Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 10405

First, let’s get some basics out of the way…

What is Transaction Malleability?

Here are 2 explanations of transaction malleability: [Coindesk] [TechTalk]

In a nutshell, Transaction Malleability is a weakness in the original Bitcoin implementation that enables a bad actor to change the unique ID of a bitcoin transaction before it is confirmed on the Blockchain. Such a change makes it possible for someone to pretend that a transaction didn’t happen, if all necessary conditions are in place.

As the Coindesk article points out, a successful attack requires certain conditions that make a successful attack difficult or even unlikely. Many analysts referred to it as a bug that should eventually be fixed, rather than an urgent issue.

Was This Flaw Addressed

Transaction malleability was addressed (for Bitcoin) with the introduction of Segregated Witness (SegWit) in August 2017. 1, 2

But Was There a Successful Attack?
Attack? Yes. Successful? It’s doubtful…

In March 2017, five months before SegWit was implemented, a mining pool that administers 2% of worldwide activity launched a malleability attack. No one lost money – and some individuals believe that they did this to emphasize urgency and hasten the adoption of SegWit.

What About Lightning Network?

The Lightning Network is a ‘Level 2’ network overlay, currently being adopted by miners (depending on the service or exchange, it is being incrementally activated in the first months of 2018). To function properly, it requires that transaction malleability be solved. But, in the event that a miner is not SegWit compliant, it can resolve the malleability problem in other ways.

1 SegWit should not be confused with SegWit2x, an upgrade process that was cancelled a few months later in November. 2017

2 In the TechTalk article linked above, the author concludes:

“Transaction Malleability is fixed with Segregated Witness by no longer taking into account signatures when calculating the transaction’s fingerprint. Fixing Transaction Malleability means that the Lightning Network can work smoothly.”

Philip Raymond co-chairs CRYPSA, hosts the New York Bitcoin Event and presents at
Crypto Conferences around the world. Book a presentation or consulting engagement.

IT’S BREAKING ALL THE RULES. Ordinarily, a supernova marks the death of a mammoth star, which then briefly outshines an entire galaxy before fading away. Not so for a baffling supernova that went off in a nearby galaxy in 2014. Instead of being the end of the story, the stellar explosion inexplicably began to brighten and has since dimmed, then brightened up again four more times.

If that weren’t odd enough, it turns out a supernova blew up in the same place in the sky more than 60 years ago. Somehow, a star that apparently died around the time Elvis Presley released his first record endured only to die again—truly a “living dead” star.

Astrophysicists suspect this apparent stellar zombie was a rare, colossal type of star with 50 to 100 times the mass of our Sun. The universe’s first stars were similarly huge, they think, though these distant objects lie beyond the reach of even our most powerful telescopes. The re-exploding star could, therefore, be a cosmic anachronism, offering scientists an unprecedented glimpse into the primeval universe.

Read more

Like every other major tech company, Google has designs on being the first to achieve quantum supremacy — the point where a quantum computer could run particular algorithms faster than a classical computer. Today it’s announced that it believes its latest research, Bristlecone, is going to be the processor to help it achieve that. According to the Google Quantum AI Lab, it could provide “a compelling proof-of-principle for building larger scale quantum computers.”

One of the biggest obstacles to quantum supremacy is error rates and subsequent scalability. Qubits (the quantum version of traditional bits) are very unstable and can be adversely affected by noise, and most of these systems can only hold a state for less than 100 microseconds. Google believes that quantum supremacy can be “comfortably demonstrated” with 49 qubits and a two-qubit error below 0.5 percent. Previous quantum systems by Google have given two-qubit errors of 0.6 percent, which in theory sounds like a miniscule difference, but in the world of quantum computing remains significant.

However, each Bristlecone chip features 72 qubits, which may help mitigate some of this error, but as Google says, quantum computing isn’t just about qubits. “Operating a device such as Bristlecone at low system error requires harmony between a full stack of technology ranging from software and control electronics to the processor itself,” the team writes in a blog post. “Getting this right requires careful systems engineering over several iterations.”

Read more

Frozen corpses could be brought back to life and made to look YOUNGER than when they died using stem cell injections, claims expert…

EXCLUSIVE: Dennis Kowalski, President of the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute, has claimed scientists could revive a frozen human corpse by using stem cells to help repair damaged cells.

Read more

Researchers from the Beijing-based technology firm trained its text-to-speech synthesis system on more than 800 hours of audio, taken from around 2,400 different speakers.

To work at its best, Deep Voice requires 100 five-second sections of sound but it can trick a voice recognition system 95 per cent of the time with just ten five-second samples.

The technology could duplicate the voices of people who have lost the ability to use their voice, developers say.

Read more

On the run up to Undoing Aging 2018, Nicola Bagalà from LEAF did an interview to learn a bit more about our foundation and the story of our involvement in life extension.

As our readers probably already know, from March 15 to March 17 this year, the Undoing Aging 2018 Conference will be held at the Umspannwerk Alexanderplatz in Berlin, Germany. The event is intended to bring together scientists working on repair-based therapies for aging as well as to give life sciences students—and anyone else who may be interested, really—an occasion to deepen their understanding of the current state of rejuvenation research.

Organised by the Forever Healthy Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation, the conference will feature eminent researchers among its many speakers, such as the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Dr. Anthony Atala; Dr. Kristen Fortney, who is an expert on computational drug discovery and aging biomarkers; Dr. Michael West, co-CEO of BioTime and founder of Geron Corporation; Dr. James Kirkland, a world-class expert on cellular senescence; and Dr. Vera Gorbunova, a pioneer of the comparative biology approach to the study of aging and co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center. In addition to its scientific, educational, and networking value, UA2018 will no doubt greatly contribute to the popularisation of this area of research and help spread awareness, both about the problem represented by age-related diseases and the great opportunity we have to finally bring aging under comprehensive medical control within a relatively short time frame.

LEAF, naturally, will attend the event to keep you fully up to date, and our readers can expect extensive coverage during and following the event. Meanwhile, to whet your appetite, we caught up with Forever Healthy’s founder and CEO, Michael Greve, to learn a bit more about his foundation and the story of his involvement in life extension.

Continue reading “Undoing Aging With Michael Greve” | >

The Pentagon is hoping to tap into the incredible survival techniques of some of nature’s hardiest creatures to ‘slow biological time’ on the battlefield.

DARPA’s new program, dubbed Biostasis, aims to develop ways to buy extra time for wounded soldiers between the moment of injury and first medical treatment.

This window, known as the ‘golden hour,’ is a critical for survival – but in reality, it’s often far less than sixty minutes.

Read more

A burger-flipping robot named Flippy is now cooking up hamburgers at a fast food restaurant called Caliburger.

A robot named Flippy is now in the kitchen at a fast food restaurant called CaliBurger in Pasadena. We were there for a preview event where Flippy made us some lunch.

Follow KTLA Tech Reporter Rich DeMuro on Facebook or Twitter for cool apps, tech tricks & tips!

Read more