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Category: government – Page 48

Boeing has come up with a new advanced airlifter concept with stealth features to meet the growing need for more durable cargo and tanker planes.

Boeing has shown an idea for a tactical, stealth-capable cargo plane with a blended wing body, or BWB. It comes almost two weeks after Frank Kendall, the secretary of the U.S. Air Force, said that having more airlifters and aerial refueling tankers that can survive will be important in future high-end conflicts against near-peer adversaries, especially China.

The company has been funding this project internally up until this point.

Wikimedia Commons.

“We thought it was a good time to share the major features of our Blended Wing Body concept, [instead of] the concepts we have shown previously to represent our BWB investigation,” according to a statement Boeing gave to The War Zone. “We are continuing BWB concept research activities with government customers to advance [the] state of the art in military transport aircraft design,” they said.

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A congressman wants it approved by Congress.

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif, hopes to get a nod from Congress to support regulating artificial intelligence by using an AI tool to write a resolution calling for the same. He will introduce a nonbinding measure that would direct the House to consider artificial intelligence, a bill fully written by ChatGPT, an online AI chatbot.

With a basic prompt, Congressman Ted Lieu generated a standard congressional resolution supporting Congress’s focus on AI without specifying that it was written using AI.

PhonlamaiPhoto/iStock.

Lieu is also demanding that Congress create a non-partisan commission that would offer recommendations on the process of regulating artificial intelligence.

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After years of delay under government pressure, Apple said Wednesday that it will offer fully encrypted backups of photos, chat histories and most other sensitive user data in its cloud storage system worldwide, putting them out of reach of most hackers, spies and law enforcement.

Maybe a New iPhone is a good idea for a second phone.

The one service Apple offered that could not be encrypted was iCloud. Now that will change.

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Connor Leahy from Conjecture joins the podcast to discuss AI safety, the fragility of the world, slowing down AI development, regulating AI, and the optimal funding model for AI safety research. Learn more about Connor’s work at https://conjecture.dev.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction.
00:47 What is the best way to understand AI safety?
09:50 Why is the world relatively stable?
15:18 Is the main worry human misuse of AI?
22:47 Can humanity solve AI safety?
30:06 Can we slow down AI development?
37:13 How should governments regulate AI?
41:09 How do we avoid misallocating AI safety government grants?
51:02 Should AI safety research be done by for-profit companies?

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Tech giants from Google to Amazon and Alibaba —not to mention nation-states vying for technological supremacy—are racing to dominate this space. The global quantum-computing industry is projected to grow from $412 million in 2020 to $8.6 billion in 2027, according to an International Data Corp. analysis.

Whereas traditional computers rely on binary “bits”—switches either on or off, denoted as 1s and 0s—to process information, the “qubits” that underpin quantum computing are tiny subatomic particles that can exist in some percentage of both states simultaneously, rather like a coin spinning in midair. This leap from dual to multivariate processing exponentially boosts computing power. Complex problems that currently take the most powerful supercomputer several years could potentially be solved in seconds. Future quantum computers could open hitherto unfathomable frontiers in mathematics and science, helping to solve existential challenges like climate change and food security. A flurry of recent breakthroughs and government investment means we now sit on the cusp of a quantum revolution. “I believe we will do more in the next five years in quantum innovation than we did in the last 30,” says Gambetta.

But any disrupter comes with risks, and quantum has become a national-security migraine. Its problem-solving capacity will soon render all existing cryptography obsolete, jeopardizing communications, financial transactions, and even military defenses. “People describe quantum as a new space race,” says Dan O’Shea, operations manager for Inside Quantum Technology, an industry publication. In October, U.S. President Joe Biden toured IBM’s quantum data center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., calling quantum “vital to our economy and equally important to our national security.” In this new era of great-power competition, China and the U.S. are particularly hell-bent on conquering the technology lest they lose vital ground. “This technology is going to be the next industrial revolution,” says Tony Uttley, president and COO for Quantinuum, a Colorado-based firm that offers commercial quantum applications. “It’s like the beginning of the internet, or the beginning of classical computing.”

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Cybercriminals hacked employees of at least two US federal civilian agencies last year as part of a “widespread” fraud campaign that sought to steal money from individuals’ bank accounts, US cybersecurity officials revealed Wednesday.

In one case, the unidentified hackers posed as tech support, convinced a federal employee to call them and then instructed the federal employee to visit a malicious website, according to the advisory from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, National Security Agency and a threat-sharing center for state and local governments known as MS-ISAC.

The goal of the scam, which appears to have hit both private sector and government agencies, was to trick victims into sending the scammers money. It was unclear if that happened in the case of the federal employees.

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Rachel Bronson, PhD, president and CEO, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said: “We are living in a time of unprecedented danger, and the Doomsday Clock time reflects that reality. 90 seconds to midnight is the closest the Clock has ever been set to midnight, and it’s a decision our experts do not take lightly. The US government, its NATO allies and Ukraine have a multitude of channels for dialogue; we urge leaders to explore all of them to their fullest ability to turn back the Clock.”

The Doomsday Clock’s time is set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board with the support of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 10 Nobel Laureates. Previously, the Doomsday Clock had been set at 100 seconds to midnight since 2020.

The Doomsday Clock statement explains that “Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks. And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high… Russia has also brought its war to the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor sites, violating international protocols and risking widespread release of radioactive materials. Efforts by the International Atomic Energy Agency to secure these plants so far have been rebuffed.” The statement has been translated into Ukrainian and Russian.

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An unsecured server discovered by a security researcher last week contained the identities of hundreds of thousands of individuals from the U.S. government’s Terrorist Screening Database and “No Fly List.”

Located by the Swiss hacker known as maia arson crimew, the server, run by the U.S. national airline CommuteAir, was left exposed on the public internet. It revealed a vast amount of company data, including private information on almost 1,000 CommuteAir employees.

CommuteAir also confirmed the legitimacy of the data, stating that it was a version of the “federal no-fly list” from roughly four years prior.

“The server contained data from a 2019 version of the federal no-fly list that included first and last names and dates of birth,” CommuteAir Corporate Communications Manager Erik Kane said. “In addition, certain CommuteAir employee and flight information was accessible. We have submitted notification to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and we are continuing with a full investigation.”

CommuteAir is a regional airline based out of Ohio. In June 2020, CommuteAir replaced ExpressJet as the carrier for its United Express Banner, a regional branch of United, which runs shorter flights.

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Despite its recent blowback, Web 3.0 offers a more interconnected and productive society.

The next significant development for the internet and all it governs is Web 3.0. To improve user experience, it will make use of artificial intelligence. In addition, blockchain technology will enable the service to be backed by decentralized networks since Web 3.0 is the fundamental framework for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. This will be a revolutionary move that might significantly influence businesses and how they function, as well as individual users. For instance, site owners won’t have to rely on larger businesses like Amazon (AWS) and Google to buy server space.

Web 2.0 – the current version of the internet – has grown overly centralized, with a small number of large technology businesses and government organizations controlling the industry. Web 3.0, which promises a decentralized online ecosystem built on the still-emerging blockchain, will be the third iteration of the internet. Web 3.0 was first coined in 2014 by a computer scientist named Gavin Wood also helped create Ethereum, the decentralized blockchain system that powers the ether coin.

The main problem with Web 2.0, according to Wood, is trusting the people who run the services. “We’ve managed to build ourselves into this fairly dystopian picture of what the world could be,” he said in a podcast with CNBC. This is why many believe Web 3.0 – with its focus on decentralization – will provide a more democratic and dispersed view of the internet. Additionally, it’s touted as an essential component of the emerging metaverse, an immersive online universe. While some are skeptical and refer to Web 3.0 and the metaverse as primarily a marketing project and even as a pyramid scheme, other venture investors are pouring billions of dollars into this futuristic vision. However, the idea is reportedly also opposed by many in the tech world, including Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter.

For many Web 3.0 supporters, the past few months have brought a harsh awakening: the market prices of significant cryptocurrencies have fallen precipitously, the trading volume of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has slowed, and, most importantly, some pioneer businesses in the field have filed for bankruptcy due to poor risk management and the misappropriation of investor funds. Nevertheless, many argue that business executives should not mistake market volatility or dishonest individuals with the potential applications of digital assets and the technology that support them, even while the debris keeps flying and many retail investors lose their savings.

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Researchers using NASA

Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. Its vision is “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.” Its core values are “safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and inclusion.” NASA conducts research, develops technology and launches missions to explore and study Earth, the solar system, and the universe beyond. It also works to advance the state of knowledge in a wide range of scientific fields, including Earth and space science, planetary science, astrophysics, and heliophysics, and it collaborates with private companies and international partners to achieve its goals.

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