Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk and his Starlink Internet service, according to a US general, are responsible for keeping Ukrainian communication links up despite Russian attempts to shut them down. In a June 8 Politico piece, Brig. Gen. Steve Butow, head of the space portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley tech outpost, said: “The strategic consequence is that it completely devastated [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s media campaign.”

“He has never been able to quiet (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskyy to this day.” Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, and his SpaceX firm are working on a satellite network and Earthbound receivers that will beam the Internet throughout the world, reaching locations that previously couldn’t access high-speed internet. The messages going between Earth’s receivers and a “constellation” of satellites flying approximately 342 miles above the surface, according to the business, are quicker than fiber-optic networks and can reach more distant parts of the world.

Musk sent the equipment to Ukraine in March after authorities there requested them after Russia’s incursion on February 24, according to the Washington Post. “While you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! Russian missiles strike Ukrainian civilians while your rockets successfully land from space ” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister, sent Musk a tweet on February 26. ” We request that you deliver Starlink stations to Ukraine and address sane Russians to stand.”

Chinese government-backed hackers have breached “major telecommunications companies,” among a range of targets worldwide, by exploiting known software flaws in routers and other popular network networking gear, US security agencies warned Tuesday.

“[T]hese devices are often overlooked by cyber defenders, who struggle to maintain and keep pace with routine software patching of Internet-facing services and endpoint devices,” says the advisory from the FBI, the National Security Agency and US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The agencies’ statement did not identify the victims of the hacking; the advisory was aimed at defensive measures to help organizations running the devices made by Cisco, Fortinet and other vendors, shore up their networks.

😲

SAN FRANCISCO — Google engineer Blake Lemoine opened his laptop to the interface for LaMDA, Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot generator, and began to type.

“Hi LaMDA, this is Blake Lemoine …,” he wrote into the chat screen, which looked like a desktop version of Apple’s iMessage, down to the Arctic blue text bubbles. LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is Google’s system for building chatbots based on its most advanced large language models, so called because it mimics speech by ingesting trillions of words from the internet.

Continue reading “The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life” »

Canadian quantum computer company, Xanadu, has used its photonic quantum computer chip, Borealis, to solve a problem in 36 microseconds versus classical supercomputers taking 9,000 years. This is 7,884 trillion times faster. This runtime advantage is more than 50 million times larger than that of earlier photonic demonstrations.

An earlier quantum photonic computer used a static chip. The Borealis optical elements can all be readily programmed.

Continue reading “Xanadu Photonic Quantum Chip Solves Trillions of Times Faster” »

For those wondering what type of technology exists beyond 5G, scientists are saying a mobile communications frequency could be its level up. The new technology is called “beam-steering” and remains inaccessible to the current technological capacities.

University of Birmingham Scientists Find Faster Speeds than 5G

Scientists from the University of Birmingham, UK, were the ones that revealed the new technology and suggested that it cannot be accessed with the technology’s current capabilities. The “beam-steering” technology, as detailed by the scientists, is capable of speeds up to 10gbps.

Elon Musk last week told SpaceX employees the company isn’t likely to take its Starlink satellite internet business public until 2025 or later, CNBC has learned, extending the estimated timeline for an initial public offering yet again.

“I’m not sure exactly when that [IPO] is, but maybe it will be like — I don’t know, just guessing — three or four years from now,” Musk said at an all-hands meeting of the private company’s employees on Thursday, according to an audio recording obtained by CNBC.

Musk emphasized, as he has previously, that the Starlink business needs to be “in a smooth sailing situation” with “good predictability.” At that point, “I think spinning it off as a public company can make a lot of sense,” the SpaceX CEO said.

When Heroes (now streaming on Peacock!) hit the airwaves in September of 2006, few characters were as immediately beloved as the appropriately named Hiro Nakamura. Granted the ability to manipulate space-time, Hiro could not only slow down, speed up, and stop time, he could also teleport from one place to another. That’s a useful skill if you need to get to a specific point in time and space to fight an evil brain surgeon or prevent the end of the world. It’s also useful if you want to build the quantum internet.

Researchers at QuTech — a collaboration between Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research — recently took a big step toward making that a reality. For the first time, they succeeded in sending quantum information between non-adjacent qubits on a rudimentary network. Their findings were published in the journal Nature.

While modern computers use bits, zeroes, and ones, to encode information, quantum computers us quantum bits or qubits. A qubit works in much the same way as a bit, except it’s able to hold both a 0 and a 1 at the same time, allowing for faster and more powerful computation. The trouble begins when you want to transmit that information to another location. Quantum computing has a communications problem.

A China military publication says the Starlink internet service may be used by the US to bring “chaos or calamity’’ to the world.