Archive for the 'Infrastructure' Category
SpaceX Acquires Former Oil Rigs to Serve as Floating Starship Spaceports
January 20th, 2021Via: NASA Space Flight: SpaceX has acquired two former oil drilling rigs to serve as these floating spaceports. Named Phobos and Deimos, after the two moons of Mars, they are currently undergoing modifications to support Starship launch operations. SpaceX has long been hinting at future floating launch and landing sites for their Starship launch system. […]
Big Tech Cleans House
January 15th, 2021Via: Awaken with JP:
The Tiny Satellites That Will Connect Cows, Cars and Shipping Containers to the Internet
January 10th, 2021“Enabling a new kind of everywhere…” Via: Wall Street Journal: In the shadow of giants like SpaceX, more than a dozen startups are building their own globe-spanning networks of nanosatellites, enabling a new kind of everywhere, all-the-time connectivity for people, animals and assets on Earth. … In the near future, it isn’t unreasonable to imagine […]
Amazon Boots Parler Off AWS
January 9th, 2021Via: ZeroHedge: And so the hammer has come down late on Saturday, when Amazon officially kicked Parler off its cloud Web hosting service, AWS according to Buzzfeed. The suspension means that once the ban takes effect on Sunday, the website – which as of this moment is still up – will be offline until it […]
University of Texas Researchers Increase Efficiency of Water Desalination
January 1st, 2021Via: University of Texas: The paper documents an increase in efficiency in the membranes tested by 30%-40%, meaning they can clean more water while using significantly less energy. That could lead to increased access to clean water and lower water bills for individual homes and large users alike.
Can The U.S. Reduce Its Dependency On Chinese Rare Earths?
December 28th, 2020Via: OilPrice: Since the days of President Jimmy Carter and the 1970s oil crisis, the United States has relentlessly pursued the utopia of energy independence. But persistent oil crises, severe oil price shocks, and the global shift to clean energy have made it glaringly obvious that Washington will never achieve true energy independence by relying […]
Large Explosion, Buildings Damaged in Downtown Nashville
December 25th, 2020Update: Improvised Thermobaric Device [???] The expert referenced below, “Conducted the FBI’s on-scene investigations of the World Trade Center, Oklahoma City, Pan Am 103 and Unabomber bombings.” Hmm. Via: SpyTalk: Find his test sites, top bomb experts say. Anthony Quinn Warner’s device, although probably made of common over-the-counter components, is unique in the annals of […]
Tesla Megapack Energy Storage System at Moss Landing Could Be World’s Largest ‘Battery’
December 21st, 2020Via: Electrek: The massive new Tesla Megapack project at the Moss Landing substation in California is starting to take shape as we can see in a new flyover of the construction site. It could soon become the world’s biggest battery. We first learned of the project at PG&E’s Moss Landing substation when they submitted it […]
Starlink Teardown
November 25th, 2020This is a full teardown of a Starlink groundstation antenna. SpaceX definitely doesn’t want people messing around with the business end of that thing, as you’ll see. My assumption all along has been that the rural broadband aspect of Starlink is a limited hangout. Looking at the size of the PCB and the phased array, […]
Cheap Chinese Routers Contain Hidden Backdoors to Control Devices
November 23rd, 2020Via: Cybernews: In a collaboration between CyberNews Sr. Information Security Researcher Mantas Sasnauskas and researchers James Clee and Roni Carta, suspicious backdoors have been discovered in a Chinese-made Jetstream router, sold exclusively at Walmart as their new line of “affordable” wifi routers. This backdoor would allow an attacker the ability to remotely control not only […]
