Archive for the 'Technology' Category
China Speeds Ahead of U.S. as Quantum Computing Race Escalates
October 23rd, 2017Via: McClatchy: U.S. and other Western scientists voice awe, and even alarm, at China’s quickening advances and spending on quantum communications and computing, revolutionary technologies that could give a huge military and commercial advantage to the nation that conquers them. The concerns echo — although to a lesser degree — the shock in the West […]
Boom Has 76 Pre Orders for Future Supersonic Passenger Jets
October 22nd, 2017Via: TechCrunch: Boom has a new design for its XB-1 Supersonic Demonstrator jet, the working prototype aircraft it’s creating to prove out its tech before beginning work on building real, commercial supersonic passenger aircraft. The new design was revealed Tuesday at the Paris Air Show, along with new business milestones: Boom has orders for 76 […]
UK Spies Using Social Media Data for Mass Surveillance
October 18th, 2017Via: TechCrunch: Privacy rights group Privacy International says it has obtained evidence for the first time that UK spy agencies are collecting social media information on potentially millions of people. It has also obtained letters it says show the intelligence agencies’ oversight body had not been informed that UK intelligence agencies had shared bulk databases […]
LAPD Becomes Nation’s Largest Police Department to Test Drones
October 18th, 2017Via: Los Angeles Times: After months of often-heated debate, a civilian oversight panel Tuesday signed off on a yearlong test of drones by the Los Angeles Police Department, which will become the largest police department in the nation to deploy the controversial technology. The Police Commission’s 3-1 vote prompted jeers, cursing and a small protest […]
WPA2 Cracked
October 16th, 2017Via: KRACK Attacks: We discovered serious weaknesses in WPA2, a protocol that secures all modern protected Wi-Fi networks. An attacker within range of a victim can exploit these weaknesses using key reinstallation attacks (KRACKs). Concretely, attackers can use this novel attack technique to read information that was previously assumed to be safely encrypted. This can […]
The USA Liberty Act
October 12th, 2017A double round o’ Freedom Fries for everyone! Via: Register: The US Senate Judiciary Committee has unveiled its answer to a controversial spying program run by the NSA and used by the FBI to fish for crime leads. Unsurprisingly, the proposed legislation [PDF] reauthorizes Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) – which […]
LG to Open Europe’s Biggest Car Battery Factory; Output 100,000 EV Packs Per Year
October 12th, 2017Via: Reuters: South Korea’s LG Chem will open Europe’s largest lithium-ion battery factory in Poland next year as the region’s auto industry gears up to mass produce electric cars. … LG Chem plans to spend 5.9 billion zlotys ($1.63 billion) on the factory near the southwestern city of Wroclaw, according to Polish state industry agency […]
Scientists Can Read a Bird’s Brain and Predict Its Next Song
October 12th, 2017Via: MIT Technology Review: “We decode realistic synthetic birdsong directly from neural activity,” the scientists announced in a new report published on the website bioRxiv. The team, which includes Argentinian birdsong expert Ezequiel Arneodo, calls the system the first prototype of “a decoder of complex, natural communication signals from neural activity.” A similar approach could […]
Self-Flying Planes May Arrive Sooner Than You Think
October 12th, 2017Via: NBC: “What the industry is telling me is that they would like to remove one of the pilots fairly soon, and re-design the cockpit around a single pilot,” says Stephen Rice, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. That would involve at least a modest cockpit redesign, so that a single […]
Will Automation Put an End to the American Trucker?
October 12th, 2017Via: Guardian: Finn Murphy, author of The Long Haul, the story of his life as a long-distance truck driver, says the days of the truck driver as we know him are coming to an end. Trucking is a $700bn industry, in which a third of costs go to compensating drivers, and, he says, if the […]
