The flight manifests were also released, with passenger info and other flight data confirming the status of some people who had been disappeared. The hacker said they were able to access GlobalX’s AWS buckets to grab and delete data, and they also sent messages to the flight crews directly.

https://www.404media.co/globalx-airline-for-trumps-deportations-hacked/

Waymo can absolutely drive at night, I’ve seen them do it. They rely heavily on LIDAR, so the time of day makes no difference to them.

And apparently they only disengage and need human assistance every 17,000 miles, on average. Contrast that to something like Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” (ignoring the controversy over whether it counts or not), where the most generous numbers I could find for it are a disengagement every 71 city miles, on average, or every 245 city miles for a “critical disengagement.”

You are correct in that Waymo is heavily geofenced, and that’s pretty annoying sometimes. I tried to ride one in Phoenix last year, but couldn’t get it to pick me up from the park I was visiting because I was just on the edge of their area. I suspect they would likely do fine if they went outside of their zones, but they really want to make sure they’re going to be successful so they’re deliberately slow-rolling where the service is available.

They’re still working on it. All the dev is by a single guy, who also runs Pixelfed. He says he’ll be open-sourcing the code soon so more people can contribute and help get things going, but he wants to finish getting the web interface working first. And apparently he’s been spending a lot of time keeping everything online during the surge of interest, which has slowed everything down.

I’m in the Discord for Loops, but not affiliated with it. The dev said they’re rate-limited by their email provider, so it does take a long time to go through the queue. The queue is also split between Pixelfed and Loops, since they have the same developer, so that slows things down even more.

It took about three days to get my invite as well, but it may be a bit faster now since I think the initial surge of signups has tapered off a bit.

Can’t speak for the person you’re replying to, but I’m a security engineer and stuff still makes its way to me that you would think would get filtered out by others (and isn’t my job to fix). It just takes the right person thinking “this is obviously a problem with $system, let’s just send it straight over to them so they can fix it quickly!” And then we get the fun job of proving it’s not us and has no relation to us.

We got a ticket today for packet loss between two systems, neither of which have any of our tools on them…

While you’re not wrong about there being other constellations in the works, Starlink is the first to actually launch more than a (relative) few. Over 50% of satellites in orbit, total, belong to Starlink.

So while there are other projects planned or under construction, Starlink is the most visible by far, and that’s a lot of why we hear about it the most.

Also yeah, it’s owned by Elon Musk, so that alone guarantees it’ll stay in the news.

That’s great! Like I said, it’s dependent on your employment contract. But for people who aren’t as certain, separate work and personal devices as much as possible just to protect yourself.

Depending on where you work, your employer may be able to take that personal device you’re using for work in the event of a lawsuit against the company (where they need to retain anything that may be relevant to discovery), or in the event of a security incident (where they may need it for forensics).

I work in information security, and I practice strict isolation for that exact reason. Two laptops, two phones, because if anything ever happens they can and will take devices for analysis or evidence. If you are using an issued device, they’ll assign you a new one; if it’s a personal device you’ll get it back when they’re done with it, which could take years.

Edited to add this is dependent on your employment contract, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Cover your camera and use your work computer.

I’m a security engineer, and encryption is great, but can be bypassed. Relying on encryption assumes it was implemented properly, that the system was shut down properly so all keys were flushed correctly, and the encryption algorithm doesn’t have weaknesses.

Generally if somebody dedicated enough can acquire physical access to a system, they can probably find a way into it given the right resources. Did that happen here? Probably not. Could it have? Absolutely. That’s why most enterprises or government hard drives are shredded rather than just relying on them being wiped or encrypted.

Encryption is part of the solution, but it’s not automatically the complete solution.

We don’t know what was on those servers, but it was apparently sensitive enough that the government redacted descriptions of the data in court filings.

The US government brief said the relocated servers were not wiped before being moved to a new data center. The type of data on the relocated servers was apparently so sensitive that it could not be described in the US court filing, which redacts the sentence that describes what the servers contained.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/us-government-slams-musk-in-court-filing-describing-chaotic-environment-at-x/

That’s also part of why a lot of large telescope mirrors get made in Tucson, at the University of Arizona!