Daily Archives: January 30, 2020

Alias Privacy “Parasite” 2.0 Adds a Layer of Security to Your Home Assistant

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Alias is a teachable “parasite” that gives you more control over your smart assistant’s customization and privacy. Through a simple app, you can train Alias to react to a self-chosen wake-word; once trained, Alias takes control over your home assistant by activating it for you. When you’re not using it, Alias makes sure the assistant is paralyzed and unable to listen to your conversations.

When placed on top of your home assistant, Alias uses two small speakers to interrupt the assistant’s listening with a constant low noise that feeds directly into the microphone of the assistant. When Alias recognizes your user-created wake-word (e.g., “Hey Alias” or “Jarvis” or whatever), it stops the noise and quietly activates the assistant by speaking the original wake-word (e.g., “Alexa” or “Hey Google”).

From here the assistant can be used as normal. Your wake-word is detected by a small neural network program that runs locally on Alias, so the sounds of your home are not uploaded to anyone’s cloud.

Source: Alias Privacy “Parasite” 2.0 Adds a Layer of Security to Your Home Assistant | Make:

Top Streamers Are Leaving Twitch Amidst Big Money And Shady Deals

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Let’s say you’re an up-and-coming streamer. You’ve done it for a while and you make decent money, although you’re no Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. But you’re on your way there, or so you hope. A while back, you got the opportunity to sign with an agency that promised to help you set up deals to advertise brands on your streams. Today, that’s finally paying off. The agency calls you to offer a $10,000 deal. You don’t think twice. That’s a handsome chunk of change. Time to pop a bottle of champagne and celebrate. There’s just one problem. Turns out the agency pocketed $90,000.

The above hypothetical scenario is based on a true story told by former CEO of esports organization CLG and current CMO of streaming company N3rdfusion Devin Nash, who opted to keep the streamer and agency’s identities anonymous. According to Nash’s story, which echoes others that Kotaku heard in the course of reporting, the initial deal was $100,000 for a single streamer to represent a big brand. But the agency was in full control of negotiations, so it just conveniently omitted the part about the remaining $90,000, because hey, $10,000 sounds pretty good in isolation, right? So the agency drew up a limited partnership agreement, and that was that. Nash went on to tell Kotaku that the streamer didn’t even get to keep the full $10,000.

“[The agency] also took the ten percent they had contractually,” Nash said in a Discord voice call. “So they took $1,000 and also pocketed the $90,000. They made $91,000, the streamer made $9,000, and nobody was the wiser.”

Streaming is big business now, and that means big money. But it also means that the world of streaming is transforming, and streamers are having to learn on the fly how to do more than just entertain. They’re having to strike deals with companies, agencies, and now entire platforms. Toward the end of last year, the deals grew bigger than ever, with blue-haired Fortnite megastar Tyler “Ninja” Blevins jumping ship from Twitch to Microsoft-owned streaming platform Mixer in a high-profile exclusivity deal that was soon followed by countless others. The business of video game streaming is rapidly evolving into something that echoes Hollywood, with agents and managers negotiating on behalf of streamers who are increasingly treated like actors or TV shows, and who wind up on platforms that stand in for more traditional networks.

Source: Top Streamers Are Leaving Twitch Amidst Big Money And Shady Deals

There is much much more to this article under the link

NSF’s newest solar telescope produces first images, most detailed images of the sun

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This first images from NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope show a close-up view of the sun’s surface, which can provide important detail for scientists. The image shows a pattern of turbulent “boiling” plasma that covers the entire sun. The cell-like structures—each about the size of Texas—are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to its surface. That hot solar plasma rises in the bright centers of “cells,” cools off and then sinks below the surface in dark lanes in a process known as convection. (See video available with this news release.)

Solar magnetic fields constantly get twisted and tangled by the motions of the sun’s plasma. Twisted magnetic fields can lead to solar storms that can negatively affect our technology-dependent modern lifestyles. During 2017’s Hurricane Irma, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that a simultaneous space weather event brought down radio communications used by first responders, aviation and maritime channels for eight hours on the day the hurricane made landfall.

Finally resolving these tiny magnetic features is central to what makes the Inouye Solar Telescope unique. It can measure and characterize the sun’s magnetic field in more detail than ever seen before and determine the causes of potentially harmful solar activity.

“It’s all about the magnetic field,” said Thomas Rimmele, director of the Inouye Solar Telescope. “To unravel the sun’s biggest mysteries, we have to not only be able to clearly see these tiny structures from 93 million miles away but very precisely measure their strength and direction near the surface and trace the field as it extends out into the million-degree corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun.”

Better understanding the origins of potential disasters will enable governments and utilities to better prepare for inevitable future space weather events. It is expected that notification of potential impacts could occur earlier—as much as 48 hours ahead of time instead of the current standard, which is about 48 minutes. This would allow for more time to secure power grids and critical infrastructure and to put satellites into safe mode.

he Inouye Solar Telescope combines a 13-foot (4-meter) mirror—the world’s largest for a —with unparalleled viewing conditions at the 10,000-foot Haleakalā summit.

Focusing 13 kilowatts of solar power generates enormous amounts of heat—heat that must be contained or removed. A specialized cooling system provides crucial heat protection for the telescope and its optics. More than seven miles of piping distribute coolant throughout the observatory, partially chilled by ice created on site during the night.

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The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has produced the highest resolution observations of the sun’s surface ever taken. In this movie, taken at a wavelength of 705 nanometers (nm) over a period of 10 minutes, we can see features as small as 30km (18 miles) in size for the first time ever. The movie shows the turbulent, Credit: NSO/AURA/NSF

The dome enclosing the telescope is covered by thin cooling plates that stabilize the temperature around the telescope, helped by shutters within the dome that provide shade and air circulation. The “heat-stop” (a high-tech, liquid-cooled metal donut) blocks most of the sunlight’s energy from the main mirror, allowing scientists to study specific regions of the sun with unparalleled clarity.

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“This image is just the beginning,” said David Boboltz, program director in NSF’s division of astronomical sciences and who oversees the facility’s construction and operations. “Over the next six months, the Inouye telescope’s team of scientists, engineers and technicians will continue testing and commissioning the telescope to make it ready for use by the international solar scientific community. The Inouye Solar Telescope will collect more information about our sun during the first 5 years of its lifetime than all the solar data gathered since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sun in 1612.”

Source: NSF’s newest solar telescope produces first images, most detailed images of the sun

Don’t use online DNA tests! If You Ever Used Promethease, Your DNA Data Might Be on MyHeritage – and so will your family’s

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When it comes to ways to learn about your DNA, Promethease’s service seemed like one of the safest. They promised anonymity, and to delete your report after 45 days. But now that MyHeritage has bought the company, users are being notified that their DNA data is now on MyHeritage. Wait, what?

It turns out that even though Promethease deleted reports as promised after 45 days, if you created an account, the service held onto your raw data. You now have a MyHeritage account, which you can delete if you like. Check your email. That’s how I found out about mine.

What Promethease does

A while back, I downloaded my raw data from 23andme and gave it to Promethease to find out what interesting things might be in my DNA. Ever since 23andme stopped providing detailed health-related results in 2013, Promethease was a sensible alternative. They used to charge $5 (now up to $12, but that’s still a steal) and they didn’t attempt to explain your results to you. Instead, you could just see what SNPs you had—those are spots where your DNA differs from other people’s—and read on SNPedia, a sort of genetics wikipedia, about what those SNPs might mea

So this means Promethease had access to the raw file you gave it (which you would have gotten from 23andme, Ancestry, or another service), and to the report of SNPs that it created for you. You had the option of paying your fee, downloading your report, and never dealing with the company again; or you could create an account so that you could “regenerate” your report in the future without having to pay again. That means they stored your raw DNA file.

Source: If You Ever Used Promethease, Your DNA Data Might Be on MyHeritage Now

Because your DNA contains information about your whole family, by uploading your DNA you also upload their DNA, making it a whole lot easier to de-anonymise their DNA. It’s a bit like uploading a picture of your family to Facebook with the public settings on and then tagging them, even though the other family members on your picture aren’t on Facebook.

UN didn’t patch SharePoint, got mega-hacked, covered it up, kept most staff in the dark, finally forced to admit it, accident waiting to happen

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The United Nations’ European headquarters in Geneva and Vienna were hacked last summer, putting thousands of staff records at miscreants’ fingertips. Incredibly, the organization decided to cover it up without informing those affected nor the public.

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A senior IT official dubbed the attack a “major meltdown,” in which personnel records – as well as contract data covering thousands of individuals and organizations – was accessed. The hackers were able to get into user-management systems and past firewalls; eventually compromising over 40 servers, with the vast majority at the European headquarters in Geneva.

But despite the size and extent of the hack, the UN decided to keep it secret. Only IT teams and the heads of the stations in question were informed.

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Employees whose data was within reach of the hackers were told only that they needed to change their password and were not informed that their personal details had been compromised. That decision not to disclose any details stems from a “cover-up culture” the anonymous IT official who leaked the internal report told the publication.

The report notes it has been unable to calculate the extent of damage but one techie – it’s not clear it is the same one that leaked the report – estimated that 400GB had been pulled from United Nations servers.

Most worrying is the fact the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) was one of those compromised. The OHCHR deals with highly sensitive information from people who put their lives at risk to uncover human rights abuses.

Making matters worse, IT specialists had warned the UN for years that it was at risk from hacking. An audit in 2012 identified an “unacceptable level of risk,” and resulted in a restructure that consolidated servers, websites, and typical services like email, and then outsourced them to commercial providers at a cost of $1.7bn.

But internal warnings about lax security continued, and an official audit in 2018 was full of red flags. “The performance management framework had not been implemented,” it stated, adding that there were “policy gaps in areas of emerging concern, such as the outsourcing of ICT services, end-user device usage, information-sharing, open data and the reuse and safe disposal of decommissioned ICT equipment.”

There were lengthy delays in security projects, and, internally, departments were ignoring compliance efforts. The audit “noted with concern” that 28 of the 37 internal groups hadn’t responded at all and that over the nearly 1,500 websites and web apps identified only a single one had carried out a security assessment.

The audit also found that less than half of the 38,105 staff had done a compulsory course in basic IT security that had been designed to help reduce overall security risks. In short, this was an accident waiting to happen, especially given the UN’s high-profile status.

As to the miscreants’ entry point, it was a known flaw in Microsoft SharePoint (CVE-2019-0604) for which a software patch had been available for months yet the UN had failed to apply it.

The hole can be exploited by a remote attacker to bypass logins and issue system-level commands – in other words, a big problem from a security standpoint. The hackers broke into a vulnerable SharePoint deployment in Vienna and then, with admin access, moved within the organization’s networks to access the Geneva headquarters and then the OHCHR.

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Source: UN didn’t patch SharePoint, got mega-hacked, covered it up, kept most staff in the dark, finally forced to admit it • The Register

Lab-Grown Heart Muscles Have Been Transplanted Into a Human For The First Time

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On Monday, researchers from Japan’s Osaka University announced the successful completion of a first-of-its-kind heart transplant.

Rather than replacing their patient’s entire heart with a new organ, these researchers placed degradable sheets containing heart muscle cells onto the heart’s damaged areas – and if the procedure has the desired effect, it could eventually eliminate the need for some entire heart transplants.

To grow the heart muscle cells, the team started with induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. These are stem cells that researchers create by taking an adult’s cells – often from their skin or blood – and reprogramming them back into their embryonic-like pluripotent state.

At that point, researchers can coax the iSP cells into becoming whatever kind of cell they’d like. In the case of this Japanese study, the researchers created heart muscle cells from the iSP cells before placing them on small sheets.

The patient who received the transplant suffers from ischemic cardiomyopathy, a condition in which a person’s heart has trouble pumping because its muscles don’t receive enough blood.

In severe cases, the condition can require a heart transplant, but the team from Osaka University hopes that the muscle cells on the sheet will secrete a protein that helps regenerate blood vessels, thereby improving the patient’s heart function.

The researchers plan to monitor the patient for the next year, and they hope to conduct the same procedure on nine other people suffering from the same condition within the next three years.

If all goes well, the procedure could become a much-needed alternative to heart transplants – not only is sourcing iPS cells far easier than finding a suitable donor heart, but a recipient’s immune system is more likely to tolerate the cells than a new organ.

Source: Lab-Grown Heart Muscles Have Been Transplanted Into a Human For The First Time

Swarm Drones Demonstrate Tactics to Conduct Urban Raid

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In its third field experiment, DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program deployed swarms of autonomous air and ground vehicles to demonstrate a raid in an urban area. The OFFSET program envisions swarms of up to 250 collaborative autonomous systems providing critical insights to small ground units in urban areas where limited sight lines and tight spaces can obscure hazards, as well as constrain mobility and communications.

In an interactive urban raid scenario, Swarm Systems Integrator teams deployed their assets in the air and on the ground to conduct the DARPA-designed mission, seeking multiple simulated items of interest located in the buildings at the Combined Arms Collective Training Facility (CACTF) at the Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center in Mississippi.

The initial phase of the OFFSET swarm’s mission is to gather intelligence about the urban area of operations. In the field experiment scenario, AprilTags – a type of 2D bar code often used in robotics – were placed on and in buildings and throughout the urban environment to represent items of interest requiring further investigation and/or hazards to avoid or render safe. As the swarm relayed information acquired from the tags, human swarm tacticians adaptively employed various swarm tactics their teams had developed to isolate and secure the building(s) containing the identified items. Concurrently, separate subswarms also were often tasked to maintain situational awareness and continue observation of the surrounding environment. The complex scenario is designed to inspire and incentivize such dynamic employment of large-scale heterogeneous robotic teams to carry out these diverse tasks.

OFFSET includes two main performer types: Swarm Systems Integrators and Swarm Sprinters. The integrators, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon BBN, create OFFSET architectures, interfaces, and their respective Swarm Tactics Exchanges, which house tools to help performers design tactics by composing collective behaviors, algorithms, and existing swarm tactics. The sprinters perform focused tasks and deliver additional technologies to merge with system integrators.

In the Camp Shelby experiment, Swarm Sprinters Charles River Analytics, Inc., Case Western University, and Northwestern University demonstrated the ability to integrate novel interactions and interface modalities for enhanced human-swarm teaming, which allows the human operator to use interactions such as gestures or haptic touch to direct the swarm. Carnegie Mellon University and Soar Technology incorporated their developments in operational swarm tactics, such as providing the swarm the capability to search and map a building or automate resource allocation.

“It has been fascinating to watch the Swarm Sprinters, who may not have been previously exposed to realistic operational settings, begin to understand why it’s so difficult to operate in dense, urban environments,” says Timothy Chung, the OFFSET program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office (TTO). “The Swarm Sprinters brought a number of novel technologies they have developed over the last 6-9 months and successfully integrated and tested their developments on physical platforms in real-world environments, which was exciting to see.”

Previous field experiments took place at the U.S. Army’s Camp Roberts in Paso Robles, California, and the Selby Combined Arms Collective Training Facility in Fort Benning, Georgia. Additional field experiments are targeted at six-month intervals.

More information about OFFSET and swarm sprint thrust areas is available on DARPA’s YouTube channel and website: https://youtu.be/c7KPBHPEMM0 and http://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/offensive-swarm-enabled-tactics.

Source: OFFSET Swarm Systems Integrators Demonstrate Tactics to Conduct Urban Raid