Monthly Archives: December 2017

The Founder of Litecoin Says He No Longer Owns Any Litecoin

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“[W]henever I tweet about Litecoin price or even just good or bads news, I get accused of doing it for personal benefit. Some people even think I short LTC! So in a sense, it is conflict of interest for me to hold LTC and tweet about it because I have so much influence,” Lee, who was also an early engineering hire for crypto trading platform Coinbase, wrote on r/litecoin. “For this reason, in the past days, I have sold and donated all my LTC.”
[…]
While an unencumbered founder may generate trust and goodwill in the short term, the question remains if Lee knows something Litecoin speculators don’t. Even the person (or people) who operated under the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto did not sell, donate, or delete their stake in Bitcoin before disappearing. Nor would it be an easy task to find a startup founder (an imperfect analogy to be sure) that did not have some level of investment in their own product. Lee notes in the same Reddit post that, “when Litecoin succeeds, I will still be rewarded in lots of different ways, just not directly via ownership of coins.”

Source: The Founder of Litecoin Says He No Longer Owns Any Litecoin

Coinbase Freezes Bitcoin Cash Trades, Launches Insider Trading Probe

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Coinbase, one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency apps, surprised its users by adding Bitcoin Cash to its offerings on Tuesday. But it appears that not everyone trading in the altcoin was blindsided by the move. Before the announcement, prices for Bitcoin Cash began climbing in other markets, and now a self-investigation of possible insider trading has been initiated.

Source: Coinbase Freezes Bitcoin Cash Trades, Launches Insider Trading Probe

The wild west of unregulated currencies! It’s nice to see these guys jumping through hoops to show that they have responsible policies in the hopes that they won’t get heavily regulated by local governments in an international setting, giving them a huge disadvantage to other companies in the same – but unregulated – space.

Lightwear: Introducing Magic Leap’s $1.9 Billion Dollar Invstement Mixed Reality Goggles

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Magic Leap today revealed a mixed reality headset that it believes reinvents the way people will interact with computers and reality. Unlike the opaque diver’s masks of virtual reality – which replace the real world with a virtual one – Magic Leap’s device, called Lightwear, resembles goggles, which you can see through as if you’re wearing a special pair of glasses. The goggles are tethered to a powerful pocket-sized computer, called the Lightpack, and can inject life-like moving and reactive people, robots, spaceships – anything – into a person’s view of the real world.
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Where the 1830s technology uses two flat images, virtual reality essentially uses two screens. Abovitz thought there had to be a better way. He was uninterested in improving virtual reality; instead, he sought a better way to create images that can be placed into a person’s view of the real world. In short, he was interested in mixed reality.
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The first was something called the analog light field signal. The light field is essentially all of the light bouncing off all of the objects in a world. When you take a picture, you’re capturing a very thin slice of that light field. The eye, however, sees much more of that light field, allowing a person to perceive depth, movement and a lot of other visual subtleties. The other thing that Abovitz wanted to figure out was how that light field signal makes its way into your brain through the eye and into the visual cortex.“The world you perceive is actually built in your visual cortex,” he says. “The idea is that your visual cortex and a good part of the brain is like a rendering engine and that the world you see outside is being rendered by roughly a 100 trillion neural-connections.”
[…]
technology didn’t need to capture the entirety of the light field and recreate it; it just needed to grab the right bits of that light field and feed it to the visual cortex through the eye. Abovitz calls it a system engineering view of the brain. “Our thought was, if we could figure out this signal and or approximate it, maybe it would be really cool to encode that into a wafer,” he says. “That we could make a small wafer that could emit the digital light field signal back through the front again. That was the key idea.”

Suddenly, Abovitz went from trying to solve the problem to needing to engineer the solution. He was sure if they could create a chip that would deliver the right parts of a light field to the brain, he could trick it into thinking it was seeing real things that weren’t there. The realization meant that they were trying to get rid of the display and just use what humans already have. “There were two core zen ideas: The no-display-is-the-best-display and what’s-outside-is-actually-inside. And they turned out to be, at least from what we’ve seen so far, completely true. Everything you think is outside of you is completely rendered internally by you, co-created by you plus the analog light field signal.
[…]
The light field photonics, which can line up a fake reality in your natural light real one, may be the most obvious of the innovations on display, but there’s much more. The visual perception system is actively tracking the world you’re moving through, noting things like flat surfaces, walls, objects. The result is a headset that sees what you do, and that can then have its creations behave appropriately, whether that means hanging a mixed reality monitor next to your real one, or making sure the floating fish in your living room don’t drift through a couch. That room mapping is also used to keep track of the things you place in your world so they’re there waiting for you when you come back. Line up six monitors above your desk and go to sleep, the next day they’ll be exactly where you left them.

Source: Lightwear: Introducing Magic Leap’s Mixed Reality Goggles – Rolling Stone



Well I don’t like the design language much, but it does look a lot better (and lighter!) than the VR stuff out there

Bitcoin exchange Youbit shuts after second hack attack – BBC News

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A crypto-currency exchange in South Korea is shutting down after it was hacked for the second time in less than eight months.

Youbit, which lets people buy and sell bitcoins and other virtual currencies, has filed for bankruptcy after losing 17% of its assets in the cyber-attack.

It did not disclose how much the assets were worth at the time of the attack.

In April, Youbit, formerly called Yapizon, lost 4,000 bitcoins now worth $73m (£55m) to cyberthieves.

Source: Bitcoin exchange Youbit shuts after second hack attack – BBC News

Yup, it’s the wild west out there with those Bitcoins!

Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers

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Verizon is among dozens of the nation’s leading employers — including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target and Facebook itself — that placed recruitment ads limited to particular age groups, an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times has found.

The ability of advertisers to deliver their message to the precise audience most likely to respond is the cornerstone of Facebook’s business model. But using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers.

Several experts questioned whether the practice is in keeping with the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which prohibits bias against people 40 or older in hiring or employment. Many jurisdictions make it a crime to “aid” or “abet” age discrimination, a provision that could apply to companies like Facebook that distribute job ads.

“It’s blatantly unlawful,” said Debra Katz, a Washington employment lawyer who represents victims of discrimination.

Facebook defended the practice. “Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work,” said Rob Goldman, a Facebook vice president.

Source: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older… — ProPublica

The statement by Rob Goldman defies belief! Being ageist is good for people of all ages? No, Rob, being ageist is only good for those people who’s age you are targetting.

Windows 10 Facial Recognition Feature Can Be Bypassed with a low res Photo

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You can bypass Windows Hello with a low-res printed photoIn a report published yesterday, German pen-testing company SySS GmbH says it discovered that Windows Hello is vulnerable to the simplest and most common attack against facial recognition biometrics software — the doomsday scenario of using a printed photo of the device’s owner.Researchers say that by using a laser color printout of a low-resolution (340×340 pixels) photo of the device owner’s face, modified to the near IR spectrum, they were able to unlock several Windows devices where Windows Hello had been previously activated.The attack worked even if the “enhanced anti-spoofing” feature had been enabled in the Windows Hello settings panel, albeit for these attacks SySS researchers said they needed a photo of a higher resolution of 480×480 pixels (which in reality is still a low-resolution photo).

Source: Windows 10 Facial Recognition Feature Can Be Bypassed with a Photo

Hackers Used DC Police Surveillance System to Distribute Ransomware

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A Romanian man and woman are accused of hacking into the outdoor surveillance system deployed by Washington DC police, which they used to distribute ransomware.The two suspects are named Mihai Alexandru Isvanca and Eveline Cismaru, Romanian nationals, both arrested last week by Romanian authorities part of Operation Bakovia that culminated with the arrest of five suspects on charges of distributing email spam laced with the CTB-Locker and Cerber ransomware strains.Hackers breached 123 of 187 of Washington police CCTV camerasAccording to an affidavit filed by the US Secret Service, the two are accused of hacking into 123 of the 187 security cameras deployed part of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPDC) closed-circuit TV system that Washington police uses to keep an eye on public spaces across the city.
[…]
The two supposedly hacked MPDC cameras and computers on January 9. Washington police discovered the intrusion on January 12 and shut down the system for four days until January 15 to clean and secure their network.

The shutdown of Washington, DC’s entire CCTV system took place two weeks ahead of President Trump’s inauguration ceremony and caused a stir in US media, as many initially pinned it on foreign nation-state hackers.

Source: Hackers Used DC Police Surveillance System to Distribute Cerber Ransomware

Nissan Canada Finance hacked, up to 1.1m Canucks exposed

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Nissan Canada’s vehicle-financing wing has been hacked, putting personal information on as many as 1.13 million customers in the hands of miscreants.
[…]
According to Nissan Canada, the exposed data includes at least customer names, addresses, vehicle makes and models, vehicle identification numbers (VINs), credit scores, loan amounts and monthly payment figures.

“We are still investigating precisely what personal information has been impacted,” the biz said, adding that it was working with the cops and infosec experts to work out what the heck happened. “At this time, there is no indication that customers who financed vehicles outside of Canada are affected.”

Nissan Canada admitted it discovered on Monday, December 11, that it had been hacked, and alerted the world, er, 10 days later.

Source: Braking news: Nissan Canada hacked, up to 1.1m Canucks exposed • The Register

 Gemini • Psion come alive again running linux and android

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Gemini brings the Psion Series 5 design into the 21st century. Psion’s designer, Martin Riddiford of Therefore, has devised a new keyboard and hinge, which allows the machine to spring open and snap shut, just like Psions used to, and stand firmly on a flat surface without keeling over. Inside is a full phone board, MediaTek’s 10-core chip.It dual boots between Android – yes, with full Google Play Services – and Linux.

Source: How’s this for a stocking filler next year? El Reg catches up with Gemini • The Register

Yes, your old iPhone is slowing down: iOS hits brakes on CPUs as batteries wear out

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It turns out Apple’s mobile operating system includes a throttling mechanism for devices with weary batteries, designed to limit CPU utilization in order to prevent peak power demands that the battery is no longer capable of providing. In other words, the OS secretly stalls the CPU on older iPhones to stop them rapidly draining their aging batteries to zero.When the CPU runs slower, though, so do the apps on the device, and some of the iPhone users who experienced this first hand have been wondering why.

Source: Yes, your old iPhone is slowing down: iOS hits brakes on CPUs as batteries wear out • The Register

Chinese Adups Backdoor Still Active on Many Android Devices

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Back in mid-November 2016, US cyber-security firm Kryptowire revealed it discovered that firmware code created by a Chinese company called Adups was collecting vasts amount of user information and sending it to servers located in China.According to Kryptowire, the backdoor code was collecting SMS messages, call history, address books, app lists, phone hardware identifiers, but it was also capable of installing new apps or updating existing ones.
[…]
At the time, experts believed Adups shipped out the backdoored component to other phone vendors and the component eventually made its way inside over 700 million devices, most of which were low-budget Android phones, and in some cases, some Android Barnes & Noble NOOK tablets.

Following the revelations, many online stores reacted by refusing to sell phone models known to be vulnerable. With pressure from smartphone manufacturers and even the DHS, Adups eventually shipped out a version of the FOTA component without the backdoor and data collection code, even if in a presentation at the Black Hat 2017 security conference held in Las Vegas in August, Kryptowire researchers said that some devices were still sending data to the Adups servers.
[…]
But Malwarebytes says it found another Adups component doing bad things. Just like the previous Adups backdoor, this app is also unremovable, and users can’t disable it either.

This second component is found on phones under two names, such as com.adups.fota.sysoper or com.fw.upgrade.sysoper, which appear in the phone’s app list with the name UpgradeSys (FWUpgradeProvider.apk).

The good news is that this one does not collect user data, but instead only includes the ability “to install and/or update apps without a user’s knowledge or consent,” according to Nathan Collier, Senior Malware Intelligence Analyst.
[…]
The only way to remove the suspicious component is if users root their devices, something that many phone manufacturers recommend against, as it could open smartphones to even more dangerous threats

Source: Chinese Backdoor Still Active on Many Android Devices

Ghostery, uBlock, Privacy Badger lead the anti-tracking browser extensions

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A group of researchers in France and Japan say RequestPolicyContinued and NoScript have the toughest policies, while Ghostery and uBlock Origin offer good blocking performance and a better user experience.

The study also gave a nod to the EFF’s Privacy Badger, which uses heuristics rather than block lists, but once trained is nearly as good as Ghostery or uBlock, demonstrating that its heuristics are reliable.

Source: Ghostery, uBlock lead the anti-track pack

Another AI attack, this time against ‘black box’ machine learning

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Unlike adversarial models that attack AIs “from the inside”, attacks developed for black boxes could be used against closed system like autonomous cars, security (facial recognition, for example), or speech recognition (Alexa or Cortana).The tool, called Foolbox, is currently under review for presentation at next year’s International Conference on Learning Representations (kicking off at the end of April).Wieland Brendel, Jonas Rauber and Matthias Bethge of the Eberhard Karls University Tubingen, Germany explained at arXiv that Foolbox is a “decision-based” attack called a boundary attack which “starts from a large adversarial perturbation and then seeks to reduce the perturbation while staying adversarial”.

“Its basic operating principle – starting from a large perturbation and successively reducing it – inverts the logic of essentially all previous adversarial attacks. Besides being surprisingly simple, the boundary attack is also extremely flexible”, they wrote.

For example, “transfer-based attacks” have to be tested against the same training data as the models they’re attacking, and need “cumbersome substitute models”.

Gradient-based attacks, the paper claimed, also need detailed knowledge about the target model, while score-based attacks need access to the target model’s confidence scores.

The boundary attack, the paper said, only needs to see the final decision of a machine learning model – the class label it applies to an input, for example, or in a speech recognition model, the transcribed sentence.

Source: Another AI attack, this time against ‘black box’ machine learning • The Register

Older Adults’ Forgetfulness Tied To non syncing Brain Rhythms In Sleep

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During deep sleep, older people have less coordination between two brain waves that are important to saving new memories, a team reports in the journal Neuron.

To find out, Walker and a team of scientists had 20 young adults learn 120 pairs of words. “Then we put electrodes on their head and we had them sleep,” he says.

The electrodes let researchers monitor the electrical waves produced by the brain during deep sleep. They focused on the interaction between slow waves, which occur every second or so, and faster waves called sleep spindles, which occur more than 12 times a second.

The next morning the volunteers took a test to see how many word pairs they could still remember. And it turned out their performance was determined by how well their slow waves and spindles had synchronized during deep sleep.

Next, the team repeated the experiment with 32 people in their 60s and 70s. Their brain waves were less synchronized during deep sleep. They also remembered fewer word pairs the next morning.

And, just like with young people, performance on the memory test was determined by how well their brain waves kept the beat, says Randolph Helfrich, an author of the new study and a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.

The team also found a likely reason for the lack of coordination associated with aging: atrophy of an area of the brain involved in producing deep sleep. People with more atrophy had less rhythm in the brain, Walker says.

But the study also suggests that it’s possible to improve an impaired memory by re-synchronizing brain rhythms during sleep.

One way to do this would be by applying electrical or magnetic pulses through the scalp. “The idea is to boost those brain waves and bring them back together,” Helfrich says.

Walker already has plans to test this approach to synchronizing brain waves.

Source: Older Adults’ Forgetfulness Tied To Faulty Brain Rhythms In Sleep : Shots – Health News : NPR

Seagate’s lightbulb moment: Make read-write heads operate independently

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Seagate is increasing IO performance in disk drives by separating read-write heads into two separate sets which can operate independently and in parallel.The heads are positioned at one end of actuator arms which rotate around a post at their other end to move the heads across the platter surfaces. Thus, with an eight-platter drive, each read-write head is positioned above the same cylindrical track on each platter and reads or writes to and from the same disk blocks on each platter’s surface.Seagate’s Multi Actuator technology divides these eight heads into two sets of four, and they can move independently of each other. An animated graphic here shows them in operation.

Source: Seagate’s lightbulb moment: Make read-write heads operate independently • The Register

KLM uses AI to answer questions on social media

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olgens KLM worden wekelijks 30.000 gesprekken gevoerd door de 250 socialmediamedewerkers. De luchtvaartmaatschappij wordt wekelijks ruim 130.000 keer genoemd op social media. Gemiddeld bestaat een gesprek tussen KLM en een klant uit vijf tot zes vragen en antwoorden. De veelgestelde vragen die met behulp van kunstmatige intelligentie automatisch kunnen worden beantwoord, worden meestal aan het begin van het gesprek gesteld.

Source: KLM laat kunstmatige intelligentie direct vragen beantwoorden op social – Emerce

China’s big brother: how artificial intelligence is catching criminals and advancing health care

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“Our machines can very easily recognise you among at least 2 billion people in a matter of seconds,” says chief executive and Yitu co-founder Zhu Long, “which would have been unbelievable just three years ago.” Yitu’s Dragonfly Eye generic portrait platform already has 1.8 billion photographs to work with: those logged in the national database and you, if you have visited China recently. Yitu will not say whether Hong Kong identity card holders have been logged in the government’s database, for which the company provides navigation software and algor­ithms, but 320 million of the photos have come from China’s borders, including ports and airports, where pictures are taken of everyone who enters and leaves the country.

According to Yitu, its platform is also in service with more than 20 provincial public security departments, and is used as part of more than 150 municipal public security systems across the country, and Dragonfly Eye has already proved its worth. On its very first day of operation on the Shanghai Metro, in January, the system identified a wanted man when he entered a station. After matching his face against the database, Dragonfly Eye sent his photo to a policeman, who made an arrest. In the following three months, 567 suspected lawbreakers were caught on the city’s underground network.
[…]
“Chinese authorities are collecting and centralising ever more information about hundreds of millions of ordinary people, identifying persons who deviate from what they determine to be ‘normal thought’ and then surveilling them,” says Sophie Richardson, China director at HRW. The activist calls on Beijing to cease the collection of big data “until China has meaningful privacy rights and an accountable police force”.

Source: China’s big brother: how artificial intelligence is catching criminals and advancing health care | Post Magazine | South China Morning Post

AI helps find planets in other solar systems

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The neural network is trained on 15,000 signals from the Kepler dataset that have been previously verified as planets or non-planets. A smaller test set with new, unseen data was fed to the neural network and it correctly identified true planets from false positives to an accuracy of about 96 per cent.The researchers then applied this model to weaker signals from 670 star systems, where scientists had already found multiple known planets to try and find any that might have been missed.Vanderburg said the got lots of false positives of planets, but also more potential real ones too. “It’s like sifting through rocks to find jewels. If you have a finer sieve then you will catch more rocks but you might catch more jewels, as well,” he said.

Source: Sigh. It’s not quite Star Trek’s Data, but it’ll do: AI helps boffins clock second Solar System • The Register

Tripwire detects hacks companies haven’t told us about by creating accounts with unique emails on thousands of servers. If the email account is accessed, the site has been breached. No-one knows or cares that there has been a breach in vast majority of cases.

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a prototype tool created by researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) aims to bring greater transparency to such breaches. The system, called Tripwire, detects websites that were hacked, as is detailed in this study.

Here’s here how it works: To detect breaches, the researchers created a bot that automatically registered accounts on thousands of websites. Each of those accounts shared a password with a unique associated email address. Working with a “major email provider,” the researchers were then notified if there was a successful login on any of the email accounts. Since the email accounts were created for the study, any login was assumed to be the result of a security breach on the website associated with that account.

“While Tripwire can’t catch every data breach, it essentially has no false positives—everything it detects definitely corresponds to a data breach,” Joe DeBlasio, a Ph.D student of Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD and an author on the research paper, told Gizmodo. “Tripwire triggering means that an attacker had access to data that wasn’t shared publicly.”

As part of the study, the researchers monitored over 2,300 sites from January 2015 through February of this year, and found that 19 of the sites (or one percent) had been compromised. The study notes that the system found “both plaintext and hashed-password breaches”—if your password is hashed, it is indecipherable to a hacker. Arguably the most damning finding of the study was that, at the time it was published, all but one of the compromised websites failed to notify their users that they had suffered a breach. Only one site told researchers they would force a password reset.

Source: Researchers Made a Clever Tool to Detect Hacks Companies Haven’t Told Users About

Windows 10 Password Manager Keeper allows sites to steal any password.

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A Google security researcher has found and helped patch a severe vulnerability in Keeper, a password manager application that Microsoft has been bundling with some Windows 10 distributions this year.”I’ve heard of Keeper, I remember filing a bug a while ago about how they were injecting privileged UI into pages,” said Tavis Ormandy, the Google security researcher who discovered the recent vulnerability.”I checked and, they’re doing the same thing again with this version,” the expert added, referring to the Keeper app bundled with some Windows 10 versions.”I think I’m being generous considering this a new issue that qualifies for a ninety day disclosure, as I literally just changed the selectors and the same attack works. Nevertheless, this is a complete compromise of Keeper security, allowing any website to steal any password,” Ormandy added.To prove his point, the expert also created a demo page where Keeper users can see the vulnerability in action.

Source: Windows 10 Bundles a Password Manager. Password Manager Bundles a Security Flaw

“Suspicious” event routes traffic for big-name sites through Russia

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According to a blog post published Wednesday by Internet monitoring service BGPMon, the hijack lasted a total of six minutes and affected 80 separate address blocks. It started at 4:43 UTC and continued for three minutes. A second hijacking occurred at 7:07 UTC and also lasted three minutes. Meanwhile, a second monitoring service, Qrator Labs, said the event lasted for two hours, although the number of hijacked address blocks varied from 40 to 80 during that time.

While BGP rerouting events are often the result of human error rather than malicious intent, BGPMon researchers said several things made Wednesday’s incident “suspicious.” First, the rerouted traffic belonged to some of the most sensitive companies, which—besides Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft—also included Twitch, NTT Communications, and Riot Games. Besides the cherrypicked targets, hijacked IP addresses were broken up into smaller, more specific blocks than those announced by affected companies, an indication the rerouting was “intentional.”

Source: “Suspicious” event routes traffic for big-name sites through Russia | Ars Technica

Looking through walls, now easier than ever • The Register

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In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Optica, Duke professors Daniel Marks and David R. Smith, and postdoctoral researcher Okan Yurduseven describe a method for through-wall imaging (TWI) that compensates for the varied distortion produced by different wall materials, to allow details to be captured more accurately.

Source: Looking through walls, now easier than ever • The Register

How to Track a Cellphone Without GPS—or Consent

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Using only data that can be legally collected by an app developer without the consent of a cellphone’s owner, researchers have been able to produce a privacy attack that can accurately pinpoint a user’s location and trajectory without accessing the device’s Global Position System—GPS. And while the ramifications of this ability falling into the wrong hands are distressing, the way in which they pulled it off is nothing short of genius.
[…]
In fact, all you really need is your phone’s internal compass, an air pressure reading, a few free-to-download maps, and a weather report.

Your cellphone comes equipped with an amazing array of compact sensors that are more or less collecting information about your environment at all time. An accelerometer can tell how fast you’re moving; a magnetometer can detect your orientation in relation to true north; and a barometer can measure the air pressure in your surrounding environment. You phone also freely offers up a slew of non-sensory data such as your device’s IP address, timezone, and network status (whether you’re connected to Wi-Fi or a cellular network.)

All of this data can be accessed by any app you download without the type of permissions required to access your contact lists, photos, or GPS. Combined with publicly available information, such as weather reports, airport specification databases, and transport timetables, this data is enough to accurately pinpoint your location—regardless of whether you’re walking, traveling by plane, train, or automobile.
[…]
To track a user, you first need to determine what kind of activity they’re performing. It’s easy enough to tell if a person is walking versus riding in a car, speed being the discriminant factor; but also, when you’re walking you tend to move in one direction, while your phone is held in a variety of different positions. In a car, you make sudden stops (when you brake) and specific types of turns—around 90 degrees—that can be detected using your phone’s magnetometer. People who travel by plane will rapidly change time zones; the air pressure on a plane also changes erratically, which can be detected by a cellphone’s barometer. When you ride a train, you tend to accelerate in a direction that doesn’t significantly change. In other words, determining your mode of travel is relatively simple.

The fact that your cellphone offers up your time zone as well as the last IP address you were connected to really narrows things down—geolocating IP addresses is very easy to do and can at least reveal the last city you were in—but to determine your exact location, with GPS-like precision, a wealth of publicly-available data is needed. To estimate your elevation—i.e., how far you are above sea level—PinMe gathers air pressure data provided freely by the Weather Channel and compares it to the reading on your cellphone’s barometer. Google Maps and open-source data offered by US Geological Survey Maps also provide comprehensive data regarding changes in elevation across the Earth’s surface. And we’re talking about minor differences in elevation from one street corner to the next.

Upon detecting a user’s activity (flying, walking, etc.) the PinMe app uses one of four algorithms to begin estimating a user’s location, narrowing down the possibilities until its error rate drops to zero, according to the peer-reviewed research. Let’s say, the app decides you’re traveling by car. It knows your elevation, it knows your timezone, and if you haven’t left the city you’re in since you last connected to Wi-Fi, you’re pretty much borked.

With access to publicly available maps and weather reports, and a phone’s barometer and magnetometer (which provides a heading), it’s only a matter of turns. When PinMe detected one of the researchers driving in Philadelphia during a test-run, for example, the researcher only had to make 12 turns before the app knew exactly where they were in the city. With each turn, the number of possible locations of the vehicles dwindles. “[A]s the number of turns increases, PinMe collects more information about the user’s environment, and as a result it is more likely to find a unique driving path on the map,” the researchers wrote.

Source: How to Track a Cellphone Without GPS—or Consent

Google Taught an AI to Make Sense of the Human Genome

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This week, Google released a tool called DeepVariant that uses deep learning to piece together a person’s genome and more accurately identify mutations in a DNA sequence.Built on the back of the same technology that allows Google to identify whether a photo is of a cat or dog, DeepVariant solves an important problem in the world of DNA analysis. Modern DNA sequencers perform what’s known as high-throughput sequencing, returning not one long read out of a full DNA sequence but short snippets that overlap. Those snippets are then compared against another genome to help piece it together and identify variations. But the technology is error-prone, and it can be difficult for scientists to distinguish between those errors and small mutations. And small mutation matter. They could provide significant insight into, say, the root cause of a disease. Distinguishing which base pairs are the result of error and which are for real is called “variant calling.”

Source: Google Taught an AI to Make Sense of the Human Genome