Lifeboat Foundation

Secure communications provider Wickr has announced that it will shutter its free encrypted messaging app, Wickr Me, next year.

Text messaging has been around since the dawn of cellular technology, and sparked its own unique language. But it’s time to put sending regular SMS messages out to pasture.

If you have an iPhone, you’re already on your way. iPhones (as well as iPads and Macs) use iMessage to send messages between Apple devices. It’s a data-based messaging system reliant on 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi, rather than SMS messaging, which uses an old, outdated but universal 2G cellular network. iMessage has grown in popularity, but has left Android devices and other computers out in the dark.

Continue reading “Cybersecurity 101: How to choose and use an encrypted messaging app” »

A team of German and Spanish researchers from Valencia, Münster, Augsburg, Berlin and Munich have succeeded in controlling individual light quanta to an extremely high degree of precision. In Nature Communications, the researchers report how, by means of a soundwave, they switch individual photons on a chip back and forth between two outputs at gigahertz frequencies. This method, demonstrated here for the first time, can now be used for acoustic quantum technologies or complex integrated photonic networks.

Light waves and soundwaves form the technological backbone of modern communications. While glass fibers with laser light form the World Wide Web, nanoscale soundwaves on chips process signals at gigahertz frequencies for wireless transmission between smartphones, tablets or laptops. One of the most pressing questions for the future is how these technologies can be extended to quantum systems, to build up secure (i.e., tap-free) quantum communication networks.

“Light quanta or photons play a very central role in the development of quantum technologies,” says physicist Prof. Hubert Krenner, who heads the study in Münster and Augsburg. “Our team has now succeeded in generating individual photons on a chip the size of a thumbnail and then controlling them with unprecedented precision, precisely clocked by means of soundwaves,” he says.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eVyphsl0x0

Where does the mind end and the world begin? Is the mind locked inside its skull, sealed in with skin, or does it expand outward, merging with things and places and other minds that it thinks with? What if there are objects outside—a pen and paper, a phone—that serve the same function as parts of the brain, enabling it to calculate or remember?

In their famous 1998 paper “The Extended Mind,” philosophers Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers posed those questions and answered them provocatively: cognitive processes “ain’t all in the head.” The environment has an active role in driving cognition; cognition is sometimes made up of neural, bodily, and environmental processes.

Continue reading “The Extended Mind | Andy Clark” »

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered that the safe operation of a negative pressure room—a space in a hospital or biological research laboratory designed to protect outside areas from exposure to deadly pathogens—can be disrupted by an attacker armed with little more than a smartphone.

According to UCI cyber-physical systems security experts, who shared their findings with attendees at the Association for Computing Machinery’s recent Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Los Angeles, mechanisms that control airflow in and out of biocontainment facilities can be tricked into functioning irregularly by a sound of a particular frequency, possibly tucked surreptitiously into a popular song.

“Someone could play a piece of music loaded on their smartphone or get it to transmit from a television or other audio device in or near a negative pressure room,” said senior co-author Mohammad Al Faruque, UCI professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “If that music is embedded with a tone that matches the resonant frequency of the pressure controls of one of these spaces, it could cause a malfunction and a leak of deadly microbes.”

It’s diversifying from its initial reliance on Taiwan-made chips.

Apple is diversifying its supply chain away from Taiwan as it has plans to buy some of its chips from a factory in Arizona, company CEO Tim Cook said last month at an internal meeting in Germany, according to a report by Bloomberg News.

Manufacturing A-series and M-series processors

Continue reading “Apple plans to source chips from Arizona plant by 2024” »

face_with_colon_three circa 2020.

Scientists in Australia have developed a new type of electronic material that is touch-responsive and just a fraction of the thickness of current smartphone screens. This could see it one day find use in next-generation mobile devices, and because of its incredible thinness and flexibility, could be manufactured at large scale using roll-to-roll (R2R) processing like a printed newspaper.

The breakthrough comes from researchers at RMIT University, who began with a material commonly used in today’s mobile touchscreens called indium-tin oxide. This transparent material is highly conductive but does have its shortcomings, chiefly that it is very brittle, so the team sought to give it better pliability by greatly reducing its thickness.

Continue reading “Ultra-thin smartphone touchscreens could be printed like a newspaper” »

Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they’d be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?

After all, if the cosmos holds other life, and if some of that life has evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, we should be considering some very extreme possibilities. Today’s futurists and believers in a machine “singularity” predict that life and its technological baggage might end up so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t even realize we were staring at it. That’s quite a claim, yet it would neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the cosmos around us, despite the sheer number of planets it could have arisen on—the so-called Fermi Paradox.

For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world.