Solar plane completes historic round-the-world trip

July 26, 2016

Abu Dhabi, Jul 26: Solar Impulse 2 landed today in the UAE, completing its epic journey to become the first sun- powered airplane to circle the globe without a drop of fuel to promote renewable energy.

solarplane

The plane touched down at 04:05 (0535 IST) in the capital Abu Dhabi after a more than 48 hour-long flight from Cairo, the final leg in its journey which began on March 9 last year.

Cheers and clapping welcomed the plane as it arrived at Al-Bateen Executive Airport, where it first launched its world tour, an AFP journalist reported.

Swiss explorer and project director Bertrand Piccard was in the cockpit during the 2,763 kilometre flight from Cairo, crossing the Red Sea, the vast Saudi desert and flying over the Gulf.

The flight capped a remarkable 42,000-kilometre journey across four continents, two oceans and three seas.

Solar Impulse 2 took off from Cairo on the final leg early on Sunday, having previously crossed Asia, North America, Europe and North Africa.

"The future is clean, the future is you, the future is now, let's take it further," said Piccard as he disembarked.

"One thing I would like for you to remember: More than an achievement in the history of aviation, Solar Impulse has made an achievement in (the) history of energy," he said.

"We have enough solutions, enough technologies. We should never accept the world to be polluted only because people are scared to think in another way."

Dubbed the "paper plane", Solar Impulse 2 has been circumnavigating the globe in stages, with 58-year-old Piccard and his compatriot Andre Borschberg taking turns at the controls of the single-seat aircraft.

Borschberg, 63, smashed the record for the longest uninterrupted journey in aviation history with the 8,924- kilometre flight between Nagoya, Japan and Hawaii that lasted nearly 118 hours.

"The adventure began 13 years ago... #futureisclean," he tweeted yesterday.

No heavier than a car but with the wingspan of a Boeing 747, the four-engine, battery-powered aircraft relies on around 17,000 solar cells embedded in its wings.

The plane has clocked an average speed of 80 kilometres an hour.

The pilots use oxygen tanks to breathe at high altitude and wear suits specially designed to cope with the extreme conditions.

They have had to withstand temperatures inside the tiny cockpit ranging from minus 20 degrees to plus 35 degrees Celsius.

Piccard has said he launched the project in 2003 to show that renewable energy "can achieve the impossible".

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News Network
March 18,2020

San Francisco, Mar 18: Facebook said a bug in its anti-spam system temporarily blocked the publication of links to news stories about the coronavirus. Guy Rosen, Facebook's vice president of integrity, said on Twitter Tuesday that the company was working on a fix for the problem.

Users complained that links to news stories about school closings and other information related to the virus outbreak were blocked by the company's automated system.

Later on Tuesday, Rosen tweeted that Facebook had restored all the incorrectly deleted posts, which also covered topics beyond the coronavirus.

Rosen said the problems were unrelated to any changes in Facebook's content-moderator workforce. The company reportedly sent its human moderators home this week because of the coronavirus outbreak.

A representative for Facebook did not immediately respond to questions on the status of Facebook's content moderators, many of whom do not work directly for the company and are not always able to work from home.

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Agencies
January 12,2020

Washington D.C., Jan 12: A recent study has claimed that people end up wasting almost an entire day when they take a vacation.

This can happen while standing in a queue or searching for places to visit, people do not keep a count of the time they have actually utilised during the trip. As a result, they end up doing much lesser activities than they originally had planned.

According to a recent report in Fox News, the study has also shared the fact that people try to justify time waste with planning and scheduling activities whereas the truth is that these things can be done well ahead to save time during the trip.

The average time waste according to the study commissioned by Sykes Holiday Cottages also said the people taking a seven days' trip waste a minimum of 17-and-a-half hours to figure out various factors.

But there are other causes involved as well. When one visits any crowded location, the real-time spent to enjoy the location is lesser than the time spent on reaching and trying to get involved. For instance, if one visits an amusement park, the activities take lesser time than the preparatory and other phases.

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Agencies
January 10,2020

Indian enterprises were flooded with a whopping 14.6 crore malware threats in 2019 - a growth of 48 per cent (year-on-year) compared to 2018, a new report said on Friday.

Manufacturing, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), education, healthcare, IT/ITES, and the government were the most at-risk industries in the country, said the report from Seqrite, the enterprise arm of Pune-based IT security firm Quick Heal Technologies.

Interestingly, almost a quarter (23 per cent) of the threats were identified through 'Signatureless behaviour-based' detection by Seqrite, indicating how a growing number of cybercriminals were deploying new or previously unknown threat vectors to compromise enterprise security.

"With the latest Seqrite annual threat report, we want to empower CIOs, CISOs, business leaders and all key public stakeholders with the insights they need to combat the growing complexity of the threat landscape," said Sanjay Katkar, Joint Managing Director and CTO, Quick Heal Technologies.

The most prominent trend was the drastic increase in the volume, intensity, and sophistication of cyber-attack campaigns targeting Indian enterprises in 2019.

The rapid integration of IoT devices, BYOD (bring your own device), and third-party APIs into enterprise networks has created newer security vulnerabilities that might go unnoticed until a major breach occurs.

Threat researchers at Seqrite observed several large-scale advanced persistent threats (APT) attacks deployed against organisations in the government sector.

"The entry of nation-states and organised cybercrime cells into the fray is expected to add more complication to this situation and will require Indian government bodies and corporate enterprises to shore up their cyber defence strategies in 2020 and beyond," the report noted.

More alarming, however, was the continued lack of security awareness amongst enterprises and government organisations.

"Unsecured Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Server Message Block (SMB) protocols continued to be targeted through brute-force attacks," said the report.

Spear phishing attack campaigns leveraging Office exploits and infected macros were also used extensively by cybercriminals to gain access to enterprise networks and steal critical data.

"India's digital journey depends on ensuring robust cybersecurity for all stakeholders within the enterprise ecosystem," said Katkar.

The sharp spike should be a cause of concern for CIOs and CISOs in the country, especially given the growing digital penetration within their enterprise networks.

"With network vulnerabilities and potential entry points increasing at a rapid pace, threat actors are expected to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to power their malware campaigns in the future to capitalise on newer attack vectors," the report added.

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