Lifeboat Foundation

Some people might throw enough parties, or have the capacity to kill entire bottles of wine in just a night, but for the others, the rest of the stored wine changes taste and appeal over the next few days to the point where it’s demoted to giving body to your stew.

The Kuvee wine bottle provides a possible solution of the latter problem. More like a smart wine sleeve, than a smart wine bottle, it solves the two biggest problems when it comes to storing wine: exposing them to air and light. It stops the sun by storing the wine in metal bottles and it stops the air by vacuum sealing the wine. No air in or out. As for the temperature part, you have to manage the rest.

You slip it over the bottle of wine you’d like to imbibe and it is wifi enabled, giving you all sorts of important details: how much wine is left, what kind of wine you’re drinking, and what vineyard it’s from.

Continue reading “These Smart Wine Bottles are wine lover’s delight!” »

DARPA’s new “Spectrum Collaboration Challenge” with a $2million prize for who can motivate a machine learning approach to dynamically sharing the RF Spectrum.

WASHINGTON, March 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — On March 23rd, 2016 DARPA announced its next Grand Challenge at the International Wireless Conference Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Program Manager, Paul Tilghman of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), made the announcement to industry leaders following the conferences Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Summit. The challenge will motivate a machine learning approach to dynamically sharing the RF Spectrum and has been named the “Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.” A top prize of $2million dollars has been announced.

While mostly transparent to the typical cell phone or Wi-Fi user, the problem of spectrum congestion has been a long standing issue for both the commercial sector and Department of Defense. The insatiable appetite for wireless connectivity over the last 30 years has grown at such a hurried pace that within the RF community the term spectrum scarcity has been coined. RF bandwidth, the number of frequencies available to communicate information over, is a relatively fixed resource, and advanced communication systems like LTE and military communications systems consume a lot of it. As spectrum planners prepare for the next big wave of connected devices, dubbed the Internet of Things, they wonder where they will find the spectrum bandwidth they need to support these billions of new devices. Equally challenging, is the military’s desire to connect every soldier on the battlefield, while using these very same frequencies.

Continue reading “DARPA Announces Next Grand Challenge — Spectrum Collaboration Challenge” »

“President Obama seems to think Google can help increase Internet access in a country that has not historically been interested in unfettered connectivity.”

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Is this another strategy to fight terrorism by seeing from techies and others the various ways terrorists can take every day items to create weapons?

Do you want to be a MacGyver and turn everyday household items into Decepticons? Then DARPA’s new Improv program wants you.

This sounds like a Transformers movie. Or a MacGyver episode. Heck, this could even be a precursor to Skynet and future Terminators. OK, that last one may not apply, but a new DARPA program wants people who can weaponize a toaster.

Continue reading “DARPA Calls For Creative Individuals to Weaponize Common Items” »

Developers can now see an early preview of experimental WebAssembly support in an internal Microsoft Edge build with the AngryBots demo, alongside similar previews for Firefox and Chrome. WebAssembly is a new, portable, size and load-time-efficient binary format suitable for compiling to the Web.

In the video above, a demo running in Microsoft Edge uses the preliminary WebAssembly support in the Chakra engine. The demo starts up significantly faster than just using asm.js, as the WebAssembly binaries have a smaller file size and parse more quickly than plain JavaScript, which needs to be parsed in the asm.js case.

Continue reading “AngryBots demo gives developers early preview of WebAssembly experiments in Microsoft Edge” »

While many tech moguls dream of changing the way we live with new smart devices or social media apps, one Russian internet millionaire is trying to change nothing less than our destiny, by making it possible to upload a human brain to a computer, reports Tristan Quinn.

“Within the next 30 years,” promises Dmitry Itskov, “I am going to make sure that we can all live forever.”

It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to devote himself to something more useful to humanity. “I’m 100% confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn’t have started it,” he says.

EU Justice Ministers Claims Cyber Attackers are terrorists. I wouldn’t say all of them are terrorists. Those who attack hospitals, attack government infrastructures, threaten markets, etc, are terrorists. The next door neighbor’s 13 yr old kid hacking to use your wireless internet service; not a terrorist.

European Union justice ministers on March 11th adopted a general approach on the directive on combatting terrorism, including serious cyber crimes, informs LETA/BNS.

On Friday the council greed its negotiating position on the proposal for a directive on combatting terrorism. The proposed directive strengthens the EU’s legal framework in preventing terrorist attacks by criminalising preparatory acts such as training and travel abroad for terrorist purposes – hence addressing the issue of foreign fighters – as well as aiding and abetting, inciting or attempting such acts. It also reinforce rules on the rights for the victims of terrorism, the Ministry of Justice said.

Continue reading “EU justice ministers defined cyber crimes as terrorism” »

It can be easy to take things like modern email for granted, and nothing highlights that more than this clip from the “Database,” an old tech show that aired in the 80s.

In the segment above, you can see what sending and receiving an email was like in 1984, back when you were greeted with prompts like “phone computer” and literally had to dial in using a rotary phone. These were the days when webpages were numbered and email was such a luxury that people would excitedly sign off on messages with phrases like “electronically yours.”

Continue reading “Video: What early email looked like” »

“Deep learning enables the robot to perceive its immediate environment, including the location and movement of its limbs. Reinforcement learning means improving at a task by trial and error. A robot with these two skills could refine its performance based on real-time feedback.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Google and Facebook Team Up to Open Source the Gear Behind Their Empires.