Tag: technology

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defense & war international affairs

The Beam in Microsoft’s Eye

mote, China, Microsoft, eye, war, computers, technology

Microsoft has just published a pretty good update on the cyber-​threat landscape, Digital Defense Report 2024. 

The report comprehensively describes the recent prolific activity of state-​affiliated hackers all over the world, primarily those affiliated with China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

In the case of China, we have a series of “Typhoon”-named cyberattacks: Raspberry Typhoon, Flax Typhoon, and Granite Typhoon, to name a few, that “have intensively targeted entities associated with IT, military, and government interests around the South China Sea.”

The toll of cyberattacks in the U.S. — all kinds from all sources — has been extensive. In the recent year, “389 healthcare institutions were successfully hit by ransomware,” resulting in closures and medical delays.

The report is also about what we’ve been doing to defend ourselves: not enough. The authors say that although better cybersecurity is important, we also need “government action” that makes it costlier for states to launch these attacks.

We need something else, too. We need companies like Microsoft to abstain from helping adversary states to cyberattack us.

At Breitbart, Lucas Nolan reports that Microsoft has been maintaining close ties with the Chinese Academy of Sciences for over a decade. Among the details of a lengthy indictment, Nolan offers a list of publications coauthored by Microsoft and CAS researchers “in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, computer vision, and even cybersecurity.”

Why help China gain knowledge that can be used to hurt us?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets general freedom national politics & policies

Junk Force

space junk, NASA, Space Force, TESLA, space exploration

A Space​.com news story indicates a big problem and a new role for government — or industry.

“The Infra-​Red Calibration Balloon (S73‑7) satellite started its journey into the great unknown after launching on April 10, 1974 through the United States Air Force’s Space Test Program,” writes Meredith Garofalo. “While in orbit, the original plan was for S73‑7 to inflate and take on the role as a calibration target for remote sensing equipment. After this failed to be achieved during deployment, the satellite faded away into the abyss and joined the graveyard of unwanted space junk until it was rediscovered in April.”

It’s a complicated story; the satellite never really worked properly. Which raises the space junk problem.

The biggest polluter is governments. Space agencies. And the corporations contracting to put up satellites. And the military that puts stuff up we know nothing about.

“[A]s more and more satellites head into space,” explains Garofalo, “the task will become even greater to know what exactly is out there and what threats that could pose.”

When Trump boasted of creating the Space Force in 2019, a lot of people scoffed. I didn’t.*Somebody’s got to do the dirty work, and it does look like Space Force personnel see an important role to be filled, that of garbage men in orbital space. Since the more than 20,000 objects in orbit — and their associated random debris — were put there by governments, maybe governments should clean it up. 

The future of space industry could be hampered, should the problem continue to grow — though, in the end, it may be industry that will take over the task. After all, space litter’s more dangerous than most terrestrial “externalities.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Also, in no small part, because ceding outer space to China and Russia seems like a bad idea. 

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government transparency national politics & policies

Identified?

UFO, UAP, aliens, US government, secrets, technology

The current UFO story is not a Big Nothing, but neither is it a Big Something.

Tucker Carlson addressed it on the first episode (6:43 mark) of Tucker on Twitter, his new show solely broadcast on the social media giant’s platform.

“A former Air Force officer, who worked for years in military intelligence, came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. Government has physical evidence of crashed, non-​human-​made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft,” Tucker explained. “The Pentagon has spent decades studying these other-​worldly remains in order to build more technologically-​advanced weapons systems. OK. That’s what the former intel officer revealed, and it’s clear he was telling the truth.”

Tucker’s conclusion? “UFOs are actually real and so, apparently, is extraterrestrial life.”

He may have gone a bit overboard. As “skeptic” science writer Michael Shermer notes, there is no real evidence here — at least in The Debrief’s  June 5 story, upon which most of the journalism is based — just very familiar rumors. Nothing whistleblower David Charles Grusch says is new; hundreds of other alleged whistleblowers have been saying similar things for decades.

What’s different? This time one of these whistleblowers has sworn under oath and given testimony to Congress.

Which is not insignificant. Grusch’s testimony also, allegedly, points to where in the Deep State the secrets lay hiding.

While the story hardly proves “UFOs are actually real” and so “is extraterrestrial life,” it suggests that the Government’s contradictory past press releases on the subject may (just may) be provably identified as the lies they’ve long seemed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war general freedom international affairs

An Invisibility Cloak We Can Use

Chinese invisibility cloak

It’s not quite the magical invisibility cloak worn by Harry Potter. But it’s the next best thing.

Chinese students have created apparel that human eyes can see but that hides the wearer from security cameras and recognition software.

The InvisDefense coat looks ordinary. So it won’t by itself arouse the suspicion of other people on the street. But it is designed in such a way as to foil the kind of cameras that, for example, try to identify who is protesting Chinazi lockdown insanity.

During the day, the printed pattern of the InvisDefense coat blinds cameras. At night, the coat emits heat signals that disrupt infrared. It was invented by Chinese graduate students at Wuhan University under the guidance of computer science professor Wang Zheng. Their coat won first prize in an innovation contest sponsored by Huawei.

Wang observes that “many surveillance devices can detect human bodies. Cameras on the road have pedestrian detection functions. And smart cars can identify pedestrians, roads, and obstacles. Our InvisDefense allows the camera to capture you. But it cannot tell if you are human.…

“We use algorithms to design the least conspicuous patterns that can disable computer vision.”

And the coat costs only seventy bucks or so.

I’m not always a fan of the algorithms. In this case, shout Hooray for algorithms and for those who put them to such good use by inventing the InvisDefense coat. 

I hope these students sell about eight billion of them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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voluntary cooperation

The Day Cillian Took Control

chair, robotics

One of the things that made 2019 a decent year was the robotics team at Farmington High School in Minnesota.

A former student at the school, Tyler Jackson, contacted the team to ask if they could help his son, two-​year-​old Cillian, become more mobile. He had been born with a condition resembling cerebral palsy that makes it hard to move around.

The Jackson family couldn’t afford the kind of power wheelchair Cillian needed.

The Farmington kids were eager to help. They replaced the electrical innards of a Fisher Price riding toy, added a bicycle seat, and used a 3D printer to design a joystick and other components.

The team applied skills gained by building robots for competitions, and they also got technical help from the University of Delaware, which had a program for designing mobility devices for disabled kids.

A local broadcast story about the wheelchair shows Cillian in action.

He isn’t the only child who has benefitted from the team’s tech prowess.

Early in 2021, the Rogue Robotics team at Farmington posted an appeal on their Facebook page after learning that Fisher Price had “discontinued the Power Wheels model Wild Thing we convert into wheelchairs for little kids” who either don’t fit into standard powered wheelchairs or can’t afford them.

They asked that anyone who happens to have a Wild Thing model in good condition consider donating it.

This kind of innovation can now be rolled out — pun intended? — broadly, not so much as mass production but as home and community and fix-​it shop projects, with 3D printing tech aiding in the revolution.

Now that’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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individual achievement progress

The Power of Man’s Mind

brain reader, text, binary, analog

Can you communicate with your mind alone, without moving a muscle?

Setting aside fantasy and wishful thinking, my answer is, at least presumptively, “No.”

But the paralyzed man known as T5 was not alone when the sentences he imagined appeared on screen at a rate of 18 words per minute with an accuracy of about 94 percent.

He had the help of inventive scientists. And, by some definitions, I suppose T5 did move a muscle: his brain. 

Normally, though, we must also move other muscles to get what’s on our mind out into the world and communicate it to others.

After suffering a spinal cord injury in 2007, T5 became almost entirely paralyzed. Several years later, he enrolled in a clinical trial called BrainGate2 to research brain-​computer interfaces.

Two small microchips were implanted in his brain.

Scientist Frank Willett of Stanford University and his colleagues asked T5 to imagine that he was writing individual letters and punctuation marks. They found that the patterns of neural activity they recorded were distinct for each letter, period, and comma.

Now all they had to do — a trifle! — is train an algorithm to predict, based on T5’s neural patterns, what letter or punctuation mark he was writing in his imagination.

It worked. Initial accuracy: 94 percent. With autocorrect that percentage went up to 99.

As yet, the technology is said to be too rudimentary to be practically applied. But the basic approach has been shown to be viable. The work also communicates the power of human ingenuity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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art credit: binary

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