Lifeboat Foundation

Amber Alerts are an important tool in helping locate abducted children. They’re authorized by law enforcement and broadcast via TVs, text messages, and other means. Now, Instagram will also push Amber Alerts into users’ feeds with the feature rolling out in the US today and set to be available in 25 total countries “in the next couple of weeks.” It shows how apps like Instagram have become basic communication infrastructure in the modern world.

Adding Amber Alerts to Instagram makes sense for a few reasons. First, younger generations may well ignore text messages but scroll through Instagram with some regularity. Second, while text alerts require people to click a link to get more information and photos of the missing child, Instagram’s alerts will include this info directly. It doesn’t seem the alerts will be issued as notifications — they’ll just appear in users’ regular feeds.

A campaign targeting poorly secured Elasticsearch databases has deleted their contents and dropped ransom notes on 450 instances, demanding a payment of $620 to give them back their indexes, totaling a demand of $279,000.

After the launched, we’ll get our first look at full-color images captured by the telescope. The European Space Agency says the imagery and first spectroscopic data on July 12th.

“The release of Webb’s first full-color images will offer a unique moment for us all to stop and marvel at a view humanity has never seen before,” Webb deputy program director Eric Smith said. “These images will be the culmination of decades of dedication, talent, and dreams — but they will also be just the beginning.”

JWST required several months of preparation before starting science work. The process included to its operating temperature, calibrating instruments and aligning the mirrors. The ESA, NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSci) spent over five years figuring out what Webb should capture first in order to show off what the observatory can do.

No more Taiwan-made CPUs, microcontrollers for Russia and Belarus.

Taiwanese government effectively bans all high-tech exports to Russia and Belarus.

A new technology is using particles of gold to make colors. With further work, the method developed at Aalto University could herald a new display technology.

The technique uses gold nanocylinders suspended in a gel. The gel only transmits certain colors when lit by polarized light, and the color depends on the orientation of the gold nanocylinders. In a clever twist, a collaboration led by Anton Kuzyk’s and Juho Pokki’s research groups used DNA molecules to control the orientation of gold nanocylinders in the gel.

“DNA isn’t just an information carrier—it can also be a building block. We designed the DNA molecules to have a certain melting temperature, so we could basically program the material,” says Aalto doctoral candidate Joonas Ryssy, the study’s lead author. When the gel heats past the melting temperature, the DNA molecules loosen their grip and the gold nanocylinders change orientation. When the temperature drops, they tighten up again, and the nanoparticles go back to their original position.

By Chuck Brooks

The rapid pace of technological change is clearly visible, but much of what you may not see, the exceedingly small physical components of change called nanotechnologies, are catalyzing the revolution.

A Korean company hopes to build a floating city Oceanix Busan. Seasteading is seen as a means to address climate-change-induced sea-level rise, as well as a sociology experiment.

But libertarian ideas are not the sole reasoning behind seasteading and floating cities. A prototype floating community is planned on the water next to Busan, South Korea. For the company that is creating it, Oceanix, it is about addressing the coastal community climate challenge of rising sea levels. Rather than building dikes and sea walls to hold back the ocean, Oceanix is offering a city that floats. So instead of increased sunshine day flooding along the US eastern seaboard that inundates Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Charleston, Norfolk, Hampton Roads and other Chesapeake Bay communities quite regularly these days, there would be cities that ride the surface of the ocean rather than be flooded by it.

It’s not like people haven’t been living in floating accommodation for decades. Houseboat communities here in Toronto have been around for a number of years. I visited one of these homes a few years ago and was surprised to see the quality of accommodation and the lifestyle it supported. Today, there are people living permanently on cruise ships that travel the globe. And in The Netherlands, boats and retired ships moored along its many canals have been turned into permanent homes often featured in HGTV’s House Hunters International. But it is in low-lying coastal areas like Bangladesh, The Maldives, and many Pacific island nations where the floating city is seen as a climate change solution for encroaching seas.

Continue reading “Oceanix Busan in South Korea Could Be The World’s First Floating City” »

When reading about the emerging cryptoworld and the new opportunities presented by blockchain technology, you may be enchanted by rags-to-riches stories with billions made overnight, or perhaps be horrified by scams, where the founders of fraudulent projects skip off to Tahiti with their investor’s money. However, it’s doubtful that the first thing that pops into your mind will be grizzly tales of extortion, kidnapping, and even murder. But for blockchain pioneers, falling victim to these horrific crimes is a very real risk that they must be wary about every day.

The explosive profit potential of cryptocurrencies has attracted a myriad of extortionists, scammers, and outright criminals over the years since Bitcoin was first launched in January of 2009. Some developers have had their companies’ reputations damaged by such conmen, and some have ended up beaten, kidnapped, and even killed.

One business that found itself the target of such nefarious opportunists was a Singapore-based company called Skycoin, which is still dealing with the fallout from these attacks to this day. After taking the rather innocuous decision to hire a marketing company to do PR and improve their website, the project and its co-founder found themselves caught in a web of blackmail, deceit, and crime that most people would only encounter in a crime thriller directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Phishing campaigns attributed to an advanced threat actor called SideWinder involved a fake VPN app for Android devices published on Google Play Store along with a custom tool that filters victims for better targeting.

SideWinder is an APT group that’s been active since at least 2012, believed to be an actor of Indian origin with a relatively high level of sophistication.

Security researchers at Kaspersky attributed close to 1,000 attacks to this group in the past two years. Among its primary targets are organizations in Pakistan, China, Nepal, and Afghanistan.