Lifeboat Foundation

Criminal’s favorite new tool for extortion.

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center was the target of a ransomware extortion plot in which hackers seized control of the hospital’s computer systems and then demanded that directors pay in bitcoin to regain access, according to law enforcement sources.

Ransomware attacks on business data systems are becoming an increasingly common form of cyber crime. The assault on Hollywood Presbyterian computers occurred Feb. 5, when hackers prevented hospital staff from accessing patient information, according to law enforcement sources, who were not authorized to discuss the details of the investigation. The hackers then demanded an unspecified sum of computer currency.

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Government and tech + telecom & ISPs need to come to an agreement in how to ensure innocent people’s privacy are respected. When a person murders, stalk, threaten, kidnap, and/ or assault a person then we have a responsibility first to protect the innocent public. And, with the resistance being displayed by Apple, are we running the risk of further alienating the consumers and business customers more when it comes to releasing AI like robots, self driving cars, etc. onto the public where criminals can buy AI technology and use it to hurt others?

We really need to be addressing these issues soon.

Tim Cook is playing a dangerous game of brinkmanship with the U.S. government. In the process, he may set in motion political and judicial processes that will endanger the security of all our mobile devices.

Continue reading “Apple CEO Tim Cook’s Dangerous Game” »

A radical discovery by researchers at Harvard and Raytheon BBN Technology about graphene’s hidden properties could lead to a model system to explore exotic phenomena like black holes and high-energy plasmas, as well as novel thermoelectric devices.

Continue reading “A black hole on a chip made of a metal that behaves like water” »

Jungsang Kim is trying to create a quantum computer by controlling the frequency of a laser to within a millionth of a percent.

According to David DiVincenzo, a prominent computer scientist at IBM, researchers must meet five criteria to create a true quantum computing device.

First, Kim needs a well-defined system that can represent different states. For example, classical computers use small electrical switches made out of semiconductors to indicate a 1 or a 0. But because an atom’s quantum spin can point in an infinite number of directions, controlling its state with a high degree of reliability is very difficult. Kim’s group has demonstrated this feat with an accuracy on par with anyone in the world.

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This is one that truly depends on the targeted audience. I still believe that the 1st solely owned & operated female robotics company will make billions.

Beyond correct pronunciation, there is the even larger challenge of correctly placing human qualities like inflection and emotion into speech. Linguists call this “prosody,” the ability to add correct stress, intonation or sentiment to spoken language.

Today, even with all the progress, it is not possible to completely represent rich emotions in human speech via artificial intelligence. The first experimental-research results — gained from employing machinelearning algorithms and huge databases of human emotions embedded in speech — are just becoming available to speech scientists.

Continue reading “How designers are grappling with the challenges of creating a computer ‘personality’” »

Radiation works as a ‘tuning fork’ to control the spin of electrons.

Scientists have found a new way of moving information between quantum bits in a computer. They used a highly purified sample of silicon doped with bismuth atoms (left) before fitting a superconducting aluminium resonator to it (middle and right).

Continue reading “Could microwaves finally crack quantum computing?” »

Theoretical physicists at MIT recently reported a quantum computer design featuring an array of superconducting islands on the surface of a topological insulator. They propose basing both quantum computation and error correction on the peculiar behavior of electrons at neighboring corners of these islands and their ability to interact across islands at a distance. “The lowest energy state of this system is a very highly entangled quantum state, and it is this state that can be used to encode and manipulate qubits,” says graduate student Sagar Vijay, lead co-author of the paper on the proposed system, with senior author Liang Fu, associate professor of physics at MIT, and Timothy H. Hsieh PhD ’15. As Vijay explains it, the proposed system can encode logical qubits that can be read by shining light on them. At the simplest level of explanation, the system can characterize the state of a quantum bit as a zero or a one based on whether there is an odd or even number of electrons associated with a superconducting quantum bit, but the underlying physical interactions that allow this are highly complex.

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Scientists at the University of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years.

Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving.

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“Computers are becoming more and more intelligent in the sense that they adapt to us.”

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