Lifeboat Foundation

Once the modchip plans are live, you can, too.

And cleaning up the resulting space debris would be like ‘collecting bullets’.

SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation is growing at rocket speed.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently announced that the private space company expects over 4,200 Starlink satellites in operation within 18 months\.

Continue reading “The worst case Starlink scenario? We could be ‘right on the edge’ of Kessler syndrome” »

Chinese internet giant Baidu has secured permits to offer a fully driverless commercial robotaxi service, with no human driver present, in Chongqing and Wuhan via the company’s autonomous ride-hailing unit, Apollo Go. Baidu’s wins in Wuhan and Chongqing come a few months after the compa…

Online safety and ethics are serious issues and can adversely affect less experienced users. Researchers have built upon familiar human verification techniques to add an element of discrete learning into the process. This way users can learn about online safety and ethics issues while simultaneously verifying they are human. Trials show that users responded positively to the experience and felt they gained something from these microlearning sessions.

The internet is an integral part of modern living, for work, leisure, shopping, keeping touch with people, and more. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could live in an affluent country, such as Japan, and not use the internet relatively often. Yet despite its ubiquity, the internet is far from risk-free. Issues of safety and security are of great concern, especially for those with less exposure to such things. So a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo including Associate Professor Koji Yatani of the Department for Electrical Engineering and Information Systems set out to help.

Continue reading “Digital security dialogue: Leveraging human verification to educate people about online safety” »

Elon Musk’s SpaceX raised $250 million in an equity round last month, the company disclosed in a securities filing on Friday. It has now raised $2 billion in 2022.

The filing doesn’t specify the sources of the funds, but noted they came from five investors.

SpaceX did not disclose a change in its valuation. The company’s value has soared in the last few years, with SpaceX raising billions to fund work on two capital-intensive projects — the next generation rocket Starship and its global satellite internet network Starlink. Its value hit $127 billion during its previous equity round in May, CNBC reported. That raise brought in $1.725 billion.

In artist Miao Ying’s animated film Surplus Intelligence, a cockroach falls in love with the artificial intelligence responsible for monitoring her behavior. There’s only one problem: The AI, personified as a man with movie-star looks, committed a crime in Walden XII, the quasi-medieval fantasyland where the story is set. He stole the village’s power stone, and so the roach sets off to mine bitcoin to save him.

Viewers might see in the plot a metaphor for the conflicted relationship some Chinese people have with social credit scoring, which is meant to nudge citizens toward better behavior. Or it could be a nod to the insidious ways social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook condition our behavior and mine us for data. If the tale itself seems a little ridiculous at times, that’s because Miao had a stealth collaborator: the AI text-generating system GPT-3, which wrote the script for the film. That power stone in the village? GPT-3 determined that it looks like “a burrito from Mexico,” perhaps a side effect of all the advertising copy GPT-3 has been tasked with writing.

The half-hour film is on view through the end of the year at the Asia Society in New York as part of the exhibition Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity. “All of Miao Ying’s work is a satirical look at what digital means in China,” says Barbara Pollack, who curated Mirror Image and wrote the book Brand New Art from China. But, she notes, the works also celebrate the creativity the policies inspire in its citizens. Miao’s Hardcore Digital Detox (2018) challenges viewers to experience the internet behind the Great Firewall—and without the filter bubbles that platforms in the East and West impose. Chinternet Plus (2016) describes how to brand a “counterfeit ideology.” And for 2007’s Blind Spot, Miao manually annotated a Chinese dictionary to indicate all of the words that were censored on Google.cn at the time.

When users want to send data over the internet faster than the network can handle, congestion can occur—the same way traffic congestion snarls the morning commute into a big city.

Computers and devices that transmit data over the internet break the data down into smaller packets and use a special algorithm to decide how fast to send those packets. These congestion control algorithms seek to fully discover and utilize available network capacity while sharing it fairly with other users who may be sharing the same network. These algorithms try to minimize delay caused by data waiting in queues in the network.

Over the past decade, researchers in industry and academia have developed several algorithms that attempt to achieve high rates while controlling delays. Some of these, such as the BBR algorithm developed by Google, are now widely used by many websites and applications.

Thirty seconds of sunlight could boost the battery life of future smartwatches and other wearables by tens of minutes, thanks to a renewable and rechargeable battery prototype developed by the University of Surrey.

Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) has demonstrated how its new photo-rechargeable system, which merges zinc-ion batteries with perovskite solar cells, could allow wearables to spring back to life without the need to plug in.

Jinxin Bi, a Ph.D. candidate at ATI and the first author of the paper, says that “this technology provides a promising strategy for efficient use of clean energy and enables wearable electronics to be operated continuously without plug-in charging. Our prototype could represent a step forward to how we interact with wearables and other internet-of-things devices, such as remote real-time health monitors.”

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In a paper distributed via ArXiv, titled “Exploring the Unprecedented Privacy Risks of the Metaverse,” boffins at UC Berkeley in the US and the Technical University of Munich in Germany play-tested an “escape room” virtual reality (VR) game to better understand just how much data a potential attacker could access. Through a 30-person study of VR usage, the researchers – Vivek Nair (UCB), Gonzalo Munilla Garrido (TUM), and Dawn Song (UCB) – created a framework for assessing and analyzing potential privacy threats. They identified more than 25 examples of private data attributes available to potential attackers, some of which would be difficult or impossible to obtain from traditional mobile or web applications. The metaverse that is rapidly becoming a part of our world has long been an essential part of the gaming community. Interaction-based games like Second Life, Pokemon Go, and Minecraft have existed as virtual social interaction platforms. The founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, and many other security experts have lately been vocal about Meta’s impact on data privacy. Since the core concept is similar, it is possible to determine the potential data privacy issues apparently within Meta.

There has been a buzz going around the tech market that by the end of 2022, the metaverse can revive the AR/VR device shipments and take it as high as 14.19 million units, compared to 9.86 million in 2021, indicating a year-over-year increase of about 35% to 36%. The AR/VR device market will witness an enormous boom in the market due to component shortages and the difficulty to develop new technologies. The growth momentum will also be driven by the increased demand for remote interactivity stemming from the pandemic. But what will happen when these VR or metaverse headsets start stealing your precious data? Not just headsets but smart glasses too are prime suspect when it comes to privacy concerns.

Continue reading “Metaverse Headsets and Smart Glasses are the Next-gen Data Stealers” »