Lifeboat Foundation

The Chinese government likes to control social media and what people do with it—but Facebook looks willing to launch in China anyway.

Heading to Russia anytime soon? Well, that cell tower that you see in Russia may actually be a missile jammer.

Missile jammers aren’t exactly new as far as technology is concerned, but Russia’s implementation of it might. According to a report from Motherboard, it seems that over in Russia, the government is apparently considering stepping up their military defense by equipping civilian cellphone towers with missile jammers.

According to a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman who spoke to the Izvestiya newspaper, “At the present time, the tests of the item have been completed and the system has been accepted into the inventory.” Dubbed Pole-21, these missile jammers can be mounted onto cellphone towers and given the spread of cellphone towers, the end result could be a dome-like defense system that can cover entire regions and protect it from satellite navigation signals.

Continue reading “Russia Turning Cellphone Towers Into Missile Jammers” »

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama sought Tuesday to reinvigorate his call for the U.S. to send humans to Mars by the 2030s, showcasing budding partnerships between the U.S. government and commercial companies to develop spacecraft capable of carrying out the extraterrestrial mission.

Obama was calling attention to government contracts awarded to six companies to build prototypes for “habitats” that could sustain human life in deep space. He also said that within two years, private companies will send astronauts to the International Space Station, part of a program to allow companies to use an open docking port on the station to develop their own innovations.

“These missions will teach us how humans can live far from Earth, something we’ll need for the long journey to Mars,” Obama wrote in an op-ed on CNN’s website. He said the ultimate goal is for humans eventually to stay on the red planet “for an extended time.”

Continue reading “Obama pushes US goal to send humans to Mars” »

A space nation, independent of countries on Earth, could be founded after a team of engineers, scientists and legal experts put forward proposals for an extra-terrestrial state.

The project, which is led by Russian scientist Dr Igor Ashurbeyli, Chairman of UNESCOs Science of Space committee, aims to create an area in space which is beyond the control of individual nations.

Under current space law, government’s must authorise and supervise space programmes run from their own countries even if they are commercial.

Continue reading “Scientists propose space nation named ‘Asgardia’ and cosmic shield to protect Earth from asteroids” »

The space race is on, and it’s only a matter of time before humans land on Mars. With several different groups aiming for the red planet, there’s likely to be not one outpost among the stars, but many.

National space agencies and private transport companies are all competing to reach Mars and establish their own base of operations, and they all have very different motivations and ideas on how to govern their colonies once they get there.

If Elon Musk gets his way and manages to lower the cost of a trip to Mars, the floodgates will open and settlers will stream towards the red planet in mass numbers. The resulting chaos is likely to produce several different Martian metropolises with their own character, laws, and forms of government much like the city-states of ancient Greece.

Continue reading “Will A Mars Colony Bring Back The City-States Of Ancient Greece?” »

Robotics and AI have “huge potential” to reshape the way people work and live, but the government needs to do more to address the issues raised by such technology, says a report.

MPs on the Science and Technology Committee have called for careful scrutiny of the probable ethical, legal and societal impact.

They want the government to establish a commission to look at the issues.

Earlier this week, Canada’s electronic spy agency the Communications Security Establishment warned government agencies and businesses against quantum mechanics, which could cripple the majority of encryption methods implemented by leading corporations and agencies globally.

Governments and private companies employ a variety of cryptographic security systems and protocols to protect and store important data. Amongst these encryption methods, the most popular system is public key cryptography (PKC), which can be integrated onto a wide range of software, platforms, and applications to encrypt data.

The Communications Security Establishment and its chief Greta Bossenmaier believes that quantum computing is technically capable of targeting PKC-based encryption methods, making data vulnerable to security breaches and hacking attempts from foreign state spies and anonymous hacking groups.

Continue reading “Quantum Computing Could Cripple Encryption; Bitcoin’s Role” »

Amid rising political tensions with the U.S., Russia is planning to further lower its usage of licensed software from IT giants like International Business Machines Corp IBM, Microsoft Corporation MSFT, SAP AG SAP and Oracle Corporation ORCL.

Per Bloomberg, “The State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, is drafting a bill to restrict government agencies from buying licensed software, giving preference to open-source software.”

The proposed law is an addition to an already existing federal law that came into effect on Jan 1, 2016, which restricts the use of foreign software in the public sector, if there is a domestic version available.

For the past two years, Zoltan Istvan has been campaigning for the US presidency on the Transhumanist Party, a largely one-man show which nevertheless remains faithful to the basic tenets of transhumanism. Now suppose he won. Top of his policy agenda had been to ensure the immortality of all Americans. But even Zoltan realized that this would entail quite big changes in how the state and society function. So, shortly after being elected president, he decides to hold a national referendum on the matter.

The question on the ballot is one that makes the stakes crystal clear: ‘The government shall endeavour to release all Americans from the constraints of mortality’. Zoltan liked this way of putting things because were he to lose to the referendum, which he half-presumed, the opportunity to air publicly the relevant issues would continue to shift naysayers in Congress to increase funding for broadly anti-death research and treatments — a step in the right direction, as far as he’s concerned.

Zoltan also liked the idea that the referendum effectively ‘rotated the political axis’, from left-right to up-down, a turn of phrase he picked up from some philosopher whose name he couldn’t remember. But this also meant that the ensuing campaign, which was fierce, attracted a motley crew of supporters on both sides.

The ‘Remainers’ (as the anti-immortalists call themselves) were composed of a mix of traditional religious believers, environmental activists and hard-headed sceptics who distrust all transcendental hype, whether it comes from religion or science. In other words, those who wanted us to remain in our normal bodies held that our fate either is confined to our current circumstances or requires that we remain in those circumstances in order for something better to happen post mortem. The stakes were so high that even the Pope was called out to argue the case, which of course he was more than happy to do, Obama-style.

Continue reading “Brexit for Transhumanists: A Parable of Getting What You Wish For” »