Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Ground squirrels spend the end of summer gorging on food, preparing for hibernation. They need to store a lot of energy as fat, which becomes their primary fuel source underground in their hibernation burrows all winter long.

While hibernating, ground squirrels enter a state called torpor. Their metabolism drops to as low as just 1 percent of summer levels and their body temperature can plummet to close to freezing. Torpor greatly reduces how much energy the animal needs to stay alive until springtime.

That long fast comes with a downside: no new input of protein, which is crucial to maintain the body’s tissues and organs. This is a particular problem for muscles.

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When the results of his study came in, Kondwani Jambo was stunned.

He’s an immunologist in Malawi. And last year he had set out to determine just how many people in his country had been infected with the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

Jambo, who works for the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme, knew the total number of cases was going to be higher than the official numbers. But his study revealed that the scale of spread was beyond anything he had anticipated — with a huge majority of Malawians infected long before the omicron variant emerged. “I was very shocked,” he says.

So to fill in the true picture, Jambo and his collaborators turned to another potential source of information: a repository of blood samples that had been collected from Malawians month after month by the national blood bank. And they checked how many of those samples had antibodies for the coronavirus. Their finding: By the start of Malawi’s third COVID-19 wave with the delta variant last summer, as much as 80% of the population had already been infected with some strain of the coronavirus.

Continue reading “Africa may have reached the pandemic’s holy grail” | >

Looking to get into fault injection for your reverse engineering projects, but don’t have the cash to lay out for the necessary hardware? Fear not, for the tools to glitch a chip may be as close as the nearest barbecue grill.

If you don’t know what chip glitching is, perhaps a primer is in order. Glitching, more formally known as electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI), or simply fault injection, is a technique that uses a pulse of electromagnetic energy to induce a fault in a running microcontroller or microprocessor. If the pulse occurs at just the right time, it may force the processor to skip an instruction, leaving the system in a potentially exploitable state.

EMFI tools are commercially available — we even recently featured a kit to build your own — but [rqu]’s homebrew version is decidedly simpler and cheaper than just about anything else. It consists of a piezoelectric gas grill igniter, a little bit of enameled magnet wire, and half of a small toroidal ferrite core. The core fragment gets a few turns of wire, which then gets soldered to the terminals on the igniter. Pressing the button generates a high-voltage pulse, which gets turned into an electromagnetic pulse by the coil. There’s a video of the tool in use in the Twitter thread, showing it easily glitching a PIC running a simple loop program.

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Meta has just revealed their AI Supercomputer which is surpassing any of its competitors in terms of capabilities and performance. Meta AI Research is using data from sites such as Facebook and Instagram to train and improve its models in the hopes of controlling and influencing its users and for other future secret projects. What other dystopian things will come from this, one can only imagine.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Meta’s Secret Weapon.
01:41 The Emergence of AI Supremacy.
04:55 What are Supercomputers used for?
08:03 Is Human AI Possible?
10:34 Last Words.
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#meta #supercomputer #dystopia

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