Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: internet – Page 118

When you visit a website, the page can capture your IP address, but this doesn’t necessarily give the site owner enough information to individually identify you. Instead, the hack analyzes subtle features of a potential target’s browser activity to determine whether they are logged into an account for an array of services, from YouTube and Dropbox to Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and more. Plus the attacks work against every major browser, including the anonymity-focused Tor Browser.

“If you’re an average internet user, you may not think too much about your privacy when you visit a random website,” says Reza Curtmola, one of the study authors and a computer science professor at NJIT. “But there are certain categories of internet users who may be more significantly impacted by this, like people who organize and participate in political protest, journalists, and people who network with fellow members of their minority group. And what makes these types of attacks dangerous is they’re very stealthy. You just visit the website and you have no idea that you’ve been exposed.”

The risk that government-backed hackers and cyber-arms dealers will attempt to de-anonymize web users isn’t just theoretical. Researchers have documented a number of techniques used in the wild and have witnessed situations in which attackers identified individual users, though it wasn’t clear how.

Read more | >

Researchers at Simon Fraser University have made a crucial breakthrough in the development of quantum technology.

Their research, published in Nature today, describes their observations of more than 150,000 silicon “T center” photon-spin qubits, an important milestone that unlocks immediate opportunities to construct massively scalable quantum computers and the quantum internet that will connect them.

Quantum computing has to provide computing power well beyond the capabilities of today’s supercomputers, which could enable advances in many other fields, including chemistry, , medicine and cybersecurity.

Read more | >

If you’re ready for connectivity on the move, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband may soon be the answer. The US Federal Communications Commission on Thursday gave the internet provider the greenlight to provide service on moving vehicles, boats, and planes.

The new authority should help SpaceX meet “the growing user demands that now require connectivity while on the move,” wrote FCC International Bureau Chief Tom Sullivan in the approval, “whether driving an RV across the country, moving a freighter from Europe to a U.S. port, or while on a domestic or international flight.”

Barely did the ink under the FCC approval signature dry, and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet announced a new pricey Maritime service for commercial ships, oil rigs, or premium yachts. Nothing is stopping people with recreational boats to get Starlink Maritime, too, save for the monthly tag and equipment fees.

Read more | >

Researchers in Germany have demonstrated quantum entanglement of two atoms separated by 33 km (20.5 miles) of fiber optics. This is a record distance for this kind of communication and marks a breakthrough towards a fast and secure quantum internet.

Quantum entanglement is the uncanny phenomenon where two particles can become so inextricably linked that examining one can tell you about the state of the other. Stranger still, changing something about one particle will instantly alter its partner, no matter how far apart they are. That leads to the unsettling implication that information is being “teleported” faster than the speed of light, an idea that was too much for even Einstein, who famously described it as “spooky action at a distance.”

Despite its apparent impossibility, quantum entanglement has been consistently demonstrated in experiments for decades, with scientists taking advantage of its bizarre nature to quickly transmit data over long distances. And in the new study, researchers from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) and Saarland University have now broken a distance record for quantum entanglement between two atoms over fiber optics.

Read more | >

We’ve learned about a few techniques in biotechnology already, but the CRISPR-Cas9 system is one of the most exciting ones. Inspired by bacterial immune response to viruses, this site-specific gene editing technique won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2020, going to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. How did they develop this method? What can it be used for? Let’s get the full story!

Select images provided by BioRender.com.

Watch the whole Biology playlist: http://bit.ly/ProfDaveBio.

General Chemistry Tutorials: http://bit.ly/ProfDaveGenChem.

Continue reading “CRISPR-Cas9 Genome Editing Technology” | >

Starlink is faster than ever but is it enough for rural internet users?

While Starlink’s download speeds have increased, Ookla’s Speedtest Intelligence shows that upload speeds decreased by almost 33 percent from 16.29 Mbps during the first quarter of last year to 9.33 Mbps in Q1 2022. At the same time, Starlink’s median latency increased from 40 ms to 43 ms in the U.S. and from 51 ms to 55ms in Canada though these changes are likely negligible for most users.

The U.S. and Canada aren’t the only places Starlink adoption has increased while the service’s speeds have improved as Ookla highlights in its report.

In Mexico, Starlink had the fastest satellite internet in North America during the first quarter of this year with a median download speed of 105.91 Mbps followed by Starlink in Canada and the U.S. However, in Puerto Rico, HughesNet took the top spot with download speeds of 20.54 Mbps.

Continue reading “How fast is Elon Musk’s Starlink — the results are in” | >