Lifeboat Foundation

Tokyo/New Delhi: Tetsuya Yamagami, who shot Shinzo Abe in Nara City, used a handmade gun to attack the former Japanese Prime Minister, said reports. The 41-year-old shooter, a resident of Nara City in Japan shot Abe in his chest from 10 feet away, said reports. For the unversed, Abe was shot during live address in Western Japan. The attack was a shock in one of the world’s safest countries with some of the strictest gun control laws. During interrogation, the attacker has confessed that he was dissatisfied with Abe.

NHK public broadcaster aired dramatic footage of Abe giving a speech outside of a train station in the western city of Nara. He is standing, dressed in a navy blue suit, raising his fist, when a gunshot is heard. Footage then shows Abe collapsed on the street, with security guards running toward him. He holds his chest, his shirt smeared with blood.

Second video shows the attempted assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Continue reading “Shinzo Abe Attacker Tetsuyo Yamagami Used A 3D Printed Gun, Shot From 10 Feet. Chilling Details Emerge” »

In many cases, security vulnerabilities appear that affect the programs that we use on a day-to-day basis. A clear example is the browser. It may have vulnerabilities and that can allow a hacker to break in and steal passwords or personal information. That is what is happening now with Google Chrome and you should update it as soon as possible to fix a zero-day bug.

Google has released security updates to address a Zero-Day in its Chrome web browser that it said is being exploited in the wild.

Continue reading “Zero-Day vulnerability in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi browsers allow taking control of your laptop or mobile” »

Shadow IT refers to the practice of users deploying unauthorized technology resources in order to circumvent their IT department. Users may resort to using shadow IT practices when they feel that existing IT policies are too restrictive or get in the way of them being able to do their jobs effectively.

An old school phenomenon

Shadow IT is not new. There have been countless examples of widespread shadow IT use over the years. In the early 2000s, for example, many organizations were reluctant to adopt Wi-Fi for fear that it could undermine their security efforts. However, users wanted the convenience of wireless device usage and often deployed wireless access points without the IT department’s knowledge or consent.

FCC chief Brendan Carr urged the CEOs of Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their stores, arguing that Chinese “data harvesting” poses an “unacceptable national security risk.”

WASHINGTON — Artificial intelligence and related digital tools can help warn of natural disasters, combat global warming and fast-track humanitarian aid, according to retired Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a onetime Trump administration national security adviser.

It can also help preempt fights, highlight incoming attacks and expose weaknesses the world over, he said May 17 at the Nexus 22 symposium.

The U.S. must “identify aggression early to deter it,” McMaster told attendees of the daylong event focused on autonomy, AI and the defense policy that underpins it. “This applies to our inability to deter conflict in Ukraine, but also the need to deter conflict in other areas, like Taiwan. And, of course, we have to be able to respond to it quickly and to maintain situational understanding, identify patterns of adversary and enemy activity, and perhaps more importantly, to anticipate pattern breaks.”

Yet when faced with enormous protein complexes, AI faltered. Until now. In a mind-bending feat, a new algorithm deciphered the structure at the heart of inheritance—a massive complex of roughly 1,000 proteins that helps channel DNA instructions to the rest of the cell. The AI model is built on AlphaFold by DeepMind and RoseTTAfold from Dr. David Baker’s lab at the University of Washington, which were both released to the public to further experiment on.

Our genes are housed in a planet-like structure, dubbed the nucleus, for protection. The nucleus is a high-security castle: only specific molecules are allowed in and out to deliver DNA instructions to the outside world—for example, to protein-making factories in the cell that translate genetic instructions into proteins.

Continue reading “In Its Greatest Biology Feat Yet, AI Unlocks the Complex Proteins Guarding Our DNA” »

Materials scientists and bioengineers at the intersection of regenerative medicine and bioinspired materials seek to develop shape-programmable artificial muscles with self-sensing capabilities for applications in medicine. In a new report now published in Science Advances, Haoran Liu and a team of researchers in systems and communications engineering at the Frontier Institute of Science and Technology, Jiaotong University, China, were inspired by the coupled behavior of muscles, bones, and nerve systems of mammals and other living organisms to create a multifunctional artificial muscle in the lab. The construct contained polydopamine-coated liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) and low-melting point alloys (LMPA) in a concentric tube or rod. While the team adopted the outer liquid crystal-elastomer to mimic reversible contraction and recovery, they implemented the inner low-melting point alloy for deformation locking and to detect resistance mechanics, much like bone and nerve functions, respectively. The artificial muscle demonstrated a range of performances, including regulated bending and deformation to support heavy objects, and is a direct and effective approach to the design of biomimetic soft devices.

Soft robotics inspired by the skeleton–muscle–nerve system

Scientists aim to implement biocompatibility between soft robotic elements and human beings for assisted movement and high load-bearing capacity; however, such efforts are challenging. Most traditional robots are still in use in industrial, agricultural and aerospace settings for high-precision sensor-based, load-bearing applications. Several functional soft robots contrastingly depend on materials to improve the security of human-machine interactions. Soft robots are therefore complementary to hard robots and have tremendous potential for applications. Biomimetic constructs have also provided alternative inspiration to emulate the skeleton-muscle-nerve system to facilitate agile movement and quick reaction or thinking, with a unique body shape to fit tasks and perform diverse physiological functions. In this work, Liu et al were inspired by the fascinating idea of biomimicry to develop multifunctional artificial muscles for smart applications.

An artificial nose, which is combined with machine learning and built with a 16-channel sensor array was found to be able to authenticate up to 20 individuals with an average accuracy of more than 97%.

“These techniques rely on the physical uniqueness of each individual, but they are not foolproof. Physical characteristics can be copied, or even compromised by injury,” explains Chaiyanut Jirayupat, first author of the study. “Recently, human scent has been emerging as a new class of biometric authentication, essentially using your unique chemical composition to confirm who you are.”

The team turned to see if human breath could be used after finding that the skin does not produce a high enough concentration of volatile compounds for machines to detect.

Software development and testing platform Travis CI confirmed the second incident of exposing its users’ data in less than a year. On this occasion, the compromised records include authentication tokens that would allow access to platforms such as AWS, GitHub, and Docker Hub.

According to a report prepared by the firm Aqua Security, tens of thousands of user tokens would have been exposed through the Travis CI API, which contains more than 770 million records with multiple types of credentials belonging to users of free subscriptions.

Continue reading “More than 770 million records available through the Travis CI API: Anyone can extract tokens, secrets, and other credentials associated with services like GitHub, AWS, and Docker Hub” »