Lifeboat Foundation

Its success will hinge on whether enough people adopt it beyond just hard-core techies.

The World Wide Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has launched a way to make it easier for people to control their personal data. Will it take off?

The news: Berners-Lee is working with people at MIT and beyond on a startup called Inrupt, which runs an open-source project, Solid, that hands you back control over your own data.

Continue reading “Tim Berners-Lee wants to remake the web to help you protect your data” »

The longer-term answer is to develop and scale up the quantum communication network and, subsequently, the quantum internet. This will take major investments from governments. However, countries will benefit from the greater security offered13. For example, Canada keeps its census data secret for 92 years, a term that only quantum cryptography can assure. Government agencies could use quantum-secured blockchain platforms to protect citizens’ personal financial and health data. Countries leading major research efforts in quantum technologies, such as China, the United States and members of the European Union, will be among the early adopters. They should invest immediately in research. Blockchains should be a case study for Europe’s Quantum Key Distribution Testbed programme, for example.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will founder unless they integrate quantum technologies, warn Aleksey K. Fedorov, Evgeniy O. Kiktenko and Alexander I. Lvovsky. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will founder unless they integrate quantum technologies, warn Aleksey K. Fedorov, Evgeniy O. Kiktenko and Alexander I. Lvovsky.

This is a massive change for Microsoft and Windows 10.

Redmond makes a big change to compete on the web.

Even after the rise of #MeToo, disbelief is all too commonly the outcome of reporting sexual harassment and assault. Many women describe the experience of having men they trust doubt the severity and frequency of what they have to put up with as painful as the experience itself. Advertising agency Ogilvy wondered if men would be more likely to pay attention to smart clothing than the women in their lives, so they created dresses that keep a record of events.

The dresses have sensors sewn into them that record contact and pressure. Any impact on a sensor is sent via wifi to a computer that not only keeps track of what is happening but translates it into a heat map of location and time of contact with the body.

When three women wore the dresses to a Brazilian party, they were touched non-consensually 157 times in less than four hours – a rate of more than once every five minutes per woman. As the video below shows, this is despite repeatedly telling the men involved to stop.

Continue reading “These Dresses Record Groping Because So Many Men Won’t Believe Women” »

This animation by Rosanna Wan for the Royal Institution tells the fascinating story of Marie Tharp’s groundbreaking work to help prove Wegener’s theory.

The Short Film Showcase spotlights exceptional short videos created by filmmakers from around the web and selected by National Geographic editors. We look for work that affirms National Geographic’s belief in the power of science, exploration, and storytelling to change the world. The filmmakers created the content presented, and the opinions expressed are their own, not those of National Geographic Partners.

Know of a great short film that should be part of our Showcase? Email [email protected] to submit a video for consideration. See more from National Geographic’s Short Film Showcase at documentary.com

Continue reading “How One Brilliant Woman Mapped the Secrets of the Ocean Floor” »

There are huge multi-trillion dollar opportunities developing with Space and the further evolution of the internet.

Space launch and space satellites were already a $300 billion per year industry. Cloud Computing is a $200 billion market in 2018. Global Internet services is a $600 billion market. The Global IT market is nearing $5 trillion in size. The global Auto industry is $2 trillion in size. The Global supply chain industry is $40 trillion in size.

Space launch, Internet and communication, Internet of Things, Space mining, Space Colonization will each become future multi-trillion markets. Those that are already trillion dollar markets will become even larger.

Continue reading “Bezos and Musk Will Both be Trillionaires in the Space Internet Age” »

Giulio Prisco ‘s key point: “My first reaction to Satoshi’s white paper was like, here’s a possibly viable implementation of an internet currency independent of nation states, which can be used for online payments with strong privacy. My current description of bitcoin is exactly the same.”

Forget the ongoing bitcoin crash. Forget that you lost 80 percent of your crypto wealth since Christmas last year. If you HODL, Crypto Santa will make you filthy rich by Christmas next year.

Ground control to major Jeff (Bezos).

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing arm, just announced a new offering aimed at satellite operators.

The news: At its annual re: Invent conference in Seattle this week, the web giant unveiled a service that lets owners of satellites rent time on Amazon-managed ground stations to send and receive data from orbit. The service, called AWS Ground Station, works in much the same way as Amazon’s well-established business for tapping computing capacity via the cloud.

Continue reading “Amazon is launching pay-as-you-go cloud computing in space” »

The flow of raw images sent from Mars, straight to the Web, has begun!

Insight begins sharing raw images on mission website.

There was jubilation when InSight landed, but I’m just as happy to be writing about a distinct InSight event: The flow of raw images sent from Mars, straight to the Web, has begun. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has begun sharing images from InSight’s two cameras to the mission website. You can check this website any time, any day, to see if there are new images from Mars, and sometimes, you’ll be able to see them even before mission team members do. Here, for example, is the first image returned from InSight’s Instrument Deployment Camera, sent straight to the Web.

Continue reading “New Cameras on Mars!” »