Lifeboat Foundation

Sweden’s government has exposed sensitive and personal data of millions, along with the nation’s military secrets, in what is now considered to be one of the worst government IT disasters ever. The leak, which occurred in 2015, saw the names, photos and home addresses of millions exposed. Those affected include fighter pilots of Swedish air force, police suspects, people under the witness relocation programme, members of the military’s most secretive units (equivalent to the SAS or SEAL teams) and more.

The leak occurred after the Swedish Transportation Agency (STA) decided to outsource its database management and other IT services to firms such as IBM and NCR. However, the STA uploaded its entire database onto cloud servers, which included details on every single vehicle in the country. The database was then emailed to marketers in clear text message. When the error was discovered, the STA merely sent another email asking the marketing subscribers to delete the previous list themselves.

In 2016, the US military’s budget was about $580 billion more than NASA’s.

By Susan Schneider, PhD, and Edwin Turner, PhD

Every moment of your waking life and whenever you dream, you have the distinct inner feeling of being “you.” When you see the warm hues of a sunrise, smell the aroma of morning coffee or mull over a new idea, you are having conscious experience. But could an artificial intelligence (AI) ever have experience, like some of the androids depicted in Westworld or the synthetic beings in Blade Runner?

Continue reading “Is anyone home? A way to find out if AI has become self-aware” »

“It’s really negative, and in some ways, I actually think it’s pretty irresponsible,” said Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook.

We would like to know what you would like to see being offered as donation rewards in future campaigns? What would you like to see as a reward for a $25, $50, $100 or even $1000 donation let us know your thoughts by adding ideas to the poll below.

Around 200 government workers in Jinan, in China’s eastern Shandong province, will soon be able to send to transmit messages across an impenetrable 125 mile long (200km) network.

Scientists who retested mineral samples collected during the Apollo moon missions now believe there’s a massive amount of water under the lunar surface – a discovery which may make manned missions to the moon easier than previously thought.

Researchers at Brown University in the US examined glass beads, a type of volcanic crystal gathered during the Apollo 15 and 17 missions in the 1970s, and found they contained similar volumes of water to Earth’s basalt rock.

The leaders of the study, which has been published in Nature Geoscience, cite the parallels as evidence that parts of the moon contain a similarly large amount of water. This, they believe, could be useful for future lunar missions as it means water could potentially be extracted rather than carried from home.

There is a persistent view that life extension advocacy is something that does not require any investments and can be done in your spare time. Fundraising for overheads is like an elephant in the room: it is hard not to notice it is there, but people try to avoid talking about it.

The truth is, it all depends on how ambitious the goal of that advocacy is. Without a doubt, talking to friends about the promise of rejuvenation technologies or reposting research news on your Facebook feed is useful and it can be done for free.

But what if the goal is more ambitious – to change local legislation to make it more longevity-friendly, to convert decisionmakers of the state grant system to allocate more money to rejuvenation research, or to reach out to wealthy individuals able to fund more studies? These activities require money. In this article we will help you become more familiar with the notion of advocacy and the expenditures behind it.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents both the biggest opportunity and potentially the greatest threat to the legal profession in history.

This is part of a bigger global revolution – where society, business and government are likely to experience more change in the next 20–30 years than in the last 500.

This large-scale disruption is being driven by the combined effects of AI and other disruptive technologies whose speed, power and capability are growing exponentially – or faster.

Continue reading “Unleashing the true potential of AI” »