TESSERA gets its CVPR debut in Denver, the BBC hedgehog story trots on into national news, and the European Space Agency puts our model on their homepage!

A security researcher says evidence suggests the U.S. military has been using an obscure GPS message field for nearly 20 years to broadcast encrypted key-distribution data, effectively turning GPS satellites into a global "numbers station." The hidden-looking 176-bit messages appear tied to the Pentagon's Over-the-Air Distribution system for remotely updating cryptographic keys, meaning ordinary…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Elon Musk's Starlink and Amazon's low-earth-orbit satellite business may be able to acquire some European mobile satellite spectrum next year, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said on Tuesday. But they said two-thirds of the satellite spectrum that allows mobile devices and vehicles to communicate seamlessly even in remote locations,…

Global affairs chief Chris Lehane wants to tone down the debate over AI’s societal impacts—and get states to pass laws that won’t derail OpenAI’s meteoric rise.

Europe is testing laser-based satellite communications through a new mountaintop ground station in Greece, aiming to deliver faster, more secure links than traditional radio systems as bandwidth demand grows. The Register reports: Lithuanian space and defense biz Astrolight says that it has commissioned a new optical ground station in Greece that will support ESA-backed CubeSat missions testing…

For an uncomfortably long time on Monday, two lawmakers shouted at one another about climate change in a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing about the Trump administration’s proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency. One was EPA administrator Lee Zeldin. The other was 83-year-old congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut. The spat did what Zeldin seemingly hoped…

BrianFagioli writes: Artificial intelligence has now run directly on a satellite in orbit. A spacecraft about 500km above Earth captured an image of an airport and then immediately ran an onboard AI model to detect airplanes in the photo. Instead of acting like a simple camera in space that sends raw data back to Earth for later analysis, the satellite performed the computation itself while still…

Slashdot reader Kirkman14 writes: A year before the Web opened to the public, Texas entrepreneur Don Lokke was trying to syndicate weekly political cartoons to bulletin board systems. His "telecomics," as he called them, represent an overlooked early experiment in online comics. Lokke launched his main series, "Mack the Mouse" at the height of the 1992 Clinton-Bush-Perot presidential race. His…

A Starlink satellite broke apart in orbit after suffering an unexplained "anomaly," apparently due to an "internal energetic source" rather than a collision. "The incident appears to have created some debris, with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks," reports Scientific American. From the report: The satellite lost communication at about 560 kilometers above Earth, Starlink…

Tax season is upon us, and so are fears of identity theft. Here's how to eliminate the risks without breaking the bank.

Gen Z’s expectations of work have been shaped by a very different social and technological environment. Many entered adulthood during a period marked by global uncertainty, economic instability and rapid digital transformation

The Orkney Local Emergency Coordination Group (OLECG) met this afternoon (Friday 20 March) to receive the latest updates from BT on the ongoing broadband outage affecting several North Isles communities. BT confirmed that its Emergency Response Team is in Westray today, working to establish temporary solutions for essential services, including Kalisgarth Care Centre and Westray […]

"Within 24 hours of the first US-Israeli strikes on Iran, ships in the region's waters found their navigation systems had gone haywire," reports CNN, "erroneously indicating that the vessels were at airports, a nuclear power plant and on Iranian land. "The location confusion was a result of widespread jamming and spoofing of signals from global positioning satellite systems." Used by all sides in…

Four decades of innovation and reliability in alarm communications

"Podcasts have officially overtaken AM/FM talk radio as the more popular medium for spoken-word audio in the United States," reports TechCrunch, citing Edison Research's Share of Ear survey: The researchers have tracked these statistics over the last decade, and almost always, the percentage of time people spent listening to podcasts increased, while their time with spoken radio broadcasts…

Telecom operators planning aggressive fiber and fixed wireless broadband rollouts in 2026 face a serious supply problem -- DRAM and NAND memory prices for consumer applications have surged more than 600% over the past year as higher-margin AI server segments absorb available capacity, according to Counterpoint Research. Routers, gateways and set-top boxes have been hit hardest, far worse than…

T-Mobile is opening registration today for a beta test of Live Translation, an AI-powered feature that will translate live phone calls into more than 50 languages when it launches this spring. The feature operates at the network level, so it doesn't require any specific app or device -- beta participants simply dial 87 to activate it on a call. T-Mobile President of Technology and CTO John Saw…