I recently deleted my Google account, marking a significant step in my ongoing effort to minimize the data I share with giant tech companies. For years, I have been increasingly wary of the cost hidden behind the "free" services these companies offer. While they don't charge money, they do require payment in the form of personal data. Every search, email, and location history entry becomes part of a vast trove of information used to build detailed profiles, often shared with advertisers and other third parties, raising concerns about the potential misuse of this data by AI systems for surveillance, manipulation, and biased decision-making.
Living through a smart phone
Slowly but surely we are turning into a society where if you do not have a smartphone you are at a disadvantage. There are several examples of this:
- Car parks which only accept payment via an app.
- Restaurants and pubs who want you to order via your phone
- Transport services which make purchasing and using tickets more cumbersome (train, etc.)
- Bank loans which are only available via an app
Signing files using GPG
I sometimes cryptographically sign documents by using GPG. I do this as a way of showing that the document was really signed by me and that it has not been modified in any way. Placing an image of a hand written signature into a document gives a false sense of security as anybody can then replicate your signature.
CHEOPS and PLATO at a glance
PLATO and CHEOPS are two European Space Agency missions aimed at characterising exoplanets.
CHEOPS is an S-class mission (small mission in ESA’s science program) which aims to characterise exoplanets already known to be orbiting around nearby bright stars. CHEOPS will target Earth- to Neptune-sized planets.
An open, borderless, decentralised, trustless space object catalogue. Possible or wishful thinking?
A real problem in the space situational awareness community, is the lack of a shared validated catalogue of known space debris. This holds back progress in a wide range of areas from operations to fundamental research.
Could an open, borderless, decentralised, trusteless space object catalogue be the solution? If so, how could one ensure the catalogue was tamper proof?
How is the PLATO exoplanet mission different from TESS?
The PLATO mission will monitor the brightness variations of more than 200,000 stars to look for planets which transit their host stars. TESS will also utilise the transit technique to focus on targeting bright host stars, to look for Earth-sized planets. It is thus not surprising when people end up thinking: why launch two space-based exoplanet spacecraft to look for Earth-sized planets?
PLATO and the search for planets in the habitable zone
One of the key scientific goals of PLATO is to detect terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zone (HZ) of solar-type stars (up to orbits of one year), and characterise their bulk properties to determine their habitability.
Earth remains the only known example where life has successfully emerged, and we can’t yet say what conditions are most suitable for life. We use the HZ as a tool to determine which planetary targets are most likely be habitable and to support recognisable life. After all, life that more closely resembles life on Earth might be easier to identify.