Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service has landed a new client in Maersk, as the two companies came to terms on a deal that would provide the company’s Ocean fleet with internet access.

Maersk announced this morning that more than 330 own-operated container vessels will now have Starlink installed, enabling the fleet to access high-speed internet with speeds at over 200 Mbps.

The logistics company said the deal with SpaceX’s Starlink service “is a leap forward in terms of internet speed and latency, which will bring significant benefits in terms of both crew welfare and business impact.”

SpaceX’s Starlink will be available on most aircraft soon, said Elon Musk. The technology will be available for use by any operator if it is ordered.

Some operators provide an internet connection during airplane flights. However, if you try to use it, you will most likely encounter a problem. The problem with most in-flight internet offerings is speed and connectivity. Airplanes connected to the antenna receive signals from communications towers on the ground as they fly overhead. This limits the availability of internet: it becomes unstable, difficult to connect to, and the actual speed reaches no more than about 10 Mbps. That is why satellite internet can offer a number of benefits, and SpaceX’s Starlink will soon do just that.

Currently, Starlink has a constellation of about 5,000 satellites in low Earth orbit and plans to increase this to 42,000 in the future. This is significantly more than all other companies combined. For example, Viasat, which provides in-flight internet service to JetBlue, United Airlines, and American Airlines, operates a fleet of four satellites, according to The Street.

Amnesty International’s Predator Files investigation traces the widespread abuse of spyware by some nations against their own citizens. The ops are “industrial scale.” @jaivijayan explains:

The Intellexa alliance has been using a range of tools for intercepting and subverting mobile and Wi-Fi technologies to deploy its surveillance tools, according to an investigation by Amnesty International and others.

Europe is pushing to create a network infrastructure based on quantum physics.

In May 2023, Dr. Benjamin Lanyon at the University of Innsbruck in Austria took an important step toward creating a new kind of internet: he transferred information along an optical fiber 50 kilometers long using the principles of quantum physics.

Information in quantum physics differs from the units of data—binary digits—stored and processed by computers that form the core of the current World Wide Web. The quantum physics realm covers the properties and interactions of molecules, atoms and even smaller particles such as electrons and photons.

From VR at the Las Vegas Sphere to AI trained on synthetic children’s stories, check out this week’s awesome tech stories from around the web.

Quantum communications have rapidly progressed toward practical, large-scale networks based on quantum key distributions that spearhead the process. Quantum key distribution systems typically include a sender “Alice,” a receiver “Bob,” who generate a shared secret from quantum measurements for secure communication. Although fiber-based systems are well-suited for metropolitan scale, a suitable fiber infrastructure might not always be in place.

In a new report in npj Quantum Information, Andrej Kržič and a team of scientists developed an entanglement-based, free-space quantum network. The platform offered a practical and efficient alternative for metropolitan applications. The team introduced a free-space quantum key distribution system to demonstrate its use in realistic applications in anticipation of the work to establish free-space networks as a viable solution for metropolitan applications in the future global quantum internet.

Quantum communication typically aims to distribute quantum information between two or more parties. A series of revolutionary applications of quantum networks have provided a roadmap towards engineering a full-blown quantum internet. The proposed invention provides a heterogeneous network of special purpose sub-networks with diverse links and interconnects. The concept of quantum key distribution networks have driven this development to pave the way for other distributed quantum information processing methods to benchmark the technological maturity of quantum networks in general.

The internet has never been less free, and AI is making it worse. But there are ways to make it safer and more open for everyone.

The M5Dial features a 1.28-inch round TFT touchscreen, a rotary encoder, an RFID detection module, an RTC circuit, a buzzer, and under-screen buttons, enabling users to easily implement a wide range of creative projects.

The main controller of M5Dial is M5StampS3, a micro module based on the ESP32-S3 chip known for its high performance and low power consumption. It supports Wi-Fi, as well as various peripheral interfaces such as SPI, I2C, UART, ADC, and more. M5StampS3 also comes with 8MB of built-in Flash, providing sufficient storage space for users.

Multiple high-severity security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in ConnectedIO’s ER2000 edge routers and the cloud-based management platform that could be exploited by malicious actors to execute malicious code and access sensitive data.

“An attacker could have leveraged these flaws to fully compromise the cloud infrastructure, remotely execute code, and leak all customer and device information,” Claroty’s Noam Moshe said in an analysis published last week.

Vulnerabilities in 3G/4G routers could expose thousands of internal networks to severe threats, enabling bad actors to seize control, intercept traffic, and even infiltrate Extended Internet of Things (XIoT) things.