Lifeboat Foundation

A new report shows just how easy it is becoming to download designs for difficult-to-trace arms.

In the darker corners of the Internet where search engines cannot go, black markets offer pistols, machine guns, even explosives — and most worrisome to security researchers, computer aided design, or CAD, files for 3D-printed guns.

A new report from RAND looked at 811 weapons listings on a dozen dark-web markets, which continue to thrive despite the shuttering of sites like the Silk Road and, just this month, AlphaBay. Firearms were the top-selling category, with was 339 active listings, roughly 42 percent of the market. But the next-largest share, with 222 listings, was a variety of digital products, from build-it-yourself explosives manuals to CAD files.

Continue reading “3D-Printed Gun Designs Are Selling for $12 on the Dark Web” »

First and foremost, consumers must realize what’s involved with 30 GHz. A Gigahertz (GHz) is a frequency equal to one billion hertz or cycles per second. Now multiply that 30 times; how many cycles per second do you get? Isn’t that 30 billion cycles per second? Now, imagine those GHz frequencies traveling over in-wall copper electric house wires that are built to take only 60 Hz!

Such GHz frequencies just may be considered as sinusoidal harmonics or “dirty electricity.”

To put the above into proper perspective about microwave technology and non-ionizing radiation waves such frequencies emit, we need to understand the frequency of electricity. One Hertz (Hz) equals one cycle per second. One kilohertz (KHz) is equivalent to one thousand cycles per second. One megahertz (MHz) equals one million cycles per second. One gigahertz (GHz) is equal to one billion hertz or cycles per second—frequencies not found naturally in Nature, except from man-made/generated electromagnetics.

Continue reading “High Tech Surveillance With 5G Wi-Fi” »

Researchers from China successfully teleported a photon from Earth to a satellite 500 km away. The work is an essential step towards establishing a global-scale quantum internet.

Not long ago, in the early 1990s, scientists only speculated that teleportation using quantum physics could be possible. Since then, the process has become a standard operation in quantum optics labs around the world. In fact, just last year, two separate teams conducted the world’s first quantum teleportation outside of a laboratory.

Continue reading “Scientists Just Teleported a Photon from Earth to Orbit for the First Time” »

Artificial intelligence software could generate highly realistic fake videos of former president Barack Obama using existing audio and video clips of him, a new study [PDF] finds.

Such work could one day help generate digital models of a person for virtual reality or augmented reality applications, researchers say.

Continue reading “AI Creates Fake Obama” »

My new article from Vice Motherboard on liberty and privacy. This is one of my most ambitious philosophical works yet: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjx5y5/liberty-mi…th-privacy #Libertarian

If tech is surveilling us constantly, we need the ability to use it to watch the watchers.

Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, transhumanist, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a Libertarian candidate for California Governor.

Continue reading “Liberty Might Be Better Served by Doing Away with Privacy” »

Technology can be wonderful. But how do you keep track of yourself when technology allows you to be everywhere at once?

In this film Prof. Yair Amichai-Hamburger (director of the Research Center for Internet Psychology at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications) argues that even though technology allows us to reach out and connect more easily than ever before, if we don’t ever take a step back, we can lose track of our humanity in the process.

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The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated. One candidate: cheap sensors and cheap internet connections. There are multiple sensors in every smartphone, but increasingly they’re everywhere, from jet engines to the soil of Californian almond farms — spotting patterns, fixing problems and eking out efficiency gains.

Forget flying cars or humanoid robots. The most disruptive inventions are often cheap, simple and easy to overlook.

In this challenging and crowded market, new competitors are emerging all the time. Moving further into software brings manufacturers up against specialised information technology companies, and there is a shifting landscape of competition and co-operation between different groups that a decade ago could have safely ignored each other.

The likes of GE and Siemens are investing billions in the ‘industrial internet’ but will face competition from IT groups and start-ups.

• Disney researchers have developed innovative technology that will allow people to charge their devices in a truly wireless fashion
• If this technology could be commercially adopted, it could revolutionize the way that we use and create everything from smartphones to AI robots

It seems like almost everything has gone wireless. Yet somehow, when it comes to charging electronic devices, we still have to deal with cords. Sure wireless charging exists, but only for small devices like your smartphone. And even then, it’s not convenient as you might hope. To actually power a device, a phone must maintain contact with a charging pad, which means it can’t be used while charging. This seems to be even a bigger hassle than dealing with cords and cables.