Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: internet

(A rendering of what X’s renewable energy storage plant would look like. X) X, the “moonshot” division of Google’s parent company Alphabet that has worked on everything from self-driving cars and delivery drones, has a new public project: storing renewable energy so it doesn’t go to waste.

The team working on the project is codenamed “Malta,” and it aims to efficiently store energy from solar and wind using salts. That way, renewable energy can still be used even if solar panels or wind turbines can’t collect energy.

Malta is part of X’s Foundry, which explores early-stage projects. It’s not an “official” project like Project Wing (drone delivery) or Project Loon (high-altitude balloons that beam the internet to the surface). X is announcing Malta now because it wants to build a prototype plant for testing how storing renewable energy can feed a power grid. It’s accepting applications for potential partners on its website.

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A startup called OneWeb aims to make access to the internet (which the U.N. has deemed a basic human right) more widely available to those living in rural areas.

A satellite internet startup called OneWeb wants to make internet access available to all. From rural neighborhoods to completely remote communities, the company want to make sure that the internet isn’t just a luxury afforded to those who live in certain locations. Thanks in part to backing from Richard Branson of the Virgin Group, as well as Airbus and Qualcomm, OneWeb hopes to launch 720 satellites that would provide internet to places on Earth that are normally far out of reach.

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A new report shows just how easy it is becoming to download designs for difficult-to-trace arms.

In the darker corners of the Internet where search engines cannot go, black markets offer pistols, machine guns, even explosives — and most worrisome to security researchers, computer aided design, or CAD, files for 3D-printed guns.

A new report from RAND looked at 811 weapons listings on a dozen dark-web markets, which continue to thrive despite the shuttering of sites like the Silk Road and, just this month, AlphaBay. Firearms were the top-selling category, with was 339 active listings, roughly 42 percent of the market. But the next-largest share, with 222 listings, was a variety of digital products, from build-it-yourself explosives manuals to CAD files.

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First and foremost, consumers must realize what’s involved with 30 GHz. A Gigahertz (GHz) is a frequency equal to one billion hertz or cycles per second. Now multiply that 30 times; how many cycles per second do you get? Isn’t that 30 billion cycles per second? Now, imagine those GHz frequencies traveling over in-wall copper electric house wires that are built to take only 60 Hz!

Such GHz frequencies just may be considered as sinusoidal harmonics or “dirty electricity.”

To put the above into proper perspective about microwave technology and non-ionizing radiation waves such frequencies emit, we need to understand the frequency of electricity. One Hertz (Hz) equals one cycle per second. One kilohertz (KHz) is equivalent to one thousand cycles per second. One megahertz (MHz) equals one million cycles per second. One gigahertz (GHz) is equal to one billion hertz or cycles per second—frequencies not found naturally in Nature, except from man-made/generated electromagnetics.

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Researchers from China successfully teleported a photon from Earth to a satellite 500 km away. The work is an essential step towards establishing a global-scale quantum internet.

Not long ago, in the early 1990s, scientists only speculated that teleportation using quantum physics could be possible. Since then, the process has become a standard operation in quantum optics labs around the world. In fact, just last year, two separate teams conducted the world’s first quantum teleportation outside of a laboratory.

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Artificial intelligence software could generate highly realistic fake videos of former president Barack Obama using existing audio and video clips of him, a new study [PDF] finds.

Such work could one day help generate digital models of a person for virtual reality or augmented reality applications, researchers say.

Computer scientists at the University of Washington previously revealed they could generate digital doppelgängers of anyone by analyzing images of them collected from the Internet, from celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger to public figures such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Such work suggested it could one day be relatively easy to create such models of anybody, when there are untold numbers of digital photos of everyone on the Internet.

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My new article from Vice Motherboard on liberty and privacy. This is one of my most ambitious philosophical works yet: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjx5y5/liberty-might-be-better-served-by-doing-away-with-privacy #Libertarian

If tech is surveilling us constantly, we need the ability to use it to watch the watchers.

Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, transhumanist, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a Libertarian candidate for California Governor.

The constant onslaught of new technology is making our lives more public and trackable than ever, which understandably scares a lot of people. Part of the dilemma is how we interpret the right to privacy using centuries-old ideals handed down to us by our forbearers. I think the 21st century idea of privacy—like so many other taken-for-granted concepts—may need a revamp.

When James Madison wrote the Fourth Amendment—which helped legally establish US privacy ideals and protection from unreasonable search and seizure—he surely wasn’t imagining Elon Musk’s neural lace, artificial intelligence, the internet, or virtual reality. Madison wanted to make sure government couldn’t antagonize its citizens and overstep its governmental authority, as monarchies and the Church had done for centuries in Europe.

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Technology can be wonderful. But how do you keep track of yourself when technology allows you to be everywhere at once?

In this film Prof. Yair Amichai-Hamburger (director of the Research Center for Internet Psychology at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications) argues that even though technology allows us to reach out and connect more easily than ever before, if we don’t ever take a step back, we can lose track of our humanity in the process.

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