Daily Archives: January 14, 2026

China has applied to launch 200,000 satellites, likely just to reserve the orbital area and stop others launching there – space squatting

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China has applied to launch nearly 200,000 satellites into Earth orbit, but the move may be an attempt at merely reserving orbital space rather than a genuine effort to build the largest mega-constellation in existence.

On December 29, the newly formed Institute of Radio Spectrum Utilisation and Technological Innovation in China filed proposals for two satellite constellations with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations body that allocates spectrum in space.

The constellations, which are called CTC-1 and CTC-2 and backed by the Chinese government, would each contain 96,714 satellites spread over an eye-watering 3660 orbits. For comparison, there are 14,300 active satellites in orbit today, about 9400 of which are SpaceX Starlink satellites operating in a handful of orbits, which beam internet connections to the ground. SpaceX has filed to launch 42,000 satellites with the ITU.

Victoria Samson at the Secure World Foundation, a US non-profit, says the Chinese filing might be a land grab of sorts. “It is possible they’re just trying to create some space for later on,” she says. “It is also possible that maybe they’re planning on something that big.”

Staking this claim with the ITU means that other satellite operators filing to launch into the same orbits must demonstrate to the ITU that they will not interfere with their operations. Under ITU rules, at least one satellite must be launched seven years after China’s initial filing, with another seven years then allowed to finish launching all the proposed satellites.

“If you file ahead of someone else, if you meet your deadlines, those other operators should not interfere with you,” says Tim Farrar, a satellite communications consultant in the US, adding that China’s large filing for so many different orbits might signal some uncertainty in the structure of this constellation. “It gives them freedom of choice of what they want to do,” he says. “There’s very little penalty to doing it this way.”

But even if the application is genuine, achieving it seems to be almost impossible. China launched 92 rockets in 2025, a record for the nation, but would need to launch more than 500 satellites a week to deploy 200,000 in seven years, requiring hundreds, if not thousands, of launches a year.

This wouldn’t be the first attempt at a land grab in space. In 2021, Rwanda filed for a constellation of 327,000 satellites with the ITU into 27 orbits. However, the filing hasn’t hampered the activity of Starlink and other operators. “People have not really changed what they’re doing,” says Farrar. “These Rwandan satellites don’t seem likely to be built in any significant quantity.”

But China’s application does highlight the growing competition in the mega-constellation field, particularly for space internet companies that aim to capture a potential market of tens or hundreds of millions of people and control the world’s flow of information. Currently, everyone is playing catch-up to compete with SpaceX. Amazon’s Project Leo in the US, formerly called Project Kuiper, has launched about 200 satellites of a planned 3236, while two major state-backed Chinese constellations called Qianfan and Guowang have launched a few hundred out of thousands of planned satellites.

“Fifteen years ago, the idea of having 1000 satellites in one constellation was crazy,” says Samson. “Now here we are with 9000-plus with Starlink.”

Source: China has applied to launch 200,000 satellites, but what are they for? | New Scientist

Signal Founder Creates Truly Private GPT: Confer

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When you use an AI service, you’re handing over your thoughts in plaintext. The operator stores them, trains on them, and–inevitably–will monetize them. You get a response; they get everything.

Confer works differently. In the previous post, we described how Confer encrypts your chat history with keys that never leave your devices. The remaining piece to consider is inference—the moment your prompt reaches an LLM and a response comes back.

Traditionally, end-to-end encryption works when the endpoints are devices under the control of a conversation’s participants. However, AI inference requires a server with GPUs to be an endpoint in the conversation. Someone has to run that server, but we want to prevent the people who are running it (us) from seeing prompts or the responses.

Confidential computing

This is the domain of confidential computing. Confidential computing uses hardware-enforced isolation to run code in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). The host machine provides CPU, memory, and power, but cannot access the TEE’s memory or execution state.

LLMs are fundamentally stateless—input in, output out—which makes them ideal for this environment. For Confer, we run inference inside a confidential VM. Your prompts are encrypted from your device directly into the TEE using Noise Pipes, processed there, and responses are encrypted back. The host never sees plaintext.

But this raises an obvious concern: even if we have encrypted pipes in and out of an encrypted environment, it really matters what is running inside that environment. The client needs assurance that the code running is actually doing what it claims.

[…]

Source: Private inference | Confer Blog

Passports, bank details compromised in Eurail / Interrail data breach

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Eurail has confirmed customer information was stolen in a data breach, according to notification emails sent out this week.

The European travel company, also known as Interrail to EU residents, initially posted the news on January 10, but affected customers, the number of whom was not disclosed, began receiving emails on January 13.

While the company’s investigation is ongoing, it revealed the data potentially affected includes:

  • First and last names
  • Dates of birth
  • Genders
  • Email addresses
  • Home addresses
  • Telephone numbers
  • Passport numbers
  • Passport issuing country
  • Passport expiration date

Customers who purchased a travel pass directly from Eurail/Interrail did not have a visual copy of their passports stored on company systems.

However, the same is not true for those who received a pass through the DiscoverEU program, an Erasmus-funded initiative that invites travelers to explore the EU by rail.

The European Commission published a separate notice about the Eurail breach, saying that in addition to the data specified in the company’s email, DiscoverEU travelers may also have photocopies of their IDs, bank account reference numbers, and health data compromised.

[…]

Source: Passports, bank details compromised in Eurail data breach • The Register

Europe is Rediscovering the Virtues of Cash

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After spending years pushing digital payments to combat tax evasion and money laundering, European Union ministers decided in December to ban businesses from refusing cash. The reversal comes as 12% of European businesses flatly refused cash in 2024, up from 4% three years earlier.

Over one in three cinemas in the Netherlands no longer accept notes and coins. Cash usage across the euro area dropped from 79% of in-person transactions in 2016 to just 52% in 2024. Sweden leads the digital shift where 90% of purchases now happen digitally and cash represents under 1% of GDP compared to 22% in Japan.

The policy change stems from concerns about financial inclusion for elderly and poor populations who struggle with digital systems. Resilience worries also drove the decision after Spaniards facing nationwide power cuts last spring found themselves unable to buy food. European officials worry about dependence on American payment giants Visa and MasterCard. The EU now recommends citizens store enough cash to survive a week without electricity or internet access.

Source: Europe is Rediscovering the Virtues of Cash | Slashdot

Also, when under digital attack it’s useful to be able to get at your money. This is not theoretical, bank attacks by the Russians regularly take down Finnish payment methods.