Tag Archives: Satellite

Think of satellites as big, vulnerable IoT devices, researcher says

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Orbiting hunks of metal make it possible for billions of earthlings to benefit from marvels of the digital age, from GPS signals and weather monitoring systems to the communication protocols for credit card authorizations and other complex transactions. Humans take these satellite connections for granted, but new research suggests we’ll need to take important steps to keep it way. As of January there were at least 1,957 satellites in orbit, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, some of which are vulnerable to various levels of snooping and disruption, including jammed communications, data interception, data hijacking and outright takeovers. The issue is especially urgent now because of the coming wave of connected devices and the evolution of 5G cellular networks, said Bill Malik, vice president of infrastructure technologies at the security vendor Trend Micro, who presented research on satellite security Wednesday at the RSA cybersecurity conference. “We didn’t think about this much until the popularization of […]

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Oops… Britain Launched A Satellite, But Who Remembers It?

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Did you know Britain launched its first satellite after the program had already been given the ax? Me neither, until some stories of my dad’s involvement in aerospace efforts came out and I dug a little deeper into the story.

I grew up on a small farm with a workshop next to the house, that housed my dad’s blacksmith business. In front of the workshop was a yard with a greenhouse beyond it, along one edge of which there lay a long gas cylinder about a foot (30mm) in diameter. To us kids it looked like a torpedo, and I …read more

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Tech startups are making security moves sooner. They don’t have much of a choice.

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For David Cowan, the tipping point was a cyberattack from Anonymous. Cowan, a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners, had spent years asking startup founders what they planned to do if hackers targeted their business. Often, the founders on the other side of the boardroom would shrug and say, “We don’t hold any personal information, so they don’t need to come after us.” That changed, he said, after the email marketing company SendGrid was hit in 2013 with a denial-of-service attack that ultimately caused about 20 percent of the young company’s clients to walk away, not too long after Bessemer had led a $21 million funding round for the company The attack occurred after an employee, Adria Richards, publicly complained that a developer from the gaming company Playhaven made sexual remarks in the audience at the 2013 PyCon tech conference. Playhaven fired the employee, infuriating an online mob that sent Richards death threats. Anonymous got involved too, […]

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All About Ham Satellites

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How hard is it to build a ground station to communicate with people via a satellite? Probably not as hard as you think. [Modern Ham] has a new video that shows just how easy it can be. It turns out that a cheap Chinese radio is all you need on the radio side. You do, however, benefit from having a bit of an antenna.

It isn’t unusual for people interested in technology to also be interested in space. So it isn’t surprising that many ham radio operators have tied space into the hobby. Some do radio astronomy, others bounce signals …read more

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Hackaday Links: Christmas Eve Eve, 2018

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The entirety of Silicon Valley is predicated on the ability to ‘move fast and break laws’. Have an idea for a scooter startup? No problem, just throw a bunch of scooters on the curb, littering and e-waste laws be damned. Earlier this year, Swarm Technologies launched four rogue satellites on an Indian rocket. All commercial satellite launches by US companies are regulated by the FCC, and Swarm just decided not to tell the FCC. This was the first unauthorized satellite launch ever. Now, Swarm has been fined $900k. Now that we know the cost of launching unauthorized satellites, so if …read more

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GPS III Launching Today But You Can’t Use it Until 2022

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Imagine if you bought a new car but they keys were not going to be shipped to you until a few years later. That’s analogous to the situation the U.S. Air Force finds itself in. The first GPS III satellite is finally ready to launch today, December 18, 2018 — a little over 2 years beyond the original schedule. However, most of the unique GPS III features won’t be available until at least 2022, according to a 2017 Government Accounting Office (GAO) report to Congress.

GPS III is a project to launch 32 new satellites that will — for military …read more

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Scientists Used Satellites to Spot Arctic Methane From Space

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An experimental technique for measuring potent methane emissions in the Arctic proved successful. Continue reading Scientists Used Satellites to Spot Arctic Methane From Space→

Amazon Creates Distributed Satellite Ground Stations

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Here’s an interesting thought: it’s possible to build a cubesat for perhaps ten thousand dollars, and hitch a ride on a launch for free thanks to a NASA outreach program. Tracking that satellite along its entire orbit would require dozens or hundreds of ground stations, all equipped with antennas and a connection to the Internet. Getting your data down from a cubesat actually costs more than building a satellite.

This is the observation someone at Amazon must have made. They’ve developed the AWS Ground Station, a system designed to downlink data from cubesats and other satellites across an entire orbit. …read more

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