Lifeboat Foundation

After years of delay under government pressure, Apple said Wednesday that it will offer fully encrypted backups of photos, chat histories and most other sensitive user data in its cloud storage system worldwide, putting them out of reach of most hackers, spies and law enforcement.

Maybe a New iPhone is a good idea for a second phone.

The one service Apple offered that could not be encrypted was iCloud. Now that will change.

Continue reading “Apple says it will allow iCloud backups to be fully encrypted” »

A robot that can shift between solid and liquid states has been filmed escaping from a miniature jail cell with bars too close together to allow it to leave in solid form. The creators claim they were inspired by sea cucumbers’ capacity to alter their tissue stiffness – but the scene is just a little too similar to Robert Patrick liquifying his way through the mental hospital bars for us to believe them. We even see the famous reabsorption of the little bit left behind.

Hard-bodied robots are common, even if they have yet to reach the capacities of science fiction films. Their soft-bodied counterparts can get into tight spaces, but what they can do there is limited, and they are also difficult to control.

Continue reading “Shape-Shifting Robot Escapes Miniature Prison Cell” »

Back in 2002, the science fiction film Minority Report once again reignited futuristic imaginations about a world and police state gone too far. At the time, the movie inspired plenty of speculation about the future of our society, how computers would interact with us, and how law enforcement would be carried out proactively based on intent. In the movie, they combined technology with the psychic abilities of the “precogs,” to proactively prevent crimes.

The precogs had the ability to predict when crimes were about to be committed ahead of time, enabling law enforcement to act early.

Twenty years later, in a climate of abundant data, almost limitless processing, and at a point in history where law enforcement is frequently discussed, some of these technologies are beginning to look more feasible than ever.

Continue reading “AI Tools: From Minority Report To Mission Possible” »

In this article, let us see how to build a potential darkweb monitoring tool out of ChatGPT

The dark web is a notorious and often misunderstood part of the internet, known for its anonymous communication and the buying and selling of illegal goods and services. It is not indexed by traditional search engines and is only accessible through specialized software, such as the Tor browser.

While the dark web can be a breeding ground for criminal activity, it is also a valuable resource for cyber security firms, law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity and threat intelligence individuals looking to track and monitor illegal activities.

Continue reading “You won’t believe how this AI tool can build a website in minutes!” »

New research suggests that those with psychopathic personality traits are less susceptible to creating false memories of negative events. The findings indicate that individuals high in the psychopathic trait of fearless dominance were less likely to produce false memories when exposed to negative stimuli. Likewise, individuals high in the psychopathic trait of cold-heartedness tended to have fewer true memories of neutral and negative events. These findings may be relevant to law enforcement, mainly when gathering witness or suspect testimony from individuals high in psychopathic traits.

The new study has been published in the British Journal of Psychology.

A significant amount of memory research in the last few decades has focused on memory construction and retrieval. Of particular interest has been the formation of false memories. False memories can have consequences in the justice system, as eyewitness reports are often crucial to investigations and convictions. In addition, individuals with psychopathic personality traits often intersect with law enforcement, making research on how they process memories relevant to determining the reliability of remembered events.

Continue reading “Study finds psychopaths may not remember emotionally negative events accurately” »

Timetable.
0:00 — AI in our society.
0:46 — Defining Algocracy.
1:00 — Current AI algorithms.
2:20 — Future of AI decision-making.
5:59 — AI governance scenarios.
7:43 — Poll on our opinions of AI
8:35 — What actually worries experts.
10:02 — What now?

Subscribe for more insight on the future of AI in our society.

Continue reading “AI might replace democracy soon, w/ experts on AI” »

Individual ants are relatively simple creatures and yet a colony of ants can perform really complex tasks, such as intricate construction, foraging and defense.

Recently, Harvard researchers took inspiration from ants to design a team of relatively simple robots that can work collectively to perform complex tasks using only a few basic parameters.

Continue reading “The physical intelligence of collectives: How ants and robots pull off a prison escape without a plan or a planner” »

Face recognition tools are computational models that can identify specific people in images, as well as CCTV or video footage. These tools are already being used in a wide range of real-world settings, for instance aiding law enforcement and border control agents in their criminal investigations and surveillance efforts, and for authentication and biometric applications. While most existing models perform remarkably well, there may still be much room for improvement.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have recently created a new and promising architecture for face recognition. This architecture, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on a strategy to extract facial features from images that differs from most of those proposed so far.

“Holistic methods using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and margin-based losses have dominated research on face recognition,” Zhonglin Sun and Georgios Tzimiropoulos, the two researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.

Terahertz (THz) radiation is electromagnetic radiation ranging from frequencies of 0.1 THz to 10 THz, with wavelengths between 30μm and 3mm. Reliably detecting this radiation could have numerous valuable applications in security, product inspection, and quality control.

For instance, THz detectors could allow law enforcement agents to uncover potential weapons on humans or in luggage more reliably. It could also be used to monitor natural environments without damaging them or to assess the quality of food, cosmetics and other products.

Recent studies introduced several devices and solutions for detecting terahertz radiation. While a few of them achieved promising results, their performance in terms of sensitivity, speed, bandwidth and operating temperature is often limited. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Minnesota, and other institutes in the United States and South Korea recently developed a new camera that can reliably detect THz radiation at room temperature, while also characterizing its so-called polarization states. This camera, introduced in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, is based on widely available complementary metal-oxide-semiconductors (CMOS), enhanced using quantum dots (i.e., nm-sized semiconductor particles with advantageous optoelectronic properties).