Lifeboat Foundation

The National Security Agency knows Edward Snowden disclosed many of its innermost secrets when he revealed how aggressive its surveillance tactics are. What it doesn’t know is just how much information the whistleblower took with him when he left.

For all of its ability to track our telecommunications, the NSA seemingly has little clue exactly what documents, or even how many documents, Snowden gave to the media. Like most large organizations, the NSA had tools in place to track who accessed what data and when. But Snowden, a system administrator, apparently was able to cover his tracks by deleting or modifying the log files that tracked that access. Read more

A radical concept could revise theories addressing cognitive behavior.

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Jose Cordeiro is a hopeless optimist. But is he right to say that in the Chinese word for crisis there’s opportunity beside the danger? I think he is. What do you think?!

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“We are interested in now, most of us,” says Robert Grass, a researcher in chemistry at ETH Zurich. “We buy our furniture in Ikea. We don’t care if in 10 years it falls apart. With information it is similar. We don’t think into the future.”

But Grass isn’t like most of us. His team, which is exploring how to use DNA as a data storage mechanism, is one of several academic and commercial entities grappling with the challenge of protecting data against the elements over time spans stretching out to millions of years. Read more

“If he was paid by the oil and gas industry lobby he couldn’t have written a more favorable article for them.”—Elon Musk

Video & Article on Criticism about Incentives

“Most of the VR prototypes we’ve seen so far use a wraparound headset. But this “shut out everything” hardware paradigm could seriously limit adoption, especially in consumer markets. There’s actually an emerging category of virtual experiences that allow a user to experience digital objects as if they were real, without the need for a wraparound headset. There hasn’t been as much chatter about it, but “non-enveloping” VR could be one of the biggest, most important parts of this new wave of digital-analog world interfaces.”

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“Canada’s domestic digital divide, with the North as its epicenter, has been a point of growing concern over the last several years. Much of the internet in the northernmost regions of the country is still beamed down by satellites, but a plan to link Europe and Asia with fiber optic cable via Nunavut is currently being negotiated by a Toronto-based company called Arctic Fibre.”

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“Machines can do some surprising things. But what you really want to know is this: Will your job be around in the future?…The researchers admit that these estimates are rough and likely to be wrong. But consider this a snapshot of what some smart people think the future might look like.” Read more

From time to time, I come across news covering collaborations between companies which are either promising or surprising. Sometimes both. A future full of science fiction technologies in medicine &…

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