Lifeboat Foundation

What makes a better Internet possible? At Orchid Labs, our goal is to ensure that every person on Earth can have access to an open, decentralized, and uncensored Internet. We believe a better Internet is one that isn’t controlled by the few, but open to all.

Currently, Internet access for the majority of the people on Earth is censored and monitored. Because of this, many Internet users are blocked from freely communicating, collaborating, and accessing information. The current centralized system, which limits our ability to communicate and learn — while also harvesting and selling our personal data — is far from the full potential of what the internet could be and strays from the original intention of its creators.

That’s why we’ve launched the Orchid Protocol, an open-source overlay network that uses excess bandwidth on top of the existing Internet to ensure that people — no matter where they live on our planet — can have unrestricted access to information and collaboration. Orchid’s protocol combines surplus bandwidth, state-of-the-art encryption, and a decentralized infrastructure enabling any Internet user to participate and exchange bandwidth for payment in peer-to-peer transactions using Orchid tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.

China is leading the world in developing unbreakable encryption using quantum physics.

Quantum theory predicts that a vast number of atoms can be entangled and intertwined by a very strong quantum relationship, even in a macroscopic structure. Until now, however, experimental evidence has been mostly lacking, although recent advances have shown the entanglement of 2,900 atoms. Scientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, recently reengineered their data processing, demonstrating that 16 million atoms were entangled in a one-centimetre crystal. They have published their results in Nature Communications.

The laws of quantum physics allow immediately detecting when emitted signals are intercepted by a third party. This property is crucial for data protection, especially in the encryption industry, which can now guarantee that customers will be aware of any interception of their messages. These signals also need to be able to travel long distances using special relay devices known as quantum repeaters—crystals enriched with rare earth atoms and cooled to 270 degrees below zero (barely three degrees above absolute zero), whose atoms are entangled and unified by a very strong quantum relationship. When a photon penetrates this small crystal block, entanglement is created between the billions of atoms it traverses. This is explicitly predicted by the theory, and it is exactly what happens as the crystal re-emits a single photon without reading the information it has received.

It is relatively easy to entangle two particles: Splitting a photon, for example, generates two entangled photons that have identical properties and behaviours. Florian Fröwis, a researcher in the applied physics group in UNIGE’s science faculty, says, “But it’s impossible to directly observe the process of entanglement between several million atoms since the mass of data you need to collect and analyse is so huge.”

Continue reading “A single photon reveals quantum entanglement of 16 million atoms” »

President Chunli Bai of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing had a meeting yesterday with President Anton Zeilinger of the Austria Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

Although 7,400 kilometres (4,600 miles) apart, they were certain no uninvited guests were eavesdropping thanks to the fact their video call was encrypted. Quantum style.

Just a few months ago, China was in the news for a landmark achievement in quantum communication, using a satellite called Micius to transmit entangled photons over a record distance.

Continue reading “Scientists Just Made The First Quantum-Encrypted International Video Call” »

For the first time, researchers have sent a quantum-secured message containing more than one bit of information per photon through the air above a city. The demonstration showed that it could one day be practical to use high-capacity, free-space quantum communication to create a highly secure link between ground-based networks and satellites, a requirement for creating a global quantum encryption network.

Quantum encryption uses photons to encode information in the form of quantum bits. In its simplest form, known as 2D encryption, each photon encodes one bit: either a one or a zero. Scientists have shown that a single photon can encode even more information—a concept known as high-dimensional quantum encryption—but until now this has never been demonstrated with free-space optical communication in real-world conditions. With eight bits necessary to encode just one letter, for example, packing more information into each photon would significantly speed up data transmission.

“Our work is the first to send messages in a secure manner using high-dimensional quantum encryption in realistic city conditions, including turbulence,” said research team lead, Ebrahim Karimi, University of Ottawa, Canada. “The secure, free-space communication scheme we demonstrated could potentially link Earth with satellites, securely connect places where it is too expensive to install fiber, or be used for encrypted communication with a moving object, such as an airplane.”

Continue reading “High-Dimensional Quantum Encryption Performed in Real-World City Conditions for First Time” »

Chinese researchers report that they’ve set a new distance record for quantum teleportation through space, the phenomenon that Albert Einstein once scoffed at as “spooky action at a distance.”

The technology isn’t yet ready for prime time, but eventually it could open the way for a new type of unbreakable encryption scheme based on the weirdness of quantum physics.

Continue reading “China’s Micius satellite sets distance record for quantum entanglement in space” »

Confidential details of a top-secret encryption-breaking supercomputer were left completely exposed on an unsecured computer server belonging to New York University (NYU), according to a new report.

While it’s not uncommon for even critical-level infrastructure to suffer potentially catastrophic security breaches, what makes this event different is that there was seemingly no foul-play or attempts to hack into NYU’s systems.

Instead, it looks like somebody may have just forgotten to secure their classified data properly, exposing hundreds of pages of information on a covert code-breaking machine co-administered by the Department of Defence, IBM, and NYU.

Continue reading “NYU Accidentally Leaked a Top-Secret Code-Breaking Supercomputer to The Entire Internet” »

Someone may have finally cracked a form of DVD encryption believed to be impenetrable. Potentially, this could mean it’s now possible to download 4K Blu-Ray movies online, though you shouldn’t get too excited yet.

According to TorrentFreak, an allegedly cracked copy of The Smurfs 2 — why that one, of all films, is a mystery — surfaced on HD Bit Torrent community UltraHDClub. There are no other details at the moment.

We’ve teamed up with Product Hunt to offer you the chance to win an all expense paid trip to TNW Conference 2017!

Continue reading “Pirates may have cracked the code to 4K UHD torrents” »

After conducting a statistical analysis of the text, Russian experts believe it’s encrypted in the following way: vowels and spaces are removed from the text. The collection of symbols is united in a new text, bestrewed with spaces beforehand. They estimate that about 60 percent of the text is written in English or German, and the other part in one of the Romance languages – possibly Italian or Spanish, or even Latin.

Experts previously thought it impossible to decipher the medieval text.