Lifeboat Foundation

A single computer chip has transmitted a record 1.84 petabits of data per second via a fibre-optic cable – enough bandwidth to download 230 million photographs in that time, and more traffic than travels through the entire internet’s backbone network per second.

Asbjørn Arvad Jørgensen at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen and his colleagues have used a photonic chip – a technology that allows optical components to be built onto computer chips – to divide a stream of data into thousands of separate channels and transmit them all at once over 7.9 kilometres.

First, the team split the data stream into 37 sections, each of which was sent down a separate core of the fibre-optic cable. Next, each of these channels was split into 223 data chunks that existed in individual slices of the electromagnetic spectrum. This “frequency comb” of equidistant spikes of light across the spectrum allowed data to be transmitted in different colours at the same time without interfering with each other, massively increasing the capacity of each core.

The new service will provide 350 Mbps internet, even while taking off and landing.

SpaceX just announced its new Starlink Aviation service, which will allow high-speed in-flight internet that will allow users to make voice calls and stream videogames, according to the company.

The new service promises speeds of up to 350 Mbps for airliners and is aimed mainly at private jet contractors. Earlier this year, SpaceX also announced a partnership with Hawaiian Airlines to bring free WiFi to its flights starting early next year.

Continue reading “SpaceX’s new Starlink Aviation service brings 350 Mbps WiFi to private jets” »

Vintage lovers, unite.

Jason Scott, a tech activist has launched a new website named Discmaster, which enables you to find any file among 91.7 million vintage computer files taken from Archive.org.

“The value proposition is the value proposition of any freely accessible research database,” stated Jason Scott in an interview with Ars Technica.

Continue reading “A new tool helps you go nostalgic and search through 91.7 million files from ‘80s and on” »

A major internet subsea fiber cable in the South of France was severed yesterday at 20:30 UTC, causing connectivity problems in Europe, Asia, and the United States, including data packet losses and increased website response latency.

Cloud security company Zscaler reports that they made routing adjustments to mitigate the impact. However, users still face problems due to app and content providers routing traffic through the impacted paths.

“Zscaler is working with the content providers to have them influence their portion of the path,” reads a notice from Zscaler.

Researchers have demonstrated a quantum sensor that can power itself using sunlight and an ambient magnetic field, an achievement that could help reduce the energy costs of this energy-hungry technology.

No longer the realm of science fiction, quantum sensors are today used in applications ranging from timekeeping and gravitational-wave detection to nanoscale magnetometry [1]. When making new quantum sensors, most researchers focus on creating devices that are as precise as possible, which typically requires using advanced—energy-hungry—technologies. This high energy consumption can be problematic for sensors designed for use in remote locations on Earth, in space, or in Internet-of-Things sensors that are not connected to mains electricity. To reduce the reliance of quantum sensors on external energy sources, Yunbin Zhu of the University of Science and Technology of China and colleagues now demonstrate a quantum sensor that directly exploits renewable energy sources to get the energy it needs to operate [2].

The Linux kernel WiFi stack has five serious flaws, according to research, which a hacker might use to execute arbitrary code or inflict a denial of service.

The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2022–42719, was brought on by a use-after-free issue in the multi-BSSID element’s ieee802 11 parse elems full function of net/mac80211/util.c. A remote authenticated adversary might leverage this issue to execute arbitrary code or bring down the system by sending a carefully crafted request. In v5.2-rc1, the CVE-2022–42719 vulnerability was first made public.

Continue reading “5 critical remote code execution vulnerabilities in Linux kernel.!Patch immediately!” »

A London-based artist named Matt DesLauriers has developed a tool to generate color palettes from any text prompt, allowing someone to type in “beautiful sunset” and get a series of colors that matches a typical sunset scene, for example. Or you could get more abstract, finding colors that match “a sad and rainy Tuesday.”

DesLauriers has posted his code on GitHub; it requires a local Stable Diffusion installation and Node. JS. It’s a rough prototype at the moment that requires some technical skill to set up, but it’s also a noteworthy example of the unexpected graphical innovations that can come from open source releases of powerful image synthesis models. Stable Diffusion, which went open source on August 22, generates images from a neural network that has been trained on tens of millions of images pulled from the Internet.

Meta’s push to put computing into a headset will end in tears.

After spending two years on the ocean’s floor, Microsoft’s underwater data center had a much lower server failure rate than land-based data centers.