Satellites could get hacked

The US government`s General Accounting Office, responsible for checking up on the US Congress, recently released a report in which it says satellites are particularly vulnerable to hacking attacks. The report says the federal government has clearly overlooked the risk posed to these communications units. "If false commands could be inserted into a satellite`s command receiver, they could cause the spacecraft to tumble or otherwise destroy itself."

Security company Kaspersky Labs says one area of particular concern is the number of satellites run by the private sector which are in fact used for government business, including defence department actions. The report says these public-private partnerships often result in inadequate security measures.

An investigation by the Accounting Office found that many satellite companies don`t encrypt satellite control data, making it relatively easy for malicious commands to be inserted into the control structure. "It is ... feasible to insert false information or computer viruses into the terrestrial computer networks associated with a space system, either remotely or through an on-site connection. Such an attack could lead to space system degradation or even complete loss of spacecraft utility."

IBM is planning to produce a 1.8GHz 64-bit PowerPC processor next year. Apple users are the most likely to benefit as the processor is likely to find its way into high-priced desktop machines shortly afterwards.

The PowerPC 970 is a scaled-down version of IBM`s Power4 server chip and will be able to run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. If the chips do find their way into the desktop Apple machines, Macintosh will leapfrog the x86 desktop machines, although with a much higher price tag. Despite the likelihood of Apple being a customer, IBM hasn`t actually named any customers for its processor and the company could find some difficulty in making the technical transition to the IBM chip.

Macintosh`s current PowerPC range reaches up to 1.25GHz compared with the Pentium 4 at around 2.8GHz and AMD`s 64-bit Hammer processors due out next year. [More at TheRegister]

Intel and Microsoft have joined together to push forward the development of speech applications language tags (SALT). At the Intel Communications Summit this week, the companies said they were already working on enabling technologies as well as a reference design for the development of speech-powered applications.

The technical collaboration will include the Microsoft .Net speech platform as well as Intel communications building blocks such as the company`s Architecture servers, NetStructure communications boards and Intel`s telephony call management interface software.

The SALT specification defines a set of lightweight tags as extensions to commonly used Web-based programming languages as well as incorporating existing standards from the World Wide Web (W3C) and other standards bodies. Developed by the SALT Forum, the SALT 1.0 specification was submitted to the W3C in August. SALT is designed for both telephony and Web applications, and will enable access to Web-based information, applications and services from a wide range of devices including PCs, telephones, cellphones, wireless personal digital assistants, pocket PCs and tablet PCs.

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