Lifeboat Foundation

… along with new, unfamiliar — and often poorly understood — risks.

Technology and business risks morph with changes in technology and how it is delivered. While cloud services are often considered more dependable, businesses face new risks with SaaS and public cloud — risks that are unfamiliar or not completely understood. People’s eyes pop open and ears perk up when they witness prolonged outage events such as the current issue with Atlassian. Suddenly, SaaS dependencies and resilience issues become relevant, as a business can’t access its favorite SaaS tool. The unique risk of using SaaS is that you don’t have control over the application or the tool and cannot reimplement yourself. It is also important to understand the cascading risks, as some of the well-known SaaS services are hosted on a leading hyperscaler’s infrastructure. You need to analyze the business impact of SaaS and cloud services outages just like for any other technology in your portfolio.

Trust but verify vendor claims about service-level agreements supporting operations and resilience plans. To ensure that your SaaS providers deliver on their own promises:

Renting space and IP addresses on a public server has become standard business practice, but according to a team of Penn State computer scientists, current industry practices can lead to “cloud squatting,” which can create a security risk, endangering sensitive customer and organization data intended to remain private.

Cloud squatting occurs when a company, such as your bank, leases space and IP addresses—unique addresses that identify individual computers or computer networks—on a public server, uses them, and then releases the space and addresses back to the public server company, a standard pattern seen every day. The public server company, such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, then assigns the same addresses to a second company. If this second company is a bad actor, it can receive information coming into the address intended for the original company—for example, when you as a customer unknowingly use an outdated link when interacting with your bank—and use it to its advantage—cloud squatting.

“There are two advantages to leasing server space,” said Eric Pauley, doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering. “One is a cost advantage, saving on equipment and management. The other is scalability. Leasing server space offers an unlimited pool of computing resources so, as workload changes, companies can quickly adapt.” As a result, the use of clouds has grown exponentially, meaning almost every website a user visits takes advantage of cloud computing.

CSIS will host a public event on responsible AI in a global context, featuring a moderated discussion with Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO of Accenture, and Brad Smith, President and Vice Chair of the Microsoft Corporation, on the business perspective, followed by a conversation among a panel of experts on the best way forward for AI regulation. Dr. John J. Hamre, President and CEO of CSIS, will provide welcoming remarks.

Keynote Speakers:
Brad Smith, President and Vice Chair, Microsoft Corporation.
Julie Sweet, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Accenture.

Continue reading “Responsible AI in a Global Context” »

Elon Musk tweeted Tesla may get into the lithium mining and refining business directly and at scale because the cost of the metal, a key component in manufacturing batteries, has gotten so high.

“Price of lithium has gone to insane levels,” Musk tweeted. “There is no shortage of the element itself, as lithium is almost everywhere on Earth, but pace of extraction/refinement is slow.”

The Tesla and SpaceX tech boss was responding to a tweet showing the average price of lithium per tonne in the last two decades, which showed a massive increase in prices since 2021. According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, the cost of the metal has gone up more than 480% in the last year.

COLORADO SPRINGS — A shortage of Ukrainian Antonov aircraft raises the prospect of more delays for satellite projects already bogged down by supply chain issues.

Satellite manufacturers make heavy use of large cargo space on Antonovs to transport GEO spacecraft from factory to launch site.

But some Antonovs have been destroyed amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, noted Mark Quinn, head of Willis Towers Watson’s satellite insurance business, and those that are in service tend to be owned by Russian air cargo companies subject to Western sanctions or are being used to support the war effort.

It’s a reference to the evil form in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ books. For those unfamiliar with the ‘Lord of the Rings” books and movies, the Eye of Sauron is the chief antagonist in the series, exemplified as a flaming eye and that is a metaphor for pure evil. It’s not something anyone would want to be compared to unless, of course, you are Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg on Long-Term Strategy, Business and Parenting Principles, Personal Energy Management, Building the Metaverse, Seeking Awe, the Role of Religion, Solving Deep Technical Challenges (e.g., AR), and More | Brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating (http://eightsleep.com/Tim), Magic Spoon delicious low-carb cereal (http://magicspoon.com/tim), and Helium 10 all-in-one software suite to sell on Amazon (https://helium10.com/tim).

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg — Founder and CEO of Meta | The Tim Ferriss Show” »

With the web of undersea cables lacing the continents together now, it’s hard to imagine that it wasn’t until 1956 that the first transatlantic telephone cable was laid. Sure, there were telegraph cables under the Atlantic starting as early as the late 1800s, but getting your voice across the ocean on copper was a long time coming. So what was the discerning 1930s gentleman of business to do when only a voice call would do? He’d have used a radiotelephone, probably at an outrageous expense, which as this video on the receiving end of the New York to London radio connection shows, was probably entirely justified.

The video details the shortwave radiotelephone system that linked New York and London in the 1930s. It starts with a brief but thorough explanation of ionospheric refraction, and how that atmospheric phenomenon makes it possible to communicate over vast distances. It also offers a great explanation on the problems inherent with radio connections, like multipath interference and the dependency on the solar cycle for usable skip. To overcome these issues, the Cooling Radio Station was built, and its construction is the main thrust of the video.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Transatlantic Radiotelephone System Of The 1930s” »

A U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts safely landed in Kazakhstan after leaving the International Space Station aboard the same capsule despite heightened antagonism between Moscow and Washington over the conflict in Ukraine.

#Space #RussianCosmonauts #USastronaut #News #Reuters.

Continue reading “U.S. & Russian crew return to Earth from ISS” »

WASHINGTON — SpiderOak Mission Systems announced March 29 it won a contract from Lockheed Martin Space for its cybersecurity software.

The contract allows Lockheed Martin to use SpiderOak’s OrbitSecure software. “This is commercial technology that was developed for terrestrial applications and has been repurposed for the space business, specifically for low Earth orbit,” SpiderOak chairman Charles Beames told SpaceNews.

Beames said he could not disclose the value of the contract with Lockheed Martin. “The goal is to make OrbitSecure available to Lockheed Martin customers as part of an offering to provide an extra level of cybersecurity,” he said.