“President Obama seems to think Google can help increase Internet access in a country that has not historically been interested in unfettered connectivity.”
Category: internet – Page 318
DARPA Calls For Creative Individuals to Weaponize Common Items
Is this another strategy to fight terrorism by seeing from techies and others the various ways terrorists can take every day items to create weapons?
Do you want to be a MacGyver and turn everyday household items into Decepticons? Then DARPA’s new Improv program wants you.
This sounds like a Transformers movie. Or a MacGyver episode. Heck, this could even be a precursor to Skynet and future Terminators. OK, that last one may not apply, but a new DARPA program wants people who can weaponize a toaster.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a program called Improv and is soliciting creative minds to submit proposals on how common off-the-shelf, internet-connected items can be used as weapons.
AngryBots demo gives developers early preview of WebAssembly experiments in Microsoft Edge
Developers can now see an early preview of experimental WebAssembly support in an internal Microsoft Edge build with the AngryBots demo, alongside similar previews for Firefox and Chrome. WebAssembly is a new, portable, size and load-time-efficient binary format suitable for compiling to the Web.
In the video above, a demo running in Microsoft Edge uses the preliminary WebAssembly support in the Chakra engine. The demo starts up significantly faster than just using asm.js, as the WebAssembly binaries have a smaller file size and parse more quickly than plain JavaScript, which needs to be parsed in the asm.js case.
Read more about WebAssembly on the Microsoft Edge Dev Blog.
The immortalist: Uploading the mind to a computer
While many tech moguls dream of changing the way we live with new smart devices or social media apps, one Russian internet millionaire is trying to change nothing less than our destiny, by making it possible to upload a human brain to a computer, reports Tristan Quinn.
“Within the next 30 years,” promises Dmitry Itskov, “I am going to make sure that we can all live forever.”
It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to devote himself to something more useful to humanity. “I’m 100% confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn’t have started it,” he says.
EU justice ministers defined cyber crimes as terrorism
EU Justice Ministers Claims Cyber Attackers are terrorists. I wouldn’t say all of them are terrorists. Those who attack hospitals, attack government infrastructures, threaten markets, etc, are terrorists. The next door neighbor’s 13 yr old kid hacking to use your wireless internet service; not a terrorist.
European Union justice ministers on March 11th adopted a general approach on the directive on combatting terrorism, including serious cyber crimes, informs LETA/BNS.
On Friday the council greed its negotiating position on the proposal for a directive on combatting terrorism. The proposed directive strengthens the EU’s legal framework in preventing terrorist attacks by criminalising preparatory acts such as training and travel abroad for terrorist purposes – hence addressing the issue of foreign fighters – as well as aiding and abetting, inciting or attempting such acts. It also reinforce rules on the rights for the victims of terrorism, the Ministry of Justice said.
Estonian Justice Minister Urmas Reinsalu said in a speech at the Justice and Home Affairs Council that for Estonia it is very important that justice ministers were able to agree on defining serious terrorist cyber attacks as terrorist crimes. This gives the EU additional legal tools in such situations as the cyber attacks that followed the so-called Bronze Night riots that took place in Tallinn in April 2007, he added.
Video: What early email looked like
It can be easy to take things like modern email for granted, and nothing highlights that more than this clip from the “Database,” an old tech show that aired in the 80s.
In the segment above, you can see what sending and receiving an email was like in 1984, back when you were greeted with prompts like “phone computer” and literally had to dial in using a rotary phone. These were the days when webpages were numbered and email was such a luxury that people would excitedly sign off on messages with phrases like “electronically yours.”
The network shown here is Micronet, an internet portal that Gizmodo points out was a lot like an early version of AOL. Micronet featured online games, a magazine, rudimentary message boards, news, downloadable software, and yes, even email.
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 12)
“Deep learning enables the robot to perceive its immediate environment, including the location and movement of its limbs. Reinforcement learning means improving at a task by trial and error. A robot with these two skills could refine its performance based on real-time feedback.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Google and Facebook Team Up to Open Source the Gear Behind Their Empires.
White House Pushes Plan to Bring Broadband to 20M More Americans
President Obama announced a new initiative this week to connect 20 million more Americans to broadband by 2020, further promoting the White House’s agenda to reclassify high speed Internet as a public utility, like water or electricity.
The digital initiative, named ConnectALL, is intended “for folks looking for jobs or workers hoping to learn new skills,” wrote Obama in a Facebook post, acknowledging that in today’s economy, “the Internet isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity.”
Can we build quantum-resistant encryption?
I do believe we’re within a 7 to 8 yr window at this point with Quantum hitting the broader main stream computing infrastructure. However, we have banks in Europe that have been using the technology for network communications, Los Alamos Labs experimenting since late 2011 with Quantum Internet, now China is launching their own Quantum Satellite for wireless communications; so I do suggest a strategy needs to be developed over the next 2 to 3 yrs for government & industry around how to manage & plan for deployment of Quantum especially with China & Russia’s interest.
New research demonstrating that quantum computing is now just an engineering challenge moves the possibility of encryption-cracking machines to the front burner.
MIT researchers found a way to load websites 34% faster on the same connection
A group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have found a way to speed up the Web without actually increasing the connection throughput or making fundamental code changes.
It created Polaris, a framework that determines how to overlap the objects being downloaded by a page and minimize the amounts of time a site fetches individual resources. The framework creates a dependency graph of the page, then uses that to determine when each object should be loaded.
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