Month: July 2023

NASA is launching its first streaming service, NASA Plus, for live broadcasts and new original shows. Here are the details.

If you’ve already devoured all of the space-themed content available on the best streaming services, fear not – NASA has announced that it’s launching its first on-demand streaming platform to give stargazers a new alternative to Netflix.

Naturally, the service will be called NASA Plus, adopting the mandatory naming scheme for (almost) all streaming platforms. And the good news is that it’ll initially be an ad-free service with no monthly fees, offering live broadcasts and also access to NASA’s collections of original video series (including some that will launch with NASA Plus).

NASA plans to launch the service “later this year”, although given that it also describes the update as “coming soon”, we’re hopeful that it will arrive before the end of August. It’ll apparently be available on most smartphones, desktop and some of the best streaming devices – so, as well as being available on NASA’s iOS and Android apps and via web browsers, you’ll be able to get it on Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV devices.

The space agency has previously won Emmy awards for its coverage of the SpaceX Demo-1 mission in 2019, which combined live coverage on TV and radio, plus social media stunts and in-person events. 

But it’s the promise of new original video series that will likely get space fans flocking to the service when it launches in the next few months, particularly given NASA Plus will be completely free (at least, to start with).

The move comes as part of a relaunch of the agency’s website and mobile app – and you can check out an early beta version of the new NASA website right now. It looks like a much more polished hub for news, photos and info about the International Space Station and more.

A new, free streaming star?

When we saw the NASA Plus name, we assumed it’d be another paid streaming service to sit alongside Apple TV Plus and Disney Plus – but thankfully, NASA says it’ll be free of both monthly charges and ads.

This suggests that NASA Plus won’t have a vast library of content initially, and naturally space-themed dramas such as The Martian will still live on the likes of Disney Plus.

But NASA does have a decent roster of live events planned for August and we’re intrigued to see those new original video series on the service when it does launch in full.

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On-device attestation looks to ensure Samsung Galaxy devices are protected from the latest threats.

Microsoft and Samsung have announced a new joint project to help protect employees who use the latter’s Galaxy devices be safer in the workplace.

This project, which the two companies described as a “groundbreaking solution”, involves an on-device device attestation, a on-device, mobile hardware-backed solution to verify device trust and health. 

It allows companies to see if the mobile devices their employees are using have been compromised, “even at their deepest components”. 

Samsung Galaxy boost

Samsung is bringing its software and hardware innovations to the table, while Microsoft will be providing its endpoint management expertise.

The solution is being released in Augus 2023 alongside the release of Microsoft Intune, and will be available to select Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablets (for example, those with Android 10 OS or later, as well as those “Secured by Knox”. 

Microsoft Intune (previously known as Windows Intune) is the company’s cloud-based unified endpoint management service for both corporate and BYOD devices. It extends some of the on-prem functionalities of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Secured by Knox is Samsung’s defense-grade mobile security platform.

In a blog post announcing the news, Microsoft says modern device attestation tools require a network connection and access to cloud services, meaning the device may fail validation if there’s no internet, of if there’s service outage. 

Furthermore, remote validation could result in high latency between detecting a threat, and notifying the device’s owners/users that they’ve been compromised with malware. 

“Complete protection from threats, however, requires that devices be attested immediately and reliably regardless of network connectivity or device ownership model,” the company concluded.

“Samsung’s hardware-backed cryptography and Intune app protection policies verify the client endpoint (application + device) and secure the communication between Intune client and service. Altogether, this helps to prevent malicious endpoints from accessing organization resources using valid client information taken from another device and limiting tampering with client requests.”

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