Lifeboat News: The Blog – Safeguarding Humanity

We explore some of the ramifications arising from superflares on the evolutionary history of Earth, other planets in the solar system, and exoplanets. We propose that the most powerful superflares can serve as plausible drivers of extinction events, and that their periodicity corresponds to certain patterns in the terrestrial fossil diversity record. On the other hand, weaker superflares may play a positive role in enabling the origin of life through the formation of key organic compounds. Superflares could also prove to be quite detrimental to the evolution of complex life on present-day Mars and exoplanets in the habitable zone of M- and K-dwarfs. We conclude that the risk posed by superflares has not been sufficiently appreciated, and that humanity might potentially witness a superflare event in the next $\sim {10}^{3}$ years, leading to devastating economic and technological losses. In light of the many uncertainties and assumptions associated with our analysis, we recommend that these results should be viewed with due caution.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 Series, Titan RTX and RTX 2080 Performance Rumors

Posted by Genevieve Klien in futurism

Aug 10
2018

A new rumor has suggested that NVIDIA will be using the new GeForce RTX branding on their upcoming GeForce 20 series graphics card lineup.

Jeff Bezos shoots for the moon

Posted by Genevieve Klien in space travel

Aug 10
2018

The Amazon.com founder is likely to meet a goal of having his Blue Origin space-travel company work with NASA to return to the moon.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Is Named for Him. 60 Years Ago, No One Believed His Ideas About the Sun

Posted by Genevieve Klien in space

Aug 10
2018

Eugene N. Parker predicted the existence of solar wind in 1958. The NASA spacecraft, scheduled to launch on Saturday, is the first named for a living person.

DeepLocker demonstrates how AI can create a new breed of malware

Posted by Genevieve Klien in cybercrime/malcode, robotics/AI

Aug 10
2018

According to Marc Ph. Stoecklin, principal research scientist at IBM Research, DeepLocker is a “new breed of highly targeted and evasive attack tools powered by AI.”

DeepLocker was designed in an attempt to improve understanding of how AI models can be combined with malware techniques to create a “new breed of malware,” Stoecklin explained in a post. This new type of malware can disguise its intent until it reaches an intended victim, which could be determined by taking advantage of facial recognition, geolocation, and voice recognition.

“The DeepLocker class of malware stands in stark contrast to existing evasion techniques used by malware seen in the wild. While many malware variants try to hide their presence and malicious intent, none are as effective at doing so as DeepLocker,” Stoecklin wrote.