Providing ongoing mentorship can be impractical for busy professionals. With STEAMRole, the idea is to empower professionals to easily share their stories with students and young professionals.
It’s like Tinder for finding your role model and dream career in science, technology, engineering, art or math, STEAMRole founder and CEO Clarence Wooten told me.
“As the saying goes, you can’t be what you can’t see,” Wooten said.
Similar to Snapchat’s story functionality, students and aspiring professionals can consume inspirational content from role models. For role models, they can post about how their backgrounds, the work they do and how they landed their dream job.
“We want to make it easy for role models to give back and who want to mentor,” Wooten said. “We do it in a way that’s like creating a Snapchat story, and then followers can subscribe to content.”
STEAMRole is also incorporating blockchain technology to incentivize learners to achieve certain skills through its digital currency, RoleCoin. STEAMRole currently has several hundred role models signed up to be notified when it launches.
Source: TechCrunch
The Defense Department’s research wing is serious about putting drones into action, not just one by one but in coordinated swarms. The Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics program is kicking off its second “sprint,” a period of solicitation and rapid prototyping of systems based around a central theme. This spring sprint is all about “autonomy.”
The idea is to collect lots of ideas on how new technology, be it sensors, software, or better propeller blades, can enhance the ability of drones to coordinate and operate as a collective.
Specifically, swarms of 50 will need to “isolate an urban objective” within half an hour or so by working together with each other and ground-based robot. That at least is the “operational backdrop” that should guide prospective entrants in their decision whether their tech is applicable.
So a swarm of drones that seed a field faster than a tractor, while practical for farmers, isn’t really something the Pentagon is interested in here. On the other hand, if you can sell that idea as a swarm of drones dropping autonomous sensors on an urban battlefield, they might take a shine to it.
But you could also simply demonstrate how using a compact ground-based lidar system could improve swarm coordination at low cost and without using visible light. Or maybe you’ve designed a midair charging system that lets a swarm perk up flagging units without human intervention.
Those are pretty good ideas, actually — maybe I’ll run them by the program manager, Timothy Chung, when he’s on stage at our Robotics event in Berkeley this May. Chung also oversees the Subterranean Challenge and plenty more at DARPA . He looks like he’s having a good time in the video explaining the ground rules of this new sprint:
You don’t have to actually have 50 drones to take part — there are simulators and other ways of demonstrating value. More information on the program and how to submit your work for consideration can be found at the FBO page.
Source: TechCrunch
The team behind the popular open-source CMS Drupal is urging admins to update their sites to ward off a nasty bug that could leave their sites “highly compromised” to attackers, according to the organization.
The effected versions (Drupal 6, 7 and 8) of the CMS power over one million websites on the internet.
Drupal has marked the security risk as “highly critical” and warns that any visitor to the site could theoretically hack it through remote code execution due to a missing input validation.
“This potentially allows attackers to exploit multiple attack vectors on a Drupal site, which could result in the site being completely compromised,” the group noted in a blog post.
Drupal sent out an alert last week, telling users that they’d be dropping a “highly critical release” this weekend and they should update immediately. The announcement was unusual for Drupal and left developers on high alert for the targeted time frame of the release on Friday. Sites running vulnerable versions of Drupal, should update to Drupal 7.58 or Drupal 8.5.1 as soon as possible to avoid exploits. Drupal notes that they have yet to see any reports of exploits in the wild yet.
The bug’s official identifier is CVE-2018-7600 though users on social media have taken to calling it drupalgeddon2, referencing another major release from the org in 2014.
Source: TechCrunch
The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Esteban Kolsky, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Saturday, March 31, 2018.
@stevegillmor, @ekolsky, @DenisPombriant, @fradice, @kteare
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
Source: TechCrunch
Just about any device capable of banging a few numbers together can contribute to a cryptocurrency mining pool, that means almost any device can technically mine any bitcoin. Thing is, it might take you a little while.
The post How to mine one million dollars in bitcoin on an $800 laptop appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
It’s no joke how much data your internet service provider can collect about you. A new service from Cloudflare aims to change that.
Source: CNET
The Link 500 is a voice-enabled Wi-Fi speaker with Google Assistant that has enough bass to power your next dance party.
Source: CNET
If you’re investing in cryptocurrencies, it’s important to have your exit strategy in place if prices start to crash. If you’ve decided it’s time to get out or just want to learn how to sell Bitcoins, here’s how to get started.
The post How to sell Bitcoins appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Generals are famously always “studying how to fight the last war,” with the last war’s technology, while dismissing how the world and its tech have changed in the interim. This is true for dissidents, rebels, and culture wars too. Our fears tend to be of 20th century boogeymen, the Nazis and the Soviet Union — but we should be worrying about other things entirely. The world and its dystopias have moved on.
The Nazis and the Soviets obviously inspired Orwell’s “1984,” which was stunning, visionary, and enormously influential … while still being slightly myopic compared to Huxley’s earlier, much weirder, and much more subversive “Brave New World.” But Orwell too was already able to prophesy a world in which no one really fought for territory any more. What would be the point?
Militaries around the world are constructed primarily for national defense against an invading, conquering force, but invading and conquering territory makes no sense any more. Wealth and power are no longer remotely related to how much real estate or raw materials you control. South Korea’s US-dollar GDP is higher than that of Russia.
The US swept Iraq’s military away like gauze paper when they invaded in 2003, but it turns out that, even after you overthrow a brutal dictator, even when it’s one of the most oil-rich nations on the planet, attempting to occupy and control a hostile nation inevitably becomes a horribly expensive catastrophe that costs enormously more than any possible benefits.
Nation-states don’t invade and conquer each other any more because of military defenses, or any kind of Pax Americana, or because everyone has gotten nicer and kinder over the last hundred years. They don’t do it because, thanks to technology-driven transformations over that time, it simply doesn’t make any sense; in fact it has become complete madness.
Similarly, counterculture individualists and lovers of freedom worry about Nazi fascism or Soviet police states. How twentieth century of us. There are plenty of neo-fascists out there, to my dismay, and we often seem to be doing our best to accidentally construct the tools of a police state out of modern technology — smartphones, drones, facial recognition technology, etc. in the much-abused name of “security.” I’m certainly not suggesting that people or societies today are somehow less likely to construct such horrors because they have grown morally better over time. There are plenty of awful people out there.
I am, however, suggesting that awful people today are a lot less likely to aim for fascism or totalitarianism because awful people benefit a lot less from those systems than they used to. The Soviet Union collapsed because it was an economic disaster as well as a moral one. The closest things we have to fascist states today — monarchies like North Korea and Saudi Arabia — are fragile, riven by internal contradictions and internecine warfare, facing the future with desperation and fear.
There’s a new playbook for oppression today. Instead of outright totalitarian rule, you construct the appearance of democracy, while controlling it by subtly — in some cases perhaps not even consciously — restricting the options available to individual voters; by controlling a tiered system of “representative” electors behind the scenes; or by simply outright stuffing the ballot box. (There can be much sound and fury about the distinctions between the available candidates, but if you’ve done your job correctly, and made democracy as awful as possible, in general only establishment candidates or easily manipulated narcissists will ever be nominated.)
Then you give your people enough freedom to thrive; to create, to disrupt, to innovate. And you siphon as much as you can of that created wealth.
You don’t give them enough to actually seriously challenge the establishment, of course; to, say, remake the system so that the siphoned wealth goes to its poor and oppressed people instead of its silent, invisible masters. That is a red line that must not be crossed. But the beauties of this system — call it parasitism — is that it is very rare to encounter a challenger who cannot be co-opted. It vampire-squids enough wealth for its upper-tier members and their families to live lives of extraordinary, gilded luxury, without the unpleasant threat of being assassinated or deposed that comes with outright fascism or totalitarianism.
These parasitic systems couldn’t exist without today’s technology. They are mostly networked, not hierarchical. They watch, they adapts, and they distract. They construct shell corporations that shuttle gobs of money around the globe like 747s. And they very rarely needs to resort to violence, because, like the Borg, and like capitalism itself — from which it is distinct, although there are places where it has been so successful that people rarely recognize any difference — parasitism usually has the capacity to absorb all those who confront it.
I’m not saying fascism and totalitarianism are things we should be completely unworried about. They’re out there, they’re real, and they’re terrifying. But there are playbooks for how to fight them. Parasitism, though, seems almost unstoppable. Presumably the solution is a technological one; let’s hope it’s discovered soon.
Source: TechCrunch
Catch up on the Stormy Daniels saga, Julian Assange’s connectivity problems, the Mueller investigation, and all of the internet’s other favorite topics of conversation here.
Source: Wired