Losses like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 might soon be a thing of the past, with new satellites that will soon allow flights to be tracked in real time over oceans. 

New international safety standards also begin to kick-in next year, although the deadline for airlines to meet most of the standards is still four years away. Even then, it could be decades before the changes permeate the entire global airline fleet because some of the requirements apply only to newly manufactured planes. 

Atholl Buchan, director of flight operations at the International Air Transport Association, which represents most international carriers, said a repeat of MH370 is "highly unlikely" since many airlines have already increased their efforts to keep tabs on planes over open ocean where they are beyond the reach of land-based radar. 

"In a few years, new systems and technology will allow for global surveillance coverage," he said. 
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The International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency, approved a series of new global safety standards last year in response to MH370, including a requirement that airline pilots flying over ocean out of the range of radar report their position by radio every 15 minutes. Previously, they were required to report every 30 minutes. The new requirement kicks in next year, but many airlines have already switched.

It took a year from proof of concept to in-the-wild attack, but ransomware for Android-based smart TVs is now here. As one victim discovered this Christmas, figuring out how to clean such an infection can be quite difficult.

Ransomware for Android phones has already been around for several years, and security experts have warned in the past that it's only a matter of time until such malicious programs start affecting smart TVs, especially since some of them also run Android.

In November 2015, a Symantec researcher named Candid Wueest even went as far as to infect his own TV with an Android ransomware application to highlight the threat. While that infection was just a demonstration, this Christmas, the owner of an LG Electronics TV experienced the real deal.

Kansas-based software developer Darren Cauthon reported on Twitter on Dec. 25 that a family member accidentally infected his Android-based TV with ransomware after downloading a movie-watching app. The picture shared by Cauthon showed the TV screen with an FBI-themed ransom message.

On Android, most ransomware applications are so-called screen lockers. They work by displaying persistent messages on the phone's screen and preventing users from performing any other actions on their devices. The messages usually impersonate some law enforcement authority and ask victims to pay fictitious fines to regain control.

Cauthon, who was the previous owner of the three-year-old TV, tried to help the new owner restore the device to its default factory settings, but didn't succeed even after receiving many suggestions and advice from other Twitter users.

According to the software developer, when he first contacted LG's tech support, he was told that a technician would have to come over and the fee for the visit would be $340.

The ransom amount itself was $500 although even paying that would have been difficult because there was no way to click on the payment section to find the instructions on how to do so. The only thing that worked was just moving a mouse-like pointer on a portion of the TV screen via an accompanying smart remote.

Eventually, LG provided Cauthon with a solution that involved pressing and releasing two physical buttons on the TV in a specific order. This action booted the TV, which runs the now defunct Android-based Google TV platform, into a recovery mode.

The Android recovery mode allows wiping the data partition, which deletes all user settings, apps and data and is the equivalent of a factory reset. While this sounds straightforward, Cauthon's experience suggests that many users would have difficulty figuring it out on their own and would probably be forced to pay for technical assistance.

If recovering from smart TV ransomware infections can be hard, imagine what users would have to deal with if these programs start infecting other internet-of-things devices, as some security experts predict.
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In this case, the victim was lucky because the ransomware app was only a screen locker and not a program that encrypts files. Smart TVs have USB ports and allow connecting external hard disk drives to watch personal videos or photo collections – the type of data that are valuable to users, especially if they're not backed up.

The last time we had a significant shift in our technology standards, people couldn’t figure out if their television would work without a tiny little box or not. The transfer from over-the-air broadcasting to digital transmissions was worth it in the end, but the confusion surrounding what to do was hard to ignore. And now we might be on the verge of another big change with Norway leading the way despite some complaints.
FM broadcasting which found its start in 1933 and would become the go-to format for musical radio over the coming decades might now be facing the end. This shouldn’t be surprising given the rise of streaming, satellite radio, and personal audio over the past years, but now there’s some spotlight on the end of FM thanks to decisions by a few nations around the globe to move on from the long-running format.

Several countries have suggested they might also shut down FM at some point soon. Switzerland, for example, has set a date of 2020 for a switch from FM to AM. “Many countries are now looking to Norway to learn,” Ole Jorgen Torvmark, head of a project called Digital Radio Norway being run by national broadcasters to aid the transition, said when the 2017 shutdown was first announced in 2015…
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Estimating that the cost of FM was eight times higher than digital, Norway’s government argued that the savings could be spent on improving radio content. “Radio digitization will open the door to a far greater range of radio channels, benefiting listeners across the country,” then-Minister of Culture Thorhild Widvey said in a statement in 2015. “Listeners will have access to more diverse and pluralistic radio content, and enjoy a better sound quality and new functionality.”

Who needs a hard drive, or for that matter cloud storage? With Kingston’s new 2 TB flash drive—yes, that’s two terabytes—you can carry around your entire digital life, right in your pocket.

After debuting the 1 TB Kingston DataTraveler HyperX Predator USB 3.0 flash drive last year, Kingston has one-upped itself with the DataTraveler Ultimate Generation Terabyte, a similar USB 3.0 flash drive with capacities of up to two terabytes, using a USB 3.1 interface. 

As you can see from the picture, the Ultimate Generation Terabyte is a monster, as the key itself dwarfs the USB connector. It measures 2.83 inches by 1 inch by 0.83 inches and it comes wrapped in a tough zinc-alloy metal casing that can survive sub-zero temperatures all the way down to 40 below zero, and protect your data all the way to up to a toasty 185 degrees Fahrenheit.

So what can you do with all that storage? Kingston has some suggestions: Store up to 70 hours of 4K video. Or 256,000 16MB photos. Or 96 PC games. You get the idea. So what will this little monster cost? Well, that’s where it gets interesting.

Kingston isn’t divulging a price for the new drive, though we can discern some clues from its last-generation drive. The DataTraveler HyperX Predator ships in two capacities: $295.59 for the 512 GB version, and a whopping $2,730 for the 1 TB version. (Both prices come from Amazon; Kingston doesn’t list any prices for the drive on its own website.) It’s reasonable, then, to assume that Kingston will charge much, much more than $2,730 for the new 2 TB model, and it’s possible that the price could even double to $5,500 because of the sheer novelty of the product.
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But, who cares? You’ve got 2 terabytes in your pocket.

The French postal service will soon start a new drone delivery program to carry parcels on a set nine-mile route, the agency announced, following approval from the French aviation regulatory authority.

It’s just an experiment for now, not a fully launched program, and will only operate once a week. But it is the first time a federal postal service will use drones to deliver on a regular route.

The DPDgroup, a subsidiary of the French national postal service, has been perfecting its drone delivery project since 2014 in the south of France, working in partnership with Atechsys, a French drone company. In September 2015, the drone delivery project demonstrated its aircraft could fly in complete autonomy carrying a package weighing over three pounds a distance of nearly nine miles.

The drone route stretches between Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Beaume and Pourrières in the Provence region of France in the southeast of the country. For now, its businesses are participating in the experiment, including a dozen tech companies that can now receive parcels by drone, according to a statement from DPDgroup.

Eventually, Le Groupe La Poste, the name of the French postal service, hopes to use drones to deliver parcels in hard to reach rural or mountainous regions, where last-mile delivery is difficult and expensive by ground vehicle.

The drones used in the French postal experiment can fly as far as 12 miles carrying a payload of about two pounds at a maximum speed of about 19 miles per hour and are equipped with a parachute to land safely in case of a disruption with the flight.
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The U.S. Postal Service has been looking into drones, too. In October, USPS released the results of a survey gauging how Americans feel about the idea of drones carrying parcels to American doorsteps, showing more Americans like the idea of drone delivery than dislike it.