About a year ago, I wrote a story with the headline “The hyperloop is dead for real this time,” based on the news that Hyperloop One, one of the biggest companies pursuing Elon Musk’s dream of tube-based, 700mph travel, had shut down.
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The hyperloop lives on as a 1/12th scale model in Switzerland
Well, I stand corrected. The hyperloop, in fact, lives on — as a 1/12th scale model in Switzerland.
Sure, this isn’t exactly the full realization of Musk’s 2013 white paper, in which he theorized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a nearly airless tube at speeds of up to 760mph. These tubes, either raised on pylons or sunk beneath the earth, could be built either within or between cities. Musk called it a “fifth mode of transportation” and argued it could help change the way we live, work, trade, and travel.
The idea is being put to the test in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a 120-meter circular test track is being operated by a team that includes the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD), and Swisspod Technologies. This week, the group announced that it had conducted “the longest” hyperloop test of its kind: traveling 11.8 km (7.3 miles) at a speed of 40.7km/h (25.3mph).
The circular test track has a circumference of 125.6 meters (412 feet) and a diameter of 40 centimeters (15.7 inches). It sounds modest, but the group claims that in a full-scale system, their test “directly translates” to a journey of 141.6 km (88 miles), which is about the distance between Geneva and Bern, or San Francisco to Sacramento, and speeds of up to 488.2 km/h (303.4mph).
The project is called LIMITLESS, which stands for Linear Induction Motor Drive for Traction and Levitation in Sustainable Hyperloop Systems. During the test, the team “monitored the performance of vital subsystems,” including propulsion, communication infrastructure, power electronics, and thermal management. They assessed “energy consumption, thrust variations, [linear induction motor] response, and control during acceleration, cruising, coasting, and braking scenarios.”
Of course, a 1/12th-scale circular test track is hardly a sign that the hyperloop is alive and well. Most of the startups and companies pursuing a full-scale hyperloop have shut down, victims of financial mismanagement, as well as infrastructure and regulatory hurdles. Critics said that while the hyperloop may be technically feasible, it still only amounts to vaporware. It’s been called a “utopian vision” that would be financially impossible to achieve.
But the Swiss team is undeterred, promising to conduct a battery of future tests to further validate the system. Swisspod CEO Denis Tudor said the group plans to test its first freight product soon, and is currently building a larger test track in the US.
“This is a key step toward making hyperloop for passengers a reality and changing how we connect, work, and live,” he said.
That would be a feat unto itself, considering that no full-scale hyperloops exist anywhere in the world. Musk’s test tunnel in California is gone. The man himself has become more enamored with campaigning for Donald Trump than solving the problem of car traffic.
The Boring Company, Musk’s tunneling operation, is still digging underground passageways in Las Vegas — but for Teslas, not hyperloops. The future, it would seem, is nearly the same as the present.
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Apple could finally add “charging time remaining” to the iPhone starting with the iOS 18.2 update. Hidden inside the incremental update are traces of code pointing to the new feature in addition to more Apple Intelligence features.
More Apple Intelligence features arriving with iOS 18.2
Apple started actively adding Apple Intelligence features to the iPhones starting with iOS 18. Eligible iOS smartphones received the first batch of Apple’s Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) features with iOS 18.1.
Apple has indicated that it will gradually roll out Apple Intelligence features and allow iPhone users to change default apps. Specifically speaking, the iOS 18.2 update, expected to arrive next month, should include Genmoji, Image Playgrounds, ChatGPT integration, and Visual Intelligence.
Apple iPhone users have been eagerly looking forward to getting the aforementioned features. However, Apple is also reportedly testing other features not related to Apple’s Gen AI.
One such feature that Android smartphone users have long had, was the ability to see when their smartphones would be fully charged. In other words, newer versions of Android have allowed smartphone users to know the estimated time their devices would take to fully charge.
‘BatteryIntelligence’ framework in iOS 18.2 may show the charging time remaining
Hidden inside the OS 18.2 beta 2, which was released on Monday to developers, is a new framework called “BatteryIntelligence”. Although the feature appears in iOS 18.2, Apple has reportedly disabled the same, and it appears unfinished.
Apple currently offers a similar feature for MacBooks within the Battery menu. Hence, it is likely that the new framework inside iOS 18.2 may extend the feature to the iPhone.
Apple may allow iPhone users to see the charging time remaining from iOS 18.2. Since it’s Apple, the company may limit the feature to a notification. Apple may only alert users when their iPhones reach 80% charge. Needless to say, an estimation of the actual charging time remaining would be very handy primarily because there are several types of USB-C chargers, cables, and charging protocols.
The Internet Archive is continuing the recovery process after a series of that took down its servers in early October. On Monday, the nonprofit digital library on X that its ‘Save Page Now’ service has been restored to the Wayback Machine.
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The Wayback Machine resumed operation on October 14; now users can upload new web pages to record their information and access them later. As the X post notes, the Wayback Machine will begin collecting web pages that have been archived since October 9 when the entire site was taken down.
The October DDoS attacks coincided with the Internet Archive’s move to disclose a data breach that saw more than 31 million records taken. Security researcher Troy Hunt, who runs the service for monitoring compromised accounts, that the two actions against the Internet Archive were “entirely coincidental” and likely taken by “multiple parties.”
10:10 Games this year launched a debut title, Funko Fusion, a mishmash of different intellectual properties — how did it all come together?Read More
For this week’s episode of Found we’re taking you backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Becca Szkutak had the chance to talk with Dan Lorenc, the CEO and co-founder of cybersecurity startup Chainguard, following their conversation onstage with prominent investors, The Chainsmokers.
The pair discuss how the EDM duo’s venture fund MANTIS went from being viewed skeptically by traditional VCs to becoming a highly sought-after investment partner in the B2B space, how Lorenc scaled the company in a difficult time for cybersecurity, and what value celebrity investors can add to a startup.
In this conversation they also discuss:
- Navigating tricky market timing after the SolarWinds attack in 2021
- How luck can play a major role when it comes to fundraising
- Pitching the value of this product to CISOs and CFOs
- The unique value that MANTIS adds to the company as they scale and work to stand out from other security tech companies
Found posts every Tuesday. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts to be alerted when new episodes drop.
The Mozilla Foundation laid off 30 percent of its workforce and completely eliminated its advocacy and global programs divisions, TechCrunch reports.
While Mozilla is best known for its Firefox web browser, the Mozilla Foundation — the parent of the Mozilla Corporation — describes itself as standing up “for the health of the internet.” With its advocacy and global programs divisions gone, its impact may be lessened going forward.
“The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward,” Brandon Borrman, the Mozilla Foundation’s communications chief, said in an email to TechCrunch.
This is Mozilla’s second round of layoffs this year. In February, the Mozilla Corporation laid off around 60 workers said it would be making a “strategic correction” that would involve involve cutting back its work on a Mastodon instance. Mozilla shut down its virtual 3D platform and refocused its efforts on Firefox and AI. The Mozilla Foundation had around 120 employees before this more recent round of layoffs, according to TechCrunch.
In an email sent to all employees on October 30th, Nabhia Syed, the foundation’s executive director, said that the advocacy and global programs divisions “are no longer part of our structure.”
“Navigating this topsy-turvy, distracting time requires laser focus — and sometimes saying goodbye to the excellent work that has gotten us this far because it won’t get us to the next peak,” wrote Syed, who previously worked as the chief executive of The Markup, an investigative news site. “Lofty goals demand hard choices.”
The Mozilla Foundation did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
- Criminals are adding hundreds of malicious packages to npm
- The packages try to fetch a stage-two payload to infect the machines
- The crooks went to lengths to hide where they host the malware
Software developers, especially those working with cryptocurrencies, are once again facing a supply chain attack via open source code repositories.
Cybersecurity researchers from Phylum have warned a threat actor has uploaded hundreds of malicious packages to the open source package repository npm. The packages are typosquatted versions of Puppeteer and Bignum.js. Developers who are in need of these packages for their products, might end up downloading the wrong version by mistake, since they all come with similar names.
If used, the package will connect to a hidden server, fetch the malicious second-stage payload, and infect the developers’ computers. “The binary shipped to the machine is a packed Vercel package,” the researchers explained.
Hiding the IP address
Furthermore, the attackers wanted to execute something else during package installation, but since the file wasn’t included in the package, the researchers couldn’t analyze it. “An apparent oversight by the malicious package author,” they say.
What makes this campaign stand out from other similar typosquatting supply chain campaigns is the lengths the crooks went to hide the servers they controlled.
“Out of necessity, malware authors have had to endeavor to find more novel ways to hide intent and to obfuscate remote servers under their control,” the researchers said. “This is, once again, a persistent reminder that supply chain attacks are alive and well.”
The IP cannot be seen in the first-stage code. Instead, the code will first access an Ethereum smart contract, where the IP is stored. This ended up being a double-edged sword, since the blockchain is permanent and immutable, and thus allowed the researchers to observe all of the IP addresses the crooks ever used.
Since the targets are developers working with cryptocurrency, the goal was most likely to steal their seed phrases, and gain access to their wallets.
Software developers, particularly those working in the Web3 space, are often targets of such attacks. Therefore, double-checking the names of all downloaded packages is a must.
Via Ars Technica
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