Lifeboat Foundation

A search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s database shows some recently filed patents by Google. The search engine titan is obviously firing all cylinders in its research of robots/drones, driverless vehicles, and what looks to be either a Google Glass reboot or some sort of stylish frames for Virtual Reality headsets, perhaps.

[Related: Apple and Google Will Lead $600 Million Near-Future Car Market]

Several patents for eye wear that Google simply refers to as “glasses” in the patent abstracts, show more stylish frames than the Google Glass prototype released in 2013.

Read more

It’s like some kind of surrealistic, never ending nightmare! Eeek.

Sleeping too well lately? Looking for that “something something” to turn those boring restful nights into a horrorscape? Turns out, zooming in too far on Google Maps’ user-uploaded 3D Spheres produces some impressively fucked up images.

Digital artist Kyle F. Williams has been collecting some of the weirder glitchy images Google Maps turns up when you zoom in too close on some of its 3D spheres. Some look like that photo in Back to the Future where the kids slowly fade. Others look like Picasso took some bad ketamine and got Photoshop:

Read more

“Ruth Porat has taken an unusual path to the tech world. Before becoming the chief financial officer at Google in May 2015 (and then at Alphabet, Google’s new parent company, a few months later), she held the same post at Morgan Stanley, where among other roles she worked closely with the U.S. government to sort out the troubles at the insurance corporation AIG and the mortgage-financing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the 2008 financial crisis.”

Read more

A fun story:

Advances in artificial intelligence have raised the question of a supercomputer running for office.

Read more

The lack of collaboration on cyber security between the senior levels of business is leaving UK firms exposed to fines and reputational damage, a study has revealed.

One in 10 C-level respondents to a survey by Palo Alto Networks said they “kind of” understand what defines an online security risk, but admitted they “still have to use Google to help explain it”.

This finding suggests that the lack of consensus on where the responsibility for cyber security lies could stem from some lack of cyber security understanding at the leadership level.

Read more

Read more

A team at Wake Forest University has used a combination of living cells and a special gel to print out living human body parts — including ears, muscles and jawbones.

It’s an advance on previous attempts, which either involved making a plastic scaffold and then trying to get cells to grow in and on it, or that printed out organ shapes that ended up being too floppy and dying.

Read more

The real question waiting to be address is how do we manage the technology to keep people safe without restricting businesses and technology progress efforts to make people’s lives better.

We look at how drones are revolutionizing the skies, and how this technology has so quickly moved from science fiction to ubiquitous reality. Airs in place of Insight on Monday, Feb 15 at 9 a.m. and 7 p.m.

Read more

Here is a thought — we’re already seeing criminals using drones for smuggling and hackers are enjoying holding data for ransom; what is going to happen when we add self driving cars, robots, etc. to this ever growing Cyber risks? Will we see a day that we have to register our drones and other robots with a national register and do a background check on owners because these things can be used as weapons?

“In Latin America drones are being used as part of the War on Drugs as both regional governments and the US are using surveillance drones to monitor drug trafficking and find smuggling routes. However, as drones are increasingly being used by drug cartels themselves to transport drugs between countries, could Latin America find itself at the forefront of emerging drone countermeasures?”

Source: From surveillance to smuggling: Drones in the War on Drugs | Remote Control Project Blog.

Read more