| European Space Agency Acknowledges Another Breach as Criminals Claim 200 GB Data Haul Jan 1st 2026, 16:01 by msmash The European Space Agency has acknowledged yet another security incident after a cybercriminal posted an offer on BreachForums the day after Christmas claiming to have stolen over 20GB of data including source code, confidential documents, API tokens and credentials. The attacker claims they gained access to ESA-linked external servers on December 18 and remained connected for about a week, during which they allegedly exfiltrated private Bitbucket repositories, CI/CD pipelines, Terraform files and hardcoded credentials. ESA said that the breach may have affected only "a very small number of external servers" used for unclassified engineering and scientific collaboration, and that it has initiated a forensic security analysis. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | The Man Taking Over the Large Hadron Collider Jan 1st 2026, 15:00 by msmash Mark Thomson, a professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge, takes over as CERN's director general this week, and one of his first major decisions during his five-year tenure will be shutting down the Large Hadron Collider for an extended upgrade. The shutdown starts in June to make way for the high-luminosity LHC -- a major overhaul involving powerful new superconducting magnets that will squeeze the collider's proton beams and increase their brightness. The upgrade will raise collisions tenfold and strengthen the detectors to better capture subtle signs of new physics. The machine won't restart until Thomson's term is nearly over. Thomson is far from disconsolate about the downtime. "The machine is running brilliantly and we're recording huge amounts of data," he told The Guardian. "There's going to be plenty to analyse over the period." Beyond the upgrade, Thomson must shepherd CERN's plans for the Future Circular Collider, a proposed 91km machine more than three times the size of the current collider. Member states vote on the project in 2028; the first phase carries an estimated price tag of 15 billion Swiss francs (nearly $19 billion).   Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | You Can't Trust Your Eyes To Tell You What's Real Anymore, Says Instagram Head Jan 1st 2026, 14:00 by msmash Instagram head Adam Mosseri closed out 2025 by acknowledging what many have long suspected: the era of trusting photographs as accurate records of reality is over, and the platform he runs will need to fundamentally adapt to an age of "infinite synthetic content." In a slideshow posted to Instagram, Mosseri wrote that for most of his life he could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened, adding that this is clearly no longer the case. He predicted a shift from assuming what we see is real by default to starting with skepticism and paying attention to who is sharing something and why. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Waymos Are Now Coming For Your Coveted San Francisco Parking Spots Jan 1st 2026, 13:00 by BeauHD An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Chronicle: A long stretch of curb in San Francisco's Mission District might contain a whole menagerie of parked vehicles: hatchbacks, SUVs, dusty pick-ups, chic Teslas. And recently, Waymo robotaxis. That's what Kyle Grochmal saw walking through the northeast Mission District on Monday afternoon. Cutting down York Street, he glimpsed a tell-tale white electric Jaguar in one of the coveted one-hour spots, its sensors spinning. The Waymo sat there for at least 20 minutes, Grochmal said. He whipped out his cell phone and started recording. After the Waymo drove off, another one showed up within an hour and took the same spot. "This is something I started to notice about six months ago," Grochmal said, recalling how disorienting it was to be strolling down a largely deserted sidewalk, and suddenly hear the purring motor and soft click of autonomous vehicle cameras. He'd look up to see a Waymo "just sitting there, not loading anyone." But Waymo's use of public curb space raised questions for Grochmal, who wonders whether San Franciscans are prepared to have their infrastructure dominated by autonomous vehicles. "Say Tesla gets to self-driving, so people have personal AVs," he said. "So then do people from Palo Alto get dropped off in San Francisco and let their cars drive around all day searching for free parking?" Such a future seems particularly unsettling in the northeast Mission, where snug streets couldn't handle much traffic, and competition for parking is already fierce. A recent influx of Artificial Intelligence companies brought many more workers and cars, as well as robotaxis that trawl the blocks, waiting for fares. It makes sense, to Grochmal, that some of them wind up squatting in one-hour spaces. [...] Still, it's conceivable that residents will lose patience with Waymo, and other AV companies, as the fleets scale up and the vehicles compete more aggressively with humans for parking. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | UK Company Sends Factory With 1,000C Furnace Into Space Jan 1st 2026, 10:00 by BeauHD A UK-based company has successfully powered up a microwave-sized space factory in orbit, proving it can run a 1,000C furnace to manufacture ultra-pure semiconductor materials in microgravity. "The work that we're doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today," says Josh Western, CEO of Space Forge. "This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it's going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it's going to be in the latest planes." The BBC reports: Conditions in space are ideal for making semiconductors, which have the atoms they're made of arranged in a highly ordered 3D structure. When they are being manufactured in a weightless environment, those atoms line up absolutely perfectly. The vacuum of space also means that contaminants can't sneak in. The purer and more ordered a semiconductor is, the better it works. [...] The company's mini-factory launched on a SpaceX rocket in the summer. Since then the team has been testing its systems from their mission control in Cardiff. Veronica Viera, the company's payload operations lead, shows us an image that the satellite beamed back from space. It's taken from the inside of the furnace, and shows plasma - gas heated to about 1,000C -- glowing brightly. [...] The team is now planning to build a bigger space factory -- one that could make semiconductor material for 10,000 chips. They also need to test the technology to bring the material back to Earth. On a future mission, a heat shield named Pridwen after the legendary shield of King Arthur will be deployed to protect the spacecraft from the intense temperatures it will experience as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | NASA's Largest Library Is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts Jan 1st 2026, 07:00 by BeauHD NASA is closing its largest research library at the Goddard Space Flight Center amid budget cuts and campus consolidation, putting tens of thousands of largely non-digitized historical and scientific documents at risk of being warehoused or discarded. The New York Times reports: Jacob Richmond, a NASA spokesman, said the agency would review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away. "This process is an established method that is used by federal agencies to properly dispose of federally owned property," Mr. Richmond said. The shutdown of the library at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is part of a larger reorganization under the Trump administration that includes the closure of 13 buildings and more than 100 science and engineering laboratories on the 1,270-acre campus by March 2026. "This is a consolidation not a closure," said NASA spokeswoman Bethany Stevens. The changes were part of a long-planned reorganization that began before the Trump administration took office, she said. She said that shutting down the facilities would save $10 million a year and avoid another $63.8 million in deferred maintenance. Goddard is the nation's premiere spaceflight complex. Its website calls it "the largest organization of scientists, engineers, and technologists who build spacecraft, instruments, and new technology to study Earth, the Sun, our solar system, and the universe." [...] The library closure on Friday follows the shutdown of seven other NASA libraries around the country since 2022, and included three libraries this year. As of next week, only three -- at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. -- will remain open. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | |
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