It is believed that Russia has the Internet that is considered as impenetrable. Such technology protects Russia from hacking attempts.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is prone to hacking, as shown in the recent cyber attacks on the US which led to outages on giants including Twitter, Amazon and Spotify, for which Russia has been largely blamed, so the Eastern European powerhouse has upped its security measures.
What does the future hold for computing? Experts at the Networked Quantum Information Technologies Hub (NQIT), based at Oxford University, believe our next great technological leap lies in the development of quantum computing.
Quantum computers could solve problems it takes a conventional computer longer than the lifetime of the universe to solve. This could bring new possibilities, such as advanced drug development, superior military intelligence, greater opportunities for space exploration and enhanced encryption security.
Heading to Russia anytime soon? Well, that cell tower that you see in Russia may actually be a missile jammer.
Missile jammers aren’t exactly new as far as technology is concerned, but Russia’s implementation of it might. According to a report from Motherboard, it seems that over in Russia, the government is apparently considering stepping up their military defense by equipping civilian cellphone towers with missile jammers.
According to a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman who spoke to the Izvestiya newspaper, “At the present time, the tests of the item have been completed and the system has been accepted into the inventory.” Dubbed Pole-21, these missile jammers can be mounted onto cellphone towers and given the spread of cellphone towers, the end result could be a dome-like defense system that can cover entire regions and protect it from satellite navigation signals.
The ALIAS system, developed by DARPA, could cut down on crew requirements in military and civilian small aircraft by taking control with a robotic arm. Although it’s still a ways off production, the system has been successfully demonstrated on a Cessna Caravan aircraft.
The inventor of the impossible EmDrive, Roger Shawyer, received a new patent for the next generation of his controversial engine and the US Department of Defense and the UK Ministry of Defense are both interested in obtaining the technology.
If the EmDrive works, which is under some debate, it would allow a military satellite to get close to its target without being detected, it would also revolutionize space travel, Shawyer told the International Business Times.
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a great navigation aid – unless you lose the signal while negotiating a complicated spaghetti junction. That’s bad enough for conventional cars, but for autonomous vehicles it could be catastrophic, so the University of California, Riverside’s Autonomous Systems Perception, Intelligence, and Navigation (ASPIN) Laboratory under Zak Kassas is developing an alternative navigation system that uses secondary radio signals, such as from cell phone systems and Wi-Fi to either complement existing GPS-based systems or as a standalone alternative that is claimed to be highly reliable, consistent, and tamper-proof.
Today, there are two global satellite navigation systems in operation, the US GPS and the Russian GLONASS, with the European Galileo system set to become fully operational in the next few years, and plans for the Chinese Beidou system to extend globally by 2020. These have revolutionized navigation, surveying, and a dozen other fields, but GPS and related systems still leave much to be desired. By their nature, GPS signals are weak and positions need to be confirmed by several satellites, so built up areas or mountainous areas can make the system useless. In addition, GPS signals can be deliberately or accidentally jammed or spoofed due to insufficient encryption and other protections.
Fuel/ energy efficient method for travel is my guess.
The US Air Force’s unmanned X-37B space plane has now spent more than 500 days orbiting the Earth, without statement or explanation. The 29-foot unmanned plane is part of the Air Force’s orbital program.
Launched May 20, 2015, it is the program’s fourth flight (hence its other name, OTV-4 for Orbital Test Vehicle-4). The first OTV took flight in 2010 and spent 224 days in orbit; two others brought the total number of OTV days in orbit before 2015 to 1,367, according to the Air Force.
If early mechanical computers were never introduced to expand people’s computing ability, the invention of the atomic bomb would have gone out the window, and human history would have been rewritten.
This highlights the significance of computer simulation in scientists’ exploration of the physical world, which also explains their strong motivation in continuously pursuing higher computing power.
