Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has applied to offer high-speed internet to Canadians living in remote areas by beaming it to them via satellites.

The Globe and Mail newspaper first reported that space exploration company SpaceX applied with Canada’s telecom regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), for what’s known as a Basic International Telecommunications Services, or BITS, licence.

Qualcomm today announced its RB5 reference design platform for the robotics and intelligent drone ecosystem. As the field of robotics continues to evolve towards more advanced capabilities, Qualcomm’s latest platform should help drive the next step in robotics evolution with intelligence and connectivity. The company has combined its 5G connectivity and AI-focused processing along with a flexible peripherals architecture based on what they are calling “mezzanine” modules. The new Qualcomm RB5 platform promises an acceleration in the robotics design and development process with a full suite of hardware, software and development tools. The company is making big promises for the RB5 platform, and if current levels of ecosystem engagement are any indicator, the platform will have ample opportunities to prove itself.

Targeting robot and drone designs meant for enterprise, industrial and professional service applications, at the heart of the platform is Qualcomm’s QRB5165 system on chip (SOC) processor. The QRB5165 is derived from the Snapdragon 865 processor used in mobile devices, but customized for robotic applications with increased camera and image signal processor (ISP) capabilities for additional camera sensors, higher industrial grade temperature and security ratings and a non-Package-on-Package (POP) configuration option.

To help bring highly capable artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to bear in these applications, the chip is rated for 15 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) of AI performance. Additionally, as it is critical that robots and drones can “see” their surroundings, the architecture also includes support for up to seven concurrent cameras and a dedicated computer vision engine meant to provide enhanced video analytics. Given the sheer amount of information that the platform can generate, process and analyze, the platform also has support for a communications module boasting 4G and 5G connectivity speeds. In particular, the addition of 5G to the platform will allow high speed and low latency data connectivity to the robots or drones.

Published: 5:00am, 18 Jun, 2020

Aquatic internet that sends data through light beams could enable divers to instantly transmit footage from under the sea to the surface.

The internet is an indispensable communication tool, connecting tens of billions of devices worldwide, and yet we struggle to connect to the web from under water. “People from both academia and industry want to monitor and explore underwater environments in detail,” explains the first author, Basem Shihada. Wireless internet under the sea would enable divers to talk without hand signals and send live data to the surface.

Underwater communication is possible with radio, acoustic and visible light signals. However, radio can only carry data over short distances, while acoustic signals support long distances, but with a very limited data rate. Visible light can travel far and carry lots of data, but the narrow light beams require a clear line of sight between the transmitters and receivers.

The internet connectivity constellation, designed for high speed and low latency, is taking shape.

A new visualization shows the SpaceX Starship releasing new Starlink satellites.

Now, the same researchers have achieved their goal of entanglement-based quantum cryptography using the Micius satellite. The scientists, who detailed their findings online in the 15 June edition of the journal Nature, say they again connected two observatories separated by 1,120 kilometers. But this time, the collection efficiency of the links was improved by up to four-fold, which resulted in data rates of about 0.12 bits per second.

A space-based, virtually unhackable quantum Internet may be one step closer to reality due to satellite experiments that linked ground stations more than 1,000 kilometers apart, a new study finds.

Quantum physics makes a strange effect known as entanglement possible. Essentially, two or more particles such as photons that get linked or “entangled” can influence each other simultaneously no matter how far apart they are.

Continue reading “Quantum Satellite Links Extend More Than 1,000 Kilometers” »

Mike Stewart was able to recover the previously lost Apollo 10 LM software, as flown (also known as Luminary 69 Rev 2). He shows us how he did it, which, fair warning, is a pretty technical hack. And contrary to (yet another) internet myth, the flown software would have been perfectly capable of landing Apollo 10 on the Moon.

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Continue reading “Recovering the Lost Apollo 10 LM Software” »

Quantum key distribution (QKD)^1,2,3 is a theoretically secure way of sharing secret keys between remote users. It has been demonstrated in a laboratory over a coiled optical fibre up to 404 kilometres long^4,5,6,7. In the field, point-to-point QKD has been achieved from a satellite to a ground station up to 1,200 kilometres away^8,9,10. However, real-world QKD-based cryptography targets physically separated users on the Earth, for which the maximum distance has been about 100 kilometres^11,12. The use of trusted relays can extend these distances from across a typical metropolitan area^13,14,15,16 to intercity¹⁷ and even intercontinental distances¹⁸. However, relays pose security risks, which can be avoided by using entanglement-based QKD, which has inherent source-independent security^19,20. Long-distance entanglement distribution can be realized using quantum repeaters²¹, but the related technology is still immature for practical implementations²². The obvious alternative for extending the range of quantum communication without compromising its security is satellite-based QKD, but so far satellite-based entanglement distribution has not been efficient²³ enough to support QKD. Here we demonstrate entanglement-based QKD between two ground stations separated by 1,120 kilometres at a finite secret-key rate of 0.12 bits per second, without the need for trusted relays. Entangled photon pairs were distributed via two bidirectional downlinks from the Micius satellite to two ground observatories in Delingha and Nanshan in China. The development of a high-efficiency telescope and follow-up optics crucially improved the link efficiency. The generated keys are secure for realistic devices, because our ground receivers were carefully designed to guarantee fair sampling and immunity to all known side channels^24,25. Our method not only increases the secure distance on the ground tenfold but also increases the practical security of QKD to an unprecedented level.