China’s legislators will discuss a new national security law specifically crafted for Hong Kong. The issue has long been controversial in the city, despite the Basic Law requiring its enactment.
Category: security
Researchers have developed a new strategy that uses optical coherence tomography (OCT) to acquire both the surface and underlying details of impressionist style oil paintings. This information can be used to create detailed 3D reconstructions to enhance the viewing experience and offer a way for the visually impaired to experience paintings.
“Visitors to art museums can’t closely examine paintings and see the artists’ techniques because of security and conservation concerns,” said research team leader Yi Yang from Penn State Abington. “Our new technology can create 3D reconstructions that can be rotated and magnified to view details such as brushstrokes. This would be especially useful for online classes.”
Yang and colleagues from Penn State University Park and New Jersey Institute of Technology report the new technique in the Optical Society journal Applied Optics. The research team brought together specialists in art history and conservation with electrical and optical engineers.
Then there is the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a multi-institutional initiative that includes The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The goal of this initiative is to create new natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to scour scientific and medical literature to help researchers prioritize potential therapies to evaluate for further study. AI is also being used to automate screening at checkpoints by evaluating temperature via thermal cameras, as well as modulations in sweat and skin discoloration. What’s more, AI-powered robots have even been used to monitor and treat patients. In Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic, an entire field hospital was transitioned into a “smart hospital” fully staffed by AI robotics.
Any time of great challenge is a time of great change. The waves of technological innovation that are occurring now will echo throughout eternity. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics are experiencing a call to mobilization that will forever alter the fabric of discovery in the fields of bioengineering, biomimicry and artificial intelligence. The promise of tomorrow will be perpetuated by the pangs of today. It is the symbiosis of all these fields that will power future innovations.
Fingerprints and DNA are widely known forms of biometrics, thanks to crime dramas on television. But as technology advances the Internet of Things, the interconnection of computer devices in common objects, other forms of biometrics are sought for security. For example, distinctive physical characteristics of users are increasingly used in computer science as forms of identification and access restriction. Smartphones use fingerprints, iris scans and face recognition in this way. Other biometrics that are likely to come into use include retinas, veins and palm prints.
The ear is another potential biometric. According to research published recently in the Journal of Electronic Imaging, ear recognition technology, or “earprints,” could one day be used as personal identification to secure smart homes via smartphones.
Even as dramatic social change has been imposed by COVID-19, the kinds of fraud attacks companies experience and the biometric authentication technologies they use to prevent them have remained basically the same. What has changed is that online volumes of traffic, transactions and authentications have reached levels they were expected to years in the future, BehavioSec VP of Products Jordan Blake told Biometric Update in an interview.
As a result, he says, “timelines are getting advanced.”
Demand is coming from new verticals, according to Blake, as numerous people begin using the online channel to interact with many organizations they never have dealt with that way before.
Samsung and South Korean carrier SK Telecom today announced a new 5G smartphone dubbed Galaxy A Quantum.
The Samsung Galaxy A Quantum is the world’s first 5G smartphone equipped with a quantum random number generator (QRNG) chipset, which is developed by SK Telecom’s Switzerland-based subsidiary ID Quantique.
The QRNG chipset is the SKT IDQ S2Q000 and it enhances the security of the phone’s data by using quantum encryption technology to generate random numbers and create unpredictable secure keys.
In the video, one person is designed as the “infected” patient and is given a special black light-ready solution to rub into his hands. (The solution is invisible without a black light, so participants in the demonstration can’t see it during the simulation.) Then, everyone in the experiment does what people normally do at a buffet restaurant — they dish up food, eat chat, and drink. At the end of the video, a black light is turned on, and you can see the “virus” just about everywhere. It shows up on utensils, cups, food and even on some participants’ faces.
Experts say this is definitely worth paying attention to.
“This is an accurate illustration of how many commonly touched surfaces there are and how many opportunities there are for viruses to spread,” Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, tells Yahoo Life.
In a major blow to citizens’ privacy, the US Senate voted today to give law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and CIA the power to look into your browser history without a warrant. Thanks, Mitch McConnell.
Senators Ron Wyden from Oregan and Senator Steve Daines of Montana led the charge to insert privacy protections into the Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement agencies power for surveillance in order to maintain national security. However, the privacy protection amendment fell short by just one vote, as many senators who may have voted in favor of it didn’t show up.
‘s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.
A group of prominent academic scientists that has been advising the U.S. government on security matters since the Cold War is conducting a quick-turnaround, pro bono study of a new threat to national security—the impact of COVID-19 on academic research. And this time it’s personal.
Last month, some 30 members of Jason began to tackle the thorny question of how to reopen university laboratories safely in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Nobody is paying for the study, a rare departure for the group, whose work is usually financed by government agencies and often involves classified information. But the study’s leader, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physicist Peter Fisher, says several federal agencies have expressed interest in the group’s analysis of the technical challenges facing every university that wants to resume research operations without jeopardizing the health of the faculty, students, and staff who work in those labs.
If schedules hold, United Launch Alliance and SpaceX will highlight this weekend with back-to-back rocket launches, a cadence rarely seen on the Space Coast.
First on the Space Force’s calendar is X-37B, a secretive Department of Defense spaceplane that stays in orbit years at a time, testing new systems and capabilities. The 29-foot vehicle will fly on an Atlas V rocket between 6:30 a.m. and 11 a.m. Saturday, though an exact time has not yet been released due to security concerns. Launch Complex 41 will host the attempt.
Though most of the spaceplane’s capabilities are classified, the Space Force said the mission known as Orbital Test Vehicle 6 will host more experiments than ever before. Some of those include testing radiation’s effects on seeds, transforming solar power to transmissible microwave energy, and how space affects different kinds of materials.