We all were unaware of the surprise that the year 2020 has stored for all of us. If I would’ve told you back in 2019 that the whole world would get shut down in the next year, you probably have called me a crazy girl right?

But the way nature changed its course everyone was limited to their homes in the year 2020. Due to the sudden limitations and the precautions which everyone needed to take, people started regarding the internet as their “safe place”.

With several months of lockdown, people started using social media in the ways they never thought of doing (not always the productive ones though) and the usage of digital media increased at a Godly speed. From doing shopping to getting health updates, everything was done online.

We, humans, have never craved to feel the touch of our loved ones so bad. We started to use our gadgets as our weapons to kill boredom and have some fun.

Even though all of this took a huge toll on our mental health as well as physical health but we are grateful that we survived the worst wave of the pandemic.

However, these latest technologies and accessories created confusion between our online and offline lives. As we gradually lost control of our real life and started to get engrossed more in our digital lives.

Many of us didn’t know whether we were working from home or were we living in our workplace now? Also, our education system took a drastic turn, suddenly our whole degree was now depending on the internet connections, laptops, and other devices.

In the middle of 2020, the death toll rose dangerously as every single home was losing a loved one to the deadly virus.

People were scared and started to think about what if they had to live their remaining life on social media? Or what if their real-life stopped to exist? On realizing the consequences, Rikard Steiber with some other former executives of Google started a company called “GoodTrust”.

The GoodTrust is a platform that was previously used for raising charity and funds for people who can’t live a good life with daily necessities.

However, now it will also protect the digital lives as a memoir of your loved ones who have passed away, unfortunately. It will help you in canceling their Netflix subscriptions, memorializing their Facebook profiles, saving their pictures and documents, etc.

Death is a fact and everyone will face it, however, to make our digital lives as real as we can, this initiative has been taken. Through GoodTrust we can create a digital legacy the people who will always remain in our hearts and memories.

We have still not recovered fully from the pandemic and neither we can for the next few years and moving forward is the only option left. So we should try to fulfill the last wishes of people around us even if we get to do it virtually.

The European Space Agency (ESA) said on 18 July that mission planners at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the ESA’s Operations Centre (ESOC) have decided on the path of the Lunar Gateway, humankind’s first permanent outpost to orbit the Moon.

Instead of orbiting around the Moon in a low lunar orbit like the Apollo missions, the Gateway will follow a highly “eccentric” path in which it will pass 3000 kilometres from surface of the Moon at its closest and 70,000 kilometres at its furthest away.

This path is called a “near-rectilinear halo” orbit (NHRO) and it will actually rotate with the Moon – as see from Earth it will appear “a little like a lunar halo”. According to the ESA, orbits like this are possible because of the “interplay between the Earth and Moon’s gravitational forces”.

As the two large bodies “dance” through space, a smaller object can be “caught” in a variety of stable, or near-stable, positions in relation to the orbiting masses, which are also known as “libration” or Lagrange points.

Such locations are “perfect for planning long-term missions, and to some extent dictate the design of the spacecraft, what it can carry to and from orbit, and how much energy it needs to get – and stay – there”, the ESA said.

Travelling on the NRHO path, one revolution of the Gateway in its orbit about the Moon would take around seven days, a time period that was chosen in order to limit the number of eclipses (when the Gateway would be in the Earth or Moon’s shadow). The Gateway will need to make “regular small station-keeping manoeuvres” to stay in position.

“Finding a lunar orbit for the gateway is no trivial thing,” Markus Landgraf, an Architecture Analyst working with ESA’s Human and Robotic Exploration activities, said in a statement. “If you want to stay there for several years, the near rectilinear halo orbit is slightly unstable and objects in this orbit do have a tendency of drifting away.”

The Gateway will be a “permanent and changeable” human outpost, much like the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits the Earth, acting as a base for astronauts and robots exploring the lunar surface.

In a press release, the ESA compared The Gateway to a “mountain refuge” as it “will also provide shelter and a place to stock up on supplies for astronauts en route to more distant destinations, as well as providing a place to relay communications and a laboratory for scientific research”.

The plan is that it should act as a “staging post” from where parts of spacecraft can be left behind, picked up or assembled. After lift-off, only a moderate manoeuvre should be needed to slow a visiting spacecraft to rendezvous with the Gateway, the ESA said.

The “fundamental limiting factor” when moving parts from Earth to a potential lunar base and the surface of the Moon is the vast amount of energy required to escape our planet’s gravitational pull. To land on the Moon as opposed to hurtling straight past it, we have to slow down by losing that same energy.

In theory, we can save some of this energy by leaving parts of the spacecraft in orbit and taking only what we need to the surface of the Moon. The Lunar lander will transport people, robots and infrastructure down to the surface – and back up again – when the Gateway is closest to the Moon.

“In human spaceflight we don’t fly one single, monolithic spacecraft,” Florian Renk, a Mission Analyst in ESOC’s Flight Dynamics Division, explained. “Instead we fly bits and pieces, putting parts together in space and soon on the surface of the Moon. Some parts we leave behind, some we bring back – the structures are forever evolving.”

The ESA plans to assemble and operate the Gateway during the 2020s, during which time they anticipate it will “move between different orbits and enable the most distant human space missions ever attempted” and “offer a platform for scientific discovery in deep space and build invaluable experience for the challenges of future human missions to Mars”.

Mission analysis teams at ESOC are “continuing to work closely with international partners to understand how the choice of orbit affects vital aspects of the mission . . . including landing, rendezvous with future spacecraft and contingency scenarios needed to keep people and infrastructure safe”.

“The flight dynamics expertise here at ESOC is unique in Europe,” Rolf Densing, ESA’s Director of Operations, concluded.

“Our analysts and flight dynamics experts provide support to a full range of missions, including some of the most complex and exciting like the lunar Gateway,” he said. “We can’t wait to see this ambitious international endeavour realised.”

The Trusted Computing Group (TCG), founded in 2003 by major technology companies to secure computers’ cryptographic keys, announced plans on 13 June to develop the “world’s tiniest Trusted Platform Module (TPM)” for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Put most simply, a TPM is a tamper resistant piece of cryptographic hardware – or security coprocessor – built onto the system board of a computer that implements primitive cryptographic functions onto which more complex features can be built.

Among other functions, it can perform public key cryptographic operations and compute hash functions, manage and generate security keys, securely store those keys and other secret data, and generate random numbers.

TPMs are frequently left out of IoT products due to size, budget or space constraints, which is what TCG is hoping to address with this initiative by developing a TPM small enough to be “integrated directly within the host chip,” eliminating space concerns for developers who still want to incorporate the additional security provided by a TPM.

Many manufacturers still want to build devices that include Roots of Trust for Measurement (RTM), Storage (RTS) and Reporting (RTR) so that these devices can work securely within the TCG Measurement and Attestation framework.

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Attestation is a mechanism for software to prove its identity, and prove to a remote party that its operating system and application software are intact and trustworthy. The verifier trusts that the attestation data is accurate because it is signed by a TPM whose key is certified by a trusted Certification Authority.

TCG said it had formed a new Measurement and Attestation RootS (MARS) Subgroup to “develop specifications that will enable manufacturers to build compliant chips with very little overhead for them and their customers”.

The company exhibited the first prototype for such a TPM – known as “Radicle” – due the inaugural session of the MARS subgroup at the TCG member’s meeting held this year in Warsaw, Poland, in June.

In a statement, TCG said that the team had also “agreed on the scope of its work, which will focus on the hardware requirements necessary to control and operate the primitives supporting the RTS and RTR, and the software API to access them”.

“As we put greater trust in things like autonomous cars, smart homes and healthcare sensors, and connect them to the Internet, we need to take steps to make sure connected devices are ubiquitously secure to protect them from data breaches and hackers,” Dr Joerg Borchert, President of TCG, said in a statement.

“As an international standard, TCG’s TPM is widely deployed and a proven solution,” he added. “This makes our technologies ideally suited to deliver on the new security needs emerging as we move towards a world where everything is connected. The work undertaken at our latest members’ meeting will ultimately deliver the specifications needed to achieve this.”

“In a nutshell, we want to specify what the tiniest TPM needs to be so it can be integrated directly within the host chip,” Tom Brostrom, Chair of the MARS subgroup, said. “This will ensure that devices that aren’t big enough to integrate a separate TPM will still be able to retain the required RTS/RTR capabilities.

“In turn, this will allow greater reach of trusted computing technologies over a wider set of devices and use cases,” he concluded.

A recent report by non-partisan, US-based think tank Pew Research Centre has found that the vast majority of adults in emerging and developing countries own – or have access to – a mobile phone, and widely use both social media and messaging apps.

The report looked at mobile phone use by adults over 18 years of age across 11 countries, including Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia; South Africa and Kenya; India, Vietnam and the Philippines; and Tunisia, Jordan and Lebanon.

These countries were selected on the basis that they are all middle-income countries as defined by the World Bank, contain a mixture of people using different kinds of device, offer country-level diversity and variety, vary in market conditions, and in many cases have high levels of internal or external migration.

Researchers found that an average of 53% of people across the nations surveyed had access to smartphones with the capability to access the internet and run apps, including WhatsApp and Facebook, both of which notably enjoyed wide use in these countries. According to the study, an average of 64% of people across the surveyed countries used at least one of seven different social media sites or messaging apps.

Smartphone and social media use were so closely intertwined, in fact, that an average of 91% of smartphone users in these countries said they also used social media, while an average of 81% of social media users said they owned or shared a smartphone.

The report found that people in these nations believed they had been personally helped by mobile phone in many ways, such as helping them to stay in touch with distant relatives and friends, and to obtain news and information about important issues. Furthermore, a majority of adults in all 11 countries surveyed said that the internet had a good impact on education – and a majority said the same about mobile phones specifically.

A smaller percentage of adults in the surveyed countries said mobile phones and social media had been good for society, and the report found that challenges posed by digital life for children were a “notable source of concern”. It was common for parents to say that they attempted to “curtail and surveil they child’s screen time”.

Around 79% of adults in these countries said they believed that “people should be very concerned about children being exposed to harmful or immoral content when using mobile phones”, while an average of 63% of surveyed adults said mobile phones had a “bad influence on children in their country”. They also expressed mixed opinions about the impact of increased connectivity on physical health and morality.

These concerns mirror those expressed by journalists and politicians in the developed world concerning the impacts of social media on elections (e.g. alleged Russian bots on Twitter during the 2016 US Presidential election), the behaviour of children and young adults, and the spread of far-right conspiracy theories on social media, among other worries.

Some of the issues listed in the survey spanned all the countries included in the survey, although some issues were “nation-specific”, such as addiction to mobile phones. Over half of mobile phone users in five of the countries described their phone as “something they couldn’t live without”, whereas users in the other six countries were more likely to describe it as “something they don’t always need”.