World's First Satellite Call From Ordinary Smartphone

Edward Correia - September 29, 2023

IN THIS ISSUE: World's First Smartphone Satellite Call; Pint-sized Juice Booster; New Tool Simplifies Analytics Embedding; Cybersecurity Ops to Shutter with Shutdown; Cyber Threats Far from Certain; HTTP/3 Adoption on the Rise?

Satellite Call on a Plain Old SmartPhone

And so it begins. Earlier this month, what could be the world's very first satellite call with voice and data was completed successfully using an unmodified 5G smartphone via satellite operated by AST SpaceMobile. The data rate on the Maui-to-Madrid space trek was 14 Mbps.

Pint-sized Juice Booster

Ever need to goose the voltage in a circuit from, say, 8 volts to 100? A buck converter might be just the ticket. And this purpose-built little device does the job without the need to tap into a multipurpose microcontroller.

New Tool to Simplify Analytics Embedding

Analytics-industry veteran Sisense released a beta of Compose SDK for Fusion, a set of tools to allow developers to easily embed analytics data in their apps along with tools to let app users easily query, chart and explore the embedded data.

Photo illustration of the US Capitol dome overlaid with a banner that reads "Sorry, We're Closed"

Cybersecurity Ops to Shutter with Shutdown

By now, the outcome of the latest threat of a U.S. Government shut-down will be known. If history is any guide, it will be averted in the final minutes, with millions of Americans breathing a sigh of relief. But if it's not, at least one doomsday scenario could unfold in the tech sector.

Cyber Threats Are Far From Certain

With the sheer volume of content on today's interwebs, there are still precious few certainties beyond death and taxes. So perhaps the first step in the defense against cyber threats might be to figure out whether there's a threat at all.

Figure 1 — The protocol stack for HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, showing how multiple protocols are combined to deliver the full Internet functionality.

HTTP/3 Adoption On The Rise?

News hounds and IT departments might be aware of HTTP/3, the beefed up browser protocol ratified by the IETF last year, but most likely have not. And while Google and Meta reportedly have adopted it, the protocol occupies less than a third of servers, despite claims of this otherwise interesting (to tech nerds) deep-dive.