Lifeboat Foundation

OTTAWA — A Chinese telecommunication company secretly diverted Canadian internet traffic to China, particularly from Rogers subscribers in the Ottawa area, says an Israeli cybersecurity specialist.

The 2016 incident involved the surreptitious rerouting of the internet data of Rogers customers in and around Canada’s capital by China Telecom, a state-owned internet service provider that has two legally operating “points of presence” on Canadian soil, said Yuval Shavitt, an electrical-engineering expert at Tel Aviv University.

Shavitt told The Canadian Press that the China Telecom example should serve as a caution to the Canadian government not to do business with another Chinese telecommunications giant: Huawei Technologies, which is vying to build Canada’s next-generation 5G wireless communications networks.

Continue reading “Israeli cyberexpert detects China hack in Ottawa, warns against using Huawei 5G” »

Another step forward in robotics self-awareness. This robot learns it’s own kinematics without human intervention and then learns to plot solution paths.

Columbia Engineering researchers have made a major advance in robotics by creating a robot that learns what it is, from scratch, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. Once their robot creates a self-simulation, it can then use that self-model to adapt to different situations, to handle new tasks as well as detect and repair damage in its own body.

At the IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture in February, Illinois computer engineering associate professor Rakesh Kumar and his collaborators will make the case for a wafer-scale computer consisting of as many as 40 GPUs. Simulations of this multiprocessor monster sped calculations nearly 19-fold and cut the combination of energy consumption and signal delay more than 140-fold.

Engineers aim to use “silicon interconnect fabric” to build a computer with 40 GPUs on a single silicon wafer.

To make its developers’ jobs more rewarding, Facebook is now using two automated tools called Sapienz and SapFix to find and repair low-level bugs in its mobile apps. Sapienz runs the apps through many tests to figure out which actions will cause it to crash. Then, SapFix recommends a fix to developers, who review it and decide whether to accept the fix, come up with their own, or ignore the problem.

Engineers began using Sapienz to review the Facebook app in September 2017, and have gradually begun using it for the rest of the company’s apps (which include Messenger, Instagram, Facebook Lite, and Workplace). In May, the team will describe its more recent adoption of SapFix at the International Conference on Software Engineering in Montreal, Canada (and they’re hiring).

Continue reading “Meet the Bots That Review and Write Snippets of Facebook’s Code” »

Illinois researchers have introduced a new cutting-edge reusable adhesive that activates in seconds, works underwater, and is strong enough to deadlift 11 pounds: shape memory polymers (SMPs).

The team—associate professor in mechanical science and engineering Seok Kim, graduate student Jun Kyu Park, and former graduate student Jeffrey D. Eisenhaure (Ph. D. ME ‘17, now with Northrop Grumman)—has proved that SMPs can retain dry adhesion properties while submerged. Their study, “Reversible underwater dry adhesion of a shape memory polymer,” was recently published by the scientific journal Advanced Materials Interfaces.

Continue reading “Groundbreaking new reusable adhesive works underwater” »

Engineering researchers have demonstrated proof-of-principle for a device that could serve as the backbone of a future quantum Internet. University of Toronto Engineering professor Hoi-Kwong Lo and his collaborators have developed a prototype for a key element for all-photonic quantum repeaters, a critical step in long-distance quantum communication.

© Getty Harvard scientists will attempt to replicate the climate-cooling effect of volcanic eruptions with a world-first solar geoengineering experiment set for early 2019.

The Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) will inject calcium carbonate particles high above the earth in an attempt to reflect some of the sun’s rays back into space.

It will likely mark the first time the controversial concept of dimming the sun — more scientifically known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) — will be tested in the real world.

Continue reading “First geoengineering experiment to dim the sun on track for 2019” »

In the future, industrial robots may create jobs, boost productivity and spur higher wages. But one thing seems more certain for now: They’re vulnerable to hackers.

Factories, hospitals and other big robot users often lack sufficient levels of defense against a digital attack, according to cybersecurity experts, robot manufacturers and engineering researchers. The risk levels are rising as more robots morph from being offline and isolated to being internet-connected machines, often working alongside humans.

5G promises to make factories a lot smarter. And that means they’ll be a lot more vulnerable.

Continue reading “For Industrial Robots, Hacking Risks Are On the Rise” »