Lifeboat Foundation

Not saying that the whole Apple situation cause this; it just odd timing.

The Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission have asked mobile phone carriers and manufacturers to explain how they release security updates amid mounting concerns over security vulnerabilities, the U.S. agencies said on Monday.

The agencies have written to Apple, AT&T and Alphabet, among others, in order “to better understand, and ultimately to improve, the security of mobile devices,” the FCC said.

Continue reading “US investigates security of mobile devices” »

DARPA was tied to this; and when you click on the article the page states content was removed. I will keep trying to track down because it is a great report; so not sure if someone has intervene.

Forget telltale finger grease prints: researchers have come up with a robot that mimics the swipe touch gestures we use to get into our phones.

You will never have to carry physical documents of your passport into the airport ever again. De La Rue, a Britain-based commercial banknote printer and passport manufacturer, is working on a technology that can store “paperless passports” in smartphones.

This would act similar to mobile boarding cards, the Telegraph reported. “Paperless passports are one of many initiatives that we are currently looking at, but at the moment it is a concept that is at the very early stages of development,” a spokesman of the company was quoted as saying.

Movidius’ Myriad 2 vision processing chip (Photo: Movidius)

The branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning has given us new wonders such as self-driving cars and instant language translation on our phones. Now it’s about to injects smarts into every other object imaginable.

That’s because makers of silicon processors from giants such as Intel Corp. and Qualcomm Technologies Inc. as well as a raft of smaller companies are starting to embed deep learning software into their chips, particularly for mobile vision applications. In fairly short order, that’s likely to lead to much smarter phones, drones, robots, cameras, wearables and more.

Continue reading “AI-On-A-Chip Soon Will Make Phones, Drones And More A Lot Smarter” »

Oxford Nanopore Technologies is changing the course of genomics through the development of their small and portable DNA sequencer, the MinION, which makes of nanopore technology.

The handheld, portable tricorder from Star Trek was essentially able to scan and record biological data from almost anything, and it could do it anytime and anywhere. Recent technology has been pulling the device out of science fiction and turning it into reality, but none have come close to getting genetic information with the same portability…except for British company Oxford Nanopore Technologies.

Continue reading “Oxford Scientists Made A Pocket-Sized, Portable DNA Sequencer” »

Cell phones do not cause brain cancer.

Mobile phone use has not caused a rise in brain cancer in Australia, says a new study led by the University of Sydney.

New tech from Carnegie Mellon makes it much easier to play ‘Angry Birds’ on your wrist.

Smartwatches walk a fine line between functionality and fashion, but new SkinTrack technology from Carnegie Mellon University’s Future Interfaces Group makes the size of the screen a moot point. The SkinTrack system consists of a ring that emits a continuous high-frequency AC signal and a sensing wristband that goes under the watch. The wristband tracks the finger wearing the ring and senses whether the digit is hovering or actually making contact with your arm or hand, turning your skin into an extension of the touchscreen.

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Ask an Information Architect, CDO, Data Architect (Enterprise and non-Enterprise) they will tell you they have always known that information/ data is a basic staple like Electricity all along; and glad that folks are finally realizing it. So, the same view that we apply to utilities as core to our infrastructure & survival; we should also apply the same value and view about information. And, in fact, information in some areas can be even more important than electricity when you consider information can launch missals, cure diseases, make you poor or wealthy, take down a government or even a country.

What is information? Is it energy, matter, or something completely different? Although we take this word for granted and without much thought in today’s world of fast Internet and digital media, this was not the case in 1948 when Claude Shannon laid the foundations of information theory. His landmark paper interpreted information in purely mathematical terms, a decision that dematerialized information forever more. Not surprisingly, there are many nowadays that claim — rather unthinkingly — that human consciousness can be expressed as “pure information”, i.e. as something immaterial graced with digital immortality. And yet there is something fundamentally materialistic about information that we often ignore, although it stares us — literally — in the eye: the hardware that makes information happen.

As users we constantly interact with information via a machine of some kind, such as our laptop, smartphone or wearable. As developers or programmers we code via a computer terminal. As computer or network engineers we often have to wade through the sheltering heat of a server farm, or deal with the material properties of optical fibre or copper in our designs. Hardware and software are the fundamental ingredients of our digital world, both necessary not only in engineering information systems but in interacting with them as well. But this status quo is about to be massively disrupted by Artificial Intelligence.

Continue reading “How AI will make information akin to electricity” »