Lifeboat Foundation

A University of Texas at Dallas physicist has teamed with Texas Instruments Inc. to design a better way for electronics to convert waste heat into reusable energy.

The collaborative project demonstrated that silicon’s ability to harvest energy from heat can be greatly increased while remaining mass-producible.

Dr. Mark Lee, professor and head of the Department of Physics in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, is the corresponding author of a study published July 15 in Nature Electronics that describes the results. The findings could greatly influence how circuits are cooled in electronics, as well as provide a method of powering the sensors used in the growing “internet of things.”

Ukrainian authorities are investigating a potential security breach at a local nuclear power plant after employees connected parts of its internal network to the internet so they could mine cryptocurrency.

The investigation is being led by the Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU), who is looking at the incident as a potential breach of state secrets due to the classification of nuclear power plants as critical infrastructure.

Investigators are examining if attackers might have used the mining rigs as a pivot point to enter the nuclear power plant’s network and retrieve information from its systems, such as data about the plant’s physical defenses and protections.

The ability to securely transmit information over the internet is extremely important, but most of the time, eavesdroppers can still generally determine who the sender and receiver are. In some highly confidential situations, it is important that the sender’s and receiver’s identities remain anonymous.

Over the past couple of decades, researchers have been developing protocols for anonymously transmitting messages over classical networks, but similar protocols for quantum networks are still in much earlier stages of development. The anonymity methods that have been proposed for quantum networks so far face challenges such as implementation difficulties or require that strong assumptions be made about the resources, making them impractical for use in the real world.

In a new paper, Anupama Unnikrishnan, Ian MacFarlane, Richard Yi, Eleni Diamanti, Damian Markham, and Iordanis Kerenidis, from the University of Oxford, MIT, Sorbonne University, the University of Paris and CNRS, have proposed the first practical protocol for anonymous communication in quantum networks.

Ever been frustrated waiting for your YouTube video to stream quickly? A team of experts from MIT has created a system that allows multiple Wi-Fi users to stream and buffer high-quality videos.

The data economy has too often betrayed its customers, whether it’s Facebook sharing data you didn’t even realize it had, or invisible trackers that follow you around the web without your knowledge. But a new app launching in the iOS App Store today wants to help you take back some control—without making your life harder.

You open your browser to look at the Web. Do you know who is looking back at you?

Over a recent week of Web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the Web.

This was made possible by the Web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.

A group of security researchers has found that some cameras are vulnerable to ransomware attacks via Wi-Fi or hijacked computers (using the USB connection) that can render a camera and its photos entirely usage until a sum of money is paid to the hackers.

Check Point Software Technologies has shown (as seen in the video above) that Canon DSLRs (it’s not clear if other cameras are also affected) are susceptible to ransomware attacks, an increasingly common exploitation in which a hacker disables a device until the owner pays a ransom to regain control. As more and more electronics gain internet connectivity, these attacks are becoming more common, particularly since manufacturers typically don’t put the same sort of effort into fortifying the network security of small electronics as they do into computers. Canon released a statement in which they offered some barebones tips to avoid being susceptible to these attacks and noted that there have been no known instances of such an attack occurring. They did not indicate whether they plan to fix the vulnerabilities through firmware updates, so it probably doesn’t hurt to be a bit more careful to protect your photos.

Iron Ox has just opened its first fully automated farm in San Carlos, California. The company claims that their hydroponic system can produce 30 times the yield per acre of land comparing to traditional farms, while using 90% less water.

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Two trends that are dominating the technology industry are the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). But for industrial automation, these two technologies are much more than the buzzwords or trending topics. The convergence of AI and IoT will redefine the future of industrial automation. It is set to lead the Industry 4.0 revolution.

IoT and AI are two independent technologies that have a significant impact on multiple industry verticals. While IoT is the digital nervous system, AI becomes the brain that makes decisions which control the overall system. The lethal combination of AI and IoT brings us AIoT — Artificial Intelligence of Things — that delivers intelligent and connected systems that are capable of self-correcting and self-healing themselves.

To appreciate the promise of AIoT, we need to look at the evolution of connected systems.