A recent Falcon 9 launch reportedly contained two prototype global internet satellites, bringing SpaceX closer to establishing the Starlink global network.
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Category: internet
Puerto Crypto is a conference focused on connecting Puerto Rico with visionary entrepreneurs and investors in the blockchain, crypto currency and ICO vertical
Posted in bitcoin, internet | Leave a Comment on Puerto Crypto is a conference focused on connecting Puerto Rico with visionary entrepreneurs and investors in the blockchain, crypto currency and ICO vertical
Puerto Rico 09:15 A History of Virtual Currency and Digital Payments Rod Garratt UCSB 09:30 Transparency and the Transformative Nature of Blockchain Technology Gerardo Trevino Paybook 10:00 Living on the Ledger And The Coming Licensing Revolution Matt Clemenson Lottery.com Scott Picken WealthMigrate.com 10:30 Coffee Break 11:00 New Money, New Internet, New World Alena Vranova Satoshi Labs 11:15 Crypto Trading Panel Jared Geata Blockchain Industries, Inc.
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Will the benefits of making data more widely available outweigh such risks? The signs are that they will. Plenty of countries are now opening up their medical records, but few have gone as far as Sweden. It aims to give all its citizens electronic access to their medical records by 2020; over a third of Swedes have already set up accounts. Studies show that patients with such access have a better understanding of their illnesses, and that their treatment is more successful. Trials in America and Canada have produced not just happier patients but lower costs, as clinicians fielded fewer inquiries. That should be no surprise. No one has a greater interest in your health than you do. Trust in Doctor You.
NO WONDER they are called “patients”. When people enter the health-care systems of rich countries today, they know what they will get: prodding doctors, endless tests, baffling jargon, rising costs and, above all, long waits. Some stoicism will always be needed, because health care is complex and diligence matters. But frustration is boiling over. This week three of the biggest names in American business—Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase—announced a new venture to provide better, cheaper health care for their employees. A fundamental problem with today’s system is that patients lack knowledge and control. Access to data can bestow both.
The internet already enables patients to seek online consultations when and where it suits them. You can take over-the-counter tests to analyse your blood, sequence your genome and check on the bacteria in your gut. Yet radical change demands a shift in emphasis, from providers to patients and from doctors to data. That shift is happening. Technologies such as the smartphone allow people to monitor their own health. The possibilities multiply when you add the crucial missing ingredients—access to your own medical records and the ability easily to share information with those you trust. That allows you to reduce inefficiencies in your own treatment and also to provide data to help train medical algorithms. You can enhance your own care and everyone else’s, too.
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This incredible map shows the undersea cables that keep the internet alive — and security services are worried Russia could cut them
Posted in internet, military | Leave a Comment on This incredible map shows the undersea cables that keep the internet alive — and security services are worried Russia could cut them
Many of the previously dumb devices in our homes are getting smarter with the advent of internet-connected lights, thermostats, and more. Surely the windows can’t be smart, can they? A team of engineers from the German Friedrich-Schiller University Jena have created just that — a smart window that can alter its opacity and harvest energy from the sun’s rays.
There have been a number of “smart” electrochromatic window designs over the years, but these are mostly aimed at changing tint or opacity only. The windows designed by Friedrich-Schiller University researchers are vastly more functional. The so-called Large-Area Fluidic Windows (LaWin) design uses a fluid suspension of iron particles. This fluid is contained within the window in a series of long vertical channels. These “functional fluids” allow the window to change opacity, but also absorb and distribute heat.
The iron-infused fluid remains diffused until you switch the window on — the nanoparticles cloud up the channels and block light. When you flip the switch, magnets drag the nanoparticles out of the liquid to make the window fully transparent. When the magnet is switched off, the nanoparticles are resuspended to darken the panel. In general, the more nanoparticles you add, the darker the window becomes. You can even completely black it out with enough iron.
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“Friday morning, David Tran, co-founder and CTO of PR-software startup Upbeat, did just that. Tran built and published a Chrome extension called On The Blockchain in around 15 minutes. Subtitle: “Everything is better on the blockchain.””
A joint China-Austria team has performed quantum key distribution between the quantum-science satellite Micius and multiple ground stations located in Xinglong (near Beijing), Nanshan (near Urumqi), and Graz (near Vienna). Such experiments demonstrate the secure satellite-to-ground exchange of cryptographic keys during the passage of the satellite Micius over a ground station. Using Micius as a trusted relay, a secret key was created between China and Europe at locations separated up to 7,600 km on the Earth.
Private and secure communications are fundamental for Internet use and e-commerce, and it is important to establish a secure network with global protection of data. Traditional public key cryptography usually relies on the computational intractability of certain mathematical functions. In contrast, quantum key distribution (QKD) uses individual light quanta (single photons) in quantum superposition states to guarantee unconditional security between distant parties. Previously, the quantum communication distance has been limited to a few hundred kilometers due to optical channel losses of fibers or terrestrial free space. A promising solution to this problem exploits satellite and space-based links, which can conveniently connect two remote points on the Earth with greatly reduced channel loss, as most of the photons’ propagation path is through empty space with negligible loss and decoherence.
A cross-disciplinary multi-institutional team of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by Professor Jian-Wei Pan, has spent more than 10 years developing a sophisticated satellite, Micius, dedicated to quantum science experiments, which was launched on August 2016 and orbits at an altitude of ~500 km. Five ground stations in China coordinate with the Micius satellite. These are located in Xinglong (near Beijing), Nanshan (near Urumqi), Delingha (37°22’44.43’‘N, 97°43’37.01” E), Lijiang (26°41’38.15’‘N, 100°1’45.55’‘E), and Ngari in Tibet (32°19’30.07’‘N, 80°1’34.18’‘E).
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Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).
In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. Dick was no better a prophet of technology than any science fiction writer, and was arguably worse than most. His imagined worlds jam together odd bits of fifties’ and sixties’ California with rocket ships, drugs, and social speculation. Dick usually wrote in a hurry and for money, and sometimes under the influence of drugs or a recent and urgent personal religious revelation.
Still, what he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. As Dick described his work (in the opening essay to his 1985 collection, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon):
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The internet is ruled by a small number of massive corporations. Roger McNamee, Co-founder of Elevation Partners on CNBC, says, Google, Facebook, Amazon are increasingly just super-monopolies, especially Google … The share of the markets they operate in is literally on the same scale that Standard Oil had … more than 100 years ago—with the …
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