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Daily Archives: March 3, 2019

Google’s DeepMind can predict wind energy income a day in advance

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Wind power has become increasingly popular, but its success is limited by the fact that wind comes and goes as it pleases, making it hard for power grids to count on the renewable energy and less likely to fully embrace it. While we can’t control the wind, Google has an idea for the next best thing: using machine learning to predict it.

Google and DeepMind have started testing machine learning on Google’s own wind turbines, which are part of the company’s renewable energy projects. Beginning last year, they fed weather forecasts and existing turbine data into DeepMind’s machine learning platform, which churned out wind power predictions 36 hours ahead of actual power generation. Google could then make supply commitments to power grids a full day before delivery. That predictability makes it easier and more appealing for energy grids to depend on wind power, and as a result, it boosted the value of Google’s wind energy by roughly 20 percent.

Not only does this tease to how machine learning could boost the adoption of wind energy, it’s also an example of machine learning being put to good use — solving critical problems and not just jumping into your text thread to recommend a restaurant when you start talking about tapas. For DeepMind, it’s a high-profile use of its technology and proof that it’s not only useful for beating up professional StarCraft II players.

Source: Google’s DeepMind can predict wind patterns a day in advance

Studies Keep Showing That the Best Way to Stop Piracy Is to Offer Cheaper, Better Alternatives

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Study after study continues to show that the best approach to tackling internet piracy is to provide these would-be customers with high quality, low cost alternatives.

For decades the entertainment industry has waged a scorched-earth assault on internet pirates. Usually this involves either filing mass lawsuits against these users, or in some instances trying to kick them off of the internet entirely. These efforts historically have not proven successful.

Throughout that time, data has consistently showcased how treating such users like irredeemable criminals may not be the smartest approach. For one, studies show that pirates are routinely among the biggest purchasers of legitimate content, and when you provide these users access to above-board options, they’ll usually take you up on the proposition.

That idea was again supported by a new study this week out of New Zealand first spotted by TorrentFreak. The study, paid for by telecom operator Vocus Group, surveyed a thousand New Zealanders last December, and found that while half of those polled say they’ve pirated content at some point in their lives, those numbers have dropped as legal streaming alternatives have flourished.

The study found that 11 percent of New Zealand consumers still obtain copyrighted content via illegal streams, and 10 percent download infringing content via BitTorrent or other platforms. But it also found that users are increasingly likely to obtain that same content via over the air antennas (75 percent) or legitimate streaming services like Netflix (55 percent).

“In short, the reason people are moving away from piracy is that it’s simply more hassle than it’s worth,” says Vocus Group NZ executive Taryn Hamilton said in a statement.

Historically, the entertainment industry has attempted to frame pirates as freeloaders exclusively interested in getting everything for free. In reality, it’s wiser to view them as frustrated potential consumers who’d be happy to pay for content if it was more widely available, Hamilton noted.

“The research confirms something many internet pundits have long instinctively believed to be true: piracy isn’t driven by law-breakers, it’s driven by people who can’t easily or affordably get the content they want,” she said.

But it’s far more than just instinct. Studies from around the world consistently come to the same conclusion, says Annemarie Bridy, a University of Idaho law professor specializing in copyright.

Bridy pointed to a number of international, US, and EU studies that all show that users will quickly flock to above-board options when available. Especially given the potential privacy and security risks involved in downloading pirated content from dubious sources.

“This is especially true given that “pirate sites” are now commonly full of malware and other malicious content, making them risky for users,” Bridy said. “It seems like a no-brainer that when you lower barriers to legal content acquisition in the face of rising barriers to illegal content acquisition, users opt for legal content.”

Source: Studies Keep Showing That the Best Way to Stop Piracy Is to Offer Cheaper, Better Alternatives – Motherboard

Ready for another fright? Spectre flaws in today’s computer chips can be exploited to hide, run stealthy malware

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Co-authored by three computer science boffins from the University of Colorado, Boulder in the US – Jack Wampler, Ian Martiny, and Eric Wustrow – the paper, “ExSpectre: Hiding Malware in Speculative Execution,” describes a way to compile malicious code into a seemingly innocuous payload binary, so it can be executed through speculative execution without detection.

Speculative execution is a technique in modern processors that’s used to improve performance, alongside out-of-order execution and branch prediction. CPUs will speculate about future instructions and execute them, keeping the results and saving time if they’ve guessed the program path correctly and discarding them if not.

But last year’s Spectre flaws showed that sensitive transient data arising from these forward-looking calculations can be exfiltrated and abused. Now it turns out that this feature of chip architecture can be used to conceal malicious computation in the “speculative world.”

The Boulder-based boffins have devised a way in which a payload program and a trigger program can interact to perform concealed calculations. The payload and trigger program would be installed through commonly used attack vectors (e.g. trojan code, a remote exploit, or phishing) and need to run on the same CPU. The trigger program can also take the form of special input to the payload or a resident application that interacts with the payload program.

“When a separate trigger program runs on the same machine, it mistrains the CPU’s branch predictor, causing the payload program to speculatively execute its malicious payload, which communicates speculative results back to the rest of the payload program to change its real-world behavior,” the paper explains.

The result is stealth malware. It defies detection through current reverse engineering techniques because it executes in a transient environment not accessible to static or dynamic analysis used by most current security engines. Even if the trigger program is detected and removed the payload code will remain operating.

There are limits to this technique, however. Among other constraints, the malicious code can only consist of somewhere between one hundred and two hundred instructions. And the rate at which data can be obtained isn’t particularly speedy: the researchers devised a speculative primitive that could decrypt 1KB of data and exfiltrate it at a rate of 5.38 Kbps, assuming 20 redundant iterations to ensure data correctness.

Source: Ready for another fright? Spectre flaws in today’s computer chips can be exploited to hide, run stealthy malware • The Register

Amazon Ring Doorbell allows people to eavesdrop with video and even insert footage

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Plaintext transmission of audio/video footage to the Ring application allows for arbitrary surveillance and injection of counterfeit traffic, effectively compromising home security (CVE-2019-9483).

[…]

We moved over to sniffing the application. Here we see a more sensible SIP/TLS approach, with pretty much all notifications, updates and information being passed via HTTPS. However, the actual RTP traffic seems plain!

The data seems sensible, and therefore we might be able to extract it. Using our handy videosnarf utility, we get a viewable MPEG file. This means anyone with access to incoming packets can see the feed! Similarly, we can also extract the audio G711 encoded stream.

[…]

Capturing the Doorbell feed is already great, but why stop there when we can inject our own? We developed a POC, whereby we first captured real footage in a so-called “recon mode”. Then, in “active mode” we can drop genuine traffic and inject the acquired footage. This hack works smoothly and is undetectable from within the app. In Mobile World Congress 2019, we publicly demonstrated the attack.

                                                Is it really Jesus at the door?

The attack scenarios possible are far too numerous to list, but for example imagine capturing an Amazon delivery and then streaming this feed. It would make for a particularly easy burglary. Spying on the doorbell allows for gathering of sensitive information – household habits, names and details about family members including children, all of which make the target an easy prey for future exploitation. Letting the babysitter in while kids are at home could be a potentially life threatening mistake.

                                 Are you sure about letting this killer clown in ?

The main takeaway from this research is that security is only as strong as its weakest link. Encrypting the upstream RTP traffic will not make forgery any harder if the downstream traffic is not secure, and encrypting the downstream SIP transmission does not thwart stream interception. When dealing with such sensitive data like a doorbell, secure transmission is not a feature but a must, as the average user will not be aware of potential tampering.

Important note: Ring has patched this vulnerability in version 3.4.7 of the ring app (Without notifying users in the patch notes!). Please make sure to upgrade to a newer version ASAP as the affected versions are still backward compatible  and vulnerable.

Source: One Ring to rule them all, and in darkness bind them

Renewable energy policies actually work

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For most of the industrial era, a nation’s carbon emissions moved in lock step with its economy. Growth meant higher emissions. But over the past decade or so, that has changed. Even as the global economy continued to grow, carbon emissions remained flat or dropped a bit.

It would be simple to ascribe this trend o the explosion in renewable energy, but reality is rarely so simple. Countries like China saw explosive growth in both renewables and fossil-fuel use; Germany and Japan expanded renewables even as they slashed nuclear power; and in the United States, the federal government has been MIA, leading to a chaotic mix of state and local efforts. So it’s worth taking a careful look into what exactly might be causing the drop in emissions.

That’s precisely what an international group of researchers has now done, analyzing what’s gone on in 79 countries, including some that have dropped emissions, and others that have not. The researchers find that renewable energy use is a big factor, but so is reduced energy use overall. And for both of these factors, government policy appears to play a large role.

Who’s losing?

The researchers started by identifying countries that show a “peak and decline” pattern of carbon emissions since the 1990s. They came up with 18, all but one of them in Europe—the exception is the United States. For comparison, they created two different control groups of 30 countries, neither of which has seen emissions decline. One group saw high GDP growth, while the second saw moderate economic growth; in the past, these would have been associated with corresponding changes in emissions.

Within each country, the researchers looked into whether there were government energy policies that could influence the trajectory of emissions. They also examined four items that could drive changes in emissions: total energy use, share of energy provided by fossil fuels, the carbon intensity of the overall energy mix, and efficiency (as measured by energy losses during use).

On average, emissions in the decline group dropped by 2.4 percent over the decade between 2005 and 2015.

Half of this drop came from lowering the percentage of fossil fuels used, with renewables making a large contribution; another 35 percent came from a drop in energy use. But the most significant factor varied from country to country. Austria, Finland, and Sweden saw a drop in the share of fossil fuels within their energy mix. In contrast, a drop in total energy use was the biggest factor for France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The US was an odd one out, with all four possible factors playing significant roles in causing emissions to drop.

For the two control groups, however, there was a single dominant factor: total energy use counted for 75 and 80 percent of the change in the low- and high-economic growth groups, respectively. But there was considerably more variability in the low-economic growth group. All of the high-growth group saw increased energy use contribute 60 percent of the growth in emissions or more. In contrast, some of the low-growth group actually saw their energy use drop.

Policy-driven change

So why are some countries so successful at dropping their emissions? Part of it is likely to be economic growth. While the countries did experience economic expansion over the study period, the growth was quite low (a bit over 1 percent), which implies that a booming economy could potentially reverse this progress.

But that’s likely to be only part of the answer. By 2015, the countries in the group that saw declining emissions had an average of 35 policies that promoted renewable energy and another 23 that promoted energy efficiency. Both of those numbers are significantly higher than the averages for the control groups. And there’s evidence that these policies are effective. The number of pro-efficiency policies correlated with the drop in energy use, while the number of renewable policies correlated with the drop in the share of fossil fuels.

The control group of rapidly expanding economies did see an effect of renewable energy policies in that the fraction of fossil-fuel use dropped—emissions went up because the total energy use expanded faster than renewables could offset it. Similarly, conservation policies correlated with a drop in the energy intensity of per unit of GDP. So in both those cases, the evidence is consistent with policies keeping matters from being worse than they might have been otherwise.

Overall, the evidence is clearly consistent with the idea that pro-renewable and efficiency policies work, lowering total energy use and the role of fossil fuels in providing that energy. But we haven’t reached the point where they have a large-enough impact that they can consistently offset the emissions associated with economic growth. And even in countries where overall emissions do drop, the effect isn’t large enough to help them reach the sort of deep emissions cuts needed to reach the goals set forth in the Paris Agreement.

The analysis isn’t sufficient to tell us what would need to change in order to see more consistent and dramatic effects. Additional or stronger policies might do the trick, but it’s also possible that they’ll hit a ceiling. In addition, policies not considered here—those promoting carbon capture, for example—might ultimately become critical.

Source: Renewable energy policies actually work | Ars Technica

Stonehenge: Geologists have found exactly where some rocks came from

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Five thousand years after people in the British Isles began building Stonehenge, scientists now know precisely where some of the massive rocks came from and how they were unearthed.

A team of 12 geologists and archaeologists from across the United Kingdom unveiled research this month that traces some of the prehistoric monument’s smaller stones to two quarries in western Wales.
The team also found evidence of prehistoric tools, stone wedges and digging activity in those quarries, tracing them to around 3000 BC, the era when Stonehenge’s first stage was constructed.
It’s rock-solid evidence that humans were involved in moving these “bluestones” to where they sit today, a full 150 miles away, the researchers say.
Researchers traced the origin of Stonehenge's famous stones.

Researchers traced the origin of Stonehenge’s famous stones.
“It finally puts to rest long-standing arguments over whether the bluestones were moved by human agency or by glacial action,” University of Southampton Archeology Professor Joshua Pollard said in an email.
[…]
Scientists have long known the stones came from the Preseli Hills, but the new research helps disprove claims about the original rock locations made in 1923 by famous British geologist H.H. Thomas. The correct quarries, called Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin, are on the north side of the hills — opposite their long-suspected location, the new findings indicate.
Scientists work to learn more about the source of the monument's rocks.

Scientists work to learn more about the source of the monument’s rocks.
“By going back and looking in detail at the actual samples he studied, we have been able to show that none of his proposals stand up to scrutiny,” Bevins said.
Stonehenge celebrates 100 years in public hands

Stonehenge celebrates 100 years in public hands
Because the rocks are from the north side of Preseli Hills, the researchers think it’s more likely the massive stones were dragged over land from Wales to England, rather than transported on river tributaries located near the south side.
It’s also possible the rocks were first used to build a stone circle in the local area before being paraded to the Salisbury plains, according to the article in the journal, Antiquity.

Source: Stonehenge: Geologists have found exactly where some rocks came from – CNN

Incredible Experiment Gives Infrared Vision to Mice—and Humans Could Be Next

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By injecting nanoparticles into the eyes of mice, scientists gave them the ability to see near-infrared light—a wavelength not normally visible to rodents (or people). It’s an extraordinary achievement, one made even more extraordinary with the realization that a similar technique could be used in humans.

Of all the remarkable things done to mice over the years, this latest achievement, described today in the science journal Cell, is among the most sci-fi.

A research team, led by Tian Xue from the University of Science and Technology of China and Gang Han from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, modified the vision of mice such that they were able to see near-infrared light (NIR), in addition to retaining their natural ability to see normal light. This was done by injecting special nanoparticles into their eyes, with the effect lasting for around 10 weeks and without any serious side effects.

[…]

Drops of fluid containing the tiny particles were injected directly in their eyes, where, using special anchors, they latched on tightly to photoreceptor cells. Photoreceptor cells—the rods and cones—normally absorb the wavelengths of incoming visible light, which the brain interprets as sight. In the experiment, however, the newly introduced nanoparticles upconverted incoming NIR into a visible wavelength, which the mouse brain was then capable of processing as visual information (in this case, they saw NIR as greenish light). The nanoparticles clung on for nearly two months, allowing the mice to see both NIR and visible light with minimal side effects.

Graphical representation of the process in action. When infrared light (red) reaches a photoreceptor cell (light green circle), the nanoparticles (pink circles) convert the light into visible green light.
Image: Cell

Essentially, the nanoparticles on the photoreceptor cells served as a transducer, or converter, for infrared light. The longer infrared wavelengths were captured in the retina by the nanoparticles, which then relayed them as shorter wavelengths within the visible light range. The rods and cones—which are built to absorb the shorter wavelengths—were thus able to accept this signal, and then send this upconverted information to the visual cortex for processing. Specifically, the injected particles absorbed NIR around 980 nanometers in wavelength and converted it to light in the area of 535 nanometers. For the mice, this translated to seeing the infrared light as the color green. The result was similar to seeing NIR with night-vision goggles, except that the mice were able to retain their normal view of visible light as well.

[…]

Looking ahead, Tian and Gang would like to improve the technique with organic-based nanoparticles comprised of FDA-approved compounds, which could result in even brighter infrared vision. They’d also like to tweak the technique to make it more responsive to human biology. Optimistic of where this technology is headed, Tian and Gang have already claimed a patent application related to their work.

I can already imagine the television commercials: “Ask your doctor if near-infrared vision is right for you.”

[Cell]

Source: Incredible Experiment Gives Infrared Vision to Mice—and Humans Could Be Next

How artificially brightened clouds could cool down the earth

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Clouds, however, naturally reflect the sun (it’s why Venus – a planet with permanent cloud cover – shines so brightly in our night sky). Marine stratocumulus clouds are particularly important, covering around 20% of the Earth’s surface while reflecting 30% of total solar radiation. Stratocumulus clouds also cool the ocean surface directly below. Proposals to make these clouds whiter – or “marine cloud brightening” – are amongst the more serious projects now being considered by various bodies, including the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s new “solar geoengineering” committee.

Stephen Salter, Emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh, has been one of the leading voices of this movement. In the 1970s, when Salter was working on waves and tidal power, he came across studies examining the pollution trails left by shipping. Much like the aeroplane trails we see criss-crossing the sky, satellite imagery had revealed that shipping left similar tracks in the air above the ocean – and the research revealed that these trails were also brightening existing clouds.

The pollution particles had introduced “condensation nuclei” (otherwise scarce in the clean sea air) for water vapour to congregate around. Because the pollution particles were smaller than the natural particles, they produced smaller water droplets; and the smaller the water droplet, the whiter and more reflective it is. In 1990, British atmospheric scientist John Latham proposed doing this with benign, natural particles such as sea salt. But he needed an engineer to design a spraying system. So he contacted Stephen Salter.

(Credit: Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center)

The pollution trails left by ships on the ocean naturally brighten the clouds above (Credit: Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center)

Spraying about 10 cubic metres per second could undo all the [global warming] damage we’ve done to the world up till now

“I didn’t realise quite how hard it was going to be,” Salter now admits. Seawater, for instance, tends to clog up or corrode spray nozzles, let alone ones capable of spraying particles just 0.8 micron in size. And that’s not to mention the difficulties of modelling the effects on the weather and climate.  But his latest design, he believes, is ready to build: an unmanned hydro-foil ship, computer-controlled and wind-powered, which pumps an ultra-fine mist of sea salt toward the cloud layer.

“Spraying about 10 cubic metres per second could undo all the [global warming] damage we’ve done to the world up until now,” Salter claims. And, he says, the annual cost would be less than the cost to host the annual UN Climate Conference – between $100-$200 million each year.

Salter calculates that a fleet of 300 of his autonomous ships could reduce global temperatures by 1.5C. He also believes that smaller fleets could be deployed to counter-act regional extreme weather events. Hurricane seasons and El Niño, exacerbated by high sea temperatures, could be tamed by targeted cooling via marine cloud brightening. A PhD thesis from the University of Leeds in 2012 stated that cloud brightening could, “decrease sea surface temperatures during peak tropical cyclone season… [reducing] the energy available for convection and may reduce intensity of storms”.

Salter boasts that 160 of his ships could “moderate an El Niño event, and a few hundred [would] stop hurricanes”. The same could be done, he says, to protect large coral reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef, and even cool the polar regions to allow sea ice to return.

Hazard warning

So, what’s the catch? Well, there’s a very big catch indeed. The potential side-effects of solar geoengineering on the scale needed to slow hurricanes or cool global temperatures are not well understood. According to various theories, it could prompt droughts, flooding, and catastrophic crop failures; some even fear that the technology could be weaponised (during the Vietnam War, American forces flew thousands of “cloud seeding” missions to flood enemy troop supply lines). Another major concern is that geoengineering could be used as an excuse to slow down emissions reduction, meaning CO2 levels continue to rise and oceans continue to acidify – which, of course, brings its own serious problems.

(Credit: James MacNeill)

Stephen Salter believes that a fleet of 300 of his autonomous ships could reduce global temperatures by 1.5C (Credit: James MacNeill)

A rival US academic team – The MCB Project – is less gung-ho than Salter. Kelly Wanser, the principal director of The MCB Project, is based in Silicon Valley. When it launched in 2010 with seed funding from the Gates Foundation, it received a fierce backlash. Media articles talked of “cloud-wrenching cronies” and warned of the potential for “unilateral action on geoengineering”. Since then, Wanser has kept relatively low-key.

Her team’s design is similar to commercial snow-making machines for ski resorts, yet capable of spraying “particles ten thousand times smaller [than snow]… at three trillion particles per second”. The MCB Project hopes to test this near Monterey Bay, California, where marine stratocumulus clouds waft overland. They would start with a single cloud to track its impact.

“One of the strengths of marine cloud brightening is it can be very gradually scaled,” says Wanser. “You [can] get a pretty good grasp of whether and how you are brightening clouds, without doing things that impact climate or weather.”

Such a step-by-step research effort, says Wanser, would take a decade at least. But due to the controversy it attracts, this hasn’t even started yet. Not one cloud has yet been purposefully brightened by academics – although cargo shipping still does this unintentionally, with dirty particles, every single day.

Source: BBC – Future – How artificially brightened clouds could stop climate change

Plain wrong: Millions of utility customers’ passwords stored in plain text by website builder SEDC

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In September of 2018, an anonymous independent security researcher (who we’ll call X) noticed that their power company’s website was offering to email—not reset!—lost account passwords to forgetful users. Startled, X fed the online form the utility account number and the last four phone number digits it was asking for. Sure enough, a few minutes later the account password, in plain text, was sitting in X’s inbox.

This was frustrating and insecure, and it shouldn’t have happened at all in 2018. But this turned out to be a flaw common to websites designed by the Atlanta firm SEDC. After finding SEDC’s copyright notices in the footer of the local utility company’s website, X began looking for more customer-facing sites designed by SEDC. X found and confirmed SEDC’s footer—and the same offer to email plain-text passwords—in more than 80 utility company websites.

Those companies service 15 million or so clients (estimated from GIS data and in some cases from PR brags on the utility sites themselves). But the real number of affected Americans could easily be several times that large: SEDC itself claims that more than 250 utility companies use its software.

Source: Plain wrong: Millions of utility customers’ passwords stored in plain text | Ars Technica

How to fake PDF signatures

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If you open a PDF document and your viewer displays a panel (like you see below) indicating that

  1. the document is signed by invoicing@amazon.de and
  2. the document has not been modified since the signature was applied You assume that the displayed content is precisely what invoicing@amazon.de has created.

During recent research, we found out that this is not the case for almost all PDF Desktop Viewers and most Online Validation Services.

So what is the problem?

With our attacks, we can use an existing signed document (e.g., amazon.de invoice) and change the content of the document arbitrarily without invalidating the signatures. Thus, we can forge a document signed by invoicing@amazon.de to refund us one trillion dollars.

To detect the attack, you would need to be able to read and understand the PDF format in depth. Most people are probably not capable of such thing (PDF file example).

To recap this, you can use any signed PDF document and create a document which contains arbitrary content in the name of the signing user, company, ministry or state.

Source: PDF Signature Spoofing

Samsung is loading McAfee antivirus software on smart TVs – which may be impossible to uninstall

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Samsung is adding bloatware to its 2019 TVs because McAfee is paying them to do so. There is arguably no reason for Samsung to offer third-party antivirus software for an operating system that is developed in-house.

Partnering with software vendors is fairly common practice for large hardware manufacturers. Laptop makers frequently pre-install bloatware in return for some sizable payouts and smartphone OEMs are no different. Samsung is now installing McAfee antivirus software on its 2019 TV lineup.

Samsung is claiming something to the effect of wanting to protect users from malware. On the surface that makes sense, but Samsung is running its very own Tizen OS on all TVs. Instead of adding more junk to a TV, why not just improve the OS? The answer though is self-explanatory. Samsung would not receive a payout from McAfee if it did not install the unneeded software.

Officially, here is Samsung’s statement on the matter.

McAfee extended its contract to have McAfee Security for TV technology pre-installed on all Samsung Smart TVs produced in 2019. Along with being the market leader in the Smart TV category worldwide, Samsung is also the first company to pre-install security on these devices, underscoring its commitment to building security in from the start. McAfee Security for TV scans the apps that run on Samsung smart TVs to identify and remove malware.

Downloading and installing apps on most TVs is a tedious process that most users are not doing very frequently. Well known apps such as Netflix and Hulu come pre-installed on most TVs regardless of brand, making it unnecessary for most users to ever even look at what other apps are available.

It may not be a big deal to have extra bloatware on a TV, but it is something undesirable and might burn a little more power for no actual benefit. If someone is going to take the time to target Tizen with malware and knowing that McAfee is pre=installed, there is little reason to believe a developer would not take the extra time to ensure detection does not happen.

Source: Samsung is loading McAfee antivirus software on smart TVs – TechSpot

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/bKgf5PaBzyg” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>

China bans 23m from buying travel tickets as part of ‘social credit’ system.

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China has blocked millions of “discredited” travellers from buying plane or train tickets as part of the country’s controversial “social credit” system aimed at improving the behaviour of citizens.

According to the National Public Credit Information Centre, Chinese courts banned would-be travellers from buying flights 17.5 million times by the end of 2018. Citizens placed on black lists for social credit offences were prevented from buying train tickets 5.5 million times. The report released last week said: “Once discredited, limited everywhere”.

The social credit system aims to incentivise “trustworthy” behaviour through penalties as well as rewards. According to a government document about the system dating from 2014, the aim is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

Social credit offences range from not paying individual taxes or fines to spreading false information and taking drugs. More minor violations include using expired tickets, smoking on a train or not walking a dog on a leash.

[…]

According to the report, other penalties for individuals include being barred from buying insurance, real estate or investment products. Companies on the blacklist are banned from bidding on projects or issuing corporate bonds.

The report said authorities collected more than 14m data points of “untrustworthy conduct” last year, including scams, unpaid loans, false advertising and occupying reserved seats on a train.

Source: China bans 23m from buying travel tickets as part of ‘social credit’ system | World news | The Guardian

Excel Can Now Turn Pictures of Tables Into Actual, Editable Tables

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Microsoft is introducing a really useful feature for Excel on mobile devices. The company is rolling out a new update to the Excel app for Android that makes it really easy to capture data.

If you ever had to manually enter data from a paper in real life into your spreadsheets, you are going to love this. Excel now lets you take pictures of a document/paper in real life, crop the picture, and turn that into an actual, editable data on Excel. After capturing the data, you can edit the data to make sure Excel’s image recognition is 100% accurate, and make any changes if some of the scanned data were incorrect.

The feature seems really useful, and it’s just one of the ways Microsoft has been pushing Office apps recently. The company’s continued focus on AI has really helped apps like Excel get better and better when it could just continue to be that one boring spreadsheet app. Microsoft can easily bring similar features powered by image recognition and AI to other Office apps as well, so this is probably just the beginning.

The company plans to bring the feature to iOS in the near future.

Source: Excel Can Now Turn Pictures of Tables Into Actual, Editable Tables – Thurrott.com

Add data to Excel directly from a photo—Using the Excel app, you can take a picture of a printed data table on your Android device and automatically convert the picture into a fully editable table in Excel. This new image recognition functionality eliminates the need for you to manually enter hardcopy data. This capability is starting to roll out for the Excel Android app with iOS support coming soon.

Animated image of an Android phone snapping a picture and gathering Excel data from the image.

Surprise! Facebook Low-Balled the Percentage of young teens It Paid to Install Spyware – by a factor of 4!

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In January, when news first broke that Facebook had been paying teens in gift cards to let it install what is, by definition, essentially spyware on their phones, it seemed like just another Tuesday. Had it been virtually any other company, the outrage would have been tenfold. After all, paying 13-year-olds to gain access to their mobile app usage and browser traffic is, on its face, an unconscionably creepy way for a business to gather intelligence about its competitors. But this shameless undertaking is now precisely the kind of dissolute conduct we’ve come to expect from the occupants 1 Hacker Way.

Facebook’s moral turpitude aside, it’s now come to light that the company also initially underreported the percentage of teens that it had paid to become lab rats, while falsely stating that parental consent forms were required.

Citing responses from the company to questions posed by Sen. Mark Warner, TechCrunch reports that Facebook now claims “about 18 percent” of the people it convinced to download the “Facebook Research App” were teens. This, as opposed to the “5 percent” figure the company provided reporters over a month ago.

Source: Surprise! Facebook Low-Balled the Percentage of Teens It Paid to Install Spyware

Comcast set mobile pins to “0000,” helping attackers steal phone numbers

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A bad security decision by Comcast on the company’s mobile phone service made it easier for attackers to port victims’ cell phone numbers to different carriers.

Comcast in 2017 launched Xfinity Mobile, a cellular service that uses the Verizon Wireless network and Comcast Wi-Fi hotspots. Comcast has signed up 1.2 million mobile subscribers but took a shortcut in the system that lets users switch from Comcast to other carriers.

To port a phone line from Comcast to another wireless carrier, a customer needs to know his or her Comcast mobile account number. Carriers generally use PINs to verify that a customer seeking to port a number actually owns the number. But Comcast reportedly set the PIN to 0000 for all its customers, and there was apparently no way for customers to change it. That means that an attacker who acquired a victim’s Comcast account number could easily port the victim’s phone number to another carrier.

Source: Comcast set mobile pins to “0000,” helping attackers steal phone numbers | Ars Technica

Four new DNA letters double life’s alphabet

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The DNA of life on Earth naturally stores its information in just four key chemicals — guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, commonly referred to as G, C, A and T, respectively.

Now scientists have doubled this number of life’s building blocks, creating for the first time a synthetic, eight-letter genetic language that seems to store and transcribe information just like natural DNA.

In a study published on 22 February in Science1, a consortium of researchers led by Steven Benner, founder of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida, suggests that an expanded genetic alphabet could, in theory, also support life.

“It’s a real landmark,” says Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The study implies that there is nothing particularly “magic” or special about those four chemicals that evolved on Earth, says Romesberg. “That’s a conceptual breakthrough,” he adds.

[…]

Still, Benner says that the work shows that life could potentially be supported by DNA bases with different structures from the four that we know, which could be relevant in the search for signatures of life elsewhere in the Universe.

Adding letters to DNA could also have more down-to-earth applications.

With more diversity in the genetic building blocks, scientists could potentially create RNA or DNA sequences that can do things better than the standard four letters, including functions beyond genetic storage.

For example, Benner’s group previously showed that strands of DNA that included Z and P were better at binding to cancer cells than sequences with just the standard four bases3. And Benner has set up a company which commercialises synthetic DNA for use in medical diagnostics.

The researchers could potentially use their synthetic DNA to create novel proteins as well as RNA. Benner’s team has also developed further pairs of new bases, opening up the possibility of creating DNA structures that contain 10 or even 12 letters. But the fact that the researchers have already expanded the genetic alphabet to eight is in itself remarkable, says Romesberg. “It’s already doubling what nature has.”

Source: Four new DNA letters double life’s alphabet

As China frightens Europe’s data protectors, America does too with Cloud Act

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A foreign power with possible unbridled access to Europe’s data is causing alarm in the region. No, it’s not China. It’s the United States.

As the US pushes ahead with the “Cloud Act” it enacted about a year ago, Europe is scrambling to curb its reach. Under the act, all US cloud service providers, from Microsoft and IBM to Amazon – when ordered – have to provide American authorities with data stored on their servers, regardless of where it’s housed. With those providers controlling much of the cloud market in Europe, the act could potentially give the US the right to access information on large swaths of the region’s people and companies.

The US says the act is aimed at aiding investigations. But some people are drawing parallels between the legislation and the National Intelligence Law that China put in place in 2017 requiring all its organisations and citizens to assist authorities with access to information. The Chinese law, which the US says is a tool for espionage, is cited by President Donald Trump’s administration as a reason to avoid doing business with companies like Huawei Technologies.

“I don’t mean to compare US and Chinese laws, because obviously they aren’t the same, but what we see is that on both sides, Chinese and American, there is clearly a push to have extraterritorial access to data,” said Ms Laure de la Raudiere, a French lawmaker who co-heads a parliamentary cyber-security and sovereignty group.

“This must be a wake up call for Europe to accelerate its own, sovereign offer in the data sector.”

Source: As Huawei frightens Europe’s data protectors, America does too, Europe News & Top Stories – The Straits Times

Boeing Just Revealed the ‘Loyal Wingman’ Fighter Drone—For Australia

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American plane-maker Boeing has revealed a stealthy, robotic fighter jet that could fly into battle alongside old-school manned planes.

But the “loyal wingman” drone, as officials call it, isn’t for the U.S. military. The Australian government funded the ‘bot’s development in the hope of equipping Royal Australian Air Force squadrons with drone wingmen.

Which is not to say American forces won’t eventually get their own drone wingmen. The idea of deploying robotic warplanes alongside manned ones dates back to World War II. Australia just took a big step toward updating the concept for the 21st century.

The United States likely won’t be far behind.

Boeing’s Australian subsidiary unveiled the so-called “Airpower Teaming System” at the Australian International Airshow at Avalon on Feb. 27. The most striking part of the new system is a 38-foot-long, jet-powered drone that Boeing said could carry weapons and sensors and fly as far as 2,000 miles—all while being more affordable than a $100-million manned jet.

Source: Boeing Just Revealed the ‘Loyal Wingman’ Fighter Drone—For Australia