Daily Archives: September 30, 2020

Instagram and Facebook Messenger Are Merging Chat Functions

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Facebook announced today that Messenger and Instagram are, for all intents and purposes, merging. Chat features from Messenger will become available to Instagram users, and folks on either service will be able to reach out to one another without needing to download a separate app.

“Today, we’re announcing an update to Instagram DMs by introducing a new Messenger experience on the app,” wrote Adam Mosseri and Stan Chudnovsky—the respective heads of Instagram and Messenger—in a blog post earlier today.

“People are communicating in private spaces now more than ever. More than a billion people already use Messenger as a place to share, hang out and express themselves with family and friends,” they added. “That’s why we’re connecting the Messenger and Instagram experience to bring some of the best Messenger features to Instagram—so you have access to the best messaging experience, no matter which app you use.”

Source: Instagram and Facebook Messenger Are Merging Chat Functions

Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs

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Samsung brags to advertisers that “first screen ads”, seen by all users of its Smart TVs when they turn on, are 100 per cent viewable, audience targeted, and seen 400 times per TV per month. Some users are not happy.

“Dear Samsung, why are you showing Ads on my Smart TV without my consent? I didn’t agree to this in the privacy settings but I keep on getting this, why?” said a user on Samsung’s TV forum, adding last week that “there is no mention of advertising on any of their brand new boxes”.

As noted by TV site flatpanelshd, a visit to Samsung’s site pitching to advertisers is eye-opening. It is not just that the ads appear, but also that the company continually profiles its customers, using a technology called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), which works by detecting what kind of content a viewer is watching.

Samsung’s Tom Focetta, VP Ad Sales and Operations in the US, said in an interview: “Our platform is built on the largest source of TV data from more than 50 million smart TVs. And we have amassed over 60 per cent of the US ACR footprint.” Focetta added that ACR data is “not sold, rented or distributed” but used exclusively by Samsung to target advertising.

The first screen ad unit was introduced five years ago, Focetta explained, and the company has since “added video, different types of target audience engagement, different ways to execute in terms of tactics like audience takeovers, roadblocks”. A “roadblock” is defined as “100 per cent ownership of first screen ad impressions across all Samsung TVs”. According to a Samsung support, quoted by flatpanelshd: “In general, the banner cannot be deactivated in the Smart Hub.”

Advertising does not stop there since Samsung also offers TV Plus, “a free ad-supported TV service”. Viewers are familiar with this deal, though, since ad-supported broadcasting is long established. What perturbs them is that when spending a large sum of money on TV hardware, they were unknowingly agreeing to advertising baked into its operating menu, every time they switch on.

The advent of internet-connected TVs means that viewers now divide their time between traditional TV delivered by cable or over the air, and streaming content, with an increasing share going to streaming. Viewers who have cancelled subscription TV services in favour of streaming are known as cord-cutters.

Even viewers who have chosen to watch only ad-free content do not escape. “30 per cent of streamers spend all of their streaming time in non-ad supported apps. This, however, does not mean ‘The Lost 30’ are unreachable,” said Samsung in a paper.

[…]

Source: Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs • The Register

Not one to be outdone by Microsoft, Apple’s cloud fell over too. Unlike Microsoft, it hasn’t said what happened

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The rivalry between Apple and Microsoft continued last night as the fruity firm’s cloud services took a tumble a mere day after Azure crapped itself.

While Apple has remained silent on what happened (we asked; it did not respond), the vast majority of its services wobbled over a two-hour period early this morning (UK time).

Issues began at around 1am affecting services including Apple TV, iCloud Mail, iWork for iCloud, and the company’s App Store. On its System Status page the company said “Some users were affected”, along with “Users experienced a problem with this service.”

The “problem” being that it simply didn’t work. A glance at social media shows disappointed fanatics wailing about Apple TV stopping midstream, Apple Music hitting the pause button, and iCloud Photos leaping from the nearest ledge.

At one point even the System Status page reportedly fell over.

Apple’s inability to keep its cloud in the air came a day after Microsoft suffered an embarrassing Azure failure, prompting us to ponder if Redmond has a reliability problem.

Unless some late-night (and early morning) fondling was involved, the outage did not cause too much European outrage. Some US users, on the other hand, found themselves at the pointy end of Apple’s issues and unable to express their feelings on the US presidential debate via the medium of iCloud email.

Things appear back to normal this morning, and The Register was heartened to note that fanboi assistant Siri did not appear to be affected.

In marked contrast to the approach taken by Microsoft, Apple has yet to explain what happened, why it happened, and why it will not happen again. We will update should a statement be forthcoming.

In the meantime, we anxiously await Cook & co’s inevitable “you’re using it wrong” retort.

Source: Not one to be outdone by Microsoft, Apple’s cloud fell over too. Unlike Microsoft, it hasn’t said what happened • The Register

Yay cloud.

Super precise measurement of all matter in universe made

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A team of US astrophysicists has produced one of the most precise measurements ever made of the total amount of matter in the Universe, a longtime mystery of the cosmos.

The answer, published in The Astrophysical Journal on Monday, is that matter consists of 31.5 percent—give or take 1.3 percent—of the total amount of matter and energy that make up the Universe.

The remaining 68.5 percent is dark energy, a mysterious force that is causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate over time, and was first inferred by observations of distant supernovae in the late 1990s.

Put another way, this means the total amount of matter in the observable Universe is equivalent to 66 billion trillion times the mass of our Sun, Mohamed Abdullah, a University of California, Riverside astrophysicist and the paper’s lead author told AFP.

Most of this matter—80 percent—is called dark matter. Its nature is not yet known but it may consist of some as-yet-undiscovered subatomic particle.

[…]

So how exactly do you weigh the Universe?

The team honed a 90-year-old technique that involves observing how galaxies orbit inside galaxy clusters—massive systems that contain thousands of galaxies.

These observations told them how strong each ‘s gravitational pull was, from which its total mass could then be calculated.

Fate of the Universe

In fact, explained Wilson, their technique was originally developed by the pioneering astronomer Fritz Zwicky, who was the first person to suspect the existence of dark matter in galaxy clusters, in the 1930s.

He noticed that the combined gravitational mass of the galaxies he observed in the nearby Coma galaxy cluster was insufficient to prevent those galaxies from flying away from one another, and realized there must be some other invisible matter at play.

The UCR team refined Zwicky’s technique, developing a tool they called GalWeight that determines more accurately which galaxies belong to a given and which do not.

They applied their tool to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the most detailed three-dimensional maps of the Universe currently available, measuring the mass of 1,800 galaxy clusters and creating a catalog.

Finally, they compared the number of clusters observed per unit volume in their catalog against a series of computer simulations, each of which was fed a different value for the total matter of the Universe.

Simulations with too little matter had too few clusters, while those with too much matter had too many clusters.

The “Goldilocks” value they found fit the simulations just right.

[…]

Source: What’s the matter with the Universe? Scientists have the answer

Second alignment plane of solar system discovered

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A study of comet motions indicates that the solar system has a second alignment plane. Analytical investigation of the orbits of long-period comets shows that the aphelia of the comets, the point where they are farthest from the Sun, tend to fall close to either the well-known ecliptic plane where the planets reside or a newly discovered “empty ecliptic.” This has important implications for models of how comets originally formed in the solar system.

In the solar system, the planets and most other bodies move in roughly the same orbital , known as the ecliptic, but there are exceptions such as comets. Comets, especially long-period comets taking tens-of-thousands of years to complete each orbit, are not confined to the area near the ecliptic; they are seen coming and going in various directions.

[…]

The solar system does not exist in isolation; the gravitational field of the Milky Way galaxy in which the resides also exerts a small but non-negligible influence

[…]

hen the galactic gravity is taken into account, the aphelia of long-period comets tend to collect around two planes. First the well-known ecliptic, but also a second “empty ecliptic.” The ecliptic is inclined with respect to the disk of the Milky Way by about 60 degrees. The empty ecliptic is also inclined by 60 degrees, but in the opposite direction. Higuchi calls this the “empty ecliptic” based on mathematical nomenclature and because initially it contains no objects, only later being populated with scattered comets.

[…]

Source: Second alignment plane of solar system discovered

YouTube celebrates Deaf Awareness Week by killing crowd-sourced captions

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Today’s the day YouTube is killing its “Community Contributions” feature for videos, which let content creators crowdsource captions and subtitles for their videos. YouTube announced the move back in July, which triggered a community outcry from the deaf, hard of hearing, and fans of foreign media, but it does not sound like the company is relenting. In one of Google’s all-time, poor-timing decisions, YouTube is killing the feature just two days after the International Week of the Deaf, which is the last full week in September.

Once enabled by a channel owner, the Community Contributions feature would let viewers caption or translate a video and submit it to the channel for approval. YouTube currently offers machine-transcribed subtitles that are often full of errors, and if you also need YouTube to take a second pass at the subtitles for machine translation, they’ve probably lost all meaning by the time they hit your screen. The Community Caption feature would load up those machine-written subtitles as a starting point and allow the user to make corrections and add text that the machine transcription doesn’t handle well, like transcribed sound cues for the deaf and hard of hearing.

YouTube says it’s killing crowd-source subtitles due to spam and low usage. “While we hoped Community Contributions would be a wide-scale, community-driven source of quality translations for Creators,” the company wrote, “it’s rarely used and people continue to report spam and abuse.” The community does not seem to agree with this assessment, since a petition immediately popped up asking YouTube to reconsider, and so far a half-million people have signed. “Removing community captions locks so many viewers out of the experience,” the petition reads. “Community captions ensured that many videos were accessible that otherwise would not be.”

[…]

Source: YouTube celebrates Deaf Awareness Week by killing crowd-sourced captions | Ars Technica

FakeCatcher Deepfake Tool looks for a heartbeat

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In the endlessly escalating war between those striving to create flawless deepfake videos and those developing automated tools that make them easy to spot, the latter camp has found a very clever way to expose videos that have been digitally modified by looking for literal signs of life: a person’s heartbeat.

If you’ve ever had a doctor attach a pulse oximeter to the tip of your finger, then you’ve already experienced a technique known as photoplethysmography where subtle color shifts in your skin as blood is pumped through in waves allows your pulse to be measured. It’s the same technique that the Apple Watch and wearable fitness tracking devices use to measure your heartbeat during exercise, but it’s not just limited to your fingertips and wrists.

Though not apparent to the naked eye, the color of your face exhibits the same phenomenon, subtly shifting in color as your heart endlessly pumps blood through the arteries and veins under your skin, and even a basic webcam can be used to spot the effect and even measure your pulse. The technique has allowed for the development of contactless monitors for infants, simply requiring a non-obtrusive camera to be pointed at them while they sleep, but now is being leveraged to root out fake news.

Researchers from Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, worked with Intel to develop a tool called FakeCatcher, and their findings were recently published in a paper titled, “FakeCatcher: Detection of Synthetic Portrait Videos using Biological Signals.” Deepfakes are typically created by matching individual frames of a video to a library of headshots, often times containing thousands of images of a particular person, and then subtly adjusting and tweaking the face being swapped in to match the existing one perfectly. Unbeknownst to the naked eye, those images still contain the telltale biological signs of the person having a pulse, but the machine learning tools used to create deepfakes don’t take into account that when the final video is played back, the moving face should still exhibit a measurable pulse. The random way in which a deepfake video is created results in an unstable pulse measurement when photoplethysmography detection techniques are applied to it, making them easier to spot.

From their testing, the researchers found that FakeCatcher was not only able to spot deepfake videos more than 90 percent of the time, but with the same amount of accuracy, it was also able to determine which of four different deepfake tools—Face2Face, NeuralTex, DeepFakes, or FaceSwap—was used to create the deceptive video. Of course, now that the research and the existence of the FakeCatcher tool has been revealed, it will give those developing the deepfake creation tools the opportunity to improve their own software and to ensure that as a deepfake videos are being created, those subtle shifts in skin color are included to fool photoplethysmography tools as well. But this is good while it lasts.

Source: Intel and Binghamton Researchers Unveil FakeCatcher Deepfake Tool

British Army develops AI shotgun drone with machine vision for indoor use

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The British Army has reportedly developed AI-equipped killer drones armed with twin-linked shotguns designed for blasting enemies of the Queen hiding inside buildings.

As if that wasn’t terrifying enough, the Army is already looking at strapping a chain gun or rocket launcher to its i9 drone instead of the shotguns, according to The Times.

“It is the UK military’s first weaponised drone to be able to fly inside, using a combination of physics and AI that allow it to overcome ‘wall suck’, which causes drones with heavy payloads to crash because of the way they displace air in small rooms,” the newspaper reported this morning.

The weaponised craft is said to be loaded with “twin stabilised shotguns” as well as making use of “machine vision” to identify its targets. A human operator will have to press a button to actually fire the shotguns, though that is potentially the least of the civilised world’s worries from this thing.

drone_swarm

We want weaponised urban drones flying through your house, says UK defence ministry as it waves a fistful of banknotes

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Assuming that the drone is genuinely capable of firing a shotgun while hovering or in flight, this would mean the “unnamed British company” behind it has overcome some rather large challenges of physics. Basic Newtonian theory tells us that flinging an ounce of lead forwards at great speed causes an equal and opposite reaction backwards. In ballistics this force is called “recoil”. It takes little imagination to realise that recoil in a confined space is likely to push a drone backwards into a wall, rendering it useless.

[…]

The Ministry of Defence is but four years behind Russia in its armed drone endeavours. Back in 2016 a group of students designed an armed drone which first flew in 2019, though that appears to be an outdoors-only craft. The Belarusian Army also strapped an RPG to a drone in 2018, though footage doesn’t show it actually being fired

Source: British Army develops AI shotgun drone with machine vision for indoor use • The Register

Plane-tracking site Flight Radar 24 DDoSed… just as drones spotted buzzing over Azerbaijan and Armenia

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[…]

Flight Radar spokesman Ian Petchenik told The Register: “At this time we understand this to be a very strong DDoS attack [orchestrated] from a single source. While it is not known why we’re being targeted, multiple flight tracking services have suffered attacks over the past two days.”

It was not immediately obvious which other sites had suffered attacks, though some had used their Twitter accounts to inform followers of planned server upgrades and updates to end-user apps.

Open source researchers claim to have picked up the live flight tracks of drones over Armenia and Azerbaijan, following armed skirmishes between the two nations over the long-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. The conflict gained a more international dimension earlier today when a Turkish F-16 fighter jet reportedly shot down an elderly Armenian Su-25 Frogfoot ground attack aircraft.

The use of DDoSes against general-interest websites has fallen out of favour in recent years as the script kiddies behind those types of attacks in days of yore a) grew up and b) realised that ransomware is far more lucrative than crayoning over someone else’s website.

With that said, such attacks are still in use: in August someone malicious forced the New Zealand stock exchange offline, while encrypted email biz Tutanota suffered a spate of similar attacks earlier this month.

Whatever the cause of the Flight Radar 24 attacks – one knowledgeable source suggested to El Reg that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict may have triggered a government determined to control what the wider world can see – they serve as a reminder that even one of the oldest online attack methods can still cause chaos today.

Source: Plane-tracking site Flight Radar 24 DDoSed… just as drones spotted buzzing over Azerbaijan and Armenia • The Register

Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, Teams, and other services suffer ~6 hour outage

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Some Microsoft services, including Outlook, Office 365, and Microsoft Teams, experienced a multi-hour outage on Monday, but the issues have been resolved, according to the company.

“We’ve confirmed that the residual issue has been addressed and the incident has been resolved,” Microsoft tweeted at 12AM ET on Tuesday. “Any users still experiencing impact should be mitigated shortly.”

The company first acknowledged issues at 5:44PM ET via the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account, and said it had rolled back a change thought to be the cause of the issue at 6:36PM ET. But just 13 minutes later, the company tweeted again to say that it was “not observing an increase in successful connections after rolling back a recent change.” Microsoft tweeted that services were mostly back at 10:20PM ET.

Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory service was also experiencing issues on Monday, but the company said those were “now mitigated” as of 11:21PM ET Monday night. Microsoft said the problems were caused by a configuration change to a backend storage layer, which the company rolled back.

Update, September 29th, 11:20AM ET: Updated to confirm Microsoft has resolved the issues. The headline has also been updated to reflect this fact.

Source: Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, Teams, and other services are back following outage – The Verge

Yay cloud!

[…]

The core service affected was Azure Active Directory, which controls login to everything from Outlook email to Teams to the Azure portal, used for managing other cloud services. The five-hour impact was also felt in productivity-stopping annoyances like some installations of Microsoft Office and Visual Studio, even on the desktop, declaring that they could not check their licensing and therefore would not run.

There are claims that the US emergency 911 service was affected, which is not implausible given that the RapidDeploy Nimbus Dispatch system describes itself as “a Microsoft Azure–based Computer Aided Dispatch platform”. If the problem is authentication, even resilient services with failover to other Azure regions may become inaccessible and therefore useless.

The company has yet to provide full details, but a status report today said that “a recent configuration change impacted a backend storage layer, which caused latency to authentication requests”.

[…]

Microsoft seems to have more than its fair share of problems. Gartner noted recently that it “continues to have concerns related to the overall architecture and implementation of Azure, despite resilience-focused efforts and improved service availability metrics during the past year”. The analyst’s reservations were based in part on the low ratio of availability zones to regions, and that “a limited set of services support the availability zone model”.

Gartner’s concerns are valid, but this was not the cause of the recent disruption. Bill Witten, identity architect at Okta, was to the point, commenting: “So, does everyone get why the mono-directory is not a good idea?”

Microsoft has built so much on Azure Active Directory that it is a single point of failure. The company either needs to make it so resilient that failure is near-impossible (which is likely to be its intention), or consider gradually reducing the dependence of so many services.

Source:

With so many cloud services dependent on it, Azure Active Directory has become a single point of failure for Microsoft