Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2667

How much would it cost to hack your phone? The best guess for an iPhone is between $0 and $65,000 — and that price mainly depends on you. If you skipped a really important security update, the cost is closer to $0.

Say you were up to date. That $65,000 figure is an upper cost of exploiting the median individual — switch to an Android, a Mac, or a PC and it could get a lot lower. Apple has invested enormous resources in hardening the iPhone. The asking price for an individual exploit, rather than as a service, can go as high as $8 million. Compare that to the cost of an exploit of a PDF reader like Adobe Acrobat — notoriously riddled with security vulnerabilities — which according to this TrendMicro research report (PDF) is $250 and up.

Switch from targeting a specific person to targeting any of the thousands of people at a large company and there are myriad ways in. An attacker only needs to find the cheapest one.

Read more | >

How did we get here? Not just we humans, scrabbling about on a pale blue dot, hurtling around a star, hurtling around a supermassive black hole, hurtling through the local cluster. But how did the dot get here, and the star, and the black hole, and the cluster?

How did the incomprehensibly immense everything of it all get to where it is now, from an unimaginable nothing, billions of years ago?

That’s it, really, the question of questions. And, with the largest project of its kind to date, astronomers are attempting to find answers – by conducting computer simulations of the entire Universe.

Read more | >

The large blue warning signs read “Video recording for fall detection and prevention” on the third-floor dementia care unit of the Trousdale, a private-pay senior living community in Silicon Valley where a studio starts from about $7,000 per month.

In late 2019, AI-based fall detection technology from a Bay Area startup, SafelyYou, was installed to monitor its 23 apartments (it is turned on in all but one apartment where the family didn’t consent). A single camera unobtrusively positioned high on each bedroom wall continuously monitors the scene.

If the system, which has been trained on SafelyYou’s ever expanding library of falls, detects a fall, staff are alerted. The footage, which is kept only if an event triggers the system, can then be viewed in the Trousdale’s control room by paramedics to help decide whether someone needs to go to hospital – did they hit their head? – and by designated staff to analyze what changes could prevent the person falling again.

Continue reading “AI in Breast Radiology” | >

Researchers from Tsinghua University, China, have developed an all-analog photoelectronic chip that combines optical and electronic computing to achieve ultrafast and highly energy-efficient computer vision processing, surpassing digital processors.

Computer vision is an ever-evolving field of artificial intelligence focused on enabling machines to interpret and understand from the world, similar to how humans perceive and process images and videos.

It involves tasks such as image recognition, object detection, and scene understanding. This is done by converting from the environment into for processing by , enabling machines to make sense of visual information. However, this -to-digital conversion consumes significant time and energy, limiting the speed and efficiency of practical neural network implementations.

Read more | >

For the first time, a physical neural network has successfully been shown to learn and remember “on the fly,” in a way inspired by and similar to how the brain’s neurons work.

The result opens a pathway for developing efficient and low-energy machine intelligence for more complex, real-world learning and .

Published today in Nature Communications, the research is a collaboration between scientists at the University of Sydney and University of California at Los Angeles.

Read more | >

A little more than two years have passed since the Lucy mission launched on an Atlas V rocket, ultimately bound for asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter. After a gravity assist from Earth in 2022, the spacecraft has been making a beeline for an intermediate target, and now it is nearly there.

On Wednesday, the $1 billion mission is due to make its first asteroid flyby, coming to within 265 miles (425 km) of the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh. In a blog post, NASA says the encounter will take place at 12:54 pm ET (16:54 UTC).

About an hour before the encounter, the spacecraft will begin attempting to lock on to the small asteroid so that its instruments are oriented toward it. This will allow for the best possible position to take data from Dinkinesh as Lucy speeds by at 10,000 mph (4,470 meters per second).

Read more | >

The search is on worldwide to find ways to extract carbon dioxide from the air or from power plant exhaust and then make it into something useful. One of the more promising ideas is to make it into a stable fuel that can replace fossil fuels in some applications. But most such conversion processes have had problems with low carbon efficiency, or they produce fuels that can be hard to handle, toxic, or flammable.

Now, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed an efficient process that can convert carbon dioxide into formate, a liquid or solid material that can be used like hydrogen or methanol to power a fuel cell and generate electricity. Potassium or sodium formate, already produced at industrial scales and commonly used as a de-icer for roads and sidewalks, is nontoxic, nonflammable, easy to store and transport, and can remain stable in ordinary steel tanks to be used months, or even years, after its production.

Read more | >