Apple rushes out patches for two zero-days threatening iOS and macOS users

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Apple on Thursday released fixes for two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in iPhones, iPads, and Macs that give hackers dangerous access to the internals of the OSes the devices run on.

Apple credited an anonymous researcher with discovering both vulnerabilities. The first vulnerability, CVE-2022-22675, resides in macOS for Monterey and in iOS or iPadOS for most iPhone and iPad models. The flaw, which stems from an out-of-bounds write issue, gives hackers the ability to execute malicious code that runs with privileges of the kernel, the most security-sensitive region of the OS. CVE-2022-22674, meanwhile, also results from an out-of-bounds read issue that can lead to the disclosure of kernel memory.

Apple disclosed bare-bones details for the flaws here and here. “Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited,” the company wrote of both vulnerabilities.

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Researchers used a decommissioned satellite to broadcast hacker TV

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Independent researchers and the United States military have become increasingly focused on orbiting satellites' potential security vulnerabilities in recent years. These devices, which are built primarily with durability, reliability, and longevity in mind, were largely never intended to be ultra-secure. But at the ShmooCon security conference in Washington, DC, on Friday, embedded device security researcher Karl Koscher raised questions about a different phase of a satellite's life cycle: what happens when an old satellite is being decommissioned and transitioning to a “graveyard orbit”?

Koscher and his colleagues received permission last year to access and broadcast from a Canadian satellite known as Anik F1R, launched to support Canadian broadcasters in 2005 and designed for 15 years of use. The satellite's coverage extends below the US southern border and out to Hawaii and the easternmost part of Russia. The satellite will move to its graveyard orbit soon, and nearly all other services that use it have already migrated to a new satellite. But while the researchers could still talk to the satellite using special access to an uplink license and transponder slot lease, Koscher had the opportunity to take over and broadcast to the Northern Hemisphere.

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Timnit Gebru Is Building a Slow AI Movement

Timnit Gebru was a well-known scholar in the AI ethics community long before she got fired by Google in December 2020—but that messy and dramatic incident brought a new level of attention to her work. Google apparently exiled Gebru from its AI ethics team (and subsequently fired the other leader of the team) in response to a paper about the dangers of the large language models that have become so important to the world's biggest technology companies. The episode created a firestorm in the AI field.

But Gebru has made the most of the jarring opportunity. In December 2021 she announced the founding of a new organization, the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), which is billed as “a space for independent, community-rooted AI research free from Big Tech's pervasive influence.” Since then, Gebru has been staffing up. In February, AI and sociology researcher Alex Hanna joined as research director, departing from her Google job with a blistering resignation letter. Gebru and Hanna spoke with IEEE Spectrum about their plans for DAIR.

Timnit Gebru and Alex Hanna on...

• A better model for AI research
• DAIR's mission
• Data sets and their discontents

Timnit, did you decide to found a new organization because you think that the current model of AI research is broken?

Timnit Gebru: Yes. For instance, I was looking at what our incentives were at Google and what happened to us—we don’t need to rehash that—and what the incentives are in academia. We want to do interdisciplinary research. We don’t want to drive people to the publishing rat race. We want to take very seriously communicating our research results to people, beyond just writing papers. And we want [researchers] to live a livable life! We don’t want them to work 24/7. And that means we plan to put out less work, so each work will take more money. I was thinking about what kind of work I wanted to do and what kind of environment I wanted to create, and it seemed like it was better to start something from scratch and figure out how to sustain that.

Your press release about the founding of DAIR mentioned that AI is often presented as inevitable, and that you want to combat that idea. Are you trying to apply the precautionary principle to AI?

Alex HannaBrittany Hosea-Small

Alex Hanna: I’m not necessarily thinking about it from the perspective of the precautionary principle. I’m thinking of it more from the perspective of developing technology that works for people. A lot of the AI research that happens right now is AI for the value of AI itself. A lot of people are thinking about this body of tools known as AI and saying, “Well, everything looks like a nail, and we have this big hammer.”

We already know that deep learning has problems. These modes of research require organizations that can gather a lot of data, data that is often collected via ethically or legally questionable technologies, like surveilling people in nonconsensual ways. If we want to build technology that has meaningful community input, then we need to really think about what’s best. Maybe AI is not the answer for what some particular community needs.

If AI is not inevitable, if it’s a choice to use it, are there any application areas right now where you think we should definitely choose not to use AI?

Gebru: I wonder about AI for social good. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t happen, but why start with the AI? Why not think about the good you want to do, and then see if AI can be helpful? Sometimes people talk about AI for climate change, but if you really do the analysis of climate change, isn’t a lot of AI being used to make the oil and gas industries more efficient? I’m not saying AI for social good shouldn’t exist. But I think that’s an example of what Alex was saying, where AI is the hammer. And of course, the technology should not be used for risk assessment, criminalizing people, predictive policing, and remotely killing people and making it easier to enter warfare.

Hanna: Even if you exclude areas like war-making, policing, and incarceration, we should think about areas in which AI is used for things that are necessary, like social welfare and education. [In schools,] there have been all these surveillance systems to “make teachers jobs’ easier” by monitoring students online. We know that student surveillance systems are applied unequally across school systems. If you have a predominately white private school, they are not going to be surveilling the same way that prominently black and brown public schools are. There was an article that was recently published in Slate that showed these school surveillance systems will flag LGBT keywords, which could unintentionally be outing students. If you’re in a place like Texas or Florida, that can be potential for reporting the student to child welfare services. And those get filed as child abuse, according to the anti-trans executive order that the governor of Texas signed. The promise of those tools is that you’re going to be able to do more with less. AI is bringing brought in to reduce inefficiencies, but maybe these schools really need many more teachers.

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What do you see your mission at DAIR? Will you be calling attention to the current problems in AI, or doing algorithmic audits, or building new types of AI?

Gebru: We have projects that are basically audits, but I’m wary of being a third-party auditor that people can point to as a green light: “Well, they said it’s okay.” But we’re basically doing all of those things. For instance, we have a project on using satellite imagery and computer vision to analyze the effects of spatial apartheid [in South Africa]—so that’s using AI for something that we think will help.

Right now, we’re also focused on the process by which we do this research. What are some of the principles we should be following? How do we not exploit people? How do we make sure that when we extract knowledge from people, we appropriately compensate them? There are lots of people in communities who are not writing papers, but they have other forms of knowledge that are very important for our projects. How do we collaborate with those people in a way that’s respectful and values what they bring to the table?

Hanna: Also, what would it mean to use AI to hold power to account? We’re having lots of discussions with NGOs that are focused on accountability and human rights.

Maybe you can tell me more about the satellite imagery project to make this more concrete. What are the goals of that project and what have you figured out so far?

Gebru: This project is about analyzing spatial satellite imagery. One of our research fellows, Raesetje Sefala, is based in South Africa and grew up in a township. She does work in computer vision, but her knowledge of that history is just as important as her work in computer vision. Spatial apartheid is legally over. But when you look at these images, you see that the townships are in one place and the white mansions are in a different place. That was mandated by the Group Areas Act of 1950. The question we’re asking is: What has happened since then?

Like always, the data set work was the most important and time-consuming work, and that was where we made the biggest innovations. And it’s so hard to publish that kind of work—as we knew already, we’ve been through this multiple times. You go to the computer vision community and they’re like, “Oh, it’s a data set paper, where’s the algorithm?” But NeurIPS had this new data sets and benchmarks track and that’s where we published it.

This project is an example of a lot of the things we’re hoping to do here. We don’t want to just write a paper and move on. We’re working on visualizations; we’re working on how to effectively communicate our findings to relevant groups. [Sefala] is going to write an article for Africa is a Country about some of the findings. We’ve realized that one of the most important things we did was to label townships in the data sets, because the South African government doesn’t label townships in the census. Just that is very important, because how can you analyze the impacts of spatial apartheid if you don’t label the townships? I don’t know if you know Mimi Onuoha—she’s an artist who made a similar point about how Google Maps completely ignores favelas in Brazil.

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It’s interesting to hear you talk about challenges with the data sets. Timnit, in your work on large language models you’ve called attention to problems with existing data sets, including embedded bias. The response I often hear is, essentially, “It’s just too hard to make data sets better.”

Gebru: If it’s just too hard to build a safe car, would we have cars out there? It goes back to what Alex was saying about a hammer. People think there’s just one way to do it. We’ve been trying to say, “Maybe there’s a different way we can think about this.” If you think [data set curation] is a necessity, that means it’ll take more time and resources before you put something out there.

Hanna: This is a point we’ve made over and over. We’ve published on data set practices and how many of these things go out with not enough attention paid to what’s in them. This data-hungry version of building models started with ImageNet, and it wasn’t until ImageNet was out for about 10 years that people started to dig in and say, “Wait, this [data set] is really problematic.”

I’ve been working on a paper with a legal scholar named Mehtab Khan on the legal dimensions of these huge data sets. The big firms like OpenAI are really pushing to say, “Oh, we can use these data, it’s fair use.” But we actually don’t know that—there’s not a lot of prior case law. Plus, fair use only matters for copyright holders, it doesn’t matter for data subjects and it doesn’t matter for the people who are affected by the decisions when these models are deployed.

It seems like a lot of the big changes need to happen within the big industry players. But can you affect change from the outside? And have you seen signs that this philosophy of AI development is spreading?

Gebru: I’ve seen changes. For instance, we’ve been talking for a long time about how data labor is completely undervalued. If you have PhD students and you want them to spend their time very carefully thinking through how they’re going to gather data sets, but then they have nowhere to publish… Now NeurIPS has the data sets and benchmarks track. When you think about what people need to do, you also have to think about the incentive structures. I see some of that changing, with help from labor organizing. And I think from the outside we can help. When we were on the inside, we partnered with people on the outside all the time. And the government has a huge role to play.

But what I worry about—and I said this to the EU parliament—is that we are stuck in this cycle where we are still talking about the potential harms of technology from a long time ago. And now people are talking about the metaverse! We have to figure out how to slow down, and at the same time, invest in people and communities who see an alternative future. Otherwise we’re going to be stuck in this cycle where the next thing has already been proliferated by the time we try to limit its harms.

Hanna: There’s a big desire for some kind of ethical framework. There is already legislation, and there’s going to be more regulations and ongoing litigation. But it’s not going to happen without a concerted effort from people who are willing to push and advocate for it.

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Ukraine Scrubbing Nuclear Agencies of Russian Influence

Ukraine’s nuclear sector is taking steps to remove Russian influence from its operations. The immediate cause appears to be concern about possible sabotage of nuclear power plants and fuel-handling operations from within—either to cause a nuclear incident or to pave the way for Russian forces to seize or retain control of key installations. Also of short-term concern is that Ukraine still relies heavily on Russian suppliers of nuclear fuel, waste handling, and parts.

Concerns about the possible enemy within surfaced last week when Ukrainian state broadcaster SUSPLINE reported that an official with the state nuclear power company had been detained. That was followed by Ukrainian news reports making allegations that two other utility officials had gone missing early—and that one had been "suspended" by the National Nuclear Energy Generating Company of Ukraine or Energoatom.

Moves to root out Russian threats within Ukraine are, however, sowing confusion as experts and officials point fingers at suspected collaborators and, in the process, at each other. Last week Energoatom hit back at one expert critic, accusing her of collusion with “the occupier.”

“The silence and inaction of the international nuclear community paves the way to World War III, to a global nuclear disaster, and the collapse of energy systems.”
—Grigoriy Plachkov, former director, SNRIU

Ukrainian officials and nuclear experts are also criticizing Russian involvement at nuclear energy organizations that have significant Russian membership and staff, including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). They say international organizations have been unwilling to condemn Russia, and thus are unable to play a role in keeping Russian aggression from unleashing a nuclear catastrophe that could spread radiation across Europe.

As Grigoriy Plachkov, former director of Ukraine’s nuclear regulatory agency, the SNRIU, put it in a Facebook post two days ago: "The silence and inaction of the international nuclear community paves the way to World War III, to a global nuclear disaster, and the collapse of energy systems. After all, our industry can become both a victim and a weapon of this war!”

Earlier this month the Russian army shocked the world by using artillery and infantry to seize Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant—Europe’s largest—and also made a failed attempt to reach the South Ukraine nuclear plant north of Odessa. They could still attack the Rivne nuclear plant, the largest under Ukraine’s control, which is just 60 kilometers from the Belarus border.

The director general of the Rivne plant, Pavlo Pavlyshyn, provided insight into fears of "internal" attacks during a recently-posted interview with an American journalist. Russian design amplifies the threat, said Pavlyshyn: "They have all the blueprints and technical specs as well as personnel with intimate knowledge of our operational procedures."

Before joining Energoatom in 2020, Oleg Boyarintsev had served as longtime aide to an alleged Russian agent who fed dirt on President Joe Biden’s family to former President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Pavlyshin continued that Energoatom was prepared for anything: “We constantly work to eliminate any potential internal threats…. We are considering all our options to minimize the risk of a nuclear disaster and prevent a possible terrorist attack on our side.”

According to the SUSPLINE report, Energoatom director of personnel Oleg Boyarintsev was detained along the border between Lviv and Rivne on suspicion of "collaborating with the Russian occupiers,” which cited statements by the SBU, Ukraine’s state security service.

Before joining Energoatom in 2020, Boyarintsev had served as a longtime aide to Andriy Derkach, a former Energoatom president, Ukrainian parliamentarian, and alleged Russian agent who fed dirt on President Joe Biden’s family to former President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Derkach was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2020 and in 2021 by Ukraine.

In a Facebook post last week Olga Kosharna, an expert on energy security who until January served on the board of the SNRIU, alleged that officials installed by Boyarintsev at the Zaporizhzhya plant welcomed its Russian attackers with the words: “I congratulate you.” Kosharna’s March 23 post has been restricted or deleted, but portions are reprinted in the SUSPINE article and in this Ukrainian news report.

Three days later, however, Energoatom posted a picture of a smiling Boyarintsev. According to the firm he was busy organizing humanitarian assistance to residents of Energodar, the Russian-occupied satellite city near Zaporizhzhia. On Boyaritsev’s Facebook page, a commenter added: "Glad to see you in good health at the workplace!”

Energoatom, meanwhile, attacked Kosharna’s assertions as “Fake News” in a March 24 Facebook post comparing her to the FSB, Russia’s state security service. “She is clearly following the FSB techniques, generating fakes and misinformation,” wrote Energoatom.

The company also sought to raise suspicion by noting that Kosharna was born in Russia and trained there—something true for many of Ukraine's nuclear experts.

IEEE Spectrum has not been able to reach Kosharna or Boyarintsev. Energoatom has not responded to our requests for comment.

International nuclear organizations “have a strong enough voice to force the world to impose specific nuclear sanctions on a country whose troops have seized foreign nuclear facilities. ... [But they] have done nothing for Ukraine's nuclear energy, and therefore for the world.”
—Grigoriy Plachkov, former director, SNRIU

What is clear is that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now in its second month, has heightened concerns over Ukraine’s dependence on Russian nuclear firms such as the state-owned nuclear reactor design, construction and fuels giant Rosatom.

Ukraine worked with U.S.-based Westinghouse for two decades to develop and certify enriched-uranium fuel assemblies for its Russian reactors. But in recent years it has continued to order Russian fuel assemblies. In fact, Rosatom delivered a fuel shipment the day before Russian forces surged into Ukraine last month.

"The Russians undercut Western suppliers,” explained Shaun Burnie, a Scotland-based senior nuclear specialist for Greenpeace International, in an interview yesterday.

Ukraine’s Minister of Energy German Galushchenko insisted yesterday in an interview with Kyiv-based newspaper Economic Pravda that Ukraine will quickly eliminate all such reliance on Russia. He said Energoatom has already notified Rosatom that it will terminate fuel purchases, and he vowed to move quickly to build a much-needed repository for spent nuclear fuel.

The Zaporozhzhia plant has its own fuel storage, and Ukraine completed a storage site at the defunct Chernobyl power plant last year to take fuel bundles from its remaining nuclear plants. However, both are now controlled by the Russians. It’s an issue that "needs to be solved fast,” according to Pavlyshyn, the Rivne nuclear plant official.

Parts are also a concern, according to Pavlyshyn, who said the best hope was to source them from other European operators of Russian-designed reactors.

That’s something that one could imagine international nuclear industry organizations such as the IAEA and the World Association of Nuclear Operators helping with. But, to date, they’ve been of little use according to Ukrainian nuclear experts.

“What is the confidentiality of very sensitive discussions the Ukrainians are having with IAEA when [affiliated organization] Rosatom is de facto the Russian government?”
—Shaun Burnie, Greenpeace International

Plachkov, the former Ukrainian nuclear regulator, wrote recently that those international organizations "have a strong enough voice to force the world to impose specific nuclear sanctions on a country whose troops have seized foreign nuclear facilities.” Instead, he wrote, they, "have done nothing for Ukraine's nuclear energy, and therefore for the world.”

The IAEA has held talks with Ukraine and Russia on a possible mission to secure or protect Ukrainian nuclear sites, but the Vienna-based organization may need to change tack to make that possible. In an official statement issued on Sunday, Ukrainian Ministry of Energy advisor Olena Zerkal said Ukraine is working with "partners" to either expel Russia from the IAEA or to at least remove Russian nationals from key positions in the organization.

The most problematic IAEA official, according to Burnie at Greenpeace, is Mikhail Chudakov, who was deputy director at Rosatom before becoming IAEA’s deputy director for nuclear energy 7 years ago. "What is the confidentiality of very sensitive discussions the Ukrainians are having with IAEA when Rosatom is de facto the Russian government?” asked Burnie.

In fact, since March 11 Rosatom experts have been on site at the captured Zaporizhzhia plant. Energoatom claims that upon arrival they announced the site was now a Rosatom facility.

Greenpeace International sent a letter to IAEA's director general two weeks ago calling for Chudakov’s removal. It also demanded clarification on Chudakov's role in IAEA's response to the nuclear crisis in Ukraine and full disclosure of communications between him and ROSATOM officials since Russia’s invasion last month.

Burnie says the IAEA should also rethink its recently updated guidance on nuclear safety assessments. The agency deemed military attacks highly unlikely, and thus instructed regulators in member states to exclude them from the list of external incidents such as floods and earthquakes that reactors should be able to manage safely. Alas, as the Chernobyl and Fukushima meltdowns and now the Ukraine crisis show, what experts presume to be unlikely or even impossible can happen.

Burnie says that safeguarding against the kind of artillery fire that hit Zaporizhzhia would expose the inherent danger of nuclear power. “Projectiles generally travel at more than Mach 1 and there is no defense from those. You can’t build those into the design. If you did, you couldn’t operate commercial nuclear power plants,” he said. Reference: https://ift.tt/lKPxs6D

Data-harvesting code in mobile apps sends user data to “Russia’s Google”

Enlarge / Photo taken on October 12, 2021 in Moscow shows Russia's internet search engine Yandex's logo on a laptop screen. (Photo by Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP) (Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images) (credit: Kirill Kudryavtsev | Getty Images)

Russia’s biggest Internet company has embedded code into apps found on mobile devices that allows information about millions of users to be sent to servers located in its home country.

The revelation relates to software created by Yandex that permits developers to create apps for devices running Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, systems that run the vast majority of the world’s smartphones.

Yandex collects user data harvested from mobiles, before sending the information to servers in Russia. Researchers have raised concerns the same “metadata” may then be accessed by the Kremlin and used to track people through their mobiles.

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How Robots Can Assist Students With Disabilities

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Some Twitter traffic briefly funneled through Russian ISP, thanks to BGP mishap

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Some Internet traffic in and out of Twitter on Monday was briefly funneled through Russia after a major ISP in that country misconfigured the Internet's routing table, network monitoring services said.

The mishap lasted for about 45 minutes before RTCOMM, a leading ISP in Russia, stopped advertising its network as the official way for other ISPs to connect to the widely used Twitter IP addresses. Even before RTCOMM dropped the announcement, safeguards prevented most large ISPs from abiding by the routing directive.

A visualization of what the event looked like is illustrated on this page from BGPStream.

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The Vacuum Tube’s Forgotten Rival

During the Second World War, the German military developed what were at the time some very sophisticated technologies, including the V-2 rockets it used to rain destruction on London. Yet the V-2, along with much other German military hardware, depended on an obscure and seemingly antiquated component you’ve probably never heard of, something called the magnetic amplifier or mag amp.

In the United States, mag amps had long been considered obsolete—“too slow, cumbersome, and inefficient to be taken seriously,” according to one source. So U.S. military-electronics experts of that era were baffled by the extensive German use of this device, which they first learned about from interrogating German prisoners of war. What did the Third Reich’s engineers know that had eluded the Americans?

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After the war, U.S. intelligence officers scoured Germany for useful scientific and technical information. Four hundred experts sifted through billions of pages of documents and shipped 3.5 million microfilmed pages back to the United States, along with almost 200 tonnes of German industrial equipment. Among this mass of information and equipment was the secret of Germany’s magnetic amplifiers: metal alloys that made these devices compact, efficient, and reliable.

U.S. engineers were soon able to reproduce those alloys. As a result, the 1950s and ’60s saw a renaissance for magnetic amplifiers, during which they were used extensively in the military, aerospace, and other industries. They even appeared in some early solid-state digital computers before giving way entirely to transistors. Nowadays, that history is all but forgotten. So here I’ll offer the little-known story of the mag amp.

An amplifier, by definition, is a device that allows a small signal to control a larger one. An old-fashioned triode vacuum tube does that using a voltage applied to its grid electrode. A modern field-effect transistor does it using a voltage applied to its gate. The mag amp exercises control electromagnetically.

Magnetic amplifiers were used for a variety of applications, including in the infamous V-2 rockets [top] that the Germany military employed during the Second World War and in the Magstec computer [middle], completed in 1956. The British Elliot 803 computer of 1961 [bottom] used related core-transistor logic. From top: Fox photos/Getty Images; Remington Rand Univac; Smith Archive/Alamy

To understand how it works, first consider a simple inductor, say, a wire coiled around an iron rod. Such an inductor will tend to block the flow of alternating current through the wire. That’s because when current flows, the coil creates an alternating magnetic field, concentrated in the iron rod. And that varying magnetic field induces voltages in the wire that act to oppose the alternating current that created the field in the first place.

If such an inductor carries a lot of current, the rod can reach a state called saturation, whereby the iron cannot become any more magnetized than it already is. When that happens, current passes through the coil virtually unimpeded. Saturation is usually undesirable, but the mag amp exploits this effect.

Physically, a magnetic amplifier is built around a metallic core of material that can easily be saturated, typically a ring or square loop with a wire wrapped around it. A second wire also wrapped around the core forms a control winding. The control winding includes many turns of wire, so by passing a relatively small direct current through it, the iron core can be forced into or out of saturation.

The mag amp thus behaves like a switch: When saturated, it lets the AC current in its main winding pass unimpeded; when unsaturated, it blocks that current. Amplification occurs because a relatively small DC control current can modify a much larger AC load current.

The history of magnetic amplifiers starts in the United States with some patents filed in 1901. By 1916, large magnetic amplifiers were being used for transatlantic radio telephony, carried out with an invention called an Alexanderson alternator, which produced a high-power, high-frequency alternating current for the radio transmitter. A magnetic amplifier modulated the output of the transmitter according to the strength of the voice signal to be transmitted.

One Navy training manual of 1951 explained magnetic amplifiers in detail—although with a defensive attitude about their history.

In the 1920s, improvements in vacuum tubes made this combination of Alexanderson alternator and magnetic amplifier obsolete. This left the magnetic amplifier to play only minor roles, such as for light dimmers in theaters.

Germany’s later successes with magnetic amplifiers hinged largely on the development of advanced magnetic alloys. A magnetic amplifier built from these materials switched sharply between the on and off states, providing greater control and efficiency. These materials were, however, exquisitely sensitive to impurities, variations in crystal size and orientation, and even mechanical stress. So they required an exacting manufacturing process.

The best-performing German material, developed in 1943, was called Permenorm 5000-Z. It was an extremely pure fifty/fifty nickel-iron alloy, melted under a partial vacuum. The metal was then cold-rolled as thin as paper and wound around a nonmagnetic form. The result resembled a roll of tape, with thin Permenorm metal making up the tape. After winding, the module was annealed in hydrogen at 1,100 °C for 2 hours and then rapidly cooled. This process oriented the metal crystals so that they behaved like one large crystal with uniform properties. Only after this was done were wires wrapped around the core.

By 1948, scientists at the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory, in Maryland, had figured out how to manufacture this alloy, which was soon marketed by an outfit called Arnold Engineering Co. under the name Deltamax. The arrival of this magnetic material in the United States led to renewed enthusiasm for magnetic amplifiers, which tolerated extreme conditions and didn’t burn out like vacuum tubes. Mag amps thus found many applications in demanding environments, especially military, space, and industrial control.

During the 1950s, the U.S. military was using magnetic amplifiers in automatic pilots, fire-control apparatus, servo systems, radar and sonar equipment, the RIM-2 Terrier surface-to-air missile, and many other roles. One Navy training manual of 1951 explained magnetic amplifiers in detail—although with a defensive attitude about their history: “Many engineers are under the impression that the Germans invented the magnetic amplifier; actually it is an American invention. The Germans simply took our comparatively crude device, improved the efficiency and response time, reduced weight and bulk, broadened its field of application, and handed it back to us.”

The U.S. space program also made extensive use of magnetic amplifiers because of their reliability. For example, the Redstone rocket, which launched Alan Shepard into space in 1961, used magnetic amplifiers. In the Apollo missions to the moon during the 1960s and ’70s, magnetic amplifiers controlled power supplies and fan blowers. Satellites of that era used magnetic amplifiers for signal conditioning, for current sensing and limiting, and for telemetry. Even the space shuttle used magnetic amplifiers to dim its fluorescent lights.

Magnetic amplifiers were also used in Redstone rockets, like the one shown here behind astronauts John Glenn, Virgil Grissom, and Alan Shepard.Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Magnetic amplifiers also found heavy use in industrial control and automation, with many products containing them being marketed under such brand names as General Electric’s Amplistat, CGS Laboratories’ Increductor, Westinghouse’s Cypak (cybernetic package), and Librascope’s Unidec (universal decision element).

The magnetic materials developed in Germany during the Second World War had their largest postwar impact of all, though, on the computer industry. In the late 1940s, researchers immediately recognized the ability of the new magnetic materials to store data. A circular magnetic core could be magnetized counterclockwise or clockwise, storing a 0 or a 1. Having what’s known as a rectangular hysteresis loop ensured that the material would stay solidly magnetized in one of these states after power was removed.

Researchers soon constructed what was called core memory from dense grids of magnetic cores. And these technologists soon switched from using wound-metal cores to cores made from ferrite, a ceramic material containing iron oxide. By the mid-1960s, ferrite cores were stamped out by the billions as manufacturing costs dropped to a fraction of a cent per core.

But core memory is not the only place where magnetic materials had an influence on early digital computers. The first generation of those machines, starting in the 1940s, computed using vacuum tubes. These were replaced in the late 1950s with a second generation based on transistors, followed by third-generation computers built from integrated circuits.

Transistors weren’t an obvious winner for early computers, and many other alternatives were developed, including magnetic amplifiers.

But technological progress in computing wasn’t, in fact, this linear. Early transistors weren’t an obvious winner, and many other alternatives were developed. Magnetic amplifiers were one of several largely forgotten computing technologies that fell between the generations.

That’s because researchers in the early 1950s realized that magnetic cores could not only hold data but also perform logic functions. By putting multiple windings around a core, inputs could be combined. A winding in the opposite direction could inhibit other inputs, for example. Complex logic circuits could be implemented by connecting such cores together in various arrangements.

How Magnetic Amplifiers Amplify

The magnetic amplifier exploits the fact that the presence of magnetizable material [tan] in the core of an induction coil increases its impedance. Reducing the influence of that magnetic material by physically withdrawing it from a coil would reduce its impedance, allowing more power to flow to an AC load.

The influence of a magnetizable material, here taking the form of a toroidal core [tan], can be changed by applying a DC bias using a second coil [left side of toroid]. Applying a DC bias current sufficient to force the material into a condition called saturation—a state in which it cannot become more magnetized—is functionally equivalent to removing the material from the coil, which allows more power to flow to the AC load.

A more realistic circuit would include two counter-wound AC coils, to avoid inducing currents in the control winding. It would also include diodes, shown here in a bridge configuration, allowing the circuit to control a DC load. Feedback coils [not shown] can be used to increase amplification.David Schneider

In 1956, the Sperry Rand Co. developed a high-speed magnetic amplifier called the Ferractor, capable of operating at several megahertz. Each Ferractor was built by winding a dozen wraps of one-eighth-mil (about 3 micrometers) Permalloy tape around a 0.1-inch (2.5-mm) nonmagnetic stainless-steel bobbin.

The Ferractor’s performance was due to the remarkable thinness of this tape in combination with the tiny dimensions of the bobbin. Sperry Rand used the Ferractor in a military computer called the Univac Magnetic Computer, also known as the Air Force Cambridge Research Center (AFCRC) computer. This machine contained 1,500 Ferractors and 9,000 germanium diodes, as well as a few transistors and vacuum tubes.

Sperry Rand later created business computers based on the AFCRC computer: the Univac Solid State (known in Europe as the Univac Calculating Tabulator) followed by the less expensive STEP (Simple Transition Electronic Processing) computer. Although the Univac Solid State didn't completely live up to its name—its processor used 20 vacuum tubes—it was moderately popular, with hundreds sold.

Another division of Sperry Rand built a computer called Bogart to help with codebreaking at the U.S. National Security Agency. Fans of Casablanca and Key Largo will be disappointed to learn that this computer was named after the well-known New York Sun editor John Bogart. This relatively small computer earned that name because it edited cryptographic data before it was processed by the NSA’s larger computers.

Five Bogart computers were delivered to the NSA between 1957 and 1959. They employed a novel magnetic-amplifier circuit designed by Seymour Cray, who later created the famous Cray supercomputers. Reportedly, out of his dozens of patents, Cray was most proud of his magnetic-amplifier design.

Computers based on magnetic amplifiers didn’t always work out so well, though. For example, in the early 1950s, Swedish billionaire industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren created a line of vacuum-tube computers, called the ALWAC (Axel L. Wenner-Gren Automatic Computer). In 1956, he told the U.S. Federal Reserve Board that he could deliver a magnetic-amplifier version, the ALWAC 800, in 15 months. After the Federal Reserve Board paid US $231,800, development of the computer ran into engineering difficulties, and the project ended in total failure.

Advances in transistors during the 1950s led, of course, to the decline of computers using magnetic amplifiers. But for a time, it wasn’t clear which technology was superior. In the mid-1950s, for example, Sperry Rand was debating between magnetic amplifiers and transistors for the Athena, a 24-bit computer to control the Titan nuclear missile. Cray built two equivalent computers to compare the technologies head-to-head: the Magstec (magnetic switch test computer) used magnetic amplifiers, while the Transtec (transistor test computer) used transistors. Although the Magstec performed slightly better, it was becoming clear that transistors were the wave of the future. So Sperry Rand built the Univac Athena computer from transistors, relegating mag amps to minor functions inside the computer’s power supply.

In Europe, too, the transistor was battling it out with the magnetic amplifier. For example, engineers at Ferranti, in the United Kingdom, developed magnetic-amplifier circuits for their computers. But they found that transistors provided more reliable amplification, so they replaced the magnetic amplifier with a transformer in conjunction with a transistor. They called this circuit the Neuron because it produced an output if the inputs exceeded a threshold, analogous to a biological neuron. The Neuron became the heart of Ferranti’s Sirius and Orion business computers.

Another example is the Polish EMAL-2 computer of 1958, which used magnetic-core logic along with 100 vacuum tubes. This 34-bit computer was Poland’s first truly productive digital computer. It was compact but slow, performing only 150 or so operations per second.

And in the Soviet Union, the 15-bit LEM-1 computer from 1954 used 3,000 ferrite logical elements (along with 16,000 selenium diodes). It could perform 1,200 additions per second.

In France, magnetic amplifiers were used in the CAB 500 (Calculatrice Arithmétique Binaire 500), sold in 1960 for scientific and technical use by a company called Société d’Electronique et d’Automatisme (SEA). This 32-bit desk-size computer used a magnetic logic element called the Symmag, along with transistors and a vacuum-tube power supply. As well as being programmed in Fortran, Algol, or SEA’s own language, PAF (Programmation Automatique des Formules), the CAB 500 could be used as a desk calculator.

Some computers of this era used multiaperture cores with complex shapes to implement logic functions. In 1959, engineers at Bell Laboratories developed a ladder-shaped magnetic element called the Laddic, which implemented logic functions by sending signals around different “rungs.” This device was later used in some nuclear-reactor safety systems.

Another approach along these lines was something called the Biax logic element—a ferrite cube with holes along two axes. Another was dubbed the transfluxor, which had two circular openings. Around 1961, engineers at the Stanford Research Institute built the all-magnetic logic computer for the U.S. Air Force using such multi-aperture magnetic devices. Doug Engelbart, who famously went on to invent the mouse and much of the modern computer user interface, was a key engineer on this computer.

Some computers of the time used transistors in combination with magnetic cores. The idea was to minimize the number of then-expensive transistors. This approach, called core transistor logic (CTL), was used in the British Elliott 803 computer, a small system introduced in 1959 with an unusual 39-bit word length. The Burroughs D210 magnetic computer of 1960, a compact computer of just 35 pounds (about 16 kilograms) designed for aerospace applications, also used core-transistor logic.

This board from a 1966 IBM System/360 [top] shows some of the machine’s magnetic-core memory, which made use of small ferrite rings through which wires were strung [bottom].Top: Maximilian Schönherr/picture-alliance/dpa/AP; Bottom: Sheila Terry/Rutherford Appleton Laboratory/Science Source

Core-transistor logic was particularly popular for space applications. A company called Di/An Controls produced a line of logic circuits and claimed that “most space vehicles are packed with them.” The company’s Pico-Bit was a competing core-transistor-logic product, advertised in 1964 as “Your best bit in space.” Early prototypes of NASA’s Apollo Guidance Computer were built with core transistor logic, but in 1962 the designers at MIT made a risky switch to integrated circuits.

Even some “fully transistorized” computers made use of magnetic amplifiers here and there. The MIT TX-2 of 1958 used them to control its tape-drive motors, while the IBM 7090, introduced in 1959, and the popular IBM System/360 mainframes, introduced in 1964, used magnetic amplifiers to regulate their power supplies. Control Data Corp.’s 160 minicomputer of 1960 used a magnetic amplifier in its console typewriter. Magnetic amplifiers were too slow for the logic circuits in the Univac LARC supercomputer of 1960, but they were used to drive its core memory.

In the 1950s, engineers in the U.S. Navy had called magnetic amplifiers “a rising star” and one of “the marvels of postwar electronics.” As late as 1957, more than 400 engineers attended a conference on magnetic amplifiers. But interest in these devices steadily declined during the 1960s when transistors and other semiconductors took over.

Yet long after everyone figured that these devices were destined for the dust heap of history, mag amps found a new application. In the mid-1990s, the ATX standard for personal computers required a carefully regulated 3.3-volt power supply. It turned out that magnetic amplifiers were an inexpensive yet efficient way to control this voltage, making the mag amp a key part of most PC power supplies. As before, this revival of magnetic amplifiers didn’t last: DC-DC regulators have largely replaced magnetic amplifiers in modern power supplies.

All in all, the history of magnetic amplifiers spans about a century, with them becoming popular and then dying out multiple times. You’d be hard pressed to find a mag amp in electronic hardware produced today, but maybe some new application—perhaps for quantum computing or wind turbines or electric vehicles—will breathe life into them yet again.

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Chris Wallace Says Life at Fox News Became ‘Unsustainable’

As he starts a new streaming show at CNN, the longtime TV anchor reflects on his decision to leave Fox News after 18 years.

Philanthropists Push Police Searches of DNA Databases

When the police can’t afford to solve cold cases, deep-pocketed donors can.

Streaming Has Won the Hollywood Debate. Is Best Picture Next?

A few years ago, the entertainment industry was arguing over whether movies on streaming services even counted as a film. Now, one is poised to win the Oscars’ top prize.

FCC puts Kaspersky on security threat list, says it poses “unacceptable risk“

Enlarge / Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and founder of Moscow-based Kaspersky, at the 2020 World Internet Conference (WIC) at Wuzhen, China. (credit: Getty Images)

The Federal Communications Commission on Friday effectively barred sales of security products from Moscow-based Kaspersky, determining that they pose an unacceptable risk to US national security.

The move adds Kaspersky to the same covered list that Huawei and ZTE landed on in 2021. Besides its Moscow headquarters, the company’s founder, Eugene Kaspersky, attended a KGB-sponsored technical college and has long been accused of having ties to Russian military and intelligence services.

Kaspersky, which was already banned from all US government networks, was one of three firms added to the covered list on Friday. China Mobile and China Telecom were the other two.

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Dagny Carlsson, Centenarian Blogger, Dies at 109

She began posting about her daily life in Sweden at the age of 99. She went on to acquire a worldwide fan base.

Engineers Say “Nyet” to Doing Business in Russia, Survey Says

Get my company out of Ukraine!

That’s the sentiment expressed by 64 percent of tech professionals responding to a survey conducted by Blind at the request of IEEE Spectrum. (Blind operates private social networks for verified tech employees.) Respondents in Europe were more likely to answer “Yes,” but many engineers at most companies surveyed supported an exit.

Exceptions included Meta (formerly Facebook), Spotify, Twitter, and ByteDance (owner of TikTok). (Some other exceptions, like Instacart, haven’t ever done business in Russia, so the question didn’t really apply.) See the chart below for company-by-company details.

Blind conducted this survey on its platform from March 11 to 15, 2022. It received responses from 7948 tech professionals in the U.S. and 839 in Europe.

The survey also asked whether respondents had taken personal action in support of Ukraine, such as making a donation or participating in a demonstration. Here, the numbers were much higher in Europe than in the United States, with 56 percent of respondents in Europe taking action compared with 36 percent in the U.S.

More than 2600 respondents provided details on actions taken via a write-in response. Of those write-ins, the vast majority (77 percent) indicated that they had made a donation, including several donating entire paychecks. A number of respondents also indicated that they participated in demonstrations, provided direct support to Ukrainians, or booked Airbnbs in the Ukraine. These and others wrote that they have also been cooking for refugees, coordinating evacuations, housing refugees, creating informative websites, or helping with data transfer for Ukraine-based organizations. Others are flying the Ukrainian flag at their homes and painting it on rocks around their neighborhoods. Three respondents—two at Amazon and one at Microsoft—indicated that they had personally participated in cyber operations or done computer hacking in support of Ukraine. And a Meta employee indicated that he has traveled to the Ukraine to directly assist.

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U.S. and European Leaders Reach Deal on Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy

President Biden said that the agreement included “unprecedented protections,” but the details of the new pact were not released.

Instacart Cuts Its Valuation by 38 Percent, Citing ‘Turbulence’

Despite the company’s fast growth during the pandemic, the market for technology stocks appears to have cooled.

Puzzling Out the Drone War Over Ukraine

In 2014, Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Crimea knew that the sight of Russian drones would soon be followed by a heavy barrage of Russian artillery. During that war, the Russian military integrated drones into tactical missions, using them to hunt for Ukrainian forces, whom they then pounded with artillery and cannon fire. Russian drones weren’t as advanced as those of their Western counterparts, but the Russian military’s integration of drones into their battlefield tactics was second to none.

Eight years later, the Russians are again invading Ukraine. And since the earlier incursion, the Russian military has spent approximately US $9 billion to domestically produce an armada of some 500 drones (a.k.a. unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs). But, astonishingly, three weeks into this invasion, the Russians have not had anywhere near their previous level of success with their drones. There are even signs that in the drone war, the Ukrainians have an edge over the Russians.

How could the drone capabilities of these two militaries have experienced such differing fortunes over the same period? The answer lies in a combination of trade embargoes, tech development, and the rising importance of countermeasures.

Since 2014’s invasion of Crimea, Russia’s drone-development efforts have lagged—during a time of dynamic evolution and development across the UAV industry.

First, some background. Military drones come in a wide variety of sizes, purposes, and capabilities, but they can be grouped into a few categories. On one end of the spectrum are relatively tiny flying bombs, small enough to be carried in a rucksack. On the other end are high-altitude drones, with wingspans up to 25 meters and capable of staying aloft for 30 or 40 hours, of being operated from consoles thousands of kilometers from the battlefield, and of firing air-to-surface missiles with deadly precision. In between are a range of intermediate-sized drones used primarily for surveillance and reconnaissance.

Russia’s fleet of drones includes models in each of these categories. However, sanctions imposed after the 2014 invasion of Crimea blocked the Russian military from procuring some key technologies necessary to stay on the cutting edge of drone development, particularly in optics, lightweight composites, and electronics. With relatively limited capabilities of its own in these areas, Russia’s drone development efforts became somewhat sluggish during a time of dynamic evolution and development elsewhere.

Current stalwarts in the Russian arsenal include the Zala Kyb, which is a “loitering munition” that can dive into a target and explode. The most common Russian drones are mid-sized ones used for surveillance and reconnaissance. These include the Eleron-3SV and the Orlan-10 drones, both of which have been used extensively in Syria and Ukraine. In fact, just last week, an Orlan-10 operator was awarded a military medal for locating a site from which Ukrainian soldiers were ambushing Russian tanks, and also a Ukrainian basing area outside Kiev containing ten artillery pieces, which were subsequently destroyed. Russia’s only large, missile-firing drone is the Kronshtadt Orion, which is similar to the American MQ-1 Predator and can be used for precision strikes as well as reconnaissance. An Orion was credited with an airstrike on a command center in Ukraine in early March 2022.

Meanwhile, since the 2014 Crimea war, when they had no drones at all, the Ukrainians have methodically assembled a modest but highly capable set of drones. The backbone of the fleet, with some 300 units fielded, are the A1-SM Fury and the Leleka-100 reconnaissance drones, both designed and manufactured in Ukraine. The A1-SM Fury entered service in April 2020, and the Leleka-100, in May, 2021.

On offense, the Ukrainian and Russian militaries are closely matched in the drone war. The difference is on defense.

The heavy hitter for Ukraine in this war, though, is the Bayraktar TB2 drone, a combat aerial flyer with a wingspan of 12 meters and an armament of four laser-guided bombs. As of the beginning of March, and after losing two TB2s to Russian-backed separatist forces in Lugansk, Ukraine had a complement of 30 of the drones, which were designed and developed in Turkey. These drones are specifically aimed at destroying tanks and as of 24 March had been credited with destroying 26 vehicles, 10 surface-to-air missile systems, and 3 command posts. Various reports have put the cost of a TB2 at anywhere from $1 million to $10 million. It’s much cheaper than the tens of millions fetched by better-known combat drones, such as the MQ-9 Reaper, the backbone of the US Air Force’s fleet of combat drones.

The Ukrainian arsenal also includes the Tu-141 reconnaissance drones, which are large and high-altitude Soviet-era drones, and which have had little success in the war. At the small end of the Ukraine drone complement are 100 Switchblade drones, which were donated by the United States as part of the $800 million weapons package announced on 16 March. The Switchblades are loitering munitions similar in size and functionality to the Russian Zala Kyb.

The upshot is that on offense, the Ukrainian and Russian militaries are closely matched in the drone war. The difference is on defense: Ukraine has the advantage when it comes to counter-drone technology. A decade ago, counter-drone technology mostly meant using radar to detect drones and surface-to-air missiles to shoot them down. It quickly proved far too costly and ineffective. Drone technology advanced at a brisk pace over the past decade, so counter-drone technology had to move rapidly to keep up. In Russia, it didn’t. Here, again, the Russian military was hampered by technology embargoes and a domestic industrial base that has been somewhat stagnant and lacking in critical capabilities. For contrast, the combined industrial base of the countries supporting Ukraine in this war is massive and has invested heavily in counter-drone technology.

Russia has deployed electronic warfare systems to counter enemy drones and have likely been using the Borisoglebsk 2 MT-LB and R-330Zh Zhitel systems, which use a combination of jamming and spoofing. These systems fill the air with radio frequency energy, increasing the noise threshold to such a level that the drone cannot distinguish control signals from the remote pilot. Another standard counter-drone technique is sending false signals to the drone, with the most common being fake (“spoofed”) GPS signals, which disorient the flyer. Jamming and spoofing systems are easy to target because they emit radio-frequency waves at fairly high intensities. In fact, open-source images show that Ukrainian forces have already destroyed three of these Russian counter-drone systems.

The exact systems that have been provided to the Ukrainians is not publicly known, but it’s possible to make an educated guess from among the many systems available.

Additionally, some of the newer drones being used by the Ukrainians include features to withstand such electronic attacks. For example, when these drones detect a jamming signal, they switch to frequencies that are not being jammed; if they are still unable to reestablish a connection, the drone operates autonomously with a series of pre-set maneuvers until a connection can be reestablished.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has access to the wide array of NATO counter-drone technologies. The exact systems that have been provided to the Ukrainians is not publicly known, but it’s possible to make an educated guess from among the many systems available. One of the more powerful ones, from Lockheed Martin, repurposes a solid-state, phased array radar system developed to spot incoming munitions, to detect and identify a drone. The system then tracks the drone and uses high-energy lasers to shoot it down. Raytheon’s counter-drone portfolio includes similar capabilities along with drone-killing drones and systems capable of beaming high-power microwaves that disrupt the drone’s electronics.

While most major Western defense contractors have some sort of counter-drone system, there has also been significant innovation in the commercial sector, given the mass proliferation of commercial drones. While many of these technologies are aimed at smaller drones, some of the technology, including acoustic sensing and radio-frequency localization, is effective against larger drones as well. Also, a dozen small companies have developed jamming and spoofing systems specifically aimed at countering modern drones.

Although we don’t know specifically which counter-drone systems are being deployed by the Ukrainians, the images of the destroyed drones tell a compelling story. In the drone war, many of the flyers on both sides have been captured or destroyed on the ground, but more than half were disabled while in flight. The destroyed Ukrainian drones often show tremendous damage, including burn marks and other signs that they were shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile. A logical conclusion is that the Russians’ electronic counter-drone systems were not effective. Meanwhile, the downed Russian drones are typically much more intact, showing relatively minor damage consistent with a precision strike from a laser or electromagnetic pulse. This is exactly what you would expect if the drones had been dispatched by one of the newer Western counter-drone systems.

In the first three weeks of this conflict, Russian drones have failed to achieve the level of success that they did in 2014. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, have logged multiple victories with drone and counter-drone forces assembled in just 8 years. The Russian drones, primarily domestically sourced, have been foiled repeatedly by NATO counter-drone technology. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian drones, such as the TB2s procured from NATO-member Turkey, have had multiple successes against the Russian counter-drone systems. Reference: https://ift.tt/XQUk7T2

Starfall: Finding a Meteorite with Drones and AI

Go outside on a clear night, and if you’re very lucky you will see the sky falling. NASA estimates that 50,000 meteorites from space have been found on Earth.

The shooting stars or fireballs they form as they enter the atmosphere can be beautiful, but they’re hard to track. Of those 50,000, astronomers have only been able to plot the past orbits of about 40.

Which is why Seamus Anderson and his colleagues at Curtin University in Australia may have made an important first. They report they've recovered a meteorite in the remote Australian outback—one that once followed an ellipse between the orbits of Venus and Jupiter—and they picked it out of nowhere with two drones and machine learning.

“It was a semi-surprise,” says Anderson, an American who came to Curtin in 2018 to do his Ph.D. work on technology for meteorite searches. “We weren’t expecting to have that much success the first time.”

Curtin’s Space Science and Technology Center, in the city of Perth, runs the Desert Fireball Network, a system of 50 automated cameras that monitor Australia’s night skies for incoming meteors. One night last year, two of the cameras tracked a streak in the sky, and the system calculated that a small rock had probably crashed in the desert scrub of Western Australia, in a region known as the Nullarbor. The observations weren’t ideal—they estimated that the meteorite weighed between 150 and 700 grams and had come down in an area of five square kilometers—but Anderson and two colleagues decided to make a field trip. In December they set out from Perth on a drive of more than 1,000 km looking for a needle in a haystack: one blackened piece of rock on the desert floor, 50 km from the nearest paved road.

In the past, the trip would have been all but pointless. Meteorite hunters usually search the ground on foot, walking back and forth in a grid pattern and hoping they hit pay dirt. Eighty percent of the time, they fail.

“It’s been shown that people are just terrible at these kinds of repetitive tasks,” says Anderson. “A major problem is humans just not paying attention.”

Through repetition, the machine and the researchers learned to deal with false positives: bottles, cans, desert plant roots and occasional kangaroo bones.

That’s where technology came in. They used off-the-shelf hardware—a quadcopter drone with a 44-megapixel camera and a desktop computer with a good video card. The unusual part was the convolutional neural network they ran on it—machine learning software not often carried by campers in the outback.

“The holy grail of meteorite hunting right now is a drone that can grid a geographic area, look at the ground, and find meteorites with AI,” says Mike Hankey of the American Meteor Society.

Seamus Anderson (right) poses with his two colleagues, all pointing at the meteorite they just found. Photo was taken with a drone they used to locate the specimen.Seamus Anderson/Curtin University

A machine learning system needs training—data about the world from which it can extrapolate—so the researchers fed it drone images of the Nullarbor terrain. Some of them included meteorite samples borrowed from a local museum and planted on the ground. Those images were given a score of 1—a definite meteorite, even if it only appeared as a black dot. Other images showing random terrain nearby were scored as 0—no meteorite here. Through repetition, the machine and the researchers learned to deal with false positives: bottles, cans, desert plant roots and occasional kangaroo bones.

“It’s like training your kid to figure out what a dog looks like,” says Anderson now. “You could show lots of images of nothing but black Labs—and then, when it sees a picture of a German Shepard, it’s maybe going to freak out and not know exactly what it’s supposed to do. So you have to give it many opportunities to know what a meteorite can look like in that background.”

Top: The incoming meteor and where it landed in Western Australia. Bottom left: The likely orbit of the meteoroid before it hit the Earth. Bottom: The section of desert scientists searched. Seamus Anderson/Curtin University

They began surveying: 43 drone flights over three days, going back and forth at an altitude of about 20 meters, recording 57,255 images. Back at camp, they began to process their images. From the first four flights alone, the algorithm gave 59,384 objects a score of at least 0.7 on that scale of 0 to 1—a lot of possible specimens. The researchers were quickly able to narrow them down to 259 and then 38, which they re-inspected with a second, smaller drone. Soon they were down to four, and set out on foot, guided by GPS, to find them.

Before we reach the conclusion, it’s worth pausing to ask why meteorites are worth chasing. Space scientists will say some date from the beginnings of the solar system. Some contain amino acids, those most basic building blocks of life. A few are large enough to do harm. Others, Anderson points out, contain rare elements, perhaps valuable for future technologies but hard to mine on Earth.

So there was a lot to think about in the desert heat—life, the universe, the reliability of their algorithm—as Anderson and his two comrades paced the ground looking for a blackened rock.

“Then one of my friends on the trip, John Fairweather, said one of the most annoying things you can hear at that moment—like, ‘Hey, is this the meteorite?’” Anderson says. He thought it was a joke. “And I thought, ‘That’s not funny right now, John.’ And I looked over and, literally, he’s got the rock.”

The meteorite, named DFN 09, with a pen for scale.Seamus Anderson/Curtin University

Anderson looked around to be sure the surroundings matched what the overhead drone image had shown. They did. The rock was a chondrite, a common type of iron-rich meteorite. It was 5 centimeters long, about the size of an egg, and weighed 70 grams. Most important to Anderson, the algorithm had given this particular patch of ground a score of 1.0—a perfect match.

“And I stood there, and I basically just screamed for a minute or two. Yes, it was awesome.”

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