Lifeboat Foundation

A team of scientists in China has linked quantum memories over more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) of fiber optic cable, beating the previous record by more than 40 times over. This feat is an important step toward a hack-proof internet, scientists said.

The internet we use today was truly a revolutionary invention. It connected the world with information and allowed us to share millions of photos of cute and cuddly cats. But the internet is also filled with hackers trying to intercept important or sensitive information. To fight back, physicists have come up with a solution, with a little help from Schrödinger’s cat, the famous, hypothetical dead-and-alive feline meant to expose the weird nature of subatomic particles.

With nearly 700 million internet users and almost an equal number of people yet to come online for the first time, India is too big a market to ignore. But the tightening of restrictions on foreign tech companies and government intervention in controlling the internet are sparking concerns that the world’s largest democracy is becoming increasingly China-esque.

In the 2010s, India’s internet exploded. More than half a billion Indians came online in the 10 years to September 2019, according to the latest government data, and the country now has twice as many internet users as the entire population of the United States.

And Big Tech rushed to cash in. Facebook ( FB ) CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter ( TWTR ) CEO Jack Dorsey both visited India and met the country’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as did Google ( GOOGL ) CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft ( MSFT ) CEO Satya Nadella, both of whom were born and grew up in India. Nadella and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos both made their second visits to the country as tech CEOs earlier this year.

Continue reading “Big Tech’s honeymoon with the world’s second-largest internet market is ending” »

Governments around the world are shutting down the internet, saying it’s needed to prevent protests or cheating on exams. But critics say blocking expression and access to information violates human rights. Here’s how internet shutdowns work. Illustration: Crystal Tai

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Researchers in Europe and the UK have managed to connect biological and artificial neurons together – and allow them to communicate long distances through the internet. The biological neurons were grown in one country, sent signals through an artificial synapse located in another to electronic neurons in a third country.

As advanced as supercomputers get, the human brain still utterly leaves them in the dust. It’s made up of neurons that communicate with each other through pulses of electrical signals, passed across tiny gaps known as synapses. These neurons can both process and store information, unlike computers that require separate types of memory for each task.

Artificial versions of neurons and synapses have shown to be far more powerful than traditional computer chip designs, but they’re still in the experimental stage. And now, a team of researchers has taken the next step and connected the artificial and biological versions between three different countries.

If planes were as reliable as in-flight Wi-Fi, we’d never get on a flight again. Fortunately, industry group Seamless Air Alliance is working to change that. The group operates under the mission of bringing “industries and technologies together to make the in-flight internet experience simple to access and delightful to use.” Its idea? To get rid of the toxic brew of current proprietary systems operated by each airline and instead establish a standard for in-flight Wi-Fi that can be flexibly swapped in and out to better allow airlines to respond as technology improves.

“The goal of the Alliance is to deliver high-speed, low-latency 5G quality access inside the plane,” the FAQ section of the group’s website states. “Access to the network will be seamless, meaning any enabled user device will work without any login, sign-on or other activities. The internet experience itself will be as good as, and in many cases better than, the home experience, including low latency, high speed, and a gate-to-gate continuity of service.”

An article for IEEE Spectrum notes that “a plane’s antennas are currently stored in a relatively small hump on the top of the craft, typically about 45 centimeters high. Even though it’s so small, that hump causes tremendous amounts of wasted jet fuel, [Seamless Air Alliance CEO Jack] Mandala says, causing an estimated minimum of an extra $75,000 per aircraft per year in fuel costs.”

In focal brain diseases, a patient’s neural network loses key connections, preventing the brain from functioning as it miraculously should. But what if there was a way to restore those connections? An EU funded study is seeking to do just that by getting real biological neurons to synaptically communicate with artificial ones.

Though still in the early stages of study, SYNCH, a team of scientists from the U.K., Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, have created what they describe as a “synaptically connected brain-silicon Neural Closed-loop Hybrid system.” Basically, they’ve taken actual brain cells and artificial brain cells, and got them talking back and forth over the internet.

For now, it’s a simple network. But, it could be an important first step toward smarter and more adaptive prosthetics and brain-computer interfaces — and potentially lay the groundwork for a world where neural implants create real brain networks.

“On one side it sets the basis for a novel scenario that was never encountered during natural evolution, where biological and artificial neurons are linked together and communicate across global networks; laying the foundations for the Internet of Neuro-electronics,” Themis Prodromakis, a nanotechnology researcher and director at the University of Southampton’s Centre for Electronics Frontiers said in a press release.

“On the other hand, it brings new prospects to neuroprosthetic technologies, paving the way towards research into replacing dysfunctional parts of the brain with AI chips.”

Rapporteur warns against trivialising psychological torture as states exploit internet to target individuals.

Handicaps: weak private sector, Soviet-style bureaucracy. Helps: Great STEM education — and history.

More than Western governments and even more than China’s, the Russian government is trying to position itself as a facilitator of innovation in artificial intelligence, the technology that Vladimir Putin said will lead whoever masters it to global advantage. Russia seeks “to go our own way,” said Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, borrowing Lenin’s 1917 words about various anti-capitalist ideologies to describe his government’s 21st-century attempt to shake the world.

Those who doubt that this uniquely state-heavy approach can succeed would do well to remember that today’s internet and mobile telecommunications grew out of Pentagon-funded research, that the Soviet Union led the Space Race for a decade, and that U.S. astronauts currently ascend to orbit atop Russian rockets.