Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2019 The world’s largest lighting company thinks it has just the thing for people fed up with wobbly WiFi signals that cut out, slow down or don’t work at all in cafes, parks, airports and other public places where the technology can be deeply unreliable.

Signify—the former Philips Lighting—has for years been developing an alternative broadband technology that transmits the Internet using light waves from commercial LED light fittings rather than the radio waves of WiFi. Now, in a recently announced deal it’s teaming up with one of the world’s largest telecommunication firms, Vodafone, in a bid to turn the technology into a daily reality.

The light at the end of the wifi tunnel?

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.

As computers get more powerful and connected, the amount of data that we send and receive is in a constant race with the technologies that we use to transmit it. Electrons are now proving insufficiently fast and are being replaced by photons as the demand for fiber optic internet cabling and data centers grow.

Though light is much faster than electricity, in modern optical systems, more information is transmitted by layering data into multiple aspects of a light wave, such as its amplitude, wavelength and polarization. Increasingly sophisticated “multiplexing” techniques like these are the only way to stay ahead of the increasing demand for data, but those too are approaching a bottleneck. We are simply running out of room to store more data in the conventional properties of light.

To break through this barrier, engineers are exploring some of light’s harder-to-control properties. Now, two studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science have shown a system that can manipulate and detect one such property known as the orbital angular momentum, or OAM, of light. Critically, they are the first to do so on small semiconductor chips and with enough precision that it can be used as a medium for transmitting information.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cU2EMupJDZs

Security researchers from ESET recently discovered a new cyber espionage campaign codenamed “Ramsay” which is designed to steal sensitive documents from air‑gapped networks. Ramsay can infect air-gapped computers, collect Word, PDF, and ZIP files in a hidden folder, and then exfiltrate them, researchers said. An air-gap is a security measure to ensure computer networks are physically isolated from the rest of the company’s networks and from potentially unsecured networks like public internet.

“We initially found an instance of Ramsay in VirusTotal. That sample was uploaded from Japan and led us to the discovery of further components and versions of the framework, along with substantial evidence to conclude that this framework is at a developmental stage, with its delivery vectors still undergoing fine-tuning,” the researchers said in an official post.

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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.

Quantum illumination uses entangled signal-idler photon pairs to boost the detection efficiency of low-reflectivity objects in environments with bright thermal noise. Its advantage is particularly evident at low signal powers, a promising feature for applications such as noninvasive biomedical scanning or low-power short-range radar. Here, we experimentally investigate the concept of quantum illumination at microwave frequencies. We generate entangled fields to illuminate a room-temperature object at a distance of 1 m in a free-space detection setup. We implement a digital phase-conjugate receiver based on linear quadrature measurements that outperforms a symmetric classical noise radar in the same conditions, despite the entanglement-breaking signal path. Starting from experimental data, we also simulate the case of perfect idler photon number detection, which results in a quantum advantage compared with the relative classical benchmark. Our results highlight the opportunities and challenges in the way toward a first room-temperature application of microwave quantum circuits.

Quantum sensing is well developed for photonic applications (1) in line with other advanced areas of quantum information (2–5). Quantum optics has been, so far, the most natural and convenient setting for implementing the majority of protocols in quantum communication, cryptography, and metrology (6). The situation is different at longer wavelengths, such as tetrahertz or microwaves, for which the current variety of quantum technologies is more limited and confined to cryogenic environments. With the exception of superconducting quantum processing (7), no microwave quanta are typically used for applications such as sensing and communication. For these tasks, high-energy and low-loss optical and telecom frequency signals represent the first choice and form the communication backbone in the future vision of a hybrid quantum internet (8–10).

Despite this general picture, there are applications of quantum sensing that are naturally embedded in the microwave regime. This is exactly the case with quantum illumination (QI) (11–17) for its remarkable robustness to background noise, which, at room temperature, amounts to ∼10³ thermal quanta per mode at a few gigahertz. In QI, the aim is to detect a low-reflectivity object in the presence of very bright thermal noise. This is accomplished by probing the target with less than one entangled photon per mode, in a stealthy noninvasive fashion, which is impossible to reproduce with classical means. In the Gaussian QI protocol (12), the light is prepared in a two-mode squeezed vacuum state with the signal mode sent to probe the target, while the idler mode is kept at the receiver.

New technology is changing the execution of AI applications.

On May 12th, SpaceX released an online simulator that allows internet users to try to dock the company’s newly developed Crew Dragon with the International Space Station.

O,.,o.

The weird world of quantum physics is being harnessed for some fascinating use cases. In the latest example, physicists have developed and demonstrated a “quantum radar” prototype that uses the quantum entanglement phenomenon to detect objects, a system which could eventually outperform conventional radar in some circumstances.

Quantum entanglement describes the bizarre state where two particles can become linked so tightly that they seem to communicate instantly, no matter how far apart they are. Measuring the state of one particle will instantly change the state of the other, hypothetically even if it’s on the other side of the universe. That implies that the information is moving faster than the speed of light, which is thought to be impossible – and yet, it’s clearly and measurably happening. The phenomenon even unnerved Einstein himself, who famously described it as “spooky action at a distance.”

Continue reading “‘Quantum radar’ uses entangled photons to detect objects” »