Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX launched the first batch of a new generation of Starlink satellites into orbit early Wednesday (Dec. 28) and nailed a rocket landing at sea to mark a record 60th flight of the year.

A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 54 upgraded Starlink internet satellites — the first generation 2 (Gen2) versions of the SpaceX fleet — lit up the predawn sky with a smooth launch at 4:34 a.m. EST (0934 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Weather should be ideal for the early Wednesday launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with Starlink internet satellites.

Dec 26 (Reuters) — SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Monday that the company is now close to having 100 active Starlinks, the firm’s satellite internet service, in Iran, three months after he tweeted he would activate the service there amid protests around the Islamic country.

Musk said, “approaching 100 starlinks active in Iran”, in a tweet on Monday.

The billionaire had said in September that he would activate Starlink in Iran as part of a U.S.-backed effort “to advance internet freedom and the free flow of information” to Iranians.

As computer scientists tackle a greater range of problems, their work has grown increasingly interdisciplinary. This year, many of the most significant computer science results also involved other scientists and mathematicians. Perhaps the most practical involved the cryptographic questions underlying the security of the internet, which tend to be complicated mathematical problems. One such problem — the product of two elliptic curves and their relation to an abelian surface — ended up bringing down a promising new cryptography scheme that was thought to be strong enough to withstand an attack from a quantum computer. And a different set of mathematical relationships, in the form of one-way functions, will tell cryptographers if truly secure codes are even possible.

Computer science, and quantum computing in particular, also heavily overlaps with physics. In one of the biggest developments in theoretical computer science this year, researchers posted a proof of the NLTS conjecture, which (among other things) states that a ghostly connection between particles known as quantum entanglement is not as delicate as physicists once imagined. This has implications not just for our understanding of the physical world, but also for the myriad cryptographic possibilities that entanglement makes possible.

An 11-year-old boy has come up with a ChatGPT game that has taken the internet by storm. This text-based chatbot game uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate game scenarios. It has already been played by thousands of people and has been featured on the front page of Reddit.

Signaling its interest in text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT, Quora this week launched a platform called Poe that lets people ask questions, get instant answers and have a back-and-forth dialogue with AI chatbots.

Short for “Platform for Open Exploration,” Poe — which is invite-only and currently only available on iOS — is “designed to be a place where people can easily interact with a number of different AI agents,” a Quora spokesperson told TechCrunch via text message.

“We have learned a lot about building consumer internet products over the last 12 years building and operating Quora. And we are specifically experienced in serving people who are looking for knowledge,” the spokesperson said. “We believe much of what we’ve learned can be applied to this new domain where people are interfacing with large language models.”

An interesting thing is happening at SpaceX. Last year they did $2 billion in revenue and Elon had mentioned that at most they could do $3 billion/year in revenue launching stuff for others.

But SpaceX has now exceeded one million subscribers for Starlink which equals to about $2 billion/year in additional revenue. So it is likely that next year that the majority of SpaceX’s revenue will be coming from Starlink even though SpaceX is launching more stuff for customers than ever before.

Starlink’s revenue should also skyrocket once Starship is able to launch Starlink 2.0 satellites which will happen at some point next year.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Starlink has 1M active subscribers globally amid expansion” »

Modern-day headsets and apps could be the key.

Virtual reality (VR) may soon be the way we use the internet. There are misconceptions about who can and cannot use the technology. Trying out headsets and apps is a great way to know if the technology suits your needs.

If you or someone you know only has one functional eye, and this has been keeping you away from exploring the world of virtual reality, then here’s a little surprise for you. VR experiences are not majorly affected if you do not use both of your eyes.

Continue reading “Virtual reality can work for those with one functional eye” »

According to an FCC filing earlier this month, SpaceX are looking to get permission to launch the next generation of its Starlink satellites very soon.

A filing with the FCC suggests that SpaceX hopes to launch a new Starlink broadband satellite system soon. This could help the company keep up with the increase in demand.

Continue reading “SpaceX may launch Gen 2 Starlink satellites by the end of the month” »