Lifeboat Foundation

The government cracks down on geographic data theft, citing national security concerns across key industries.

China has upped the ante on espionage and introduced stricter warnings on possessing unauthorized information related to national interests.

The amount of funds crypto projects lost to hackers has declined by about half to around $1.7 billion so far this year, amid improved security measures and an uptick in law enforcement actions.

One month after OpenAI unveiled a program that allows users to easily create their own customized ChatGPT programs, a research team at Northwestern University is warning of a “significant security vulnerability” that could lead to leaked data.

In November, OpenAI announced ChatGPT subscribers could create custom GPTs as easily “as starting a conversation, giving it instructions and extra knowledge, and picking what it can do, like searching the web, making images or analyzing data.” They boasted of its simplicity and emphasized that no coding skills are required.

“This democratization of AI technology has fostered a community of builders, ranging from educators to enthusiasts, who contribute to the growing repository of specialized GPTs,” said Jiahao Yu, a second-year doctoral student at Northwestern specializing in secure machine learning. But, he cautioned, “the high utility of these custom GPTs, the instruction-following nature of these models presents new challenges in security.”

Fairphone promises five Android version upgrades and at least eight years of security updates to achieve a total lifespan of a decade. Whether its performance will remain adequate for all users’ needs throughout that time remains to be seen.

What the industry can learn

In a world dominated by disposable electronics, the Fairphone 5 stands out. The Fairphone 5 offers a different excitement – the thrill of a phone built to last. With its modular design, long-term software support, and commitment to sustainability, the Fairphone 5 is a game-changer for anyone who wants a smartphone that’s both good for their pocket and the planet. While the EU is pushing for a removable battery for all smartphones by 2027, making USB-C already a standard, more needs to be done.

Scientists develop ‘Targettrack’ to accelerate brain imaging research.

A team of scientists have developed a pioneering AI method to track neurons inside moving and deforming animals.

Can technology be developed to identify small objects in space? This is something the U.S. Air Force hopes to address and they recently awarded a $5 million grant to a Georgia State University professor with the goal of identifying, charting, and imaging small objects in space, also known as Space Domain Awareness (SDA). This grant holds the potential to improve SDA regarding small objects between the Earth and the Moon, which could benefit national security as well as observational astronomy.

This grant comes as the number of objects launched into space continues to increase every year. For example, while the total of objects launched into space worldwide in 2016 was 221, that number jumped to 456 in 2017, experienced a slight decrease to 454 in 2018, increased to 586 in 2019, but then experienced massive spikes to 1,274 in 2020, 1,813 in 2021, and 2,478 in 2022, more than a tenfold increase in six years. So many objects not only pose threats to observational astronomy but to national security, as well.

“Detecting objects in the space region between where many communications satellites are located extending to the distance at which the Moon orbits the Earth presents a substantial challenge,” said Dr. Stuart Jefferies, who is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Georgia State University, and recipient of the grant. “The faintness of these objects makes observation difficult using ground-based telescopes, as they are starved of photons from the target of interest, creating a potential vulnerability that adversaries could exploit.”

Google’s adding a new garage door detection feature to its Nest security cameras that will alert you if your garage door has been left open. The company is also bringing the first-gen Google Nest Outdoor Cam to the Google Home app and finally allowing Nest Cam users to create custom clips in the Google Home app.

These new features are part of the Google Home app’s public preview and are rolling out this week. Adina Roth, product manager of Google Home & Nest, announced the updates in a blog post on Wednesday.

Quantum technologies are currently maturing at a breath-taking pace. These technologies exploit principles of quantum mechanics in suitably engineered systems, with bright prospects such as boosting computational efficiencies or communication security well beyond what is possible with devices based on today’s ‘classical’ technologies.

As with classical devices, however, to realize their full potential, quantum devices must be networked. In principle, this can be done using the fiber-optic networks employed for classical telecommunications. But practical implementation requires that the information encoded in quantum systems can be reliably stored at the frequencies used in telecom networks—a capability that has not yet been fully demonstrated.

Writing in Nature Communications, the group of Prof. Xiao-Song Ma at Nanjing University reports record-long quantum storage at telecom wavelengths on a platform that can be deployed in extended networks, paving the way for practical large-scale quantum networks.

It seems for every proponent for quantum computing there is also a detractor.

Given the amount of quantum computing investment, advancements, and activity, the industry is set for a dynamic change, similar to that caused by AI – increased performance, functionality, and intelligence. This also comes with the same challenges presented by AI, such as security, as outlined in the recent Quantum Safe Cryptography article. But just like AI, quantum computing is coming. You might say that quantum computing is where AI was in 2015, fascinating but not widely utilized. Fast forward just five years and AI was being integrated into almost every platform and application. In just five years, quantum computing could take computing and humanity to a new level of knowledge and understanding.

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