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Tech News
SIGSALY was a secret, expensive voice-encryption system installed by US signallers in Britain during World War II, with connections extending to Downing Street and the Cabinet War Rooms. It allowed Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt to communicate securely despite the technical demands of operating such advanced equipment at the time.
Bulgarian PM Rumen Radev confirmed a fire damaged a Starlink satellite internet facility near Sofia last week, with opposition group Democratic Bulgaria saying 11 of 17 antennas were deliberately burned on October 9. Two German passport holders, aged 20 and 21, have been detained in connection with the suspected sabotage, and authorities are investigating possible links to recent arrests in Germany tied to an attack on a Starlink site in Poland.
Ukrainian drone units reported Starlink terminal signal failures at speeds above 160 km/h starting Wednesday, disrupting frontline logistics and strike missions without prior notice, according to military personnel and senior officials. Kyiv also said it received no advance warning from allies of a Russian missile strike on energy facilities for a second consecutive day.
Multiple countries, including Germany and New Zealand, are reporting record shares of electric vehicles in new car sales. The surge coincides with rising oil prices tied to the conflict involving Iran that followed U.S. military action, which has pushed gasoline costs higher in many markets.
Researchers and former officials gathered at Queen Mary University of London for a war-game exercise simulating how nations, companies and NGOs would respond to solar radiation modification technologies that could cool the planet by reflecting sunlight. Participants, including climate researcher Colleen Golja, played roles ranging from national governments to indigenous groups and tech firms, testing how a race to deploy such technology might unfold. The exercise revealed that reaching consensus on ethical, science-based deployment proved far harder than expected.
A writer reflects on reading Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 short story 'The Gold-Bug' as a middle schooler in India, describing how it introduced them to cryptography through a tale of a buried pirate treasure decoded from symbols. The essay notes Poe wrote the story around 1840, submitted it to a Philadelphia newspaper contest, won $100, and had it published in 1843, making it likely the oldest fiction to feature cryptography.
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London ran a tabletop exercise last September simulating how nations, NGOs, indigenous groups and companies would respond to emerging solar radiation modification technologies. Participants, including roles for governments and tech firms, struggled to agree on ethical guardrails for deploying methods such as spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere to cool the planet. Climate researcher Colleen Golja, who advised players on the science, said she expected easy agreement on ethical research but instead encountered sharp disagreement.
A new open-source project, PS2 Web Recomp, statically translates PlayStation 2 Emotion Engine machine code into C++ and compiles it to WebAssembly, pairing it with a reimplemented PS2 OS and WebGPU-based graphics to run games directly in a browser without an emulator. The project, a sibling to an earlier PSP recompilation effort, has gotten Gran Turismo 4 and God of War II playable from boot through gameplay, with saves stored in the browser; users must supply their own disc images since no game data is distributed.
Early reviews of Gears of War: E-Day highlight strong combat mechanics and multiplayer modes as standout features. However, critics have noted that the single-player campaign suffers from repetitive mission design, tempering overall enthusiasm for the title.
A developer has released PSP Web Recomp, a tool that translates decompiled PSP game executables into C++ and compiles them to WebAssembly, pairing the output with a reimplemented PSP operating system and a WebGL2 graphics layer. Using disc images supplied by the user, it runs God of War: Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta directly in Chrome and Firefox, including on phones with touch controls, at 60 frames per second and higher-than-native resolutions, though in-game movies are currently skipped.
A dredging crew at Exmouth Marina uncovered a large unexploded German bomb on 14 January 2026, 81 years after the end of the second world war, prompting marina manager Steve Hockings-Thompson to alert police. The army's 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Search Regiment, based at Vauxhall Barracks in Didcot, was called in to handle the device, led by Maj Andrew Boyce, who initially received conflicting information about the bomb's size.
The Space Force has retired its last two satellites used for monitoring global conflicts, moving them to a designated orbital disposal zone. This marks the conclusion of the satellite program dedicated to early warning and surveillance. The satellites had been operational for several years before their decommissioning.