Lifeboat Foundation

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are tools that can connect the human brain with an electronic device, typically using electroencephalography (EEG). In recent years, advances in machine learning (ML) have enabled the development of more advanced BCI spellers, devices that allow people to communicate with computers using their thoughts.

So far, most studies in this area have focused on developing BCI classifiers that are faster and more reliable, rather than investigating their possible security vulnerabilities. Recent research, however, suggests that machine learning algorithms can sometimes be fooled by attackers, whether they are used in computer vision, speech recognition, or other domains. This is often done using adversarial examples, which are tiny perturbations in data that are indistinguishable by humans.

Researchers at Huazhong University of Science and Technology have recently carried out a study investigating the security of EEG-based BCI spellers, and more specifically, how they are affected by adversarial perturbations. Their paper, pre-published on arXiv, suggests that BCI spellers are fooled by these perturbations and are thus highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has succeeded in sending entangled quantum memories over a 50-kilometer coiled fiber cable. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes several experiments they conducted involving entangling quantum memory over long distances, the challenges they overcame, and problems still to be addressed.

Over the past several years, scientists have been working toward the development of a quantum internet—one very much the same as the present-day network, but with much stronger security. One such approach is based on the development of quantum keys that would allow parties to a private conversation to know that an interloper is eavesdropping, because doing so would change the state of the keys. But in such systems, measurements of the quantum state of the keys is required, which can be impacted by environmental conditions, making the approach nearly impractical.

Another approach involves using entangled particles to form a network—but this has proven to be difficult to implement because of the sensitivity of such particles and their short lifespan. But progress is being made. In this new effort, the researchers in China succeeded in entangling quantum memory between buildings 20 kilometers apart and across 50 kilometers of coiled cable in their lab.

WASHINGTON — Spaceflight Industries announced Feb. 11 it will sell its smallsat rideshare launch business to a pair of Japanese companies, allowing it to focus on its BlackSky geospatial business.

Spaceflight Industries said that Mitsui & Co., Ltd. and Yamasa Co., Ltd. will acquire its rideshare business, known as Spaceflight, Inc., for an undisclosed sum. Mitsui & Co. and Yamasa will own Spaceflight as a 50/50 joint venture. The companies said that they expect the deal to close in the second quarter of this year, after a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to examine any national security implications of the sale.

Spaceflight Industries said it will use the proceeds from the deal to accelerate the growth of BlackSky, its geospatial intelligence business that is developing a constellation of high-resolution imaging satellites. BlackSky has four satellites in orbit currently with another eight scheduled for launch this year.

Circa 2016

In a sign of the autonomous security of the future, a $2m contest wants teams to build a system that can exploit rivals’ vulnerabilities while fixing its own.

One of the biggest problems in the sneaker resale market may now be more manageable.

Product authentication technology provider Entrupy on Wednesday released its Legit Check Tech (LCT) solution, a device that uses artificial intelligence to determine whether a sneaker is counterfeit or not — and it only takes about a minute to use.

Fake pairs of popular Nike and Adidas sneakers are rampant in the resale sector. Authorities recently busted a counterfeiting operation that shipped $470 million worth of fake Nikes to the US.

Data can be stolen from an air gapped personal computer just by using variations in screen brightness. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University wrote a paper on it.

As the team defines them, “Air-gapped computers are systems that are kept isolated from the Internet since they store or process sensitive information.”

Continue reading “Information theft via manipulating screen brightness in air-gapped computers” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXo5BVdzZQE

Ira Pastor, ideaXme exponential health ambassador interviews Dr. Tara O’Toole, Executive Vice President and Senior Fellow at In-Q-Tel.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/intelligence-history/in-q-tel

Continue reading “Dr Tara O’Toole: The CIA, National Security And Preventing The Next Pandemic” »

This patched critical flaw is the first remote code execution threat to a major cloud platform, undermining the security layers that isolate shared resources.

San Francisco startup RealityEngines. AI has turned off stealth mode and today launched its completely autonomous cloud AI service. It’s all very tedious to the common reader IMO — enterprise-level business stuff — but the technology itself and how it could shape our future in both data and perceived reality should be at least mildly considered.

Here’s how RealityEngines. AI works: using a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technique called BANANAS, when a user points their data (through an API) to RealityEngines. AI and selects a use case (churn predictions, fraud detection, sales lead forecasting, security threat detection, cloud spend optimization, et al.), the data is attacked by the NAS to create cutting-edge models then refined by a generative adversarial network (GAN) in order to augment sparse or noisy data with synthetic data to further enhance the data modeling. Now that, is bananas.

Continue reading “RealityEngines.AI Launches World’s First Autonomous Cloud AI Service” »