Lifeboat Foundation

Staying ahead of the emerging trend of serverless software development, Alibaba Cloud is making its key cloud products serverless to enable customers to concentrate on product deployment and development without worrying about managing servers and infrastructure. Essentially, Alibaba Cloud’s updated products focus on turning computing power into an on-demand capability for users.

Examples of these are the cloud native database PolarDB, the cloud-native data warehouse AnalyticDB (ADB) and ApsaraDB for Relational Database Service (RDS). Leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s serverless technologies, customers can enjoy automatic scaling with extreme elasticity based on actual workloads and a pay-as-you-go billing model to reduce costs. The automatic elastic scaling time on demands can be as little as one second. The use of updated database products can help businesses in the internet industry reduce their costs by 50%, on average, compared to using traditional ones. Currently, Alibaba Cloud has more than 20 serverless key products in total and is adding more product categories to become serverless.

Alibaba Cloud also upgraded its ODPS (Open Data Platform and Services), a self-developed integrated data analytics and intelligent computing platform, to provide companies with diversified data processing and analytics services. The platform can handle both online and offline data simultaneously in one system, providing businesses dealing with complex workloads with analytics for business decision-making with reduced cost and increased efficiency.

Something strange has been happening lately. Lots of people are under the impression that images from the James Webb Space Telescope have somehow proven big bang cosmology wrong. This is very stupid and objectively wrong, but it has caused a confusion among even pro-science people, who have been asking me if there is any legitimacy to such claims. I decided a brief debunk was in order, to shine a spotlight on the fraud behind this frenzy, briefly explain why such a claim is so ridiculous, and link to other resources for further information. Enjoy!

Lerner’s dumb article: https://iai.tv/articles/the-big-bang-didnt-happen-auid-2215
Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains how Lerner is a crackpot: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/has-jwst-disproven-big-bang/
Cosmologist Brian Keating debunks Lerner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPna7WUODuo.
Astronomer Ned Wright debunks Lerner: https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.html.
Real scientists use an entire appendix to debunk Lerner’s mistakes: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/529134/pdf.

Continue reading “No, The James Webb Space Telescope Did Not Disprove the Big Bang (Eric Lerner is Delusional)” »

Elon Musk doesn’t follow the same standards that most entrepreneurs do. He’s different, he likes to be different!

And when you’re different, and you’re not afraid to be, it’s okay to test a cigar (or should I say ‘joint’?) of tobacco mixed with marijuana, on Joe Rogan’s famous podcast. But if you look closely, Elon was just nice (polite) and followed Rogan’s elaborate script. Before trying it, Musk even asked him if it was legal.

Then all those facial expressions of Musk, which photojournalists love to catch, go viral as if he’s there promoting some soft drug or passing abroad that his office at Tesla (or SpaceX) is enveloped in a large cloud of smoke.

Quite the opposite. The expressions themselves spoke for themselves, as if to say, “This is nothing special, Joe. Why do you waste my time with these scenes”? Musk even claimed that weed is not good for productivity at all, but it has nothing against (as I do, by the way).

Continue reading “From ‘Chief Twit’ to ‘Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator’” »

This time I come to talk about a new concept in this Age of Artificial Intelligence and the already insipid world of Social Networks. Initially, quite a few years ago, I named it “Counterpart” (long before the TV series “Counterpart” and “Black Mirror”, or even the movie “Transcendence”).

It was the essence of the ETER9 Project that was taking shape in my head.

Over the years and also with the evolution of technologies — and of the human being himself —, the concept “Counterpart” has been getting better and, with each passing day, it makes more sense!

Imagine a purely digital receptacle with the basics inside, like that Intermediate Software (BIOS⁽¹⁾) that computers have between the Hardware and the Operating System. That receptacle waits for you. One way or another, it waits patiently for you, as if waiting for a Soul to come alive in the ether of digital existence.

Continue reading “Digital Doubles and Second Selves” »

face_with_colon_three circa 2016.

Two basic types of encryption schemes are used on the internet today. One, known as symmetric-key cryptography, follows the same pattern that people have been using to send secret messages for thousands of years. If Alice wants to send Bob a secret message, they start by getting together somewhere they can’t be overheard and agree on a secret key; later, when they are separated, they can use this key to send messages that Eve the eavesdropper can’t understand even if she overhears them. This is the sort of encryption used when you set up an online account with your neighborhood bank; you and your bank already know private information about each other, and use that information to set up a secret password to protect your messages.

The second scheme is called public-key cryptography, and it was invented only in the 1970s. As the name suggests, these are systems where Alice and Bob agree on their key, or part of it, by exchanging only public information. This is incredibly useful in modern electronic commerce: if you want to send your credit card number safely over the internet to Amazon, for instance, you don’t want to have to drive to their headquarters to have a secret meeting first. Public-key systems rely on the fact that some mathematical processes seem to be easy to do, but difficult to undo. For example, for Alice to take two large whole numbers and multiply them is relatively easy; for Eve to take the result and recover the original numbers seems much harder.

Public-key cryptography was invented by researchers at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — the British equivalent (more or less) of the US National Security Agency (NSA) — who wanted to protect communications between a large number of people in a security organization. Their work was classified, and the British government neither used it nor allowed it to be released to the public. The idea of electronic commerce apparently never occurred to them. A few years later, academic researchers at Stanford and MIT rediscovered public-key systems. This time they were thinking about the benefits that widespread cryptography could bring to everyday people, not least the ability to do business over computers.

Continue reading “Quantum Cryptography Is Unbreakable. So Is Human Ingenuity” »

Over the past couple of months, Starlink has branched out, offering its service in more ways than ever before. As more and more people sign up for its service, the network naturally gets a bit more strained and congested. Now it looks like Starlink is implementing a way to combat network congestion by creating a data cap.

According to The Verge, Starlink service will now have a data cap starting in December. Next month, residential customers will start off with a 1TB bucket of data that will be designated as “Priority Access.” Priority Access data will be used anytime the internet is accessed during the hours of 7 am to 11 pm. Once the data is depleted, users will encounter slower data speeds during peak hours. The bucket will be replenished at the top of every month, and customers will have the option to buy Priority Access data, but it will cost 25 cents per GB.

For the most part, this shouldn’t really affect many customers, as Starlink states that less than 10 percent of its users actually manage to hit this cap every month. In addition to a new data cap, the company will also be expanding its service to more parts of Alaska and also Canada, primarily focusing on the Northern areas. For areas in the region that aren’t yet covered, Starlink does have plans to expand to more areas in the first part of 2023.

Google’s cybersecurity arm says activity shows a new interest in sowing discord in American politics, though the impact has been minimal.

Ever hear of the Turk —the 19th-century mechanism topped by a turbaned head that played chess against all comers? In fact, hidden inside was a diminutive chessmaster, one you might imagine deadpanning, “Eh, It’s a living.”

Then there’s its namesake, the Mechanical Turk —a 21st-century service offered by Amazon to mark up images on the Web with the help of crowdsourced freelancers. They, too, might intone, glassy-eyed, “It’s a living.”

Continue reading “Pong in a Dish” »

The Wi-Peep uses many messages to communicate with a target device while it is in the air.

A research team from the University of Waterloo created a drone-powered tool that uses WiFi networks to penetrate barriers.

Called Wi-Peep, the device can fly close to buildings and then use the WiFi network of the occupants to identify and locate any WiFi-enabled devices quickly.