Lifeboat Foundation

Two men are accused of starting a business in China using battery manufacturing technology pilfered from Tesla and trying to sell the proprietary information, federal prosecutors in New York said Tuesday.

Klaus Pflugbeil, 58, a Canadian citizen who lives in Ningbo, China, was arrested Tuesday morning on Long Island, where he thought he was going to meet with businessmen to negotiate a sale price for the information, federal authorities said. Instead, the businessmen were undercover federal agents.

The other man named in the criminal complaint is Yilong Shao, 47, also of Ningbo. He remains at large. They are charged with conspiracy to transmit trade secrets, which carries up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

The AI boom, including the advent of large language models (LLMs) and their associated chatbots, poses new challenges for privacy. Is our personal information part of a model’s training data? Are our prompts being shared with law enforcement? Will chatbots connect diverse threads from our online lives and output them to anyone?

Scientists have referred to black holes as cosmic objects that consume whatever comes into them but do not allow anything to escape from the inside. Stephen Hawking assumes that a black hole could be a portal to another universe. While addressing about 1,000 people at Harvard in 2015, Hawkings analyzed the groundbreaking theory with these words.

“Blackholes aren’t the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole, both from the outside and possibly through another universe. So, if you ever feel you’re in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.”

Scientists listening to the renowned astrophysicist were fascinated with his explanations. Keep in mind that Stephen Hawkings came up with Hawking’s radiation theory which revolutionized our understanding of black holes. According to this theory, Black holes thermally generate and emit subatomic particles until they lose their energy and proceed to evaporate. Based on this theory, Hawkings says that black holes are not entirely black and they don’t last for eternity.

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States in 1,865, with one exception: compulsory labor in prisons.

Sublette County was one of the first counties in Wyoming to add high-end drones to its law enforcement arsenal. Bingham is one of the pilots on the drone team, although he was not part of the Feb. 19 rescue.

Bingham said the drone’s thermal camera was a huge asset. The camera detected the missing woman’s heat signature in the frigid darkness with enough resolution that the woman’s body was immediately discernible from the deer nearby, which it also detected.

Continue reading “Thermal Drone Used To Save Woman Missing In Rugged Northwest Wyoming” »

The technology can reconstruct a hidden scene in just minutes using advanced mathematical algorithms.

Potential use case scenarios

Law enforcement agencies could use the technology to gather critical information about a crime scene without disturbing the evidence. This could be especially useful in cases where the scene is dangerous or difficult to access. For example, the technology could be used to reconstruct the scene of a shooting or a hostage situation from a safe distance.

Continue reading “New technology can reveal what’s hidden behind objects using algorithm” »

After a recent car crash, John Murray-Bruce wished he could have seen the other car coming. The crash reaffirmed the USF assistant professor of computer science and engineering’s mission to create a technology that could do just that: See around obstacles and ultimately expand one’s line of vision.

Using a single photograph, Murray-Bruce and his doctoral student, Robinson Czajkowski, created an algorithm that computes highly accurate, full-color three-dimensional reconstructions of areas behind obstacles—a concept that can not only help prevent car crashes but help law enforcement experts in hostage situations search-and-rescue and strategic military efforts.

“We’re turning ordinary surfaces into mirrors to reveal regions, objects, and rooms that are outside our line of vision,” Murray-Bruce said. “We live in a 3D world, so obtaining a more complete 3D picture of a scenario can be critical in a number of situations and applications.”

A coalition of international law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and UK National Crime Agency, said they have disrupted LockBit, one of the most prolific hacker groups of all time, including shutting down websites the organization used for ransomware payments.

Google, the internet giant now a subsidiary of Alphabet, announced on Tuesday that it will limit the kinds of queries related to elections that its chatbot Bard and search generative experience can answer ahead of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election.

The company said that the new restrictions will be implemented by early 2024. The company recently made a landmark change to its location data privacy which has made it difficult for law enforcement agencies to access private location data of people near the crime scene and issue geofence warrants.

According to Reuters, the U.S. is not the only country that will witness crucial elections in 2024. India, the world’s largest democracy, and South Africa, among others, will also hold national elections in the same year.