A Chinese electronics component manufacturer says its products inadvertently played a role in a massive cyberattack that disrupted major internet sites in the U.S. on Friday.
Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology, a vendor behind DVRs and internet-connected cameras, said on Sunday that security vulnerabilities involving weak default passwords in its products were partly to blame.
According to security researchers, malware known as Mirai has been taking advantage of these vulnerabilities by infecting the devices and using them to launch huge distributed denial-of service attacks, including Friday’s outage.
Artificial intelligence is a “momentous development,” said George Lee, co-chairman of the global technology, media and telecom group at Goldman Sachs.
“As awesome as the internet has been, it will be best remembered as really the predicate for machine learning,” said Lee, who’s also chief information officer of Goldman’s investment banking division. He appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley” on Wednesday from Goldman’s Builders + Innovators Summit in Santa Barbara, California.
The internet enabled computing scale in a network and serves as a way to “collect data that’s used to train all these algorithms,” Lee said, predicting machine learning will “change our world … and even the course of our species in ways that are hard to predict today.”
The idea of storing digital data in DNA seems like science fiction. At first glance, it might not seem obvious that a molecule can store data. The term “data storage” conjures up images of physical artifacts like CDs and data centers, not a microscopic molecule like DNA. But there are a number of reasons why DNA is an exciting option for information storage.
The status quo
We’re in the midst of a data explosion. We create vast amounts of information via our estimated 17 billion internet-connected devices: smartphones, cars, health trackers, and all other devices. As we continue to add sensors and network connectivity to physical devices we will produce more and more data. Similarly, as we bring online the 4.2 billion people who are currently offline, we will produce more and more data.
I never get tired of articles highlighting the potential around leveraging Quantum teleporting as a method to replace networks and communications. Now the real question is how soon and how much of the existing infrastructure will need to be replaced to begin taking advantage of this technology earlier than others? As with most things, governments are often early adopters as well as Financial Services and ISPs are a close 2nd in the adoption of such technologies.
An experiment conducted about quantum teleportation could improve and transform the modern phone and Internet communication by having highly secure and encrypted messaging.
A recent study has suggested that comet outbursts are caused by avalanches and not geysers.
Will the testing of the new electric aircraft start a revolution in the aviation industry? Read what NASA has to say.
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a great navigation aid – unless you lose the signal while negotiating a complicated spaghetti junction. That’s bad enough for conventional cars, but for autonomous vehicles it could be catastrophic, so the University of California, Riverside’s Autonomous Systems Perception, Intelligence, and Navigation (ASPIN) Laboratory under Zak Kassas is developing an alternative navigation system that uses secondary radio signals, such as from cell phone systems and Wi-Fi to either complement existing GPS-based systems or as a standalone alternative that is claimed to be highly reliable, consistent, and tamper-proof.
Today, there are two global satellite navigation systems in operation, the US GPS and the Russian GLONASS, with the European Galileo system set to become fully operational in the next few years, and plans for the Chinese Beidou system to extend globally by 2020. These have revolutionized navigation, surveying, and a dozen other fields, but GPS and related systems still leave much to be desired. By their nature, GPS signals are weak and positions need to be confirmed by several satellites, so built up areas or mountainous areas can make the system useless. In addition, GPS signals can be deliberately or accidentally jammed or spoofed due to insufficient encryption and other protections.
In military circles, various supplementary systems are employed with everything from submarines to foot soldiers also using Inertial Navigation System (INS) that emply accelerometers and compasses to calculate positions from the last good GPS fix, but these only work for a limited time before they start to drift.
New experiments in Calgary tested quantum teleportation in actual infrastructure, representing a major step forward for the technology.
Quantum physics is a field that appears to give scientists superpowers. Those who understand the world of extremely small or cold particles can perform amazing feats with them — including teleportation — that appear to bend reality.
The science behind these feats is complicated, and until recently, didn’t exist outside of lab settings. But that’s changing: researchers have begun to implement quantum teleportation in real-world contexts. Being able to do so just might revolutionize modern phone and Internet communications, leading to highly secure, encrypted messaging.
Los Alamos is the 1st place where QC Internet was launched.
A research team from Los Alamos National Laboratory published a paper in the journal Nature Energy this week that demonstrates an effective method for scaling up quantum dot solar power technology from production models to full-sized windows that could power a building.
“We are developing solar concentrators that will harvest sunlight from building windows and turn it into electricity, using quantum-dot based luminescent solar concentrators,” lead scientist and leader of the Los Alamos Center for Advanced Solar Photophysics (CASP) Victor Klimov said.
The Los Alamos paper advances techniques relating to luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) – slabs of transparent glass or plastic into or onto which highly emissive fluorophores are placed in order to create large-area sunlight collectors for photovoltaic cells – examining large LSC windows that were created by using a blade to create a thin, highly uniform film on a surface. The quantum dots used in the Nature Energy study are dual-layered semiconductor spheres that enable control over the two separate layers’ emission spectra.
Valorem has another HoloLens release this week — it is truly out of this world! Watch a video here.
Do you remember that aha moment, when you saw Princess Leia projected as a hologram from R2-D2’s holographic projector? From science fiction of yesteryear to today, the crew at Valorem has been working on an innovative telepresence technology that is becoming a reality! We have produced a holographic streaming technology, which allows the likeness of a person to be captured using a stereoscopic camera as 3D point cloud data. The point cloud data is then streamed or “beamed” (for you Trekkies out there), across the Internet. The holographic stream is decoded and rendered via Microsoft HoloLens, providing a shockingly good representation of the sender’s likeness.
Pitch black darkness and silence may help some people drift off at night, but others fall asleep better with music, TV or a fan on in the room. For the latter group, a white noise machine or app can be a handy bedside companion, but Cambridge Sound Management claims it has a better option with the Nightingale, a new Internet of Things-enabled system that uses two speakers in a room to create a “sound blanket” that is designed to blend into the background and block disruptive sounds.
Devices like the Snooz are designed to sit by the bed while they give off their comforting soundscapes, but according to CSM, when sound is coming from a single source a listener’s brain can pinpoint it, making it less effective at helping people switch off and drift off. To counter this apparent shortcoming, the Nightingale system comes in pairs, and placing them in different parts of the room creates a more uniform blanket of white noise that the brain can’t precisely locate.
Each unit contains two speakers, and when plugged into an outlet – actually two outlets –, outputs ambience from a selection of 15 different types of soundscapes. The company says the layout of the room is taken into account, and the devices will work even when plugged in behind furniture. Electrical outlet real estate is valuable, so the front of each unit contains two more outlets, to replace the ones it’s hogging.
