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Category: internet

In the future, industrial robots may create jobs, boost productivity and spur higher wages. But one thing seems more certain for now: They’re vulnerable to hackers.

Factories, hospitals and other big robot users often lack sufficient levels of defense against a digital attack, according to cybersecurity experts, robot manufacturers and engineering researchers. The risk levels are rising as more robots morph from being offline and isolated to being internet-connected machines, often working alongside humans.

5G promises to make factories a lot smarter. And that means they’ll be a lot more vulnerable.

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https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

We’ll likely see a rise in internet blackouts in 2019, for two reasons: countries deliberately “turning off” the internet within their borders, and hackers disrupting segments of the internet with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Above all, both will force policymakers everywhere to reckon with the fact that the internet itself is increasingly becoming centralized — and therefore increasingly vulnerable to manipulation, making everyone less safe.

From a report: The first method — states deliberately severing internet connections within their country — has an important history. In 2004, the Maldivian government caused an internet blackout when citizens protested the president; Nepal similarly caused a blackout shortly thereafter. In 2007, the Burmese government apparently damaged an underwater internet cable in order to “staunch the flow of pictures and messages from protesters reaching the outside world.” In 2011, Egypt cut most internet and cell services within its borders as the government attempted to quell protests against then-President Hosni Mubarak; Libya then did the same after its own unrest.

In 2014, Syria had a major internet outage amid its civil war. In 2018, Mauritania was taken entirely offline for two days when undersea submarine internet cables were cut, around the same time as the Sierra Leone government may have imposed an internet blackout in the same region. When we think about terms like “cyberspace” and “internet,” it can be tempting to associate them with vague notions of a digital world we can’t touch. And while this is perhaps useful in some contexts, this line of thinking forgets the very real wires, servers, and other hardware that form the architecture of the internet. If these physical elements cease to function, from a cut wire to a storm-damaged server farm, the internet, too, is affected. More than that, if a single entity controls — or can at least access — that hardware for a region or even an entire country, government-caused internet blackouts are a tempting method of censorship and social control.

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Blockchain ‘as disruptive as the Web’?

Blockchain is featured as a disrupting technology in the Tech Trends 2019 report published by Big Four audit and consulting firm Deloitte on Jan. 16.

According to one article in the report, “[a]dvanced networking is the unsung hero of our digital future,” and blockchain is cited as a part of it. The report — which mentions blockchain 25 times — notes that blockchain is among the technologies the importance of which is growing rapidly and still on its path towards mass adoption.

The report also cites a International Data Corporation’s (IDC) projection from last year that states worldwide spending on blockchain solutions will reach $9.7 billion in 2021. Another IDC’s prediction sees the spending hitting $11.7 billion in 2022.

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https://www.laserfocusworld.com/…/on-chip-optical-link-is-c…

Researchers of the University of Twente (UT; Enschede, Netherlands) have, for the first time, succeeded in connecting two parts of an electronic chip using an on-chip optical link, all fabricable with standard CMOS technology — a long-sought-after goal, as intrachip connection via light is almost instantaneous and also provides electrical isolation. Such a connection can, for example, be a safe way of connecting high-power electronics and digital control circuitry on a single chip without a direct electrical link. Vishal Agarwal, a UT PhD student, created a very small optocoupler circuit that delivers a data rate of megabits per second in an energy-efficient way.

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Hacker attacks on everything from social media accounts to government files could be largely prevented by the advent of quantum communication, which would use particles of light called “photons” to secure information rather than a crackable code.

Using light to send information is a game of probability: Transmitting one bit of information can take multiple attempts. The more photons a light source can generate per second, the faster the rate of successful information transmission.

“A source might generate a lot of photons per second, but only a few of them may actually be used to transmit information, which strongly limits the speed of quantum communication,” Bogdanov said.

For faster quantum communication, Purdue researchers modified the way in which a light pulse from a laser beam excites electrons in a man-made “defect,” or local disturbance in a crystal lattice, and then how this defect emits one photon at a time.

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Researchers in the field of quantum communication have recently made great strides, taking us closer to a perfectly secure method of communication.

For years, researchers struggled to find ways to amplify quantum signals, store large amounts of quantum data, and allow for more than two nodes in a quantum network. However, in the last two months, solutions to all three of these problems have been found using the bizarre properties of the quantum world, in particular quantum entanglement.

Now that these hurdles have been overcome, quantum networks and even a quantum internet seem like real possibilities.

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