Lifeboat Foundation

The case for creating a United States Space Force is compelling. The United States military’s ability to wage war has become increasingly reliant on satellites. Navigation, reconnaissance, and communications are all handled by space assets. The world economy has become dependent on space satellites. The Internet consists of servers throughout the world linked by satellite constellations. Knock out those satellites and commercial companies’ ability to do business becomes seriously compromised. The space version of Pearl Harbor could reduce the United States to developing-world status in a single blow.

China and Russia, the main enemies of the United States in a potential conflict, are busily developing weapons systems to destroy America’s space infrastructure. Indeed, remote jamming may well do the job without resorting to a direct strike. The potential for jamming is a reason why Pence mentioned the development of jam-proof satellites in his speech. In all, Pence proposed an investment of $8 billion in new space systems during the next five years. The money is likely to be just a down payment for creating a new military branch that would achieve President Trump’s dream of achieving American space dominance.

The idea of a United States Space Force brings science fiction visions of American military personnel doing battle against an enemy in space. Indeed, the joke that has become common on social media is that President Trump is proposing to create nothing less than Star Fleet, the organization made famous in the Star Trek franchise of movies and TV shows.

A new FBI warning provides advice on protecting home WiFi networks from attack.

A popular WiFi chip, ESP32, contains a security flaw that enables hackers to implant malware that can never be removed. The attack works by implanting code into eFuses, a chip feature that can only be configured once.

“We want a new space race—space races are exciting,” declared SpaceX founder Elon Musk after the successful inaugural flight last year of the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket since the Space Shuttle.

Hawks and headline writers think space races are exciting too, especially the “new space race” between China and the United States. That’s why they keep referring to it—even though it doesn’t exist.

Historic changes are indeed afoot in the space sector. Private crewed spaceflight is about to come of age. Mobile robotic spacecraft are being built to rendezvous with satellites to service them. Vast swarms of broadband satellites are set to make the Internet truly global for the first time, and increase the number of spacecraft in orbit tenfold. Back on Earth, satellite imagery fed through artificial intelligence algorithms promises powerful insights into all manner of human activity. Dozens of countries are active in space and the number is growing all the time. The tired trope of the superpower space race does little to make sense of all this.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has officially launched the Contract for the Web, a set of principles designed to “fix” the internet and prevent us from sliding into a “digital dystopia,” The Guardian reports. The contract lists nine core principles for governments, companies, and individuals to adhere to, including responsibilities to provide affordable, reliable internet access and to respect civil discourse and human dignity.

At launch, the initiative has received the backing of over 150 organizations, including tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, DuckDuckGo, and Facebook, and nonprofit groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Guardian initially reported that Amazon and Twitter were absent from the list of backers, however as of November 25th, Twitter’s logo has appeared on the Contract’s homepage. Twitter’s increasing role in political discourse was recently brought into sharp focus after it chose to ban political ads on its platform, citing the “challenges to civic discourse” that they create.

The contract’s launch comes as tech companies such as Facebook and Google have faced mounting pressure around both the amount of user data they collect, and the ways in which they collect it. The Contract for the Web includes principles designed to prevent this, including a requirement for companies to respect people’s privacy and personal data. If companies do not show that they are working to support these aims they risk being removed from the list of the project’s endorsers.

Park Las Vegas, sponsored by Bleutech Park Properties, Inc. is breaking ground in the Las Vegas Valley in December 2019 as the first city in the world to boast a digital revolution in motion, redefining the infrastructure industry sector. This $7.5 billion, six year project, will be constructed of net-zero buildings within their own insular mini-city, featuring automated multi-functional designs, renewable energies from solar/wind/water/kinetic, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality, Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, supertrees, and self-healing concrete structures.

Bleutech Park’s mixed-use environment featuring workforce housing, offices, retail space, ultra-luxury residential, hotel and entertainment will introduce a new high-tech biome to the desert valley.

A powerful commercial communications satellite to broadcast Internet signals over the Asia-Pacific region has arrived at Cape Canaveral for final launch preparations ahead of a planned Dec. 15 liftoff on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The JCSAT 18/Kacific 1 communications satellite, based on Boeing’s 702MP satellite design, is a shared spacecraft between Sky Perfect JSAT Corp. of Japan and Kacific, a startup telecom company headquartered in Singapore.

Kacific announced the satellites’s arrival at Cape Canaveral on Thursday. Ground crews will complete final testing on the spacecraft and load it with maneuvering propellant ahead of its launch next month.

At Google’s hardware event this morning, the company introduced a new voice recorder app for Android devices, which will tap into advances in real-time speech processing, speech recognition and AI to automatically transcribe recordings in real time as the person is speaking. The improvements will allow users to take better advantage of the phone’s voice recording functionality, as it will be able to turn the recordings into text even when there’s no internet connectivity.

This presents a new competitor to others in voice transcriptions that are leveraging similar AI advances, like Otter.ai, Reason8, Trint and others, for example.

As Google explained, all the recorder functionality happens directly on the device — meaning you can use the phone while in airplane mode and still have accurate recordings.

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