Daily Archives: October 26, 2017

What DNA Testing Companies’ Terrifying Privacy Policies Actually Mean

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When you spit in a test tube in in hopes of finding out about your ancestry or health or that perfect, genetically optimized bottle of wine, you’re giving companies access to some very intimate details about what makes you, you. Your genes don’t determine everything about who you are, but they do contain revealing information about your health, relationships, personality, and family history that, like a social security number, could be easily abused. Not only that—your genes reveal all of that information about other people you’re related to, too.
[…]
Gizmodo slogged though every line of Ancestry.com, 23andMe, and Helix’s privacy, terms of service, and research policies with the help of experts in privacy, law and consumer protection. It wasn’t fun. We fell asleep at least once. And what we found wasn’t pretty.

“It’s basically like you have no privacy, they’re taking it all,” said Joel Winston, a consumer protection lawyer. “When it comes to DNA tests, don’t assume you have any rights.”
[…]
here’s what you need to know before giving away your genetic information.

Testing companies can claim ownership of your DNA

It’s unclear who has access to your DNA, or for what

Your anonymous genetic information could get leaked

If you sue and lose, you’re screwed

If companies get rich off your DNA, you get nothing

Source: What DNA Testing Companies’ Terrifying Privacy Policies Actually Mean

A very good article examining the privacy clauses of some genetic testing companies followed up by an analysis of what this means for the consumer. Be scared.

New AI Go machine defeats old best Go AI by 100-0, learning without human input.

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A long-standing goal of artificial intelligence is an algorithm that learns, tabula rasa, superhuman proficiency in challenging domains. Recently, AlphaGo became the first program to defeat a world champion in the game of Go. The tree search in AlphaGo evaluated positions and selected moves using deep neural networks. These neural networks were trained by supervised learning from human expert moves, and by reinforcement learning from self-play. Here we introduce an algorithm based solely on reinforcement learning, without human data, guidance or domain knowledge beyond game rules. AlphaGo becomes its own teacher: a neural network is trained to predict AlphaGo’s own move selections and also the winner of AlphaGo’s games. This neural network improves the strength of the tree search, resulting in higher quality move selection and stronger self-play in the next iteration. Starting tabula rasa, our new program AlphaGo Zero achieved superhuman performance, winning 100–0 against the previously published, champion-defeating AlphaGo.

Source: Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge : Nature : Nature Research

Atlas of the Underworld: a map of the tectonic plates (slabs) and their depth into the mantle

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Welcome to the website of The Atlas of the underworld – the first complete mapping of subducted plates in the Earth’s mantle and their geological interpretation.The Earth’s rigid outer shell – the lithosphere – is broken into plates that move relative to one another along discrete plate boundaries – ridges, transforms, and subduction zones. At subduction zone plate boundaries, one plate disappears below another and sinks into the mantle. These sinking plates, called ‘slabs’, are colder than their surroundings, and remain colder for a very long period of time – about 250 million years. As a result, the speed at which seismic waves travel through these bodies of sinking lithosphere is a little higher than from the surrounding hot mantle. Since the 1980’s, the technique of seismic tomography has been developed that provides a 3D image of the seismic velocity structure of the Earth’s crust and mantle, from the surface to the boundary between the mantle and the Earth’s liquid outer core at a depth of 2900 km.Subduction leaves a distinct geological record at the Earth’s surface, in the form of major mountain ranges such as the Andes or the Himalaya, or major volcanic arcs such as the Pacific Ring of Fire. Using these geological records, Earth Scientists have developed ways to determine when and where subduction episodes started and ended. On this website, we provide the current state-of-the-art of the images of slabs in the Earth’s upper and lower mantle, and the geological interpretation of when and where they were subducting. In the main article associated with this website, we use the information provided here to deduct physical properties of the mantle and slabs, and discuss ways to develop reference frames for plate reconstructions of the geological past. On this website, we provide open access to all slabs, organized by location, age, depth, and name.

Source: Atlas of the Underworld | van der Meer, D.G., van Hinsbergen, D.J.J., and Spakman, W., 2017, Atlas of the Underworld: slab remnants in the mantle, their sinking history, and a new outlook on lower mantle viscosity, Tectonophysics

IBM broke its cloud by letting three domain names expire

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Back in September, IBM was left red-faced when its global load balancer and reverse DNS services fell over for 21 hours.At the time, IBM blamed the outage on a third-party domain name registrar that was transferring some domains to another registrar. The sending registrar, IBM said, accidentally put the domains in a “hold state” that prevented them being transferred. As the load balancer and reverse DNS service relied on the domains in question, the services became inaccessible to customers.IBM’s now released an incident summary [PDF] in which it says “multiple domain names were mistakenly allowed to expire and were in hold status.”The explanation also reveals that the network-layer.net domain was caught up in the mess, in addition to the global-datacenter.com and global-datacenter.net domains that IBM reported as messed up in September.It’s unclear if IBM or its outsourced registrar was responsible for the failure to renew registration for the domains.

Source: IBM broke its cloud by letting three domain names expire • The Register

The dangers of the Cloud ™