Monthly Archives: February 2019

Nanomachines taught to fight cancer

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Scientists from ITMO in collaboration with international colleagues have proposed new DNA-based nanomachines that can be used for gene therapy for cancer. This new invention can greatly contribute to more effective and selective treatment of oncological diseases. The results were published in Angewandte Chemie.

Gene therapy is considered one of the promising ways of treating oncological diseases, even though the current approaches are far from perfect. Oftentimes, the agents fail to discern malignant from healthy ones, and are bad at interacting with folded RNA targets.

In order to solve this issue, scientists, including a Russian team from ITMO University headed by professor Dmitry Kolpashchikov, proposed special nanomachines. They sought to develop particular molecules, deoxyribozymes, which can interact with targeted RNA, bind them, unfold and cleave. According to the idea, these nanomachines have to recognize DNA oncomarkers and form complexes that can break down messenger RNA of vital with high selectivity, which will then result in apoptotic death of malignant cells.

The researchers tested the efficiency of the new machines in a model experiment and learned that they can cleave folded RNA molecules better than the original deoxyribozymes. They showed that the design of the nanomachine makes it possible to break down targeted RNA in the presence of a DNA oncomarker only, and the use of RNA-unfolding arms provides for better efficiency. The scientists also learned that the nanomachine can inhibit the growth of , though cellular experiments didn’t show high specificity. The researchers associate this result with a possibly poor choice of the RNA target and a low stability of DNA structures in the cell.

The new approach differs fundamentally from the ones used before. The existing agents are aimed at suppressing the expression of oncological markers. In the research in question, the scientists focused on the messenger RNA of vital genes, and the oncological marker was used as an activator. This makes it possible to apply the DNA nanomachine in treating any kind of cancer by using new DNA oncomarkers for activating the breakdown of targeted molecules.

The opens new ways of treating oncological diseases. Still, there are many experiments to be conducted before it can be applied in therapy.

“For now, we are trying to introduce new functional elements in the framework that will contribute to a more effective recognition of oncological markers, and are also optimizing the DNA nanomachine for various RNA targets. In order to improve the efficiency and selectiveness of our constructions in cellular conditions, we are selecting new RNA targets and studying the stability of DNA machines in cells, which we plan to improve with the help of already existing chemical modifications,” comments Daria Nedorezova, Master’s student at ITMO University.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-nanomachines-taught-cancer.html#jCp

Source: Nanomachines taught to fight cancer

Ster uses Adscan AI to allow you to test your TV advert (dutch)

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AdScan biedt elke adverteerder een snelle gratis pre-test om in kaart te brengen welke elementen beter of minder scoren en daarmee effect hebben op de ontvangst en het effect van die specifieke commercial.

AdScan is een machine learning-tool die op basis van de inhoud van reclames een voorspelling kan doen over hoe een panel van honderd mensen een reclame beoordeelt. AdScan combineert daarbij historische paneldata, computerpatronen en slimme algoritmes om zo tot een analyse te komen.

De reclamewaarderingstool levert binnen 20 minuten een adviesrapport dat kan bijdragen aan het succes van een campagne. AdScan stelt dan vast of een reclame lager, gemiddeld of hoger dan de benchmark scoort en welke elementen je aan kunt passen om tot een hogere score te komen.

Source: Ster zet machine learning in voor onderzoeksinstrument – Emerce

Many popular iPhone apps secretly record your screen without asking

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Many major companies, like Air Canada, Hollister and Expedia, are recording every tap and swipe you make on their iPhone apps. In most cases you won’t even realize it. And they don’t need to ask for permission.

You can assume that most apps are collecting data on you. Some even monetize your data without your knowledge. But TechCrunch has found several popular iPhone apps, from hoteliers, travel sites, airlines, cell phone carriers, banks and financiers, that don’t ask or make it clear — if at all — that they know exactly how you’re using their apps.

Worse, even though these apps are meant to mask certain fields, some inadvertently expose sensitive data.

Apps like Abercrombie & Fitch, Hotels.com and Singapore Airlines also use Glassbox, a customer experience analytics firm, one of a handful of companies that allows developers to embed “session replay” technology into their apps. These session replays let app developers record the screen and play them back to see how its users interacted with the app to figure out if something didn’t work or if there was an error. Every tap, button push and keyboard entry is recorded — effectively screenshotted — and sent back to the app developers.

Or, as Glassbox said in a recent tweet: “Imagine if your website or mobile app could see exactly what your customers do in real time, and why they did it?”

Source: Many popular iPhone apps secretly record your screen without asking | TechCrunch

Biohackers Encoded Malware in a Strand of DNA

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In new research they plan to present at the USENIX Security conference on Thursday, a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer. While that attack is far from practical for any real spy or criminal, it’s one the researchers argue could become more likely over time, as DNA sequencing becomes more commonplace, powerful, and performed by third-party services on sensitive computer systems. And, perhaps more to the point for the cybersecurity community, it also represents an impressive, sci-fi feat of sheer hacker ingenuity.

Source: Biohackers Encoded Malware in a Strand of DNA

Stock market shows greater reaction to forecasts by analysts with favorable surnames

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Financial analysts whose surnames are perceived as favourable elicit stronger market reactions to their earnings forecasts, new research from Cass Business School has found.

The researchers found that following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, market reactions weakened for forecasts from analysts with Middle Eastern surnames. They also found that following the French and German governments’ opposition to the US-led Iraq War, the US market reactions weakened for analysts with French or German surnames. This effect was stronger in firms with lower institutional ownership and for analysts with non-American first names.

The researchers measured surname favourability using the US historical immigration records to identify countries of origin associated with a particular surname and the Gallup survey data on Americans’ favourability toward foreign countries.

Dr. Jay Jung, assistant professor of accounting at Cass Business School, said surname favourability was not associated with quality such as accuracy, bias, and timeliness but rather it suggested the investors made biased judgements based on their perception of analysts’ .

“Our finding is consistent with the prediction based on motivated reasoning that people have a natural desire to draw conclusions that they are motivated to reach. If investors have favourable views toward an analyst due to his or her surname, they are motivated to assess the analyst’s forecasts as being more credible or of higher quality because it reduces the unpleasant inconsistency between their attitudes and judgments,” said Dr. Jung.

Dr. Jung said surname favourability did have a complementary effect on analysts’ career outcomes, helping analysts prosper in their profession.

“We found that, conditional on good forecasting performance, having a favourable surname made it more likely for an analyst to get elected as an All-Star analyst and survive in the profession when his or her brokerage house went out of business or went through a M&A (mergers and acquisition) process,” he adds.

Dr. Jung said surname favourability also had impact on price drifts in the .

“The speed at which stock prices reacted to an analyst’s forecasts was faster when the analyst had a favourable surname. We found significantly smaller delayed price responses.”

Dr. Jung said the research demonstrated that investors’ perception of an analyst’ surname not only influences their information processing in capital markets but also affects market efficiency and leads to different labour market consequences for finance professionals.

“It is quite interesting to see how the favorability of a surname, unrelated to the or quality of an analyst’s forecast, influences investor reaction and price anomalies in the capital market.”

Explore further: Marriage name game: What kind of guy would take his wife’s last name?

More information: The research paper ‘An Analyst by Any Other Surname: Surname Favorability and Market Reaction to Analyst Forecasts’ is conditionally accepted for publication in the Journal of Accounting and Economics.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-stock-greater-reaction-analysts-favorable.html#jCp

Source: Stock market shows greater reaction to forecasts by analysts with favorable surnames

Visualizing the Crime Rate Perception Gap

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The Crime Rate Perception Gap

The Crime Rate Perception Gap

There’s a persistent belief across America that crime is on the rise.

Since the late 1980s, Gallup has been polling people on their perception of crime in the United States, and consistently, the majority of respondents indicate that they see crime as becoming more prevalent. As well, a recent poll showed that more than two-thirds of Americans feel that today’s youth are less safe from crime and harm than the previous generation.

Even the highest ranking members of the government have been suggesting that the country is in the throes of a crime wave.

We have a crime problem. […] this is a dangerous permanent trend that places the health and safety of the American people at risk.

— Jeff Sessions, Former Attorney General

Is crime actually more prevalent in society? Today’s graphic, amalgamating crime rate data from the FBI, shows a very different reality.

Data vs Perception

In the early ’90s, crime in the U.S. was an undeniable concern – particularly in struggling urban centers. The country’s murder rate was nearly double what it is today, and statistics for all types of crime were through the roof.

Since that era, crime rates in the United States have undergone a remarkably steady decline, but public perception has been slow to catch up. In a 2016 survey, 57% of registered voters said crime in the U.S. had gotten worse since 2008, despite crime rates declining by double-digit percentages during that time period.

There are many theories as to why crime rates took such a dramatic U-turn, and while that matter is still a subject for debate, there’s clear data on who is and isn’t being arrested.

Are Millennials Killing Crime?

Media outlets have accused millennials of the killing off everything from department stores to commuting by car, but there’s another behavior this generation is eschewing as well – criminality.

Compared to previous generations, people under the age of 39 are simply being arrested in smaller numbers. In fact, much of the decline in overall crime can be attributed to people in this younger age bracket. In contrast, the arrest rate for older Americans actually rose slightly.

Arrests by Age Group

There’s no telling whether the overall trend will continue.

In fact, the most recent data shows that the murder rate has ticked up ever-so-slightly in recent years, while violent and property crimes continue to be on the decline.

A Global Perspective

Perceptions of increasing criminality are echoed in many other developed economies as well. From Italy to South Korea, the prevailing sentiment is that youth are living in a society that is less safe than in previous generations.

global crime perceptions

As the poll above demonstrates, perception gaps exist in somewhat unexpected places.

In Sweden, where violent crime is actually increasing, 53% of people believe that crime will be worse for today’s youth. Contrast that with Australia, where crime rates have declined in a similar pattern as in the United States – yet, more than two-thirds of Aussie respondents believe that crime will be worse for today’s youth.

One significant counterpoint to this trend is China, where respondents felt that crime was less severe today than in the past.

Source: Visualizing the Crime Rate Perception Gap

The “Do Not Track” Setting Doesn’t Stop You from Being Tracked – by Google, Facebook and Twitter, among many more

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Most browsers have a “Do Not Track” (DNT) setting that sends “a special signal to websites, analytics companies, ad networks, plug in providers, and other web services you encounter while browsing, to stop tracking your activity.” Sounds good, right? Sadly, it’s not effective. That’s because this Do Not Track setting is only a voluntary signal sent to websites, which websites don’t have to respect 😧.

Screenshot showing the Do Not Track setting in the Chrome browser

Nevertheless, a hefty portion of users across many browsers use the Do Not Track setting. While DNT is disabled by default in most major web browsers, in a survey we conducted of 503 U.S. adults in Nov 2018, 23.1% (±3.7) of respondents have consciously enabled the DNT setting on their desktop browsers. (Note: Apple is in the process of removing the DNT setting from Safari.)

Graph showing survey responses about the current status of the Do Not Track setting in respondent's primary desktop browser

We also looked at DNT usage on DuckDuckGo (across desktop and mobile browsers), finding that 24.4% of DuckDuckGo requests during a one day period came from browsers with the Do Not Track setting enabled. This is within the margin of error from the survey, thus lending more credibility to its results.

[…]

It can be alarming to realize that Do Not Track is about as foolproof as putting a sign on your front lawn that says “Please, don’t look into my house” while all of your blinds remain open. In fact, most major tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, do not respect the Do Not Track setting when you visit and use their sites – a fact of which 77.3% (±3.6) of U.S. adults overall weren’t aware.

There is simply a huge discrepancy between the name of the setting and what it actually does. It’s inherently misleading. When educated about the true function and limitation of the DNT setting, 75.5% (±3.8) of U.S. adults say it’s “important” or “very important” that these companies “respect the Do Not Track signal when it is enabled.” So, in shocking news, when people say they don’t want to be tracked, they really don’t want to be tracked.

Pie chart showing 75.5 percent of respondents believe it's important that major tech companies respect the Do Not Track signal.

As a matter of fact, 71.9% (±3.9) of U.S. adults “somewhat favor” or “strongly favor” a federal regulation requiring companies to respect the Do Not Track signal.

Pie chart showing 71.9 percent of respondents would favor federal regulation requiring companies and their websites to respect the Do Not Track signal when enabled.

We agree and hope that governments will focus this year on efforts to enforce adherence to the Do Not Track setting when users enable it. As we’ve seen here and in our private browsing research, many people seek the most readily available (though often, unfortunately, ineffective) methods to protect their privacy.

Source: The “Do Not Track” Setting Doesn’t Stop You from Being Tracked

Zooniverse – crowd sourced classification of real scientific questions

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The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. This research is made possible by volunteers — hundreds of thousands of people around the world who come together to assist professional researchers. Our goal is to enable research that would not be possible, or practical, otherwise. Zooniverse research results in new discoveries, datasets useful to the wider research community, and many publications.

At the Zooniverse, anyone can be a researcher

You don’t need any specialised background, training, or expertise to participate in any Zooniverse projects. We make it easy for anyone to contribute to real academic research, on their own computer, at their own convenience.

You’ll be able to study authentic objects of interest gathered by researchers, like images of faraway galaxies, historical records and diaries, or videos of animals in their natural habitats. By answering simple questions about them, you’ll help contribute to our understanding of our world, our history, our Universe, and more.

With our wide-ranging and ever-expanding suite of projects, covering many disciplines and topics across the sciences and humanities, there’s a place for anyone and everyone to explore, learn and have fun in the Zooniverse. To volunteer with us, just go to the Projects page, choose one you like the look of, and get started.

Source: About — Zooniverse

The Milky Way is warped, not a flat disc

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The Milky Way galaxy’s disk of stars is anything but stable and flat. Instead, it becomes increasingly warped and twisted far away from the Milky Way’s center, according to astronomers from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).

From a great distance, the galaxy would look like a thin disk of stars that orbit once every few hundred million years around its central region, where hundreds of billions of stars, together with a huge mass of dark matter, provide the gravitational ‘glue’ to hold it all together.

But the pull of gravity becomes weaker far away from the Milky Way’s inner regions. In the galaxy’s far outer disk, the making up most of the Milky Way’s gas disk are no longer confined to a thin plane, but they give the disk an S-like warped appearance.

“It is notoriously difficult to determine distances from the sun to parts of the Milky Way’s outer gas disk without having a clear idea of what that disk actually looks like,” says Dr. Chen Xiaodian, a researcher at NAOC and lead author of the article published in Nature Astronomy on Feb. 4.

“However, we recently published a new catalogue of well-behaved known as classical Cepheids, for which distances as accurate as 3 to 5 percent can be determined.” That database allowed the team to develop the first accurate three-dimensional picture of the Milky Way out to its far outer regions.

The Milky Way in a twist
Top: 3D distribution of the classical Cepheids in the Milky Way’s warped disk. Bottom: Precession of the warp’s line of nodes with Galactocentric radius. Credit: CHEN Xiaodian

Classical Cepheids are that are some four to 20 times as massive as the sun and up to 100,000 times as bright. Such high imply that they live fast and die young, burning through their nuclear fuel very quickly, sometimes in only a few million years. They show day- to month-long pulsations, which are observed as changes in their brightness. Combined with a Cepheid’s observed brightness, its pulsation period can be used to obtain a highly reliable distance.

“Somewhat to our surprise, we found that in 3-D, our collection of 1339 Cepheid and the Milky Way’s gas disk follow each other closely. This offers new insights into the formation of our home galaxy,” says Prof. Richard de Grijs from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and senior co-author of the paper. “Perhaps more importantly, in the Milky Way’s outer regions, we found that the S-like stellar disk is warped in a progressively twisted spiral pattern.”

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-milky-warped.html#jCp

Source: The Milky Way is warped

Muscle-inspired materials that get stronger after stretching

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Scientists a Hokkaido University have found a way to create materials that actually get stronger the more you use them. By mimicking the mechanism that allows living muscles to grow and strengthen after exercise, the team led by Jian Ping Gong developed a polymer that breaks down under mechanical stress, then regrows itself into a stronger configuration by feeding off a nutrient bath.

One of the drawbacks of non-living materials is that they have a very finite service life compared to living, organic materials. Materials like steel, plastic, ceramics, and textiles wear out with use at a surprisingly fast rate compared to comparable living things. Metals undergo fatigue, plastics crumble, ceramics crack, and textiles have a sadly short life compared to the skin they cover.

The reason for this is that living tissue can not only regrow itself, it can become stronger the more it’s used. That’s why a human heart can pump at a rate of about 72 beats per minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for over a century. It’s also why exercise can make skeletal muscles stronger. A workout in the gym that makes a human healthier would just be so much wear and tear to a machine.

[…]

the Hokkaido team used what is called double-network hydrogels. Like other hydrogels, these are polymers that are 85 percent water by weight, but in this case, the material consist of both a rigid, brittle polymer and a soft, stretchable one. In this way, the finished product is both soft and tough.

Graph comparing the muscle-like hydrogel with other materials

However, the clever bit is that under laboratory conditions the hydrogel was immersed in a bath of monomers, which are the individual molecular links that make up a polymer. These serve the same function in the muscle-mimicking material as amino acids do in living tissue.

According to the team, when the hydrogel is stretched, some of the brittle polymer chains break, creating a chemical species called “mechanoradicals” at the end of the broken polymer chains. These are very reactive and quickly join up with the floating monomers to form a new, stronger polymer chain.

Under testing, the hydrogel acted much like muscles under strength training. It became 1.5 times stronger, 23 times stiffer, and increased in weight by 86 percent. It was even possible to control the properties of the material by using heat-sensitive monomers and applying high temperatures to make it more water resistant.

Gong says this approach could lead to materials suitable for a variety of applications, such as in flexible exosuits for patients with skeletal injuries that become stronger with use.

Source: Muscle-inspired materials that get stronger after stretching

The question in my mind is, why didn’t they make the material this strength in the first place? Or is it really self-repairing?

The world’s biggest spice company is using AI to find new flavors

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McCormick — the maker of Old Bay and other seasonings, spices and condiments — hopes the technology can help it tantalize taste buds. It worked with IBM Research to build an AI system trained on decades worth of data about spices and flavors to come up with new flavor combinations.
The Baltimore, Maryland-based company plans to bring its first batch of AI-assisted products to market later this year. The line of seasoning mixes, called One, for making one-dish meals, includes flavors such as Tuscan Chicken and Bourbon Pork Tenderloin.
Hamed Faridi, McCormick’s chief science officer, told CNN Business that using AI cuts down product development time, and that the company plans to use the technology to help develop all new products by the end of 2021.

Source: The world’s biggest spice company is using AI to find new flavors – CNN

Why nonviolent resistance is more successful in effecting change than violent campaigns

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Chenoweth and Stephan collected data on all violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 that resulted in the overthrow of a government or in territorial liberation. They created a data set of 323 mass actions. Chenoweth analyzed nearly 160 variables related to success criteria, participant categories, state capacity, and more. The results turned her earlier paradigm on its head—in the aggregate, nonviolent civil resistance was far more effective in producing change.
[…]

it really boils down to four different things. The first is a large and diverse participation that’s sustained.

The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide how violent the confrontation with—and reaction to—the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other security elites, economic and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the status quo, and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then that’s a decisive factor.

The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation in the methods they use.

The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed—which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes—they don’t either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to throw the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they’re essentially co-signing what the regime wants—for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they’re probably going to get totally crushed.

[…]

One of the things that isn’t in our book, but that I analyzed later and presented in a TEDx Boulder talk in 2013, is that a surprisingly small proportion of the population guarantees a successful : just 3.5 percent. That sounds like a really small number, but in absolute terms it’s really an impressive number of people. In the U.S., it would be around 11.5 million people today. Could you imagine if 11.5 million people—that’s about three times the size of the 2017 Women’s March—were doing something like mass noncooperation in a sustained way for nine to 18 months? Things would be totally different in this country.

WCIA: Is there anything about our current time that dictates the need for a change in tactics?

CHENOWETH: Mobilizing without a long-term strategy or plan seems to be happening a lot right now, and that’s not what’s worked in the past. However, there’s nothing about the age we’re in that undermines the basic principles of success. I don’t think that the factors that influence success or failure are fundamentally different. Part of the reason I say that is because they’re basically the same things we observed when Gandhi was organizing in India as we do today. There are just some characteristics of our age that complicate things a bit.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-nonviolent-resistance-successful-effecting-violent.html#jCp

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-nonviolent-resistance-successful-effecting-violent.html#jCp

Source: Why nonviolent resistance is more successful in effecting change than violent campaigns

A step closer to self-aware machines – let the robot imagine itself

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Columbia Engineering researchers have made a major advance in robotics by creating a robot that learns what it is, from scratch, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. Initially the robot does not know if it is a spider, a snake, an arm–it has no clue what its shape is. After a brief period of “babbling,” and within about a day of intensive computing, their robot creates a self-simulation. The robot can then use that self-simulator internally to contemplate and adapt to different situations, handling new tasks as well as detecting and repairing damage in its own body. The work is published today in Science Robotics.

To date, robots have operated by having a human explicitly model the robot. “But if we want robots to become independent, to adapt quickly to scenarios unforeseen by their creators, then it’s essential that they learn to simulate themselves,” says Hod Lipson, professor of mechanical engineering, and director of the Creative Machines lab, where the research was done.

Source: A step closer to self-aware machines | EurekAlert! Science News

OK, smarty pants AI. You can beat us humans at video games. But how about real-world puzzles like Jenga? Oh, oh no

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A robot built by a team of researchers at MIT in America has two prongs for fingers, sensors in its wrist, and a camera for eyes.

As the AI-powered bot surveys the tower, one of its prongs is told by software to poke a block, which sends feedback to its sensor to work out how movable that particular block is. If it’s too stiff, the robot will try another block, and keep pushing in millimetre increments until it has protruded far enough to be removed and placed on top of the tower.

Prodding until you find a suitable block to push may seem like cheating, but, well, given the state of 2019 so far, we’ll take a rule-stretching robot any day. Here it is in action…

“Unlike in more purely cognitive tasks or games such as chess or Go, playing the game of Jenga also requires mastery of physical skills such as probing, pushing, pulling, placing, and aligning pieces,” said Alberto Rodriguez, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, this week.

“It requires interactive perception and manipulation, where you have to go and touch the tower to learn how and when to move blocks. This is very difficult to simulate, so the robot has to learn in the real world, by interacting with the real Jenga tower. The key challenge is to learn from a relatively small number of experiments by exploiting common sense about objects and physics.”

Source: OK, smarty pants AI. You can beat us humans at video games. But how about real-world puzzles like Jenga? Oh, oh no • The Register

I’m a crime-fighter, says FamilyTreeDNA boss after being caught giving folks’ DNA data to FBI

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Some would argue he has broken every ethical and moral rule of his in his profession, but genealogist Bennett Greenspan prefers to see himself as a crime-fighter.

“I spent many, many nights and many, many weekends thinking of what privacy and confidentiality would mean to a genealogist such as me,” the founder and president of FamilyTreeDNA says in a video that appeared online yesterday.

He continues: “I would never do anything to betray the trust of my customers and at the same time I felt it important to enable my customers to crowd source the catching of criminals.”

The video and surrounding press release went out at 10.30pm on Thursday. Funnily enough, just a couple of hours earlier, BuzzFeed offered a very different take on Greenspan’s philanthropy. “One Of The Biggest At-Home DNA Testing Companies Is Working With The FBI,” reads the headline.

Here’s how FamilyTreeDNA works, if you don’t know: among other features, you submit a sample of your DNA to the biz, and it will tell you if you’re related to someone else who has also submitted their genetic blueprint. It’s supposed to find previously unknown relatives, check parentage, and so on.

And so, by crowd sourcing, what Greenspan means is that he has reached an agreement with the FBI to allow the agency to create new profiles on his system using DNA collected from, say, corpses, crime scenes, and suspects. These can then be compared with genetic profiles in the company’s database to locate and track down relatives of suspects and victims, if not the suspects and victims themselves.

[…]

Those profiles have been built by customers who have paid between $79 and $199 to have their generic material analyzed, in large part to understand their personal history and sometimes find connections to unknown family members. The service and others like it have become popular with adopted children who wish to locate birth parents but are prevented from being given by the information by law.

However, there is a strong expectation that any company storing your most personal generic information will apply strict confidentiality rules around it. You could argue that handing it over to the Feds doesn’t meet that standard. Greenspan would disagree.

“Greenspan created FamilyTreeDNA to help other family researchers solve problems and break down walls to connect the dots of their family trees,” reads a press release rushed out to head off, in vain, any terrible headlines.

“Without realizing it, he had inadvertently created a platform that, nearly two decades later, would help law enforcement agencies solve violent crimes faster than ever.”

Crime fighting, it seems, overrides all other ethical considerations.

Unfortunately for Greenspan, the rest of his industry doesn’t agree. The Future of Privacy Forum, an organization that maintains a list of consumer DNA testing companies that have signed up to its privacy guidelines struck FamilyTreeDNA off its list today.

Its VP of policy, John Verdi, told Bloomberg that the deal between FamilyTreeDNA and the FBI was “deeply flawed.” He went on: “It’s out of line with industry best practices, it’s out of line with what leaders in the space do, and it’s out of line with consumer expectations.”

Source: I’m a crime-fighter, says FamilyTreeDNA boss after being caught giving folks’ DNA data to FBI • The Register

Officer jailed for using police database to access personal details of dozens of Tinder dates

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A former long-serving police officer has been jailed for six months for illegally accessing the personal details of almost 100 women to determine if they were “suitable” dates.

Adrian Trevor Moore was a 28-year veteran of WA Police and was nominated as police officer of the year in 2011.

The former senior constable pleaded guilty to 180 charges of using a secure police database to access the information of 92 women he had met, or interacted with, on dating websites including Tinder and Plenty of Fish.

A third of the women were checked by Moore multiple times over several years.

Source: Officer jailed for using police database to access personal details of dozens of Tinder dates – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Well, that’s what you get when you collect loads of personal data in a database.

Unsecured MongoDB databases expose Kremlin’s single username / password backdoor into Russian businesses

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A Dutch security researcher has stumbled upon the Kremlin’s backdoor account that the government had been using to access the servers of local and foreign businesses operating in Russia.

The backdoor account was found inside thousands of MongoDB databases that had been left exposed online without a password.

Any hacker who noticed the account could have used it to gain access to sensitive information from thousands of companies operating in Russia.

“The first time I saw these credentials was in the user table of a Russian Lotto website,” Victor Gevers told ZDNet in an interview today. “I had to do some digging to understand that the Kremlin requires remote access to systems that handle financial transactions.”

The researcher says that after his initial finding, he later found the same “admin@kremlin.ru” account on over 2,000 other MongoDB databases that had been left exposed online, all belonging to local and foreign businesses operating in Russia.

Examples include databases belonging to local banks, financial institutions, big telcos, and even Disney Russia.

Kremlin credentials found in the internet-exposed database of a Russian lotto agency
Kremlin credentials found in the internet-exposed database of a Russian lotto agency

Image: Victor Gevers

Kremlin credentials found in the internet-exposed database of Disney Russia
Kremlin credentials found in the internet-exposed database of Disney Russia

Image: Victor Gevers

Gevers even found this account inside a leaky MongoDB database belonging to Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs that was holding details about ERDR investigations carried out by the country’s General Prosecutor’s Office into corrupt politicians.

This latter case was very strange because, at the time, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict had already been raging for at least two years.

Kremlin credentials found in the internet-exposed database of a Ukrainian ministry
Kremlin credentials found in the internet-exposed database of a Ukrainian ministry

Image: Victor Gevers

Gevers, who at the time was the Chairman of the GDI Foundation, is one of the world’s top white-hat hackers. His research didn’t include digging through companies’ logs to see what this account was used for, so it’s currently unknown if the Russian government used this account only to retrieve financial-related information or they actively altered data.

“We have been searching for open MongoDB for years,” Gevers told ZDNet. “When we investigate a MongoDB instance, we try to respect privacy as much as possible by limiting the search for breadcrumbs such as the owner’s email addresses to a minimum.”

“All the systems this password was on were already fully accessible to anyone,” Gevers said. “The MongoDB databases were deployed with default settings. So anyone without authentication had CRUD [Create, Read, Update and Delete] access.”

Source: Unsecured MongoDB databases expose Kremlin’s backdoor into Russian businesses | ZDNet

European Commission orders mass recall of creepy, leaky child-tracking Enox smartwatch

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The latest weekly report includes German firm Enox’s Safe-KID-One watch, which is marketed to parents as a way of keeping tabs on their little ones – ostensibly to keep them safe – and comes with one-click buttons for speed-dialling family members.

However, the commission said the device does not comply with the Radio Equipment Directive and detailed “serious” risks associated with the device.

“The mobile application accompanying the watch has unencrypted communications with its backend server and the server enables unauthenticated access to data,” the directive said.

As a result, data on location history, phone numbers and device serial number can be found and changed.

“A malicious user can send commands to any watch making it call another number of his choosing, can communicate with the child wearing the device or locate the child through GPS,” the alert warned.

Source: European Commission orders mass recall of creepy, leaky child-tracking smartwatch • The Register

Doctors Zap the Brains of Awake Brain Surgery Patients to Make Them Laugh and Have Fun

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A distinct pathway in the white matter part of the brain known as the cingulum bundle can be used to alleviate stress and anxiety during awake brain surgery, according to new research published today in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. When electrically stimulated, this pathway triggers instantaneous laughter in the patient. But unlike previous experiments, this laughter was also accompanied by positive, uplifting feelings. Preliminary research suggests this technique could be used to calm patients during awake brain surgery, with the authors of the new study, led by neuroscientist Kelly Bijanki from Emory University School of Medicine, saying the findings could also lead to innovative new treatments for depression, anxiety, and chronic pain.

Source: Doctors Zap the Brains of Awake Brain Surgery Patients to Make Them Laugh and Have Fun

Nest Secure has an unlisted disabled microphone (Edit: Google statement agrees!)

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We received a statement from Google regarding the implication that the Nest Secure alarm system has had an unlisted microphone this whole time. It turns out that yes, the Nest Guard base system (the circular device with a keypad above) does have a built-in microphone that is not listed on the official spec sheet at Nest’s site. The microphone has been in an inactive state since the release of the Nest Secure, according to Google.

This unlisted mic is how the Nest Guard will be able to operate as a pseudo-Google Home with just a software update, as detailed below.

[…]

Once the Google Assistant is enabled, the mic is always on but only listening for the hotwords “Ok Google” or “Hey Google”. Google only stores voice-based queries after it recognizes those hotwords. Voice data and query contents are sent to Google servers for analysis and storage in My Activity.

[…]

Original Article, February 4, 2019 (02:20 PM ET): Owners of the Nest Secure alarm system have been able to use voice commands to control their home security through Google Assistant for a while now. However, to issue those commands, they needed a separate Google Assistant-powered device, like a smartphone or a Google Home smart speaker.

The reason for this limitation has always seemed straightforward: according to the official tech specs, there’s no onboard microphone in the Nest Secure system.

Source: Nest Secure has an unlisted disabled microphone (Edit: Google statement)

That’s pretty damn creepy

Hi, Jack’d: A little PSA for anyone using this dating-hook-up app… Anyone can slurp your private, public snaps • The Register

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Dating-slash-hook-up app Jack’d is exposing to the public internet intimate snaps privately swapped between its users, allowing miscreants to download countless X-rated selfies without permission.

The phone application, installed more than 110,000 times on Android devices and also available for iOS, lets primarily gay and bi men chat each other up, exchange private and public pics, and arrange to meet.

Those photos, public and private, can be accessed by anyone with a web browser and who knows just where to look, though, it appears. As there is no authentication, no need to sign up to the app, and no limits in place, miscreants can therefore download the entire image database for further havoc and potential blackmail.

You may well want to delete your images until this issue is fixed.

We’re told the developers of the application were warned of the security vulnerability three months ago, and yet no fix has been made. We’ve repeatedly tried to contact the programmers to no avail. In the interests of alerting Jack’d users to the fact their highly NSFW pictures are facing the public internet, we’re publishing this story today, although we are withholding details of the flaw to discourage exploitation.

Source: Hi, Jack’d: A little PSA for anyone using this dating-hook-up app… Anyone can slurp your private, public snaps • The Register

Dirty dealing in the $175 billion Amazon Marketplace

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Last August, Zac Plansky woke to find that the rifle scopes he was selling on Amazon had received 16 five-star reviews overnight. Usually, that would be a good thing, but the reviews were strange. The scope would normally get a single review a day, and many of these referred to a different scope, as if they’d been cut and pasted from elsewhere. “I didn’t know what was going on, whether it was a glitch or whether somebody was trying to mess with us,” Plansky says.

As a precaution, he reported the reviews to Amazon. Most of them vanished days later — problem solved — and Plansky reimmersed himself in the work of running a six-employee, multimillion-dollar weapons accessory business on Amazon. Then, two weeks later, the trap sprang. “You have manipulated product reviews on our site,” an email from Amazon read. “This is against our policies. As a result, you may no longer sell on Amazon.com, and your listings have been removed from our site.”

A rival had framed Plansky for buying five-star reviews, a high crime in the world of Amazon. The funds in his account were immediately frozen, and his listings were shut down. Getting his store back would take him on a surreal weeks-long journey through Amazon’s bureaucracy, one that began with the click of a button at the bottom of his suspension message that read “appeal decision.”

[…]

For sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state. They rely on its infrastructure — its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers — and pay taxes in the form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced. A cryptic email like the one Plansky received can send a seller’s business into bankruptcy, with few avenues for appeal.

Sellers are more worried about a case being opened on Amazon than in actual court, says Dave Bryant, an Amazon seller and blogger. Amazon’s judgment is swifter and less predictable, and now that the company controls nearly half of the online retail market in the US, its rulings can instantly determine the success or failure of your business, he says. “Amazon is the judge, the jury, and the executioner.”

Amazon is far from the only tech company that, having annexed a vast sphere of human activity, finds itself in the position of having to govern it. But Amazon is the only platform that has a $175 billion prize pool tempting people to game it, and the company must constantly implement new rules and penalties, which in turn, become tools for new abuses, which require yet more rules to police. The evolution of its moderation system has been hyper-charged. While Mark Zuckerberg mused recently that Facebook might need an analog to the Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes and hear appeals, Amazon already has something like a judicial system — one that is secretive, volatile, and often terrifying.

Amazon’s judgments are so severe that its own rules have become the ultimate weapon in the constant warfare of Marketplace. Sellers devise all manner of intricate schemes to frame their rivals, as Plansky experienced. They impersonate, copy, deceive, threaten, sabotage, and even bribe Amazon employees for information on their competitors.

[…]

Scammers have effectively weaponized Amazon’s anti-counterfeiting program. Attacks have become so widespread that they’ve even pulled in the US Patent and Trademark Office, which recently posted a warning that people were making unauthorized changes through its electronic filing system, likely “part of a scheme to register the marks of others on third-party ‘brand registries.’” Scammers had begun swapping out the email addresses on their rival’s trademark files, which can be done without a password, and using the new email to register their competitor’s brand with Amazon, gaining control of their listings. As Harris encountered, Amazon appears not to check whether a listing belongs to a brand already enrolled in brand registry. Stine has a client who had trademarked their party supply brand and registered it with Amazon, only to have a rival change their trademark file, register with Amazon, and hijack their listing for socks, which had things like “If you can read this, bring coffee” written on the soles.

[…]

There are more subtle methods of sabotage as well. Sellers will sometimes buy Google ads for their competitors for unrelated products — say, a dog food ad linking to a shampoo listing — so that Amazon’s algorithm sees the rate of clicks converting to sales drop and automatically demotes their product. They will go on the black market and purchase or rent seller accounts with special editing privileges and use them to change the color or description of their rival’s products so they get suspended for too many customers complaining about the item being “not as described.” They will exile their competitor’s listings to an unrelated category — say, move a product with a “Best Seller” badge in the office category to lawn care, taking the badge for themselves.

“They took a kids toy made for six to 12 year olds and they changed it to a sex toy,” one outraged seller told me. This is a common move, as Amazon hides products in that category unless the customer clicks a button saying they’re over 18. Another seller who had been battling counterfeiters of his childproof locks and outlet covers received a threat in Chinese saying that, while it is hard to build a listing like his, it would be easy to destroy. “Be cautious,” the message warned. Later, he too was banished to sex toys. “It’s suppressed from search results unless you literally search for a “sexual child proof door lock,” he says. (He had no sales.)

Source: Dirty dealing in the $175 billion Amazon Marketplace

An incredible story, very worth reading in its’ entirety