Veilid (pronounced Vay-Lid, from 'Valid and Veiled Identification')

Veilid allows anyone to build a distributed, private app. Veilid gives users the privacy to opt out of data collection and online tracking. Veilid is being built with user experience, privacy, and safety as our top priorities. It is open source and available to everyone to use and build upon.

Veilid goes above and beyond existing privacy technologies and has the potential to completely change the way people use the Internet. Veilid has no profit motive, which puts us in a unique position to promote ideals without the compromise of capitalism.

IPFS is an open system to manage data without a central server

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a set of composable, peer-to-peer protocols for addressing, routing, and transferring content-addressed data in a decentralized file system. M

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a set of composable, peer-to-peer protocols for addressing, routing, and transferring content-addressed data in a decentralized file system. Many popular Web3 projects are built on IPFS

MMarsh Ars Praefectus
8y
3,363
Subscriptor
The stock market's perception of Viasat through this whole project has been.... interesting.
Screenshot_20230714-200332.png
That's not the stock graph of a company that has its act together, is in the lead, and is likely to stay in the lead.

It's the stock graph of a company that's putting a lot of expensive eggs into very few baskets, and has technically superior competitors nipping at its heels.

The Viasat-3 program, while it pushes the limits of technological possibility, is still fundamentally rooted in a system architecture from the 1970s that has now been eclipsed by new and better architectures. In 2019, with LEO constellations still very much unproven, there was some optimism that a revitalized Viasat could be the definitive big fish in the small market. But today? At best, a totally successful Viasat-3 program would hold the line and prevent the company from dying entirely as virtually all of the growth in the market, along with a non-negligible share of current customers, goes to Starlink (and, eventually, other LEO competitors).

If they can get the other two working, the business is still viable for a while, but they've missed the paradigm shift and are probably too late to save it long-term.

A new Viasat communications satellite launched in April has been crippled by a problem when unfurling its huge mesh antenna. The problem jeopardizes Viasat’s much-needed refresh to its space-based Internet network that would let it better compete with newer broadband offerings from companies like SpaceX and OneWeb.

Viasat confirmed the antenna problem Wednesday after it was first reported by Space Intel Report. The satellite in question is named ViaSat-3 Americas, and it launched on April 30 as the primary payload on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. //

The satellite is one of the most powerful commercial spacecraft ever built, with two solar array wings as wide as a Boeing 767 jetliner capable of generating more than 30 kilowatts of electricity. The solar panels deployed soon after the spacecraft arrived in orbit, and the next step was to unfurl a large reflector to bounce Internet signals between the ground and transmitters and receivers on board the main body of the satellite.

That’s when ground controllers ran into trouble. An “unexpected event” occurred during the deployment of the reflector that may “materially impact” the performance of the satellite, Viasat said. //

The spacecraft was built by Boeing, with a communications payload developed internally by Viasat. The reflector was supplied by Northrop Grumman’s Astro Aerospace, said Dave Ryan, Viasat’s president of space and commercial networks, in an interview before the launch in April. //

The reflector is required to focus signals from the satellite onto a small location on the ground. It’s critical to enabling the satellite to reach thousands of users at once, with a total throughput of more than a terabit per second over its 15-year design life. //

Viasat’s geostationary orbit architecture requires fewer satellites for global reach, but their distance from Earth results in longer latency Internet connections. They also need to be much larger and more expensive than SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, which the company mass-produces at a rate of about six per day and launches into orbit in large batches on a single rocket. SpaceX has launched more than 4,700 Starlink satellites to date. //

Viasat completed the acquisition of Inmarsat, another major satellite operator, in May for $7.3 billion. Taken together, the combined company has 19 large communications satellites in orbit, including 12 operating in Ka-band, the same piece of the radio spectrum used by the ViaSat-3 Americas satellite. //

UnionGirl Smack-Fu Master, in training
1d
1
DistinctivelyCanuck said:
a few articles back, we ended up in a discussion about how certain of the secret squirrel agency satellites can only be readied in a vertical integration facility because how the orientation of the bird literally impacts the ability of the antenna to eventually unfold (the Mentor SIGINT birds if memory serves) the force of gravity in a horizontal orientation could cause the thing to not open up once its flipped vertical...

brainstorming off a massively limited information set.

It would be 'entertaining' if it turned out the same folks did the antenna for VIASAT... which was, of course, integrated in a horizontal orientation first, before going vertical.

second massively limited brainstorm:

it would be interesting to see when NG's launching another one of their MEV's (the mission extension vehicles that go to GEO to provide more station keeping fuel).

For a 700 million dollar bird: I wonder if you send a MEV with a hammer and a pair of scissors on the end of a telescoping arm :)

(yes, I'm joking...) But maybe you send the MEV to go have a look at least... "remove before flight" still in place? :)
Click to expand...Hi! Made an account to reply to this.

I work at NG and am currently sitting across from the successor spacecraft to MEV, the Mission Robotic Vehicle, currently under construction. We can do a bit better than that :) if ViaSat calls us, we can probably try to fix them. And better yet: we launch next year.

www.northropgrumman.com
Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) Satellite Technology
Northrop Grumman continues to push the boundary of possible by building an adaptable satellite servicing and logistics architecture with our Mission Robotic Vehicle and Mission Extension Pods.
www.northropgrumman.com www.northropgrumman.com

I have a mixed-use scenario; I am fine with paying for content and streaming it using proprietary applications. "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" remains one of the most insightful things anyone has said about media consumption in the last twenty years. But I have plenty of content that I have, at some point, paid a license for, and ripped to an unencumbered format that I can use going forward. //

There's no question that Downloader is frequently used to load programs that, in concept, can "enable piracy". But that almost always indicates that people want to consume content that is region locked, under onerous licensing terms, or no longer available through legal means. If I want to watch an Israeli TV show in the United States, and no one wants to sell it to me, what other choice do I have? It probably takes more effort to block those services by region than it does to sell it everywhere. Instead, grey market streams, private torrent trackers, and VPNs make money because they are serving a market. That people are paying for ways to circumvent restrictive licensing and content delivery is evidence in itself that the providers could make money by selling the content instead of blocking it. They don't even have to make a physical product! Just let some bits go one way instead of restricting them.

Editor’s note: based on industry research (from Chrome and others), and the ubiquity of HTTPS, we will be replacing the lock icon in Chrome’s address bar with a new “tune” icon – both to emphasize that security should be the default state, and to make site settings more accessible. Read on to learn about this multi-year journey.

Statistical Ars Legatus Legionis
12y
50,437

Also the longer the slant the larger area the weather is impacting you. If the beam is coming in close to the horizon it isn't just the weather where you are that matters it is the weather along the entire slant potentially a thousand or more kilometers away. It could be bright sunny day where you are at and the signal has to punch through a dozen storm systems to get to you.

It is why Starlink was such a big deal for the Antarctica bases. Prior to that they were limited to very expensive MEO constellation services or a 2 or 3 GSO sats (one of the TRDS sats) that are actually at an 8.7 degree inclination instead of the normal 0. The sats are in GSO not GEO. It means the sats trace a figure eight around the equator instead of being exactly on it. It also means that they move in the sky as seen from Earth which is very much non-ideal for most applications BUT it means that for roughly 12 hours out of each day they are just barely over the horizon from the Antarctic bases to allow service. Bad news that 12 hour availability window shifts by 3 minutes each day. Being a network engineer in Antarctica prior to SL must have been a challenge prior to SL.

The Antarctic specific satellite mission is the only polar GSO service I know of. SL pretty much overnight changed that. Not only are their official SL dishes but there are now dozens of user owned terminals. Throughput to Antarctica was in the 1 to 5 Mbps range for decades and now is in the hundreds of Mbps and gigabits is possible with enough user terminals.

MMarsh Ars Praefectus
7y
3,252
Subscriptor
From a "can it be done?" tech standpoint, I think this is very cool.

From a "can you offer a profitable and economical service this way?" standpoint, I'm not optimistic, for a few reasons.

The first problem is the latency, of course. That's going to be just as bad as with any other GEO satellite. We put up with it for decades when there was no better option, but now that LEO constellations exist, a 700 ms ping time is a hard sell unless there are other compelling advantages.

Which brings us to the competition. Inmarsat and Iridium, being part of GMDSS, have the advantage in the commercial maritime market. Starlink is rapidly replacing Viasat and Hughes in the terrestrial residential, business, and vehicle-portable markets; OneWeb and Kuiper ought to be nipping at its heels sometime soon. Who is the target market for a product that can't compete with Inmarsat or Iridium on coverage, and can't compete with Starlink on throughput or latency?

And then you get to the tech aspects of it. Yes, it's possible to put a small satellite in GEO and relay comms from it, and it's an impressive technical achievement. But the physics of antennas and of RF propagation don't change. How much performance was given up to make it work with less power and smaller antennas? Could more efficient use of that same RF spectrum have been achieved with a larger satellite with more power, more spot beams, and larger antenna apertures to allow the use of tighter geometry in those spot beams?

If the target market is Alaska, then in the panhandle (eg. Ketchikan) you're aiming your ground station antennas about 35° above the horizon. That's tolerable as long as you have clear land or ocean to the south. Up in Anchorage, though, that angle drops to 29° and in Nome it's 25°. Hold your hand at arm's length, put your thumb on the southern horizon, and stretch your pinky vertically above it to full span; that's 25°. If there are trees or mountains or weather below that mark, you have no chance of using any GEO satellites from that location.

To date Astranis has raised $550 million and is well capitalized for growth with a team of 300 people. The company has already built four more satellites—one of which will serve a customer in Peru, two for airline Wi-Fi, and one for an unspecified customer—that will launch on a dedicated Falcon 9 mission later this summer or early fall.

Now that the company has confidence that its custom-built technology works, it plans to scale up production to two satellites a month, Gedmark said. The 1-meter-by-1-meter satellites, which have a mass of around 400 kg, will be built to serve whatever demand there is, wherever in the world it's needed.

"We’re just going to keep launching them as long as there is demand," he said. "And we think there will be a lot of demand for that. We absolutely plan to launch dozens and then hundreds."

Amazon is an amazing technical company, but they lack in some ways. Technological prowess, culture, and/or business decisions will hamper them from capturing the next wave of cloud computing like they have the last two. This report will cover these 3 phases of cloud computing and how Amazon’s continued dominance in the first two phases doesn’t necessarily give them a head start in the battle for the future of computing. //

As Amazon ballooned in size with its retail business, it began to run into limitations of its monolithic 90s-era software practices. Metcalfe’s law sort of applied; as each additional service or developer was added, complexity grew at an n^2 rate. Even simple changes or enhancements impacted many downstream applications and use cases, requiring huge amounts of communication. As such, Amazon would have to freeze most code changes at a certain point in the year so the holiday season could focus on bug fixes and stability.

Ten years ago, the cloud was mostly used by small startups that didn’t have the resources to build and operate a physical infrastructure and for businesses that wanted to move their collaboration services to a managed infrastructure. Public cloud services (and cheap capital in a low interest-rate economy) meant such customers could serve a growing number of users relatively inexpensively. This environment enabled cloud-native startups such as Uber and Airbnb to scale and thrive.

Over the next decade, companies flocked en masse to the cloud because it lowered costs and expedited innovation. This was truly a paradigm shift and company after company announced “cloud-first” strategies and moved infrastructures wholesale to cloud service providers.

However, cloud-first strategies may be hitting the limits of their efficacy, and in many cases, ROIs are diminishing, triggering a major cloud backlash. Ubiquitous cloud adoption has given rise to new challenges, namely out-of-control costs, deepening complexity and restrictive vendor lock-in. We call this cloud sprawl.

CHATONS – kittens in french – is the Collective of Hosters Alternative, Transparent, Open, Neutral and Solidarity. This collective aims to bring together structures offering free, ethical and decentralised online services in order to allow users to quickly find alternatives that respect their data and privacy to the services offered by GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). CHATONS is a collective initiated by the association Framasoft in 2016 following the success of its campaign De-google-ify Internet.

Two months before Zeran's suit, Congress had enacted the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a mostly anti-porn law that the Supreme Court would later strike down on First Amendment grounds. The law contained something else, though: a provision now best known as Section 230. //

But just how sweeping was this law?

Before Zeran, it was hard to say. The 26 words of Section 230 that give "interactive computer services" immunity were inscrutable. Debate raged about how broad or narrow the words should be seen.

But when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit issued its opinion in Zeran's case, it strongly favored AOL, expanding and strengthening the law and leaving little doubt about just how powerful this legal shield is.

"Congress recognized the threat that tort-based lawsuits pose to freedom of speech in the new and burgeoning Internet medium," the court wrote. "The imposition of tort liability on service providers for the communications of others represented, [is] for Congress, simply another form of intrusive government regulation of speech."

With that ruling, tech companies no longer had to fear getting sued for something users posted, even if the online service was put on notice about defamatory content. It helped propel tech startups into multi-trillion-dollar global behemoths. Scholars call the Zeran decision "the most important Internet law ruling ever."

[Cueball is typing on a computer.]
Voice outside frame: Are you coming to bed?
Cueball: I can't. This is important.
Voice: What?
Cueball: Someone is WRONG on the Internet.

Title text: What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!

Welcome to Screen-Free Parenting. Becoming a mother led me to start this site back in 2016 to help parents, doctors, and other caregivers tackle the challenge of raising a child in today’s tech-heavy world.

Since 2016, a lot has changed and the pandemic has forced rapid adoption of tech by many families that were otherwise very thoughtful about screen time.

We’re here to help. Since our inception we have been scouring academic publications and written hundreds of articles to help you make smart choices and advocate for the children. Over the years this site has gotten deep with research results and helpful, fun parenting tips.

This positive journey has led me to write my book Spoiled Right: Delaying Screen Time and Giving Children What They Really Need, and develop an old-fashioned family board game called Starting Lines.

Leap seconds cause network turmoil. Meta wants to end them before the next one. //

Meta’s call to action might not be the first, but it could end up being great timing.

1. Wise Digital Citizens Understand that the Digital World is Public.
   There is no private message or disappearing photo that can’t be made public. Screenshots, using one device to take a photo of another device, and a quick “copy and paste” are a few of the ways that images and words shared electronically can be saved and shared by the recipient to an unintended recipient. //

2. Wise Digital Citizens Understand that the Digital World is Forever.
   Similar but different to the “digital is public” truth, digital is forever. Only a few short decades ago, when a note was passed between students in school or a photograph shared, it could be torn up into tiny pieces, doused with water, and thrown in the trash, even burned or put through a shredder. It would take a CIA-level forensics lab to even attempt to reassemble the message if there were any physical paper or part of the photograph remaining. Kids could truly destroy something they wrote or a photo of themselves.

All the same ways of saving things that were mentioned above apply here. That not only means that words and images can be shared but also that they can be stored. Forever. It’s not entirely unheard of for a business or educational institute to learn more about an individual through social media or an Internet search. Preteens and teens struggle with the idea of long-term consequences by the very nature of their maturity. Have your kids ask themselves, before posting: “What would I think about it if an adult I admired posted or shared the same thing? Would it be bad?” //

3. Wise Digital Citizens Understand that the Digital World is Human.
   It is approximately one billion times easier to say something mean across cyberspace than to someone’s face. Looking someone in the eye is powerful. Extreme emotions are easier to express when you don’t have to look the person in the eye and deal with the consequences. Cyberbullying is outrageously common, especially for young girls. For example, it may be hard to physically get up and move everyone at a lunch table, leaving one person to eat alone, but it takes less than a second to delete someone from a group chat or post a nasty comment on someone’s Instagram post. //

4. Wise Digital Citizens Understand that the Digital World is a Security Risk.
   Full names. Emails. Phone numbers. Addresses. Birth dates. The amount of data systems and strangers can get from profiles is disturbing. The same is true for using public wifi and clicking on links from unknown senders. Hackers don’t limit their attacks to adults, and if they can get a child’s data, they can make their life miserable as they grow up and begin interacting as an adult.

Referencing the “digital is public” point, have family ground rules for what is shared in a profile, especially those that are public on platforms or in systems by default. Read the fine print to know what you can hide from strangers when you are entering personal information. Talk about how to create unique passwords, where to store those passwords, and how never to click on a link sent by someone you don’t know. Have expectations for what kind of apps you use to transfer money, and make sure that kids know to never share things like their social security number. //

5. Wise Digital Citizens Understand that the Digital World is Powerful.
   Words, images, and videos all shape us. Studies show how viewing porn can be addictive and alter brain chemistry, and that is a massive problem in our world today. However, consider how the kind of content your kids consume shapes their behavior in other ways, as well. Most kids (and adults!) will say that media doesn’t shape us, but it’s difficult not to reflect on what we consume or not become numb to things that should bother us.

“We’ve got more than 11,000 Starlink stations and they help us in our everyday fight on all the fronts,” Ukraine’s vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov told Politico. “We’re ready, even if there is no light, no fixed internet, through generators using Starlink, to renew any connection in Ukraine.” //

In April, a Ukrainian solider identified as “Dima” told journalist David Patrikarakos that the service was playing a key role in the resistance.

“I want to say one thing: @elonmusk’s Starlink is what changed the war in #Ukraine’s favor. #Russia went out of its way to blow up all our comms. Now they can’t. Starlink works under Katyusha fire, under artillery fire,” the soldier said, according to Patrikarakos’ Twitter thread detailing their interview.

Apple's Safari web browser has more than 1 billion users, according to an estimate by Atlas VPN. Only one other browser has more than a billion users, and that's Google's Chrome. But at nearly 3.4 billion, Chrome still leaves Safari in the dust.

It's important to note that these numbers include mobile users, not just desktop users. Likely, Safari's status as the default browser for both the iPhone and iPad plays a much bigger role than its usage on the Mac.

Still, it's impressive given that Safari is the only major web browser not available on Android, which is the world's most popular mobile operating system, or Windows, the most popular desktop OS. //

According to the data, Chrome has approximately 3,378,967,819 users, while Safari has 1,006,232,879. In a very distant third place is Microsoft's Edge, at 212,695,363. Firefox is hot on Edge's tails in fourth at 179,084,244.

The blog post claims that Edge only just overtook Firefox for the third-place spot in the past year.