Day: January 17, 2015

Elon Musk is like the “real life” Tony Stark…. and he wants to build a space based Internet… like Google has proposed.

Revealed: Elon Musk’s Plan to Build a Space Internet

Bloomberg BusinessWeek – By: Ashlee Vance – “Because he doesn’t have enough going on, Elon Musk—he of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, SolarCity, and the Hyperloop—is launching another project. Musk wants to build a second Internet in space and one day use it to connect people on Mars to the Web.

Musk is tonight hosting a SpaceX event in Seattle, where the company is opening a new office. The talk will mostly be about SpaceX’s plans for hiring aerospace and software engineers in the Pacific Northwest to boost the company’s rocket-building efforts. But he’ll also use the talk to announce his newest idea, which would launch a vast network of communication satellites to orbit earth. The network would do two things: speed up the general flow of data on the Internet and deliver high-speed, low-cost Internet services to the three billion-plus people who still have poor access to the Web. ‘Our focus is on creating a global communications system that would be larger than anything that has been talked about to date,’ Musk told Bloomberg Businessweek ahead of the announcement.

The Space Internet venture, to which Musk hasn’t yet given a name, would be hugely ambitious. Hundreds of satellites would orbit about 750 miles above earth, much closer than traditional communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit at altitudes of up to 22,000 miles. The lower satellites would make for a speedier Internet service, with less distance for electromagnetic signals to travel. The lag in current satellite systems makes applications such as Skype, online gaming, and other cloud-based services tough to use. Musk’s service would, in theory, rival fiber optic cables on land while also making the Internet available to remote and poor regions that don’t have access.

In Musk’s vision, Internet data packets going from, say, Los Angeles to Johannesburg would no longer have to go through dozens of routers and terrestrial networks. Instead, the packets would go to space, bouncing from satellite to satellite until they reach the one nearest their destination, then return to an antenna on earth. ‘The speed of light is 40 percent faster in the vacuum of space than it is for fiber,’ Musk says. ‘The long-term potential is to be the primary means of long-distance Internet traffic and to serve people in sparsely populated areas.”

This project, he says, will be based in the Seattle office. (Musk has yet to determine the location of the satellite factory.) The office will start with about 60 people and may grow to 1,000 within three to four years. The employees will also work on SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, Dragon capsules, and additional vehicles to carry various supplies (and soon, people) into space. “We want the best engineers that either live in Seattle or that want to move to the Seattle area and work on electronics, software, structures, and power systems,” Musk says. ‘We want top engineering talent of all kinds.’

Earlier this week, the entrepreneur Greg Wyler announced a similar effort through a startup called OneWeb. Wyler has spent the last 15 years trying to bring Internet access to the so-called ‘other three billion.’ He started a telecommunications company in Rwanda that set up Africa’s first 3G cell network. Later, he founded a company called O3b, which owns a satellite network that delivers fast, cheap Internet to hard-to-reach places along the equator. Through OneWeb, Wyler looks to expand this vision and fill the skies with hundreds of satellites that will beam their signals down to low-cost, solar-powered rooftop antennas.

OneWeb has announced that Qualcomm and the Virgin Group will invest in its effort, which is expected to cost around $2 billion. Wyler has also already secured the spectrum needed to deliver such a service from space and expects to be up and running by 2018. He has a team of more than 30 engineers developing the satellites, antennas, and software for OneWeb.

Musk and Wyler have known each other for years. Musk, in fact, used to crash at Wyler’s guest house in Atherton, Calif. While there are major similarities between the two ventures, Musk says he’ll have an edge through SpaceX’s smarts and manufacturing techniques. ‘Greg and I have a fundamental disagreement about the architecture,’ Musk says. ‘We want a satellite that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than what Greg wants. I think there should be two competing systems.'”

This is a rough week for Linux users! Ouch! This is, at least, a problem with the Steam client, not Linux itself.

Steam on Linux bug can delete all user’s files

Slash Gear – By: JC Torres – “No software bug is more egregious than one that can potentially wipe out users’ precious files without warning or indication. Some Linux users are finding this out the hard way when they discovered that their Steam client was silently deleting files starting from the very root directory all the way into the deepest folders. While the system’s files might remain intact because of how Linux security policies work, user data are left unprotected, making this serious flaw even more personal and frightening.

The small bit of good news is that this bug doesn’t happen randomly and would require you to actually be a semi power Linux user of some sort to trigger it. It only happens when you try to move the Steam directory, located at ~/.local/share/Steam by default, somewhere else, like on a more spacious storage device, and then try to symlink (like ‘create shortcut’) it to the original location. This seems to trigger Steam’s automatic integrity detection which, in turn, triggers its reset mechanism and, along the way, will try to delete everything. User TcM1911 seems to have traced the root cause (no pun intended) in the following snippet of code.

Due to symlinking, the variable $STEAMROOT ends up as blank, so that later on the command ‘rm -rf $STEAMROOT/’ will actually just read as ‘rm -rf /’. Any seasoned Linux user will tell you how dangerous that command is, which is basically like deleting all the contents of your C:\ drive on Windows. Fortunately, thanks to how Linux works, it can only delete the files owned by the user, which means that the OS itself remains untouched and functional. That doesn’t save the user’s own files though, and any external storage attached to the computer at that time will also be effected.

The problem is somewhat easy enough to fix by simply checking whether or not $STEAMROOT is empty or invalid before proceeding with the command. Variations of that idea have been suggested in Valve’s Github account, but Valve has yet to chime in on the issue.

One interesting note is that this side effect, if you could call it that, isn’t really peculiar to Linux only. Steam’s uninstallation guide does warn that if you had moved or installed the contents of the Steam folder somewhere else on Windows, it will delete everything there as well during the process. Meaning if you, for one reason or another, put all the contents of C:\Program Files\Steam\ inside C:\, uninstalling Steam will delete everything in C:\. Given how permissions work on Windows, that will have even more destructive consequences.”

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