Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: economics

While many associate account takeovers with personal services, the real threat is unfolding in the enterprise. Flare’s latest research, The Account and Session Takeover Economy, analyzed over 20 million stealer logs and tracked attacker activity across Telegram channels and dark web marketplaces. The findings expose how cybercriminals weaponize infected employee endpoints to hijack enterprise sessions—often in less than 24 hours.

Here’s the real timeline of a modern session hijacking attack.

Infection and Data Theft in Under an Hour.

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Notably in April, Sierra Space announced the completion of successful hypervelocity impact trials conducted at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, to optimize the structural integrity of Sierra Space’s LIFE habitat space station technology. This included the use of NASA’s .50 caliber two-stage light gas gun to replicate micrometeoroid and orbital debris (MMOD) impacts to LIFE’s outer shield, to prepare the space station of use in orbit.

About Sierra Space.

Sierra Space is a leading commercial space company and emerging defense tech prime that is building an end-to-end business and technology platform in space to benefit and protect life on Earth. With more than 30 years and 500 missions of space flight heritage, the company is reinventing both space transportation with Dream Chaser®, the world’s only commercial spaceplane, and the future of space destinations with the company’s expandable space station technology. Using commercial business models, the company is also delivering orbital services to commercial, DoD and national security organizations, expanding production capacity to meet the needs of constellation programs. In addition, Sierra Space builds a host of systems and subsystems across solar power, mechanics and motion control, environmental control, life support, propulsion and thermal control, offering myriad space-as-a-service solutions for the new space economy.

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From river-clogging plants to disease-carrying insects, the direct economic cost of invasive species worldwide has averaged about $35 billion a year for decades, researchers said Monday.

Since 1960, damage from non-native plants and animals expanding into new territory has cost society more than $2.2 trillion, more than 16 times higher than previous estimates, they reported in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The accelerating spread of —from mosquitoes to to tough-to-eradicate plants—blights agriculture, spreads disease and drives the growing pace of species extinction.

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HELSINKI — Chinese commercial satellite manufacturer MinoSpace has won a major contract to build a remote sensing satellite constellation for Sichuan Province, under a project approved by the country’s top economic planner.

Beijing-based MinoSpace won the bid for the construction of a “space satellite constellation,” the National Public Resources Trading Platform (Sichuan Province) announced May 18, Chinese language Economic Observer reported.

The contract is worth 804 million yuan (around $111 million) and the constellation has been approved by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, signaling potential alignment with national satellite internet and remote sensing infrastructure goals.

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Munich, 4 June 2024 – According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the pulp and paper industry is one of the largest industrial sectors in the world and has an enormous influence on global forests. This sector accounts for 13–15% of total wood consumption and uses between 33–40% of all industrial wood traded globally. In search of more sustainable solutions for paper production, 23-year-old Ukrainian inventor Valentyn Frechka developed a method for recycling leaf litter into paper. Frechka is a finalist for the Young Inventors Prize of the European Inventor Award 2024, in recognition of his promising work towards a circular economy and addressing one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). He was selected from over 550 candidates for this year’s edition.

Using new technology to recycle fallen leaves into paper

The global loss of trees is known to significantly exacerbate climate change, increasing air pollution levels, causing the loss of biodiversity, and disrupting the water cycle. Global warming also leads to issues such as soil erosion and reduced freshwater availability. It also increases costs for managing environmental problems such as flooding.

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On this episode, Ben Goertzel joins me to discuss what distinguishes the current AI boom from previous ones, important but overlooked AI research, simplicity versus complexity in the first AGI, the feasibility of alignment, benchmarks and economic impact, potential bottlenecks to superintelligence, and what humanity should do moving forward.

Timestamps:
00:00:00 Preview and intro.
00:01:59 Thinking about AGI in the 1970s.
00:07:28 What’s different about this AI boom?
00:16:10 Former taboos about AGI
00:19:53 AI research worth revisiting.
00:35:53 Will the first AGI be simple?
00:48:49 Is alignment achievable?
01:02:40 Benchmarks and economic impact.
01:15:23 Bottlenecks to superintelligence.
01:23:09 What should we do?

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Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist since 2024, believes artificial intelligence models will soon be capable of producing original research and making measurable economic impacts. In a conversation with Nature, Pachocki outlined how he sees the field evolving — and how OpenAI plans to balance innovation with safety concerns.

Pachocki, who joined OpenAI in 2017 after a career in theoretical computer science and competitive programming, now leads the firm’s development of its most advanced AI systems. These systems are designed to tackle complex tasks across science, mathematics, and engineering, moving far beyond the chatbot functions that made ChatGPT a household name in 2022.

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Using global land use and carbon storage data from the past 175 years, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Cognizant AI Labs have trained an artificial intelligence system to develop optimal environmental policy solutions that can advance global sustainability initiatives of the United Nations.

The AI tool effectively balances various complex trade-offs to recommend ways of maximizing carbon storage, minimizing economic disruptions and helping improve the environment and people’s everyday lives, according to a paper published today in the journal Environmental Data Science.

The project is among the first applications of the UN-backed Project Resilience, a team of scientists and experts working to tackle global decision-augmentation problems—including ambitious sustainable development goals this decade—through part of a broader effort called AI for Good.

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