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Category: government – Page 85

The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics.

Criminals have a long history of conducting cyber espionage on China’s behalf. Protected from prosecution by their affiliation with China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), criminals turned government hackers conduct many of China’s espionage operations. Alarming as it may sound, this is not a new phenomenon. An indictment issued by the U.S. Department of Justice last year, for example, indicated that the simultaneous criminal-espionage activity of two Chinese hackers went back as far as 2009. In another case, FireEye, a cybersecurity company, alleges that APT41, a separate cohort of MSS hackers, began as a criminal outfit in 2012 and transitioned to concurrently conducting state espionage from 2014 onward. But there’s reason to believe that since then, China has been laying the groundwork for change.

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A spate of policies beginning in 2015 put China in a position to replace contracted criminals with new blood from universities. The CCP’s first effort in 2015 was to standardize university cybersecurity degrees by taking inspiration from the United States’ National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education — a NIST framework for improving the U.S. talent pipeline. One year later, China announced the construction of a new National Cybersecurity Talent and Innovation Base in Wuhan. Including all of the Base’s components, it is capable of training and certifying 70,000 people a year in cybersecurity.

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The most intelligent AI Scientists in the world are becoming increasingly worried about Artificial Intelligence programs becoming more unpredictable and incomprehensible as they become more powerful. AI is also overtaking powerful positions in the government, healthcare and defense which could prove dangerous as an Artificial Super Intelligence is coming very close as the Singularity approaches in the future of 2045. People like Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil have long warned us about AI beating Humans in anything we can imagine. Nvidia and Meta are also working on specially made hardware and software in the form of pytorch and 2022 GPU’s. Artificial General Intelligence is a real dangers and here are some solutions to it.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 The Dawn of incomprehensible AI
01:33 The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence.
03:03 A Possible solution.
04:23 What ASI means for Society.
07:15 So, is all hope lost?
09:03 Last Words.
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#ai #asi #agi

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The Montauk Monster is a pit bull, a dogfighting washout who washed up a Long Island beach. You heard it here first.

Or maybe you heard it elsewhere first. Even with Google Alert, it’s not easy to keep track of the rumors, speculation and rare pieces of actual news concerning the odd-looking corpse found in late July on a beach near Montauk, New York.

First described on pop culture rag Gawker under the apotheosis-of-hipster subheading “Good Luck With Your Hell Demons,” the Montauk Monster hit the internet like a match tossed on lighter fluid. Was it the handiwork of mad government scientists at the nearby Plum Island Animal Disease Center? A member of some miraculously undiscovered species, giving silent testimony to the power of Nature, so exhaustively explored and encroached upon, to surprise?

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The Hardware Giant NVIDIA is now working on one of the craziest projects I’ve ever seen. They’re attempting to build the fastest supercomputer ever made in hopes of simulating the entire earth in real time for climate research and potentially even more. They call this super computer Earth 2 and it’s going to feature their most powerful next generation GPU’s in the world. It’ll feature multiple exaflops of performance and be supported by the government. I can’t wait to see how this crazy project works out. It was announced by Jensen Huang at NVIDIA GTC 2021.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 The Simulation Hypothesis.
01:29 What is Nvidia attempting to do?
03:10 What are supercomputers usually used for?
05:54 What is NVIDIA doing differently now?
07:02 Last Words.
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#nvidia #gtc #supercomputer

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Congress is making its biggest push ever to stop drunk driving with President Biden’s huge infrastructure bill. As we previously reported, one of the provisions included a mandate for anti-drunk driving technology in new cars. Now, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has passed Congress with the measure intact, Autoblog (AP) reports, and it’s expected to be signed by the President soon. As part of the legislation, carmakers will have to include technology to detect and stop drunk drivers by as early as 2026.

First, though, the Department of Transportation will have to determine the best solution to curtail intoxicated drunk driving. Specifically, the bill requires something that will “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired.” That sounds similar to infrared camera solutions already used today by GM, Nissan and others, Sam Abuelsamid, principal mobility analyst for Guidehouse Insights, tells the AP. It goes without saying that we’d need something more advanced than breathalyzers, which are already used as a punishment for convicted drunken drivers.

Around 10,000 people die every year in the US from drunk driving accidents, the NHTSA says. Now that we have smarter sensors and plenty of camera technology to monitor driver behavior, it makes sense to explore solutions that could help prevent those sorts of accidents. Within a decade, it should feel as commonplace as seatbelts.

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The same goes for the broader economy. Lower subsidies, higher taxes and pricier labour have eroded some of Saudi Arabia’s traditional selling points for firms. It is unclear what will replace them.

Until the government banned the practice, residents of Abha would chop down juniper trees for firewood, to stave off the winter chill. As part of the regional tourism project, developers plan to plant 1m trees to reforest the mountains. It will be a long time before visitors can appreciate them: they grow just 5cm a year in the region’s dry climate, says Turki al-Bishri, a local guide. For all the talk of rapid change, the slow-growing juniper may offer a better glimpse of Saudi Arabia’s economic future. ■

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “No tourist Mecca”.

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Solar car is better option.

The influx of electric vehicles into Australia could put an additional load of 20 gigawatts a day — or a doubling of peak electricity demand — on the electricity grid by 2030 if most owners charged up at the same time every night, a new report has found.

The $350 million research collaboration between industry, universities and government has identified a raft of challenges for the arrival of EVs which are expected to make up 80 per cent of new vehicles sales by the end of the decade, making up almost 25 per cent of Australia’s total car fleet.

While there will be huge benefits from taking petrol-guzzling cars off the road, the arrival of EVs – which need to be charged either at home or at public charging stations – creates a range of new headaches, not the least for the electricity grid.

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Researchers in Korea succeeded in developing a core material for the next-generation neuromorphic (neural network imitation) semiconductor for the first time in the country. This is a result of a research team led by Dr. Jung-dae Kwon and Yong-hun Kim of the Department of Energy and Electronic Materials of the Korea Institute of Materials Science, together with Professor Byungjin Cho’s research team at Chungbuk National University. KIMS is a government-funded research institute under the Ministry of Science and ICT.

This new concept memtransistor uses a two-dimensional nanomaterial with a thickness of several nanometers. By reproducibly imitating the electrical plasticity of nerve synapses with more than 1,000 electrical stimulations, the researchers succeeded in obtaining a high pattern recognition rate of about 94.2% (98% of simulation-based pattern recognition rate).

Molybdenum sulfur (MoS2), widely used as a , works on the principle that defects in a single crystal are moved by an external electric field, which makes it difficult to precisely control the concentration or shape of the defect. To solve the problem, the research team sequentially stacked an oxidic layer of niobium oxide (Nb2O5) and a molybdenum sulfur material and succeeded in developing an artificial synaptic device having a memtransistor structure with high electrical reliability by an external electric field. In addition, they have demonstrated that the resistance switching characteristics can be freely controlled by changing the thickness of the niobium oxidic layer, and that brain information related to memory and forgetting can be processed with a very low energy of 10 PJ (picojoule).

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