Lifeboat Foundation

The central government has started a drive to upgrade its IT equipment and infrastructure so that all electronic, data storage and communication devices used in government departments and agencies remain within the life span specified by the manufacturer and remain immune to cyber threats.

The move comes in the wake of a large number of cyber security incidents reported by Cert-In, a nodal agency for responding to such incidents and a recent ransomware attack at country’s top medical institute All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi on 23 November.

The ministry of electronics and information technology (Meity) has directed all secretaries of central ministries to actively take actions with regards to cyber security. Use of out-of-date operating systems and IT equipment must be discontinued, Meity said in a communication reviewed by Mint.

25 years ago, the film Contact made its theatrical debut starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey and told the story of Dr. Eleanor Arroway (Jodie Foster) who picked up a radio signal from the star Vega and how this discovery impacted not just herself, but humanity as a whole. Over time, she discovers the signal has embedded instructions sent by the aliens to build a device capable of sending one person into outer space, presumably to meet the Vegans.

The device is built, and she is eventually hurled through a series of outer space tunnels where she meets an alien in the form of her long-deceased father. Right before she’s sent back home, the alien informs her, “This was just a first step. In time you’ll take another.” When she awakens, her colleagues inform her the pod she sat in fell straight through the device and she never actually left. With no hard evidence of both her travels and meeting the aliens, Eleanor is left scrutinized by both the public and Congress. She is ultimately given a “healthy grant” to fund further research into finding more signals from ET, and the film ends with her pondering her journey to the stars.

While some moviegoers were bummed that they didn’t see the aliens—who instead downloaded Jodie Foster’s consciousness so they could talk to her easier—the important message of the film, and the book that it’s based on, is to persevere, but also knowing there will be hardships and sacrifices along the way. In the case of Eleanor, she loses her father at a very young age who had gotten her hooked on astronomy. Later, she passes on love with Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) to remain in pursuit of her research, all while consistently being roadblocked by her former boss. And even after she reaches her goal of contacting the aliens who sent the message, she’s still scrutinized and ridiculed.

British engineer Rolls-Royce has successfully used hydrogen instead of conventional jet fuel to power a modern aircraft engine in a world first for the aviation industry, according to the company.

The ground test, which took place at a government test facility at Boscombe Down, used green hydrogen generated by wind and tidal power from the Orkney Islands in Scotland.

Rolls-Royce used a converted AE 2100-A turboprop engine that powers civil and military aircraft to conduct the test in partnership with easyJet.

Apple cut one of the few ways to avoid censorship in China, airdrops.

Apple’s recent iOS update quietly, and completely unannounced, stopped offering the AirDrop service to Chinese phones and tablets. Airdrops are a file transfer service that sends specific files, directly between phones, without the need for a network. In the wave of anti-government protests larger than ever before, protesters are having to communicate without the use of a crucial tool: AirDrops.

AirDrop, a file-sharing feature on Apple iOS devices, has aided dissent in many authoritarian countries. The phones form a local network of devices, that are independent of any external sources.

Continue reading “Apple limits airdrops from Chinese phones, kneecapping government protesters” »

NEW DELHI: Among all the protests that have erupted across China following the strict quarantine measures enforced by the government for Covid-19, one form that has stood out is the display of a physics equation.

In images widely being circulated on social media, students of Beijing’s Tsinghua University can be seen holding sheets on which is written one of the Friedmann equations.

What these equations have to do with the subject of the protests is open to speculation. Many on social media have suggested that it is a play on the words “free man”. Another view is that it symbolises a free and “open” China, because the Friedmann equations describe an “open” (expanding) universe.

• Through Innovate UK, the Department for Transport has commissioned a Costain led consortium to assess the economic and technical potential of the UK’s first ‘eHighway’

• The study is part of the UK government’s plan to reach zero net emissions for heavy road freight.

• It aims to demonstrate the technology is ready for a national roll-out.

The Israeli government has teamed up with a defense contractor to invent a new material matrix that can hide soldiers from infrared sensors, making them more difficult to detect.

Polaris Defense’s Kit 300 system is a “thermal visual concealment” system that uses a combination of “metals, microfibres, and polymers” to mask a soldier’s thermal signature, according to Business Insider.

Thermal imaging technology creates a visual representation of an object via the invisible infrared (“heat radiation”) the object emits. If that object radiates heat, a thermal imager will show an image of it, with different colors representing relative levels of heat.

Elon Musk announced in a tweet today (Nov .25) that Twitter would launch its delayed color-coded “Verified” service on Friday next week.

The new service would feature a “gold check” for companies, a grey one for government accounts and the existing blue one for individuals, regardless of whether they are celebrities or not. See the tweet for yourself below:

“Painful but necessary”

The information security landscape is rapidly changing in response to quantum computing technology, which is capable of cracking modern encryption techniques in minutes, but a promising US government encryption algorithm for the post-quantum world was just cracked in less than an hour thanks to a decades-old math theorem.

In July 2022, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) chose a set of encryption algorithms that it hoped would stand up to the encryption-cracking power of quantum computers and tasked researchers with probing them for vulnerabilities, offering a $50,000 prize for anyone who was able to break the encryption.