Lifeboat Foundation

My new story for Vice Motherboard on lessons learned running for President as a transhumanist. It’s also my endorsement of a ranked voting system:

Campaigning in Times Square.

With such overwhelming odds against my candidacy and tiny political party from the start, I chose to bypass the battle to get on state ballots and instead focus using media to move the transhumanism movement ahead. After all, only very rarely have third parties in America affected the outcome of the elections anyway. Like it or not, you are stuck with an elephant or a donkey-headed leader.

Continue reading “​What I Learned” »

Elon Musk is obsessed with space. At age 30, he founded SpaceX. At age 41, he oversaw the first cargo mission to the International Space Station by a private company. And at age 12, as a kid living in South Africa, he made a space-themed PC game called Blastar. Now, thanks to the power of the internet, you can play that game.

Musk sold the code for Blastar for $500 to the magazine PC and Office Technology, and a reproduction of the page it appeared on was published in Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. From there, Tomas Lloret Llinares — a software engineer at Google — took the code and rebuilt the game to work in HTML5.

Your mission, as the game’s lonely space pilot, is to “destroy [the] alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines.” Blastar is mostly a mix of Space Invaders and Asteroid, though it’s much more basic. There is never more than two ships on the screen, there are few sound effects, and — like many games of its time — it really has no ending. It’s almost unimpressive; that is, until you remember that it was made by a 12-year-old in 1984.

Continue reading “Play the PC game Elon Musk wrote as a pre-teen” »

For my CISO/ CSO friends.

It is believed that Russia has the Internet that is considered as impenetrable. Such technology protects Russia from hacking attempts.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is prone to hacking, as shown in the recent cyber attacks on the US which led to outages on giants including Twitter, Amazon and Spotify, for which Russia has been largely blamed, so the Eastern European powerhouse has upped its security measures.

Continue reading “Russian military build impenetrable closed internet – and mocks US technology” »

A Chinese electronics component manufacturer says its products inadvertently played a role in a massive cyberattack that disrupted major internet sites in the U.S. on Friday.

Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology, a vendor behind DVRs and internet-connected cameras, said on Sunday that security vulnerabilities involving weak default passwords in its products were partly to blame.

According to security researchers, malware known as Mirai has been taking advantage of these vulnerabilities by infecting the devices and using them to launch huge distributed denial-of service attacks, including Friday’s outage.

Continue reading “Chinese firm admits its hacked products were behind Friday’s massive DDOS attack” »

Artificial intelligence is a “momentous development,” said George Lee, co-chairman of the global technology, media and telecom group at Goldman Sachs.

“As awesome as the internet has been, it will be best remembered as really the predicate for machine learning,” said Lee, who’s also chief information officer of Goldman’s investment banking division. He appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley” on Wednesday from Goldman’s Builders + Innovators Summit in Santa Barbara, California.

The internet enabled computing scale in a network and serves as a way to “collect data that’s used to train all these algorithms,” Lee said, predicting machine learning will “change our world … and even the course of our species in ways that are hard to predict today.”

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence will change the ‘course of our species’: Top Goldman tech banker” »

The idea of storing digital data in DNA seems like science fiction. At first glance, it might not seem obvious that a molecule can store data. The term “data storage” conjures up images of physical artifacts like CDs and data centers, not a microscopic molecule like DNA. But there are a number of reasons why DNA is an exciting option for information storage.

The status quo

We’re in the midst of a data explosion. We create vast amounts of information via our estimated 17 billion internet-connected devices: smartphones, cars, health trackers, and all other devices. As we continue to add sensors and network connectivity to physical devices we will produce more and more data. Similarly, as we bring online the 4.2 billion people who are currently offline, we will produce more and more data.

Continue reading “Can DNA Hard Drives Solve Our Looming Data Storage Crisis?” »

“AT&T and Time Warner are reportedly in talks about a potential merger.”

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I never get tired of articles highlighting the potential around leveraging Quantum teleporting as a method to replace networks and communications. Now the real question is how soon and how much of the existing infrastructure will need to be replaced to begin taking advantage of this technology earlier than others? As with most things, governments are often early adopters as well as Financial Services and ISPs are a close 2nd in the adoption of such technologies.

An experiment conducted about quantum teleportation could improve and transform the modern phone and Internet communication by having highly secure and encrypted messaging.

A recent study has suggested that comet outbursts are caused by avalanches and not geysers.

Continue reading “Quantum Teleportation Could Revolutionize Modern Phone And Internet Communication” »

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a great navigation aid – unless you lose the signal while negotiating a complicated spaghetti junction. That’s bad enough for conventional cars, but for autonomous vehicles it could be catastrophic, so the University of California, Riverside’s Autonomous Systems Perception, Intelligence, and Navigation (ASPIN) Laboratory under Zak Kassas is developing an alternative navigation system that uses secondary radio signals, such as from cell phone systems and Wi-Fi to either complement existing GPS-based systems or as a standalone alternative that is claimed to be highly reliable, consistent, and tamper-proof.

Today, there are two global satellite navigation systems in operation, the US GPS and the Russian GLONASS, with the European Galileo system set to become fully operational in the next few years, and plans for the Chinese Beidou system to extend globally by 2020. These have revolutionized navigation, surveying, and a dozen other fields, but GPS and related systems still leave much to be desired. By their nature, GPS signals are weak and positions need to be confirmed by several satellites, so built up areas or mountainous areas can make the system useless. In addition, GPS signals can be deliberately or accidentally jammed or spoofed due to insufficient encryption and other protections.

Continue reading “No satellites needed for next-gen navigation system that uses ‘signals of opportunity’” »