Daily Archives: May 8, 2019

Radical Desalination Approach May Disrupt the Water Industry

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Columbia Engineering researchers design new desalination method for hypersaline brines that is low-cost, efficient, and effective; could address the growing water challenges across the globe

About the Study

The study is titled “Membrane-less and Non-evaporative Desalination of Hypersaline Brines by Temperature Swing Solvent Extraction.”

A New Paradigm for Desalination

New York, NY—May 6, 2019—Hypersaline brines—water that contains high concentrations of dissolved salts and whose saline levels are higher than ocean water—are a growing environmental concern around the world. Very challenging and costly to treat, they result from water produced during oil and gas production, inland desalination concentrate, landfill leachate (a major problem for municipal solid waste landfills), flue gas desulfurization in fossil-fuel power plants, and effluent from industrial processes.

If hypersaline brines are improperly managed, they can pollute both surface and groundwater resources. But if there were a simple, inexpensive way to desalinate the brines, vast quantities of water would be available for all kinds of uses, from agriculture to industrial applications, and possibly even for human consumption.

A Columbia Engineering team led by Ngai Yin Yip, assistant professor of earth and environmental engineering, reports today that they have developed a radically different desalination approach—“temperature swing solvent extraction (TSSE)”—for hypersaline brines. The study, published online in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, demonstrates that TSSE can desalinate very high-salinity brines, up to seven times the concentration of seawater. This is a good deal more than reverse osmosis, the gold-standard for seawater desalination, and can handle approximately twice the seawater salt concentrations.

 

Amine solvents (top phase) extracting water from hypersaline brines (bottom phase).

Illustration showing fresh water production from hypersaline brines by temperature swing solvent extraction.

Currently, hypersaline brines are desalinated either by membrane (reverse osmosis) or water evaporation (distillation). Each approach has limitations. Reverse osmosis methods are ineffective for high-saline brines because the pressures applied in reverse osmosis scale with the amount of salt: hypersaline brines require prohibitively high pressurizations. Distillation techniques, which evaporate the brine, are very energy-intensive.

Yip has been working on solvent extraction, a separation method widely employed for chemical engineering processes. The relatively inexpensive, simple, and effective separation technique is used in a wide range of industries, including production of fine organic compounds, purification of natural products, and extraction of valuable metal complexes.

Source: Radical Desalination Approach May Disrupt the Water Industry | Columbia Engineering

Experimental device generates electricity from the coldness of the universe, good for night time

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The obvious drawback of solar panels is that they require sunlight to generate electricity. Some have observed that for a device on Earth facing space, which has a frigid temperature, the chilling outflow of energy from the device can be harvested using the same kind of optoelectronic physics we have used to harness solar energy. New work, in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters, looks to provide a potential path to generating electricity like solar cells but that can power electronics at night.

An international team of scientists has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to generate a measurable amount of electricity in a diode directly from the coldness of the universe. The infrared semiconductor device faces the sky and uses the difference between Earth and space to produce the electricity.

[…]

By pointing their device toward space, whose temperature approaches mere degrees from absolute zero, the group was able to find a great enough to generate power through an early design.

“The amount of power that we can generate with this experiment, at the moment, is far below what the theoretical limit is,” said Masashi Ono, another author on the paper.

[…]

Calculations made after the diode created showed that, when atmospheric effects are taken into consideration, the current device can theoretically generate almost 4 watts per square meter, roughly one million times what the group’s device generated and enough to help power machinery that is required to run at night.

By comparison, today’s solar panels generate 100 to 200 watts per square meter.

While the results show promise for ground-based devices directed to the sky, Fan said the same principle could be used to recover waste heat from machines. For now, he and his group are focusing on improving their ‘s performance.

Source: Experimental device generates electricity from the coldness of the universe

One of the World’s Largest Crypto Exchanges, Binance, Hacked to the Tune of $40 Million

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Cryptocurrency trading hub Binance, one of the world’s largest, has confirmed it lost about 7,000 Bitcoins (around $40 million) to hackers after its so-called “hot wallet,” i.e. one connected to the internet and used to process transactions, was breached, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

The hot wallet in question contained about two percent of Binance’s holdings and was robbed in a single transaction, Bloomberg wrote. Binance wrote in a statement that they were aware the hackers involved “used a variety of techniques, including phishing, viruses and other attacks,” though the company was “still concluding all possible methods used” and there may be “additional affected accounts that have not been identified yet.”

[…]

Binance said that it would cover any losses in full using its Secure Asset Fund for Users, an insurance reserve set up for this type of situation, Bloomberg wrote. The news network added that Binance said automated systems triggered an alarm during the incident, though it was unable to prevent the attack’s success, and it estimates a security review and temporary halt to all deposits and withdrawals will take a week to complete:

Source: One of the World’s Largest Crypto Exchanges, Binance, Hacked to the Tune of $40 Million

Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers

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March 11, a Vice President at Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing behemoth, published a blog post announcing the release of its own version of Elasticsearch, a powerful open-source software search engine tool.

Elastic is a public company founded in 2012 that is currently worth over $5 billion; the vast majority of its revenue is generated by selling subscription access to Elastic’s search capabilities via the cloud. It’s based in Amsterdam and employs more than 1,200 people.

In the blog post, Adrian Cockcroft, VP of cloud architecture strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), explained that the company felt forced to take action because Elastic was “changing the rules” on how its software code could be shared. Those changes, made in the run-up to Elastic’s 2018 IPO, started mixing intellectual property into Elastic’s overall line of software products.

Open-source software is defined as code that can be freely shared and modified by anyone. But now Elastic was telling customers that certain elements in its product mix could not be accessed without payment and that the code could not be freely shared.

Elastic did not explain its strategic shift at the time. But industry observers interpreted the changes as a response to increasing competition from AWS, which had incorporated Elasticsearch’s code and search functionality into its own suite of computing services.

Elastic isn’t the only open source cloud tool company currently looking over its shoulder at AWS. In 2018 alone, at least eight firms have made similar “rule changes” designed to ward off what they see as unfair competition from a company intent on cannibalizing their services.

[…]

Open source software has been one of the biggest success stories of the software industry. In 2018 alone, Microsoft’s purchase of the open source software development platform GitHub for $7.5 billion, Salesforce’s purchase of the open source company Mulesoft for $6.5 billion, and IBM’s blockbuster $34 billion purchase of the Linux vendor Red Hat proved that open source is a crucial part of the larger software industry. And there is growing acceptance that the collaborative model of developing open source software is a winning strategy to meet the tech industry’s need for constant innovation. So, when the likes of Amazon start accusing companies of not playing fair, people notice.

Sharone Zitzman, a respected commentator on open source software and the head of developer relations at AppsFlyer, an app development company, called Amazon’s move a “hostile takeover” of Elastic’s business. Steven O’Grady, co-founder of the software industry analyst firm RedMonk, cited it as an example of the “existential threat” that open source companies like Elastic believe a handful of cloud computing giants could pose. Shay Banon, founder and CEO of Elastic, carefully defended Elastic’s new licensing practices, while at the same time making his unhappiness with Amazon crystal clear.

[…]

The reaction to Amazon’s move wasn’t all negative. Some veterans of the open source community praised Amazon’s defense of open source values, while pointing out the fundamentally messy contradictions of Elastic mixing commercial priorities with open source principles. And fundamentally, adopting open source code is entirely legal.

But the notion that Amazon was presenting itself as an altruistic defender of the digital public commons rankled community veterans like Zitzman, who says that Amazon has a poor reputation for working with the community. (GitHub data shows that Amazon has far fewer employees than Microsoft, Google, or IBM contributing code to open source projects.)

These critics see Amazon’s decision to recreate Elasticsearch as opportunistic . behavior. Amazon, they say, is leveraging its dominant power in cloud computing in order to unfairly reap intellectual property. In doing so, AWS is striking at the Achilles’ heel of open source: lifting the work of others, and renting access to it.

Source: Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers

Hacker Finds He Can Remotely Kill Car Engines, take location and personal data After Breaking Into Fleet GPS Tracking Apps, because default account password is 123456

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The hacker, who goes by the name L&M, told Motherboard he hacked into more than 7,000 iTrack accounts and more than 20,000 ProTrack accounts, two apps that companies use to monitor and manage fleets of vehicles through GPS tracking devices. The hacker was able to track vehicles in a handful of countries around the world, including South Africa, Morocco, India, and the Philippines. On some cars, the software has the capability of remotely turning off the engines of vehicles that are stopped or are traveling 12 miles per hour or slower, according to the manufacturer of certain GPS tracking devices.

By reverse engineering ProTrack and iTrack’s Android apps, L&M said he realized that all customers are given a default password of 123456 when they sign up.

At that point, the hacker said he brute-forced “millions of usernames” via the apps’ API. Then, he said he wrote a script to attempt to login using those usernames and the default password.

This allowed him to automatically break into thousands of accounts that were using the default password and extract data from them.

According to a sample of user data L&M shared with Motherboard, the hacker has scraped a treasure trove of information from ProTrack and iTrack customers, including: name and model of the GPS tracking devices they use, the devices’ unique ID numbers (technically known as an IMEI number); usernames, real names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses. (According to L&M, he was not able to get all of this information for all users; for some users he was only able to get some of the above information.)

[…]

Though the hacker didn’t prove that he was able to turn off a car’s engine, a representative for Concox, the makers of one of the hardware GPS tracking devices used by some of the users of ProTrack GPS and iTrack, confirmed to Motherboard that customers can turn off the engines remotely if the vehicles are going under 20 kilometers per hour (around 12 miles per hour.)

[…]

Rahim Luqmaan, the owner of Probotik Systems, a South African company that uses ProTrack, said in a phone call with Motherboard that it’s possible to use ProTrack to stop engines if a technician enables that function when installing the tracking devices.

[…]

ProTrack is made by iTryBrand Technology, a company based in Shenzhen, China. iTrack is made by SEEWORLD, a company based in Guangzhou, China. Both iTryBrand and SEEWORLD sell hardware tracking devices and the cloud platforms to manage them directly to users, and to companies that then distribute the hardware and services to users. L&M claimed to have broken into the accounts of some distributors too, which allows him to monitor the vehicles and control the accounts of their customers.

[…]

On its Google Play app page, iTrack advertises a free demo account with the username “Demo,” and the password “123456.” ProTrack provides potential customers with a free demo on its website. This week, when Motherboard tried the demo, the site displayed a prompt to change password because “the default password is too simple.” Last week, when Motherboard first tried the demo, this message did not appear. ProTrack’s API, moreover, also mentions the default password of “123456” in its documentation.

[…]

L&M said that ProTrack has reached out to customers via the app and via email to ask them to change their password this week, but it’s not forcing password resets yet.

ProTrack denied the data breach via email, but confirmed that its prompting users to change passwords.

“Our system is working very well and change password is normal way for account security like other systems, any problem?” a company representative said. “What’s more, why you contact our customers for this thing which make them to receive this kind of boring mail. Why hacker contact you?”

Source: Hacker Finds He Can Remotely Kill Car Engines After Breaking Into GPS Tracking Apps – VICE

EU Votes to Amass a Giant Centralised Database of Biometric Data with 350m people in it

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The European Parliament has voted by a significant margin to streamline its systems for managing everything from travel to border security by amassing an enormous information database that will include biometric data and facial images—an issue that has raised significant alarm among privacy advocates.

This system, called the Common Identity Repository (CIR), streamlines a number of functions, including the ability for officials to search a single database rather than multiple ones, with shared biometric data like fingerprints and images of faces, as well as a repository with personally identifying information like date of birth, passport numbers, and more. According to ZDNet, CIR comprises one of the largest tracking databases on the planet.

The CIR will also amass the records of more than 350 million people into a single database containing the identifying information on both citizens and non-citizens of the EU, ZDNet reports. According to Politico Europe, the new system “will grant officials access to a person’s verified identity with a single fingerprint scan.”

This system has received significant criticism from those who argue there are serious privacy rights at stake, with civil liberties advocacy group Statewatch asserting last year that it would lead to the “creation of a Big Brother centralised EU state database.”

The European Parliament has said the system “will make EU information systems used in security, border and migration management interoperable enabling data exchange between the systems.” The idea is that it will also make obtaining information a faster and more effective process, which is either great or nightmarish depending on your trust in government data collection and storage.

[…]

The CIR was approved through two separate votes: one for merging systems used for things related to visas and borders was approved 511 to 123 (with nine abstentions), and the other for streamlining systems users for law enforcement, judicial, migration, and asylum matters, which was approved 510 to 130 (also with nine abstentions). If this sounds like the handiwork of some serious lobbying, you might be correct, as one European Parliament official told Politico Europe.

A European Commission official told the outlet that they didn’t “think anyone understands what they’re voting for.” So that’s reassuring.

Source: EU Votes to Amass a Giant Database of Biometric Data

Because centralised databases are never leaked or hacked. Wait…

Is Alexa Listening? Amazon Employees Can Access Home Addresses, telephone numbers, contacts

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An Amazon.com Inc. team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the program.

The team, spread across three continents, transcribes, annotates and analyzes a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa. The program, whose existence Bloomberg revealed earlier this month, was set up to help Amazon’s digital voice assistant get better at understanding and responding to commands.

Team members with access to Alexa users’ geographic coordinates can easily type them into third-party mapping software and find home residences, according to the employees, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program.

While there’s no indication Amazon employees with access to the data have attempted to track down individual users, two members of the Alexa team expressed concern to Bloomberg that Amazon was granting unnecessarily broad access to customer data that would make it easy to identify a device’s owner.

[…]

Some of the workers charged with analyzing recordings of Alexa customers use an Amazon tool that displays audio clips alongside data about the device that captured the recording. Much of the information stored by the software, including a device ID and customer identification number, can’t be easily linked back to a user.

However, Amazon also collects location data so Alexa can more accurately answer requests, for example suggesting a local restaurant or giving the weather in nearby Ashland, Oregon, instead of distant Ashland, Michigan.

[…]

It’s unclear how many people have access to that system. Two Amazon employees said they believed the vast majority of workers in the Alexa Data Services group were, until recently, able to use the software.

[…]

A second internal Amazon software tool, available to a smaller pool of workers who tag transcripts of voice recordings to help Alexa categorize requests, stores more personal data, according to one of the employees.

After punching in a customer ID number, those workers, called annotators and verifiers, can see the home and work addresses and phone numbers customers entered into the Alexa app when they set up the device, the employee said. If a user has chosen to share their contacts with Alexa, their names, numbers and email addresses also appear in the dashboard.

[…]

Amazon appears to have been restricting the level of access employees have to the system.

One employee said that, as recently as a year ago, an Amazon dashboard detailing a user’s contacts displayed full phone numbers. Now, in that same panel, some digits are obscured.

Amazon further limited access to data after Bloomberg’s April 10 report, two of the employees said. Some data associates, who transcribe, annotate and verify audio recordings, arrived for work to find that they no longer had access to software tools they had previously used in their jobs, these people said. As of press time, their access had not been restored.

Source: Is Alexa Listening? Amazon Employees Can Access Home Addresses – Bloomberg

brain implant turns thoughts to speech

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Scientists have developed a brain implant that can read people’s minds and turn their thoughts to speech.

[…]

They add that their findings, published in the journal Nature, could help people when disease robs them of their ability to talk.

[…]

The mind-reading technology works in two stages.

First an electrode is implanted in the brain to pick up the electrical signals that manoeuvre the lips, tongue, voice box and jaw.

Then powerful computing is used to simulate how the movements in the mouth and throat would form different sounds.

This results in synthesised speech coming out of a “virtual vocal tract”.

Why do it like that?

You might think it would be easier to scour the brain for the pattern of electrical signals that code for each word.

However, attempts to do so have only had limited success.

Instead it was focusing on the shape of the mouth and the sounds it would produce that allowed the scientists to achieve a world first.

[…]

It is not perfect.

If you listen to this recording of synthesised speech:

Media captionListen to speech decoded from brain activity

You can tell it is not crystal clear (the recording says “the proof you are seeking is not available in books”).

The system is better with prolonged sounds like the “sh” in ship than with abrupt sounds such as the “buh” sound in “books”.

In experiments with five people, who read hundreds of sentences, listeners were able to discern what was being spoken up to 70% of the time when they were given a list of words to choose from.

[…]

The participants in the study were told not to make any specific mouth movements.

Prof Chang said: “There were just asked to do the very simple thing of reading some sentences.

“So it’s a very natural act that the brain translates into movements itself.”

Source: ‘Exhilarating’ implant turns thoughts to speech – BBC News

Amazon behaving as a monopoly is really affecting open source development and their income models, leading to changes in open sourcing (finally, but in the wrong way). An example from Elasticsearch which Amazon calls a kettle.

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March 11, a Vice President at Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing behemoth, published a blog post announcing the release of its own version of Elasticsearch, a powerful open-source software search engine tool.

Elastic is a public company founded in 2012 that is currently worth over $5 billion; the vast majority of its revenue is generated by selling subscription access to Elastic’s search capabilities via the cloud. It’s based in Amsterdam and employs more than 1,200 people.

In the blog post, Adrian Cockcroft, VP of cloud architecture strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), explained that the company felt forced to take action because Elastic was “changing the rules” on how its software code could be shared. Those changes, made in the run-up to Elastic’s 2018 IPO, started mixing intellectual property into Elastic’s overall line of software products.

[…]

Elastic did not explain its strategic shift at the time. But industry observers interpreted the changes as a response to increasing competition from AWS, which had incorporated Elasticsearch’s code and search functionality into its own suite of computing services.

Elastic isn’t the only open source cloud tool company currently looking over its shoulder at AWS. In 2018 alone, at least eight firms have made similar “rule changes” designed to ward off what they see as unfair competition from a company intent on cannibalizing their services.

[…]

Open source software has been one of the biggest success stories of the software industry. In 2018 alone, Microsoft’s purchase of the open source software development platform GitHub for $7.5 billion, Salesforce’s purchase of the open source company Mulesoft for $6.5 billion, and IBM’s blockbuster $34 billion purchase of the Linux vendor Red Hat proved that open source is a crucial part of the larger software industry. And there is growing acceptance that the collaborative model of developing open source software is a winning strategy to meet the tech industry’s need for constant innovation. So, when the likes of Amazon start accusing companies of not playing fair, people notice.

Sharone Zitzman, a respected commentator on open source software and the head of developer relations at AppsFlyer, an app development company, called Amazon’s move a “hostile takeover” of Elastic’s business. Steven O’Grady, co-founder of the software industry analyst firm RedMonk, cited it as an example of the “existential threat” that open source companies like Elastic believe a handful of cloud computing giants could pose

[…]

The reaction to Amazon’s move wasn’t all negative. Some veterans of the open source community praised Amazon’s defense of open source values, while pointing out the fundamentally messy contradictions of Elastic mixing commercial priorities with open source principles. And fundamentally, adopting open source code is entirely legal.

[…]

These critics see Amazon’s decision to recreate Elasticsearch as opportunistic . behavior. Amazon, they say, is leveraging its dominant power in cloud computing in order to unfairly reap intellectual property. In doing so, AWS is striking at the Achilles’ heel of open source: lifting the work of others, and renting access to it.

What happened to Elastic, Zitzman says, fits into a “long-standing trend of AWS rolling out managed services of popular open source technology, or replicating such technologies… This move is a text-book commoditization move — providing Elastic’s premium services for free.” Or as Salil Deshpande, a managing director at Bain Capital Ventures and an investor in multiple open source companies, puts it: “It is clear that AWS is using its market power to be anti-competitive.”

Source: Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers

Some notes – most people who defend open source viciously as it is, formed by some idealists years ago actually have full employment at either universities or at closed source companies. It’s easy to be idealistic with a full belly.

This fits in well with a talk I gave in Zagreb in 2017: Open Source XOR Money about the problems facing the Open Source community, especially the financials.

In 2019 I gave another talk called “Break it up!” about the growing anti-competitive monopolistic powers of the big 5 tech companies.

It’s interesting to see how these subjects are suddenly flaring up in conjunction with each other.

Epic Games Boss Says They’ll Stop Doing Exclusives If Steam Gives Developers More Money because some people seem to be happy to live with a Steam monopoly

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Last night, Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney tweeted that his company would end its controversial exclusivity agreements if Steam raised its revenue cut for developers. It’s a strong statement, even if there are reasons to be skeptical of Sweeney’s position.

“If Steam committed to a permanent 88% revenue share for all developers and publishers without major strings attached,” Sweeney wrote, “Epic would hastily organize a retreat from exclusives (while honoring our partner commitments) and consider putting our own games on Steam.”

Since the Epic Game Store launched in December, the company behind Fortnite and the Unreal Engine has struck several exclusivity deals with high-profile games like Borderlands 3 and The Division 2, preventing those games from appearing on Steam. The practice has been contentious, drawing a lot of ire from PC gamers, especially considering the Epic Game Store lacks many of the features that make Steam so enticing for players. For developers, however, being on the Epic Store is a boon, as it gives 88% of revenue earned from games to the people who make them. PC megalith Steam, on the other hand, gives developers between 70-80% depending on sales.

Source: Epic Games Boss Says They’ll Stop Doing Exclusives If Steam Gives Developers More Money

Yup, exclusivity deals are a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition. No one is forcing anyone to go with the Epic store, if they don’t like it. But there is a clear victor in monopoly breaking: the developers. And happier developers should lead to better products, so eventually the customer will win too. And with any luck, the Steam game player will be a different kind of player than the Epic game player, which means that the stores will have different popularity scores,  leading to more diversity and recognition of different products in the gaming ecosphere. Again, the customer wins.