Monthly Archives: February 2020

Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time

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A powerful antibiotic that kills some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in the world has been discovered using artificial intelligence.

The drug works in a different way to existing antibacterials and is the first of its kind to be found by setting AI loose on vast digital libraries of pharmaceutical compounds.

[…]

“I think this is one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered to date,” added James Collins, a bioengineer on the team at MIT. “It has remarkable activity against a broad range of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.”

[…]

To find new antibiotics, the researchers first trained a “deep learning” algorithm to identify the sorts of molecules that kill bacteria. To do this, they fed the program information on the atomic and molecular features of nearly 2,500 drugs and natural compounds, and how well or not the substance blocked the growth of the bug E coli.

Once the algorithm had learned what molecular features made for good antibiotics, the scientists set it working on a library of more than 6,000 compounds under investigation for treating various human diseases. Rather than looking for any potential antimicrobials, the algorithm focused on compounds that looked effective but unlike existing antibiotics. This boosted the chances that the drugs would work in radical new ways that bugs had yet to develop resistance to.

Jonathan Stokes, the first author of the study, said it took a matter of hours for the algorithm to assess the compounds and come up with some promising antibiotics. One, which the researchers named “halicin” after Hal, the astronaut-bothering AI in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, looked particularly potent.

Writing in the journal Cell, the researchers describe how they treated numerous drug-resistant infections with halicin, a compound that was originally developed to treat diabetes, but which fell by the wayside before it reached the clinic.

Tests on bacteria collected from patients showed that halicin killed Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bug that causes TB, and strains of Enterobacteriaceae that are resistant to carbapenems, a group of antibiotics that are considered the last resort for such infections. Halicin also cleared C difficile and multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infections in mice.

To hunt for more new drugs, the team next turned to a massive digital database of about 1.5bn compounds. They set the algorithm working on 107m of these. Three days later, the program returned a shortlist of 23 potential antibiotics, of which two appear to be particularly potent. The scientists now intend to search more of the database.

Stokes said it would have been impossible to screen all 107m compounds by the conventional route of obtaining or making the substances and then testing them in the lab. “Being able to perform these experiments in the computer dramatically reduces the time and cost to look at these compounds,” he said.

Barzilay now wants to use the algorithm to find antibiotics that are more selective in the bacteria they kill. This would mean that taking the antibiotic kills only the bugs causing an infection, and not all the healthy bacteria that live in the gut. More ambitiously, the scientists aim to use the algorithm to design potent new antibiotics from scratch.

Source: Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time | Society | The Guardian

People Are Killing Puppy Clones That Don’t Come Out ‘Perfect’ – wait you can clone your puppy?!

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This is a hugely holier than thou article written by a strident anti-abortionist, but it’s quite interesting in that a) you can clone your puppy commercially and b) it’s absolutely not a perfected science.

You have five days after your pet dies to extract its genetic material for cloning, according to the Seoul-based Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, which offers dog and cat cloning services. The company recommends wrapping the deceased in wet blankets and throwing them into the fridge before you send the package. From there, scientists will harvest tissue and eggs, usually from slaughterhouses, then transfer them into surrogate mothers via in vitro fertilization.

It can take dozens of artificial inseminations into a mother animal’s womb to get a single egg to gestation. When that mother finally does give birth — there are scores of these surrogate mothers whose only job is to be filled with needles until they conceive, and then do it again — what’s born might be a genetic copy of the original, but it isn’t a perfect copy.

When I picked up Onruang’s pups and examined them head to hock — they weighed maybe three pounds a piece — I saw surprising amounts of subtle variations in markings and size.

[…]

When an animal is cloned, the donor — the mother carrying the clone — contributes extremely low levels of mitochondrial DNA. “That’s the variation which can account for differing color patterns and other unknowns,” says Doug Antczak, a veterinary scientist at Cornell University who specializes in horse genetics.

What’s eventually passed to the cloned pet buyer is a reasonable facsimile, something good enough to the naked eye that they’ll say: “That’s my dog!” And here’s where the scale of this production might — or should — give pause.

Many clones are born with defects and genetic disorders, and since those imperfections aren’t what their buyer is spending tens of thousands of dollars on, they end up discarded.

[…]

if that cloned dog does make it through the gauntlet — but is missing the spot over its eye that a deceased pet had, for instance — it still faces a swift death via euthanasia, just another pile of genetic material to harvest.

“There’s too many mistakes, too many stillbirths, deformities, and mutations,” warns Chris Cauble, a Glendale, California, veterinarian whose mobile service offers tissue collection for cloning pets.

Source: People Are Killing Puppy Clones That Don’t Come Out ‘Perfect’

All that Samsung users found on UK website after weird Find my Mobile push notification was… other people’s details

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In the early hours of this morning, a very large number of Samsung devices around the world received a push notification from the vendor’s Find my Mobile app. That notification simply read “1/1”.

[…]

A handful of Reg staffers also received the notification, which caused surprise and concern at Vulture Central – not least because Find my Mobile is disabled on two of those devices.

A pre-installed default Samsung OEM app regarded by some as bloatware, Find my Mobile cannot be fully uninstalled if you don’t plan to format the entire phone with a new third-party ROM – which is a profoundly technical process, and, with modern Samsung devices, requires the user to unlock the bootloader.

[…]

Ominously, some Register readers who received the unwanted notification immediately assumed the worst and went into their accounts to change their Samsung passwords only to be confronted by other people’s personal data on the Samsung UK website.

One told us that after seeing other people’s names, addresses and phone numbers displayed in his Samsung Account after logging in using his own details, he phoned the Samsung helpdesk. Our reader said: “When I explained to [the call centre worker] what I saw, he said, ‘Yes, we’ve had a few reports of that this morning’.”

Mark showed us screenshots he had taken, showing himself logged in and someone else’s details being displayed as if they were associated with his account.

Source: All that Samsung users found on UK website after weird Find my Mobile push notification was… other people’s details • The Register

Details of 10.6 million Vegas MGM hotel guests posted on a hacking forum

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The personal details of more than 10.6 million users who stayed at MGM Resorts hotels have been published on a hacking forum this week.

Besides details for regular tourists and travelers, included in the leaked files are also personal and contact details for celebrities, tech CEOs, reporters, government officials, and employees at some of the world’s largest tech companies.

ZDNet verified the authenticity of the data today, together with a security researcher from Under the Breach, a soon-to-be-launched data breach monitoring service.

A spokesperson for MGM Resorts confirmed the incident via email.

What was exposed

According to our analysis, the MGM data dump that was shared today contains personal details for 10,683,188 former hotel guests.

Included in the leaked files are personal details such as full names, home addresses, phone numbers, emails, and dates of birth.

Source: Exclusive: Details of 10.6 million MGM hotel guests posted on a hacking forum | ZDNet

Google users in UK to lose EU data protection, get US non-protection

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The shift, prompted by Britain’s exit from the EU, will leave the sensitive personal information of tens of millions with less protection and within easier reach of British law enforcement.

The change was described to Reuters by three people familiar with its plans. Google intends to require its British users to acknowledge new terms of service including the new jurisdiction.

Ireland, where Google and other U.S. tech companies have their European headquarters, is staying in the EU, which has one of the world’s most aggressive data protection rules, the General Data Protection Regulation.

Google has decided to move its British users out of Irish jurisdiction because it is unclear whether Britain will follow GDPR or adopt other rules that could affect the handling of user data, the people said.

If British Google users have their data kept in Ireland, it would be more difficult for British authorities to recover it in criminal investigations.

The recent Cloud Act in the United States, however, is expected to make it easier for British authorities to obtain data from U.S. companies. Britain and the United States are also on track to negotiate a broader trade agreement.

Beyond that, the United States has among the weakest privacy protections of any major economy, with no broad law despite years of advocacy by consumer protection groups.

A Google spokesman declined to comment ahead of a public announcement.

Source: Exclusive: Google users in UK to lose EU data protection – sources – Reuters

Firm Tracking Purchase, Transaction Histories of Millions Not Really Anonymizing Them

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The nation’s largest financial data broker, Yodlee, holds extensive and supposedly anonymized banking and credit card transaction histories on millions of Americans. Internal documents obtained by Motherboard, however, appear to indicate that Yodlee clients could potentially de-anonymize those records by simply downloading a giant text file and poking around in it for a while.

According to Motherboard, the 2019 document explains how Yodlee obtains transaction data from partners like banks and credit card companies and what data is collected. That includes a unique identifier associated with the bank or credit card holder, amounts of transactions, dates of sale, which business the transaction was processed at, and bits of metadata, Motherboard wrote; it also includes data relating to purchases involving multiple retailers, such as a restaurant order through a delivery app. The document states that Yodlee is giving clients access to this data in the form of a large text file rather than a Yodlee-run interface.

The document also shows how Yodlee performs “data cleaning” on that text file, which means obfuscating patterns like “account numbers, phone numbers, and SSNs by redacting them with the letters “XXX,” Motherboard wrote. It also scrubs some payroll and financial transfer data, as well as the names of the banking and credit card companies involved.

But this process leaves the unique identifiers, which are shared across each entry associated with a particular account, intact. Research has repeatedly shown that taking supposedly anonymized data and reverse-engineering it to identify individuals within can be a trivial undertaking, even when no information is shared across records.

Experts told Motherboard that anyone with malicious intent would just need to verify a purchase was made by a specific individual and they might gain access to all other transactions using the same identifier.

With location and time data on just three to four purchases, an “attacker can unmask the person with a very high probability,” Rutgers University associate professor Vivek Singh told the site. “With this unmasking, the attacker would have access to all the other transactions made by that individual.”

Imperial College of London assistant professor Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, who worked with Singh on a 2015 study that identified shoppers from metadata, wrote to Motherboard this process appeared to leave the data only “pseudonymized” and that “someone with access to the dataset and some information about you, e.g. shops you’ve been buying from and when, might be able to identify you.”

Yodlee and its owner, Envestnet, is facing serious heat from Congress. Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Sherrod Brown, as well as Representative Anna Eshoo, recently sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking for it to investigate whether the sale of this kind of financial data violates federal law.

“Envestnet claims that consumers’ privacy is protected because it anonymizes their personal financial data,” the congresspeople wrote. “But for years researchers have been able to re-identify the individuals to whom the purportedly anonymized data belongs with just three or four pieces of information.”

Source: Report: Firm Tracking Purchase, Transaction Histories of Millions Maybe Not Really Anonymizing Them

It’s very hard to get anonymity right.

Forcing us to get consent before selling browser histories violates our free speech, US ISPs claim

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The US state of Maine is violating internet broadband providers’ free speech by forcing them to ask for their customers’ permission to sell their browser history, according to a new lawsuit.

The case was brought this month by four telco industry groups in response to a new state-level law aimed at providing Maine residents with privacy protections killed at the federal level by the FCC just days before they were due to take effect.

ACA Connects, CTIA, NCTA and USTelecom are collectively suing [PDF] Maine’s attorney general Aaron Frey, and the chair and commissioners of Maine’s Public Utilities Commission claiming that the statute, passed in June 2019, “imposes unprecedented and unduly burdensome restrictions on ISPs’, and only ISPs’, protected speech.”

How so? Because it includes “restrictions on how ISPs communicate with their own customers that are not remotely tailored to protecting consumer privacy.” The lawsuit even explains that there is a “proper way to protect consumer privacy” – and that’s the way the FCC does it, through “technology-neutral, uniform regulation.” Although that regulation is actually the lack of regulation.

If you’re still having a hard time understanding how requiring companies to get their customers’ permission before they sell their personal data infringes the First Amendment, the lawsuit has more details.

It “(1) requires ISPs to secure ‘opt-in’ consent from their customers before using information that is not sensitive in nature or even personally identifying; (2) imposes an opt-out consent obligation on using data that are by definition not customer personal information; (3) limits ISPs from advertising or marketing non-communications-related services to their customers; and (4) prohibits ISPs from offering price discounts, rewards in loyalty programs, or other cost saving benefits in exchange for a customer’s consent to use their personal information.”

All of this results in an “excessive burden” on ISPs, they claim, especially because not everyone else had to do the same. The new statute includes “no restrictions at all on the use, disclosure, or sale of customer personal information, whether sensitive or not, by the many other entities in the Internet ecosystem or traditional brick-and-mortar retailers,” the lawsuit complains.

Discrimination!

This is discrimination, they argue. “Maine cannot discriminate against a subset of companies that collect and use consumer data by attempting to regulate just that subset and not others, especially given the absence of any legislative findings or other evidentiary support that would justify targeting ISPs alone.”

We’ll leave the idea that customers are suffering by not receiving marketing materials from companies that ISPs sell their data to alone for now and focus on the core issue: that if Google and Facebook are allowed to sell their users’ personal data then ISPs feel they should be allowed to as well.

Which is a fair point, although profoundly depressing in a broader context. The basic argument appears to be that we should only provide the minimum protections that are available. Nothing above minimum is legal.

If you look at what the statute actually does, it was clearly written in users’ own interests. It prevents companies from refusing to serve customers that do not agree to allow it to collect and sell their personal data and it requires ISPs to take “reasonable measures” to protect that data. Those companies are still allowed to use the data to market their own products; just not to sell it to others to sell theirs.

But because the ISPs successfully managed to get the FCC to kill off its own rules on similar protections, it argues that the scrapping of rules is the legal precedent here. “The Statute is preempted by federal law because it directly conflicts with and deliberately thwarts federal determinations about the proper way to protect consumer privacy,” the lawsuit argues.

The solution of course is federal privacy protections. But despite overwhelming public support for just such a law, the same ISPs and telcos fighting this law in Maine, have flooded Washington DC with lobbying money and campaign contributions to make sure that it doesn’t progress through Congress. And if this Maine challenge is successful, next in the ISPs’ sites will be California’s new privacy laws.

Source: Forcing us to get consent before selling browser histories violates our free speech, US ISPs claim • The Register

A new use for McDonald’s used cooking oil: 3D printing

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Simpson had bought a 3D printer for the lab in 2017. He hoped to use it to build custom parts that kept organisms alive inside of the NMR spectrometer for his research.
But the commercial resin he needed for high-quality light projection 3D printing (where light is used to form a solid) of those parts was expensive.
This could be America’s smallest restaurant
The dominant material for light projection printing is liquid plastic, which can cost upward of $500 a liter, according to Simpson.
Simpson closely analyzed the resin and spotted a connection. The molecules making up the commercial plastic resin were similar to fats found in ordinary cooking oil.
“The thought came to us. Could we use cooking oil and turn it into resin for 3D printing?” Simpson said.

Only one restaurant responded — McDonald’s

What came next was the hardest part of the two-year experiment for Simpson and his team of 10 students — getting a large sample batch of used cooking oil.
“We reached out to all of the fast-food restaurants around us. They all said no,” said Simpson.
Except for McDonald’s (MCD).
In the summer of 2017, the students went to a McDonald’s location near the campus in Toronto, Ontario, that had agreed to give them 10 liters of waste oil.

Back in the lab, the oil was filtered to take out chunks of food particles.
[…]
The team successfully printed a high-quality butterfly with details as minute as 100 micrometers in size.
A 3D printed butterbly made from McDonald's waste cooking oil.

A 3D printed butterbly made from McDonald’s waste cooking oil.
“We did analysis on the butterfly. It felt rubbery to touch, with a waxy surface that repelled water,” said Simpson. He described the butterfly as “structurally stable.” It didn’t break apart and held up at room temperature. “We thought you could possibly 3D print anything you like with the oil,” he said.
The experiment yielded a commercially viable resin that Simpson estimates could be sourced as cheaply as 30 cents a liter of waste oil.
Simpson was equally excited about another benefit of the butterfly the team had created.”The butterfly is essentially made from fat, which means it is biodegradable,” he said.
To test this, he buried a sample butterfly in soil and found that 20% of it disappeared in a two-week period.
“The concept of sustainability has been underplayed in 3D printing,” said Tim Greene, a research director for global research firm IDC who specializes in the 3D printing market. “The melted plastic currently being used as resin is not so great for the environment.”

Source: A new use for McDonald’s used cooking oil: 3D printing – CNN

Vodafone: Yes, we slurp data on customers’ network setups, but we do it for their own good. No, you can’t opt out.

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Seeking to improve its pisspoor customer service rating, UK telecoms giant Vodafone has clarified just how much information it slurps from customer networks. You might want to rename those servers, m’kay?

The updates are rather extensive and were noted by customers after a headsup-type email arrived from the telco.

One offending paragraph gives Vodafone an awful lot of information about what a customer might be running on their own network:

For providing end user support and optimizing your WiFi experience we are collecting information about connected devices (MAC address, Serial Number, user given host names and WiFi connection quality) as well as information about the the WiFi networks (MAC addresses and identifiers, radio statistics).

More accurately, it gives a third party that information. Airties A.S. is the company responsible for hosting information that Vodafone’s support drones might use for diagnostics.

With Vodafone topping the broadband and landline complaint tables, according to the most recent Ofcom data (PDF), the company would naturally want to increase the chances of successfully resolving a customer’s problem. However, there is no way to opt out.

Source: Vodafone: Yes, we slurp data on customers’ network setups, but we do it for their own good • The Register

Shipping is so insecure we could have driven off in an oil rig, says Pen Test Partners

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Penetration testers looking at commercial shipping and oil rigs discovered a litany of security blunders and vulnerabilities – including one set that would have let them take full control of a rig at sea.

Pen Test Partners (PTP), an infosec consulting outfit that specialises in doing what its name says, reckoned that on the whole, not many maritime companies understand the importance of good infosec practices at sea. The most eye-catching finding from PTP’s year of maritime pentesting was that its researchers could have gained a “full compromise” of a deep sea drilling rig, as used for oil exploration.

PTP’s Ken Munro explained, when The Register asked the obvious question, that this meant “stop engine, fire up thrusters (dynamic positioning system), change rudder position, mess around with navigation, brick systems, switch them off, you name it.”

The firm’s Nigel Hearne explained that many maritime tech vendors have a “variable” approach to security.

Making heavy use of the word “poor” to summarise what he had seen over the past year, Hearne wrote that he and his colleagues had examined everything from a deep water exploration and the aforementioned drilling rig to a brand new cruise ship to a Panamax container vessel, and a few others in between.

Munro also published a related blog post this week.

Among other things the team found were clandestine Wi-Fi access points in non-Wi-Fi areas of ships (“they want to stream tunes/video in a work area that they can’t get crew Wi-Fi in,” said Munro), and crews bridging designed gaps between ships’ engineering control systems and human interface systems.

Why were seafarers doing something that seems so obviously silly to an infosec-minded person? Munro told us: “Someone needs to administrate or monitor systems from somewhere else in the vessel, saving a long walk. Ships are big!”

Another potential explanation proferred by Munro could apply to cruise ship crews where Wi-Fi is generally a paid-for, metered commodity: “Their personal satellite data allowance has been used up, so they put a rogue Wi-Fi AP on to the ship’s business network where there are no limits.”

A Panamax vessel (the largest size of ship that can pass through the Panama Canal, the vital central American shipping artery between the Atlantic and Pacific) can be up to 294 metres (PDF, page 8 gives the measurements) from stem to stern. A crew member needing to move from, say, bow thruster to main machinery control room in the aft part of the ship and back again will spend significant amounts of time doing so. It’s far easier to jury-rig remote access than do all that walking.

PTP also found that old infosec chestnut, default and easy-to-guess passwords – along with a smattering of stickers on PCs with passwords in plaintext.

Default passwords aboard ships. Pic: Pen Test Partners

Default passwords aboard ships. Pic: Pen Test Partners

“One of the biggest surprises (not that I should have been at all surprised in hindsight) is the number of installations we still find running default credentials – think admin/admin or blank/blank – even on public facing systems,” sighed Hearne, detailing all the systems he found that were using default creds – including an onboard CCTV system.

The pentesters also found “hard coded credentials” embedded in critical items including a ship’s satcom (satellite comms mast) unit, potentially allowing anyone aboard the ship to log in and piggyback off the owners’ paid-for internet connection – or to cut it off

Source: Shipping is so insecure we could have driven off in an oil rig, says Pen Test Partners • The Register

The Paywalled Garden: iOS is Adware

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Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and iCloud data subscriptions, they expanded to Apple Music a few years ago, only to dramatically ramp up their offerings last year with TV+, News+, Arcade, and Card. Their services business, taken as a whole, is quickly becoming massive; Apple reported $12.7 billion in Q1 2020 alone, nearly a sixth of its already gigantic quarterly revenue.

All that money comes from the wallets of 480 million subscribers, and their goal is to grow that number to 600 million this year. But to do that, Apple has resorted to insidious tactics to get those people: ads. Lots and lots of ads, on devices that you pay for. iOS 13 has an abundance of ads from Apple marketing Apple services, from the moment you set it up and all throughout the experience. These ads cannot be hidden through the iOS content blocker extension system. Some can be dismissed or hidden, but most cannot, and are purposefully designed into core apps like Music and the App Store. There’s a term to describe software that has lots of unremovable ads: adware, which what iOS has sadly become.

If you don’t subscribe to these services, you’ll be forced to look at these ads constantly, either in the apps you use or the push notifications they have turned on by default. The pervasiveness of ads in iOS is a topic largely unexplored, perhaps due to these services having a lot of adoption among the early adopter crowd that tends to discuss Apple and their design. This isn’t a value call on the services themselves, but a look at how aggressively Apple pushes you to pay for them, and how that growth-hack-style design comes at the expense of the user experience. In this post, I’ll break down all of the places in iOS that I’ve found that have Apple-manufactured ads. You can replicate these results yourself by doing a factory reset of an iPhone (backup first!), installing iOS 13, and signing up for a new iCloud account.

Source: The Paywalled Garden: iOS is Adware – Steve Streza

This Bracelet Prevents Smart Speakers From Spying on You

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You probably don’t realize just how many devices in your home or workplace are not only capable of eavesdropping on all your conversations but are specifically designed to. Smartphones, tablets, computers, smartwatches, smart speakers, even voice-activated appliances that have access to smart assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant feature built-in microphones that are constantly monitoring conversations for specific activation words to bring them to life. But accurate voice recognition often requires processing recordings in the cloud on faraway servers, and despite what giant companies keep assuring us, there are obvious and warranted concerns about privacy.

You could simply find yourself a lovely cave deep in the woods and hide out the rest of your days away from technology if you don’t want to be the victim of endless eavesdropping, but this wearable jammer, created by researchers from the University of Chicago, is a (slightly) less drastic alternative. It’s chunky, there’s no denying it, but surrounding an inner core of electronics and batteries are a series of ultrasonic transducers blasting sound waves in all directions. While inaudible to human ears, the ultrasonic signals take advantage of a flaw found in sensitive microphone hardware that results in these signals being captured and interfering with the recordings of lower parts of the audio spectrum where the frequencies of human voices fall.

The results are recordings that are nearly incomprehensible to both human ears and the artificial intelligence-powered voice recognition software that smart assistants and other voice-activated devices rely on.

But why pack the technology into a wearable bracelet instead of creating a stationary device you could set up in the middle of a room for complete privacy? An array of transducers pointing in all directions are needed to properly blanket a room in ultrasonic sound waves, but thanks to science, wherever the signals from two neighboring transducers overlap, they cancel each other out, creating dead zones where microphones could continue to effectively operate.

By incorporating the jamming hardware into a wearable device, the natural and subconscious movements of the wearer’s arms and hands while they speak keep the transducers in motion. This effectively eliminates the risk of dead zones being created long enough to allow entire words or sentences to be detected by a smart device’s microphone. For those who are truly worried about their privacy, the research team has shared their source code for the signal generator as well as 3D models for the bracelet on GitHub for anyone to download and build themselves. You’ll need to supply your own electronics, and if you’re going to all the trouble, you might as well build one for each wrist, all but ensuring there’s never a dead zone in your silencing shield.

Source: This Punk Bracelet Prevents Smart Speakers From Hearing You

This is nice  because Project Alias / Parasite is aimed at a very specific machine, whereas this will protect you wherever you go. It’s just a bit clunky.

Generating electricity ‘out of thin air’ using a protein and moisture in the air

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Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a device that uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air, a new technology they say could have significant implications for the future of renewable energy, climate change and in the future of medicine.

As reported today in Nature, the laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley at UMass Amherst have created a device they call an “Air-gen.” or air-powered generator, with electrically conductive nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter. The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere.

“We are literally making electricity out of thin air,” says Yao. “The Air-gen generates 24/7.” Lovely, who has advanced sustainable biology-based electronic materials over three decades, adds, “It’s the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet.”

The new technology developed in Yao’s lab is non-polluting, renewable and low-cost. It can generate power even in areas with extremely low humidity such as the Sahara Desert. It has significant advantages over other forms of renewable energy including solar and wind, Lovley says, because unlike these other renewable energy sources, the Air-gen does not require sunlight or wind, and “it even works indoors.”

The Air-gen device requires only a thin film of protein nanowires less than 10 microns thick, the researchers explain. The bottom of the film rests on an electrode, while a smaller electrode that covers only part of the nanowire film sits on top. The film adsorbs from the atmosphere. A combination of the electrical conductivity and surface chemistry of the protein nanowires, coupled with the fine pores between the nanowires within the film, establishes the conditions that generate an between the two electrodes.

The researchers say that the current generation of Air-gen devices are able to power small electronics, and they expect to bring the invention to commercial scale soon. Next steps they plan include developing a small Air-gen “patch” that can power electronic wearables such as health and fitness monitors and smart watches, which would eliminate the requirement for traditional batteries. They also hope to develop Air-gens to apply to cell phones to eliminate periodic charging.

[…]

Source: New green technology generates electricity ‘out of thin air’

Internet Society told to halt .org sale to dodgy companies… by its own advisory council

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The Internet Society’s own members are now opposing its sale of the .org internet registry to an unknown private equity firm.

The Chapters Advisory Council, the official voice of Internet Society (ISOC) members, will vote this month on whether to approve a formal recommendation that the society “not proceed [with the sale] unless a number of conditions are met.”

Those conditions largely comprise the publication of additional details and transparency regarding ISOC’s controversial sell-off of .org. Despite months of requests, neither the society nor the proposed purchaser, Ethos Capital, have disclosed critical elements of the deal, including who would actually own the registry if the sale went through.

Meanwhile, word has reached us that Ethos Capital attempted to broker a secret peace treaty this coming weekend in Washington DC by inviting key individuals to a closed-door meeting with the goal of thrashing out an agreement all sides would be happy with. After Ethos insisted the meeting be kept brief, and a number of those opposed to the sale declined to attend, Ethos’s funding for attendees’ flights and accommodation was suddenly withdrawn, and the plan to hold a confab fell apart, we understand.

ISOC – and .org’s current operator, the ISOC-controlled Public Interest Registry (PIR) – are still hoping to push DNS overseer ICANN to make a decision on the .org sale before the end of the month. But that looks increasingly unlikely following an aggressive letter from ICANN’s external lawyers last week insisting ICANN will take as much time as it feels necessary to review the deal.

The overall lack of transparency around the $1.13bn deal has led California’s Attorney General to demand documents relating to the sale – and ISOC’s chapters are demanding the same information as a pre-condition to any sale in their proposed advice to the ISOC board.

That information includes: full details of the transaction; a financial breakdown of what Ethos Capital intends to do with .org’s 10 million internet addresses; binding commitments on limiting price increases and free speech protections; and publication of the bylaws and related corporate documents for both the replacement to the current registry operator, PIR, and the proposed “Stewardship Council” which Ethos claims will give .org users a say in future decisions.

Disregarded

“There is a feeling amongst chapters that ISOC seems to have disregarded community participation, failed to properly account for the potential community impact, and misread the community mindset around the .ORG TLD,” the Chapters Advisory Council’s proposed advice to the ISOC board – a copy of which The Register has seen – states.

Although the advisory council has no legal ability to stop ISOC, if the proposed advice is approved by vote, and the CEO and board of trustees push ahead with the sale regardless, it could have severe repercussions for the organization’s non-profit status, and would further undermine ISOC’s position that the sale will “support the Internet Society’s vision that the Internet is for everyone.”

[…]

That lack of transparency was never more clear than when the ISOC board claimed to have met for two weeks in November to discuss the Ethos Capital offer to buy .org, but made no mention of the proposal and only made ISOC members and chapters aware of the decision after it had been made.

With a spotlight on ISOC’s secretive deliberations – and with board members now claiming they are subject to a non-disclosure agreement over the sale – the organization has added skeleton minutes that provide little or no insight into deliberations. It is not clear when those minutes were added – no update date is provided.

“The primary purpose of the Chapters Advisory Council shall be to channel and facilitate advice and recommendations to and from the President and Board of Trustees of the Internet Society in a bottom up manner, on any matters of concern or interest to the Chapter AC and ISOC Chapters,” reads the official description of the council on ISOC’s website.

With Ethos having failed to broker a secret deal, and ICANN indicating that it will consider the public interest in deciding whether to approve the sale, if ISOC’s advisory council does vote to advise the board not to move forward with the sale, the Internet Society will face a stark choice: stick by the secretive billionaires funding the purchase of .org with the added risk of blowing up the entire organization; or walk away from the deal.

Source: Revolution, comrades: Internet Society told to halt .org sale… by its own advisory council • The Register

Google allows random company to DMCA sites with the word ‘Did’ in it, de-indexes (deletes) them without warning or recourse.

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In 2018, Target wrote an article about Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron who some credit as being the world’s first computer programmer, despite being born in 1815. Unfortunately, however, those who search for that article today using Google won’t find it.

As the image below shows, the original Tweet announcing the article is still present in Google’s indexes but the article itself has been removed, thanks to a copyright infringement complaint that also claimed several other victims.

While there could be dozens of reasons the article infringed someone’s copyrights, the facts are so absurd as to be almost unbelievable. Sinclair’s article was deleted because an anti-piracy company working on behalf of a TV company decided that since its title (What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?) contained the word ‘DID’, it must be illegal.

This monumental screw-up was announced on Twitter by Sinclair himself, who complained that “Computers are stupid folks. Too bad Google has decided they are in charge.”

At risk of running counter to Sinclair’s claim, in this case – as Lovelace herself would’ve hopefully agreed – it is people who are stupid, not computers. The proof for that can be found in the DMCA complaint sent to Google by RightsHero, an anti-piracy company working on behalf of Zee TV, an Indian pay-TV channel that airs Dance India Dance.

Now in its seventh season, Dance India Dance is a dance competition reality show that is often referred to as DID. And now, of course, you can see where this is going. Because Target and at least 11 other sites dared to use the word in its original context, RightsHero flagged the pages as infringing and asked Google to deindex them.

But things only get worse from here.

Look up the word ‘did’ in any dictionary and you will never find the definition listed as an acronym for Dance India Dance. Instead, you’ll find the explanation as “past of do” or something broadly along those lines. However, if the complaint sent to Google had achieved its intended effect, finding out that would’ve been more difficult too.

Lo, here it is in its full glory.

As we can see, the notice not only claims Target’s article is infringing the copyrights of Dance India Dance (sorry, DID), but also no less than four online dictionaries explaining what the word ‘did’ actually means. (Spoiler: None say ‘Dance India Dance’).

Perhaps worse still, some of the other allegedly-infringing articles were published by some pretty serious information resources including:

-USGS Earthquake Hazards Program of the U.S. Geological Survey (Did You Feel It? (DYFI) collects information from people who felt an earthquake and creates maps that show what people experienced and the extent of damage)

– The US Department of Education (Did (or will) you file a Schedule 1 with your 2018 tax return?)

– Nature.com (Did pangolins spread the China coronavirus to people?)

Considering the scale of the problem here, we tried to contact RightsHero for comment. However, the only anti-piracy company bearing that name has a next-to-useless website that provides no information on where the company is, who owns it, who runs it, or how those people can be contacted.

In the absence of any action by RightsHero, Sinclair Target was left with a single option – issue a counterclaim to Google in the hope of having his page restored.

“I’ve submitted a counter-claim, which seemed to be the only thing I could do,” Target told TorrentFreak.

“Got a cheery confirmation email from Google saying, ‘Thanks for contacting us!’ and that it might be a while until the issue is resolved. I assume that’s because this is the point where finally a decision has to be made by a human being. It is annoying indeed.”

Finally, it’s interesting to take a line from Target’s analysis of Lovelace’s program. “She thought carefully about how operations could be organized into groups that could be repeated, thereby inventing the loop,” he writes.

10 DELETE “DID”
20 PROFIT?
30 GOTO 10

Source: Don’t Use the Word ‘Did’ or a Dumb Anti-Piracy Company Will Delete You From Google – TorrentFreak

Facebook was repeatedly warned of security flaw that led to biggest data breach in its history

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Facebook knew about a huge security flaw that let hackers to steal personal data from millions of its users almost one year before the crime, yet failed to fix it in time, the Telegraph can reveal.

Legal documents show that the company was repeatedly warned by its own employees as well as outsiders about a dangerous loophole that eventually led to the massive data breach in September 2018.

Despite this, the loophole remained open for nine months after it was first raised, leading employees to later speak of their “guilt” and “hurt” at knowing that the attack “could have been prevented”.

The breach, which involved stealing digital “access tokens” used by Facebook to verify users’ identity without needing their passwords, exposed the names, phone numbers and email addresses of 29 million people and a host of more intimate data for 14 million of them, putting users around the world at risk of identity theft….

Source: Facebook was repeatedly warned of security flaw that led to biggest data breach in its history

Booknooks Bookshelf Inserts Add Mystery to Your Bookshelf

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Suddenly in December 2019, booknooks were discovered:

Take a look behind the ‘small doors to imaginary spaces’ within bookshelves – BBC News

A "book nook" - a small diorama of an alleyway visible between books on a bookshelf
Post image

Twitter post by @monde55212068: 路地裏bookshelf 文庫本サイズを作りました。両面を開くことはできませんが小さくて可愛らしいです。電源スイッチを表面につけました。制作2018年 材質 木#design #art #bookend #路地裏#文庫

Image Copyright @monde55212068 @monde55212068

A book nook. It is a bookcase model with a light

And Bored Panda had a look at 33 Bookshelf Inserts That Book Lovers Will Appreciate

I Made A Booknook For A Christmas Gift, My Inspiration Was Blade Runner. It's 11" X 6"
Witch Is Watching You
Post image

Unfortunately the term Booknook is not yet a keyword, so when searching you will find loads of other stuff you’re not looking for. So here Is some stuff I have found for you:

To Buy

Etsy:

Old town Japan miniature diorama bookend booknook shelf insert

Old town Japan miniature diorama bookend booknook shelf insert image 0

Book Nook – Book Shelf Insert – Book Shelf Decoration – Bookend (Wood)

Book Nook Book Shelf Insert Book Shelf Decoration image 4

Book nook bookshelf insert art Hidden world of old Italy patio – Booknook alley is original book lover gift

Book nook bookshelf insert art Hidden world of old Italy patio image 0

Whimsical themed booknook shelf insert.

Whimsical themed booknook shelf insert. image 0

Ebay

LEMAX Caddington Village Joseph Marley Antiques Victors Book Nook Lighted House

LEMAX-Caddington-Village-Joseph-Marley-Antiques-Victors-Book-Nook-Lighted-House

LEMAX 2004 Sutton’s Folk Art and Crafts + Marley Antiques/Victor’s Book Nook

LEMAX-2004-Sutton-039-s-Folk-Art-and-Crafts-Marley-Antiques-Victor-039-s-Book-Nook

Smaller sellers

TECHARGE

Japan Old Town Booknook Shelf Insert

Wizard Alley Booknook – A cozy wizard shopping alley on your bookshelf (Kickstarter)

Making your Own

People seem to make these mainly from wood or plastic. 3D printing is a thing, so on Thingiverse, some people are sharing their designs so you can print your own (and then paint it yourself)

3D Models

AlphaLyr’s Booknook contains a right wall, left wall, lantern and 2 signs

kborisov’s Fantasy Bookshelf Insert includes two bridge halves, cobbles, objects and left and right walls.

FiveNights has a Bookshelf Insert – Magic Book

FiveNights also has a different version, Magic Book II

Cardboard and plastics

A Cardboard Alley Bookshelf Howto

Warhammer 40k plastic model

Inspiration

Reddit has a few subreddits worth visiting:

/r/guidebooknook/ A guidebook for booknooks. DIY, design tips, STL files and ideas

/r/booknook/ Booknooks

How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails

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The popular Edison email app, which is in the top 100 productivity apps on the Apple app store, scrapes users’ email inboxes and sells products based off that information to clients in the finance, travel, and e-Commerce sectors. The contents of Edison users’ inboxes are of particular interest to companies who can buy the data to make better investment decisions, according to a J.P. Morgan document obtained by Motherboard.

On its website Edison says that it does “process” users’ emails, but some users did not know that when using the Edison app the company scrapes their inbox for profit. Motherboard has also obtained documentation that provides more specifics about how two other popular apps—Cleanfox and Slice—sell products based on users’ emails to corporate clients.

Source: How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails – VICE

The advertising industry is systematically breaking the law says Norweigan consumer council

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Based on the findings, more than 20 consumer and civil society organisations in Europe and from different parts of the world are urging their authorities to investigate the practices of the online advertising industry.

The report uncovers how every time we use apps, hundreds of shadowy entities are receiving personal data about our interests, habits, and behaviour. This information is used to profile consumers, which can be used for targeted advertising, but may also lead to discrimination, manipulation and exploitation.

– These practices are out of control and in breach of European data protection legislation. The extent of tracking makes it impossible for us to make informed choices about how our personal data is collected, shared and used, says Finn Myrstad, director of digital policy in the Norwegian Consumer Council.

The Norwegian Consumer Council is now filing formal complaints against Grindr, a dating app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people and companies that were receiving personal data through the app;  Twitter`s MoPub, AT&T’s AppNexus, OpenX, AdColony and Smaato. The complaints are directed to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority for breaches of the General Data Protection Regulation.

[…]

Every time you open an app like Grindr advertisement networks get your GPS location, device identifiers and even the fact that you use a gay dating app. This is an insane violation of users’ EU privacy rights, says Max Schrems, founder of the European privacy non-profit NGO noyb.

The harmful effects of profiling

Many actors in the online advertising industry collect information about us from a variety of places, including web browsing, connected devices, and social media. When combined, this data provides a complex picture of individuals, revealing what we do in our daily lives, our secret desires, and our most vulnerable moments.

–  This massive commercial surveillance is systematically at odds with our fundamental rights  and can be used to discriminate, manipulate and exploit us. The widespread tracking also has the potential to seriously degrade consumer trust in digital services, says Myrstad.

– Furthermore, in a recent Amnesty International report, Amnesty showed how these data-driven business models are a serious threat to human rights such as freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought, and the right to equality and non-discrimination.

[…]

– The situation is completely out of control. In order to shift the significant power imbalance between consumers and third party companies, the current practices of extensive tracking and profiling have to end, says Myrstad.

– There are very few actions consumers can take to limit or prevent the massive tracking and data sharing that is happening all across the internet. Authorities must take active enforcement measures to protect consumers against the illegal exploitation of personal data.

Source: New study: The advertising industry is systematically breaking the law : Forbrukerrådet

Confusing car autopilots using projections

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The absence of deployed vehicular communication systems, which prevents the advanced driving assistance systems (ADASs) and autopilots of semi/fully autonomous cars to validate their virtual perception regarding the physical environment surrounding the car with a third party, has been exploited in various attacks suggested by researchers. Since the application of these attacks comes with a cost (exposure of the attacker’s identity), the delicate exposure vs. application balance has held, and attacks of this kind have not yet been encountered in the wild. In this paper, we investigate a new perceptual challenge that causes the ADASs and autopilots of semi/fully autonomous to consider depthless objects (phantoms) as real. We show how attackers can exploit this perceptual challenge to apply phantom attacks and change the abovementioned balance, without the need to physically approach the attack scene, by projecting a phantom via a drone equipped with a portable projector or by presenting a phantom on a hacked digital billboard that faces the Internet and is located near roads. We show that the car industry has not considered this type of attack by demonstrating the attack on today’s most advanced ADAS and autopilot technologies: Mobileye 630 PRO and the Tesla Model X, HW 2.5; our experiments show that when presented with various phantoms, a car’s ADAS or autopilot considers the phantoms as real objects, causing these systems to trigger the brakes, steer into the lane of oncoming traffic, and issue notifications about fake road signs. In order to mitigate this attack, we present a model that analyzes a detected object’s context, surface, and reflected light, which is capable of detecting phantoms with 0.99 AUC. Finally, we explain why the deployment of vehicular communication systems might reduce attackers’ opportunities to apply phantom attacks but won’t eliminate them.

​

Source: Phantom of the ADAS

In Trump fascist playbook, Johnson trying to kill BBC licence fee in favour of a subscription model due to BBC being critical, independent

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Claims were made on Sunday that No 10may be preparing a new onslaught on the BBC with a threat to scrap the television licence fee and turn it into a subscription service.

The Sunday Times quoted a senior source as saying that the broadcaster could be forced to sell off most of its radio stations in a “massive pruning back” of its activities.

The source told the paper that Boris Johnson was “really strident” on the need for serious reform. They said there would be a consultation on replacing the licence fee with a subscription model, adding: “We will whack it.”

The paper said that the number of BBC television channels could also be reduced, the website scaled back and stars banned from cashing in on well-paid second jobs.

This potential attack will be seen as a further escalation of the hostilities between No 10 and the corporation, with many Tories still angry at its coverage of last year’s general election. The government is already consulting on proposals to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee, and ministers have suggested it could be abolished altogether when the BBC’s charter comes up for renewal in 2027.

It was reported that the review will be led by former culture secretary John Whittingdale, who was reappointed to his old department in last week’s reshuffle.

The Sunday Times quoted one source as saying: “We are not bluffing on the licence fee. We are having a consultation and we will whack it. It has got to be a subscription model. They’ve got hundreds of radio stations, they’ve got all these TV stations and a massive website. The whole thing needs massive pruning back.

“They should have a few TV stations, a couple of radio stations and massively curtailed online presence and put more money and effort into the World Service which is part of its core job. The PM is firmly of the view that there needs to be serious reform. He is really strident on this.”

The warning comes after the BBC chairman, Sir David Clementi, last week mounted a strong defence of the licence fee system. He warned that putting the broadcaster behind a paywall would undermine its ability to “bring the country together”.

Meanwhile the prime minister’s aides also turned their fire on highly paid BBC stars who made huge sums from outside work, suggesting they should be forced to donate the money to charity.

“It’s an outrage that people who make their profile at public expense should seek to give themselves further financial rewards and personal gain,” one source told the paper. “They’re basically making their names on the taxpayer and cashing in. The BBC should immediately halt this practice and give the money to good causes.”

Source: No 10 could scrap BBC licence fee in favour of a subscription model | Media | The Guardian

Not giving out interviews and destroying critical thought are hallmarks of fascism. In order for democracy to work, people need as much information as they can get, from as many informed angles as they can get. And this is something the BBC can do, due to it’s independent money source. It doesn’t have to pander to the Love Island crowd.

Car ‘splatometer’ tests reveal 80% decline in number of insects in last decade

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Two scientific studies of the number of insects splattered by cars have revealed a huge decline in abundance at European sites in two decades.

The research adds to growing evidence of what some scientists have called an “insect apocalypse”, which is threatening a collapse in the natural world that sustains humans and all life on Earth. A third study shows plummeting numbers of aquatic insects in streams.

The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects.

The second survey, in the UK county of Kent in 2019, examined splats in a grid placed over car registration plates, known as a “splatometer”. This revealed 50% fewer impacts than in 2004. The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects.

“This difference we found is critically important, because it mirrors the patterns of decline which are being reported widely elsewhere, and insects are absolutely fundamental to food webs and the existence of life on Earth,” said Paul Tinsley-Marshall from Kent Wildlife Trust. “It’s pretty horrendous.”

[…]

The Danish research, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, used data from an average of 65 car journeys a year on the same stretch of road and at the same speed between 1997 and 2017. Møller took account of the time of day, temperature, wind speed and date of the journey and found an 80% decline in insect abundance over the 21-year period. Checks using insect nets and sticky traps showed the same trend.

Møller said the causes were likely to be “a bit of everything”, but noted significant changes due to global heating. “In my 50 years, the temperature in April, May and June has increased by 1.5C [2.7F] on average in my study area,” he said. “The amount of rain has increased by 50%. We are talking about dramatic differences.”

The stream research, published in the journal Conservation Biology, analysed weekly data from 1969 to 2010 on a stream in a German nature reserve, where the only major human impact is climate change.

“Overall, water temperature increased by 1.88C and discharge patterns changed significantly. These changes were accompanied by an 81.6% decline in insect abundance,” the scientists reported. “Our results indicate that climate change has already altered [wildlife] communities severely, even in protected areas.”

Source: Car ‘splatometer’ tests reveal huge decline in number of insects | Environment | The Guardian

Netflix Loses Bid to Dismiss $25 Million Lawsuit Over ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’ because someone feels they own the phrase: choose your own adventure

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Chooseco LLC, a children’s book publisher, filed its complaint in January 2019. According to the plaintiff, it has been using the mark since the 1980s and has sold more than 265 million copies of its Choose Your Own Adventure books. 20th Century Fox holds options for movie versions, and Chooseco alleges that Netflix actively pursued a license. Instead of getting one, Netflix released Bandersnatch, which allows audiences to select the direction of the plot. Claiming $25 million in damages, Chooseco suggested that Bandersnatch viewers have been confused about association with its famous brand, particularly because of marketing around the movie as well as a scene where the main character — a video game developer — tells his father that the work he’s developing is based on a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

In reaction to the lawsuit, Netflix raised a First Amendment defense, particularly the balancing test in Rogers v. Grimaldi, whereby unless a work has no artistic relevance, the use of a mark must be misleading for it to be actionable.

U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions agrees that Bandersnatch is an artistic work even if Netflix derived profit from exploiting the Charlie Brooker film.

And the judge says that use of the trademark has artistic relevance.

“Here, the protagonist of Bandersnatch attempts to convert the fictional book ‘Bandersnatch’ into a videogame, placing the book at the center of the film’s plot,” states the ruling. “Netflix used Chooseco’s mark to describe the interactive narrative structure shared by the book, the videogame, and the film itself. Moreover, Netflix intended this narrative structure to comment on the mounting influence technology has in modern day life. In addition, the mental imagery associated with Chooseco’s mark adds to Bandersnatch’s 1980s aesthetic. Thus, Netflix’s use of Chooseco’s mark clears the purposely-low threshold of Rogers’ artistic relevance prong.”

Thus, the final question is whether Netflix’s film is explicitly misleading. Judge Sessions doesn’t believe it’s appropriate to dismiss the case prematurely without exploring factual issues in discovery.

“Here, Chooseco has sufficiently alleged that consumers associate its mark with interactive books and that the mark covers other forms of interactive media, including films,” continues the decision. “The protagonist in Bandersnatch explicitly stated that the fictitious book at the center of the film’s plot was a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book. In addition, the book, the videogame, and the film itself all employ the same type of interactivity as Chooseco’s products. The similarity between Chooseco’s products, Netflix’s film, and the fictitious book Netflix described as a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book increases the likelihood of consumer confusion.”

Netflix also attempted to defend its use of “Choose Your Own Adventure” as descriptive fair use. Here, too, the judge believes that factual exploration is appropriate.

Writes Sessions, “The physical characteristics and context of the use demonstrate that it is at least plausible Netflix used the term to attract public attention by associating the film with Chooseco’s book series.”

The decision adds that while Netflix contends that the phrase in question has been used by others to describe a branch of storytelling, that argument entails consideration of facts outside of Chooseco’s complaint, which at this stage must be accepted as true.

“Additionally, choose your own adventure arguably is not purely descriptive of narrative techniques — it requires at least some imagination to link the phrase to interactive plotlines,” writes Sessions. “Moreover, any descriptive aspects of the phrase may stem from Chooseco’s mark itself. In other words, the phrase may only have descriptive qualities because Chooseco attached it to its popular interactive book series. The Court lacks the facts necessary to determine whether consumers perceive the phrase in a descriptive sense or whether they simply associate it with Chooseco’s brand.”

Here’s the full decision allowing Chooseco’s Lanham Act and unfair competition claims to proceed.

The ruling may be surprising to some, particularly as there’s a line of cases where studios have escaped trademark claims over content. For example, see Warner Bros.’ win a few years ago over “Clean Slate” in The Dark Knight Rises. If Netflix and Chooseco can’t come to a settlement, many of these issues may be re-explored at the summary judgment round.

Source: Netflix Loses Bid to Dismiss $25 Million Lawsuit Over ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’ | Hollywood Reporter

Wow, copyright law is beyond strange.

Plastic surgery images and invoices leak from unsecured database

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Thousands of images, videos and records pertaining to plastic surgery patients were left on an unsecured database where they could be viewed by anyone with the right IP address, researchers said Friday. The data included about 900,000 records, which researchers say could belong to thousands of different patients.

The data was generated at clinics around the world using software made by French imaging company NextMotion. Images in the database included before-and-after photos of cosmetic procedures. Those photos often contained nudity, the researchers said. Other records included images of invoices that contained information that would identify a patient. The database is now secured.

Researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found the exposed database. They published their research with vpnMentor, a security website that rates VPN services and earns commissions when readers make purchases. Rotem said he sees exposed health care databases all too often as part of his web-mapping project, which looks for exposed data.

“The state of privacy protection, especially in health care, is really abysmal,” Rotem said.

NextMotion, which says on its website that it has 170 clinics as customers in 35 countries, said in a statement to its clients that it had addressed the problem.”We immediately took corrective steps and this same company formally guaranteed that the security flaw had completely disappeared,” said NextMotion CEO Emmanuel Elard in the statement. “This incident only reinforced our ongoing concern to protect your data and your patients’ data when you use the Nextmotion application.”

Elard went to apologize for the “fortunately minor incident.”

While NextMotion said the photos and videos don’t include names or other identifying information, many of the images show patients’ faces, according to vpnMonitor. Some of the invoices detail the types of procedures patients received, such as acne scar removal and abdominoplasty, and contain patients’ names and other identifying information.

Source: Plastic surgery images and invoices leak from unsecured database – CNET

Google’s Autoflip Can Intelligently Crop Videos

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Google has released an open-source tool, Autoflip, that could make bad cropping a thing of the past by intelligently reframing video to correctly fit alternate aspect ratios.

In a blog post, Google’s AI team wrote that footage shot for television and desktop computers normally comes in a 16:9 or 4:3 format, but with mobile devices now outpacing TV in terms of video consumption, the footage is often displayed in a way that looks odd to the end-user. Fixing this problem typically requires “video curators to manually identify salient contents on each frame, track their transitions from frame-to-frame, and adjust crop regions accordingly throughout the video,” soaking up time and effort that could be better spent on other work.

Autoflip aims to fix that with a framework that applies video stabilizer-esque techniques to keep the camera focused on what’s important in the footage. Using “ML-enabled object detection and tracking technologies to intelligently understand video content” built on the MediaPipe framework, Google’s team wrote, it’s able to adjust the frame of a video on the fly.

Gif: Google AI

What’s more, Autoflip automatically adjusts between scenes by identifying “changes in the composition that signify scene changes in order to isolate scenes for processing,” according to the company. Finally, it analyzes each scene to determine whether it should use a static frame or tracking mode.

Illustration for article titled Googles Autoflip Can Intelligently Crop Videos on the Fly to Fit Any Aspect Ratio
Graphic: Google AI

This is pretty neat and offers obvious advantages over static cropping of videos, though it’s probably better suited to things like news footage and Snapchat videos than movies and TV shows (where being able to view an entire shot is more important).

For a more technical explanation of how all this works, the Google AI team explained the various technologies involved in its blog post. The project’s source code is also available to view on Github, along with instructions on how to take it for a spin.

Source: Google’s Autoflip Can Intelligently Crop Videos