(credit: Aurich Lawson)

A federal appeals court has upheld (PDF) a life sentence for Ross Ulbricht. He was convicted in 2015 of being the Dread Pirate Roberts who ran the Silk Road website, the largest Internet black market at that time.

The three-judge panel unanimously upheld the rulings on a variety of issues by US District Judge Kathleen Forrest, who oversaw the trial. Ulbricht’s defense lawyers wrote dozens of pages challenging Forrest’s rulings on the rules of cross-examination, hearsay evidence, and expert witnesses. But the appeals court ruled in favor of the lower court judge on every count, saying she handled the trial with “patience and skill.”

It’s debatable how much of a defense case Ulbricht would have had even if the judge had ruled for him on all of those matters. The shell of a defense he was left with included “cross-examining government witnesses, briefly calling four character witnesses, having a defense investigator authenticate a task list on Ulbricht’s computer, and reading a few of DPR’s posts into the record,” the appeals judge wrote.

Enlarge / NGA headquarters. A trove of top secret data processed by NGA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton was left exposed on a public Amazon cloud instance. (credit: Trevor Paglen)

On May 24, Chris Vickery, a cyber risk analyst with the security firm UpGuard, discovered a publicly accessible data cache on Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage service that contained highly classified intelligence data. The files, which were connected to the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)—the US military’s provider of battlefield satellite and drone surveillance imagery—were posted to an account linked to defense and intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. The data was classified at up to the Top Secret level.

Based on domain-registration data tied to the servers linked to the S3 “bucket,” the data was apparently tied to Booz Allen and another contractor, Metronome. Also present in the data cache was a Booz Allen Hamilton engineer’s remote login (SSH) keys, as well as login credentials for at least one system in the company’s data center.

Vickery immediately sent an e-mail to Booz Allen Hamilton’s chief information security officer but received no response. The next morning, he contacted the NGA and within nine minutes, access to the storage bucket was cut off. At 8PM Eastern time on May 25, Booz Allen Hamilton’s security team finally responded and confirmed the breach.

Paul Allen’s intriguing launch company, Vulcan Aerospace, has gone relatively quiet in recent years, and questions about the venture’s viability have been increasing. But on Wednesday, the cofounder of Microsoft shared a new photo of the company’s Stratolaunch airplane—the largest in the world—and it seems the company is moving forward.

The new plane is, in a word, bigly. The aircraft has 385-foot wingspan and, powered by six Boeing 747 engines, has a maximum takeoff weight of 1.3 million pounds. The Stratolaunch’s wingspan is the largest in history, blowing away the previous record-holder (Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose) by 65 feet. Vulcan Aerospace says its Stratolaunch airplane will have an operational range of 2,000 nautical miles. Serving as a reusable first stage for rocket launches, the Stratolaunch system will be capable of delivering payloads to multiple orbits and inclinations in a single mission.

Enlarge / Oil processing towers and gas processing infrastructure stand at the Exxon Mobil Corp. (credit: Dimas Ardian/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Wednesday, 62.3 percent of investors in oil giant Exxon Mobil voted for the company to produce an annual report on the impacts of climate change policies on the company’s business. The resolution, which was opposed by Exxon leadership, passed by a large margin compared to last year, when a similar resolution garnered only 38 percent of the investor vote.

According to a copy of the resolution posted by Ceres, a nonprofit sustainability organization, the investors want Exxon to “publish an annual assessment of the long-term portfolio impacts of technological advances and global climate change policies.” They also instruct the company to annually assess the financial risks of “a scenario in which reduction in demand results from carbon restrictions and related rules or commitments adopted by governments consistent with the globally agreed upon 2-degree target.”

Although Wednesday morning reports suggested that US President Donald Trump will leave the Paris Agreement signed by the Obama administration to limit greenhouse gases, the European Union and China have reaffirmed their commitment to the agreement, and Exxon is a global company that will be affected by the multinational agreement.