Lifeboat Foundation

On October 10, the European Space Agency (ESA) published some interim data from its nearly a decade-long Gaia mission. The data includes half a million new and faint stars in a massive cluster, over 380 possible cosmic lenses, and the position of over 150,000 asteroids within the solar system.

[Related: See the stars from the Milky Way mapped as a dazzling rainbow.]

Launched in December 2013, Gaia is an astronomical observatory spacecraft with a mission to generate an accurate stellar census, thus mapping our galaxy and beyond. A more detailed picture of Earth’s place in the universe could help us better understand the diverse objects that make up the known universe.

https://informatech.co/3Ff6TaR by @wirelesswench

Microsoft flagged two zero-day security vulnerabilities under active attack in October’s Patch Tuesday update, which affect Microsoft WordPad and Skype for Business. The release also features a critical-rated, wormable bug in Message Queuing that could instill terror for admins of vulnerable systems.

The two bugs are part of a cadre of 103 total CVEs addressed by the computing giant this month. The patches run the gamut of Microsoft’s portfolio, including Azure, ASP.NET, Core, and Visual Studio; Exchange Server; Office, Microsoft Dynamics, and Windows.

Continue reading “Microsoft Patch Tuesday Haunted by Zero-Days, Wormable Bug” »

If you spend time online before you go to bed, you could be hurting your chances for a good night’s sleep.

This is the first algorithm that can design robots that actually work in the real world.

In recent years, roboticists have developed increasingly sophisticated robotic systems designed to mimic both the structure and function of the human body. This work includes robotic hands, grippers that allow robots to grasp objects and manipulate them like humans do while completing everyday tasks.

Ideally, robotic hands should be able to perform highly precise movements, while also being relatively affordable and easy to fabricate. However, most bio-inspired skeleton structures for robotic hands introduced so far have highly intricate designs containing numerous advanced components, which makes them difficult to fabricate on a large scale.

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently created a new highly precise robotic hand that could be easier to upscale, as its components can be crafted using commonly employed techniques, such as 3D printing and laser cutting. Their robotic hand, introduced in a paper published in the journal 2023 IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), is based on a so-called modular structure, meaning that it comprises multiple building blocks that can be rearranged to achieve different movements.

Physicists working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN have observed entanglement between pairs of top quarks for the first time. The finding demonstrates that entanglement can occur at energies more than 12 orders of magnitude higher than is typical for laboratory entanglement experiments. They also show that particle-physics facilities such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can be used to study quantum mechanics and quantum information.

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Entanglement is one of quantum mechanics’ strangest features. Dubbed “spooky action at a distance” by Albert Einstein, it creates an invisible connection between two objects that share a joint quantum state, such that measuring the state of one object – the spin of a particle, for example – immediately gives the state of the other, regardless of the distance between them. Many objects have been entangled, including photons, atoms and molecules as well as larger objects such as macroscopic diamonds.

Edge AI isn’t a type of algorithm in and of itself, but it’s about where AI happens, regardless of the algorithm in question.

Engineered Arts’ humanoid robot, Ameca, can speak using responses generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3 and make appropriate facial expressions, the LLM suggests.

After a researcher discovered that an Android TV streaming box, known as T95, was infected with preloaded malware, researchers at Human Security released information regarding the extent of infected devices and how malicious schemes are connected to these corrupted products.

Daniel Milisic, a systems security consultant, created a script alongside instructions to help other users mitigate the threat after first coming across the issue. Now, Human Security’s threat intelligence and research team has dubbed the operation “Bandbox,” which it characterizes as a complex, interconnected series of ad fraud schemes on a massive scale.

Human Security describes the operation as “a global network of consumer products with firmware backdoors installed and sold through a normal hardware supply chain.” Once activated, the malware on the devices connect to a command-and-control (C2) server for further instructions. In tandem, a botnet known as Peachpit is integrated with Badbox, and engages in ad fraud, residential proxy services, fake email/messaging accounts, and unauthorized remote code installation.