Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX updated the website for its Starlink satellite internet project on Friday, as the company continues to move closer to its goal of offering direct-to-consumer broadband from space later this year.

“Get updates on Starlink news and service availability in your area,” the website reads, with a submission form for an email address and zip code. The form allows prospective customers to apply for updates and access to a public beta test of the Starlink service.

Click on photo to start video.

Radio waves travel poorly through the water, which makes it difficult for divers or submersibles to wirelessly transmit information to the surface. Scientists are trying to change that, though, by developing an underwater version of Wi-Fi.

Back in 2018, we heard how researchers at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) had used lasers to transmit HD video through water. Their experimental new system, known as Aqua-Fi, builds on that technology.

A user such as a scuba diver would start by sending data (such as photos or videos) from a smartphone contained in a watertight housing. That data would initially be transmitted in the form of radio waves, going just a few feet to a small device mounted on the diver’s air tanks.

A bug in a protocol used by virtually all Internet of Things devices exposes millions of users to potential attack, a researcher reported Monday. The fault centers on the Universal Plug and Play protocol, a 12-year-old implementation that simplifies connections among network devices such as computers, printers, mobile devices and Wi-Fi access points.

Billions of devices are theoretically vulnerable, the report stated, but only those with UPnP activated currently face risk of attack.

Turkish security engineer Yunus Çadirci uncovered the UPnP bug, named CallStranger, that could be exploited to gain access to any smart device such as security cameras, printers and routers that are connected to the Internet. Once access is gained, malicious code can be sent through network firewalls and other security defenses and reach internal data banks.

SpaceX has promised that future Starlink satellites will have sunshades so they don’t blocks astronomers’ views of the stars.

Aquatic internet that sends data through light beams could enable divers to instantly transmit footage from under the sea to the surface.

The internet is an indispensable communication tool, connecting tens of billions of devices worldwide, and yet we struggle to connect to the web from under water. “People from both academia and industry want to monitor and explore underwater environments in detail,” explains the first author, Basem Shihada. Wireless internet under the sea would enable divers to talk without hand signals and send live data to the surface.

Underwater communication is possible with radio, acoustic and visible light signals. However, radio can only carry data over short distances, while acoustic signals support long distances, but with a very limited data rate. Visible light can travel far and carry lots of data, but the narrow light beams require a clear line of sight between the transmitters and receivers.

After SpaceX’s eighth Starlink internet satellite launch, the company released a video of its Falcon 9 rocket jettisoning two $3 million fairings.

The Homeland Security’s cybersecurity advisory division is cautioning Windows 10 users of the possibility of a wave of cyberattacks due to the recent publication of an exploit code.

“Malicious cyber actors are targeting unpatched systems with the new [threat],” the agency noted on the Homeland Security web site. The agency said it “strongly recommends using a firewall to block server message block ports from the internet and to apply patches to critical- and high-severity vulnerabilities as soon as possible.”

The agency also referred concerned parties to Microsoft’s security guidance posts and notes published by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team at us-cert.gov.

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation is still deep into testing mode, but it’s already generating 5 trillion bytes of data on a daily basis and getting software updates on a weekly basis.

Those are a couple of the nuggets coming from a weekend Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session featuring SpaceX’s software team.

Continue reading “5 trillion bytes a day: SpaceX engineers flash some facts about Starlink satellites” »