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Archive for the ‘internet’ category: Page 244

Oct 23, 2018

Biohackers Are Implanting Everything From Magnets to Sex Toys

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, bitcoin, business, cybercrime/malcode, cyborgs, ethics, health, internet, robotics/AI, sex, transhumanism

Biohacking raises a host of ethical issues, particularly about data protection and cybersecurity as virtually every tech gadget risks being hacked or manipulated. And implants can even become cyberweapons, with the potential to send malicious links to others. “You can switch off and put away an infected smartphone, but you can’t do that with an implant,” says Friedemann Ebelt, an activist with Digitalcourage, a German data privacy and internet rights group.


Patrick Kramer sticks a needle into a customer’s hand and injects a microchip the size of a grain of rice under the skin. “You’re now a cyborg,” he says after plastering a Band-Aid on the small wound between Guilherme Geronimo’s thumb and index finger. The 34-year-old Brazilian plans to use the chip, similar to those implanted in millions of cats, dogs, and livestock, to unlock doors and store a digital business card.

Kramer is chief executive officer of Digiwell, a Hamburg startup in what aficionados call body hacking—digital technology inserted into people. Kramer says he’s implanted about 2,000 such chips in the past 18 months, and he has three in his own hands: to open his office door, store medical data, and share his contact information. Digiwell is one of a handful of companies offering similar services, and biohacking advocates estimate there are about 100,000 cyborgs worldwide. “The question isn’t ‘Do you have a microchip?’ ” Kramer says. “It’s more like, ‘How many?’ We’ve entered the mainstream.”

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Oct 22, 2018

How the Blockchain Could Break Big Tech’s Hold on A.I.

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, information science, internet, robotics/AI

Many A.I. experts are concerned that Facebook, Google and a few other big companies are hoarding talent in the field. The internet giants also control the massive troves of online data that are necessary to train and refine the best machine learning programs.


Several start-ups hope to use the technology introduced by Bitcoin to give broader access to the data and algorithms behind artificial intelligence.

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Oct 17, 2018

How Robots and Drones Will Change Retail Forever

Posted by in categories: drones, internet, robotics/AI

We are in the early days of what might be called the “physical cloud,” an e-commerce ecosystem that functions like the internet itself. Netflix caches the movies you stream at a data center physically close to you; Amazon is building warehouse after warehouse to store goods closer to consumers. And the storage systems at those warehouses are looking more like the data-storage systems in the cloud. Instead of storing similar items in the same place—a helpful practice when humans were fetching the goods—Amazon’s warehouses store multiples of the same item at random locations, known only to the robots. Trying to find an Instapot at one of Amazon’s warehouses would be like trying to find where in the cloud one of your emails is stored. Of course, you don’t have to. You just tap your screen and the email appears. No humans are involved.


What if you could store and deliver goods as easily as data? Amazon, Walmart and others are using AI and robotics to transform everything from appliance shopping to grocery delivery. Welcome to the physical cloud.

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Oct 11, 2018

Chinese tech giant Huawei unveils A.I. chips, taking aim at giants like Qualcomm and Nvidia

Posted by in categories: internet, robotics/AI

Huawei unveiled two new artificial intelligence chips aimed at data centers and smart devices, pitting it against major silicon players including Qualcomm and Nvidia, as the Chinese giant laid out a strategy it hopes will drive growth in the next few years.


Huawei’s new chipsets are called the Ascend 910 and Ascend 310 and are designed to be used in data centers and internet-connected consumer devices.

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Oct 6, 2018

ZS2.0: The Zero State Reboot [⅓]

Posted by in categories: futurism, internet

Zero state reboot ~ amon twyman


The Zero State (ZS) community and movement was officially founded with the release of the Social Futurist Principles on 1st May 12011. It started energetically, but soon encountered a problem common across the internet, which we will briefly examine below. That problem led to a fallow period, and subsequent “reboot” announced at the end of December 12017.

The ZS reboot was intended to span this year (12018), and this article series aims to identify some key ideas related to that process, with a particular emphasis on our transition from theory to action. This is the last article series clarifying ZS ideas that I will be posting for the foreseeable future, so I can focus on developing our events, releases, and project teams.

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Oct 4, 2018

Wi-Fi 6 Is Coming: Here’s Why You Should Care

Posted by in categories: computing, internet, mobile phones

Get ready for the next generation of wifi technology: Wi-fi 6 (for so it is named) is going to be appearing on devices from next year. But will you have to throw out your old router and get a new one? And is this going to make your Netflix run faster? Here’s everything you need to know about the new standard.

A brief history of wifi

Those of you of a certain age will remember when home internet access was very much wired—only one computer could get online, a single MP3 took half an hour to download, and you couldn’t use the landline phone at the same time.

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Oct 3, 2018

Scientists Have Connected The Brains of 3 People, Enabling Them to Share Thoughts

Posted by in categories: internet, neuroscience

Cientistas conectaram o cérebro de 3 pessoas, permitindo que elas compartilhassem os pensamentos! smile


Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it’s as weird as it sounds.

It works through a combination of electroencephalograms (EEGs), for recording the electrical impulses that indicate brain activity, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), where neurons are stimulated using magnetic fields.

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Oct 2, 2018

Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web

Posted by in categories: government, internet

Berners-Lee believes Solid will resonate with the global community of developers, hackers, and internet activists who bristle over corporate and government control of the web. “Developers have always had a certain amount of revolutionary spirit,” he observes. Circumventing government spies or corporate overlords may be the initial lure of Solid, but the bigger draw will be something even more appealing to hackers: freedom. In the centralized web, data is kept in silos–controlled by the companies that build them, like Facebook and Google. In the decentralized web, there are no silos.


With an ambitious decentralized platform, the father of the web hopes it’s game on for corporate tech giants like Facebook and Google.

[Photo: Flickr user gdsteam].

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Sep 29, 2018

California just became the first state with an Internet of Things cybersecurity law

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, internet, law

California Governor Jerry Brown has signed a cybersecurity law covering “smart” devices, making California the first state with such a law. The bill, SB-327, was introduced last year and passed the state senate in late August.

Starting on January 1st, 2020, any manufacturer of a device that connects “directly or indirectly” to the internet must equip it with “reasonable” security features, designed to prevent unauthorized access, modification, or information disclosure. If it can be accessed outside a local area network with a password, it needs to either come with a unique password for each device, or force users to set their own password the first time they connect. That means no more generic default credentials for a hacker to guess.

The bill has been praised as a good first step by some and criticized by others for its vagueness. Cybersecurity expert Robert Graham has been one of its harshest critics. He’s argued that it gets security issues backwards by focusing on adding “good” features instead of removing bad ones that open devices up to attacks. He praised the password requirement, but said it doesn’t cover the whole range of authentication systems that “may or may not be called passwords,” which could still let manufacturers leave the kind of security holes that allowed the devastating Mirai botnet to spread in 2016.

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Sep 28, 2018

Iridium plans to launch CloudConnect satellite IoT system in partnership with Amazon Web Services

Posted by in categories: internet, space

Iridium, the satellite communications network, announced Thursday that it intends to work with Amazon Web Services to connect the leading cloud-provider’s internet-of-things services with Iridium’s satellite network in 2019.

This new service will be called CloudConnect. It builds on an existing IoT satellite network operated by Iridium to allow companies using AWS IoT services to reach places where the physical internet does not reach, which even in 2018 is a lot more places than you might imagine. Iridium is joining the AWS Partner Network along with this announcement, which will present Iridium’s satellite network as a deployment choice for AWS customers using its IoT services.

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