Lifeboat Foundation

The Russian government has blocked Tor privacy service in its latest move toward censorship.

Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

A new era of space stations is about to kick off. NASA has announced three commercial space station proposals for development, joining an earlier proposal by Axiom Space.

These proposals are the first attempts to create places for humans to live and work in space outside the framework of government space agencies. They’re part of what has been called “Space 4.0,” where space technology is driven by commercial opportunities. Many believe this is what it will take to get humans to Mars and beyond.

“The industry will see normalization and balance by the middle of 2022, with a potential for overcapacity in 2023 as larger scale capacity expansions begin to come online towards the end of 2022,” the research firm predicts.

Indeed, major semiconductor makers—including Intel, TSMC and Samsung—have all boosted investment in expanding chip capacity amid the current shortage. At the same time, the US government wants to spur more domestic chip manufacturing with billions in potential funding.

The big question is which sectors will see the semiconductor supplies improve to the point of overcapacity. Current shortage have ensnared a wide range of products, including PCs, graphics cards, video game consoles, in addition to cars, smartphones, and smart home devices.

While they wrestle with the immediate danger posed by hackers today, US government officials are preparing for another, longer-term threat: attackers who are collecting sensitive, encrypted data now in the hope that they’ll be able to unlock it at some point in the future.

The threat comes from quantum computers, which work very differently from the classical computers we use today. Instead of the traditional bits made of 1s and 0s, they use quantum bits that can represent different values at the same time. The complexity of quantum computers could make them much faster at certain tasks, allowing them to solve problems that remain practically impossible for modern machines—including breaking many of the encryption algorithms currently used to protect sensitive data such as personal, trade, and state secrets.

While quantum computers are still in their infancy, incredibly expensive and fraught with problems, officials say efforts to protect the country from this long-term danger need to begin right now.

Security experts around the world raced Friday to patch one of the worst computer vulnerabilities discovered in years, a critical flaw in open-source code widely used across industry and government in cloud services and enterprise software.

“I’d be hard-pressed to think of a company that’s not at risk,” said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer for Cloudflare, whose online infrastructure protects websites from malicious actors. Untold millions of servers have it installed, and experts said the fallout would not be known for several days.

New Zealand’s computer emergency response team was among the first to report that the flaw in a Java-language utility for Apache servers used to log user activity was being “actively exploited in the wild” just hours after it was publicly reported Thursday and a patch released.

Car sharing should become the norm to end “20th-century thinking” that values private vehicle ownership, as part of the drive to cut carbon emissions, a government minister has said.

Trudy Harrison, a junior transport minister, said the transport system would soon be designed around “access to services rather than what you own”.

She said the UK was “reaching a tipping point where shared mobility in the form of car clubs, scooters and bike shares will soon be a realistic option for many of us to get around.”

The South African satellite, SumbandilaSat (Pathfinder in Venda) is reaching the end of its life and will deorbit on Friday 10 December 2021.

The satellite was launched in 2009 and took a total of 1,128 high-resolution, usable images. In addition, these imageries were applied in local research and on the Copernicus (previously GMES: Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) programme. The data also contributed towards disaster management such as flood monitoring in Namibia and fire campaigns in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. Furthermore, it also recorded timely images of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Tuscaloosa tornado in the USA.

In May 2005, the then DST (Department of Science and Technology) of the South African Government commissioned Stellenbosch University and SunSpace to develop the ZASat pathfinder satellite program (later renamed SumbandilaSat), a technology demonstrator in conjunction with the South African industry. Consequently, SumbandilaSat was delivered 15 months later and launched from Baikonur, Kazakhstan on September 17 2009 with monitoring and satellite support from the SANSA Space Operations facility in Hartebeesthoek.

The concept by Chinese-born engineer Ming Han Tang was largely neglected by the US government, but in China the design has attracted increasing attention.

And it can go faster than five times the speed of sound.

A team of researchers in China has built and tested a prototype hypersonic flight engine based on a design that was scrapped by NASA over 20 years ago, according to a report from the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Continue reading “China’s New Hypersonic Aircraft Is Based on a Rejected NASA Design” »