A wealthy stock trader and "skilled computer hacker" was sentenced Monday to nine years in prison for the fiery death of a man who was helping him secretly dig tunnels for a nuclear bunker beneath a Maryland home. Baltimore Sun reports: Daniel Beckwitt, 28, had faced a maximum of 30 years in prison when Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Margaret Schweitzer sentenced him. In total, Beckwitt was sentenced to 21 years but the judge suspended all but nine years of the sentence. In April, a jury convicted Beckwitt of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter in the September 2017 death of 21-year-old Askia Khafra. During the trial, Montgomery County prosecutor Marybeth Ayres accused Beckwitt of recklessly endangering Khafra's life. Beckwitt ignored obvious signs of danger and sacrificed safety for secrecy while they dug a network of tunnels beneath a home in Bethesda, a suburb of Washington, D.C., the prosecutor said.

Defense attorney Robert Bonsib had told jurors the fire was an accident, not a crime. Firefighters found Khafra's naked, charred body in the basement of Beckwitt's trash-filled house, only a few steps from an exit. Prosecutors said the extreme hoarding conditions in the home prevented Khafra from escaping. Hours before the fire broke out in the basement, Khafra texted Beckwitt to warn him it smelled like smoke in the tunnels. Ayres said Beckwitt didn't respond for more than six hours before telling Khafra that there had been a "major electrical failure." Instead of getting Khafra out of the tunnels, Beckwitt told him that he "just switched it all over to another circuit," according to the prosecutor. Bonsib said Beckwitt screamed for help from neighbors after the fire broke out and tried to rescue his friend from the blaze before heavy smoke and flames forced him to retreat. A prosecutor described Beckwitt as having "a paranoid fixation on a possible nuclear attack by North Korea."

The tunnels that Khafra was working on were kept a secret, so much so that Beckwitt "tried to trick Khafra into thinking they were digging the tunnels in Virginia instead of Maryland by having him don 'blackout glasses' before taking him on a long drive," the report says. "Khafra had a cellphone with him in the tunnels, but Beckwitt used internet 'spoofing' to make it appear they were digging in Virginia."

A tiny, old star just 12 light-years away might host two temperate, rocky planets, astronomers announced today. If they're confirmed, both of the newly spotted worlds are nearly identical to Earth in mass, and both planets are in orbits that could allow liquid water to trickle and puddle on their surfaces. National Geographic reports: Scientists estimate that the stellar host, known as Teegarden's star, is at least eight billion years old, or nearly twice the sun's age. That means any planets orbiting it are presumably as ancient, so life as we know it has had more than enough time to evolve. And for now, the star is remarkably quiet, with few indications of the tumultuous stellar quakes and flares that tend to erupt from such objects.

The two worlds orbit a star so faint that it wasn't even spotted until 2003, when NASA astrophysicist Bonnard Teegarden was mining astronomical data sets and looking for dim, nearby dwarf stars that had so far evaded detection. Teegarden's star is a stellar runt that's barely 9 percent of the sun's mass. It's known as an ultra-cool M dwarf, and it emits most of its light in the infrared -- just like the star TRAPPIST-1, which hosts seven known rocky planets. But Teegarden's star is just a third as far from Earth as the TRAPPIST-1 system, which makes it ideal for further characterization. The team of astronomers reported their findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

India plans to have its own space station in the future and conduct separate missions to study Sun and Venus, it said on Thursday, as the nation moves to bolster its status as a leader in space technologies and inspire the young minds to take an interest in scientific fields. From a report: India's space agency said today that it will begin working on its space station following its first manned mission to space, called Gaganyaan, in 2022 -- just in time to commemorate 75 years of the country's independence from Britain. The government has sanctioned Rs 10,000 crores ($1.5 billion) for Gaganyaan mission, it was unveiled today. "We have to sustain the Gaganyaan program after the launch of the human space mission. In this context, India is planning to have its own space station," said Dr Kailasavadivoo Sivan, chairman of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). ISRO is India's equivalent to NASA. "While navigation, communication, and earth observation are going to be the bread and butter for us, it is missions such as Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan, and Gaganyaan that excite the youth, unite the nation, and also pave a technological seed for the future." The ambitious announcements come a day after the space agency said it will launch a lunar mission on July 15 this year in an attempt to become only the fourth nation to land on the moon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The renewable energy sector had slightly more installed capacity than coal in April, according to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report. That means U.S. power plants can produce more energy from clean sources than coal for the first time in history, according to the SUN DAY Campaign, a nonprofit research group supporting sustainable energy. The breakthrough reflects the plunging cost of solar and wind as well as heightened environmental concern about coal. Also in April, the renewable energy sector was projected to have generated more electricity than coal, according to a separate report published by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. That transition was partially driven by seasonal issues.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: NASA's trip to the Moon's surface in July 1969 was preceded by a lot of preparatory missions -- including Apollo 10, which involved a mock mission with everything but the actual landing. Astronauts Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan flew a lunar module, nicknamed "Snoopy" by the agency, nearly all the way to the Moon during Apollo 10, and then shot the module off into space once they'd completed their task. There was never any intent to return Snoopy to Earth -- it was sent into an orbit around the sun beyond the Moon after the astronauts completed their maneuvers and returned to the command module, and NASA did not track its trajectory. The effort to discover its location began in 2011, undertaken by a group of amateur U.K. astronomers led by Nick Howes -- the same who now claim they're "98 percent convinced" they've discovered where it ended up, according to Sky News. Howes' further speculated that if they confirm its location, someone like Elon Musk could recover it and preserve it as a key cultural artifact.

Spielberg's After Dark horror series will only be able to be streamed when it's dark outside. It'll be available exclusively on Quibi (short for "Quick Bites"), a new streaming platform dedicated to short-form video, created by former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and former HP CEO Meg Whitman. Variety reports: Spielberg had an unusual request however: He wanted viewers to only be able to watch the program after midnight. Given that phones can track where it is at the moment -- and keep tabs on when the sun rises and sets in its area -- Katzenberg and Whitman challenged their engineers to come up with an idea for how to view the show when it's spooky out. The result: A clock will appear on phones, ticking down until sun sets in wherever that user is, until it's completely gone. Then the clock starts ticking again to when the sun comes back up -- and the show will disappear until the next night. According to the report, Quibi is planning for an April 2020 launch, and is "hoping to trigger a 'third generation of film narrative,' following movies and TV."

"At launch, Quibi will offer a two-week free trial period, and have eight 'super premium' productions (which Katzenberg still called 'movies') ready to view," reports Variety. "After that, there will be 26 more 'lighthouse' (read: signature projects) productions that will roll out, every other Monday, for the first year."

An anonymous reader reminded us about the open source reimplementation of Java Web Start, a framework originally developed by Sun Microsystems that allowed users to more easily run Java applications in an applet-like sandbox using a web browser.

From OpenWebStart.com: Java Web Start (JWS) was deprecated in Java 9, and starting with Java 11, Oracle removed JWS from their JDK distributions. This means that clients that have the latest version of Java installed can no longer use JWS-based applications. And since public support of Java 8 has ended in Q2/2019, companies no longer get any updates and security fixes for Java Web Start.

This is why we decided to create OpenWebStart, an open source reimplementation of the Java Web Start technology. Our replacement will provide the most commonly used features of Java Web Start and the JNLP standard, so that your customers can continue using applications based on Java Web Start and JNLP without any change.
Red Hat is apparently involved in its parent project, IcedTea-Web, which it distributes as part of their Windows OpenJDK distribution.

"Nuclear experts have warned against re-opening a 43-year-old Scottish nuclear reactor riddled with cracks over fears of a meltdown," writes the Daily Mirror.

An anonymous reader quotes their report: Hunterston B nuclear power plant was shut down last year after it was found that Reactor 3 had almost 400 cracks in it -- exceeding the operational limit. EDF, which own the plant in Ardrossan, Ayrshire, are pushing to return the reactor to service at the end of June and July and want to extend the operational limit of crack allowed from 350 to 700. However, the plans to reopen the plant have sparked fears it could lead to a nuclear meltdown similar to the 1986 Chernoybl disaster.

Experts have warned that in the very worst case the hot graphite core could become exposed to air and ignite leading to radioactive contamination and evacuation of a large area of Scotland's central belt -- including Glasgow and Edinburgh. According to Dr Ian Fairlie, an independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment, and Dr David Toke, Reader in Energy Policy at the University of Aberdeen, the two reactors definitely should not be restarted...

The plant, which is more than 40 years old, can generate enough electricity to power more than 1.7 million homes, and is one of Britain's eight nuclear plants which provide around 20 percent of the country's electricity.
Nuclear expert Professor Neil Hyat reminds The Sun that the reactor will be shut down by 2030 -- and "possibly earlier."

According to a peer-reviewed paper revealed this week, Google is continuing its experiments into the controversial science of cold fusion -- the theory that nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun, can produce energy in a table-top experiment at room temperature. While Google's recent project found no evidence that cold fusion is possible, it did make some advances in measurement and materials-science techniques that the researchers say could benefit energy research. "The team also hopes that its work will inspire others to revisit cold-fusion experiments, even if the phenomenon still fails to materialize," reports Nature. From the report: The Google team explored three experimental set-ups that have been proposed to generate cold fusion -- two involving palladium and hydrogen, and one involving metallic powders and hydrogen. None foundï evidence of fusion. The results have been published across 12 papers over the past 2 years: 9 in peer-reviewed journals and 3ï on the arXiv preprint server.

In March 1989, two U.S.-based chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced that they had seen excess heat and fusion-reaction products -- signs of nuclear fusion -- when they ran a current across two palladium plates in water laden with deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen. Others quickly pointed out errors in their experimental procedure. Since then, two U.S. Department of Energy reviews have found no evidence of the phenomenon . But cold fusion -- now commonly referred to as low-energy nuclear reactions -- has retained a persistent following that continues to claim evidence of success. Google's $10-million project aimed to test the cold-fusion claims rigorously in a field that lacked credible scientific data, says Matthew Trevithick, a research program manager at Google. Another goal was also to push methods in challenging experimental conditions. But, he adds: "The fact that the pay-out could be huge is definitely a component of our interest.

"SpaceX's unorthodox card-dealing launch of 60 Starlink broadband satellites has led to an unusual viewing opportunity for skywatchers -- and an occasion to wonder about the impact of such mega-constellations on the natural night sky," reports GeekWire: A video captured by satellite-watcher Marco Langbroek in the Netherlands sums up the awe... It didn't take long for Langbroek and other skywatchers to work out the coordinates for the long train of satellites, and to plug those coordinates into online satellite-pass calculators such as CalSky. On Twitter, David Dickinson, author of "The Universe Today: Ultimate Guide to Viewing the Cosmos," started doling out location-specific sighting predictions based on the Orbitron satellite-tracking program.

CalSky automatically picks up your coordinates for satellite sightings, but for those in the Seattle area, the best time to look for the Starlink train passing by tonight is likely to be in the range of 10:50 to 11:10 p.m. PT, going from southwest to northeast. That's a liberal stretch of time that accounts for a range of locations (say, Port Townsend vs. North Bend), plus uncertainties in the orbital estimates. There are other passes overnight at around 12:30, 3:50 and 5:20 a.m. PT. The brightness of the satellites is a question mark. Some say they can be seen with the naked eye, while others advise scanning with binoculars. A lot depends on how the satellites pick up the glint of the sun after dusk or before dawn. Tonight Langbroek reported that the satellite train wasn't as bright as it was the night before.

Speaking of brightness, astronomers and SpaceX fans have already begun the debate over the prospect of having thousands of broadband-beaming satellites in low Earth orbit. The 60 satellites launched this week merely represent the beginning of a campaign aimed at launching as many as 11,000 such spacecraft. And that's just for SpaceX's Starlink system. Thousands more could go into orbit for the constellations being contemplated by OneWeb, Telesat, LeoSat Enterprises and Amazon's Project Kuiper.
Today Elon Musk tweeted defensively that "sats will be in darkness when stars are visible" -- while GeekWire points out that the satellites are also scheduled to spread. "Within just a few days, the tightly spaced 'train' will turn into a dispersed chain that girdles the globe," their article concludes.

"And once that happens, chances are that skywatchers and sky-worriers alike will turn their attention to the next batch of Starlink satellites."

The Baltimore city government is recovering from a devastating ransomware attack that has locked up its systems, but officials in the city faced a new problem today. As first reported by The Baltimore Sun, Google blocked city departments from using Gmail accounts created as a workaround. The Verge reports: On May 7th, a ransomware attack froze government systems, including email, and demanded the city hand over bitcoin to reverse the hack. Weeks later, the city is still recovering from the attack, which has also shut down systems for paying water bills and some other services. While officials deal with the problem, which could still take months to fix, some have reportedly signed up for free Gmail accounts to keep operating.

Gmail distinguishes between individual users and users in businesses and other organizations, requiring the latter to pay for the service. According to the Sun, which cited the mayor's office, Google's systems deemed the city officials to be part of an organization, and shut down the temporary accounts. Emails to the city health department, city council aides, and the mayor's office bounced on Thursday, according to the report from the Sun. UPDATE: Google has since fixed the problem. "We have restored access to the Gmail accounts for the Baltimore city officials," the spokesperson said. "Our automated security systems disabled the accounts due to the bulk creation of multiple consumer Gmail accounts from the same network."

Elon Musk's Boring Company now has a paying customer. "Late Wednesday, the board of directors of the Las Vegas Conventions and Visitors Authority voted to grant a $48,675,000 contract to the Boring Company to build a 0.83-mile, three-station version of the company's Loop mass-transit system inside of Vegas' sprawling, revamped convention center, which is currently under construction," reports Wired. From the report: As previously outlined by BoCo, the Loop system is made up of 8- to 16-passenger battery-powered autonomous electric vehicles, built to shoot people from station to station at speeds of up to 150 mph. This Las Vegas system is slated to transport at least 4,400 passengers per hour between the center's new exhibit and south halls, about a 20-minute walk by foot. The Boring Company has also pledged to build an escalator or elevator system for each of the three stations, pedestrian entrances and exits, tunnel lighting, power and video surveillance systems, a control room, and cell phone, Wi-Fi, intercom, and ventilation systems. The convention center hopes to time the opening of the Loop with the 2021 Consumer Electronics Show.

Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman was the only board member to vote against granting the Boring Company its bid. During the bidding process, Goodman had asked fellow board members to consider a more expensive proposal from another company, Doppelmayr. "Doppelmayr has been in existence for 125 years," Goodman wrote in a letter, according to the Las Vegas Sun. "They already have projects here that are operating successfully. The Boring Co. is 3 years old and has yet to deliver a final package on anything." Goodman's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On May 7, hackers infected about 10,000 of Baltimore city government's computers with an aggressive form of ransomware called RobbinHood, and insisted the city pay 13 bitcoin (then $76,280, today $102,310) to cut the computers loose. The hackers claimed the price would go up every day after four days, and after the tenth day, the affected files would be lost forever. From a report: "We won't talk more, all we know is MONEY!" the ransom note read. "Hurry up! Tik Tak, Tik Tak, Tik Tak!" But the city has not paid. In the two weeks since, Baltimore citizens have not had access to many city services. The city payment services and email systems are still offline. A May 7 Baltimore Sun report stated the Robbinhood ransomware used in this attack encrypts files with a "file-locking" virus so the hackers can hold the files hostage. Among the departments that have had issues with their email and phone systems are the Department of Public Works, the Department of Transportation, and the Baltimore Police Department.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Health Department's epidemiologists aren't able to use the network that allows them to alert citizens of certain which types of drugs are causing recent overdoses. Many services have resumed through phone, and vital emergency systems like 911 and 311 reportedly continued to function. The ransomware froze the system the city uses for executing home sales, which reportedly hurt the local market, but the city began implementing a manual workaround earlier this week.

Most of the solar cells Tesla is producing at its Gigafactory in upstate New York "are being sold overseas instead of being used in the company's trademark 'Solar Roof' as originally intended," reports Reuters. "The exporting underscores the depth of Tesla's troubles in the U.S. solar business, which the electric car maker entered in 2016 with its controversial $2.6 billion purchase of SolarCity." From the report: Tesla has only sporadically purchased solar cells produced by its partner in the factory, Panasonic Corp, according to a Buffalo solar factory employee speaking on condition of anonymity. The rest are going largely to foreign buyers, according to a Panasonic letter to U.S. Customs officials reviewed by Reuters. When the two firms announced the partnership in 2016, the companies said they would collaborate on cell and module production and Tesla would make a long-term commitment to buy the cells from Panasonic. Cells are components that convert the sun's light into electricity; they are combined to make solar panels.

The situation raises new questions about the viability of cash-strapped Tesla's solar business. Musk once called the deal a "no brainer" - but some investors panned it as a bailout of an affiliated firm at the expense of Tesla shareholders. Before the merger, Musk had served as chairman of SolarCity's board of directors, and his cousin, Lyndon Rive, was the company's CEO. [...] Panasonic also produces traditional solar panels at the Buffalo plant for Tesla, but has been selling many of them to other buyers since at least last year due to low demand from the California car company, Reuters reported in August 2018. Tesla last month reported a 36 percent slide in its overall solar sales in the first quarter, adding to previous big drops since the SolarCity acquisition.

"A team of student designers and engineers from the RCA and Imperial College have designed an open-source alternative to GPS, called Aweigh, that does not rely on satellites," reports the design magazine Dezeen.

It's similar to the sextant, calculating positions by measuring the angular distances between the horizon and the sun. ExRex (Slashdot reader #47,177) shares their report: They said that Aweigh can even work on a cloudy day when the sun is not in view, and unlike devices that use satellites, such as smartphones, Aweigh functions offline so a user's positional data cannot be leaked through the internet.

"Satellites send information which can be intercepted and interfered with, but to interfere with Aweigh, one would need to artificially move the sun," explained the team of four, made up of States Lee, Samuel Iliffe, Flora Weil and Keren Zhang. "If one of the devices is faulty or broken, it is only that user who suffers. If one satellite is faulty, then the consequences can affect millions of users.

"Most people don't think about the way they navigate," the group continued, "but as concerns over centralised technology and data privacy increase, individuals should have a choice over how their data is taken and used. Aweigh is about giving back choice...." Describing the system as "a set of tools and blueprints", the team wanted users to be able to hack or fix the tools they use, so making the project open-source was important.
There's a video about the device here. It locates the sun by reading light values with a customized Raspberry Pi board.

Although Slashdot reader RockDoctor asks an interesting question: does it work at night?

Two Harvard researchers believe a small meteor that struck earth in 2014 was from another solar system, saying it's "like getting a message in a bottle from a distant location." CNN reports: Dr. Abraham Loeb, the chair of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University, and his co-author Amir Siraj, studied the velocity of objects entering the Earth's atmosphere, which can be used to predict whether the object was traveling in relation to our sun's orbit... Of the three fastest objects on record, the fastest was clearly bound to our sun. The third-fastest couldn't be clearly categorized. But the second-fastest, Loeb says, bore all the hallmarks of being literally out of this solar system. "At this speed, it takes tens of thousands of years for a object to move from one star to another," he says. Since they don't know exactly where it originated, they can't say exactly how old it is, but it could be downright ancient. "To cross the galaxy it would take hundreds of millions of years."

Of all of the possibilities wrapped up in this relatively small object, perhaps the most exciting is the idea that, theoretically, interstellar objects could carry life from other solar systems. "Most importantly, there is a possibility that life could be transferred between stars," Loeb says. "In principle, life could survive in the core of a rock. Either bacteria, or tardigrades (a microscopic, water-dwelling animal); they can survive harsh conditions in space and arrive right to us..." [A]lthough the object detailed in this paper is the first recorded interstellar meteor to hit Earth, the study estimates such objects enter earth's atmosphere every ten years or so, which means there could be a million different interstellar objects floating around our solar system, just waiting to be examined.

If we're going to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we'll need an energy revolution. But there's a big problem. Making that future a reality will, among other things, require a lot of batteries: batteries to charge our electric cars; batteries to store solar power collected while the sun's up and wind power harnessed when it's gusty out. And as a new report by researchers at the University of Technology Sydney warns, that's likely to drive demand for the metals used to build green batteries -- as well as wind turbines and solar panels -- through the roof.

From a report: In other words the clean tech boom is, at least in the short term, likely to fuel a mining boom. And that won['t come without cost. "We already know about the environmental, social, and human rights impacts extraction is posing to front line communities right now," Payal Sampat, mining program director at Earthworks, which commissioned the new report, told Earther. "It's kind of unimaginable to think about... how it would be considered sustainable to scale up those impacts that many fold and still be reaping benefits."

Much like our smartphones and computers, the high-tech energy infrastructure of tomorrow requires a host of metals and minerals from across the periodic table and the planet. The lithium-ion batteries used in EVs and energy storage require not just lithium, but often cobalt, manganese, and nickel. Electric vehicle engines rely on rare earths, as do the permanent magnet-based generators inside some wind turbines. Solar panels gobbles up a significant share of the world's supply of tellurium, and gallium, along with a sizable fraction of mined silver and indium. Most renewable technologies demand heaps of copper and aluminum.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Colorado Sun: Now that Democrats are in charge, Colorado's second attempt at its own version of a net neutrality law passed the General Assembly and now heads to Gov. Jared Polis for his certain signature. Keeping internet speeds consistent regardless of whether a customer is streaming video from Comcast or Netflix wasn't the only intent of the Senate Bill 78. The bill also makes internet service providers pay back state grants to build broadband infrastructure if those companies use paid prioritization to favor some internet traffic over others, or slow down speeds for some users.

The Colorado law is similar to the former federal one in that it would prohibit ISPs from prioritizing certain content. It would also force violating ISPs that benefited from state broadband grants to refund all money received in the previous 24 months. After the governor signs the bill into law, Colorado's attorney general would by Oct. 1 create guidelines on how consumers can file complaints about net neutrality violations. "What I was really looking for in this year's bill was the appropriate nexus of action. A lot of the bills we saw getting in trouble in other states, or bills that were facing a lot of opposition, were more about sending a message of net neutrality instead of looking for a fulcrum point for state action," said Sen. Kerry Donovan, a Democrat from Vail who sponsored last year's bill and wrote this year's bill. "This bill says that if you're going to ask to be funded by the people in Colorado directly out of their paycheck then you need to adhere to these principles."

William Robinson writes: The Hayabusa2 Japanese spacecraft on Friday dropped an explosive on the Ryugu asteroid (named after an undersea palace in a Japanese folktale) to make a crater on its surface. The spacecraft safely evacuated and remained intact after dropping a "small carry-on impactor" made of copper onto the asteroid. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said that they plan to send Hayabusa2 back to the site later, when the dust and debris settle, for observations from above and to collect samples from underground that have not been exposed to the sun or space rays. If successful, it would be the first time a spacecraft has taken such materials. In a 2005 "Deep Impact" mission to a comet, NASA observed fragments after blasting the surface but did not collect them.

Joseph Tsidulko, writing for CRN: Oracle asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to not review an appellate court's decision finding Google violated Oracle's copyright of the Java platform when building the Android mobile operating system. In that opposition brief, Oracle's attorneys said Google's copyright violation shut Oracle, the Java platform owner, out of the emerging smartphone market, causing incalculable harm to its business. The complex case pitting two Silicon Valley giants against each other has raged on since 2010, and already saw many twists in turns before a circuit court last year reversed a jury decision in favor of Oracle. That prompted Google's appeal to the nation's highest court. Oracle notes Google had previously asked for a writ of certiorari -- the legal term for review by the high court -- in 2015 without success in an earlier phase of the case, and the company argues nothing has changed in the time since.

Oracle believes Google destroyed its hopes of competing as a smartphone platform developer with the Java platform, which enables development and execution of software written in Java, including through APIs that access a vast software library. The lawsuit alleged Google copied those APIs without a proper license. Java was developed at Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in 2010. "Google's theory is that, having invested all those resources to create a program popular with platform developers and app programmers alike, Oracle should be required to let a competitor copy its code so that it can coopt the fan base to create its own best-selling sequel," Oracle's brief states.