SpaceX has ended production of new Crew Dragon astronaut capsules, a company executive told Reuters, as Elon Musk’s space transportation company heaps resources on its next-generation spaceship program. From the report: Capping the fleet at four Crew Dragons adds more urgency to the development of the astronaut capsule’s eventual successor, Starship, SpaceX’s moon and Mars rocket. Starship’s debut launch has been delayed for months by engine development hurdles and regulatory reviews. It also poses new challenges as the company learns how to maintain a fleet and quickly fix unexpected problems without holding up a busy schedule of astronaut missions.

“We are finishing our final (capsule), but we still are manufacturing components, because we’ll be refurbishing,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told Reuters, confirming the plan to end Crew Dragon manufacturing. She added that SpaceX would retain the capability to build more capsules if a need arises in the future, but contended that “fleet management is key.” Musk’s business model is underpinned by reusable spacecraft, so it was inevitable the company would cease production at some point. But the timing was not known, nor was his strategy of using the existing fleet for its full backlog of missions. “Crew Dragon has flown five crews of government and private astronauts to space since 2020, when it flew its first pair of NASA astronauts and became the U.S. space agency’s primary ride for getting humans to and from the International Space Station,” notes Reuters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – SpaceX Ending Production of Flagship Crew Capsule

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Energy bills for people living near onshore wind farms could be slashed under new reforms, according to a cabinet minister. Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi also suggested he supports more onshore wind farms but only if they are backed by the local community. Boris Johnson has committed to publishing a British energy security strategy although when asked about onshore wind farms, the Prime Minister stressed there is a “massive opportunity” for the UK with offshore wind.

Mr Zahawi told Sky’s Sophy Ridge On Sunday program: “I would say that if we are going to make sure that we carry the will of local people, whether it’s onshore wind or nuclear, we have to learn from how it’s done well in other countries. “The way you do that is to make sure the local community has a real say. “But also we’ve seen great examples of other people where if they build a nuclear power station, within a certain radius of that power station they get free power. So it’s right to look at innovation to make sure we wean ourselves off hydrocarbons, we have to do that, we have to do that well, part of that is making sure we look after the will of the local people.” Mr Zahawi insisted there “isn’t a row” around the Cabinet table about onshore wind.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Give Free Power To People Living Near Wind Farms, UK Minister Suggests

The Lapsus$ hackers used compromised credentials to break into the network of customer service giant Sitel in January, days before subsequently accessing the internal systems of authentication giant Okta, according to documents seen by TechCrunch that provide new details of the cyber intrusion that have not yet been reported. The report adds: […] The documents provide the most detailed account to date of the Sitel compromise, which allowed the hackers to later gain access to Okta’s network. […] The documents, obtained by independent security researcher Bill Demirkapi and shared with TechCrunch, include a Sitel customer communication sent on January 25 — more than a week after hackers first compromised its network — and a detailed timeline of the Sitel intrusion compiled by incident response firm Mandiant dated March 17 that was shared with Okta.

According to the documents, Sitel said it discovered the security incident in its VPN gateways on a legacy network belonging to Sykes, a customer service company working for Okta that Sitel acquired in 2021. The timeline details how the attackers used remote access services and publicly accessible hacking tools to compromise and navigate through Sitel’s network, gaining deeper visibility to the network over the five days that Lapsus$ had access. Sitel said that its Azure cloud infrastructure was also compromised by hackers. According to the timeline, the hackers accessed a spreadsheet on Sitel’s internal network early on January 21 called “DomAdmins-LastPass.xlsx.” The filename suggests that the spreadsheet contained passwords for domain administrator accounts that were exported from a Sitel employee’s LastPass password manager.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Lapsus$ Found a Spreadsheet of Passwords as They Breached Okta, Documents Show

juul_advocate shares a report from iTWire: Apple’s output of the iPhone SE will drop by a fifth in the coming quarter, indicating that the Russia-Ukraine conflict and fears of inflation have affected demand for the device, a report claims. The Nikkei Asia website reported that the company had been telling a number of suppliers that production orders for the next three months would be lower by about two or three million units. Orders for AirPods earphones were also down, by about 10 million units for the whole year, the website said, citing four unnamed individuals as sources. Apple announced the third-generation iPhone SE earlier this month at its “Peek Performance” event. It features the A15 Bionic chip, improved battery life, 5G connectivity, and a new camera system, among other things, for a starting price of $429.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Conflict, Inflation Lead To Cuts In iPhone SE Production, Report Claims

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Collecting satellite data for research is a group effort thanks to this app developed for Android users. Camaliot is a campaign funded by the European Space Agency, and its first project focuses on making smartphone owners around the world part of a project that can help improve weather forecasts by using your phone’s GPS receiver. The Camaliot app works on devices running Android version 7.0 or later that support satellite navigation. Researchers think that they can use satellite signals to get more information about the atmosphere. For example, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere can affect how a satellite signal travels through the air to something like a phone.

The app gathers information to track signal strength, the distance between the satellite and the phone being used, and the satellite’s carrier phase, according to Camaliot’s FAQs. With enough data collected from around the world, researchers can theoretically combine that with existing weather readings to measure long-term water vapor trends. They hope to use that data to inform weather forecasting models with machine learning. They can also track changes in Earth’s ionosphere — the part of the atmosphere near space. Creating better ionospheric forecasts could be relevant in tracking space weather and could eventually make Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) more accurate by accounting for events like geomagnetic storms. Camaliot could eventually expand to include more attempts at collecting data on a massive scale using sensors present in “Internet of Things” connected home devices. According to The Verge, these are the steps to take to begin using the Camaliot app on your Android phone:

1. Select “start logging” and place your phone in an area with a clear sky view to begin logging the data
2. Once you have measured to your liking, select “stop logging”
3. Then, upload your session to the server and repeat the process over time to collect more data. You can also delete your locally-stored log files at this step.

“In addition to being able to view your own measurements against others accumulated over time, you can also see a leaderboard showing logging sessions done by other participants,” adds The Verge. “Eventually, the information collected for the study will be available in a separate portal.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Global Science Project Links Android Phones With Satellites To Improve Weather Forecasts