#Commercial Broadband

[smallseoagency]

The leading (ISP) Internet Service Provider in Mumbai Ring Networks, Offers internet connection Solutions for Individual Homes, Offices, and Companies.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Linkty Dumpty

I was supposed to be on vacation, and while I didn’t do any blogging for a month, that didn’t mean that I stopped looking at my distraction rectangle and making a list of things I wanted to write about. Consequentially, the link backlog is massive, so it’s time to declare bankruptcy with another linkdump:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

[Image ID: John Holbo’s ‘trolley problem’ art, a repeating pattern of trolleys, tracks, people on tracks, and people standing at track switches]++

Let’s kick things off with a little graphic whimsy. You’ve doubtless seen the endless Trolley Problem memes, working from the same crude line drawings? Well, philosopher John Holbo got tired of that artwork, and he whomped up a fantastic alternative, which you can get as a poster, duvet, sticker, tee, etc:

https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/145078097

The trolley problem has been with us since 1967, but it’s enjoying a renaissance thanks to the insistence of “AI” weirdos that it is very relevant to our AI debate. A few years back, you could impress uninformed people by dropping the Trolley Problem into a discussion:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/25/mercedes-weird-trolley-problem-announcement-continues-dumb-debate-about-self-driving-cars/

Amazingly, the “AI” debate has only gotten more tedious since the middle of the past decade. But every now and again, someone gets a stochastic parrot to do something genuinely delightful, like the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, who sell chatbots that will pretend to be tantalyzingly confused marks in order to tie up telemarketers and waste their time:

https://jollyrogertelephone.com/

Jolly Roger sells different personas: “Whitebeard” is a confused senior who keeps asking the caller’s name, drops nonsequiturs into the conversation, and can’t remember how many credit-cards he has. “Salty Sally” is a single mom with a houseful of screaming, demanding children who keep distracting her every time the con artist is on the verge of getting her to give up compromising data. “Whiskey Jack” is drunk:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-hire-phone-bots-to-torture-telemarketers-2dbb8457

The bots take a couple minutes to get the sense of the conversation going. During that initial lag, they have a bunch of stock responses like “there’s a bee on my arm, but keep going,” or grunts like “huh,” and “uh-huh.” The bots can keep telemarketers and scammers on the line for quite a long time. Scambaiting is an old and honorable vocation, and it’s good that it has received a massive productivity gain from automation. This is the AI Dividend I dream of.

The less-fun AI debate is the one over artists’ rights and tech. I am foresquare for the artists here, but I think that the preferred solutions (like creating a new copyright over the right to train a model with your work) will not lead to the hoped-for outcome. As with other copyright expansions — 40 years’ worth of them now — this right will be immediately transferred to the highly concentrated media sector, who will simply amend their standard, non-negotiable contracting terms to require that “training rights” be irrevocably assigned to them as a condition of working.

The real solution isn’t to treat artists as atomic individuals — LLCs with an MFA — who bargain, business-to-business, with corporations. Rather, the solutions are in collective power, like unions. You’ve probably heard about the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike, in which creative workers are bargaining as a group to demand fair treatment in an age of generative models. SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher’s speech announcing the strike made me want to stand up and salute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4SAPOX7R5M

The actors’ strike is historic: it marks the first time actors have struck since 2000, and it’s the first time actors and writers have co-struck since 1960. Of course, writers in the Writers Guild of America (West and East) have been picketing since since April, and one of their best spokespeople has been Adam Conover, a WGA board member who serves on the negotiating committee. Conover is best known for his stellar Adam Ruins Everything comedy-explainer TV show, which pioneered a technique for breaking down complex forms of corporate fuckery and making you laugh while he does it. Small wonder that he’s been so effective at conveying the strike issues while he pickets.

Writing for Jacobin, Alex N Press profiles Conover and interviews him about the strike, under the excellent headline, “Adam Pickets Everything.” Conover is characteristically funny, smart, and incisive — do read:

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/adam-conover-wga-strike

Of course, not everyone in Hollywood is striking. In late June, the DGA accepted a studio deal with an anemic 41% vote turnout:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/26/23773926/dga-amptp-new-deal-strike

They probably shouldn’t have. In this interview with The American Prospect’s Peter Hong, the brilliant documentary director Amy Ziering breaks down how Netflix and the other streamers have rugged documentarians in a classic enshittification ploy that lured in filmmakers, extracted everything they had, and then discarded the husks:

https://prospect.org/culture/2023-06-21-drowned-in-the-stream/

Now, the streaming cartel stands poised to all but kill off documentary filmmaking. Pressured by Wall Street to drive high returns, they’ve become ultraconservative in their editorial decisions, making programs and films that are as similar as possible to existing successes, that are unchallenging, and that are cheap. We’ve gone directly from a golden age of docs to a dark age.

In a time of monopolies, it’s tempting to form countermonopolies to keep them in check. Yesterday, I wrote about why the FTC and Lina Khan were right to try to block the Microsoft/Activision merger, and I heard from a lot of people saying this merger was the only way to check Sony’s reign of terror over video games:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

But replacing one monopolist with another isn’t good for anyone (except the monopolists’ shareholders). If we want audiences and workers — and society — to benefit, we have to de-monopolize the sector. Last month, I published a series with EFF about how we should save the news from Big Tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

After that came out, the EU Observer asked me to write up version of it with direct reference to the EU, where there are a lot of (in my opinion, ill-conceived but well-intentioned) efforts to pry Big Tech’s boot off the news media’s face. I’m really happy with how it came out, and the header graphic is awesome:

https://euobserver.com/opinion/157187

De-monopolizing tech has become my life’s work, both because tech is foundational (tech is how we organize to fight over labor, gender and race equality, and climate justice), and because tech has all of these technical aspects, which open up new avenues for shrinking Big Tech, without waiting decades for traditional antitrust breakups to run their course (we need these too, though!).

I’ve written a book laying out a shovel-ready plan to give tech back to its users through interoperability, explaining how to make new regulations (and reform old ones), what they should say, how to enforce them, and how to detect and stop cheating. It’s called “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation” and it’s coming from Verso Books this September:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

[Image ID: The cover of the Verso Books hardcover of ‘The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation]

I just got my first copy in the mail yesterday, and it’s a gorgeous little package. The timing was great, because I spent the whole week in the studio at Skyboat Media recording the audiobook — the first audiobook of mine that I’ve narrated. It was a fantastic experience, and I’ll be launching a Kickstarter to presell the DRM-free audio and ebooks as well as hardcovers, in a couple weeks.

Though I like doing these crowdfunders, I do them because I have to. Amazon’s Audible division, the monopolist that controls >90% of the audiobook market, refuses to carry my work because it is DRM-free. When you buy a DRM-free audiobook, that means that you can play it on anyone’s app, not just Amazon’s. Every audiobook you’ve ever bought from Audible will disappear the moment you decide to break up with Amazon, which means that Amazon can absolutely screw authors and audiobook publishers because they’ve taken our customers hostage.

If you are unwise enough to pursue an MBA, you will learn a term of art for this kind of market structure: it’s a “moat,” that is, an element of the market that makes it hard for new firms to enter the market and compete with you. Warren Buffett pioneered the use of this term, and now it’s all but mandatory for anyone launching a business or new product to explain where their moat will come from.

As Dan Davies writes, these “moats” aren’t really moats in the Buffett sense. With Coke and Disney, he says, a “moat” was “the fact that nobody else could make such a great product that everyone wanted.” In other words, “making a good product,” is a great moat:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/stuck-in-the-moat

But making a good product is a lot of work and not everyone is capable of it. Instead, “moat” now just means some form of lock in. Davies counsels us to replace “moat” with:

our subscription system and proprietary interface mean that our return on capital is protected by a strong Berlin Wall, preventing our customers from getting out to a freer society and forcing them to consume our inferior products for lack of alternative.

I really like this. It pairs well with my 2020 observation that the fight over whether “IP” is a meaningful term can be settled by recognizing that IP has a precise meaning in business: “Any policy that lets me reach beyond the walls of my firm to control the conduct of my competitors, critics and customers”:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

To see how that works in the real world, check out “The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy,” a magisterial piece of scholarship from Sarah Lamdan, Jason M. Schultz, Michael Weinberg and Claire Woodcock:

https://www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-anti-ownership-ebook-economy/

Something happened when we shifted to digital formats that created a loss of rights for readers. Pulling back the curtain on the evolution of ebooks offers some clarity to how the shift to digital left ownership behind in the analog world.

The research methodology combines both anonymous and named sources in publishing, bookselling and librarianship, as well as expert legal and economic analysis. This is an eminently readable, extremely smart, and really useful contribution to the scholarship on how “IP” (in the modern sense) has transformed books from something you own to something that you can never own.

The truth is, capitalists hate capitalism. Inevitably, the kind of person who presides over a giant corporation and wields power over millions of lives — workers, suppliers and customers — believes themselves to be uniquely and supremely qualified to be a wise dictator. For this kind of person, competition is “wasteful” and distracts them from the important business of making everyone’s life better by handing down unilateral — but wise and clever — edits. Think of Peter Thiel’s maxim, “competition is for losers.”

That’s why giant companies love to merge with each other, and buy out nascent competitors. By rolling up the power to decide how you and I and everyone else live our lives, these executives ensure that they can help us little people live the best lives possible. The traditional role of antitrust enforcement is to prevent this from happening, countering the delusions of would-be life-tenured autocrats of trade with public accountability and enforcement:

https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153

Of course, for 40 years, we’ve had neoliberal, Reaganomics-poisoned antitrust, where monopolies are celebrated as “efficient” and their leaders exalted as geniuses whose commercial empires are evidence of merit, not savagery. That era is, thankfully, coming to an end, and not a moment too soon.

Leading the fight is the aforementioned FTC chair Lina Khan, who is taking huge swings at even bigger mergers. But the EU is no slouch in this department: they’re challenging the Adobe/Figma merger, a $20b transaction that is obviously and solely designed to recapture customers who left Adobe because they didn’t want to struggle under its yoke any longer:

https://gizmodo.com/adobe-figma-acquisition-likely-to-face-eu-investigation-1850555562

For autocrats of trade, this is an intolerable act of disloyalty. We owe them our fealty and subservience, because they are self-evidently better at understanding what we need than we could ever be. This unwarranted self-confidence from the ordinary mediocrities who end up running giant tech companies gets them into a whole lot of hot water.

One keen observer of the mind-palaces that tech leaders trap themselves in is Anil Dash, who describes the conspiratorial, far-right turn of the most powerful men (almost all men!) in Silicon Valley in a piece called “‘VC Qanon’ and the radicalization of the tech tycoons”:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/

Dash builds on an editorial he published in Feb, “The tech tycoon martyrdom charade,” which explores the sense of victimhood the most powerful, wealthiest people in the Valley project:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/02/27/tycoon-martyrdom-charade/

These dudes are prisoners of their Great Man myth, and leads them badly astray. And while all of us are prone to lapses in judgment and discernment, Dash makes the case that tech leaders are especially prone to it:

Nobody becomes a billionaire by accident. You have to have wanted that level of power, control and wealth more than you wanted anything else in your life. They all sacrifice family, relationships, stability, community, connection, and belonging in service of keeping score on a scale that actually yields no additional real-world benefits on the path from that first $100 million to the tens of billions.

This makes billionaires “a cohort that is, counterintutively, very easily manipulated.” What’s more, they’re all master manipulators, and they all hang out with each other, which means that when a conspiratorial belief takes root in one billionaire’s brain, it spreads to the rest of them like wildfire.

Then, billionaires “push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they’re genius outliers who can see things others can’t, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit.”

They live in privileged bubbles, which insulates them from disconfirming evidence — ironic, given how many of these bros think they are wise senators in the agora.

There are examples of billionaires’ folly all around us today, of course. Take privacy: the idea that we can — we should — we must — spy on everyone, all the time, in every way, to eke out tiny gains in ad performance is objectively batshit. And yet, wealthy people decreed this should be so, and it was, and made them far richer.

Leaked data from Microsoft’s Xandr ad-targeting database reveals how the commercial surveillance delusion led us to a bizarre and terrible place, as reported on by The Markup:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

The Markup’s report lets you plumb 650,000 targeting categories, searching by keyword or loading random sets, 20 at a time. Do you want to target gambling addicts, people taking depression meds or Jews? Xandr’s got you covered. What could possibly go wrong?

The Xandr files come from German security researcher Wolfie Christl from Cracked Labs. Christi is a European, and he’s working with the German digital rights group Netzpolitik to get the EU to scrutinize all the ways that Xandr is flouting EU privacy laws.

Billionaires’ big ideas lead us astray in more tangible ways, of course. Writing in The Conversation, John Quiggin asks us to take a hard look at the much ballyhooed (and expensively ballyhooed) “nuclear renaissance”:

https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584

Despite the rhetoric, nukes aren’t cheap, and they aren’t coming back. Georgia’s new nuclear power is behind schedule and over budget, but it’s still better off than South Carolina’s nukes, which were so over budget that they were abandoned in 2017. France’s nuke is a decade behind schedule. Finland’s opened this year — 14 years late. The UK’s Hinkley Point C reactor is massively behind schedule and over budget (and when it’s done, it will be owned by the French government!).

China’s nuclear success story also doesn’t hold up to scrutiny — they’ve brought 50GW of nukes online, sure, but they’re building 95–120GW of solar every year.

Solar is the clear winner here, along with other renewables, which are plummeting in cost (while nukes soar) and are accelerating in deployments (while nukes are plagued with ever-worsening delays).

This is the second nuclear renaissance — the last one, 20 years ago, was a bust, and that was before renewables got cheap, reliable and easy to manufacture and deploy. You’ll hear fairy-tales about how the early 2000s bust was caused by political headwinds, but that’s simply untrue: there were almost no anti-nuke marches then, and governments were scrambling to figure out low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels (this was before the latest round of fossil fuel sabotage).

The current renaissance is also doomed. Yes, new reactors are smaller and safer and won’t have the problems intrinsic to all megaprojects, but designs like VOYGR have virtually no signed deals. Even if they do get built, their capacity will be dwarfed by renewables — a Gen III nuke will generate 710MW of power. Globally, we add that much solar every single day.

And solar power is cheap. Even after US subsidies, a Gen III reactor would charge A$132/MWh — current prices are as low as A$64-$114/MWh.

Nukes are getting a charm offensive because wealthy people are investing in hype as a way of reaping profits — not as a way of generating safe, cheap, reliable energy.

Here in the latest stage of capitalism, value and profit are fully decoupled. Monopolists are shifting more and more value from suppliers and customers to their shareholders every day. And when the customer is the government, the depravity knows no bounds. In Responsible Statecraft, Connor Echols describes how military contractors like Boeing are able to bill the Pentagon $52,000 for a trash can:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/20/the-pentagons-52000-trash-can/

Military Beltway Bandits are nothing new, of course, but they’ve gotten far more virulent since the Obama era, when Obama’s DoD demanded that the primary contractors merge to a bare handful of giant firms, in the name of “efficiency.” As David Dayen writes in his must-read 2020 book Monopolized, this opened the door to a new kind of predator:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

The Obama defense rollups were quickly followed by another wave of rollups, these ones driven by Private Equity firms who cataloged which subcontractors were “sole suppliers” of components used by the big guys. These companies were all acquired by PE funds, who then lowered the price of their products, selling them below cost.

This maximized the use of those parts in weapons and aircraft sold by primary contractors like Boeing, which created a durable, long-lasting demand for fresh parts for DoD maintenance of its materiel. PE-owned suppliers hits Uncle Sucker with multi-thousand-percent markups for these parts, which have now wormed their way into every corner of the US arsenal.

Yes, this is infuriating as hell, but it’s also so grotesquely wrong that it’s impossible to defend, as we see in this hilarious clip of Rep Katie Porter grilling witnesses on US military waste:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJhf6l1nB9A

Porter pulls out the best version yet of her infamous white-board and makes her witnesses play defense ripoff Jepoardy!, providing answers to a series of indefensible practices.

It’s sure nice when our government does something for us, isn’t it? We absolutely can have nice things, and we’re about to get them. The Infrastructure Bill contains $42B in subsidies for fiber rollouts across the country, which will be given to states to spend. Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin breaks down the state-by-state spending:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/us-allocates-42b-in-broadband-funding-find-out-how-much-your-state-will-get/

Texas will get $3.31B, California will get $1.86B, and 17 other states will get $1B or more. As the White House announcement put it, “High-speed Internet is no longer a luxury.”

To understand how radical this is, you need to know that for decades, the cable and telco sector has grabbed billions in subsidies for rural and underserved communities, and then either stole the money outright, or wasted it building copper networks that run at a fraction of a percent of fiber speeds.

This is how America — the birthplace of the internet — ended up with some of the world’s slowest, most expensive broadband, even after handing out tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. Those subsidies were gobbled up by greedy, awful phone companies — these ones must be spent wisely, on long-lasting, long-overdue fiber infrastructure.

That’s a good note to end on, but I’ve got an even better one: birds in the Netherlands are tearing apart anti-bird strips and using them to build their nests. Wonderful creatures 1, hostile architecture, 0. Nature is healing:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/11/crows-and-magpies-show-their-metal-by-using-anti-bird-spikes-to-build-nests

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/15/in-the-dumps/#what-vacation

Next Tues, Jul 18, I'm hosting the first Clarion Summer Write-In Series, an hour-long, free drop-in group writing and discussion session. It's in support of the Clarion SF/F writing workshop's fundraiser to offer tuition support to students:

https://mailchi.mp/theclarionfoundation/clarion-write-ins

[Image iD: A dump-truck, dumping out a load of gravel. A caricature of Humpty Dumpty clings to its lip, restrained by a group of straining, Lilliputian men.]

[healthcaremmr]

Commercial Satellite Broadband Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.23% during the forecast period and market is expected to reach US$ 9.97 Bn. by 2030.

[nutzo0001]

1 From web, weirdcore II //NAME???//

1.1 2

1.2 3

2 9 things I learned about the world according to anonymous

3 1. Attempts to portray sincere parent/child relationships always seem creepy.

4 2. Hot curly haired black women go moist for wireless broadband routers and mainframes.

5 3. People who sit in cramped cubicles answering customer service calls in drab corporate callcenters are overjoyed to help fix your DSL modem.

6 4. At least 1 in 3 people chosen at random will necessarily be "African American," even though only 13% of the US population is black.

7 5. The amount of forced enthusiasm you have for a commercial product is directly proportional to how big of an asshole you are.

8 6. Kids love manual labor.

9 7. That one-handed, one-knee laptop bullshit is the preferred way to get real work done.

10 8. Random-ass white dudes should be placed all over your corporate website for no fucking reason.

11 9. Teenage boys share intimate feelings with each other.

12 Source

13 |references=

1 Promised Neverland

1.1 Mini-gallery

1.2 More:

2 "90s (Cyber/-) Positivism" and or, "Oldest (Alt.) Nets (80s-'93)"

We need name for

term that is something like guilty-pleasure, but it is *this* feeling when you feel good, disgusted, question how society and economy still works; and how dissecting everything into some kind of morale render us incapable to do anything that is not (in) any sense "bad"...

if you get this; what i wanted to say

[luxe-pauvre]

Before the pandemic, there was a real world, and this fake one, real friendships and “friends”, political communities and “followers”, genuine political expression and “likes”. The risk, when interactions with other human beings are narrowed to these remote, glancing and often combative exchanges – simulations – is that, once the lockdowns are over, people will bring the culture of the virtual into the real, creating even angrier, more impatient, more superficial, more transactional, more commercial and less democratic societies. Forging stronger bonds in a post-pandemic world, if one ever comes, will require acts of moral imagination that are not part of any political ideology or corporate mission statement, but are, instead, functions of the human condition: tenderness, compassion, longing, generosity, allegiance and affection. These, too, are the only real answers to loneliness, alienation, dislocation and disintegration. But the fullest expression of these functions across distances as easily spanned by viruses and flood waters as by broadband cables and TikTok videos, requires both society and government. What’s needed is nothing less than a new social contract for public goods, environmental protection, sustainable agriculture, public health, community centres, public education, grants for small businesses, public funding for the arts. It won’t be a new New Deal. The dangers are graver because decades of a world, both real and virtual, shaped by Reaganism and Thatcherism, has left the waters rising, all around us, and the forests on fire. Governments rest on a social contract, an agreement to live together. That contract needs renewing. But the problem, in the end, isn’t with society, or the social fabric. It’s with governments that have abandoned their obligations of care.

Jill Lepore, Is society coming apart?

[klimkovsky]

Awaiting the first launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket

Blue Origin is a direct and perhaps the closest competitor to SpaceX. Its founder, Jeff Bezos (Jeffrey Preston “Jeff” Bezos), better known as the founder and owner of Amazon, as well as the head of the Washington Post publishing house, was the richest man on the planet for several years, and only a couple of years ago he gave up his place in this rating to Elon Musk. Almost simultaneously with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos assessed the prospects of the private sector in American and world cosmonautics, and began to actively invest in this industry — he created an aerospace company, whose name for many years was associated only with commercial suborbital jumps to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere — an attraction for the rich. But in parallel with this, a heavy-class carrier was being developed, strategically aimed at reusability.

This development has been delayed. The launch of the New Glenn rocket (named after the first American astronaut to make the first orbital flight, John Glenn) has been expected for many years. Its creation began more than 10 years ago, but since then the dates for demonstrating at least something have only been postponed. Contracts were even signed for the launch of payloads, but most of them were terminated due to the unreadiness of the carrier, or postponed indefinitely. For example, in 2021, New Glenn was supposed to deliver a research station to the Moon, and in 2023, send another rover to Mars. Most of the failed Blue Origin contracts went to (it’s not hard to guess who) SpaceX. It’s gotten ridiculous — like SpaceX, Blue Origin aims to create its own satellite constellation for broadband Internet access around the world (this is the so-called Project Kuiper — an analogue of the Starlink system), and the New Glenn rocket was primarily developed for this project, but the first devices of Jeff Bezos’ satellite constellation were launched into orbit by Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 carriers.

The delay in the development of New Glenn is largely due to problems in the development of BE-4 engines. These are innovative engines on a Methane-Oxygen fuel pair. Elon Musk preferred Kerosene-Oxygen fuel for his workhorse Falcon 9 and was right. Despite the promising benefit of using methane, the technology of methane engines is still only being researched. But Bezos decided not to waste time on temporary solutions and ended up getting stuck at the development and testing stage, which also let down industry partners — the American space giant ULA (United Launch Alliance), whose Vulcan rocket (which replaced the Atlas-5 launch vehicle, which used Russian RD-180 engines) also could not put anything into orbit for several years, since there were no BE-4 engines for it. And most of ULA’s contracts also went to SpaceX.

But now the engines are ready, and even Vulcan has already launched a couple of times. But New Glenn still couldn’t take off — apparently, the development was stuck on something else besides the engines. At the end of 2024, the stumbling block was the launch permit from the FAA, which had previously passionately slowed down test flights of the Starship system from SpaceX, but now it seems the American regulator has a new passion.

However, permission has already been received — in the first days of the new year 2025. Fire tests of the carrier, which has been on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral for many days, have been conducted. The launch may occur in the very near future, but not earlier than January 10.

This will be a demonstration flight, during which a demo version of the orbital tug “Blue Ring Pathfinder” will appear in space, which will not even separate from the second stage — it will be deorbited (submerged) together with it. Orbital tugs are a relatively new direction in space technology. The cost of launches is rapidly falling. And the cost of the payload is still quite high. For example, launching into orbit can cost from 50 to 100 million dollars, but the device itself can cost a billion. Its service life is limited by the wear of solar panels or the supply of fuel for correction and raising the orbit. What if it was possible to refuel a satellite worth a billion for 100 million dollars or transfer it to another orbit, replace a number of components right in orbit, or even deorbit it — with the help of a special satellite — a tug? Previously, this was not thought about. Of course, the Space Shuttle system sometimes solved such problems, but now it is gone, and there are satellites waiting for servicing in orbit. New players in the space technology market are also trying to fill this niche with their developments. Blue Origin is also developing tugs. “Blue Ring Pathfinder” is their brainchild. It turns out that in the upcoming flight we will see a demonstration of two promising technologies at once.

Blue Ring — a space tug from Blue Origin

Source: Universe and Human

Author: Andrey Klimkovsky

[danikriatura]

As of 2025, approximately 10,000 active satellites orbit Earth, marking an unprecedented surge in satellite deployments driven by the exponential growth of space-based technology, satellite communications, and global internet infrastructure. A significant share of these satellites belong to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, designed to deliver high-speed, low-latency satellite internet worldwide, bridging the digital divide and revolutionizing telecommunications, remote connectivity, and broadband access. However, this rapid expansion has intensified concerns over space debris, orbital congestion, and satellite collision risks, posing a serious challenge to space sustainability, aerospace security, and the longevity of commercial space exploration. With more satellites crowding low Earth orbit (LEO), the probability of catastrophic collisions and fragmentation increases, creating thousands of high-velocity debris particles that threaten critical infrastructure, global positioning systems (GPS), Earth observation satellites, space stations, and future manned space missions. Even millimeter-sized debris traveling at hypersonic speeds can severely damage operational satellites, leading to multi-million-dollar losses and disrupting essential services such as weather forecasting, defense communications, financial transactions, and disaster management. To mitigate these risks, space agencies, defense organizations, and private aerospace companies are investing in advanced debris removal technologies, artificial intelligence-driven space traffic management, and next-generation satellite designs with automated de-orbiting mechanisms. While proactive initiatives such as laser-based debris clearing, autonomous robotic collectors, and AI-powered collision avoidance systems are in development, the rapid escalation of satellite launches underscores the urgent need for international regulatory frameworks, sustainable space policies, and coordinated space governance to ensure the long-term viability of orbital ecosystems and the future of commercial space exploration. The new space age demands cutting-edge solutions that balance technological innovation, economic growth, and environmental responsibility, making space traffic management and orbital sustainability one of the most pressing challenges for the global aerospace industry and emerging space economy.

More details/photos: https://www.beautyofplanet.com/the-growing-threat-of-space-debris-managing-earths-crowded-orbit/

[seasurfacefullofclouds1]

Today I learned that Liberty Media (John Malone) owns 81% of Sirius XM Holdings Inc., sold Liberty Broadband to Charter Communications, owns a big chunk of Live Nation (70 million shares) and all of Formula One Racing.

Formula One revenue for the past YTD is about $900 million. It was purchased in 2016 for $4.4 billion. Formula One has commercial agreements with LVMH, MotoGP and Lego for 2025.

Malone (who also owns the majority of Warner Discovery) has some interesting things to say about media mergers in the second Trump era.

[spatialmanufactureltd]

hello!

this is my sample pack. it includes all the one-shots, loops, and mixer presets i have used for all of my releases from 2019-2024. this includes:

Ｒ​ｅ​ｌ​ａ​ｔ​ｉ​ｏ​ｎ Ｅ​ｍ​ｕ​ｌ​ａ​ｔ​ｉ​ｏ​ｎ (2019)

█​▓​▒​░​❛​❛​Ｓ​ｕ​ｉ Ｇ​ｅ​ｎ​ｅ​ｒ​ｉ​ｓ​？​❜​❜​░​▒​▓​█ (2019)

Ｈ​ｉ​ｎ​ｄ​ｍ​ｏ​ｓ​ｔ Ｒ​ｅ​ｓ​ｉ​ｄ​ｕ​ｕ​ｍ Ｏｆ Ｔ​ｈ​ｅ Ｍ​ｏ​ｎ​ｏ​ｃ​ｈ​ｒ​ｏ​ｍ​ａ​ｔ​ｉ​ｃ Ｉ​ｎ​ａ​ｍ​ｏ​ｒ​ａ​ｔ​ａ (2020)

MAGICORE w/ STATICCA (2020)

•​⧉​•​Ａ​ｒ​ｔ​ｉ​ｆ​ａ​ｃ​ｔ​ｕ​ａ​ｌ​•​Ｃ​ｏ​ｎ​ｓ​ｔ​ｒ​ｕ​ｃ​ｔ​ｉ​ｏ​ｎ​•​⧈​• (2020)

Ｏ​ｂ​ｊ​ｅ​ｃ​ｔ Ｌ​ｉ​ｍ​ｎ​ｅ​ｒ​（​ ​✎​）(2022)

Ｌ​ｏ​ｃ​ｕ​ｓ Ｆ​ａ​ｃ​ｉ​ｅ​ｎ​ｄ​ｉ Ｍ​ａ​ｎ​ｕ​ｓ​​​（​ ​¿​）(2024)

it is sourced, specialized, and customized from various sample packs (Satan's Drum Stuff, SOPHIE, Com Truise, COSMIC, PRXZ, gin$eng, John Mello, Jungle 1989-1999, etc. & more) and includes some of my own custom samples, all organized with a focus on decisive sound design for music production.

below you can find a list of all of the virtual instruments and presets i have used on tracks:

DAW - FL Studio

Instruments > Bass > Ibanez

Instruments > Guitar > Strat Pos A, Strat Pos B, Strat Mute

FM8 - VST

Telepath

Crystal

Bigdiz Bass

Massive - VST

Blue In Grey

Big Lead

kutsustrings

Pluck - Square

Dank Lead 2

A Love Lead

Kodosyn

Amazing Lead

ATM NASTY WEATHER

Sytrus - VST

Orbital

Cerbera Saw

Deformed

Deep

Fry

Detuned Saw

Choir

Choir 2

Choir 3

Arrakeen tabla

Harmor - VST

Rhodes by nucleon

Aural Psynapse

Moonlight EP (intransigence)

Rotochip

Pad Atmosferico

Toxic BioHazard - VST

LED KutThroat ToTc

Musical ToTc

Dune - VST

FM Beauty BT

Frozen Bottle ARK

Amiga Organ KS

Brute Sine RL

Intelligence KS

Rimshots KS

Magenta KS

CS-80 V4 - VST

Big Move

CS-80 V3 - VST

Ach Steel*

Morphine - VST

LED LoFi Techno Chord MC

Vox TakeMe2TheTop MC

FabFilter Twin 2 - VST

Fudge Chunk -O

Omnisphere - VST

Epic Proportions

In Memorium 2

Boys Choir Oos

Spire - VST

GT Old Trance V

BA Beatitude

PD Beatitude

LD Dimension 8000 SK

LD Sawer IPM

BA Rave SK

LEAD - Infinite

SQ JP Order

BA Up And Down AS

LD Juicy V

LD Crispy V

LD NEON

LD Eclipse

BA ONE V

LD Unlinked

LD Virus V

BA 304 Square FL

BA Grungier Dub

PD Formanta DP

PL The Trance Pluck A

PL Stopper DRK

BA Benassi

LD Matrix 12

LD Eighty's MLM

BA Oxygene

DR Animal Kick 5

LD Exhale AS

LD Zero76 AL&RS

LD Angry Reso

LD Eurotrancer

PD Unicorn DP

LD Digital Egyptian BJP

LD Your Typical Superlead

LD Chromium V

LD Combo A DP

LD Fusion AS

LD Bright Future DRK

DR Tape Kick

DR Animal Kick 6

LD Underground

LD MODSynth HFM

PD East Coast DP

LD InstaWhore SK

LD Virus V

LD Glider DP

LD Heavy Duty DP

LD X-Lead

BA Synth Bass VS

BSQ Outbreak V

BA Analog Square

PL Nord Pole 3 DP

BA Snappy AS

LD Sprut

PL Anjuna Pluck

PL PlayHouse

PD Hid Lights

LD Aquamarine

LD Disarm MLM

ZETA+ 2 - VST

"DruggedEraBass"

Huge Chord Seq

Sad Arp

Equinox BT

Stella C2 2011

The Good Times 1

Phadt Raver

Funky Hi Fat Lo

Dancing Oscillators

Dynascraper

Textures - Trance anthem

Build That Track

Digital sound factory - Modern Digi Synth

24-osc xy hoover

Vjooprrrr Lead

crispy arp c1 (mw)

crispy arp c1 02 (mw)

Basic Trancer 1

FM Hall Practice

The Phatness FG

Noisy Beauty (Mw) BT

BitTek DMS

Creamy Poly XS

Super Eight Bars FI

Classic Content - Leads Hard - undecided

Old Lab FS

Brutal Legato FS

FM Lead Shapes FI

Commercial Trance

Ravers Arp 3

zt3r30 zinc

BroadBand Connection

Crisp Keyed FG

Chiptune Plucks XS

Reso Fat Lead

90s Revisited FS

technic

Broken Piano Amp BC

Phatman XS

Teccnoe Boeing

Ravers Slice 4

Ez Raver BC

Commodore64 Hits XS

Leading Tarnce FI

Toy Piano DMS

Electron Drum Circle 3 FI

Spezial Bell Swirl Laye

Hardcore Kick 1 XS

The Prophet FG

Zeta+ Crunk 2 FI

Milk Steak WRJ

Phased Noise Tines FI

Sp3ctrum S4w mw FI

Lofi Dream (Mw+Pb) BT

Electro FM FI (Synthwave-y + knitecap)

Alone in the Arena II

Sizzle Keys (Mw) BT

Thick Gate FI (umieram)

Angelic Vocoder (juncture)

FM Gliss FI

Digi Slapper (Mw+Vel) BT

Multipoint Brass FI

Metallic Vapors XS

Aqua Flange Pad BC

Hard Fanfare FS

FMed Duplets 1 FI

Big Bass Lead FS

Classic Rock Lead XS

Brass lead

Resonator Pluck

Blue Stars XS

Dream Arp 2

Psytrance Kick XS

Colors Crossfade FS

Sweet Dee WRJ

Serum - VST

Such Relaxation

Celestial Light

BASS - R4V3R

BASS - Make Some Jungle

MoBambaBell

PL Hot Chocolate

SuperAlba

Bass - Cold Night

Key JP09

PAD - Pancakes

LD Hypersaw

BASS - Deep and Clear

BASS - Hard Bass Pluck

SQ Automator 4 [GS]

FG Pop-Star

SY Euphonic

PL Little Harp - Mw-loop

BASS - Essential Subs

SY ModSync 1 [GS]

SY Morricone

PL Big Bells [AS]

PL Downpitcher [FN]

PL Crusty Pluck [LCV]

POLY FM242 Brass

LD Festival Beez [FP]

BA Modern Fapping [GI]

BA RBLz [7S] (ataraxia intro)

KY Static Crystal

SQ PianoStepper

SY Sqrs [GS]

KY Let's Get Nutz [FP]

SQ8L - VST

Voyager

Drumaxx - VST

Diseased FG

Sawer - VST

FG Burnt

FG Pro-52

FG Hum & Bass

FG Squarer

PD Memories

LD Pulse Lead

FG Fat Plastic

MC Chunkee

MC Waterphone

PD Sonic Juice

FG TypiTarnce

FG Fury of V

LD Chiptune 2

PD Sapphire

SY Metal Scrape

SY Sunkissed

SY Poly '86 (Shlohmo-like)

KB Accordion

FG Four Bits

LD Dance Lead 1

LD Sad Lead (ataraxia main)

BA Analog Bass

KB 80's Keys

LD Space Voice

FG Harpsichordal Injury

LD Stiff Pulse

SY Beijing

FG Soviet Stylee

Nexus - VST

Dirty Might 2

Amigo

Angel One

Bellevue

Broken Square

Butterfield

Good Chi

Tremolize

We Atlas

DnB Sine

Chinese Dominator

Phantompad

Dance Guitar

Crystalbells

Broad Pulse

Attack Lead 3

Attack Lead 2

Benny Dance Split

Pulse Noise Lead

Vocoder Talk

Vocoder Larry

Chainsmoker 4

Guitar Strummed 1

Dance Pattern 2

Detuned Bass 2

VZ Bells 2

Dutch Style 2

Culture

Piranha

Detuned Lead 6

Detuned Lead 3

Detuned Lead 10

Wild West Saloon

Big Bells

Hollywood Violins

Andro default Saw

AR Etheral

King of Buzz 1

King of Buzz 5

Distorted Piano Strings

Delayed Piano

Slapped Bass

Detuned Lead 11

Dance Saw 1 (Fuck Somebody Nice)

Arena Ambience

Dance Saw 2 (His)

PN Trancepiano

LD Detuned Lead 8

LD Trance Saws Wide

TG Vocal Slicer

Cheap Dance Organ

ST Dark Cellos

Xpand!2 - VST

29 Glassy Glockenspiel

Sylenth1 - VST

433 KEY Harpsichord

118 LD Tunnelvision

007 ARP ClassicVA

OB-XA V - VST

Cross-mod Suitcase

SEM V2 - VST

Age of Solo

Jup-8 V3 - VST

Muppet Mayhem

Nitzer Bass

India

GMS - VST

Boomerang Bass

TAL U-No-LX-V2 - VST

76 Space Sound 3 (Lifter)

Sakura - VST

BW Catgut Chorus

KBD Grand Harpsikord FG

SYNTH String Like DS

Poizone - VST

ARP Classic VA

KBD AmbientKeys ToTc

KBD JazzAmpedGuitar ToTc

SYN Funky HP

BAS Stereo Bass

BAS Simple But Peppy

---

check out the music that was made with this sample pack at all these places:

thanks!

[trdw]

The Future of Satellite Internet and Satellite Phones: Bridging Global Connectivity

In a world that increasingly relies on seamless communication and high-speed internet access, satellite technology is poised to play a pivotal role in bridging the digital divide. Satellite internet and satellite phones are no longer just tools for remote areas or emergency communication; they are becoming essential components of a global communication infrastructure. As we look to the future, advancements in satellite technology promise to enhance connectivity, accessibility, and reliability for users worldwide. This analysis delves into the evolution of satellite internet and satellite phones, anticipated advancements, and their implications for consumers, industries, and academic institutions like Telkom University, which is instrumental in fostering research and innovation in this field.

The Evolution of Satellite Technology

Satellite technology has come a long way since the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Initially, satellites were used primarily for military and governmental purposes, but with the advent of the telecommunications revolution in the 1980s, commercial satellite services began to emerge. global entrepreneurial university. The first commercial satellites facilitated long-distance telephone calls, and over time, they expanded to include television broadcasting and, eventually, internet services.

Today, satellite internet is gaining traction as a viable alternative to traditional broadband connections, especially in remote and rural areas where terrestrial infrastructure is lacking. Companies like SpaceX with their Starlink project, Amazon's Project Kuiper, and OneWeb are revolutionizing the satellite internet landscape by deploying large constellations of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. These advancements promise to deliver high-speed internet access to users across the globe, even in the most challenging environments.

The Future of Satellite Internet

1. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellites

One of the most significant trends shaping the future of satellite internet is the deployment of LEO satellites. Unlike traditional geostationary satellites that orbit at altitudes of approximately 36,000 kilometers, LEO satellites operate at altitudes ranging from 500 to 2,000 kilometers. This reduced distance allows for lower latency and faster internet speeds, making LEO satellites a game-changer for internet connectivity.

As more LEO satellites are launched, coverage will expand significantly. These satellites will create a mesh network in the sky, enabling users to access high-speed internet almost anywhere on the planet. For regions that have struggled with unreliable or nonexistent internet access, this technology could bring transformative changes to education, healthcare, and economic opportunities.

2. Enhanced Connectivity in Remote Areas

Satellite internet holds immense promise for bridging the digital divide in underserved regions. As governments and organizations strive to achieve universal internet access, satellite technology can provide a reliable solution for remote communities that lack traditional infrastructure.

Educational institutions, such as Telkom University, can lead the charge in leveraging satellite internet to enhance learning opportunities. By providing access to online resources, distance learning programs, and virtual classrooms, satellite technology can empower students and educators in remote areas, fostering inclusivity and educational equity.

3. Integration with Emerging Technologies

The future of satellite internet will also see increased integration with emerging technologies, such as 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT). As 5G networks continue to roll out globally, satellite internet can complement terrestrial networks by providing connectivity in areas where 5G coverage is limited or nonexistent.

IoT devices, which rely on constant connectivity for data transmission, will benefit significantly from satellite internet. This integration can support applications in agriculture, environmental monitoring, and logistics, where real-time data is crucial for decision-making. For instance, farmers in remote regions can utilize satellite internet to monitor soil conditions and crop health, optimizing agricultural practices and enhancing food security.

The Future of Satellite Phones

1. Resilient Communication in Emergencies

Satellite phones have long been associated with emergency communication, but their role is evolving. In an increasingly unpredictable world, where natural disasters and geopolitical conflicts can disrupt traditional communication networks, satellite phones provide a reliable lifeline.

Advancements in satellite phone technology are making these devices more compact, user-friendly, and accessible. Newer models offer features such as high-definition voice calls, data services, and messaging capabilities, allowing users to stay connected even in the most challenging circumstances. Organizations involved in disaster response and recovery can benefit from satellite phones, ensuring that communication remains intact when it matters most.

2. Integration with Smartphones

The convergence of satellite phone technology with smartphone capabilities is another exciting development on the horizon. As satellite phones become more integrated with everyday devices, users will have the flexibility to switch between traditional cellular networks and satellite connections seamlessly.

This integration will empower travelers, adventurers, and professionals working in remote areas to stay connected without the need for multiple devices. As Telkom University engages in research on satellite technology, it can explore innovative applications that harness this convergence to enhance communication capabilities in various sectors, including tourism, logistics, and remote work.

3. Global Connectivity Initiatives

The future of satellite phones also hinges on global connectivity initiatives that aim to provide affordable access to communication tools. Organizations and governments are working to subsidize satellite phone services in underserved regions, making them more accessible to communities that lack reliable cellular networks.

In areas where traditional infrastructure is limited, satellite phones can serve as a vital resource for connecting individuals and businesses. As research institutions like Telkom University contribute to the development of cost-effective satellite communication solutions, they can play a crucial role in promoting equitable access to technology and fostering economic growth.

Challenges and Considerations

Despite the promise of satellite internet and satellite phones, several challenges must be addressed. One significant concern is the issue of space debris. As the number of satellites in orbit increases, the risk of collisions and the creation of space debris also rises. Sustainable practices in satellite deployment and end-of-life management will be essential to mitigate this issue.

Moreover, regulatory frameworks must adapt to the rapidly evolving satellite communication landscape. Ensuring compliance with international standards and addressing spectrum allocation will be critical for fostering collaboration among satellite operators, governments, and other stakeholders.

[mahosop]

Exploring the World of Satellite Communication Services

In today’s fast-paced world, staying connected is more crucial than ever. Satellite communication services have revolutionized the way we interact, offering unparalleled connectivity across the globe. From enabling seamless internet access to broadcasting live events, satellite technology plays a pivotal role in our daily lives. In this blog, we’ll delve into the various facets of satellite communication services, including satellite services, satellite internet providers, satellite distribution services, and broadcasting services.

What Are Satellite Communication Services?

Satellite communication services encompass a broad range of technologies and solutions designed to facilitate communication and data transfer via satellites orbiting Earth. These services leverage satellites to provide internet connectivity, broadcast television, and facilitate secure communication channels for both commercial and government use. They are vital for regions where traditional communication infrastructure is lacking or challenging to deploy.

Satellite Services: Bridging the Connectivity Gap

Satellite services include various applications such as satellite phone services, satellite internet, and satellite television. They are crucial for bridging connectivity gaps in remote or underserved areas where terrestrial infrastructure is limited or non-existent. Key benefits of satellite services include:

Global Coverage: Satellites provide near-global coverage, making it possible to connect even the most isolated regions.

Scalability: Services can be easily scaled up or down depending on the needs of the user, from individual users to large organizations.

Reliability: Satellite networks offer high reliability, often providing connectivity where other forms of communication may fail due to natural disasters or infrastructure damage.

Satellite Internet Providers: Bringing the World Online

Satellite internet providers offer a unique solution for high-speed internet access in areas where traditional broadband services are unavailable. Companies such as SpaceX’s Starlink, HughesNet, and ViaSat are leading the charge in satellite internet technology. These providers deploy low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites to deliver faster and more reliable internet service compared to traditional geostationary satellites.

Benefits of satellite internet include:

High-Speed Connectivity: Advances in satellite technology have greatly improved internet speeds, bringing high-speed access to rural and remote areas.

Low Latency: LEO satellites reduce latency compared to traditional satellites, making for a smoother online experience.

Wide Accessibility: Satellite internet can reach locations where other forms of internet connectivity are not feasible.

Satellite Distribution Services: Efficient Data Delivery

Satellite distribution services involve the use of satellites to distribute data and content to multiple locations. This includes everything from television programming to data for weather forecasting. These services ensure efficient and reliable delivery of content to various endpoints, including:

Content Distribution: Satellite distribution networks are used by broadcasters to deliver television channels and media content to cable operators and viewers across the globe.

Data Services: Businesses and governments use satellite data distribution to relay information for applications such as climate monitoring, disaster response, and military operations.

Broadcasting Services: Bringing Information to the Masses

Broadcasting services rely heavily on satellite technology to reach large audiences with television and radio content. Satellite broadcasting provides a wide range of programming, from news and entertainment to educational content. The advantages of satellite broadcasting include:

Wide Reach: Satellite broadcasting covers vast geographical areas, making it possible to reach a global audience.

High Quality: Modern satellite broadcasting provides high-definition content with minimal signal degradation.

Cost-Effective: Satellite broadcasting can be more cost-effective for distributing content over large areas compared to terrestrial networks.

Conclusion

Satellite communication services have become an indispensable part of our global communication infrastructure. Whether it’s connecting remote communities through satellite internet, distributing content via satellite networks, or enabling global broadcasting, satellite technology continues to push the boundaries of connectivity and communication. As technology advances, the capabilities and applications of satellite services will likely expand, further enhancing our ability to stay connected and informed.

[usafphantom2]

Boeing is using Fortnite game technology to update the B-52s

Will this "hyper-realistic" modeling tool help give the program a Victory Royale?

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 23/09/2023 - 12:27 in Military

A popular Fortnite game engine is helping Boeing modernize 60-year-old B-52 bombers for another three decades of service.

To see how the new Rolls-Royce F-130 engines would work in the U.S. Air Force's B-52 Stratofortresses, the plane's manufacturer resorted to Unreal Engine 5, the software that powers the Fortnite shooting game. The 3D environment of the game engine allows pilots and maintainers to virtually interact with an updated digital representation of the B-52, such as starting and turning off an engine.

It is a "powerful and really impressive tool," said Jennifer Wong, senior director of bombers at Boeing.

Wong said that commercial digital software, such as the "hyper-realism features" of Unreal Engine 5, reduces costs and delivery time.

“We learn faster and are able to adjust faster when we talk about models than [when] we learn after bending metal,” she told reporters last week at the annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference event of the Air and Space Forces Association.

The virtual environment gives USAF “unprecedented access” to modifications from the beginning and gives feedback to Boeing long before they start upgrading the aircraft, Wong said.

This is part of a modernization effort called the Commercial Engine Replacement Program, or CERP, which will replace the eight Pratt & Whitney TF33 engines in each jet to keep the bomber flying.

The program is much larger than just the engine replacement, Wong said, as Boeing will also update the aircraft's displays, cockpits and other avionics systems.

Rolls-Royce is on track to complete the initial engine tests by the end of the year and begin the "critical project review" in the first quarter of 2024.

Boeing will also replace the current B-52 radars with Raytheon's active electronic scanning radar, called AESA. The radar is already used in the U.S. Navy's F/A-18E/F Super Hornets jets.

"When we say things like 'the B-52 will have capabilities similar to those of fighters in the future', that's what we mean. Eventually, the B-52 will be able to have some notion of capacity similar to that of a fighter and a little of that visualization that is currently on the F-18 platform," Wong said.

The new radar will allow the B-52 to track multiple targets simultaneously, Wong said. Other updates to the radar program include a new broadband radome, which protects the radar antenna, large digital touchscreen displays for browsers and manual controllers.

"This will allow us to continue to improve resources in the future, because the advance will be made through software, rather than hardware changes in the future," Wong said.

Raytheon recently announced that it has delivered the first AESA radar to Boeing for the program.

These modernization programs are crucial, since the B-52 could fly even beyond the 2050s, according to Colonel Scott Foreman, leader of the Air Force's B-52 program. Foreman pointed to the A-10 Warthog, almost half a century old, as an example of an airplane that is still flying after several attempts by the U.S. Air Force to retire it.

“Even if we're saying 2050, I have no reason to believe that he can't fly for a long time after that,” Foreman said at the AFA conference.

Boeing said it will have all the B-52s modified with the new radar by the end of fiscal year 2031 and the engine replacement program completed by the end of fiscal year 2036.

Source: DefenseOne

Tags: Military AviationBoeing B-52H StratofortressCERPUSAF - United States Air Force / U.S. Air Force

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Daytona Airshow and FIDAE. He has work published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. Uses Canon equipment during his photographic work throughout the world of aviation.

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[anyab]

Devastation’ at Tulkarem refugee camp following Israeli raid

An Israeli raid on the occupied West Bank camp, which led to the death of six Palestinians, also left “devastation” behind, after military bulldozers destroyed roads and other vital infrastructure, says Faisal Salama, who heads the committee that provides services to residents.

Salama told Al Jazeera the army destroyed all the entry points to the camp and closed them using earth mounds and other barriers. It also demolished five houses and detained more than 50 Palestinians.

“The army destroyed water pipes and power networks, as well as cell phone towers and poles for broadband services, and damaged more than 100 commercial stores as well as 120 homes,” Salama said.

“This is the third raid on the camp since October 7, and the fifth in the past two months. These incursions are part of the policy of collective punishment carried out by the Israeli occupation.”

Via Ayman Nobani [Reporting from Nablus, occupied West Bank] for al jazeera november 22 2023

[xtruss]

This long exposure photo of the sky above Gunnison National Park in Colorado shows the movement of light—coming from both natural and artificial sources. The thousands of satellites in orbit around the earth can shine millions of times brighter than objects farther away in space, getting in the way of astronomic observations. Photograph By Babak Tafreshi

It Looked Like A Bizarre Alignment of Meteors. It Was Something Else.

Astronomers are calling arrays of thousands of Satellites, like that of Starlink’s, “Mega Constellations” because of their overwhelming presence in the night sky.

— By Terry Ward | August 11, 2023

A fleet of UFOs, a bizarre alignment of meteors, a drone show: These are just a few of the things SpaceX’s Starlink satellites have been mistaken for of late.

National Geographic photographer Babak Tafreshi, however, knew exactly what he was seeing on a recent July evening in California’s Pinnacles National Park, when a “caravan of satellites” paraded across the sky, aligned as if they were perfectly-spaced stars.

“I see them very often because there are just so many of them,” he says. “People react because they have no idea what it is.”

These satellites bring broadband internet to some of the planet’s most remote reaches. They are usually seen in low-earth orbit (around 186 miles from ground) on their way up to their final orbit at 342 miles high. As they rise, they grow dimmer and spread out until they’re mostly out of sight of the naked eye, which can take up to several weeks. Astronomers call these massive arrays of satellites “mega constellations.”

In recent months, these satellites are being launched more frequently, often with over 50 satellites at a time, by Elon Musk’s commercial space company. Sightings of Starlink mega constellations are also becoming more common, says David J. Helfand, a professor of Astronomy at Columbia University.

The satellites are making it much more difficult for astronomers to do their jobs, he says. “When a satellite goes through the field of view of a telescope, it’s extremely bright,” Helfand says. “The objects we’re trying to study–distant galaxies and stars–are 20 million times fainter than satellites. So when one of these streaks goes across the image, it completely obliterates the image.”

At least 6 percent of the 2021 images from the Hubble Space Telescope were “compromised or completely ruined” by satellite interference by Starlink satellites, he says. “That’s when there were only 1,500 Starlink satellites…Now there are three times that amount.” And many more are on the way.

Satellites: An Invaluable Tool, An Astronomic Obstacle

In a February press release, SpaceX said they’d launched “nearly 4,000 satellites” over the last five years. They aim to send up to 42,000 satellites into its mega constellation in coming years, according to Space.com. SpaceX did not respond to National Geographic’s request for comment.

These satellites can be seen with the naked eye in the days following their launch (when their orbit is lower to Earth and satellites are still close enough together to appear in a line), and in the hours just after sunset and just before sunrise. Websites like Heavens-Above.com predict when Starlink satellite trains will pass overhead for people looking to spot them.

Starlink satellites travel across the night sky above Yosemite National Park, California. Photograph By Babak Tafreshi

Satellites like Starlink’s have long been used to enhance mobile services like cell phone coverage, internet and GPS navigation for people on Earth. Satellites also make weather forecasting, TV signaling, radio, and military surveillance possible.

But before Starlink launches, there were no “trains of satellites” to be seen, says Tafreshi. SpaceX uses new satellites that can be folded up in the dozens and sent into space on private rocket launches out of Cape Canaveral in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

“You used to see a couple of satellites at the beginning of the night and it was very cool to see a ‘moving star’ in the sky,” Tafreshi says. “Now, every direction you look there are a few moving above you. They’ve stolen the show from the stars.”

While Starlink satellites in low-earth orbit aren’t the brightest man-made objects in the sky, it’s the sheer number of them that’s worrying, says James Lowenthal, professor of astronomy at Smith College. “Starlink’s appear very bright when they're first launched into low orbit—brighter than the great majority of naked-eye stars,” he says. They become fainter as they are both moved to higher orbit as well as actively controlled to face certain directions–primarily for their own communication, but in part to make them appear dimmer, too.

Other companies with mega constellation projects in the works include Amazon’s Project Kuiper, currently planning a mega constellation of 3,236 satellites for broadband internet purposes. AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 will start with 100 satellites and they may be brighter than 99.8 percent of visible stars, according to New Scientist.

Regulating Our Skyscape

When Lowenthal witnessed Starlink’s first satellite launch in 2019, he says he knew “the sky would never be the same again.”

A lack of international regulation and environmental oversight is endangering the sanctity of our skies like never before, says Aparna Venkatesan, a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of San Francisco.

"We have no framework in place to conduct environmental assessments of all phases of satellite constellations, from launches to in-orbit operation to decommissioning,” she says.

Thousands of satellites break down in the atmosphere, leaving an estimated million pieces of space debris “criss-crossing at high relative speeds” and increasing the chance of collision with other space crafts, a 2021 paper asserts. These rockets also leave behind sooty discharge called black carbon, which could cause “changes in the global atmospheric circulation and distributions of ozone and temperature,” according to a 2010 paper.

Satellites contribute to light pollution by reflecting the sun’s light and also by their sheer numbers. Dark Skies organizations are fighting to minimize artificial light at night both to protect local ecosystems, and also to respect communities whose identities are closely tied to the night sky.

“Rapidly growing ground- and space-based light pollution is erasing Indigenous stories and identities—again—as history is painfully repeated for marginalized communities already disproportionately impacted by climate change and other crises,” Venkatesan says.

SpaceX has “done some due diligence,” says Vishnu Reddy, director of the Space4 Center at the University of Arizona, which measures the brightness of Starlink mega constellations and their impacts on ground-based astronomy.

Newer Starlink satellites “don’t reflect as much,” as the first generation satellites from 2019 and 2020, Reddy says, and some older ones have also been “deorbited‚”—falling out of orbit and burning up in the atmosphere.

Lowenthal agrees that SpaceX “quickly heard the alarm from astronomers around the world,” engaging in conversations with astronomers from the company’s first Starlink launch. “What they haven’t done, however, is slow down launches,” he says. “We have always relied on our ability to turn to the night sky for solace and personal connection as well as scientific study…that’s all threatened.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

#15yrsago Zoe’s Tale: Scalzi’s smart-ass young-adult sf thriller https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/12/zoes-tale-scalzis-smart-ass-young-adult-sf-thriller/

#10yrsago UK home secretary wants to overturn human rights treaties and make terror suspects stateless https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/12/theresa-may-british-terror-suspects-stateless-passport

#10yrsago David Nutt wants to make non-addictive, safer synth-booze that comes with a sober-up pill https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/getting-drunk-without-the-hangover-or-health-risks-scientist-seeks-investment-for-alcohol-substitute-drug-8931946.html

#10yrsago Irish Freedom of Information amendment will send FOI fees to infinity https://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2013/11/10/freedom-information-fees-multiplied-new-amendment/

#10yrsago GCHQ used fake Slashdot, LinkedIn to target employees at Internet exchanges https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/uk-spies-continue-quantum-insert-attack-via-linkedin-slashdot-pages/

#5yrsago A catalog of ingenious cheats developed by machine-learning systems https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml

#5yrsago Youtube CEO: it will be impossible to comply with the EU’s new Copyright Directive (adios, Despacito!) https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/i-support-goals-of-article-13-i-also/

#5yrsago Italian prosecutors have given up on catching the person who hacked and destroyed Hacking Team https://www.vice.com/en/article/3k9zzk/hacking-team-hacker-phineas-fisher-has-gotten-away-with-it

#5yrsago Wells Fargo: We can’t be sued for lying to shareholders because it was obvious we were lying https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-wells-puffery-20181109-story.html

#5yrsago Global antiquarian bookseller strike brings Amazon to its knees https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/technology/amazon-bookseller-protest-strike.html

#5yrsago New, “unbreakable” Denuvo DRM cracked two days before its first commercial deployment https://torrentfreak.com/hitman-2s-denuvo-protection-cracked-three-days-before-launch-181112/

#5yrsago How many computers are in your computer? https://gwern.net/turing-complete#how-many-computers-are-in-your-computer

#5yrsago The market failed rural kids: poor rural broadband has created a “homework gap” https://www.wired.com/story/rural-kids-internet-homework-gap-fcc-could-help/

[ryanmpendu]

10 Awesome Internet Facts

Here are ten internet – related facts and milestones that have helped shaped connectivity across the South Africa, Africa, and the Earth.

It was in 1974, when the term “internet” was first used as a shortened term for “internetworking” (lame, right?) . At the time, there were several internets, as they referred to collections of linked networks.

The internet emerged in ’89 when a programmer named Tim Berners – Lee wrote the code for the first web browser called World Wide Web along with the standards for HTML, HTTP and URLs. The world also saw it’s first internet service providers (ISPs) starting at the same year. In the US, the first commercial dial-up ISP called ‘The World’ was started in 1989.

Rhodes University located in Makhanda, Eastern Cape, South Africa received the first South African IP Address in ’88.

In ’90, the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers granted South Africa the country code top-level domain .za.

South Africa’s internet user base grew from 2.4 million in 2000, to 5 million in 2008 to 12.3 million in 2012. In January 2021, this number grew to 38.13 million or close to 60% of the population, by contrast, Africa’s average internet penetration is just under 50%

Africa’s first broadband submarine cable system was launched by SEACOM in 2009. The 17 000 kilometers submarine cable connects African countries like South Africa, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania etc. to the internet.

In 2017, China had 756 million people connected to the internet, and India, 391 million people connected to the internet so basically Asia accounts for almost half of the world’s active internet users!

Gauteng is the province with the most access to the internet with 72.2% of the population connected and growing, while Limpopo is the province with the least number of people connected to the internet with 42.6% of the population connected to the internet and growing.

The average fixed broadband download speed in SA is 50 mbps which is an increase from when it was 46 mbps in May 2021. As fibre infrastructure in being rolled out and capacity improved, this number is expected to keep climbing.

The most popular website is…. You guessed it. Google. Facebook is the world’s favorite social media platform with 2.8 billion monthly users and growing.