Lifeboat Foundation

My new Vice Motherboard article on increased social media use, trolling and what psychologically it might be doing to us:

The internet has turned us into belligerent critics.

The amount of growth Facebook has experienced in active users from 2012 to 2016 is staggering. An extra 650 million members joined worldwide in that election cycle. In the same years, Twitter—the ultimate blow-your-top-outlet-without-thinking—has grown from 340 million tweets a day to over 500 million (or 200 billion a year). In fact, many politicians and similar public personalities weren’t even on Twitter in 2012. Snapchat didn’t even exist until September of 2011.

Continue reading “Do We Really Hate Trump and Clinton So Much?” »

(Phys.org)—One of the most ambitious endeavors in quantum physics right now is to build a large-scale quantum network that could one day span the entire globe. In a new study, physicists have shown that describing quantum networks in a new way—as mathematical graphs—can help increase the distance that quantum information can be transmitted. Compared to classical networks, quantum networks have potential advantages such as better security and being faster under certain circumstances.

“A worldwide quantum network may appear quite similar to the internet—a huge number of devices connected in a way that allows the exchange of information between any of them,” coauthor Michael Epping, a physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, told Phys.org. “But the crucial difference is that the laws of quantum theory will be dominant for the description of that information. For example, the state of the fundamental information carrier can be a superposition of the basis states 0 and 1. By now, several advantages in comparison to classical information are known, such as prime number factorization and secret communication. However, the biggest benefit of quantum networks might well be discovered by future research in the rapidly developing field of quantum information theory.”

Quantum networks involve sending entangled particles across long distances, which is challenging because particle loss and decoherence tend to scale exponentially with the distance.

Continue reading “Worldwide quantum web may be possible with help from graphs” »

Legendary master filmmaker Werner Herzog examines the past, present and constantly evolving future of the Internet in Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World. Working with NETSCOUT, a world leader in-real time service assurance and cybersecurity, which came aboard as a producer and led him into a new world, Herzog conducted original interviews with cyberspace pioneers and prophets such as PayPal and Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, Internet protocol inventor Bob Kahn, and famed hacker Kevin Mitnick. These provocative conversatons reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works, from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships.

““This poses a threat to whether the ‘right to be forgotten’ can be maintained in the long term,” said Keith Ross, the dean of engineering and computer science at N.Y.U. Shanghai who led the project and who said he had contacted Google with his research.”

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Technology, meet your future beyond AI & Quantum.

While scientists study the possibilities of storing data in DNA, the web magazine Engadget reports that another group of researchers are looking into the possibility of utilizing living cells for next-generation computing.

The latest studies have developed a method of integrating both analog and digital computing into gene-based circuits. This allowed researchers to convert analog chemical reactions into binary output, or the ones and zeros that regular computers understand.

Continue reading “The future of computing may lie in living cells” »

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Legendary master filmmaker Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams) examines the past, present and constantly evolving future of the Internet in Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World. Herzog conducted original interviews with cyberspace pioneers and prophets such as PayPal and Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, Internet protocol inventor Bob Kahn, and famed hacker Kevin Mitnick. These provocative conversations reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works, from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships.

Continue reading “Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World” »

” The explosion of information technology on the internet has lead to some of its greatest glories.” Magnolia has released an official US trailer for the new Werner Herzog documentary Lo and Behold: Reveries of The Connected World, in which Herzog profiles the internet and how it has changed the world, for better or worse. The doc premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year to mostly positive reviews. We featured the first two trailers a few months ago while waiting for release info to be revealed. The doc has 10 distinct chapters, from “The Early Days” to “The Future”, and explores both the good and bad of what the internet has provided. I’m still quite excited to see this doc, anything by Herzog is usually quite fascinating.

Continue reading “Watch: New Trailer for Werner Herzog’s Internet Doc ‘Lo and Behold’” »

Another reliable article on the Quantum Internet work.

You can’t sign up for the quantum internet just yet, but researchers have reported a major experimental milestone towards building a global quantum network — and it’s happening in space.

With a network that carries information in the quantum properties of single particles, you can create secure keys for secret messaging and potentially connect powerful quantum computers in the future. But scientists think you will need equipment in space to get global reach.

Continue reading “Quantum satellite device tests technology for global quantum network” »

A quantum node device that might pave the way for a future space-based quantum Internet has been successfully tested for the first time aboard a small satellite.

The device, called SPEQS, has been developed by a team from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Glasgow-based University of Strathclyde. It contains technology for creation of the so-called correlated photons, which are a precursor for the better known entangled photons that communicate across large distances.

In an article published in the latest issue of the journal Physical Review Applied, the team led by NUS researcher Alexander Ling described first result of the experiment, which saw the SPEQS system reliably creating and measuring pairs of photons with correlated properties.

Continue reading “First step toward space-based quantum internet” »