China wants to keep its spot as a leader in the space race with plans to launch 30 missions
Keeping its spot among the top countries competing in the space race, China is planning to launch 30 missions this year, according to information from the state-run China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., reported by the Xinhua news agency.
Last year, China outpaced the United States in the number of national launches it had completed through the middle of December, according to a report in the MIT Technology Review. Public and private Chinese companies launched 35 missions that were reported to the public through 2018 compared to 30 from the U.S., wrote Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College.
âPrivately funded space startups are changing Chinaâs space industry,â Johnson-Freese wrote at the time. âAnd even without their help, China is poised to become a space power on par with the United States.â
Major missions for 2019 will include the Long March-5 large carrier rocket, whose last launch was marred by malfunction. If the new Long March launch goes well, China will stage another flight to launch a probe designed to bring lunar samples back to Earth at the end of 2019.
China will also send still another version of the Long March rocket to lay the groundwork for the countryâs private space station.
While the bulk of Chinaâs activity in space is being handled through government ministries and state-owned companies, private companies are starting to make their mark, as well.
LandSpace, OneSpace and iSpace form a triumvirate of privately held Chinese companies that are all developing launch vehicles and planning to carry payloads to space.
In all, using some back of the napkin math and the calendar of launches available at Spaceflight Insider, there were roughly 80 major rocket launches scheduled.
Those figures mean that over once a week a rocket blasted off to deliver some sort of payload to a place above the atmosphere. RocketLab put its first commercial payload into orbit in November, and launched a second rocket the following month. Meanwhile, SpaceX,  the darling of the private space industry, launched 21 rockets itself.
Source : techcrunch
Keeping its spot among the top countries competing in the space race, China is planning to launch 30 missions this year, according to inform
Realme U1 Gets Price Cut In India After Company Becomes Fourth Largest Brand In Q4
Realme U1, the first selfie-centric smartphone from former subsidiary of Chinese smartphone maker Oppo, has received a price cut in India. The smartphone was launched in India in late November and went on its first sale in December. The price cut comes just days after Counterpoint Research revealed that Realme beat its parent company Oppo to become the fourth largest smartphone maker in the country during the fourth quarter. The company finished the year by becoming the fourth largest brand with a market share of 8 percent.
REALME U1 PRICE CUT IN INDIA
Realme has announced that Realme U1 will be available at a starting price of Rs 10,999 in India. The smartphone was launched at a retail price of Rs 11,999 and is getting a price cut of Rs 1,000 in the country. After the price, the 3GB RAM variant of Realme U1 is available for Rs 10,999. The 4GB RAM variant is getting a discount of Rs 500 and is now available at a retail price of Rs 13,499. The device was previously available at a retail price of Rs 14,999
Source : BGR.in
Technology News & Mobile Reviews, Gadgets & Gizmos in Video & Photo Reviews at BGR India. Get latest Gadgets & technology news on laptops, m
A government propaganda app is going viral in China
Besides binge-watching TikTok  videos and battling enemies in the magical land of mobile games, many Chinese people may also pass time during the upcoming Lunar New Year on Xuexi Qiangguo, a news and chat app developed by the countryâs top ideology officials.
The app managed to top the Chinese App Store between January 22 and 25 before two ByteDance  apps pushed it down to the third place this week, download statistics from App Annie shows. At a glance, the news section is almost exclusively about the Communist Party and president Xi Jinping.
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The app is almost exclusively about the Communist Party and president Xi Jinping.
It doubles as an instant messenger, with development support provided by Alibabaâs Dingtalk enterprise communications tool. That means users can log in via their Dingtalk account and chat with their Dingtalk contacts directly over Xuexi Qiangguo.
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The app doubles as a messenger with technical support provided by Alibabaâs Dingtalk
Directly translated as âstudying strengthens the nation,â Xuexi Qiangguo is the product of a research center under Chinaâs Publicity Department, an important organ in charge of how information disseminates in the country. The digital weapon underscores the Communist Partyâs growing efforts in recent years to appeal to phone-savvy generations, though the app seems to have peaked.
As of February 1, the iOS version of Xuexi Qiangguo is rated 2.4 out of 5 from 6,810 reviews. Its impressive download number, as it turns out, is in part a result of a top-down order. Many early users are Party members or work in Chinaâs giant state apparatus, who were told to install the app. Several users TechCrunch spoke to, including a public school principal, a director of a district party committee and a municipal government official, confirmed that everyone in their organizations must download the app and every now and then, users may get quizzed on relevant content.
Newspapers and social media posts also suggest local governments have mandated downloads among Party members and encouraged the general public to give it a try. Some take a step further to organize offline study sessions for the app. For some context, China had nearly 90 million Communist Party members by the end of 2017.
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A city in Hunan Province has ordered all Party members to install Xuexi Qiangguo, a local newspaper reported. The photo shows a study session held for the app. Source: èĄĄéłææ„ via WeiboÂ
âI believe that most of the downloads were incentivized, probably only a very small portion was initiated by a real interest,â says Kristin Shi-Kupfer, director at MERICS, a German think tank specializing in China. âThis app will probably drop out of the rankings of any app store soon.â
To engage the younger crowd, the app takes cues from new media forms in Chinaâs flourishing online world. The news section, for instance, appears to be modeled on ByteDanceâs popular news app Jinri Toutiao . While Toutiao uses algorithms to understand user preferences and delivers content from a wide array of third-party publications, Xuexi Qiangguo curates from an army of 18 state-controlled outlets.
The app also has a gamified loyalty program, which rewards users virtual points when they complete a task, such as daily sign-in. Because registrations are on a real-name basis, supervisors can check who in their organizations havenât installed the app, ushering in a new kind of digital monitoring.
âThe timing of the publishing of this app might be linked to the upcoming Chinese New Year Festival, which the Chinese Communist Party sees as an opportunity and a necessity to spread their ideology,â notes Shi-Kupfer.â [It] may be hoping that people would use the holiday season to take a closer look, but probably also knowing that most people would rather choose other sources to relax, consume and travel.â
Source : tech crunch
Besides binge-watching TikTok videos and battling enemies in the magical land of mobile games, many Chinese people may also pass time during
Everything you need to know about Facebook, Googleâs app scandal
Facebook and Google landed in hot water with Apple this week after two investigations by TechCrunch revealed the misuse of internal-only cer
Facebook  and Google landed in hot water with Apple this week after two investigations by TechCrunch revealed the misuse of internal-only certificates â leading to their revocation, which led to a day of downtime at the two tech giants.
Confused about what happened? Hereâs everything you need to know.
How did all this start, and what happened?
On Monday, we revealed that Facebook was misusing an Apple-issued enterprise certificate that is only meant for companies to use to distribute internal, employee-only apps without having to go through the Apple  App Store. But the social media giant used that certificate to sign an app that Facebook distributed outside the company, violating Appleâs rules.
The app, known simply as âResearch,â allowed Facebook unparalleled access to all of the data flowing out of a device. This included access to some of the usersâ most sensitive network data. Facebook paid users â including teenagers â $20 per month to install the app. But it wasnât clear exactly what kind of data was being vacuumed up, or for what reason.
It turns out that the app was a repackaged app that was effectively banned from Appleâs App Store last year for collecting too much data on users.
Apple was angry that Facebook was misusing its special-issue enterprise certificates to push an app it already banned, and revoked it â rendering the app unable to open. But Facebook was using that same certificate to sign its other employee-only apps, effectively knocking them offline until Apple re-issued the certificate.
Then, it turned out Google  was doing almost exactly the same thing with its Screenwise app, and Appleâs ban-hammer fell again.
Whatâs the controversy over these enterprise certificates and what can they do?
If you want to develop Apple apps, you have to abide by its rules â and Apple expressly makes companies agree to its terms.
A key rule is that Apple doesnât allow app developers to bypass the App Store, where every app is vetted to ensure itâs as secure as it can be. It does, however, grant exceptions for enterprise developers, such as to companies that want to build apps that are only used internally by employees. Facebook and Google in this case signed up to be enterprise developers and agreed to Appleâs developer terms.
Each Apple-issued certificate grants companies permission to distribute apps they develop internally â including pre-release versions of the apps they make, for testing purposes. But these certificates arenât allowed to be used for ordinary consumers, as they have to download apps through the App Store.
Whatâs a ârootâ certificate, and why is its access a big deal?
Because Facebookâs Research and Googleâs Screenwise apps were distributed outside of Appleâs App Store, it required users to manually install the app â known as sideloading. That requires users to go through a convoluted few steps of downloading the app itself, and opening and trusting either Facebook or Googleâs enterprise developer code-signing certificate, which is what allows the app to run.
Both companies required users after the app installed to agree to an additional configuration step â known as a VPN configuration profile â allowing all of the data flowing out of that userâs phone to funnel down a special tunnel that directs it all to either Facebook or Google, depending on which app you installed.
This is where the Facebook and Google cases differ.
Googleâs app collected data and sent it off to Google for research purposes, but couldnât access encrypted data â such as the content of any network traffic protected by HTTPS, as most apps in the App Store and internet websites are.
Facebook, however, went far further. Its users were asked to go through an additional step to trust an additional type of certificate at the ârootâ level of the phone. Trusting this Facebook Research root certificate authority allowed the social media giant to look at all of the encrypted traffic flowing out of the device â essentially what we call a âman-in-the-middleâ attack. That allowed Facebook to sift through your messages, your emails and any other bit of data that leaves your phone. Only apps that use certificate pinning â which reject any certificate that isnât its own â were protected, such as iMessage, Signal and additionally any other end-to-end encrypted solutions.
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Facebookâs Research app requires Root Certificate access, which Facebook gather almost any piece of data transmitted by your phone (Image: supplied)
Googleâs app might not have been able to look at encrypted traffic, but the company still flouted the rules â and had its separate enterprise developer code-signing certificate revoked anyway.
What data did Facebook have access to on iOS?
Itâs hard to know for sure, but it definitely had access to more data than Google.
Facebook said its app was to help it âunderstand how people use their mobile devices.â In reality, at root traffic level, Facebook could have accessed any kind of data that left your phone.
Will Strafach, a security expert with whom we spoke for our story, said: âIf Facebook makes full use of the level of access they are given by asking users to install the certificate, they will have the ability to continuously collect the following types of data: private messages in social media apps, chats from in instant messaging apps â including photos/videos sent to others, emails, web searches, web browsing activity, and even ongoing location information by tapping into the feeds of any location tracking apps you may have installed.â
Remember: this isnât ârootâ access to your phone, like jailbreaking, but root access to the network traffic.
How does this compare to the technical ways other market research programs work?
In fairness, these arenât market research apps unique to Facebook or Google. Several other companies, like Nielsen and comScore, run similar programs, but neither ask users to install a VPN or provide root access to the network.
In any case, Facebook already has a lot of your data â as does Google. Even if the companies only wanted to look at your data in aggregate with other people, it can still hone in on who you talk to, when, for how long and, in some cases, what about. It might not have been such an explosive scandal had Facebook not spent the last year cleaning up after several security and privacy breaches.
look like random retweets are appearing in your timeline
A number of Twitter  users have been complaining that tweets that were retweeted by people they donât follow are now showing in their timeline. The issue, thankfully, is not related to a new Twitter algorithm or recommendation system, as some had feared. Instead, the company confirmed that a bug affecting Android users was mislabeling the âsocial proofâ tag on Retweets.
This is the part of the Retweet that tells you who, among the people you already do follow, had retweeted the post in question.
The company says that the social proof label is wrong, so the Android users were seeing tweets that looked like they had been retweeted by someone they donât know.
