[NEWS] World’s First Quantum Computing Safe Tape Drive

Ten months ago we assembled a team from IBM Research in Switzerland and IBM tape developers based in Tucson, Arizona, to try to build something which has never been built before to address a risk that may not materialize for another decade or more. As you can tell, we love a good challenge.
The risk comes from quantum advantage, the point when a quantum computer can perform some particular computation significantly faster than a classical computer.  The challenge we faced, develop a quantum computing safe tape drive, because at the current rate of progress in quantum computing, it is expected that data protected by the asymmetric encryption methods used today may become insecure.

Preparing Cybersecurity for a Quantum World

Quantum computing is an emerging form of computing that takes advantage of quantum mechanical phenomena to solve certain types of problem that are effectively impossible to solve on classical computers. Quantum Advantage will occur when quantum computers surpass today’s classical computers at which point they are expected to enable dramatic advances in areas such as chemistry, bioinformatics and artificial intelligence, but at the same time they will impact information security.
State of the art storage technologies, such as magnetic tape drives, use a combination of symmetric and asymmetric encryption to ensure that the data they store remains secure. However, in the future, the security of today’s asymmetric encryption techniques will very likely be broken by advances in quantum computing.

At the current rate of progress in quantum computing, it is expected that asymmetric encryption may become insecure within the next 10-30 years. While this seems rather far in the future, tape systems are often used to archive data for many years which is why it’s important to begin implementing quantum computing-safe solutions now to provide clients sufficient time to migrate to this new technology before their data becomes vulnerable.

Making Tape Quantum Computing Safe

In order to prepare for the impact that quantum computers are expected to have on data security, IBM Research has been developing cryptographic algorithms that are resistant to potential security concerns posed by quantum computers.
These algorithms are based on Lattice Cryptography, which is in turn related to a set of mathematical problems that have been studied since the 1980’s and have not succumbed to any algorithmic attacks, either classical or quantum.

In collaboration with several academic and commercial partners including: ENS Lyon, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica and Radboud University, IBM researchers have developed two quantum resistant cryptographic primitives based this work: Kyber, a secure key encapsulation mechanism and Dilithium, a secure digital signature algorithm. These two algorithms make up the “Cryptographic Suite for Algebraic Lattices”  we call “CRYSTALS”.

Both of these algorithms are candidates in the second round of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Post Quantum Cryptography standardization process and will be presented today at the Second PQC Standardization Conference at the University of Santa Barbara, Aug 22-24, 2019.
The new IBM quantum computing-safe tape drive prototype is based on a state-of-the-art IBM TS1160 tape drive and uses both Kyber and Dilithium in combination with symmetric AES-256 encryption to enable the world’s first quantum computing-safe tape drive. The new algorithms are implemented as part of the tape drive’s firmware and could be provided to customers as a firmware upgrade for existing tape drives and/or included in the firmware of future generations of tape drives.
Magnetic tape has a long history of leadership in storage security and is an essential technology for protecting and preserving data. For example, IBM tape drives were the first storage technology to provide built-in encryption starting with the TS1120 Enterprise Tape Drive.

In addition, tape provides an additional layer of security via an airgap between the data stored on a cartridge and the outside world, i.e. data  stored on a cartridge cannot be read or modified unless it is mounted in a tape drive. The security and reliability provided by tape systems combined with their low total cost of ownership have resulted in tape becoming the technology of choice for archiving data in the cloud as well as in commercial and scientific data centers

With the development of quantum computing-safe tape encryption technology, IBM Tape continues the legacy of tape leadership in security and encryption and  reaffirms its long term commitment to this critical part of modern storage infrastructure.

AS SEEN @https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/08/crystals/

Homni: The new superorganism taking over Earth

Is our species evolving into something new? Gaia Vince makes the provocative argument that humanity is transforming, and it is already having a huge effect on life on our planet.

    By Gaia Vince

2 July 2014

In Ancient Greek mythology, the Earth Goddess Gaia had nine titan sons, who attempted to control not just the Earth, but the entire Universe. I’d like to introduce another. It’s a new creature who emerged only in recent decades. But it’s a creature who is already as influential over life on the planet as the phytoplankton or forests that regulate global temperature, the weather and the air we breathe.

That new creature is us, or more precisely, what humanity is becoming. The entirety of our species, Homo sapiens, is evolving into a superorganism; I’ll call this new life force Homo omnis, or ‘Homni’.

We have now become the dominant force shaping our planet. Some say that because of our actions we have entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, or the age of man. Homni is a product of this age, a product of human industrialisation, population expansion, globalisation and the revolution in communications technology, and he is immensely powerful. Homni can influence the biosphere, and has needs – currently, he uses 18 terawatts (trillion watts) of energy at any time, 9,000 billion cubic metres of water per year, 40% of global land area for farming, and a plethora of other natural and mineral resources.

Only time will tell if he will be a benign caretaker, or a monster that destroys life and with it himself. But there are clues, and here I will examine what Homni is, and what he means for our species, the planet and the rest of life on Earth.

Crowd power

To understand Homni, let me first take you down into the soil to consider one of the most simple and ancient single-celled organisms, an amoeba called a slime mould. It evolved some 600 million years ago, and occupies soils across the world, from Antarctica to the Arctic. For most of its life-cycle, the cell lives the unexceptional life of most amoeba. But sometimes, these single cells gather in their thousands to create an organism, encased in its own slime, that can creep, crawl, pulsate, grow tentacles and even negotiate a maze.

Scientists describe these slime moulds as ‘societies’ because of the way the individual amoebae work together towards a common cause, sometimes sacrificing themselves on the way. For example, if food is scarce in their soil patch, the amoeba coalesce together forming a tendril that creeps up to the light. Once it has reached the surface, a portion of them form a stalk above ground, by turning their bodies into hard cellulose – a process that kills them. The rest of the mould then climbs the stalk and waits in a blob at the top for a passing animal to transport them to new soils. All this, from the simplest organism.

The human brain is a bit like the mould. Each single brain cell, or neuron, cannot be described as conscious or sentient, and yet, when all 86 billion neurons are networked together, the human brain is far, far more than the sum of its parts, capable of thinking and processing ideas in original ways. We still don’t understand how thoughts or personality or behaviours are seeded and take root in this network, or how the neurons become organised to drive such processes, but somehow consciousness is created from the most prosaic building materials.

We can describe the intelligence, creativity and sociability of Homni as being comparable to the networked, linked-up, conversational accumulation of all the human brains, including those from the past who have left a cultural and intellectual legacy, and also the artificial ‘brains’ of our technological inventions, such as computer programs and Wikipedia. Homni is a global network of civilisations with a stream of knowledge already being channelled for human protection. Just as a cloud of starlings suddenly flips direction en masse, it is difficult to predict how Homni’s behaviour will play out.

But this is just one aspect of Homni.

'Artificial Man'

Not long ago, I sat in a rainforest in Belize, watching a troop of fire ants at work. Individually, each is a formidable beast, a few centimetres long but with a powerful bite. But together, they form what entomologist EO Wilson described as a superorganism of thousands of organised ants that systematically devours everything in its path, tearing down trees and crops and stripping the insulation off wiring and other electrical equipment. In some places the ants run a protection racket for other aphids and bugs, which supply them with nectar. And the superorganism has even figured out a way of surviving heavy rainfall, by clinging to each other and forming a floating life raft in times of flooding. Once they’ve exhausted their environment’s resources, the entire community ups and moves to pastures new. Ants are sophisticated farmers – pre-dating human farmers by more than 50 million years – and they also raise and milk livestock (aphids), they build complex residences, keep slaves, and wage massive battles that involve psychological warfare. The comparisons with humans are multiple.

Applying the idea of superorganisms to humanity is more complicated – individually, we are more autonomous than cells, or even ants. But over the centuries, the idea has emerged in many different guises. The Ancient Greeks imagined each of us as cells in the greater being. Others have referred to the roles that different parts of society play – such as generating energy or food – as analogous to organs in a body. The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes also described society as forming an 'Artificial Man' that functions (through civilisation) in a way as to ensure its own survival.

Now, as we advance into the Anthropocene, we are seeing these ideas put into practice on an unprecedented scale. While individual humans or societies can exert a local or regional effect on landscapes, water flow or biodiversity, the impact of our superspecies is planetary. Homni now controls three-quarters of Earth’s freshwater supplies, has modified more than three-quarters of ice-free land surface, and modulates the planet's air, biodiversity, and oceanic chemistry and biology. Homni has even started littering space with telescopes, satellites and other artificial junk. Homni’s actions are like the environmental rampaging of Argentinian ants on a global scale.

Increasingly, individual people are less and less able to function independently in modern society – we rely on the superorganism to feed, clothe and power our many tools, to inform and heal us, even to help us reproduce through surrogacy or IVF. In coming decades, it is likely that access to the internet will have reached almost every part of the globe and, as we become more cohesive as a networked society, individuals who remain outside of the new superorganism will find themselves isolated culturally and technologically from what it means to be a human in the Anthropocene.

In the coming decades, it is also likely that access to electricity, sanitation and antibiotics will become near universal – thus, describing a human in the Anthropocene will increasingly assume a doubled lifespan and basic awareness of the scientific, geopolitical, cultural and social factors behind how the world operates. The result will be a new way of living that is almost akin to being a new subspecies. It is the new modern human that created the Anthropocene and gave rise to Homni, but it is Homni who now sculpts the new human.

Monster issues

And here lies an interesting paradox. Humans may have evolved through a process of natural selection – essentially outcompeting rivals to death – but as palaeontologist Tim Flannery says, this has led not to a "dog-eat-dog world", but to a cooperative society. He believes we are in the process of forming an interdependent global society with a set of shared beliefs – a "civilisation of ideas" – that will transform Earth into a more equitable and ecologically curated planet. It's an optimistic view of Homni, based on the fact that most people want to get on with each other and look after their neighbourhood environment. Whether, or to what degree, Flannery's altruistic view of humanity bears out is the big question.

Individuals may exert an influence over Homni to some degree, rather like the single neuron that fires off a signal, starting an original thought, which then progresses to a painting, song or an invention like the iPod. Or the individual who sends a single tweet that then becomes an internet meme propagating and evolving through the internet. The “tipping point” is thought to be low: just 10% are needed to hold a new belief before it spreads to the majority of the population.

Although individuals may be able to steer Homni to some level, it is far from obvious how we might do this to ensure our survival through the Anthropocene. Homni’s influence is already being seen in planetary changes unprecedented for millions of years, affecting humans and our relationship to the natural world. We are changing the climate by increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; we're reducing the planet's biodiversity, causing what scientists fear may be the sixth mass extinction in its history; and terraforming Earth's land surface with multiple megacities of concrete, steel and glass. Deciding as an individual to reduce freshwater waste, or cut my carbon footprint has negligible impact on the state of the world's rivers or global temperature.

Homni is essentially a concept – I invented him because our superorganism has characteristics that go beyond the simple accumulation of humans. In other examples from the animal world, like bee hives or ant nests, killing the queen results in the collapse of the entire colony. Homni has no single queen, though, and in this way he is as robust as a forest. It would take a catastrophe on an epic scale – an epidemic, massive environmental change, an asteroid impact, or nuclear war – to possibly kill Homni, leaving a straggle of human survivors.

But our impulse would always be to strengthen rather than kill Homni – we are social collaborators and most of our recent discoveries, inventions and successes have been born out of group effort. And the secret to ensuring a better Anthropocene is in recognising Homni's power, but also nurturing his human side, the side committed to improving relations with the neighbours and cleaning up the neighbourhood. Will we achieve this through global international agreements? Possibly. I think that increasingly, as we see through a network of eyes, in the form of the many powerful satellites and remote cameras that track individual trees in rainforests or reveal the extent of glacial carving, we will start to read Homni’s mind, and have more nuanced control over his actions.

Maybe then we will begin to use the power of Homni to restore and curate the planet. The alternative is too monstrous to contemplate.

as seen @ http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140701-the-superorganism-engulfing-earth

The end of humanity as we know it is ‘coming in 2045’ and Google is preparing for it

This isn’t the prediction of a conspiracy theorist, a blind dead woman or an octopus but of Google’s chief of engineering, Ray Kurzweil.

Kurzweil has said that the work happening now ‘will change the nature of humanity itself’.

Tech company Softbank’s CEO Masayoshi Son predicts it will happen in 2047.

And it’s all down to the many complexities of artificial intelligence (AI).

AI is currently limited to Siri or Alexa-like voice assistants that learn from humans, Amazon’s ‘things you might also like’, machines like Deep Blue, which has beaten grandmasters at chess, and a few other examples.

But the Turing test, where a machine exhibits intelligence indistinguishable from a human, has still not been fully passed.

Not yet at least…


What we have at the moment is known as narrow AI, intelligent at doing one thing or a narrow selection of tasks very well.

General AI, where humans and robots are comparable, is expected to show breakthroughs over the next decade.

They become adaptable and able to turn their hand to a wider variety of tasks, in the same way as humans have areas of strength but can accomplish many things outside those areas.

This is when the Turing Test will truly be passed.

The third step is ASI, artificial super-intelligence.

ASI is the thing that the movies are so obsessed with, where machines are more intelligent and stronger than humans. It always felt like a distant dream but predictions are that it’s getting closer.

People will be able to upload their consciousness into a machine, it is said, by 2029 – when the machine will be as powerful as the human brain – and ASI – or the singularity – will happen, Google predicts, in 2045.

There are many different theories about what this could mean, some more scary than others.

‘We project our own humanist delusions on what life might be life [when artificial intelligence reaches maturity],’ philosopher Slavoj Žižek says.

‘The very basics of what a human being will be will change.

‘But technology never stands on its own. It’s always in a set of relations and part of society.’

Society, however that develops, will need to catch up with technology. If it doesn’t, then there is a risk that technology will overtake it and make human society irrelevant at best and extinct at worst.

One of the theories asserts that once we upload our consciousness into a machine, we become immortal and remove the need to have a physical body.

Another has us as not being able to keep up with truly artificial intelligence so humanity is left behind as infinitely intelligent AI explores the earth and/or the universe without us.

The third, and perhaps the scariest, is the sci-fi one where, once machines become aware of humanity’s predilection to destroy anything it is scared of, AI acts first to preserve itself at the expense of humans so humanity is wiped out.

All this conjures up images of Blade Runner, of iRobot and all sorts of Terminator-like dystopian nightmares.

‘In my lifetime, the singularity will happen,’ Alison Lowndes, head of AI developer relations at technology company Nvidia, tells Metro.co.uk at the AI Summit.

‘But why does everyone think they’d be hostile?

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @

http://metro.co.uk/2017/07/27/the-end-of-humanity-as-we-know-it-is-coming-in-2045-and-big-companies-are-working-towards-it-6807683/

Five Ways Elon Musk’s Brain-Computer Interface Could Transform the World

Date: 18/05/2017
Source: futurism.com


This technology would take the form of an injectable “neural lace” — composed of a mesh of electrodes — that would augment the human brain, adding another layer to the cortex and limbic system that is capable of communicating with a computer (essentially creating cyborgs). This, hypothetically, creates an upgradable, updatable interface that could be applied in countless ways. Some of these include:

CONTROLLING COMPUTERS WITH YOUR MIND

Brains and technology both operate using the same vectors: electricity and data. Musk’s Neural Lace would be a system that provides a way for them to communicate directly with each other. To borrow a simile from Phillip Alvelda, the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program manager (another nascent BCI), “Today’s best brain-computer interface systems are like two supercomputers trying to talk to each other using an old 300-baud modem […] Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools.” Applications could stretch from the remote operation of technology to the completely hands free and voiceless operation of computers. Researchers in Korea have already used a BCI to control turtles.

UPDATING YOUR MIND OR COMMUNICATING WITH SOMEONE ELSE’S

Elon Musk’s idea could both initiate brain activity and monitor it. The technology does not necessarily have to be a one-way communication stream, it is capable of both sending messages and creating information in the brain. The high-bandwidth interface could allow you to wirelessly transmit information to the cloud, to computers, or even directly to the brains of other people with a similar interface in their head. There is also the possibility of downloading content to augment your consciousness: think Neo learning kung-fu in the Matrix. While initial tests to improve intelligence haven’t been too successful, if brains and computers speak the same language, then computers can impart information to the brain. The technology is currently being used to allow paralyzed people to communicate, but its uses could extend far beyond that.

BIONIC LIMBS THAT FEEL LIKE REAL LIMBS

As part of this two-way communication stream, robotic arms could communicate fleshy messages by being connected to existing nerve structures. Rather than making the brain learn how to use a new part of the nervous system, robotic limbs could be quickly and easily integrated into the system. This has the potential to revolutionize prosthetic limbs for the disabled, but may also encourage people to rid themselves of their biological arms in favour of mechanical super limbs. Who knows!

EMOTIONALLY AWARE TECHNOLOGY

As computers and brains would essentially be speaking the same language, emotions could be read as data using electrodes. This would shift technology’s perception of humans from basic recognition to complex understanding. Robot helpers would be able to adapt to your emotional state rather than just responding to commands. Photos and videos could also be implanted with emotional metadata, meaning that one could feel what it would be like to be in any given scenario, rather than just trying to imagine it.

NEXT GENERATION ADAPTABLE GAMING

One issue with the lifespan of games is repetition; people become accustomed, know what to expect, or are limited by the programmed narrative. A BCI could improve this situation by having games respond to what your brain is feeling, remaining one step ahead and endlessly diverse. This would be most applicable to the horror genre, in which enemies could come at you when and where you least expect it, providing constant shocks, jumps, and thrills. The Black Mirror episode Playtest is an hour long exploration of just how terrifying this could be. Since AI has been shown to be as creative as a human composer, this reality could be surprisingly close.

As seen @
https://futurism.com/five-ways-elon-musks-brain-computer-interface-could-transform-the-world/

World champion calls Google’s AlphaGo a “Go god” after defeat Technology

AlphaGo has beaten the reigning world Go champion in the first of three matches

Date: 23/05/2017
source: alphr.com

Last year the world’s top Go player said he would never be beaten by a machine. Today, Ke Jie has called Google’s AlphaGo AI a “Go god”, after losing in a tense match that is sure to be held as a watermark in the progress of artificial intelligence.

The 19-year-old Chinese world champion lost the first of three scheduled matches by only half a point – the closest margin possible in the game. It’s a narrow victory, but the result nevertheless sees AlphaGo take the lead ahead of final matches on Thursday and Saturday.

Ke complimented the AI’s strategy for making “all the stones work across the board”, but said the game had ultimately been a “horrible experience”.

Read the full article @

http://www.alphr.com/technology/1005961/world-champion-calls-google-s-alphago-a-go-god-after-defeat

3-D Printed Ovaries Yield New Life

Date: 16.05.2017
source: discovermagazine.com

It’s another success for members of the same Northwestern University team that in March reproduced an entire menstrual cycle using organs-on-a-chip. This time, they’ve created ovaries from a type of gelatin hydrogel and infused them with immature egg cells before implanting them in female mice. The ovaries behaved like the natural ones, picking out an egg cell to mature and pass along, allowing the mice to bear healthy offspring. The procedure marks another step toward printing replacements for missing or damaged organs.

From Skeleton to Organ

To create their ovaries, the researchers, led by Theresa Woodruff, the director of the Women’s Health Research Institute at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, first learned to print the gelatin at exactly the right consistency. It had to be strong enough to handle surgical implantation while porous enough to hold on to egg cells and allow veins to grow. Through a series of trial and error experiments, the researchers discovered the best way to print the scaffolding from gelatin fibers that contained a series of tiny pockets to hold ovarian follicles.

read the whole article @ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/05/16/3d-printed-ovaries-mice/#.WRuCOu0y_tR

The world's best poker bot is learning, now crushing humanity again

DATE: 21/01/2017
RETRIEVED: 23/01/2017
SOURCE: BUSINESS INSIDER


For a few days, it looked like the humans had it figured out. Four poker pros facing off against the Libratus AI in a 20-day no-limit Texas Hold'em competition pulled back from an early $193,000 deficit with big wins on days four and six, bringing the deficit down to to $51,000, with one human, Dong King, up $33,000.

"It took us a while to study and get an understanding of what was going on," one of the pros, Jason Les, wrote in an email.

But then the bot started winning again and big. By the end of day 10, it was up a likely insurmountable $677,000, with all of the humans down six figures. (You can see the latest here).

What happened? Simply said, the bot is learning.



READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @

http://www.businessinsider.com/libratus-poker-bot-winning-at-texas-holdem-2017-1

Quantum Computers Ready to Leap Out of the Lab in 2017

Google, Microsoft and a host of labs and start-ups are racing to turn scientific curiosities into working machines

DATE: 04/01/2017
RETRIEVED: 04/01/2017
SOURCE: SCIAM


Quantum computing has long seemed like one of those technologies that are 20 years away, and always will be. But 2017 could be the year that the field sheds its research-only image.

Google started working on a form of quantum computing that harnesses superconductivity in 2014. It hopes this year, or shortly after, to perform a computation that is beyond even the most powerful ‘classical’ supercomputers—an elusive milestone known as quantum supremacy. Its rival, Microsoft, is betting on an intriguing but unproven concept, topological quantum computing, and hopes to perform a first demonstration of the technology.

Quantum Circuits is focused on making fully error-corrected machines from the start. This requires building in more qubits, but the machines could also run more-sophisticated quantum algorithms.

IonQ aims to build machines that have 32 or even 64 qubits, and the ion-trap technology will enable their designs to be more flexible and scalable than superconducting circuits, he says.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is betting on the technology that has the most to prove. Topological quantum computing depends on excitations of matter that encode infor­mation by tangling around each other like braids.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-computers-ready-to-leap-out-of-the-lab-in-2017/

Microsoft’s Testing DNA Storage: 1,000,000,000 TB in 1 Gram

DATE: 28/04/2016
RETRIEVED: 03/01/2017
SOURCE: FUTURISM


Microsoft is now looking to biology to come up with solutions for data storage. The tech giant just purchased ten million strands of synthetic DNA from Twist Bioscience to use for digital data storage research.

The purchase involves ten million long oligonucleotides. Twist Bioscience CEO Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D. said in a press release: “Today, the vast majority of digital data is stored on media that has a finite shelf life and periodically needs to be re-encoded. DNA is a promising storage media, as it has a known shelf life of several thousand years, offers a permanent storage format and can be read for continuously decreasing costs.”

“We need new methods for long-term, secure data storage,” says Doug Carmean, a Microsoft partner architect in its Technology and Research organization. Their initial tests have shown that they can successfully encode and recover 100 percent of binary data from synthetic DNA.


READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @

http://futurism.com/microsofts-testing-dna-storage-1000000000-tb-1-gram/

Scientists reverse ageing in mammals and predict human trials within 10 years

DATE: 15/12/2016
AUTHOR: SARAH KNAPTON
SOURCE: THE TELEGRAPH


Using a new technique which takes adult cells back to their embryonic form, US researchers at the Salk Institute in California, showed it was possible to reverse ageing in mice, allowing the animals to not only look younger, but live for 30 per cent longer.

Scientists hope to eventually create a drug which can mimic the effect of the found genes which could be taken to slow down, and even reverse the ageing process. They say it will take around 10 years to get to human trials.

"Our study shows that ageing may not have to proceed in one single direction," said Dr Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor in Salk's Gene Expression Laboratory. “With careful modulation, aging might be reversed.

"Obviously, mice are not humans and we know it will be much more complex to rejuvenate a person. But this study shows that ageing is a very dynamic and plastic process, and therefore will be more amenable to therapeutic interventions than what we previously thought."

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/12/15/scientists-reverse-ageing-mammals-predict-human-trials-within/