Drone swarms frequently fly outside for a reason: it’s difficult for the robotic fliers to navigate in tight spaces without hitting each other. Caltech researchers may have a way for those drones to fly indoors, however. They’ve developed a machine learning algorithm, Global-to-Local Safe Autonomy Synthesis (GLAS), that lets swarms navigate crowded, unmapped environments. The system works by giving each drone a degree of independence that lets it adapt to a changing environment.
Instead of relying on existing maps or the routes of every other drone in the swarm, GLAS has each machine learning how to navigate a given space on its own even as it coordinates with others. This decentralized model both helps the drones improvise and makes scaling the swarm easier, as the computing is spread across many robots.
An additional tracking controller, Neural-Swarm, helps the drones compensate for aerodynamic interactions, such as the downwash from a robot flying overhead. It’s already more reliable than a “commercial” controller that doesn’t account for aerodynamics, with far smaller tracking errors.
This could be useful for drone light shows, of course, but it could also help with more vital operations. Search and rescue drones could safely comb areas in packs, while self-driving cars could keep traffic jams and collisions to a minimum. It may take a while before there are implementations outside of the lab, but don’t be surprised if flocks of drones become relatively commonplace.
After slogging through that book, I began paying attention to similarly stereotyped descriptions of bodies in other books. Women are all soft thighs and red lips. Men, strong muscles and rough hands.
I was frustrated by this lazy writing. I want to read books that explore the full humanity of their characters, not stories that reduce both men and women to weak stereotypes of their gender.
Before getting too upset, I wanted to see if this approach to writing was as widespread as it seemed, or if I was succumbing to selective reading. Do authors really mention particular body parts
more for men than for women? Are women’s bodies described using different adjectives than those attributed to men?
[…]
It’s easy to dismiss or overlook the differences in the way men’s and women’s bodies are depicted because they can be subtle and hard to discern in one particular book—one or two extra mentions of “his bushy hair” may not register over 300 pages.
But when you zoom out and look at thousands of books, the patterns are clear.
In real life, women are obviously more dimensional than soft, sexual objects. Men are more complex than muscular lunkheads. We should expect that same nuance of the characters in the books we read.
Instead of focusing on her perfect hair and soft hips and wet eyes, tell me about her strong legs
that carry her through the world, or her capable hands that do her life’s work. Don’t reduce him to his muscular forearms and rough knuckles and chiseled jaw. I want to read about his silly smile for his family or his soft heart for animals.
Mozilla says it’s working on fixing a bug in Firefox for Android that keeps the smartphone camera active even after users have moved the browser in the background or the phone screen was locked.
A Mozilla spokesperson told ZDNet in an email this week that a fix is expected for later this year in October.
The bug was first spotted and reported to Mozilla a year ago, in July 2019, by an employee of video delivery platform Appear TV.
The bug manifests when users chose to video stream from a website loaded in Firefox instead of a native app.
Mobile users often choose to stream from a mobile browser for privacy reasons, such as not wanting to install an intrusive app and grant it unfettered access to their smartphone’s data. Mobile browsers are better because they prevent websites from accessing smartphone data, keeping their data collection to a minimum.
The Appear TV developer noticed that Firefox video streams kept going, even in situations when they should have normally stopped.
While this raises issues with streams continuing to consume the user’s bandwidth, the bug was also deemed a major privacy issue as Firefox would continue to stream from the user’s device in situations where the user expected privacy by switching to another app or locking the device.
“From our analysis, a website is allowed to retain access to your camera or microphone whilst you’re using other apps, or even if the phone is locked,” a spokesperson for Traced, a privacy app, told ZDNet, after alerting us to the issue.
“While there are times you might want the microphone or video to keep working in the background, your camera should never record you when your phone is locked,” Traced added.
Starting today, there’s a VPN on the market from a company you trust. The Mozilla VPN (Virtual Private Network) is now available on Windows and Android devices. This fast and easy-to-use VPN service is brought to you by Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, and a trusted name in online consumer security and privacy services.
See for yourself how the Mozilla VPN works:
The first thing you may notice when you install the Mozilla VPN is how fast your browsing experience is. That’s because the Mozilla VPN is based on modern and lean technology, the WireGuard protocol’s 4,000 lines of code, is a fraction in size of legacy protocols used by other VPN service providers.
You will also see an easy-to-use and simple interface for anyone who is new to VPN, or those who want to set it and get onto the web.
With no long-term contracts required, the Mozilla VPN is available for just $4.99 USD per month and will initially be available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia, and New Zealand, with plans to expand to other countries this Fall.
A string of “zero logging” VPN providers have some explaining to do after more than a terabyte of user logs were found on their servers unprotected and facing the public internet.
This data, we are told, included in at least some cases clear-text passwords, personal information, and lists of websites visited, all for anyone to stumble upon.
It all came to light this week after Comparitech’s Bob Diachenko spotted 894GB of records in an unsecured Elasticsearch cluster that belonged to UFO VPN.
The silo contained streams of log entries as netizens connected to UFO’s service: this information included what appeared to be account passwords in plain text, VPN session secrets and tokens, IP addresses of users’ devices and the VPN servers they connected to, connection timestamps, location information, device characteristics and OS versions, and web domains from which ads were injected into the browsers of UFO’s free-tier users.
UFO stated in bold in its privacy policy: “We do not track user activities outside of our site, nor do we track the website browsing or connection activities of users who are using our Services.” Yet it appears it was at least logging connections to its service – and in a system anyone could access if they could find it.
More than 20 million entries were added a day to the logs, according to Comparitech, and UFO happens to boast on its website it has 20 million users. Diachenko said he alerted the provider to the misconfiguration on July 1, the day he found the unprotected database, and heard nothing back.
Oh, it gets worse
A few days later, on July 5, the data silo was separately discovered by Noam Rotem’s team at VPNmentor, and it became clear the security blunder went well beyond UFO. It appears seven Hong-Kong-based VPN providers – UFO VPN, FAST VPN, Free VPN, Super VPN, Flash VPN, Secure VPN, and Rabbit VPN – all share a common entity, which provides a white-labelled VPN service.
And they were all leaking data onto the internet from that unsecured Elasticsearch cluster, VPNmentor reported. Altogether, some 1.2TB of data was sitting out in the open, totaling 1,083,997,361 log entries, many featuring highly sensitive information, it is said.
This exposed cluster contained, we’re told, at least some records of websites visited, connection logs, people’s names, subscribers’ email and home addresses, plain-text passwords, Bitcoin and Paypal payment information, messages to support desks, device specifications, and account info.
“Each of these VPNs claims that their services are ‘no-log’ VPNs, which means that they don’t record any user activity on their respective apps,” Rotem’s team said. “However, we found multiple instances of internet activity logs on their shared server. This was in addition to the personally identifiable information, which included email addresses, clear text passwords, IP addresses, home addresses, phone models, device ID, and other technical details.”
Scores of websites and services went down Friday afternoon due to problems with Cloudflare’s DNS service, sparking rampant speculation about the cause. After all, a global DDOS attack would totally fit the real-life apocalypse movie that 2020 is increasingly turning into.
The outage, which started shortly after 5 p.m. ET, brought down popular sites and services like Discord, Politico, Feedly, and League of Legends for roughly half an hour on Friday. Once connections were restored, Cloudflare issued an incident report stating that the issue “was not as a result of an attack” and that it “has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”
Turns out the real explanation’s nothing so nefarious. Evidently, half the internet briefly went dark because of a crappy router in Atlanta.
“It appears that a router in Atlanta had an error that caused bad routes across our backbone. That resulted in misrouted traffic to PoPs that connect to our backbone,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince tweeted Friday. “We isolated the Atlanta router and shut down our backbone, routing traffic across transit providers instead. There was some congestion that caused slow performance on some links as the logging caught up. Everything is restored now and we’re looking into the root cause.”
According to the incident report, this issue with Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service impacted its data centers internationally, from Frankfurt to Paris and Schiphol, as well as several in major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, and San Jose. Reports on Downdetector showed the outages appeared to be concentrated in the U.S. and northern Europe.
The drop in battery prices is enabling battery integration with renewable systems in two contexts. In one, the battery serves as a short-term power reservoir to smooth over short-term fluctuations in the output of renewable power. In the other, the battery holds the power for when renewable power production stops, as solar power does at night. This works great for off-grid use, but it adds some complications in the form of additional hardware to convert voltages and current.
But there’s actually an additional option, one that merges photovoltaic and battery hardware in a single, unified device that can have extensive storage capacity. The main drawback? The devices have either been unstable or have terrible efficiency. But an international team of researchers has put together a device that’s both stable and has efficiencies competitive with those of silicon panels.
Solar flow batteries
How do you integrate photovoltaic cells and batteries? At its simplest, you make one of the electrodes that pulls power out of the photovoltaic system into the electrode of a battery. Which sounds like a major “well, duh!” But integration is nowhere near that simple. Battery electrodes, after all, have to be compatible with the chemistry of the battery—for lithium-ion batteries, for example, the electrodes end up storing the ions themselves and so have to have a structure that allows that.
[…]
Previous records for a solar flow battery show the tradeoffs these devices have faced. The researchers used a measure of efficiency termed solar-to-output electricity efficiency, or SOEE. The most efficient solar flow devices had hit 14.1 percent but had short lifespans due to reactions between the battery and photovoltaic materials. More stable ones, which had lifespans exceeding 200 hours, only had SOEEs in the area of 5 to 6 percent.
The new material had an SOEE in the area of 21 percent—about the same as solar cells already on the market, and not too far off the efficiency of the photovoltaic hardware of the device on its own. And their performance was stable for over 400 charge/discharge cycles, which means for at least 500 hours. While they might eventually decay, there was no indication of that happening over the time they were tested. Both of those are very, very significant improvements.
Obviously, given that both batteries and photovoltaic cells can potentially last for decades, 500 hours shouldn’t be viewed as a definitive test—especially for a device that’s proposed to enable off-the-grid electrical production. But the demonstration that voltage matching provides such a large efficiency boost should allow researchers to identify a wider range of battery and photovoltaic chemistries that have improved efficiencies. That accomplished, researchers will then be able to search among those for stable configurations. Whether all of that is compatible with low cost and mass production will be the critical question. But, at this stage of the renewable energy revolution, having more options to explore can only be a good thing.
The United Arab Emirates has successfully launched a Mars probe.
The Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) aims to orbit the red planet with a probe named “Hope” that will gather data to help humanity build a proper Martian weather map, characterise the planet’s lower atmosphere and offer an explanation of why Mars is losing Hydrogen and Oxygen into space.
Early on Monday, Hope was launched atop from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center atop a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA rocket.
Moments that make history… The Emirates Mars Mission team participates in the first Arabic countdown from Japan… The countdown that ushers a new era for Arab space exploration. #HopeMarsMission#HopeProbepic.twitter.com/PaKk75e5F9
— Hope Mars Mission (@HopeMarsMission) July 19, 2020
The mission appears to be in fine shape, as just a few hours after launch the probe was beaming back a signal.
— Hope Mars Mission (@HopeMarsMission) July 20, 2020
Now comes the seven-month schlep to the Red Planet. On arrival Hope will conduct a 30-minute burn to slow itself from over 121,000 km/h to approximately 18,000 km/h. At the latter speed, Mars’ gravity should be sufficient to see the probe enter an orbit with a perigee that sometimes falls beneath 1,000km. Further operations will aim to settle the craft into its planned orbit for doing science, with a perigee and apogee of between 20,000km and 43,000km.
From that orbit Hope will use its infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers, plus a 4:3 visible-spectrum imager packing a 12-megapixel 12-bit monochrome CMOS array, to gather data on Mars’ atmosphere. The probe will contact Earth twice a week for sessions lasting between six and eight hours. Mission scientists expect around one terabyte of data to flow during those connection windows and have planned for the probe to operate for two years.
Hope’s scientific payload is modest compared to NASA’s MAVEN or India’s Mangalyaan, but the mission is significant as it is the first interplanetary effort mounted by an Arab nation. As such it is the source of considerable pride.
