Here we experimentally demonstrate that polarization quantum states including general qubits of single photon and entangled states can survive well after travelling through seawater. We perform experiments with seawater collected over a range of 36 kilometers in the Yellow Sea. For single photons at 405 nm in a blue-green window, we obtain an average process fidelity above 98%
Two founders of The Pirate Bay have been ordered by a court in Finland to pay record labels more than $477,000 in compensation. Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm were found liable for ongoing copyright breaches on the site. Neither appeared to mount a defense so both were found guilty in their absence.
In November 2011, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), with support from Finnish anti-piracy group Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC), filed a lawsuit in the Helsinki District Court against The Pirate Bay.
IFPI, which represents the world’s major labels, demanded that the site’s operators stop facilitating the unauthorized distribution of music and pay compensation to IFPI and CIAPC-affiliated rightsholders for the damages caused through their website.
Progress in the case has been somewhat glacial but this morning, almost six years after the complaint was first filed, a decision was handed down.
Source: Pirate Bay Founders Ordered to Pay Music Labels $477,000 – TorrentFreak
The law is insane – why has Google not been sued to this extent? So the labels get a load of money: how will they divide this amongst their artists? I think the answer is NOT.
Antennas receive information by resonating with EM waves, which they convert into electrical voltage. For such resonance to occur, a traditional antenna’s length must roughly match the wavelength of the EM wave it receives, meaning that the antenna must be relatively big. However, like a guitar string, an antenna can also resonate with acoustic waves. The new antennas take advantage of this fact. They will pick up EM waves of a given frequency if its size matches the wavelength of the much shorter acoustic waves of the same frequency. That means that that for any given signal frequency, the antennas can be much smaller.
The trick is, of course, to quickly turn the incoming EM waves into acoustic waves. To do that, the two-part antenna employs a thin sheet of a so-called piezomagnetic material, which expands and contracts when exposed to a magnetic field. If it’s the right size and shape, the sheet efficiently converts the incoming EM wave to acoustic vibrations. That piezomagnetic material is then attached to a piezoelectric material, which converts the vibrations to an oscillating electrical voltage. When the antenna sends out a signal, information travels in the reverse direction, from electrical voltage to vibrations to EM waves. The biggest challenge, Sun says, was finding the right piezomagnetic material—he settled on a combination of iron, gallium, and boron—and then producing it at high quality.
The team created two kinds of acoustic antennas. One has a circular membrane, which works for frequencies in the gigahertz range, including those for WiFi. The other has a rectangular membrane, suitable for megahertz frequencies used for TV and radio. Each is less than a millimeter across, and both can be manufactured together on a single chip. When researchers tested one of the antennas in a specially insulated room, they found that compared to a conventional ring antenna of the same size, it sent and received 2.5 gigahertz signals about 100,000 times more efficiently, they report today in Nature Communications.
Source: Mini-antennas could power brain-computer interfaces, medical devices | Science | AAAS
Bad news, Sonos customers: to lay the groundwork for its upcoming voice assistant support, the company is asking users to agree to an updated privacy policy, one that includes both mandatory data collection rules and a mention about future device functionality. Should you disagree with said policy update, your device’s basic functions could stop working, according to Consumerist.
Source: How to Stop Your Sonos From Collecting (As Much) Personal Data
In a blog post, Sonos claimed the update was necessary to “improve your listening experience” and identify issues by analyzing collected error information. Its earlier privacy policy (you can check it out here) allowed users to choose whether or not they wanted to register their device with Sonos for data collection. The new one says that opting out of “Functional Data collection” is not an option.
Data Collection is MandatoryData collected previously included information about equalizer usage, playback errors, and time spent listening to local or streaming music. Its new privacy policy, however, collects what the company is calling “Functional Data,” information Sonos claims is “absolutely necessary for your Sonos System to perform its basic functions in a secure way.” Functional Data includes personal information like location data, IP addresses, and more:
Registration data:
This data includes your email address, location, language preference, Product serial number, IP address, and Sonos account login information (as described above).
System data:
This data includes things like product type, controller device type, operating system of controller, software version information, content source (audio line in), signal input (for example, whether your TV outputs a specific audio signal such as Dolby to your Sonos system), information about wifi antennas, audio settings (such as equalization or stereo pair), Product orientation, room names you have assigned to your Sonos Product, whether your product has been tuned using Sonos Trueplay technology, and error information.
Sonos is also trying to collect performance and activity information shown below, otherwise known as Additional Usage Data:
Performance Information:
This includes things like temperature of your Product, Wi-Fi information such as signal strength, what music services you have connected to your Sonos system (including, for some services, your login username – but not password – for such service), information about how often you use the Sonos app versus another control mechanism, flow of interactions within the Sonos app, how often you use the physical controls on the unit, and location data when the Sonos app is in use, and duration of Sonos Product use.
Activity Information:
This includes duration of music service use, Product or room grouping information; command information such as play, pause, change volume, or skip tracks; information about track, playlist, or station container data; and Sonos playlist or Sonos favorites information; each correlated to individual Sonos Products.
How to (Partially) Protect Yourself
For now, as long as you don’t enable voice assistant support, you can opt out of sharing the aforementioned Additional Usage Data with Sonos by adjusting some settings in your apps.
Sonos for iOS or Android:
From the Sonos music menu, tap Settings.
Tap Advanced Settings.
Tap Usage Data then Turn off Usage Data Sharing.Sonos for Mac:
From the menu bar at the top of your screen click Sonos then Preferences.
On the left side of the window, click Advanced.
Click Improve Sonos.
Check the box that reads Turn usage data sharing off.Sonos for PC:
From the menu bar at the top of the Sonos app click Manage then Settings.
On the left side of the window, click Advanced.
Click Improve Sonos.
Check the box that reads Turn usage data sharing off.If you’re concerned about the data Sonos may have already collected, you can edit or delete it by accessing your Sonos account online or going through the Sonos app, though deleting personal data could render your Sonos device useless. You can also shoot Sonos an email and ask them to delete your personal data, if you’re into that.
And the US high courts still say that accepting these kind of terms of service is legal. Sonos hardware is expensive and forcing people to change the terms of their use after the financial investment makes it even worse than the disgrace that this kind of behavior is already.