Lifeboat Foundation

The Russian government is now facing a digital storage crisis as Western cloud services have pulled their services from the country.

Western cloud storage providers have pulled out of Russia following heavy Western sanctions designed to cripple the Russian economy. According to reports, the Russian government is looking at several different ways to solve the problem of finding hosts for Russia’s data, and some of those solutions include leasing all available data storage across Russia or seizing all data storage from Russian businesses that have left the country.

Pushing Moore’s Law to its bitter limits, a new graphene transistor gate measures a mere 0.34 nanometers—a mark that’ll be hard to beat.

If true, Redmond is capable sustaining a stable working environment somewhere after all.

A wide range of QNAP NAS devices are affected by dirty pipe linux.

A newly disclosed security flaw in the Linux kernel could be leveraged by a local adversary to gain elevated privileges on vulnerable systems to execute arbitrary code, escape containers, or induce a kernel panic.

Tracked as CVE-2022–25636 (CVSS score: 7.8), the vulnerability impacts Linux kernel versions 5.4 through 5.6.10 and is a result of a heap out-of-bounds write in the netfilter subcomponent in the kernel. The issue was discovered by Nick Gregory, a senior threat researcher at Sophos.

A team of researchers working at Tsinghua University in China has created a sub-1-nm gate in a MoS₂ transistor. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group outlines how they created the super tiny gate and explains why they believe it will be difficult for anyone to beat their record.

For most of the history of microcomputing, Moore’s Law has held up—researchers and engineers have managed to double the speed and capability of computers regularly by reducing the size of their components. But more recently, it has grown increasingly difficult to make components smaller as scientists now run into physical limitations. In this new effort, the researchers believe they may have bumped up against the ultimate limit—they have built a gate that is just one atom in length.

At their most basic, transistors are a source and a drain, with a gate controlling the flow of electricity between them. It switches on and off depending on how much electricity is applied. The push to reduce the size of the components has led to the testing of materials such as carbon nanotubes, which are approximately 1nm, for use as gates. In this new effort, the researchers have unrolled the carbon nanotube and used its graphene edge as the gate—reducing its length to just 0.34 nm.

Circa 2019

When Ken-Ichiro Kamei, a microengineer at Kyoto University, goes out drinking with his friends, he usually brings along one of his “bodies on a chip.” When the topic of work inevitably comes up, he’ll whip out the chip – which looks like a lab slide, but with an added crystal-clear silicone rubber layer containing faintly visible troughs and channels – and declare, “I’m making these devices to recreate humans and animals.”

Wows inevitably ensue. “It’s like I’m a magician and my friends have asked me to do some tricks,” Kamei chuckles.

Continue reading “How ‘bodies on a chip’ can transform animal welfare” »

Designed to train students to practice responsible technology development, the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) publishes a collection of original pedagogical materials developed for instructional use on MIT OpenCourseWare.