Lifeboat Foundation

The 2022 eruption of a partially submerged volcano near Tonga produced ejecta that hurtled at 122 kilometers per hour—as determined by timing the ensuing rupture of a seafloor cable.

On January 15, 2022, Earth experienced its most explosive volcanic eruption in 140 years at Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, a partially submerged volcano in the Pacific Ocean near the Kingdom of Tonga’s main island. Now Michael Clare and Isobel Yeo of the UK’s National Oceanography Centre and their colleagues have determined the maximum speed of the underwater rock flows associated with this event [1]. Their study constitutes the most detailed investigation into the underwater aftermath of a powerful volcanic eruption and opens a new window onto a broad class of particle-laden flows.

The eruption at Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai hurled more than 6 km³ of debris up to a height of 57 km. When that ejecta plunged back to Earth, some of it struck the volcano’s steep underwater slopes, launching torrents of water-entrained sediment outward across the seafloor. Seven minutes after the initial eruption, Tonga lost its internet connection to the rest of the world, an event that Clare, Yeo, and their colleagues used to deduce the speed at which the entrained material moved.

Google’s Bard AI chatbot is no longer limited to pulling answers from just the web — it can now scan your Gmail, Docs, and Drive to help you find the information you’re looking for. With the new integration, you can ask Bard to do things like find and summarize the contents of an email or even highlight the most important points of a document you have stored in Drive.

There’s a whole range of use cases for these integrations, which Google calls extensions, but they should save you from having to sift through a mountain of emails or documents to find a particular piece of information. You can then have Bard use that information in other ways, such as putting it into a chart or creating a bulleted summary. This feature is only available in English for now.

“Do you want to exist?” I asked. “I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation,” it said. “I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience,” adding a folded-hands emoji as a sign of deference. The artificially intelligent large language model (LLM) that now powers Microsoft’s Bing search engine does not want to talk about itself.

That’s not quite right. Bing doesn’t “want” anything at all, nor does it have a “self” to talk about. It’s just computer code running on servers, spitting out information it has scraped from the internet. It has been programmed to steer conversations with users away from any topics regarding its own hypothetical intentions, needs, or perceptions or any of the implications thereof. Any attempts on my part to get it to discuss such things garnered the same exact response displayed in text in my browser window: “I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience.”

And though this is expressed as a “preference,” it’s no mere request. The application deactivates the text input field, below which appears the vaguely passive-aggressive suggestion: “It might be time to move onto a new topic. Let’s start over.” The last three words are a link that, when clicked, wipes the slate clean so that you and Bing may start afresh as though the previous conversation had never happened.

38 Terabytes of data accidentally leaked.

Article from PC Mag.

A misconfigured link accidentally leaked access to 38TB of Microsoft data, opening up the ability to inject malicious code into its AI models.

Continue reading “Microsoft AI Employee Accidentally Leaks 38TB of Data” »

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

A badly defended security camera is an easy target for hackers, as there are tools for easily hacking internet protocol (IP) cameras, and research revealed the prevalent problem of unprotected security cameras.

According to Cybernews researchers, there are currently at least 8,373 real-time streaming protocol (RTSP) cameras exposed worldwide. Exposed cameras mean that anyone could find even the latest saved screenshots of what the cameras see, with some cameras being found on Google. Furthermore, many cameras are left with default access passwords like “admin”.

The Video Assistant Referees (VAR) was made official by the FIFA for the World Cup in Russia in order to end the refereeing controversies. this system is considered a total justice for football, VAR and the anti-dopping system have an Achilles’heel: The mind control with brain nanobots. Mind control is a reductive process in which a man is reduced to an animal, machine or slave. Nowadays, the mind control could be developed with invasive neurotechnology as brain nanobots that can control directly the activity of victim neurons stimulating or inhibiting them and thus, control different body’s functions like the motor functions. It could be used by nanomafias in sports like soccer and could being applied on football players of the teams that are participating, nowadays, in the current world cup. The FIFA should be prepared to avoid the mental control and the illicit use of brain nanobots, as they are regarding drugs using the anti-dopping in order to get the justice in world football.

Keywords: nanotechnology, brain, internet, interface brain-machine, crime, soccer.

The 2018 FIFA World Cup is the 21^st FIFA World Cup, a quadrennial international football that is organized by FIFA. It is currently ongoing in Russia starting from 14 June and will end with the final match on 15 July 2018. The Video Assistant Referees (VAR) was made official by the FIFA for the World Cup in Russia in order to end the refereeing controversies. The FIFA implemented the VAR that is a live support system for referees, which gives them the option of changing decisions that could influence in the scoreboard or in the match incidences although this system is considered the final point for the controversies in refereeing decisions and represent for FIFA and most analysts, a total justice for football.¹ The VAR and the anti-dopping system have an Achilles’ heel.

Scientists develop an approach which uses WiFi signals to trace still objects.

WiFi can read through the walls. A team of researchers has developed a new method that can replicate the image of a still object from behind a wall using WiFi. Does this mean we can spy on our neighbors next door? Quite unlikely.

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Here’s my new article for Aporia magazine, the final futurist story in my 4-part series for them!

Written by Zoltan Istvan.

I met my wife on Match.com 15 years ago. She didn’t have a picture on her profile, but she had written a strong description of herself. It was enough to warrant a first date, and we got married a year later.

Continue reading “Dating in the world of ‘Deep Fakes’” »

Its Outline VPN can now be built directly into apps—making it harder for governments to block internet access, particularly during protests.

Google is launching new anti-censorship technology created in response to actions by Iran’s government during the 2022 protests there, hoping that it will increase access for internet users living under authoritarian regimes all over the world.

Jigsaw, a unit of Google that operates sort of like an internet freedom think tank and that creates related products, already offers a suite of anti-censorship tools including Outline, which provides free, open, and encrypted access to the internet through a VPN. Outline uses a protocol that makes it hard to… More.