Lifeboat Foundation

Israel notified the NSA, where alarmed officials immediately began a hunt for the breach, according to people familiar with the matter, who said an investigation by the agency revealed that the tools were in the possession of the Russian government.

Israeli spies had found the hacking material on the network of Kaspersky Lab, the global anti-virus firm under a spotlight in the United States because of suspicions that its products facilitate Russian espionage.

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security instructed federal civilian agencies to identify Kaspersky Lab software on their networks and remove it on the grounds that “the risk that the Russian government, whether acting on its own or in collaboration with Kaspersky, could capitalize on access provided by Kaspersky products to compromise federal information and information systems directly implicates U.S. national security.” The directive followed a decision by the General Services Administration to remove Kaspersky from its list of approved vendors. And lawmakers on Capitol Hill are considering a governmentwide ban.

Continue reading “Israel hacked Kaspersky, then tipped the NSA that its tools had been breached” »

Through behavioral biometrics, a wearable glasses continuous authentication system improves privacy protection by detecting imposters through voice & touch.

Head coverings and fake beards have foiled face recognition technologies, but a new system overcomes many of the challenges while raising privacy concerns.

David Brin: “Our midweek posting resumes the ongoing saga of transparency and freedom, and how (surprise?) each year’s declared “secure” system gets stripped bare, in the next. Now it’s Yahoo and Equifax and Billions of records. Millions of sincere people can see an Orwellian nightmare looming. Yet, the common reflex is to call for more shadows and walls! For us to HIDE from elites! It won’t work. It cannot work. It will never work. But there is an alternative. The very same trick that got us our freedom and wealth, in the first place.”

“We will not preserve freedom by hiding. Nor will it ever be possible to conceal info from elites. Moreover, that is not how we got the freedom that we already have.”

“We will remain free by aggressively applying these tools upon all elites. It is the only way we ever got freedom and it is the only way we can retain it.”

Continue reading “Transparency and Privacy: what we need, want and do not understand” »

Tattoos are fast becoming more than just a means of self-expression: soon they could be used for more practical applications, like tracking blood alcohol levels or turning the skin into a touchscreen. Now, a team from Harvard and MIT has developed a smart ink that could make for tattoos that monitor biometrics like glucose levels, and change color as a result.

Currently, bodily biomarkers can be monitored through a wardrobe-load of wearables, but they usually need batteries for power and wireless communication systems to transmit data. Using biosensitive inks (bio-inks), the Harvard and MIT design is self-contained, and since it works on simple chemical reactions it doesn’t require power for any data processing or transmission.

Continue reading “Color-changing tattoos monitor blood glucose at a glance” »

To help you understand the significance of this, in terms of cameras, we’re looking at 6 times more than the total number of our global population today. And in terms of sensors, we’re looking at 133 times more than the total number of our global population.

To quote economics theorist Jeremy Rifkin at length:

While privacy has long been considered a fundamental right, it has never been an inherent right. Indeed, for all of human history, until the modern era, life was lived more or less publicly, as befits the most social species on Earth. As late as the sixteenth century, if an individual was to wander alone aimlessly for long periods of time in daylight, or hide away at night, he or she was likely to be regarded as possessed. In virtually every society that we know of before the modern era, people bathed together in public, often urinated and defecated in public, ate at communal tables, frequently engaged in sexual intimacy in public, and slept huddled together en masse.

Continue reading “Social Experiment Known as Privacy Won’t Survive the Future” »

Breakthroughs in biometric science mean future troops will fight with weapons that understand them — inside and out.

Imagine a group of volunteers, their chests rigged with biophysical sensors, preparing for a mission in a military office building outfitted with cameras and microphones to capture everything they do. “We want to set up a living laboratory where we can actually pervasively sense people, continuously, for a long period of time. The goal is to do our best to quantify the person, the environment, and how the person is behaving in the environment,” Justin Brooks, a scientist at the Army Research Lab, or ARL, told me last year.

ARL was launching the Human Variability Project, essentially a military version of the reality- TV show Big Brother without the drama. The Project seeks to turn a wide variety of human biophysical signals into machine-readable data by outfitting humans and their environment with interactive sensors.

Continue reading “Tomorrow Soldier: How The Military Is Altering the Limits of Human Performance” »

Despite the NSA confirming the existence of Skynet, we all should be grateful that technology has not yet advanced to the stage where a liquid metal T-1000 terminator can shape-shift its way into your home and demand to see John Connor.

But scientists in China are making a solid effort make a less sinister version of this scenario at reality, by creating liquid metal droplets that could one day make “self-powered liquid metal machines” a real possibility.

Because of their excellent conductivity, low toxicity, and shape-shifting abilities, liquid metal alloys have been put to good use in targeting cancer cells, creating nature-inspired self-fuelled motors for robots, and many other liquid metal biomaterials.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Created Liquid Metal Drops That Move Like T-1000” »

Malicious software that blocks access to computers is spreading swiftly across the world, snarling critical systems in hospitals, telecommunications and corporate offices, apparently with the help of a software vulnerability originally discovered by the National Security Agency.

The reports of the malware spread began in Britain, where the National Health Service (NHS) reported serious problems throughout Friday. But government officials and cybersecurity experts later described a far more extensive problem growing across the Internet and unbounded by national borders. Europe and Latin America were especially hard hit.

“This is not targeted at the NHS,” British Prime Minister Theresa May told reporters. “It’s an international attack, and a number of countries and organizations have been affected.”

Continue reading “Malware, described in leaked NSA documents, cripples computers worldwide” »