Lifeboat Foundation

Stranded with no obvious way out, the man came up with a plan on how to alert rescuers to his situation. He attached his cellphone to a drone he had in his vehicle. He typed out a text on his phone to a friend describing what had happened and his exact location. Then he hit send on the text and launched the drone several hundred feet into the air. That high up, the phone was able to connect to service and send the text.

The man’s friend received the text, reached out to authorities and rescue crews were able to locate the man and rescue him. During the rescue trip, crews also found and rescued another driver who’d been stranded nearby in the snow for multiple days.

The most famous one is the cell phone itself: Captain Kirk’s communicator inspired the folks at Motorola to make the first handheld mobile device in 1973. Star Trek: The Original Series (popularly called TOS) from the 1960s also inspired video conferencing. But things started to amp up when, in 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation (aka TNG) hit the floors, with Sir Patrick Stewart in the lead. It became one of the most syndicated shows on television—which is how I discovered it in mid-90s India on the Star network. It fundamentally impacted my life, inspiring me to become the technology writer I am today.

But more than me, this show heralded more technological concepts that are becoming increasingly real. The LCARS computer on the Galaxy-Class USS Enterprise D is basically the foundation of what Google is today. Google’s former head of search, Amit Singhal, often said that the company is “trying to build the Star Trek computer”.

As impersonation scams in the United States rise, Card’s ordeal is indicative of a troubling trend. Technology is making it easier and cheaper for bad actors to mimic voices, convincing people, often the elderly, that their loved ones are in distress. In 2022, impostor scams were the second most popular racket in America, with over 36,000 reports of people being swindled by those pretending to be friends and family, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission. Over 5,100 of those incidents happened over the phone, accounting for over $11 million in losses, FTC officials said.

Advancements in artificial intelligence have added a terrifying new layer, allowing bad actors to replicate a voice with just an audio sample of a few sentences. Powered by AI, a slew of cheap online tools can translate an audio file into a replica of a voice, allowing a swindler to make it “speak” whatever they type.

Experts say federal regulators, law enforcement and the courts are ill-equipped to rein in the burgeoning scam. Most victims have few leads to identify the perpetrator and it’s difficult for the police to trace calls and funds from scammers operating across the world. And there’s little legal precedent for courts to hold the companies that make the tools accountable for their use.

ALGORITHMS TURN PHOTO SHAPSHOTS INTO 3D VIDEO AND OR IMMERSIVE SPACE. This has been termed “Neural Radiance Fields.” Now Google Maps wants to turn Google Maps into a gigantic 3D space. Three videos below demonstrate the method. 1) A simple demonstration, 2) Google’s immersive maps, and 3) Using this principle to make dark, grainy photographs clear and immersive.

This technique is different from “time of flight” cameras which make a 3D snapshot based on the time light takes to travel to and from objects, but combined with this technology, and with a constellation of microsatellites as large as cell phones, a new version of “Google Earth” with live, continual imaging of the whole planet could eventually be envisioned.

Continue reading “NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images” »

We could finally see passwords retired in favor of passkeys with Android 14.

WHETHER you’re an Android fan or an iPhone lover, you should be wary of a common text message scam.

It’s called “smishing” and has been flagged by the experts at Security Intelligence as a growing problem.

Smishing is essentially the same as phishing, the common email scam technique that tries to get you to give away personal data.

The firm’s strategists broke down why AI is about to “revolutionize everything” with a similar impact to Steve Jobs’ smartphone.

On April 3, 1973, Marty Cooper made the world’s first call from a handheld portable brick phone —weighing 2.5 pounds and 11 inches long.

The first cellphone inventor aka the father of cellphones, Marty Cooper, has projected that phones would be implanted under the skin of consumers’ ears.

“The next generation will have the phone embedded under the skin of their ears,” said cooper.

Continue reading “Your body, ‘perfect charger’ for smartphones, says father of cellphone” »

While the chatter around the metaverse has slowed down, both social media companies and phone manufacturers have been experimenting with tech that could lead to commercial AR glasses. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Xiaomi unveiled its new prototype Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition, which weighs 126 grams and has a “retina-level” display.

Xiaomi has used a pair of MicroLED screens with a peak brightness of 1,200 nits and free-form light-guiding prisms to recreate an image. The company said that when PPD (pixels per degree) reaches 60, humans can’t perceive individual pixels. The Xiaomi AR glass display boasts 58 PPD, so that’s close enough.

Xiaomi said it is using electrochromic lenses to adjust viewing in different light conditions. The glasses also have a complete blackout mode for a fully immersive experience — kind of making it like a VR headset.