Lifeboat Foundation

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The FBI says that 2023 was a record year for cryptocurrency fraud, with total losses exceeding $5.6 billion, based on nearly 70,000 reports received through the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

This marks a 45% increase in losses compared to the previous year, driven primarily by investment fraud, which accounted for 71% of the total cryptocurrency losses. Other types of fraud contributing to the statistics include tech support scams, call center fraud, and government impersonation.

The vast majority of the reported losses ($4.8 billion) were incurred by U.S. citizens, followed by Cayman Islands ($196M), Mexico ($127M), Canada ($72M), the UK ($59M), India ($44M), and Australia ($25M).

Life insurers and those offering income protection and permanent disability insurance will be banned from using genetic testing to refuse cover, or hike up charges, for a range of insurance products.

The federal government announced on Tuesday it would ban the practice that saw consumers discriminated against if they disclosed the results of genetic tests that predict their likelihood of an inherited disease.

It comes after consultation to address genetic discrimination in life insurance earlier this year. More than 1,000 submissions were received with 97 per cent supporting a total ban.

The plan states that Toyota will begin solid-state battery production in 2026, although the initial ramp-up will be slow with mass production coming after 2030.

White House declares BGP security issues a national priority – BGP handles routing for the entire internet.

A Dangerous Network: The Border Gateway Protocol has been the primary routing technology for the internet for at least three decades. Like other fundamental internet protocols developed in the 1980s, BGP was not originally designed with security in mind – and it shows.

After numerous incidents related to traffic routing among different autonomous systems, the White House has decided to address the security issues of the Border Gateway Protocol. The US administration has tasked the White House Office of the National Cyber Director with developing a roadmap to enhance the security of routing procedures managed through BGP.

Continue reading “White House declares BGP security issues a national priority — BGP handles routing for the entire internet” »

The big picture: The US is committed to establishing semiconductor manufacturing within its borders, and perhaps no effort is more crucial to this goal than TSMC’s three-fab facility in Arizona. The government is pouring billions into the development, alongside TSMC’s $65 billion investment.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has reached a significant milestone in its expansion into the US. Recent trial production at the company’s new Arizona facility has yielded results comparable to those of its established plants in Taiwan, according to Bloomberg, which cited a person familiar with the company who requested anonymity. This development is a positive sign for the chipmaker’s ambitious US project, which has faced delays and doubts about whether it could match the production efficiency of its Taiwanese operations.

The Arizona plant began engineering wafer production in April using advanced 4-nanometer process technology. With production yields now on par with its facilities in Tainan, Taiwan, TSMC should be able to maintain its targeted gross margin rates of 53 percent or higher.

TAMPA, Fla. — European small satellite maker Aerospacelab announced the opening of its first manufacturing facility in the United States Sept. 5 amid efforts to break into the lucrative U.S. government market.

The company sees the potential for contracts that would enable the 3,300 square-meter facility in Torrance, California, to reach a capacity to produce an average of two satellites a week in a single shift.

“With Space Force recently announcing its plans for not only a commercialization strategy, but [also the Space Development Agency] signaling their desire to diversify their supply base, we see potential not only for U.S. commercial customers,” said Tina Ghataore, group chief strategy and revenue officer at Aerospacelab and its CEO for North America.

This team is on a roll.

Launching aboard Firefly’s Alpha vehicle in 2024, this mission will demonstrate the responsive on-orbit capabilities of our Elytra vehicle. As the first of many missions utilizing multiple Firefly vehicles, the demonstration will lay the groundwork for Firefly’s end-to-end mission solutions, proving our capabilities to rapidly launch, maneuver, and deploy satellites at a time and place of our customers’ choosing.

In support of Xtenti’s follow-on study contract with the NRO, the mission will demonstrate a rapid payload reconfiguration utilizing Xtenti’s FANTM-RiDE payload dispenser prior to launching on Firefly’s Alpha vehicle. Upon launching on Alpha, Firefly’s Elytra vehicle will utilize the FANTM-RiDE dispenser to first deploy commercial rideshare payloads in Sun-Synchronous Orbit, and then perform an on-orbit maneuver and stand ready to deploy U.S. government payloads on-demand.

Continue reading “Elytra Mission 1” »

A real stinker.

The trial, conducted by Amazon Web Services, was commissioned by the government regulator as a proof of concept for generative AI’s capabilities, and in particular its potential to be used in business settings.

That potential, the trial found, is not looking promising.

Continue reading “Government Test Finds That AI Wildly Underperforms Compared to Human Employees” »