Lifeboat Foundation

Samsung has started shipping the world’s first 3-nanometer (nm) chips from its chip-making complex in Hwaseong, South Korea’s Gyeonggi Province, the tech giant revealed on Monday at a ceremony to celebrate the shipment.

The company said its first-generation 3nm process has reduced power consumption by 45 percent and improved performance by 23 percent using gate-all-around (GAA) process, compared to the current 5nm chips using fin field-effect transistor technology (FinFET).

According to Samsung, its engineers started researching on GAA transistors in the early 2000s and went on to experiment with the design from 2017. Last month, the company became the first chipmaker to begin mass production of the 3nm chips.

Computers are sometimes kept disconnected from the internet, or “air gapped”, to avoid remote hackers gaining access to steal data, but now there is a way to use a hard drive cable to transmit information via radio waves.

Scientists in China have invented a powerful laser which can essentially scorch the air to create patterns. Lasers have already been used to create optical illusions, but they needed dust or clouds as a medium.

The Wuhan-based team demonstrated the laser by writing Chinese characters in the air, which can be viewed and even touched.

BEC was kind enough to share a parts list of everything used to create this project. It’s operated primarily by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, with most components housed neatly inside an acrylic cylinder. It’s driven by a drone propeller alongside a couple of Pololu 2,130 DRV8833 Dual H-bridge motor drivers. The sensors include both a pressure sensor and a distance sensor, while a Lego Rechargeable 9V Battery Box supplies the power with the assistance of a Pololu 2,123 S7V8F5 5V voltage regulator.

The Raspberry Pi runs Raspberry Pi OS, while the code used to operate the submarine functions is handled using a custom Python script. BEC explains that Thonny was used to run the Python code, which is open-source and available for anyone to explore.

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Lego-Powered Submarine Makes a Splash” »

RIYADH (BLOOMBERG) — Saudi Arabia wants to build a gigantic megastructure that contains a city for 9 million people, its crown prince announced on Monday (July 25).

The design takes the shape of two parallel buildings with mirrored surfaces, rising 500m above sea level — taller than the Empire State Building — and stretching horizontally for more than 100km.

They’re part of the prince’s US$500 billion (S$693 billion) Neom project, a plan to turn an expanse of desert the size of Belgium into a high-tech region.

WASHINGTON — L3Harris Technologies and Northrop Grumman Strategic Space Systems won a U.S. Department of Defense contract to furnish multimillion-dollar satellites that help detect, identify and target missiles and other cutting-edge threats, including hypersonics.

The Space Development Agency on July 18 said the companies will each produce 14 prototype satellites for the Tranche 1 Tracking Layer, a key component of the National Defense Space Architecture, which will consist of hundreds of satellites operating primarily in low-Earth orbit.

Together, the agreements are valued at more than $1.3 billion. The L3Harris deal came in at $700 million, making each satellite and related service package worth roughly $50 million. The Northrop Grumman deal came in at $617 million.

The launch of Recurve reveals the latest technological advancements in radio frequencies and information transmission in the increasingly contested environment of space.

A crucial but poorly-studied parameter that dictates battery performance is the migration barrier. It determines the rate at which ions move through an electrode inside the battery, and ultimately the rate at which it charges or discharges. Because it is hard to measure the migration barrier in the…

Microsoft is now taking steps to prevent Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) brute-force attacks as part of the latest builds for the Windows 11 operating system in an attempt to raise the security baseline to meet the evolving threat landscape.

To that end, the default policy for Windows 11 builds – particularly, Insider Preview builds 22528.1000 and newer – will automatically lock accounts for 10 minutes after 10 invalid sign-in attempts.

“Win11 builds now have a DEFAULT account lockout policy to mitigate RDP and other brute-force password vectors,” David Weston, Microsoft’s vice president for OS security and enterprise, said in a series of tweets last week. “This technique is very commonly used in Human Operated Ransomware and other attacks — this control will make brute forcing much harder which is awesome!”