Lifeboat Foundation

Security experts around the world raced Friday to patch one of the worst computer vulnerabilities discovered in years, a critical flaw in open-source code widely used across industry and government in cloud services and enterprise software.

“I’d be hard-pressed to think of a company that’s not at risk,” said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer for Cloudflare, whose online infrastructure protects websites from malicious actors. Untold millions of servers have it installed, and experts said the fallout would not be known for several days.

New Zealand’s computer emergency response team was among the first to report that the flaw in a Java-language utility for Apache servers used to log user activity was being “actively exploited in the wild” just hours after it was publicly reported Thursday and a patch released.

Car sharing should become the norm to end “20th-century thinking” that values private vehicle ownership, as part of the drive to cut carbon emissions, a government minister has said.

Trudy Harrison, a junior transport minister, said the transport system would soon be designed around “access to services rather than what you own”.

She said the UK was “reaching a tipping point where shared mobility in the form of car clubs, scooters and bike shares will soon be a realistic option for many of us to get around.”

The South African satellite, SumbandilaSat (Pathfinder in Venda) is reaching the end of its life and will deorbit on Friday 10 December 2021.

The satellite was launched in 2009 and took a total of 1,128 high-resolution, usable images. In addition, these imageries were applied in local research and on the Copernicus (previously GMES: Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) programme. The data also contributed towards disaster management such as flood monitoring in Namibia and fire campaigns in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. Furthermore, it also recorded timely images of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Tuscaloosa tornado in the USA.

In May 2005, the then DST (Department of Science and Technology) of the South African Government commissioned Stellenbosch University and SunSpace to develop the ZASat pathfinder satellite program (later renamed SumbandilaSat), a technology demonstrator in conjunction with the South African industry. Consequently, SumbandilaSat was delivered 15 months later and launched from Baikonur, Kazakhstan on September 17 2009 with monitoring and satellite support from the SANSA Space Operations facility in Hartebeesthoek.

The concept by Chinese-born engineer Ming Han Tang was largely neglected by the US government, but in China the design has attracted increasing attention.

And it can go faster than five times the speed of sound.

A team of researchers in China has built and tested a prototype hypersonic flight engine based on a design that was scrapped by NASA over 20 years ago, according to a report from the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Continue reading “China’s New Hypersonic Aircraft Is Based on a Rejected NASA Design” »

Skills shortages are easily brushed off as Covid collateral, but in fact, they are much more troubling signs of an education system that is not preparing people for the future of work. These issues stem from a union of education and employment that has been designed to fill specific criteria for the workforce, but the job market that young people are training for today will require a much greater emphasis on human skills to complement the repetitive tasks handled by AI and automation.

But bringing up young people with the human skills they need for a changing world of work is a mammoth task that must combine the powers of government, businesses, and dedicated organizations to reshape our education systems and integrate them with the communities they serve. I spoke with Justin van Fleet, Executive Director of the Global Business Coalition for Education (GBC-Education), about the need for a holistic and skills-centered approach to education, and how change needs to start as early as possible.

Full Story:

The FlyZero aircraft is one of a range of aircraft being designed by the FlyZero program. The new concept will store hydrogen in cryogenic fuel tanks, keeping them at a temperature of minus 250°Celsius (minus 418°Fahrenheit). Two cryogenic tanks will be placed at the rear of the plane, while two smaller “cheek” tanks will be placed near the front of the plane to keep the aircraft balanced. The mid-size aircraft will have a wingspan of 54 meters, each of which will have a turbofan engine attached.

“These designs could define the future of aerospace and aviation,” said U.K. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng in the ATI’s statement. “By working with industry, we are showing that truly carbon-free flight could be possible, with hydrogen a frontrunner to replace conventional fossil fuels.”

Continue reading “A New Hydrogen Plane Can Fly Halfway Around the World Without Refueling” »

The government wants to have a “search engine for faces,” but the experts are wary.

If you haven’t heard of Clearview AI then you should, as the company’s facial recognition technology has likely already spotted you. Clearview’s software goes through public images from social media to help law enforcement identify wanted individuals by matching their public images with those found in government databases or surveillance footage. Now, the company just got permission to be awarded a U.S. federal patent, according to Politico.

The firm is not without its fair share of controversy. It has long faced opposition from privacy advocates and civil rights groups. The first says it makes use of citizens’ faces without their knowledge or consent. The latter warns of the fact that facial recognition technology is notoriously prone to racially-based errors, misidentifying women and minorities much more frequently than white men and sometimes leading to false arrests.

Clearview AI is about to get formal acknowledgment for its controversial facial recognition technology. Politico reports Clearview has received a US Patent and Trademark Office “notice of allowance” indicating officials will approve a filing for its system, which scans faces across public internet data to find people from government lists and security camera footage. The company just has to pay administrative fees to secure the patent.

In a Politico interview, Clearview founder Hoan Ton-That claimed this was the first facial recognition patent involving “large-scale internet data.” The firm sells its tool to government clients (including law enforcement) hoping to accelerate searches.

As you might imagine, there’s a concern the USPTO is effectively blessing Clearview’s technology and giving the company a chance to grow despite widespread objections to its technology’s very existence. Critics are concerned Clearview is building image databases without targets’ knowledge or permission, and multiple governments (including Australia and the UK) believe the facial recognition violates data laws. The tech could theoretically be used to stifle political dissent or, in private use, to stalk other people. That’s not including worries about possible gender and race biases for facial recognition as a whole.