Hughes Network Systems has announced a new suite of innovations that will advance connectivity beyond single-transport services, yielding smart solutions for small business, enterprise, aeronautical and military applications, the company announced on Thursday.  

"Everyone wants to be connected, everywhere, all the time, and we are innovating the technologies and services that make constant connectivity possible for people, enterprises and things," said Pradman Kaul, president of Hughes. 

New Hughes technologies include multi-transport terminals, satellite roaming capabilities and patented Hughes ActivePath technology that dynamically senses and selects the best available transport technology.

Hughes’ HT2000L, its multi-transport terminal, will provide connectivity for satellite, cellular, and LTE services. The company has integrated a primary network path with automatic failover switching to enable a compact software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solution. 

The company has also developed satellite system roaming, referred to as the JUPITER System. The new software will utilize Hughes’ VSAT platform for broadband satellite communication on land, sea and air. The system supports roaming capabilities for aeronautical and maritime mobility applications.

Hughes has also introduced Hughes ActivePath Technology to power multi-transport services. A proprietary, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technology, Hughes ActivePath automatically classifies customer traffic flows and selects the best mode of transport – such as HTS or LTE – to optimize the transmission. 

"We are making the connected future possible with innovations that leverage the value of geostationary High-Throughput Satellites (HTS), Non-Geostationary Orbit (NGSO) satellites and terrestrial services, because we need every type of transport to meet the unabating demand for bandwidth."

About Hughes Network Systems

Hughes Network Systems, LLC (HUGHES) is the global leader in broadband satellite technology and services for home and office. Its flagship high-speed satellite Internet service is HughesNet®, the world's largest satellite network with over 1.4 million residential and business customers across the Americas. 

For large enterprises and governments, the company's HughesON managed network services provide complete connectivity solutions employing an optimized mix of satellite and terrestrial technologies.

The U.S. Air Force put a one-fifteenth scale F-35A Lightning II model in a transonic wind tunnel to test the aircraft's store separation. The test took place ahead of schedule at Arnold Air Force Base's Engineering Development Complex 4, USAF said Tuesday.

“Our goal was to collect aerodynamic data used to determine characteristics of the GBU-54/38 Laser JDAM metric store for all three variants of the F-35,” said Jimmy Williams, a project manager with USAF.

A separation test trials the safety of an aircraft as it releases missiles, fuel tanks or other stores. The test assessed the aerodynamic effects of carried stores and the actual separation or release across two phases.

The U.S. Army plans to deploy an authenticator app that will provide an alternative for personnel seeking to log into systems without a Common Access Card, FedScoop reported Monday. The Army is continuing a pilot program to assess the capacity of the YubiKeys app in an effort to expand system access to users without a physical card or token.

YubiKeys makes use of USB tokens and multifactor authentication to verify user credentials and enable remote log-ins through devices and mobile phones. The service is continuing testing activities and is slated to conclude the pilot effort with over 1,000 participants this month.

“Multifactor authentication for the Army is a game changer for our Soldiers,” Lee James, project director for enterprise services at the Army.  “It allows Soldiers the convenience and capability of conducting business in a secure way from their own devices and on their own time.”

If successful, the pilot will result in additional purchases of YubiKeys USB tokens which may be used to allow log-ins during remote training and emergency response activities. YubiKeys will not serve as a replacement for CAC, according to the report.

The Department of Justice's (DOJ) Cybersecurity Unit has published a document that addresses the legality of certain intelligence-gathering approaches. The unit tackled methods that utilize online "dark web" forums where contributors discuss computer crimes and sell illegally obtained data, DOJ said.

Organizations that intend to access these forums may do so in a legal manner by using credentials that do not steal the identities of other people. Forum operators would provide these legitimate credentials. The use of stolen credentials and other unauthorized means may violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and other related roles.

Private entities may conduct intelligence gathering in these forums, but may be subject to illegal concerns if they take part in dark web activities. Dark web forums also feature services that are considered illegal. Illegal offerings include stolen passwords, credit card accounts and other means of unauthorized information access.

The National Science Foundation will invest $90 million in funds to support an initiative that seeks to develop a framework that will scale high-performance computing platforms and applications, HPCwire reported Monday.

The Principles and Practice of Scalable Systems program aims to address scalability gaps with artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches. It will also validate the distributed trait of applications and accommodate proof-of-principles for scalable and secure applications, tools and systems.

"We are now entering a new era, where achieving the same pace of transformative computing innovation will require a refamiliarization of different communities—algorithms, hardware, networking, software, systems—with each other’s domains and the development of new abstractions and paradigms to handle the domain-specific challenges we are already confronting,” said Rance Cleaveland, director at NSF's computing and communications foundations division.

NSF has started accepting submissions for the initiative's planning phase, while proposals for large projects will be entertained in 2021. Proposals for large projects are required to employ full-stack approaches within various areas. Fifteen projects may receive grants up to $80 million for the project phase of the program.