When top White House defense and national security leaders discussed plans for an attack on targets in Yemen over the messaging app Signal, it raised many questions about operational security and recordkeeping and national security laws. It also puts Signal in the spotlight. Why do so many government officials, activists and journalists use Signal for secure messaging' The short answer is that it uses end-to-end encryption, meaning no one in position to eavesdrop on the communication ' including Signal itself ' can read messages they intercept. But Signal isn't the only messaging app that uses end-to-end encryption, and end-to-end encryption isn't the only consideration in choosing a secure messaging app. In addition, secure messaging apps are only part of the picture when it comes to keeping your communications private, and there is no such thing as perfect security. The most common messaging protocol, SMS, is built into every smartphone and is easy to use, but does not encrypt messages. Since there is no encryption, carriers or government agents with a warrant, which are typically submitted by law enforcement and issued by a judge, can read the message content. They can also view the message metadata, which includes information about you and your recipient, like an internet address, name or both....

When people think about fiber optic cables, its usually about how they're used for telecommunications and accessing the internet. But fiber optic cables ' strands of glass or plastic that allow for the transmission of light ' can be used for another purpose: imaging the ground beneath our feet. MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) PhD student Hilary Chang recently used the MIT fiber optic cable network to successfully image the ground underneath campus using a method known as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). By using existing infrastructure, DAS can be an efficient and effective way to understand ground composition, a critical component for assessing the seismic hazard of areas, or how at risk they are from earthquake damage. 'We were able to extract very nice, coherent waves from the surroundings, and then use that to get some information about the subsurface,' says Chang, the lead author of a recent paper describing her work that was co-authored with EAPS Principal Research Scientist Nori Nakata....

Cyberattacks linked to the Chinese government that compromised large portions of the American telecommunications network have the U.S. government sounding the alarm. The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), has called it the 'worst telecom hack in our nation's history' and noted that it makes prior cyberattacks by Russian operatives look like 'child's play' by comparison. The complex cyberattack, carried out by a group of Chinese hackers dubbed Salt Typhoon, began as far back as 2022. Its purpose, according to U.S. officials, was to give Chinese operatives persistent access to telecommunications networks across the U.S. by compromising devices like routers and switches run by companies like AT&T, Verizon, Lumen and others. This attack comes on the heels of reports that the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were assisting telephone companies with countering other China-connected compromises of their networks. The earlier hacking was part of an attack targeting people in the Washington area in government or political roles, including candidates for the 2024 presidential election....

In 1969, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface ' a momentous engineering and science feat marked by his iconic words, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Three years later, Apollo 17 became NASA's final Apollo mission to land humans on the brightest and largest object in our night sky. Since then, no humans have visited the moon or traveled past low Earth orbit (LEO), largely because of shifting politics, funding, and priorities. But that is about to change. Through NASA's Artemis II mission, scheduled to launch no earlier than September 2025, four astronauts will be the first humans to travel to the moon in more than 50 years. In 2022, the uncrewed Artemis I mission proved the ability of NASA's new spacecraft Orion ' launched on the new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System ' to travel farther into space than ever before and return safely to Earth. Building on that success, the 10-day Artemis II mission will pave the way for Artemis III, which aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface, with the goal of establishing a future lasting human presence on the moon and preparing for human missions to Mars....