Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 8622

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The communications system of Mexico’s oil giant Pemex is still suffering the lingering effects of a cyberattack that occurred earlier this month, sources from the company told Bloomberg.

A ransomware attack caused administrative operations at Pemex to grind to a halt on November 10, with the company announcing the resumption of work soon after, saying the actual attack had been prevented.

The attackers used the Ryuk ransomware, which specifically targets companies with annual revenues of between $500 million and $1 billion. The Ryuk ransomware gets dropped into a network by another malware and soon after begins encrypting files. Yet the encryption begins with a delay, which gives the attackers time to study their target and how much money they could extort from it.

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“We want a new space race—space races are exciting,” declared SpaceX founder Elon Musk after the successful inaugural flight last year of the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket since the Space Shuttle.

Hawks and headline writers think space races are exciting too, especially the “new space race” between China and the United States. That’s why they keep referring to it—even though it doesn’t exist.

Historic changes are indeed afoot in the space sector. Private crewed spaceflight is about to come of age. Mobile robotic spacecraft are being built to rendezvous with satellites to service them. Vast swarms of broadband satellites are set to make the Internet truly global for the first time, and increase the number of spacecraft in orbit tenfold. Back on Earth, satellite imagery fed through artificial intelligence algorithms promises powerful insights into all manner of human activity. Dozens of countries are active in space and the number is growing all the time. The tired trope of the superpower space race does little to make sense of all this.

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China’s strides towards reform have been well received domestically and abroad, but effecting lasting change is hard2. To better characterize the situation, my team has studied global retraction data alongside national grants and applications that were revoked. We also surveyed researchers online and interviewed major stakeholders in China3,4. These included experts on university ethics committees, programmes for research-integrity training and plagiarism detection, as well as funding-programme managers, journal editors and academics. Here, I outline major challenges in research integrity, and potential strategies and solutions to buttress it.

A swift increase in scientific productivity has outstripped the country’s ability to promote rigour and curb academic misconduct; it is time to seize solutions.

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