Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: security – Page 131

The Pentagon wants to fundamentally change how social science research is conducted.

The Defense Department uses principles of human behavior to make major decisions affecting national security, but social science is inherently limited, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, mostly because social scientists “rarely, if ever, have ground truth” about “actual causes of observed behaviors in the ‘real world.’”

To help mitigate those shortcomings, DARPA is gathering information on ways, and potentially new technology, that can assess how closely social science research methods do represent the real world. Simulations, for instance, could be used to calibrate whether the inferences about human behavior social scientists make when they’re conducting an analysis are valid.

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“The vast majority of space technology being developed is dual-use, and so serves Chinese security interests as well,” says Johnson-Freese, an expert on the Chinese space program and a professor at the US Naval War College. “China understands the military advantages reaped by US space capabilities for many years, and wants those same capabilities”.

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Nice.

“We’ve managed to put quantum-based technology that has been used in high profile science experiments into a package that might allow it to be used commercially.”

Random number generators are crucial to the encryption that protects our privacy and security when engaging in digital transactions such as buying products online or withdrawing cash from an ATM. For the first time, engineers have developed a fast random number generator based on a quantum mechanical process that could deliver the world’s most secure encryption keys in a package tiny enough to use in a mobile device.

In The Optical Society’s journal for high impact research, Optica, the researchers report on their fully integrated device for random number generation. The new work represents a key advancement on the path to incorporating quantum-based random number generators — delivering the highest quality numbers and thus the highest level of security — into computers, tablets and mobile phones.

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As I mentioned 4 months ago when an article came out stating that this type of concept of a scalable quantum chip was at least 15 years away was bunk; this is again one more example where contributors really need to do their homework and make sure they are speaking to the real folks on the frontlines of QC.

Quantum-based random number generators are now small enough that they could fit in mobile devices.

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The future frontier for hackers is synthetic biology.

Landmark scientific projects such as the Human Genome Project can encourage international cooperation and bring nations together. However, when security interests and defence research align with the prestige of a landmark project—international competition is all but assured. Synthetic biology is a scientific discipline less than a decade old, and the potential defence and security applications may create a new space race, this time between the USA and China.

The larger concern is not that this race may happen, but that if it does it will politicise and militarise an ethically sensitive area of the life sciences at a time when this frontier technology is critical to maintaining a sustainable world.

The Human Genome Project (HGP) cost about US$300 million (A$394 million), involved 20 international institutions and sequenced the human genome in just over a decade. The draft sequence was published in February 2001 and has driven economic, health and social benefits the world over for the last 15 years. To a very large extent this research project underpins the modern life sciences and is the equivalent of landing on the moon.

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The Gatekeeper keychain uses bluetooth 4.0 technology with an AES encryption method to automatically lock your computer when you walk away.

Every office has that one coworker—that person who sneaks on to your computer and posts absurd messages on your various social media pages. Fortunately, computers come with handy security features and are generally password protected.

“But!” you think, “what about those times that I forget to lock my computer?”

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Virtual reality robots could someday teleport juries to gruesome crime scenes to investigate murders…

Juries are rarely allowed to visit crime scenes.

There are some exceptions, usually in difficult, high-profile murder cases such as the O.J Simpson trial in 1995.

Asking jurors to become fact finders in this way comes with a range problems, from possible biases to the logistical and security challenges.

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