Daily Archives: October 30, 2017

Bitcoin Pioneer Says New Coin to Work on Many Blockchains

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The mobility means that if one blockchain dies out as the result of infighting among developers or slackened use, metronome owners can move their holdings elsewhere. That should help the coins retain value, and ensure their longevity, Garzik, co-founder of startup Bloq that created metronome, said in a phone interview. It will be unveiled Tuesday at the Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas.”Institutional investors should be very excited to see something like this,” Matthew Roszak, the other co-founder of Bloq and chairman of industry advocate Chamber of Digital Commerce, said in a phone interview. “We’ve built a thousand-year cryptocurrency, something that’s built to last.”That’s a concern for many digital currencies. Infighting among developers and various supporters, and the slow pace of enhancements on the bitcoin blockchain have helped to limit use. Both bitcoin and its main rival, ethereum, have split into several versions.More splits could be coming — partly, thanks to Garzik, who is a proponent of and a developer for an upgrade to the bitcoin network called SegWit2x, which offers one way to speed up transactions. That split could happen in November.

Source: Bitcoin Pioneer Says New Coin to Work on Many Blockchains – Bloomberg

A useful feature for a coin.

Turns out that dating apps can give away your location, show who you like and who and where you are

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It seems just about everyone has written about the dangers of online dating, from psychology magazines to crime chronicles. But there is one less obvious threat not related to hooking up with strangers – and that is the mobile apps used to facilitate the process. We’re talking here about intercepting and stealing personal information and the de-anonymization of a dating service that could cause victims no end of troubles – from messages being sent out in their names to blackmail. We took the most popular apps and analyzed what sort of user data they were capable of handing over to criminals and under what conditions.We studied the following online dating applications: Tinder for Android and iOS Bumble for Android and iOS OK Cupid for Android and iOS Badoo for Android and iOS Mamba for Android and iOS Zoosk for Android and iOS Happn for Android and iOS WeChat for Android and iOS Paktor for Android and iOSBy de-anonymization we mean the user’s real name being established from a social media network profile where use of an alias is meaningless.

Source: Dangerous liaisons – Securelist

AMD sales soar, actually makes a profit, beats expectations, share price… decimated

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Personal TechAMD sales soar, actually makes a profit, beats expectations, share price… decimatedIntel’s antitrust shield even loses when it winsBy Shaun Nichols in San Francisco 25 Oct 2017 at 00:0816 Reg comments SHARE ▼guitar player on shuttertsock photo of (sisyphus) man rolling a rock up a hill. photo by SHutterstock/PHOTOCREO Michal BednarekAMD revenues were up, an actual proper profit was banked, and its future looking brighter than ever in the past financial quarter… meanwhile investors are selling off shares fearing a downturn looming for the chip designer.Strong sales from its Ryzen and Epyc Zen-based processor lines helped the world’s second-favorite x86 PC and server chip slinger grow revenues by more than 25 per cent in its third quarter of 2017, the three months to September 30. Here’s a summary of the figures, announced on Tuesday: Revenues of $1.64bn were up 26 per cent from $1.31bn in Q3 2016, and topped analyst estimates of $1.51bn. Net income of $71m topped the admittedly low bar set by last year’s $406m quarterly loss, in large part caused by a $340m payment to Global Foundries. For a different angle, non-GAAP operating income this year was $110m compared to $27m this time last year. Earnings per share were $0.10 non-GAAP, topping analyst estimates of $0.08. Computing and graphics processors (PC CPUs and GPUs) accounted for much of the jump, as the Ryzen launch and Radeon revamp bumped revenues to $819m, compared to $472m on the year-ago quarter. CEO Lisa Su claimed AMD’s Ryzen desktop processors made up 40 to 50 per cent of CPU sales at certain online retailers. Enterprise, embedded, and semi-custom (everything from servers to games console chips) logged revenues of $824m, down slightly from $835m this time last year.
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Investors, meanwhile, seemed to be less interested in 7nm than in what lies immediately ahead for AMD. For the upcoming quarter, the chip designer is expecting a sequential revenue decline of 15 per cent, with year-over-year Q4 revenues up by 26 per cent. Additionally, AMD said that it sees sales for hardware specializing in blockchain calculations – GPUs for Bitcoin and other alt-coin mining, which has fueled sales – “leveling off” as demand slows.

Those figures spooked shareholders after hours, sending AMD stock down by 10.5 per cent to around $12.75 per share at the time of writing.

Source: AMD sales soar, actually makes a profit, beats expectations, share price… decimated • The Register

Signs the market we use is outdated!

International (24 regulators) enforcement operation finds website privacy notices are too vague and generally inadequate (over 455 websites and apps)

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An investigation by 24 data protection regulators from around the world – led by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office – concluded that ‘there is significant room for improvement in terms of specific details contained in privacy communications’.The privacy notices, communications and practices of 455 websites and apps in sectors including retail, finance and banking, travel, social media, gaming/gambling, education and health were assessed to consider whether it was clear from a user’s perspective exactly what information was collected, for what purpose, and how it would be processed, used and shared.Overall, the Global Privacy Enforcement Network (GPEN) came to the following conclusions: Privacy communications across the various sectors tended to be vague, lacked specific detail and often contained generic clauses. The majority of organisations failed to inform the user what would happen to their information once it had been provided. Organisations were generally quite clear on what information they would collect from the user. Organisations generally failed to specify with whom data would be shared. Many organisations failed to refer to the security of the data collected and held – it was often unclear in which country data was stored or whether any safeguards were in place. Just over half the organisations examined made reference to how users could access the personal data held about them.

Source: GPEN Sweep 2017 – International enforcement operation finds website privacy notices are too vague and generally inadequate | Global Privacy Enforcement Network

Samsung repurposes old phones – bitcoin miner, fishtank monitor, promises to open up

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The phone-in-the-closet phenomenon has become a hidden store of e-waste; a two-year-old phone still has value and is still a powerful device. And so it’s great news that Samsung is starting a new “Upcycling” initiative that is designed to turn old smartphones and turn them into something brand new.Behold, for example, this bitcoin mining rig, made out of 40 old Galaxy S5 devices, which runs on a new operating system Samsung has developed for its upcycling initiative.
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The team hooked 40 old Galaxy S5’s together to make a bitcoin mining rig, repurposed an old Galaxy tablet into a ubuntu-powered laptop, used a Galaxy S3 to monitor a fishtank, and programed an old phone with facial recognition software to guard the entrance of a house in the form of an owl.
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It’s all very cool and Samsung plans to release both the software it used to unlock the phones as well as the various plans for the projects online for free.
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Upcycling is a great way to keep old devices alive and it can’t easily happen without the original manufacturer’s support. “The challenge with keeping old electronics running a long time is software,” Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, told me over the phone. “With phones in particular, the old software is insecure and doesn’t run the new apps.
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Samsung’s upcycling project has a placeholder github with a video explaining its process. “They’re setting up a maker magazine style portfolio of projects,” Wiens explained. The site will work by allowing users to download software that removes Android and opens the devices up to other forms of software. From there, users can browse a wide variety of homebrew software and projects.

The platform will be open, so users can make and upload their own projects and software once it launches. In an example from a Samsung promotional video, a user downloaded fish monitoring software to an old Galaxy S3 and ordered the sensors for the water right from the website. After it’s all set up, the user has a device that monitors the PH balance and heat of the fish tank. It even allows the pet owner to snap pics of their swimmers or turn the lights on and off.

Robust support for repurposing devices like this is unheard of in the tech industry. Companies such as Apple have made it hard for users to fix their own broken devices. In most cases, manufacturers would rather people just buy new devices than fix their old ones. It’s a philosophy that’s good for the company, but bad for the environment and bad for the customer.

Source: Samsung Made a Bitcoin Mining Rig Out of 40 Old Galaxy S5s – Motherboard

Well done Samsung!
The upcycling website is https://galaxyupcycling.github.io/

Android Is Quietly Sharing Your Physical Activity with Other Apps

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Google snuck a questionable feature into the operating system with a recent update. A new permission called “activity recognition” may be tracking your physical activity and sharing it with third-party apps, and there’s no easy way to stop it.
What Is Activity Recognition?

The “activity recognition” permission was shared on Reddit earlier this week. Basically, it allows Google to track your physical activity (biking, running, standing still) using your phone’s built-in sensors and then share that information with third-party apps.
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SoundHound and Shazam both appear to be using the permission, though it’s unclear why. Activity recognition is also categorized in the list of “other” permissions, so it won’t show up when an app updates on your phone. The only way to check is to go into each app on your device and look at all of its permissions.
How to Deal With It

There’s also no way to revoke this specific permission either across the board or on an app-by-app basis. If it’s an app you don’t use that often you could always delete it off your phone to avoid sharing your personal information. One Reddit user also suggested preventing those apps from running in the background.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to deal with activity recognition for now. Hopefully Google will offer a fix eventually, but until then you may just have to accept that owning a smartphone means giving up a bit of your privacy.

Source: Android Is Quietly Sharing Your Physical Activity with Other Apps

Google is getting more and more invasive, with Google Maps tracking your location all the time and the Google play store, Inbox and Google Play services (among others) requiring microphone and body sensors permissions for proper operations. Why? Because privacy is dead to Google as well.

This Company Added the Word ‘Blockchain’ to Its Name and Saw Its Shares Surge 394%

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n-line Plc jumped as much as 394 percent on Friday after announcing plans to change its name to On-line Blockchain Plc, following an initial climb of 19 percent on Thursday when it first announced the news. It’s the biggest one-day gain for the small-cap company since its December 1996 listing. The trading volume that reached 2.9 million shares by early afternoon in London is equal to more than 16 times the entire year’s trading before the last two days.
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This isn’t the first time that investors have gotten excited about a name. Shares in Colorado-based Bioptix Inc. nearly doubled in value in the days leading up to its name change to Riot Blockchain Inc. earlier this month. In what seems to be a case of mistaken identity, a New York-based startup called SNAP Interactive Inc. jumped more than 150 percent in the days after Snap Inc. filed for a $3 billion initial public offering in February. Little-known SNAP Interactive makes mobile dating apps, while Snap Inc. is the parent of the popular Snapchat photo-sharing app.

Source: This Company Added the Word ‘Blockchain’ to Its Name and Saw Its Shares Surge 394% – Bloomberg

A generative vision model that trains with high data efficiency and breaks text-based CAPTCHAs

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Learning from few examples and generalizing to dramatically different situations are capabilities of human visual intelligence that are yet to be matched by leading machine learning models. By drawing inspiration from systems neuroscience, we introduce a probabilistic generative model for vision in which message-passing based inference handles recognition, segmentation and reasoning in a unified way. The model demonstrates excellent generalization and occlusion-reasoning capabilities, and outperforms deep neural networks on a challenging scene text recognition benchmark while being 300-fold more data efficient. In addition, the model fundamentally breaks the defense of modern text-based CAPTCHAs by generatively segmenting characters without CAPTCHA-specific heuristics. Our model emphasizes aspects like data efficiency and compositionality that may be important in the path toward general artificial intelligence.

Source: A generative vision model that trains with high data efficiency and breaks text-based CAPTCHAs

Nvidia uses Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation and makes photorealistic faces with them

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We describe a new training methodology for generative adversarial networks. The key idea is to grow both the generator and discriminator progressively, starting from low-resolution images, and add new layers that deal with higher resolution details as the training progresses. This greatly stabilizes the training and allows us to produce images of unprecedented quality, e.g., CelebA images at 1024² resolution. We also propose a simple way to increase the variation in generated images, and achieve a record inception score of 8.80 in unsupervised CIFAR10. Additionally, we describe several small implementation details that are important for discouraging unhealthy competition between the generator and discriminator. Finally, we suggest a new metric for evaluating GAN results, both in terms of image quality and variation. As an additional contribution we construct a higher quality version of the CelebA dataset that allows meaningful exploration up to the resolution of 1024² pixels.

Source: Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation | Research

alcohol hangover–a puzzling phenomenon

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The alcohol hangover develops when blood alcohol concentration (BAC) returns to zero and is characterized by a feeling of general misery that may last more than 24 h. It comprises a variety of symptoms including drowsiness, concentration problems, dry mouth, dizziness, gastro-intestinal complaints, sweating, nausea, hyper-excitability, and anxiety. The alcohol hangover is an intriguing issue since it is unknown why these symptoms are present after alcohol and its metabolites are eliminated from the body.

Although numerous scientific papers cover the acute effects of alcohol consumption, researchers largely neglected the issue of alcohol hangover. This lack of scientific interest is remarkable, since almost everybody is familiar with the unpleasant hangover effects that may arise the day after an evening of excessive drinking, and with the ways these symptoms may affect performance of planned activities.

Many people favour the (unproven) popular belief that dehydration is the main cause of alcohol hangover symptoms. However, taking a closer look at the present research on biological changes during alcohol hangovers suggests otherwise.
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nterestingly, no significant differences were found in absenteeism between workers reporting hangovers and those who did not. A possible explanation may be that workers with a hangover feel that having a hangover is ‘their own fault’, and the obligation they have to go to work may prevent calling sick. The fact that workers do go to work when having a hangover is of concern, especially since some in jobs making the wrong decisions may have serious consequences.

The article by Stephens and colleagues calls for additional hangover research, using more sophisticated research methods. In this context, researchers should ask themselves the question ‘ what is the alcohol hangover?’. It is evident that besides the alcohol amount many other factors play a role in determining the presence and severity of hangovers. To complicate matters, co-occurring dehydration and sleep deprivation have an impact on the next-day effect of excessive alcohol consumption as well. Until future research elucidates its pathology, the alcohol hangover remains a puzzling phenomenon.

Source: alcohol hangover–a puzzling phenomenon | Alcohol and Alcoholism | Oxford Academic

It turns out we don’t really know much about hangovers and it’s quite difficult to actually study them.