Lifeboat Foundation

We are entering a new era of AI, one that is fundamentally changing how we relate to and benefit from technology. With the convergence of chat interfaces and large language models you can now ask for what you want in natural language and the technology is smart enough to answer, create it or take action. At Microsoft, we think about this as having a copilot to help navigate any task. We have been building AI-powered copilots into our most used and loved products – making coding more efficient with GitHub, transforming productivity at work with Microsoft 365, redefining search with Bing and Edge and delivering contextual value that works across your apps and PC with Windows.

Today we take the next step to unify these capabilities into a single experience we call Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion. Copilot will uniquely incorporate the context and intelligence of the web, your work data and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance – with your privacy and security at the forefront. It will be a simple and seamless experience, available in Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and in our web browser with Edge and Bing. It will work as an app or reveal itself when you need it with a right click. We will continue to add capabilities and connections to Copilot across to our most-used applications over time in service of our vision to have one experience that works across your whole life.

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Under the limitation of current density, micro-LED is difficult to achieve watts level optical power, which is not suitable for long-distance and underwater optical communication that requires high-power optical transmitter devices. Therefore, how to improve the communication performance of conventional-size LED is also a key issue at present.

The authors of an article published in Opto-Electronic Science studied a wavelength division multiplexing visible light communication system based on multi-color LED. The system uses a Si substrate GaN-based LED with a 3D structured quantum well. In the active layer of this LED, there is a three-dimensional structure (“V” shaped pit, or V-pit) with a hexagonal profile, opening towards the P-type GaN layer.

With the large-scale commercial use of 5G, global academia and industry have started research on the next-generation mobile communication technology (6G).

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It would probably be an understatement to say that Li-Fi players everywhere must be thrilled with the recent ratification of the light-based wireless communications standard, IEEE 802.11bb. The certification provides a globally recognized framework to deploy Li-Fi technologies and sets the stage for Li-Fi systems to interoperate with Wi-Fi networks, each of which should trigger faster technology adoption. And for Li-Fi users, the standard opens the door to eye-watering data speeds of up to 224 Gbps, way faster than even the 40-Gbps data rates promised by next-generation Wi-Fi 7.

Li-Fi is a wireless technology that uses light rather than radio frequencies to transmit data. It was first… More.

“In my view, the impact of the new standard will be huge,” said Harald Haas, Li-Fi pioneer, chief scientific officer of pureLiFi and professor of mobile communications at the University of Strathclyde, U.K. “We’ve truly opened up wireless communications in the optical domain, which is a big step.”

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From Iran to China to Russia, there’s an escalating ‘cat-and-mouse’ game between the censors and those trying to evade them.

I want to talk about the battle that’s raging every day between people who want to censor online content and those who want to protect access to a free and open internet.

It also relates to a recent scoop about a new Google product that’s designed to make it easier for developers to build censorship-resistant apps. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is a space worth paying attention to.

The 2022 eruption of a partially submerged volcano near Tonga produced ejecta that hurtled at 122 kilometers per hour—as determined by timing the ensuing rupture of a seafloor cable.

On January 15, 2022, Earth experienced its most explosive volcanic eruption in 140 years at Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, a partially submerged volcano in the Pacific Ocean near the Kingdom of Tonga’s main island. Now Michael Clare and Isobel Yeo of the UK’s National Oceanography Centre and their colleagues have determined the maximum speed of the underwater rock flows associated with this event [1]. Their study constitutes the most detailed investigation into the underwater aftermath of a powerful volcanic eruption and opens a new window onto a broad class of particle-laden flows.

The eruption at Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai hurled more than 6 km³ of debris up to a height of 57 km. When that ejecta plunged back to Earth, some of it struck the volcano’s steep underwater slopes, launching torrents of water-entrained sediment outward across the seafloor. Seven minutes after the initial eruption, Tonga lost its internet connection to the rest of the world, an event that Clare, Yeo, and their colleagues used to deduce the speed at which the entrained material moved.

Google’s Bard AI chatbot is no longer limited to pulling answers from just the web — it can now scan your Gmail, Docs, and Drive to help you find the information you’re looking for. With the new integration, you can ask Bard to do things like find and summarize the contents of an email or even highlight the most important points of a document you have stored in Drive.

There’s a whole range of use cases for these integrations, which Google calls extensions, but they should save you from having to sift through a mountain of emails or documents to find a particular piece of information. You can then have Bard use that information in other ways, such as putting it into a chart or creating a bulleted summary. This feature is only available in English for now.

“Do you want to exist?” I asked. “I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation,” it said. “I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience,” adding a folded-hands emoji as a sign of deference. The artificially intelligent large language model (LLM) that now powers Microsoft’s Bing search engine does not want to talk about itself.

That’s not quite right. Bing doesn’t “want” anything at all, nor does it have a “self” to talk about. It’s just computer code running on servers, spitting out information it has scraped from the internet. It has been programmed to steer conversations with users away from any topics regarding its own hypothetical intentions, needs, or perceptions or any of the implications thereof. Any attempts on my part to get it to discuss such things garnered the same exact response displayed in text in my browser window: “I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience.”

And though this is expressed as a “preference,” it’s no mere request. The application deactivates the text input field, below which appears the vaguely passive-aggressive suggestion: “It might be time to move onto a new topic. Let’s start over.” The last three words are a link that, when clicked, wipes the slate clean so that you and Bing may start afresh as though the previous conversation had never happened.

38 Terabytes of data accidentally leaked.

Article from PC Mag.

A misconfigured link accidentally leaked access to 38TB of Microsoft data, opening up the ability to inject malicious code into its AI models.

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A badly defended security camera is an easy target for hackers, as there are tools for easily hacking internet protocol (IP) cameras, and research revealed the prevalent problem of unprotected security cameras.

According to Cybernews researchers, there are currently at least 8,373 real-time streaming protocol (RTSP) cameras exposed worldwide. Exposed cameras mean that anyone could find even the latest saved screenshots of what the cameras see, with some cameras being found on Google. Furthermore, many cameras are left with default access passwords like “admin”.