Lifeboat Foundation

Here’s a people-friendly/business-friendly plan to replace Labor Day with Basic Income Day in America. Your half million dollars is waiting and yours! http://www.businessinsider.com/basic-income-with-federal-lan…2017-7 #FederalLandDividend

Futurist and 2018 libertarian candidate for California governor Zoltan Istvan outlines his plan to give everyone a government kickback from untapped land.

Our Andromeda interstellar probe article has been featured in MlT Technology Review :

Business Impact.

Femto-spacecraft could travel to alpha centauri.

Continue reading “Here’s how to get to Alpha Centauri: propel a tiny spacecraft on the tip of a powerful laser beam” »

Chinese electronics giant Huawei on Saturday unveiled its first mobile personal assistant with artificial intelligence in Berlin, in hopes it will rival the dominance of Samsung’s Bixby and Apple’s Siri.

“Smartphones are smart but they are not intelligent enough,” Richard Yu, chief executive of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, said at this year’s IFA electronics fair.

The mobile assistant, called Kirin 970, will systematically respond to three questions—” the most important combination,” Yu said: Where is the user? Who are they and what are they doing?

LEATHERMAKING is an ancient craft. The oldest leather artefact found so far is a 5,500-year-old shoe from a cave in Armenia, but paintings in Egyptian tombs show that, 7,000 years ago, leather was being turned into all manner of things, from sandals to buckets to military equipment. It is a fair bet that the use of animal skins for shelter and clothing goes back hundreds of thousands of years at least.

Leathermaking is also, though, a nasty business. In 18th-century London the soaking of putrefying hides in urine and lime, to loosen any remaining flesh and hair, and the subsequent pounding of dog faeces into those skins to soften and preserve them, caused such a stench that the business was outlawed from the City proper and forced downwind and across the river into Bermondsey. In countries such as India and Japan, the trade tainted people as well as places and was (and often still remains) the preserve of social outcasts such as Dalits and Burakumin.

Let’s say you are the program manager of a very large, complex system. Perhaps it’s an aircraft, or a building, or a communications network. Your system is valued at over US $500 million. Could you imagine being told that you won’t ever be able to maintain it? That once it’s operational, it will never be inspected, repaired, or upgraded with new hardware?

Welcome to the world of satellite building. After a satellite is launched, it is on a one-way journey to disrepair and obsolescence, and there is little anyone can do to alter that path. Faults (which are called anomalies in the space business) can only be diagnosed remotely, using data and inferential reasoning. Software fixes and upgrades may be possible, but the nuts and bolts remain untouched. The upshot: Even if a satellite is operating well, it could lose its state-of-the-art status just a few years into a typical 15-year lifetime.

If governments and private companies could actively repair and revitalize their satellites in geosynchronous orbit—and move them to new orbits as needed—they could extend the lifespans of their investments and substantially defer the cost of building and launching replacements.

Continue reading “Robot Mechanic Could Prevent Satellites From Becoming Space Junk” »

Berkeley-based quantum computing firm Rigetti will allow 40 machine learning startups from 11 countries to make use of its devices to help crunch their AI problems.

Rigetti is small compared to its main rivals—the likes of Google, IBM, and Intel. But as we’ve reported in the past, the firm is working on a complex chip architecture that promises to scale up well, and should be particularly suited to applications like machine learning and chemistry simulations. That’s why we made it one of our 50 Smartest Companies of 2017.

But, like IBM and Google, part of Rigetti’s business model has always been to develop a kind of quantum-powered cloud service that would allow people to make use of its technology remotely. The newly announced partnership—which will be with companies from Creative Destruction Lab, a Canadian incubator that focuses on science-based startups—is a chance to test that theory out using Rigetti’s Forest programming environment.

Continue reading “This Small Quantum-Computing Firm Wants to Supercharge AI Startups” »

Zero-day vulnerabilities targeting popular secure messenger applications, like Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp, can fetch payments of up to $500,000 from Zerodium, a buyer and seller of zero-day research, based on a newly released list of available awards offered by the U.S. firm.

The market for zero-day vulnerabilities — an undisclosed software security hole that can be exploited by hackers — is notoriously rich and murky. Traders tend to operate away from public scrutiny for a number of reasons that make it difficult to learn about the market.

Although Zerodium isn’t known for the transparency of its business, the company’s listings for vulnerabilities provides a window into the supply and demand behind the vulnerability resale industry.

Continue reading “Private firm puts $500K bounty on Signal, WhatsApp zero-day vulnerabilities” »

” … Paul Tudor Jones co-founded JUST Capital to fix the ills of corporate capitalism by identifying the most just or “good” companies. Will it work?”

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Set on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island, the third annual Blockchain Summit, hosted by BitFury, a leading full service Blockchain company, and Bill Tai, a venture investor and technologist, has come to a close. This event was an intimate, if perfectly balanced, gathering of technology, policy, investment and business leaders from around the world and across sectors. Topics ranged from the public policy implications of what is being heralded as a foundational technology, to new emerging business models that can ride on the very rails that enabled the global bonanza of digital currencies like Bitcoin. A key question that underpinned the Summit is if Blockchain could not have existed without the Internet, what could not exist without Blockchain?

Blockchain technology can undoubtedly change industries, especially those that labor under often byzantine, opaque and friction-laden business models. While many of the early pioneers are focusing on finance and insurance, the opportunities for this radical technology may very well reorder society as we know it. The remarkable case of Estonia, for example, shows a country reinventing itself into a future-proof digital state, where citizen services are rendered nearly instantaneously and to people all over the world. Similarly, promising work inspired by the famed Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, on improving land registries is being carried out by BitFury in a host of countries. With land and property being the two largest assets people will own — and the principal vehicle of value creation and wealth transfer — an unalterable, secure and transparent registration process should give the world comfort and elected leaders longevity.

What drives this unique technology is the power of distributed singularity, from which Blockchain’s identity pioneers like Dr. Mariana Dahan, who launched the World Identity Network on Necker Island, and Vinny Lingham of Civic, draw their inspiration. Blockchain operates on the basis of a distributed ledger (or database) system, inexorably marching forward recording and time-stamping transactions or records. While some may herald Bitcoin as Blockchain’s “killer app,” it is easy to maintain that the killer app is not the digital currencies that ride on Blockchain’s rails, but rather the rail system altogether. Two trains can ride on rails. But a high-speed maglev train is a decidedly faster mode of transport than a steam engine. Just as the maglev makes little or no contact with the rails enabling low-friction transport, the Blockchain can greatly reduce the friction in how the world transfers and records value.

Continue reading “Blockchain and the Power of Singularity” »