n-day.

L'articolo Zyxel sotto Attacco: Come il Ransomware Helldown Sfrutta la Falla nei Dispositivi VPN proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

SpaceX’s Starship is the most powerful launch system ever built, dwarfing even the mighty Saturn V both in terms of mass and total thrust. The scale of the vehicle is such that concerns have been raised about the impact each launch of the megarocket may have on the local environment. Which is why a team from Brigham Young University measured the sound produced during Starship’s fifth test flight and compared it to other launch vehicles.

Published in JASA Express Letters, the paper explains the team’s methodology for measuring the sound of a Starship launch at distances ranging from 10 to 35 kilometers (6 to 22 miles). Interestingly, measurements were also made of the Super Heavy booster as it returned to the launch pad and was ultimately caught — which included several sonic booms as well as the sound of the engines during the landing maneuver.

Sounds were measured at eight different locations.
The paper goes into considerable detail on how the sound produced Starship’s launch and recovery propagate, but the short version is that it’s just as incredibly loud as you’d imagine. Even at a distance of 10 km, the roar of the 33 Raptor engines at ignition came in at approximately 105 dBA — which the paper compares to a rock concert or chainsaw. Double that distance to 20 km, and the launch is still about as loud as a table saw. On the way back in, the sonic boom from the falling Super Heavy booster was enough to set off car alarms at 10 km from the launch pad, which the paper says comes out to a roughly 50% increase in loudness over the Concorde zooming by.

OK, so it’s loud. But how does it compare with other rockets? Running the numbers, the paper estimates that the noise produced during a Starship launch is at least ten times greater than that of the Falcon 9. Of course, this isn’t hugely surprising given the vastly different scales of the two vehicles. A somewhat closer comparison would be with the Space Launch System (SLS); the data indicates Starship is between four and six times as loud as NASA’s homegrown super heavy-lift rocket.

That last bit is probably the most surprising fact uncovered by this research. While Starship is the larger and more powerful of the two launch vehicles, the SLS is still putting out around half the total energy at liftoff. So shouldn’t Starship only be twice as loud? To try and explain this dependency, the paper points to an earlier study done by two of the same authors which compared the SLS with the Saturn V. In that paper, it was theorized that the arrangement of rocket nozzles on the bottom of the booster may play a part in the measured result.

hackaday.com/2024/11/21/measur…

A questo punto amici della Rogue Records vi attendiamo al varco.

Eh sì perché continuare a dare luce a prodotti di così alto lignaggio senza sbagliare un colpo sembra impresa davvero titanica. Certo, conosciamo la vostra competenza e la vostra passione, ma perdio fatelo uscire un 7" un po' inferiore alla media.
iyezine.com/the-woggles-anyway…
@Musica Agorà

The Woggles - Anyway the Wind / Slippin'out 7"

The Woggles - Anyway the Wind / Slippin'out 7" - The Woggles - Anyway the Wind / Slippin'out 7" se tale occasione ci sarà non si tratta comunque di questa perché la recente infornata di singoli offertaci dall'etichetta di Tolosa è nuovamente di una q…

^{Il Santo (In Your Eyes ezine)}

Buongiorno a tutti. 😊
Da quando, anni fa, ho abbandonato Facebook (e tutti gli altri social classici e tossici) e sono approdato nel Fediverso, tante cose sono cambiate nel mio modo di percepire il mondo social e il web in generale.
Per prima cosa ho aperto un account su Mastodon, poi ho conosciuto Friendica, Peertube e Pixelfed, ma ho sempre scritto quasi esclusivamente su Mastodon, a parte i video pubblicati su Peertube.
Stamattina ho pensato che sarebbe carino iniziare delle interazioni anche qui e cominciare a pubblicare pure su Pixelfed.
Questo messaggio è il primo passo del mio buon proposito.
Voi come siete giunti sul Fediverso? Quali sono state le motivazioni che vi hanno spinto a cambiare?

In lak'ech. 🙏
Marco