Report Identifies Vulnerabilities Popular on Criminal Forums

Cognyte Identifies Top 6 Flaws, Including One That's 17 Years OldRashmi Ramesh • July 21, 2021    

Researchers at security analytics provider Cognyte identified the six common vulnerabilities and exposures - or CVEs - that were most frequently discussed by apparent cyberattackers on dark web forums between Jan. 1, 2020 and March 1, 2021. Five of these CVEs were for Microsoft products.

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Cognyte examined discussions on 15 English, Russian, Turkish, Chinese and Spanish deep and dark web forums to determine the CVEs that had the most mentions and the widest distribution - mentions on multiple forums in different languages. It did not take into account replies to the posts.

The Microsoft flaws were:

• CVE-2020-1472, aka ZeroLogon: This critical elevation of privileges vulnerability exists in Netlogon, the protocol responsible for authenticating users against domain controllers and affects Windows servers. Exploitation could allow attackers to take over servers running as domain controllers in an organization’s network by obtaining domain admin privileges.
• CVE-2020-0796, aka SMBGhost: This buffer overflow vulnerability exists due to an error in the way the vulnerable Microsoft Server Message Block protocol handles a maliciously crafted compressed data packet. It could be exploited by a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code and gain control over vulnerable systems.
• CVE-2019-0708, aka BlueKeep: This use-after-free vulnerability abuses Remote Desktop Services in Windows XP through Windows Server 2008. An exploitation may allow an attacker to run arbitrary code in the kernel level of the system or at least cause a denial of service. Alternatively, it could lead to a complete take-over of the attacked system. During 2019, it was spotted mainly being abused by cryptomining malware, such as Watchbog, or in campaigns distributing such malware families.
• CVE-2017-11882: This 17-year-old memory corruption issue in Microsoft Office resides within Equation Editor, which inserts or edits OLE objects in documents. By exploiting this flaw, attackers could execute remote code on a vulnerable machine, even without user interaction, after a malicious document is opened.
• CVE-2017-0199: Exploiting this vulnerability in Microsoft Office could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted document. In 2020, an exploit attributed to North Korea targeted American and European defense and aerospace industries.

According to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2017-0199 are among the top 10 flaws exploited by nation-state actors from China, North Korea, Russia and Iran.

The sixth flaw highlighted in the Cognyte report, CVE-2019-19781, affects the Citrix Application Delivery Controller formerly known as NetScaler ADC. An exploit could allow an unauthenticated attacker to connect remotely and execute arbitrary code on the affected computer.

This was the most popular CVE in Russian speaking forums, while CVE-2020-0796, which had the highest number of posts across forums at 52, was discussed most in Chinese forums.

Most CVEs on the list apparently were exploited by both nation-state groups and cybercriminals, such as ransomware gangs, during worldwide campaigns in various sectors, the report says.

"Our findings also showed that even a long time after relevant updates were released, CVEs are still popular on dark web platforms, such as CVE-2017-11882, which received the widest distribution with mentions in 12 out of 15 forums examined," the report says.

Cognyte did not immediately respond to Information Security Media Group's requests for further comment.

Varied Arsenal

The list of commonly exploited CVEs shows cybercriminals can leverage a wide variety of attack vectors, says Dirk Schrader, global vice president of security research at telecommunications provider New Net Technologies.

"The attacks include remote code execution attacks on MS Office products (CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2017-0199), on protocols such as RDP (CVE-2019-0708) and SMB (CVE-2020-0796), on systems that allow for further propagation of malicious code such as application delivery controller (CVE-2019-19781) or to expand their privileges to control a domain (CVE-2020-1472)," he says. They would all enable a relatively faster takeover of an attacked system, he adds.

Tim Mackey, principal security strategist at Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center or CyRC, says that if exploiting a CVE grants administrative access to a large number of internet connected systems, leveraging the CVE will prove popular with attackers. "Similarly, if exploitation of a CVE enables a more sophisticated attack, then it too becomes more valuable. CVE-2017-0199 is a perfect example of what could be used as part of a ransomware attack, while CVE-2020-1472 would be valuable to criminals targeting data centers."

In addition to promptly applying patches, Mackey says the key prevention measures to take as part of a preparedness program include "having a detailed incident response plan, performing ongoing threat assessments for the software powering the business - independent of origin or deployment model - and having a comprehensive inventory of all software assets, not just those used in an office setting."

Organizations also should implement active detection, such as checking for suspicious changes in the file system and registry, and mysterious entries in event logs, Schrader adds.

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THEY USE NORTH KOREA
‘Criminal contract hackers’: China, Iran, Russia enlist more high-tech gangsters for cyberattacks

This Feb 23, 2019, file photo shows the inside of a computer in Jersey City, N.J. Cybersecurity teams worked feverishly Sunday, July 4, 2021, to stem the impact of the single biggest global ransomware attack on record, with some details ... more >


By Ryan Lovelace - The Washington Times - Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Rogue governments are increasingly outsourcing cyberattacks to criminals in the borderless domain of cyberspace to wreak havoc on the U.S. and other nations around the world.

China, Iran, Russia and other foreign adversaries have contracted with hackers, deployed sophisticated spyware technology and used social media platforms as tools to facilitate espionage.

The U.S. and its allies blamed the Microsoft Exchange hack, which compromised tens of thousands of computers, on “criminal contract hackers” working for China’s Ministry of State Security), a senior Biden administration official said.

The Justice Department has indicted four Chinese nationals, including three suspected officers of the Ministry of State Security, in the malicious cybercampaign. The ministry recruits hackers through universities in Hainan and elsewhere in China.

“Not only did such universities assist the MSS in identifying and recruiting hackers and linguists to penetrate and steal from the computer networks of targeted entities, including peers at many foreign universities, but personnel at one identified Hainan-based university also helped support and manage Hainan Xiandun as a front company, including through payroll, benefits and a mailing address,” the Justice Department said.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian posted a message to Twitter rejecting the U.S. and allies’ condemnations as “groundless accusations” and claiming that the U.S. was the “world’s top ‘hacking empire.’”

China is not the only outsourcer of cyberattacks. Facebook said it observed a group of hackers in Iran outsourcing the development of malicious software to several cybercriminal gangs.

HEART OF DARKNESS —
Event Horizon Telescope captures birth of black hole jet in Centaurus A
Images narrow down possible theoretical explanations for how black hole jets form.

JENNIFER OUELLETTE - 7/21/2021

Enlarge / Highest-resolution image of Centaurus A obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope on top of a color composite image of the entire galaxy.
Radboud University/ESO/WFI/MPIfR//APEX/NASA/CXC/CfA/EHT/

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration made headlines in 2019 by capturing the very first direct image of a black hole at the center of a galaxy. Now, the EHT is back with another exciting breakthrough: images of the "dark heart" of a radio galaxy known as Centaurus A. The images enable the EHT to pinpoint the location of the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The images also capture the birth of a powerful jet emitting from the black hole. The jet's unusual characteristics could help astronomers answer a few nagging questions about how such jets are produced in the first place.

"This allows us for the first time to see and study an extragalactic radio jet on scales smaller than the distance light travels in one day," said co-author Michael Janssen, an astronomer at Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn and Radboud University Nijmegen. "We see up close and personally how a monstrously gigantic jet launched by a supermassive black hole is being born."

Centaurus A (aka NGC 5128) is one of the largest and brightest objects in the night sky, making it especially popular with amateur stargazers, although it's only visible from the Southern Hemisphere and low northern latitudes. Located in the constellation Centaurus, the galaxy was discovered in 1826 by James Dunlop. In 1847, John Herschel noted its peculiar shape—it looks elliptical when viewed from Earth, with a lane of dust superimposed across it.

\
Enlarge / The Centaurus A galaxy, showcasing the powerful jets emitted from the supermassive black hole at its center.
ESO/WFI; MPIfR/ESO/APEX; A. Weiss et al./NASA/CXC/CfA/R. Kraft et al.

In 1949, astronomers identified Centaurus A as the first known source of radio waves outside the Milky Way galaxy. That's because the galaxy boasts an active galactic nucleus, which produces powerful jets that emit light in both X-ray and radio wavelengths that span distances far greater than the size of the galaxy itself. Centaurus A has been studied extensively ever since in the radio, optical, X-ray, and gamma-ray regimes.

As Ars' John Timmer reported back in 2019, the EHT isn't a telescope in the traditional sense. Instead, it's a collection of telescopes scattered around the globe. The EHT is created by interferometry, which uses light captured at different locations to build an image with a resolution similar to that of a telescope the size of the most distant locations. Interferometry has been used for facilities like ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), where telescopes can be spread across 16 km of desert


In theory, there's no upper limit on the size of the array, but to determine which photons originated simultaneously at the source, you need very precise location and timing information on each of the sites. And you still have to gather sufficient photons to see anything at all. So atomic clocks were installed at many of the locations, and exact GPS measurements were built up over time. For the EHT, the large collecting area of ALMA, combined with choosing a wavelength where supermassive black holes are very bright, ensured sufficient photons. The net result is a telescope that can do the equivalent of reading the year stamped on a coin in Los Angeles from New York City—assuming the coin was glowing at radio wavelengths.

Enlarge / The top-left image shows how the jet disperses into gas clouds that emit radio waves. The top-right panel displays a color composite image. The next panel below shows a zoom image of the inner radio jet obtained with the TANAMI telescopes.
Radboud University; CSIRO/ATNF/;; ESO/WFI; MPIfR/ESO/APEX; NASA/CXC/CfA/; TANAMI

The EHT announced the first direct image ever taken of a black hole at the center of an elliptical galaxy in 2019, located in the constellation of Virgo some 55 million light-years away: Messier 87 (M87). This image would have been impossible a mere generation ago, and it was made possible by technological breakthroughs, innovative new algorithms, and (of course) connecting several of the world's best radio observatories. The image confirmed that the object at the center of M87 is indeed a black hole. Small wonder that Science magazine named the image its Breakthrough of the Year.


FURTHER READING

Event Horizon Telescope captures new view of black hole in polarized light

What was still lacking was insight into the process behind the powerful twin jets produced by M87. Most matter near the edge of a black hole—attracted by the black hole's strong gravitational pull—falls in, but some particles can escape and get blown out via those massive jets at nearly light speed. But astronomers don't yet agree about how those jets get accelerated to such high speeds. Perhaps the mechanism is an accretion disk that produces a magnetic field, funneling some of that matter into a jet. Or maybe the rotational energy of the black hole as it spins is the culprit. Or the mechanism could be a combination of both.

Enlarge / The new highest-resolution image of the jet-launching region obtained with the EHT.
EHT/M. Janssen et al.

Earlier this year, we reported on another groundbreaking result from the EHT collaboration: a new image of M87, this time showing how it looks in polarized light. The ability to measure that polarization for the first time—a signature of magnetic fields at the black hole's edge—yielded fresh insight into how black holes gobble up matter and emit powerful jets from their cores. The observations suggested that the magnetic fields at the black hole's edge are strong enough to push back on the hot gas and help it resist gravity's pull. So only the gas that slips through the magnetic field can spiral inward to the event horizon. Theoretical models that don't incorporate this feature of a strongly magnetized gas don't match the EHT's observations and thus can be ruled out.


The new images of Centaurus A place even more constraints around the various competing theories, further narrowing the possibilities. According to this latest EHT data, the radio emissions form massive lobes emanating outward from Centaurus A. But only the outer edges of the jets emit radiation, perhaps due to the jets colliding with galactic gas, thus heating the edge. "Now we are able to rule out theoretical jet models that are unable to reproduce this edge-brightening," said co-author Matthias Kadler of the University of Würzburg in Germany. "It's a striking feature that will help us better understand jets produced by black holes."

The new Centaurus A observations are also of interest because the black hole at its center is medium-sized: 55 million times the mass of our Sun. That falls smack in the middle between M87 (6.5 billion solar masses) and the mass of the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy (about 4 million solar masses). The jets emitted by Centaurus A's black hole look pretty much the same as the EHT's images of M87, just on a smaller scale. In other words, the Centaurus A black hole doesn't seem to behave differently from its bigger or smaller siblings, adding further credence to physicists' notion that these exotic objects can be defined just by their mass, charge, and spin.

"These data are from the same observing campaign that delivered the famous image of the black hole in M87," said co-author Heino Falcke of Radboud University. "The new results show that the EHT provides a treasure trove of data on the rich variety of black holes, and there is still more to come." One day, the collaboration hopes to use space-based telescopes to capture a direct image of the black hole at the center of Centaurus A, just like they did for M87.

DOI: Nature Astronomy, 2021. 10.1038/s41550-021-01417-w (About DOIs).

JENNIFER OUELLETTE is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Los Angeles

The Olympics are a hypocritical waste of time and money

Ron Cerabona

OPINION
JULY 20 2021 - 
 

A man takes a selfie outside Japan's national stadium. Picture: Getty Images

So, the Tokyo Olympics are going ahead - despite COVID-19 and the limitations it imposes, despite the cost. Cue the purple-prose paens and pumped-up patriotic puffery.

Bah humbug, I say, much to the horror and amused contempt of my workmates.

Yes, I am and always have been one of those "unAustralian types" with no interest in sport. I'm not against amateur and professional sport and willingly concede they have many worthwhile elements: I simply don't care about them.

But I am against the Olympic Games. "Faster, higher, stronger" seems more like "Costlier, dirtier, more hypocritical."

This quadrennial quagmire of quackery is questionable at best - more like an egregious and unconscionable waste on a global scale.

And this year, COVID-19 cases have already broken out in the Olympic village. Let's hope the virus doesn't accompany the victims when they return home.

The original idea was that the modern Olympics were for amateurs, a high-minded but nonsensical notion. It meant those who competed were generally those who could afford to participate, either because they had the money and time or they were sponsored - privately or by a government - so they could train. So much for "amateurism".

Eventually the pretence began to crumble: money talked, as it inevitably does, and the Olympics became just another big international moneyspinner and political plaything.


Between 2012 and 2016, Australia spent $340 million funding Olympic atheltes. At the Rio Olympics in 2016, Australia won 29 medals - eight gold, 11 silver, 10 bronze. That's almost $12 million a medal: while not denigrating the winners' achievement, we can ask, is it value for money for the country? Australian Olympic Committee predictions before 2016 had us winning 37 medals in total (13 gold). This year they've scrapped predictions. I wonder why?

Either police drug cheating seriously and comprehensively or just accept that such shenanigans are going to happen and let the best dopers win. Russia has been banned from these Olympics for doping - there that's "Olympic ideal" at work - but it's highly unlikely they are the only culprits.

We also have the world championships - do we really need both events? Or either? Sporting competitions should be more objective than, say, artistic ones so how many do we need to show off the "best"?

If we really must continue the Olympics, don't have countries waste vast amounts of money and time on mostly failed bids to secure them that could be put to better use. Either permanently place them in Athens for the obvious historical reason or have an international committee decide future host cities. The latter would inevitably be a rigamorole but at least there might be certainty and a lot of resources could be saved.

The original games were held during an Olympic Truce if there was a war on but the modern Oympics had a more troubled first century including two World Wars during which the event was cancelled. More recently, the International Olympic Committee vowed to build a peaceful and better world through sport and "the Olympic ideal". Or - here's a thought - maybe the UN and countries could simply work towards building that better and peaceful world.

#CANCELTOKYOOLYMPICS

Opening ceremony director for 2021 Tokyo Olympics fired after comments about Holocaust surface

Tom Schad, USA TODAY 

TOKYO — Organizers announced Thursday that they have dismissed the director of the opening ceremony for the Tokyo Olympics after learning that he made light of the Holocaust in a comedy routine

The firing of the director, comedian and theater director Kentaro Kobayashi, comes a little more than 24 hours before the scheduled start of the ceremony Friday.

"We offer our deepest apologies for any offense and anguish this matter may have caused to the many people involved in the Olympic Games, as well as to the citizens of Japan and the world," the organizing committee said in a statement.

© Peter Casey-USA TODAY Sports A view of Olympic Stadium, where the opening and closing ceremonies will be held.

Kobayashi said in a statement released by Tokyo 2020 that he remembered making the joke in question in 1998 and regretted it shortly thereafter.

"I understand that my choice of words was wrong, and I regret it," he wrote in Japanese. "I am sorry."

Tokyo 2020 president Seiko Hashimoto said in a news conference that organizers are reviewing the entirety of the program for the opening ceremony in the wake of Kobayashi's dismissal. Hashimoto said they became aware of the joke Wednesday morning and regretted that they did not know about it earlier.

"The overall responsibility lies in me," she said.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish global human rights organization based in Los Angeles, condemned Kobayashi's remarks in a statement released Wednesday. The center, citing Japanese news reports, said one of Kobayashi's jokes included the phrase "let's play Holocaust."

"Any person, no matter how creative, does not have the right to mock the victims of the Nazi genocide," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center's associate dean and global social action director.

RELATED: Ceremony composer resigns after backlash for bullying

Kobayashi's dismissal is the latest in a string of embarrassing moments for the organizing committee, and particularly its opening ceremony team.

Keigo Oyamada, a Japanese composer, resigned from the Tokyo 2020 creative team earlier this week amid backlash for bullying a classmate with disabilities during his childhood. And a previous creative director for the opening ceremony, Hiroshi Sasaki, resigned in March amid revelations that he had made sexist remarks about a well-known female entertainer in Japan, likening her in a brainstorming session to a pig.

The former president of the organizing committee, Yoshiro Mori, also resigned earlier this year after making sexist remarks about women.

Organizers said Thursday that the crowd on hand at the opening ceremony will be limited to about 950 people, including VIPs, government officials and foreign dignitaries. First Lady Jill Biden will be there as the head of the U.S. delegation, and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee has said it expects about 230 of its athletes to march during the ceremony.

Details about the content of the opening ceremony remain largely under wraps, though it is expected to have more of a somber, thankful note than other recent ceremonies, with COVID-19 likely to be a major theme.

How the billionaire space race could be one giant leap for pollution


One rocket launch produces up to 300 tons of carbon dioxide into the upper atmosphere where it can remain for years

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Photograph: Joe Marino/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock

Katharine Gammon
Mon 19 Jul 2021

Last week Virgin Galactic took Richard Branson past the edge of space, roughly 86 km up – part of a new space race with the Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, who aims to make a similar journey on Tuesday.

Both very wealthy businessmen hope to vastly expand the number of people in space. “We’re here to make space more accessible to all,” said Branson, shortly after his flight. “Welcome to the dawn of a new space age.”

Already, people are buying tickets to space. Companies including SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Space Adventures want to make space tourism more common.

The Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa spent an undisclosed sum of money with SpaceX in 2018 for a possible future private trip around the moon and back. And this June, an anonymous space lover paid $28m to fly on Blue Origin’s New Shepard with Bezos – though later backed out due to a “scheduling conflict”.

But this launch of a new private space industry that is cultivating tourism and popular use could come with vast environmental costs, says Eloise Marais, an associate professor of physical geography at University College London. Marais studies the impact of fuels and industries on the atmosphere.

When rockets launch into space, they require a huge amount of propellants to make it out of the Earth’s atmosphere. For SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, it is kerosene, and for Nasa it is liquid hydrogen in their new Space Launch System. Those fuels emit a variety of substances into the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide, water, chlorine and other chemicals.

The carbon emissions from rockets are small compared with the aircraft industry, she says. But they are increasing at nearly 5.6% a year, and Marais has been running a simulation for a decade, to figure out at what point will they compete with traditional sources we are familiar with.

The rocket motor on Richard Branson’s Unity 22 burns as it heads toward space. Photograph: Virgin Galactic/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

“For one long-haul plane flight it’s one to three tons of carbon dioxide [per passenger],” says Marais. For one rocket launch it’s 200-300 tonnes of carbon dioxide carrying 4 or so passengers – close on two orders of magnitude more, according to Marais. “So it doesn’t need to grow that much more to compete with other sources.”
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Right now, the number of rocket flights is very small: in the whole of 2020, for instance, there were 114 attempted orbital launches in the world, according to Nasa. That compares with the airline industry’s more than 100,000 flights each day on average.

But emissions from rockets are emitted right into the upper atmosphere, which means they stay there for a long time: two to three years. Even water injected into the upper atmosphere – where it can form clouds – can have warming impacts, says Marais. “Even something as seemingly innocuous as water can have an impact.”

Closer to the ground, all fuels emit huge amounts of heat, which can add ozone to the troposphere, where it acts like a greenhouse gas and retains heat. In addition to carbon dioxide, fuels like kerosene and methane also produce soot. And in the upper atmosphere, the ozone layer can be destroyed by the combination of elements from burning fuels.

“While there are a number of environmental impacts resulting from the launch of space vehicles, the depletion of stratospheric ozone is the most studied and most immediately concerning,” wrote Jessica Dallas, a senior policy adviser at the New Zealand Space Agency, in an analysis of research on space launch emissions published last year.

Another report from 2019 penned by the Center for Space Policy and Strategy likened the space emissions problem to that of space debris, which the authors say creates an existential risk to the industry. “Today, launch vehicle emissions present a distinctive echo of the space debris problem. Rocket engine exhaust emitted into the stratosphere during ascent to orbit adversely impacts the global atmosphere,” they wrote.

“We just don’t know how large the space tourism industry could become,” says Marais.

A new market report estimates that the global suborbital transportation and space tourism market is estimated to reach $2.58bn in 2031, growing 17.15% each year of the next decade.

“The major driving factor for the market’s robustness will be focused efforts to enable space transportation, emerging startups in suborbital transportation, and increasing developments in low-cost launching sites,” the report says.

In the past, most space transportation has been focused on cargo supply missions to the International Space Station and satellite launch services, but currently, this focus has shifted to in-space transportation, planetary explorations, crewed missions, suborbital transportation and space tourism.

Several companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, have been focusing on developing platforms such as rocket-powered suborbital vehicles that will enable the industry to carry out suborbital transportation and space tourism.

People have pointed out that the money these billionaires have poured into space technology could be invested in making life better on our planet, where wildfires, heatwaves and other climate disasters are becoming more frequent as the globe warms up in the climate crisis.

“Is anyone else alarmed that billionaires are having their own private space race while record-breaking heatwaves are sparking a ‘fire-breathing dragon of clouds’ and cooking sea creatures to death in their shells?” the former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich tweeted last week.

Marais says that there is always an element of excitement to new developments in space – but it’s still possible to be responsible while doing something exciting. She urges caution as the space tourism industry grows, and says there are currently no international rules around the kinds of fuels used and their impact on the environment. “We have no regulations currently around rocket emissions,” she says. “The time to act is now – while the billionaires are still buying their tickets.”

BEZOS PENETRATED SPACE

Why does Jeff Bezos’s rocket look like that? An inquiry


Experts weigh in on the ‘anthropomorphic’ design of New Shepard, the Amazon CEO’s Blue Origin rocket

New Shepard, the rocket that ferried Jeff Bezos into space on Tuesday, sports a rounded top and a long, slim shaft. Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock


Matthew Cantor
@CantorMatthew
Wed 21 Jul 2021 

Jeff Bezos’s 11-minute trip aboard a Blue Origin rocket to the edge of space on Tuesday left the world’s richest man feeling “unbelievably good” and his crew “very happy”. But afterwards, as he wondered aloud how fast he could refuel, the rest of the world was left pondering just why the New Shepard rocket had such a distinctive shape.

As social media erupted with innuendo, we contacted a few experts to find out why it looked, in the words of one astrophysicist, so “anthropomorphic”. At one major research institution, the press officer referred us to the gender studies department, but Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was able to shed some light on the topic.





New Shepard consists of a mushroom-like crew capsule that flares out over a long shaft, called a booster. The rounded top appears more bulbous than that of many other rockets, but it’s not unique. “There’s a long history of what we call hammerhead rockets,” on which the capsule’s diameter is wider than the booster, said McDowell. “If you’re careful, it actually has perfectly fine aerodynamics.”

Just like the tips of passenger and military jets, capsules come in all different shapes, New Shepard’s interior is designed to “maximize the interior volume” to hold six passengers, said Laura Forczyk, the owner of Astralytical, a space analytics company. It also needs a “big, flat bottom” for stable re-entry, McDowell said.

“They went through a lot of iterations coming up with the perfect shape to give them the most volume, the best windows, and [a design that] wouldn’t kill anyone onboard,” said the astrophysicist Scott Manley in a private video shared with the Guardian. “And this is the shape they came up with, this dome shape.”

As for the booster, engineers work to minimize its mass, making it as small as possible. “It is easier to balance a long and skinny cylinder than it is to balance a thicker, fatter cylinder,” Forczyk said.



These competing concerns can lead to a capsule that is a bit wider than might originally have been envisioned. “It comes down to optimizing two different things and not being able to make them quite match,” McDowell said. He pointed to other examples of rockets with slightly flared tops, including the Atlas V Starliner, expected to launch next week.

Adding to those “anthropomorphic” qualities is a ridge near the top that is “very, very obvious”, Manley said. That’s there to accommodate a “ring-shaped fin” that is fundamental to the re-entry process, counteracting the effects of the fin at the bottom as the booster travels in reverse.

All this adds up to some particularly memorable optics. Was there any subtle aesthetic messaging involved? “I don’t know if I would have made the design this way, but I’m sure it was driven entirely by physics” as well as cost savings, said Forczyk.

Still, “they can’t not have noticed,” McDowell said. “You’ve got to imagine there was a meeting where someone went, ‘Do you really want to fly looking like this?’ But I’m guessing an engineer got up and said, ‘This is what the math says. This is the optimum configuration. So this is what we’re gonna fly.’”

FUNNY IT REMINDS ME OF THE SPACE SHIP FROM FLESH GORDON

Jeff Bezos flies to the edge of space in giant phallus…
Brian O'Neill on July 21, 2021, 



The billionaire space race is equal parts vulgar and hilarious.

Last week alleged tax exile Richard Branson put last year’s unfortunate business of asking the government to bail out his companies behind him to blast to the edge of space for a few minutes. He nearly managed to achieve what the Soviets did 60 years ago with less technology than you would find in a modern wristwatch.

Not to be outdone Jeff Bezos has gone full Dr Evil and blasted himself to the edge of space in a giant phallus.

A few people pointed out the gilded age levels of wealth between Bezos and his employees.

Jon Stewart perfectly sends up the whole farce with this hilarious video:

I am sure it is fun messing around with big rockets, but just a suggestion lads. Could you put your skills and money into something useful? Solving global warning? Curing malaria? Giving the developing world proper water and sanitation?

Thankfully Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife McKenzie Scott has a bit more of a social conscience. She has donated $8.5 billion in less than a year to actual worthy causes on this planet.

Brian O'Neill
I help keep the good ship Slugger afloat by managing the business and techy stuff.

Why is Bezos flying to space? Because billionaires think Earth is a sinking ship

He and his fellow space-obsessed billionaires are exactly like the rich men aboard the Titanic who pushed others aside to jump into lifeboats

‘It is not a coincidence that the richest people in America are funding a new space race.’ Photograph: Blue Origin/Reuters

Hamilton Nolan
Tue 20 Jul 2021 

THE GUARDIAN

Jeff Bezos is the most reptilian of billionaires. His heart has never shown evidence of a drop of warm blood. Despite all of the public relations that money can buy, his discomfort with normal human emotion shines through every time he is forced to contort his face into a squinting, uncomfortable smile. It seems overwhelmingly likely that once he gets to space, he will peel back the skin from his bald pate like the creatures in V and exclaim to his fellow aliens: “I’m here!”




Few men in history have been able to match his icy ability to simultaneously accumulate grotesque mountains of wealth while showing no impulse to even pretend to have an obligation to the greater good. A century ago, Andrew Carnegie hired private armies to smash and shoot his employees when they went on strike. Yet he also had the good sense to build a bunch of public libraries, to create the appearance of some redeeming qualities. Bezos, thus far, has nothing on the humanitarian side of his ledger. His logistics-addled brain has never been able to process the kindergarten concept “To whom much is given, much is required”. In the space of a single year, his ex-wife has become an infinitely greater philanthropist than Bezos himself has in the past quarter-century. This is a conclusive demonstration of the fact that if you want the Bezos fortune to do any good, the first thing you must do is to take it away from Jeff Bezos.

The most revealing quote from any rich person in the past decade came out of Bezos’s mouth in 2018, when he told an interviewer: “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.” I admire the honesty of the sheer inhumanity this quote displays. What would you do with $200bn? Cure diseases? End hunger? Eradicate poverty in an entire nation? Nah. Build a bunch of space rockets! I simply can’t see any other way to get all of these cumbersome gold bars out of my personal vault.

This, from a man who has bulletproof glass in his office and a seven-figure tab for personal security, seems rather disingenuous – I’m sure that leaving all that cash piled up in an unlocked room open to the public would get rid of it quite efficiently. Imagining Bezos as a lizard person incapable of feeling human emotion is actually the most generous interpretation of his behavior. His true motivations, I’m afraid, are more sinister.

Extremely rich people, as a rule, have come to believe that everything is for sale

Extremely rich people, as a rule, have come to believe that everything is for sale. The one thing they cannot accept is being told that they cannot buy something. And once you’ve bought everything else, the most alluring prize is life itself. This is why billionaires are so obsessed with funding technology to extend their own lifespans. It’s difficult to spend all those billions in only a hundred years on Earth. Why give your fortune to others when you could instead increase the amount of time that you have to luxuriate in your own revolting wealth, a brain in a vat being endlessly stimulated by an army of servants who exist only for your own all-important pleasure?

It is not a coincidence that the richest people in America are funding a new space race. They are not motivated by a love of technology, or even a belief in the universe as a business opportunity. Let’s call this what it is: they are making plans to get the hell out of here. In the same way that every good billionaire has an armored escape room in each home and a helicopter on call to whisk them away from any sinking yacht, so too do they expect to have a way off Earth if things go bad here. It may sound absurd to us, the little people without an Ultra Success Mindstate, who have accepted that our fate is bound to the fate of this planet. But it is perfectly in line with the sort of thinking that drives men to become billionaires in the first place. Looming climate change disaster is not a reason to come together and recognize that our destinies are linked with those of all living things; rather, it is a sign that the time has come to build the escape vehicle.

This, my friends, is what Jeff Bezos meant when he said that his rocket company is “the most important work I’m doing”. He and his fellow space-obsessed billionaires are exactly like the rich men aboard the Titanic who pushed the women and children aside to jump into the lifeboats when they realized that the ship was sinking. As the public gawks and smiles at the neato spectacle of the space tourists blasting off, what we are really witnessing is the dry run of a getaway plan – the pure, distilled embodiment of the concept of selfishness, brought to life in fiery spectacle.

When Bezos announced he was going to space, many people joked that he should stay there. Absolutely not. He must be returned to Earth at all costs. The problems of the world that he is escaping were created by rich people just like him. We’re not going to let them get away from us that easily.


Hamilton Nolan is a writer based in New York

 

Bezos blasted for traveling to space while Amazon workers toil on planet Earth

Space-obsessed billionaires come under fire with the Amazon founder declaring the critics ‘largely right’

Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos sits in the New Shepard rocket booster and Crew Capsule mockup in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Photograph: Isaiah Downing/Reuters

Adam Gabbatt

@adamgabbatt

Tue 20 Jul 2021 

As Jeff Bezos blasts into space on Tuesday, his voyage has some people asking whether the billionaire’s time, or at least money, might be better spent here.

Bezos, the Amazon founder who has an estimated net worth of $206bn, is taking off from Texas on Tuesday morning on the rocket New Shepard, owned by his company Blue Origin.

How the billionaire space race could be one giant leap for pollution

Read more

It will be a moment of celebration for Bezos, a noted space enthusiast who said he has “dreamed of traveling to space” since he was five-years-old. But many others are unimpressed with Bezos spending his fortune on space travel, given the long-running complaints about working conditions at Amazon, and broader concerns about income inequality and the amount of taxes the wealthiest Americans pay – or don’t pay – to the government.

In June, a ProPublica investigation revealed how the wealthiest Americans have consistently avoided paying income tax, stirring anger from struggling Americans taxed at normal rates.

Bezos isn’t the only billionaire with a lust for space travel. His fellow billionaires Richard Branson and Elon Musk have been engaged in a space race for some time, with Branson arguably winning when he flew in a Virgin Galactic flight last week.

The competition has left Warren Gunnels, a staffer for Bernie Sanders, distinctly unimpressed.

Bezos addressed some of the criticism on Monday, when he was asked about the claim that he was taking a rich person’s “joyride” instead of focusing on problems on Earth.

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The critics are “largely right”, Bezos said.

“We have to do both. We have lots of problems here and now on Earth and we need to work on those and we also need to look to the future, we’ve always done that as a species and as a civilization. We have to do both.”

Bezos, who has stepped down as Amazon CEO, saw his net worth increase by $70bn during the pandemic, as hundreds of millions of people looked to his company for food deliveries and entertainment. Amazon has been criticized for years over the conditions for its workers, with reports of staff urinating in bottles for fear of missing delivery rates and regularly working 14-hour days.

Andy Levin, a US representative from Michigan, pointed out the discrepancy between owner and worker in a tweet.

While others noted that as Bezos did a round of interviews to discuss his spaceflight, the media largely avoided asking him about his company’s procedures.

Bezos’ flight comes after the British billionaire Richard Branson flew to space in his own Virgin Galactic aircraft. Branson reached an altitude of 53 miles (85 km) in his vessel, lower than the 62 mile (100 km) Kármán line which Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the Switzerland-based world body, defines as space, though other organizations – such as Nasa – have it lower.

Blue Origin engaged in some social media bickering of its own after Branson’s return from the air. The company’s Twitter feed posted a side by side comparison of its own space trips with those of Virgin Galactic, pointing out that its own trips definitely will go into space, and describing Branson’s ‘space craft’ as a “high altitude airplane”.

UK

U-turn sees NHS workers handed a 3% pay rise

Unions will now make arrangements to consult their members on the offer.

Matt Bodell
21 July 2021


The government previously said 1% was all it could afford.

NHS workers in England are to be handed a 3% single-year pay rise, health secretary Sajid Javid has announced.

The news comes only hours after Conservative MP and Health Minister Helen Whately told Parliament that the Government was still “considering” the undisclosed recommendations of the NHS Pay Review Body (NHSPRB).

Mr Javid said that the government had accepted in full the recommendations of the NHS independent pay review bodies.

He confirmed the rise would cover the vast majority of NHS staff including clinical support workers, nurses, paramedics, consultants, dentists and salaried GPs and recognised their contribution to battling the coronavirus pandemic.

The rise will also be backdated to April 2021.
Extraordinary efforts.

Health Secretary Sajid Javid said: “NHS staff are rightly receiving a pay rise this year despite the wider public sector pay pause, in recognition of their extraordinary efforts.

“We asked the independent pay review bodies for their recommendations and I’m pleased to accept them in full, with a 3% pay rise for all staff in scope, from doctors and nurses to paramedics and porters.

“We will back the NHS as we focus our efforts on getting through this pandemic and tackling the backlog of other health problems that has built up.

“I will continue to do everything I can to support all those in our health service who are working so tirelessly to care for patients.”

Health unions and grassroots campaigning groups have been calling for a 12.5% to 15% pay rise since July 2020 following over a decade of real-terms pay cuts.

Figures suggest that the most experienced front-line nurses are around £6144 per year worse off now than ten years ago due to wages failing to keep up with the rate of inflation (RPI).

Unions will now make arrangements to consult their members on the offer.
A shambolic announcement.

Responding to the NHS pay announcement, RCN Interim General Secretary and Chief Executive, Pat Cullen, said: “After a shambolic day, comes a shambolic announcement. When the Treasury expects inflation to be 3.7%, ministers are knowingly cutting pay for an experienced nurse by over £200 in real-terms.

“Hospitals and other parts of the NHS are struggling to recruit nurses and healthcare support workers. The government has been warned that many more are on the verge of leaving. With today’s decision, ministers have made it even harder to provide safe care to patients.

“This announcement is light on detail. It must be fully-funded with additional monies for the NHS and ringfenced for the workforce bill.

“Nursing staff will remain dignified in responding to what will be a bitter blow to many. But the profession will not take this lying down. We will be consulting our members on what action they would like to take next.”