FCC Approves Mysterious SpaceX Device: Is It for the Starlink Mini Dish?

“SpaceX has received FCC clearance to operate a mysterious ‘wireless module’ device,” PC Magazine reported earlier this week, speculating that the device “might be a new Starlink router.”
On Tuesday, the FCC issued an equipment authorization for the device, which uses the 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi radio bands. A document in SpaceX’s filing also says it features antennas along with Wi-Fi chips apparently from MediaTek. Another document calls the device by the codename “UTW-231,” and defines it as a “wireless router” supporting IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ax for Wi-Fi 6 speeds up to 1,300Mbps. But perhaps the most interesting part is an image SpaceX attached, which suggests the router is relatively small and can fit in a person’s open hand…. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said the “Starlink mini” dish is slated to arrive later this year and that it’s small enough to fit in a backpack…
On Wednesday, PCMag also spotted the official Starlink.com site referencing the name “Mini” in a specification page for the satellite internet system.

Today saw some interesting speculation on the unoffical “Starlink Hardware” blog (written by Noah Clarke, who has a degree in electronics). Clarke guesses the product “will be aimed at portable use cases, such as camping, RV’s, vans, hiking… designed to be easy to store, transport, and deploy”. But he also notes Starlink updated their app today, with a new shopping page showing what he believes the upcoming product will look like. (“Very similar to the Standard dish, just smaller. It has a similar shape, and even a kickstand.”)

If you go into developer mode and play around with the Mini network settings, you notice something interesting. There is no separate router. Devices are connected to the dish itself… I’m guessing that, in order to make the Mini as portable as possible, Starlink decided it was best to simplify the system and limit the number of components.

There are more Wifi details that have been revealed, and that is mesh compatibility. For those of you that might be interested in using the Mini at home, or for larger events where you need additional Wifi coverage, the Mini’s built-in router will be compatible with Starlink mesh. You’ll be able to wirelessly pair another Starlink router to the Mini.

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Is C++ More Popular Than C?

Last month TIOBE announced its estimate that the four most popular programming languages were:
1. Python
2. C
3. C++
4. Java
But this month C++ “overtook” C for the first time, TIOBE announced, becoming (according to the same methodology) the #2 most popular programming language, with C dropping to #3. ” C++ has never been that high in the TIOBE index,” says TIOBE Software CEO Paul Jansen in the announcement, “whereas C has never been that low.”

1. Python
2. C++
3. C
4. Java

C++ started a new life as of 2011 with its consistent 3 yearly updates. Although most compilers and most engineers can’t take up with this pace, it is considered a success to see the language evolve.

The main strengths of C++ are its performance and scalability. Its downside is its many ways to get things done, i.e. its rich idiom of features, which is caused by its long history and aim for backward compatibility.

C++ is heavily used in embedded systems, game development and financial trading software, just to name a few domains.

There’s different rankings from the rival PYPL index of programming language popularity. It lumps C and C++ together to award them a collective ranking (#5). But unlike TIOBE, it shows Java [and JavaScript and C#] all being more popular (with Python still the #1 most popular language).

Of course, statistical anomalies could be also skewing the results. Visual Basic also lost two ranks in popularity in the last month, according to TIOBE, dropping from the #7 position to the #9 position (now falling just behind Go and SQL). This becomes the first time that Go has risen as high as #7, according to TIOBE’s announcement — with Rust also reaching an all-time high of #17…

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Security Lessons from the Change Healthcare Ransomware Catastrophe

The $22 million paid by Change Healthcare’s parent company to unlock its systems “may have emboldened bad actors to further target the vulnerable industry,” writes Axios:
There were 44 attacks against the health care sector in April, the most that [cybersecurity firm] Recorded Future has seen in the four years it’s been collecting data. It was also the second-largest month-over-month jump, after 30 ransomware attacks were recorded in March. There were 32 attacks in February and May.

But an analysis by the security-focused magazine CSO says the “disastrous” incident also “starkly illustrated the fragility of the healthcare sector, prompting calls for regulatory action.”
In response to the attack, US politicians have called for mandated baseline cybersecurity standards in the health sector, as well as better information sharing. They have also raised concerns that industry consolidation is increasing cyber risk.

So what went wrong? The attackers used a set of stolen credentials to remotely access the company’s systems. But the article also notes Change Healthcare’s systems “suffered from a lack of segmentation, which enables easy lateral movement of the attack” — and that the company’s acquisition may have played a role:

Mergers and acquisitions create new cyber threats because they involve the integration of systems, data, and processes from different organizations, each with its own security protocols and potential vulnerabilities. “During this transition, cybercriminals can exploit discrepancies in security measures, gaps in IT governance, and the increased complexity of managing merged IT environments,” Aron Brand, CTO of CTERA told CSOonline. “Additionally, the heightened sharing of sensitive information between parties provides more opportunities for data breaches.”

And “In the end, paying the ransom failed to protect UHG from secondary attempts at extortion.”

In April, cybercriminals from the RansomHub group threatened to leak portions of 6TB of sensitive data stolen from the breach of Change Healthcare, and obtained through Nichy, according to an analysis by security vendor Forescout. An estimated one in three Americans had their sensitive data exposed as a result of the attack. Such secondary scams are becoming increasingly commonplace and healthcare providers are particularly at risk, according to compliance experts… The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is investigating whether a breach of protected health information occurred in assessing whether either UHG or Change Healthcare violated strict healthcare sector privacy regulations.

Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article.

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Researchers Find No Amount of Alcohol is Healthy For You

The New York Times magazine remembers that once upon a time, in the early 1990s, “some prominent researchers were promoting, and the media helped popularize, the idea that moderate drinking…was linked to greater longevity.

“The cause of that association was not clear, but red wine, researchers theorized, might have anti-inflammatory properties that extended life and protected cardiovascular health…”

More recently, though, research has piled up debunking the idea that moderate drinking is good for you. Last year, a major meta-analysis that re-examined 107 studies over 40 years came to the conclusion that no amount of alcohol improves health; and in 2022, a well-designed study found that consuming even a small amount brought some risk to heart health. That same year, Nature published research stating that consuming as little as one or two drinks a day (even less for women) was associated with shrinkage in the brain — a phenomenon normally associated with aging…

[M]ore people are now reporting that they consume cannabis than alcohol on a daily basis. Some governments are responding to the new research by overhauling their messaging. Last year, Ireland became the first country to pass legislation requiring a cancer warning on all alcohol products sold there, similar to those found on cigarettes: “There is a direct link between alcohol and fatal cancers,” the language will read. And in Canada, the government has revised its alcohol guidelines, announcing: “We now know that even a small amount of alcohol can be damaging to health.” The guidelines characterize one to two drinks a week as carrying “low risk” and three to six drinks as carrying “moderate risk.” (Previously the guidelines suggested that women limit themselves to no more than two standard drinks most days, and that men place that limit at three.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.