Lifeboat Foundation

CrowdStrike warns of targeted phishing campaign exploiting recent update incident. New threat actor targets German customers with fake installer.

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a privilege escalation vulnerability impacting Google Cloud Platform’s Cloud Functions service that an attacker could exploit to access other services and sensitive data in an unauthorized manner.

Tenable has given the vulnerability the name ConfusedFunction.

“An attacker could escalate their privileges to the Default Cloud Build Service Account and access numerous services such as Cloud Build, storage (including the source code of other functions), artifact registry and container registry,” the exposure management company said in a statement.

Google Chrome now warns when downloading risky password-protected files and provides improved alerts with more information about potentially malicious downloaded files.

These new, more detailed warning messages help users quickly learn the nature of the danger presented by each file downloaded from the Internet.

For this, Google introduced a two-tier download warning system that uses AI-powered malware verdicts sourced from its Safe Browsing service to help evaluate the actual risk quickly.

Meta has removed 63,000 Instagram accounts from Nigeria that were involved in sextortion scams, including a coordinated network of 2,500 accounts linked to 20 individuals targeting primarily adult men in the United States.

The social media giant said these accounts are linked to an organized cybercrime group called ‘Yahoo Boys,’ that has recently increased its operational volume.

Apart from the offending Instagram accounts, Meta has also deleted 1,300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook Pages, and 5,700 Facebook Groups, also based in Nigeria, that were handing out tips and training material for carrying out various scams.

In the last 60 years technology has evolved at such an exponentially fast rate that we are now regularly conversing with AI based chatbots, and that same OpenAI technology has been put into a humanoid robot. It’s truly amazing to see this rapid development. Above: OpenAI technology in a humanoid robot Continued advancement […].

An exploration of the question of whether dark matter exists and what the evidence for it is. My Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/johnmichaelgodierMy Eve…

A loss of controlled inhibition of overly excited brain cells might explain how a common knock-out anesthesia drug works.

A new animal study led by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has found that propofol, a sedative used to safely lull people into unconsciousness for medical procedures, disrupts the brain’s normal ability to regain control of highly excitable neurons.

“The brain has to operate on this knife’s edge between excitability and chaos,” explains MIT neuroscientist and senior study author Earl Miller.

Researchers at California State Polytechnic University (CalPoly), Pomona are carrying out a series of quantum physics experiments expected to provide strong scientific evidence that we live in a computer simulated virtual reality.

Devised by former NASA physicist Thomas Campbell, the five experiments are variations of the double-slit and delayed-choice quantum eraser experiments, which explore the conditions under which quantum objects ‘collapse’ from a probabilistic wavefunction to a defined particle. In line with the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, Campbell attributes a fundamental role to measurement, but extends it to human observers. In his view, quantum mechanics shows that the physical world is a virtual reality simulation that is computed for our consciousness on demand. In essence, what you do not see does not exist.

Campbell’s quantum experiments have been designed to reveal the interactive mechanism by which nature probabilistically generates our experience of the physical world. Herein, Campbell asserts that, like a videogame, the universe is generated as needed for the player and does not exist independent of observation.

While multiple quantum experiments have pointed to the probabilistic and informational nature of reality, Campbell’s experiments are the first to investigate the connection between consciousness and simulation theory. These experiments are based on Campbell’s paper ‘On Testing the Simulation Theory’ originally published in the International Journal of Quantum Foundations in 2017.

Paradigm-shifting consequences

Importantly, Campbell’s version of the simulation hypothesis differs from the ‘ancestor simulation’ thought experiment popularized by philosopher Dr. Nick Bostrom. “Contrary to what Bostrom postulates, the idea here is that consciousness is not a product of the simulation — it is fundamental to reality,” Campbell explains. “If all five experiments work as expected, this will challenge the conventional understanding of reality and uncover profound connections between consciousness and the cosmos.” The first experiment is currently being carried out by two independent teams of researchers — One at California State Polytechnic University (Pomona) headed by Dr. Farbod Khoshnoud, and the other at a top-tier Canadian university that has chosen to participate anonymously at this time.

To learn more, or to follow their progress visit Testing the Hypothesis, a platform bringing together all relevant information about Campbell’s experiments, including a detailed explanation of each.

Campbell will be joined by Donald Hoffman, Rizwan Virk, Stephan A. Schwartz and others for the Doorway to the Future Event in Huntsville, Alabama this September.

Minimally invasive cellular-level target-specific neuromodulation is needed to decipher brain function and neural circuitry. Here nano-magnetogenetics using magnetic force actuating nanoparticles has been reported, enabling wireless and remote stimulation of targeted deep brain neurons in freely behaving animals.