If you know much about radios and espionage, you’ve probably encountered number stations. These are mysterious stations that read out groups of numbers or otherwise encoded messages to… well… someone. Most of the time, we don’t know who is receiving the messages. You’d be excused for thinking that this is an old technology. After all, […]
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is tasked with regulating both wired and wireless communications, which also includes a national security component. This is how previously the FCC tossed networking gear made by Huawei and foreign-manufactured drones onto its Covered List, effectively banning it from sale in the US. Now foreign-made consumer routers have been […]
The Slug Algorithm has been around for a decade now, mostly quietly rendering fonts and later entire GUIs using Bézier curves directly on the GPU for games and other types of software, but due to its proprietary nature it didn’t see much adoption outside of commercial settings. This has now changed with its author, [Eric […]
Sunday night, around 7:00 PM local time, a bright fireball streaked across the western German sky, exploded, and rained chunks of space rock down on the region around Koblenz. One of the largest known chunks put a soccer-ball-sized hole in someone’s roof, landing in their bedroom. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. But given the apparent size […]
Cryptography is a funny thing. Supposedly, if you do the right kind of maths to a message, you can send it off to somebody else, and as long as they’re the only one that knows a secret little thing, nobody else will be able to read it. We have all sorts of apps for this, […]
You’ve got to be ambitious to target a legend. If there’s one thing the folks at Hermeus Aerospace are, though, it’s ambitious: not only do they plan on their Quarterhorse unmanned arial vehicle (UAV) to outfly the SR-71 blackbird, they’re hoping to do it in record time. They took one big step closer to that […]
2000 m above ground level (AGL), winds are stronger and much, much more consistent than they are at surface. Even if the Earth were a perfect sphere, there’d be a sluggish boundry layer at the surface, but since it’s got all these interesting bumps and bits and bobs, it’s not just sluggish but horribly turbulent, […]
While you may have never heard of TAT-8, there is a good chance you sent some data through it. TAT-8 was the 8th transatlantic communications cable and the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable, carrying 560 Mbit/s on two fibers between Tuckerton, New Jersey, and, thanks to an underwater splitting device, Widemouth Bay, England, and Penmarch, France. […]
One of the issues with nuclear power plants is that they produce long-lived radioactive waste. Storing spent nuclear fuel is a real problem. However, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have made strides not only to produce more electricity from spent fuel but also to break it down into shorter-lived […]