In Sunday’s segment on Sky News Australia (Weekend Edition with Tim Gilbert) we looked at how space tourism is now an option for travellers with big wallets and plenty of patience. Virgin Galactic is already planning its next launch after flying tourists into space for the first time this week. Virgin Galactic already has a backlog of about 800 customers with tickets ranging from US$250,000 to US$450,000.
The idea is to make space exploration accessible to everyone. Eventually weekly flights and cheaper prices will hopefully make that a reality. For now, monthly flights are planned with Galactic 03 – the company’s third commercial spaceflight – slated for September 2023.
The Virgin Galactic VSS vehicle is a reusable rocket-powered spaceplane.
Once the mothership or carrier aircraft reaches 45,000ft, the rocket-propelled spaceplane blasts straight up to an altitude of approximately 85 kilometres.
It’s one helluva ride, albeit a short one.
NEW REPORT WARNS MAC USERS NOT TO BE COMPLACENT
The latest macOS Threat Landscape Report from Bitdefender should be of interest to Australians as Mac and other Apple device use is very high here. More than 45 per cent of Australians are now using at least one Apple system on their computers or phones.
Microsoft dominates with 63% of the desktop market but while Apple users enjoy less risk due to the platform’s smaller footprint, Macs aren’t bulletproof.
- Mac users are targeted by three key threats: Trojans, Adware and Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUAs)
- Trojans are the biggest single threat to Macs, accounting for more than half of threat detections followed by PUAs and Adware
- EvilQuest remains the single most common piece of malware targeting Macs at 52.7%
- Trojans designed to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities present a real danger to users who typically postpone installing the latest security patches from Apple
- With a 25.3% share, PUAs represent a quarter of ‘executable’ threats to Macs
- 8% of PUA detections on Macs are crypto miners and 1% are jailbreak utilities
- Trojans designed to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities present a real danger to users who typically postpone installing the latest security patches from Apple
- Threats designed to infect Macs typically require victims to manually run an executable
- Threat actors put effort into making malware packages look and feel like legitimate applications
While named differently, these hazards share one trait: they require victims to manually run the threat, meaning their authors try hard to make their malware look like legitimate applications.
MOMENTUM CONTINUES TO BUILD FOR REPAIRABLE SMARTPHONES
The Australian Repair Summit was held in Canberra during the week – just as Nokia released the G42 5G. The Nokia G42 is the industry’s first sub-A$450 smartphone with 5G connectivity to feature QuickFix repairability.
That means cracked screens, bent charging ports and batteries can all be easily replaced .. just like I did on the cheaper model seen in the segment.
The deal with iFixit offers step-by-step repair guides and cheap parts.
The momentum is now unstoppable. The EU wants easy swapping of batteries and now the Australian Repair Summit has called for major reform to incentivise and support the repair of products, machines and equipment.