Secure Communication, Buried In A News App

March 9, 2026 by Lewin Day 21 Comments

Cryptography is a funny thing. Supposedly, if you do the right kind of maths to a message, you can send it off to somebody else, and as long as they’re the only one that knows a secret little thing, nobody else will be able to read it. We have all sorts of apps for this, too, that are specifically built for privately messaging other people.

Only… sometimes just having such an app is enough to get you in trouble. Even just the garbled message itself could be proof against you, even if your adversary can’t read it. Enter The Guardian. The UK-based media outlet has deployed a rather creative and secure way of accepting private tips and information, one which seeks to provide heavy cover for those writing in with the hottest scoops.

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New Artemis Plan Returns To Apollo Playbook

March 4, 2026 by Tom Nardi 51 Comments

In their recent announcement, NASA has made official what pretty much anyone following the Artemis lunar program could have told you years ago — humans won’t be landing on the Moon in 2028.

It was always an ambitious timeline, especially given the scope of the mission. It wouldn’t be enough to revisit the Moon in a spidery lander that could only hold two crew members and a few hundred kilograms of gear like in the 60s. This time, NASA wants to return to the lunar surface with hardware capable of setting up a sustained human presence. That means a new breed of lander that dwarfs anything the agency, or humanity for that matter, has ever tried to place on another celestial body.

Unsurprisingly, developing such vehicles and making sure they’re safe for crewed missions takes time and requires extensive testing. The simple fact is that the landers, being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin, won’t be ready in time to support the original Artemis III landing in 2028. Additionally, development of the new lunar extravehicular activity (EVA) suits by Axiom Space has fallen behind schedule. So even if one of the landers would have been ready to fly in 2028, the crew wouldn’t have the suits they need to actually leave the vehicle and work on the surface.

But while the Artemis spacecraft and EVA suits might be state of the art, NASA’s revised timeline for the program is taking a clear step back in time, hewing closer to the phased approach used during Apollo. This not only provides their various commercial partners with more time to work on their respective contributions, but critically, provides an opportunity to test them in space before committing to a crewed landing.

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Accidental Climate Engineering With Disintegrating Satellites

March 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

For many decades humankind has entertained the notion that we can maybe tweak the Earth’s atmosphere or biosphere in such a way that we can for example undo the harms of climate change, or otherwise affect the climate for our own benefit. This often involves spreading certain substances in parts of the atmosphere in order to reflect or retain thermal solar radiation or induce rain.

Yet despite how limited in scope these attempts at such intentional experiments have been so far – with most proposals dying somewhere before being implemented – we have already embarked on a potentially planet-wide atmospheric reconfiguration that could affect life on Earth for centuries to come. This accidental experiment comes in the form of rocket stages, discarded satellites, and other human-made space litter that burn up in the atmosphere at ever increasing rates.

Rather than burning up cleanly into harmless components, this actually introduces metals and other compounds into the upper parts of the atmosphere. What the long-term effects of this will be is still uncertain, but with the most dire scenarios involving significant climate change and ozone layer degradation, we ought to figure this one out sooner rather than later.

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The Curse Of The Everything Device

February 26, 2026 by Maya Posch 104 Comments

In theory having a single device that combines the features of multiple dedicated devices is a great idea, saving a lot of space, time and money. However, in reality it mostly means that these features now conflict with each other, force us to deal with more complex devices that don’t last nearly as long, and become veritable vampires for your precious attention.

Whereas in the olden days a phone was just used for phone calls, now it’s also a video and photo camera, multimedia computer, pager, and more, but at any point an incoming phone call can interrupt what you are doing. There’s also always the temptation of doom scrolling on one of the infinite ‘social media’ apps. Even appliances like televisions and refrigerators are like that now, adding ‘smarts’ that also vie for your attention, whether it’s with advertisements, notifications, or worse.

Meanwhile trying to simply do some writing work on your PC is a battle against easy distractions, leading people to flee to the digital equivalent of typewriters out of sheer desperation. Similarly, we increasingly see ‘dumb’ phones, and other single-task devices making a comeback, both as commercial options and as DIY projects by the community.

Are we seeing the end of the ‘everything device’ and the return to a more simple time?

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The Requirements Of AI

February 19, 2026 by Al Williams 76 Comments

The media is full of breathless reports that AI can now code and human programmers are going to be put out to pasture. We aren’t convinced. In fact, we think the “AI revolution” is just a natural evolution that we’ve seen before. Consider, for example, radios. Early on, if you wanted to have a radio, you had to build it. You may have even had to fabricate some or all of the parts. Even today, winding custom coils for a radio isn’t that unusual.

But radios became more common. You can buy the parts you need. You can even buy entire radios on an IC. You can go to the store and buy a radio that is probably better than anything you’d cobble together yourself. Even with store-bought equipment, tuning a ham radio used to be a technically challenging task. Now, you punch a few numbers in on a keypad.

The Human Element

What this misses, though, is that there’s still a human somewhere in the process. Just not as many. Someone has to design that IC. Someone has to conceive of it to start with. We doubt, say, the ENIAC or EDSAC was hand-wired by its designers. They figured out what they wanted, and an army of technicians probably did the work. Few, if any, of them could have envisoned the machine, but they can build it.

Does that make the designers less? No. If you write your code with a C compiler, should assembly programmers look down on you as inferior? Of course, they probably do, but should they?

If you have ever done any programming for most parts of the government and certain large companies, you probably know that system engineering is extremely important in those environments. An architect or system engineer collects requirements that have very formal meanings. Those requirements are decomposed through several levels. At the end, any competent programmer should be able to write code to meet the requirements. The requirements also provide a good way to test the end product.

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Real LED TVs Are Finally Becoming A Thing

February 16, 2026 by Lewin Day 58 Comments

Once upon a time, the cathode ray tube was pretty much the only type of display you’d find in a consumer television. As the analog broadcast world shifted to digital, we saw the rise of plasma displays and LCDs, which offered greater resolution and much slimmer packaging. Then there was the so-called LED TV, confusingly named—for it was merely an LCD display with an LED backlight. The LEDs were merely lamps, with the liquid crystal doing all the work of displaying an image.

Today, however, we are seeing the rise of true LED displays. Sadly, decades of confusing marketing messages have polluted the terminology, making it a confusing space for the modern television enthusiast. Today, we’ll explore how these displays work and disambiguate what they’re being called in the marketplace.

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Practice Makes Perfect: The Wet Dress Rehearsal

February 12, 2026 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

If you’ve been even casually following NASA’s return to the Moon, you’re likely aware of the recent Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) for the Artemis II mission. You probably also heard that things didn’t go quite to plan: although the test was ultimately completed and the towering Space Launch System (SLS) rocket was fully loaded with propellant, a persistent liquid hydrogen leak and a few other incidental issues lead the space agency to delay further testing for at least a month while engineers make adjustments to the vehicle.

This constitutes a minor disappointment for fans of spaceflight, but when you’re strapping four astronauts onto more than five million pounds of propellants, there’s no such thing as being too cautious. In fact, there’s a school of thought that says if a WDR doesn’t shake loose some gremlins, you probably weren’t trying hard enough. Simulations and estimates only get you so far, the real thing is always more complex, and there’s bound to be something you didn’t account for ahead of time.

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