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Using uninitialized memory for fun and profit (2008)

Using Uninitialized Memory for Fun and Profit Posted on Friday, March 14, 2008. This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years, in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array. Like the best programming tricks, this one is the right tool for the job in certain situations. The sleaziness of uninitialized data access is offset by performance improveme

SpaceX Has the Nerve to Be Mad About a Competitor’s Massive Satellites Littering Earth Orbit

Despite owning more than half of the satellites currently in low Earth orbit, SpaceX is complaining about AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird constellation and how it’ll introduce added risks. In a letter sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), SpaceX raised concerns that AST SpaceMobile poses a threat to the sustainability of low Earth orbit. Elon Musk’s space venture accused the Texas startup of underestimating collision risks in space and whether its satellites pose a threat to people on

South Korea Plans to Build a Base on the Moon

China, India, and Japan are not the only countries on the Asian continent looking to establish themselves in the fledgling space economy. South Korea also wants to be in the space race, and even plans for a presence beyond Earth’s orbit, with ambitions to create its own lunar base within 20 years. At a public meeting held at the National Research Foundation of Korea on July 17, the South Korean AeroSpace Administration (KASA) released a roadmap proposing “five core missions, including low-Earth

A Top NASA Official Is Among Thousands of Staff Leaving the Agency

You can add another name to the thousands of employees leaving NASA as the Trump administration primes the space agency for a 25 percent budget cut. On Monday, NASA announced that Makenzie Lystrup will leave her post as director of the Goddard Space Flight Center on Friday, August 1. Lystrup has held the top job at Goddard since April 2023, overseeing a staff of more than 8,000 civil servants and contractor employees and a budget last year of about $4.7 billion. These figures make Goddard the

Origami Space Planes Could Solve a Major Problem in Orbit

Building a spacecraft could one day be as simple as folding a piece of paper into a plane and letting aerodynamics do the rest. A team of researchers from the University of Tokyo simulated the release of a paper airplane from the International Space Station (ISS) to see if would survive atmospheric reentry. In a paper published in Acta Astronautica, the researchers demonstrated how origami may be the solution to low Earth orbit’s growing trash problem. Rather than relying solely on metals to co

Elon Now Facing the Possibility That SpaceX Will Never Get Starship Working

SpaceX is nine full-scale test launches into developing its enormous, nearly 400-feet-tall Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built. Over the last two and a half years, we've seen over half a dozen spectacular explosions. Two launches earlier this year sent massive streaks of debris hurtling over the Turks and Caicos Islands, prompting airspace closures. Its most recent test in May ended in an uncontrolled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico after helplessly spinning on its axis and suffering

Trump wants to “eliminate or expedite” environmental rules for rocket launches

The Trump administration is considering slashing rules meant to protect the environment and the public during commercial rocket launches, changes that companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have long sought. A draft executive order being circulated among federal agencies, and viewed by ProPublica, directs Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for launch licenses. It could also, in time, require states to allow more la

Environmental protection rules for rocket launches targeted by Trump administration

The Trump administration is considering slashing rules meant to protect the environment and the public during commercial rocket launches, changes that companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have long sought. A draft executive order being circulated among federal agencies, and viewed by ProPublica, directs Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for launch licenses. It could also, in time, require states to allow more la

After Fight With Musk, Trump Reportedly Ordered Review of Government SpaceX Contracts

Now that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and president Donald Trump are no longer seeing eye to eye, it sounds like the White House is working to undercut the richest man in the world's revenue from Washington. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Trump aides initiated a review of SpaceX contracts with the federal government to identify potential waste — pointed scrutiny not unlike the so-called Department of Government Efficiency helmed by Musk himself prior to his ousting from the Trump administration.

Headspace annual subscriptions are 40 percent off right now

Engadget has been testing and reviewing consumer tech since 2004. Our stories may include affiliate links; if you buy something through a link, we may earn a commission. Read more about how we evaluate products . Like any habit, maintaining a meditation practice can be challenging. Having the right tools can make it a bit easier, which is why we're excited to see a subscription to Headspace is back on sale. Right now, you can get one year of Headspace for $42, down from $70. The 40 percent disc

The ‘Hail Mary’ That Saved NASA’s Juno Camera From Jupiter’s Radiation Hell

NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which launched in 2011 to investigate Jupiter’s origin and evolution, travels through the solar system’s most intense planetary radiation fields. When the spacecraft’s JunoCam—a color, visible-light camera—began to suffer the consequences in December 2023, the mission team back on Earth had to think of a remote fix before they lost their chance to photograph the Jovian moon, Io. A relatively simple process was ultimately what enabled the long-distance save: heating the i

Show HN: A rudimentary game engine to build four dimensional VR evironments

Hypershack Hypershack is a standalone, private space designed for tinkering and learning with 4D objects in Virtual Reality. There are some elements designed to help get oriented in the 4d world: there are small particles falling down, i.e. moving towards negative y-axis. The speed they are falling depends on the orientation of the observed 3d space in the 4d world, the closer the 3d space is aligned with y-axis, the faster the particles fall. If you rotate the 3d space to be perpendicular to

Nearly 3,000 people are leaving NASA, and this director is one of them

You can add another name to the thousands of employees leaving NASA as the Trump administration primes the space agency for a 25 percent budget cut. On Monday, NASA announced that Makenzie Lystrup will leave her post as director of the Goddard Space Flight Center on Friday, August 1. Lystrup has held the top job at Goddard since April 2023, overseeing a staff of more than 8,000 civil servants and contractor employees, and a budget last year of about $4.7 billion. These figures make Goddard the

FAA Allows SpaceX to Drop Starship Rocket Bits on Sacred Hawaiian Island

Elon Musk’s obsession with colonizing Mars is polluting Earth. As SpaceX seeks to ramp up its launches of Starship, it’s also expanding its splashdown area where pieces of the rocket are allowed to litter the Pacific Ocean. A recent expansion threatens marine wildlife surrounding a sacred island in native Hawaiian tradition. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved SpaceX’s request to rain down debris in the waters surrounding Mokumanamana, an uninhabited island in Northwestern Hawaii

The Download: how your data is being used to train AI, and why chatbots aren’t doctors

The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Hackers exploited a flaw in Microsoft’s software to attack government agencies Engineers across the world are racing to mitigate the risk it poses. (Bloomberg $) + The attack hones in on servers housed within an organization, not the cloud. (WP $) 2 The French government has launched a criminal probe into X It’s investigating the company’s recommendation algorithm—

The Hunt for a Fundamental Theory of Quantum Gravity

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time and the latter a point in space, but in both cases the normally interwoven threads of space and time seem to stop short. These mysterious points are known as singularities. Singularities are predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. According to this theory, clumps of matter o

Man Who Skydived From Space Dies During New Stunt

Image by Buda Mendes/Getty Images for Laureus / Futurism Developments Nearly 13 years after skydiving from the edge of space, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner has died during a tragic accident. As the New York Post reports, Baumgartner was 56 when he took on what became his last stunt: flying a motorized paraglider near the town of Porto Sant Elpidio, a beachside resort off Italy's Adriatic coast. According to the NYP's translation of the Italian newspaper Il Resto del Carlino, the extreme

Astronomers Detect Entirely New Type of Plasma Wave Above Jupiter’s North Pole

Since entering Jupiter’s orbit in 2016, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been hard at work unveiling the many mysteries of our solar system’s largest planet. And its latest discovery may be one of the most intriguing yet: an entirely new type of plasma wave near Jupiter’s poles. In a paper published Wednesday in Physical Review Letters, astronomers describe an unusual pattern of plasma waves in Jupiter’s magnetosphere—a magnetic “bubble” shielding the planet from external radiation. Jupiter’s excepti

Origami Space Planes Could Solve a Major Problem in Orbit

Building a spacecraft could one day be as simple as folding a piece of paper into a plane and letting aerodynamics do the rest. A team of researchers from the University of Tokyo simulated the release of a paper airplane from the International Space Station (ISS) to see if would survive atmospheric reentry. In a paper published in Acta Astronautica, the researchers demonstrated how origami may be the solution to low Earth orbit’s growing trash problem. Rather than relying solely on metals to co

A New Geometry for Einstein's Theory of Relativity

Kunzinger and Sämann wanted to use their new way of estimating curvature to determine whether these singularity theorems would still be valid if they no longer assumed space-time is smooth. Would singularities persist even in rougher, more realistic-looking spaces? It’s important to find out if the smoothness condition can be waived, Sämann said, because doing so would bring the theorems closer to physical reality. After all, he added, “we believe non-smoothness is an inescapable part of the nat

Starbase injury rates outpace rivals as SpaceX chases its Mars moonshot

SpaceX employees are more likely to be injured while working at Starbase than any of its other manufacturing facilities, according to company worker safety records reviewed by TechCrunch. Starbase, a sprawling launch-and-manufacturing site that recently incorporated as its own Texas city, logged injury rates almost six times higher than the average for comparable space vehicle manufacturing outfits and nearly three times higher than aerospace manufacturing as a whole in 2024, according to Occup

SpaceX worker injury rates at Starbase outpace industry rivals

SpaceX employees are more likely to be injured while working at Starbase than any of its other manufacturing facilities, according to company worker safety records reviewed by TechCrunch. Starbase, a sprawling launch-and-manufacturing site that recently incorporated as its own Texas city, logged injury rates almost six times higher than the average for comparable space vehicle manufacturing outfits and nearly three times higher than aerospace manufacturing as a whole in 2024, according to Occup

If You Thought Your Life Was a Mess, Spare a Thought for Boeing's Massively Failed Starliner Spacecraft

Even after pouring $2 billion into its much-maligned Starliner spacecraft, NASA and Boeing remain committed to getting back off the ground. As Ars Technica reports, the head of NASA's commercial crew program, Steve Stich, revealed last week that Boeing and its propulsion supplier, Aerojet Rocketdyne, are making considerable changes to the astronaut shuttle following a disastrous first crewed mission to the International Space Station last year. The spacecraft experienced several "in-flight ano

After a partly successful test flight, European firm eyes space station mission

Last month, the parachutes on Hélène Huby's small spacecraft failed to deploy, and the vehicle and its cargo crashed into the ocean on Earth. It was both a success and a failure. The success was that after Huby founded The Exploration Company in Europe, she managed to move nimbly with the "Mission Possible" spacecraft such that it cost less than $25 million to build and reached space in less than three years. The vehicle ticked off a number of successes in spaceflight before making a controlle

Starbase injury rates outpace rivals as SpaceX chases its Mars moonshot

SpaceX employees are more likely to be injured while working at Starbase than any of its other manufacturing facilities, according to company worker safety records reviewed by TechCrunch. Starbase, a sprawling launch-and-manufacturing site that recently incorporated as its own Texas city, logged injury rates almost six times higher than the average for comparable space vehicle manufacturing outfits and nearly three times higher than aerospace manufacturing as a whole in 2024, according to Occup

Rocket Report: SpaceX won’t land at Johnston Atoll; new North Sea launch site

Welcome to Edition 8.03 of the Rocket Report! We are at an interesting stage in Europe, with its efforts to commercialize spaceflight. Finally, it seems the long-slumbering continent is waking up to the need to leverage private capital to drive down the costs of space access, and we are seeing more investment flow into European companies. But it is critical that European policymakers make strategic investments across the industry or companies like PLD Space, which outlined big plans this week, w

Nothing’s Essential Space can now talk to your Google Calendar

Ryan Haines / Android Authority TL;DR Nothing has updated its Essential Space app with several additions and improvements. The smart note-taking app now offers Google Calendar integration for your to-do items. You can also edit AI-generated summaries and share text summaries from your recordings. The Nothing Phone 3a series debuted a so-called Essential Key, which has since been adopted by the Nothing Phone 3. Pressing this button summons the Essential Space app to quickly capture audio note

Too many open browser tabs? This is still my favorite solution - and has been for years

NoSystem images/Getty Images How many browser tabs do you have open right now? If you're like most people who spend their workday in front of a PC or Mac, the answer is probably "too many to count," and you're staring at a row of icons that offer only the faintest clue of what's on the tab associated with each one. Good luck remembering what's on each page when all you can see are favicons for each tab Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET When tab overload strikes, the usual cure is to declare tab ban

If You Thought Your Life Was a Mess, Spare a Thought for Boeing's Starliner

Even after pouring $2 billion into its much-maligned Starliner spacecraft, NASA and Boeing remain committed to getting back off the ground. As Ars Technica reports, the head of NASA's commercial crew program, Steve Stich, revealed last week that Boeing and its propulsion supplier, Aerojet Rocketdyne, are making considerable changes to the astronaut shuttle following a disastrous first crewed mission to the International Space Station last year. The spacecraft experienced several "in-flight ano

Boeing’s Starliner Won’t Get to Fly This Year, but the Wonky Spacecraft Is Far From Dead

It’s been more than a year since Starliner’s failed test flight left a crew stranded in space, and Boeing’s spacecraft still isn’t ready to fly. In a recent update, NASA officials said they are working toward launching a mission aboard Starliner in 2026, and there probably won’t be any astronauts involved. During a press briefing last week, Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, told reporters that Boeing is making several changes to its Starliner spacecraft to keep its thrusters