Lifeboat Foundation

One of the new products unveiled at CES this year is a new kind of home security system — one that includes drones to patrol your property, along with sensors designed to mimic garden light and a central processor to bring it all together.

Sunflower Labs debuted their new Sunflower Home Awareness System, which includes the eponymous Sunflowers (motion and vibration sensors that look like simple garden lights but can populate a map to show you cars, people and animals on or near your property in real time); the Bee (a fully autonomous drone that deploys and flies on its own, with cameras on board to live-stream video); and the Hive (a charging station for the Bee, which also houses the brains of the operation for crunching all the data gathered by the component parts).

Roving aerial robots keeping tabs on your property might seem a tad dystopian, and perhaps even unnecessary, when you could maybe equip your estate with multiple fixed cameras and sensors for less money and with less complexity. But Sunflower Labs thinks its security system is an evolution of more standard fare because it “learns and reacts to its surroundings,” improving over time.

Mozilla has warned Firefox users to update their browser to the latest version after security researchers found a vulnerability that hackers were actively exploiting in “targeted attacks” against users.

The vulnerability, found by Chinese security company Qihoo 360, was found in Firefox’s just-in-time compiler. The compiler is tasked with speeding up performance of JavaScript to make websites load faster. But researchers found that the bug could allow malicious JavaScript to run outside of the browser on the host computer.

In practical terms, that means an attacker can quietly break into a victim’s computer by tricking the victim into accessing a website running malicious JavaScript code.

The Trump administration is proposing new rules to guide future federal regulation of artificial intelligence used in medicine, transportation and other industries.

But the vagueness of the principles announced by the White House is unlikely to satisfy AI watchdogs who have warned of a lack of accountability as computer systems are deployed to take on human roles in high-risk social settings, such as mortgage lending or job recruitment.

The White House said that in deciding regulatory action, U.S. agencies “must consider fairness, non-discrimination, openness, transparency, safety, and security.” But federal agencies must also avoid setting up restrictions that “needlessly hamper AI innovation and growth,” reads a memo being sent to U.S. agency chiefs from Russell Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The Federal Aviation Administration put forward a rule Thursday that would empower the government to track most drones in the U.S.

The rule will require drones to implement a remote ID system, which will make it possible for third parties to track them. The measure will help law enforcement identify unauthorized drones that may pose a security threat, paving the way for wider adoption of commercial drone technology.

The rule said that the FAA expects all eligible drones in the U.S. to comply with the rule within three years.

Today, Google is announcing that Android 10 is arriving on Android TV, and it’s about as bland of an update as they come. Primarily, it’s just the performance and security benefits of Android 10, without a single new user-facing feature. But at the bottom of Google’s blog post, the company hints at why: Google’s busy prepping for the “next-generation of Android TV,” starting with the miniature box above.

Google says this new ADT-3 dongle is a full-fledged Android TV platform, with a quad-core ARM Cortex A53 CPU, 2GB of DDR3 memory, and the ability to output 4K HDR content at 60 frames per second over its HDMI 2.1 port.

Up to 10% of global GDP could be stored on blockchains by 2025, according to the World Economic Forum. From product identifiers, medical records to land registries, academic degrees and insurance contracts, blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are already functioning in many sectors.

What blockchain promises is no less than the technological backbone of the 21st century’s renaissance of the social commons, giving back power to the people. In this century more than ever, power comes from data. Blockchain promises to give control of data back to the people. But this requires one element: trust in the technology, trust that it does what it’s supposed to do.

The paradox here is that blockchain removes the need to trust the intermediary – i.e., notaries, insurers and bankers – by requiring us to trust the technology. But how likely are we to trust the technology if it is breached repeatedly?

AI is Pandora’s box, s’ true…

On the one hand we can’t close it and on the other hand our current direction is not good. And this is gonna get worse as AI starts taking its own ‘creative’ decisions… the human overlords will claim it has nothing to do with them if and when things go wrong.

The solution for commercialization is actually quite simple.

Continue reading “Edward Snowden on the Dangers of Mass Surveillance and Artificial General Intelligence” »

Researchers have created a new terahertz radiation emitter with coveted frequency adjustment capability. The compact source could enable the development of futuristic communications, security, biomedical, and astronomical imaging systems.

Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Duke University U.S. Army #lasers #photonics

The national artificial intelligence strategy, which was unveiled in November, will focus on five key sectors — transport and logistics, smart cities and estates, safety and security, healthcare, and education.

Read the full story: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/tapping-ai-to-deliver…ect-issues

Continue reading “Singapore’s human-centric artificial intelligence strategy | The Straits Times” »