French company Nawa technologies says it’s already in production on a new electrode design that can radically boost the performance of existing and future battery chemistries, delivering up to 3x the energy density, 10x the power, vastly faster charging and battery lifespans up to five times as long.
Nawa is already known for its work in the ultracapacitor market, and the company has announced that the same high-tech electrodes it uses on those ultracapacitors can be adapted for current-gen lithium-ion batteries, among others, to realize some tremendous, game-changing benefits.
It all comes down to how the active material is held in the electrode, and the route the ions in that material have to take to deliver their charge. Today’s typical activated carbon electrode is made with a mix of powders, additives and binders. Where carbon nanotubes are used, they’re typically stuck on in a jumbled, “tangled spaghetti” fashion. This gives the charge-carrying ions a random, chaotic and frequently blocked path to traverse on their way to the current collector under load.
The benefits are all about how far an ion has to carry its charge; on the left, a depiction of a typical, chaotic electrode structure through which an ion has to travel long and circuitous distances. On the right, the rigid structure of a vertically aligned carbon nanotube structure, which links every tiny blob of active material and the ions within straight to the current collector
Nawa Technologies
Nawa’s vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, on the other hand, create an anode or cathode structure more like a hairbrush, with a hundred billion straight, highly conductive nanotubes poking up out of every square centimeter. Each of these tiny, securely rooted poles is then coated with active material, be it lithium-ion or something else.
The result is a drastic reduction in the mean free path of the ions – the distance the charge needs to travel to get in or out of the battery – since every blob of lithium is more or less directly attached to a nanotube, which acts as a straight-line highway and part of the current collector. “The distance the ion needs to move is just a few nanometers through the lithium material,” Nawa Founder and CTO Pascal Boulanger tells us, “instead of micrometers with a plain electrode.”
This radically boosts the power density – the battery’s ability to deliver fast charge and discharge rates – by a factor of up to 10x, meaning that smaller batteries can put out 10 times more power, and the charging times for these batteries can be brought down just as drastically. Nawa says a five-minute charge should be able to take you from 0-80 percent given the right charging infrastructure.
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“Research has shown vertically aligned – or even just well distributed – carbon nanotubes have far greater properties than randomly placed carbon nanotubes,” said Dr. Shearer. “I am not surprised a x10 in conductivity is possible. Controlling the placement of carbon nanotubes is really the way to unlock their potential. The issue in commercialization is the cost associated with producing aligned carbon nanotubes. My guess is the cost would be much more than x10.”
We put the question of cost to Nawa. “The million dollar question!” said Boulanger. “Here’s a million dollar answer: the process we’re using is the same process that’s used for coating glasses with anti-reflective coatings, and for photovoltaics. It’s already very cheap.”
“In high volume, like those processes, yes,” added Nawa CEO Ulrik Grape. “We are firmly convinced that this will be cost-competitive with existing electrodes.”
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In some cases, Nawa says, it eliminates issues that have been holding back certain other battery chemistries. Silicon-based batteries, for example, could offer around twice the energy density of lithium-ion, but the active material grows to four times its size as it’s charged and shrinks back again as it discharges, causing mechanical issues that lead to cracks. As a result, you might be lucky to get 50 charges out of a silicon battery before it dies.
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Moving to these electrodes, Grape and Boulanger say, will require battery companies to make some fairly considerable changes to the early stages of their manufacturing processes prior to cell assembly. But such dramatic performance multipliers without a price penalty or any changes to battery chemistry will surely make these things tough to compete against.
Nawa’s first large-scale customer is French battery manufacturer Saft, which is partnering with PSA and Renault as part of the European Battery Alliance to develop EV batteries for the brands under those umbrellas. The company is also speaking to a number of car companies directly, as well as other battery manufacturers supplying the EV space.
Apple’s T2 security chip is insecure and cannot be fixed, a group of security researchers report.
Over the past three years, a handful of hackers have delved into the inner workings of the custom silicon, fitted inside recent Macs, and found that they can use an exploit developed for iPhone jailbreaking, checkm8, in conjunction with a memory controller vulnerability known as blackbird, to compromise the T2 on macOS computers.
The primary researchers involved – @h0m3us3r, @mcmrarm, @aunali1 and Rick Mark (@su_rickmark) – expanded on the work @axi0mX did to create checkm8 and adapted it to target the T2, in conjunction with a group that built checkm8 into their checkra1n jailbreaking software. Mark on Wednesday published a timeline of relevant milestones.
The T2, which contains a so-called secure enclave processor (SEP) intended to safeguard Touch ID data, encrypted storage, and secure boot capabilities, was announced in 2017. Based on the Arm-compatible A10 processor used in the iPhone 7, the T2 first appeared in devices released in 2018, including MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini. It has also shown up in the iMac Pro and was added to the Mac Pro in 2019, and the iMac in 2020.
The checkm8 exploit, which targets a use-after-free() vulnerability, allows an attacker to run unsigned code during recovery mode, or Device Firmware Update (DFU) mode. It has been modified to enable a tethered debug interface that can be used to subvert the T2 chip.
So with physical access to your T2-equipped macOS computer, and an appropriate USB-C cable and checkra1n 0.11, you – or a miscreant in your position – can obtain root access and kernel execution privileges on a T2-defended Mac. This allows you to alter macOS, loading arbitrary kernel extensions, and expose sensitive data.
According to Belgian security biz ironPeak, it also means that firmware passwords and remote device locking capabilities, instituted via MDM or the FindMy app, can be undone.
Compromising the T2 doesn’t dissolve macOS FileVault2 disk encryption but it would allow someone to install a keylogger to obtain the encryption key or to attempt to crack the key using a brute-force attack.
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Unfortunately, it appears the T2 cannot be fixed. “Apple uses SecureROM in the early stages of boot,” explained Rick Mark in a blog post on Monday. “ROM cannot be altered after fabrication and is done so to prevent modifications. This usually prevents an attacker from placing malware at the beginning of the boot chain, but in this case also prevents Apple from fixing the SecureROM.”
Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel wants to build his startup Redwood Materials into the world’s top battery recycling company and one of the largest battery materials companies, he said at a technology conference Wednesday.
Straubel aims to leverage two partnerships, one with Panasonic Corp 6752.T, the Japanese battery manufacturer that is teamed with Tesla TSLA.O at the Nevada gigafactory, and one announced weeks ago with e-commerce giant Amazon AMZN.O.
With production of electric vehicles and batteries about to explode, Straubel says his ultimate goal is to “make a material impact on sustainability, at an industrial scale.”
Established in early 2017, Redwood this year will recycle more than 1 gigawatt-hours’ worth of battery scrap materials from the gigafactory — enough to power more than 10,000 Tesla cars.
That is a fraction of the half-million vehicles Tesla expects to build this year. At the company’s Battery Day in late September, Chief Executive Elon Musk said he was looking at recycling batteries to supplement the supply of raw materials from mining as Tesla escalates vehicle production.
Redwood’s partnership with Panasonic started late last year with a pilot operation to recover materials at Redwood’s recycling facilities in nearby Carson City, according to Celina Mikolajczak, vice president of battery technology at Panasonic Energy of North America.
Mikolajczak, who spent six years at Tesla as a battery technology leader, said: “People underestimate what recycling can do for the electric vehicles industry. This could have a huge impact on raw material prices and output in the future.”
Straubel’s broader plan is to dramatically reduce mining of raw materials such as nickel, copper and cobalt over several decades by building out a circular or “closed loop” supply chain that recycles and recirculates materials retrieved from end-of-life vehicle and grid storage batteries and from cells scrapped during manufacturing.
In September, Redwood said it received funding from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, following an investment by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, backed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
one app developer revealed to Congress that it — just like WordPress — had been forced to monetize a largely free app. That developer testified that Apple had demanded in-app purchases (IAP), even though Apple had approved its app without them two years earlier — and that when the dev dared send an email to customers notifying them of the change, Apple threatened to remove the app and blocked all updates.
That developer was ProtonMail, makers of an encrypted email app, and CEO Andy Yen had some fiery words for Apple in an interview with The Verge this week.
We’ve known for months that WordPress and Hey weren’t alone in being strong-armed by the most valuable company in the world, ever since Stratechery’s Ben Thompson reported that 21 different app developers quietly told him they’d been pushed to retroactively add IAP in the wake of those two controversies. But until now, we hadn’t heard of many devs willing to publicly admit it. They were scared.
And they’re still scared, says Yen. Even though Apple changed its rules on September 11th to exempt “free apps acting as a stand-alone companion to a paid web based tool” from the IAP requirement — Apple explicitly said email apps are exempt — ProtonMail still hasn’t removed its own in-app purchases because it fears retaliation from Apple, he says.
He claims other developers feel the same way: “There’s a lot of fear in the space right now; people are completely petrified to say anything.”
He might know. ProtonMail is one of the founding partners of the Coalition for App Fairness, a group that also includes Epic Games, Spotify, Tile, Match, and others who banded together to protest Apple’s rules after having those rules used against them. It’s a group that tried to pull together as many developers as it could to form a united front, but some weren’t as ready to risk Apple’s wrath.
That’s clearly not the case for Yen, though — in our interview, he compares Apple’s tactics to a Mafia protection racket.
“For the first two years we were in the App Store, that was fine, no issues there,” he says. (They’d launched on iOS in 2016.) “But a common practice we see … as you start getting significant uptake in uploads and downloads, they start looking at your situation more carefully, and then as any good Mafia extortion goes, they come to shake you down for some money.”
“We didn’t offer a paid version in the App Store, it was free to download … it wasn’t like Epic where you had an alternative payment option, you couldn’t pay at all,” he relates.
Yen says Apple’s demand came suddenly in 2018. “Out of the blue, one day they said you have to add in-app purchase to stay in the App Store,” he says. “They stumbled upon something in the app that mentioned there were paid plans, they went to the website and saw there was a subscription you could purchase, and then turned around and demanded we add IAP.”
“There’s nothing you can say to that. They are judge, jury, and executioner on their platform, and you can take it or leave it. You can’t get any sort of fair hearing to determine whether it’s justifiable or not justifiable, anything they say goes.”
This is what monopolies will do for you. I have been talking about how big tech is involved in this since 2019 and it’s good to see it finally really coming out of the woodwork
There are few things as revealing as a person’s search history, and police typically need a warrant on a known suspect to demand that sensitive information. But a recently unsealed court document found that investigators can request such data in reverse order by asking Google to disclose everyone who searched a keyword rather than for information on a known suspect.
In August, police arrested Michael Williams, an associate of singer and accused sex offender R. Kelly, for allegedly setting fire to a witness’ car in Florida. Investigators linked Williams to the arson, as well as witness tampering, after sending a search warrant to Google that requested information on “users who had searched the address of the residence close in time to the arson.”
The July court filing was unsealed on Tuesday. Detroit News reporter Robert Snell tweeted about the filing after it was unsealed.
Court documents showed that Google provided the IP addresses of people who searched for the arson victim’s address, which investigators tied to a phone number belonging to Williams. Police then used the phone number records to pinpoint the location of Williams’ device near the arson, according to court documents.
The original warrant sent to Google is still sealed, but the report provides another example of a growing trend of data requests to the search engine giant in which investigators demand data on a large group of users rather than a specific request on a single suspect.
“This ‘keyword warrant’ evades the Fourth Amendment checks on police surveillance,” said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “When a court authorizes a data dump of every person who searched for a specific term or address, it’s likely unconstitutional.”
The keyword warrants are similar to geofence warrants, in which police make requests to Google for data on all devices logged in at a specific area and time. Google received 15 times more geofence warrant requests in 2018 compared with 2017, and five times more in 2019 than 2018. The rise in reverse requests from police have troubled Google staffers, according to internal emails.
Facebook is using its vast legal muscle to silence one of its most prominent critics.
The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group established last month in response to the tech giant’s failure to get its actual Oversight Board up and running before the presidential election, was forced offline on Wednesday night after Facebook wrote to the internet service provider demanding the group’s website — realfacebookoversight.org — be taken offline.
The group is made up of dozens of prominent academics, activists, lawyers, and journalists whose goal is to hold Facebook accountable in the run-up to the election next month. Facebook’s own Oversight Board, which was announced 13 months ago, will not meet for the first time until later this month, and won’t consider any issues related to the election.
In a letter sent to one of the founders of the RFOB, journalist Carole Cadwalladr, the ISP SupportNation said the website was being taken offline after Facebook complained that the site was involved in “phishing.”
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It’s unclear what evidence Facebook presented to support its claim that RFOB was operating a phishing website.
Typically, ISPs have a dispute resolution process in place that allows the website operator to challenge the allegations. This process can normally take months and ultimately result in a court order being obtained to take a site offline. In this case, there was no warning given.
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Facebook had previously forced another website the group set up — realfacebookoversight.com — offline over alleged copyright infringement.
Facebook denied that it was responsible for the website being taken offline. “This website was automatically flagged by a vendor because it contained the word “facebook” in the domain and action was taken without consulting with us,” a spokesperson told VICE News.
But, an email from the ISP, SupportNation, sent to the Real Facebook Oversight Board and viewed by VICE News, links to a message from the original complainant sent in the early hours of Friday morning after the website was taken offline.
The message tells SupportNation that “notices of trademark abuse/trademark infringement were sent out in error.” The message comes from what appears to be a Facebook email address.
Facebook said that while normally the ISP would confirm requests like this with Facebook first but “in this instance that did not happen.” A spokesperson added that the message to SupportNation was sent by “a generic email address used by the vendor.”
John Taylor, a spokesperson for Facebook’s actual Oversight Board told VICE News that the takedown wasn’t something it was “aware of or had any involvement in.” Taylor added that the group doesn’t “think this is a constructive approach. We continue to welcome these efforts and contributions to the debate.”
On Wednesday night, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone responded to Cadwalladr’s post, saying: “Your fake thing that accuses us of fake things was caught in our thing to prevent fake things.”
Stone did not immediately respond to requests for comment to clarify what he meant by “fake things” in these instances.
“The most extraordinary thing about this whole affair is how it’s exposed the total Trumpification of Facebook’s corporate comms,” Cadwalladr told VICE News. “There is a brazen shamelessness at work here. It’s not just that a company that has used ‘free speech’ as a protective cloak would go after our ISP and drive us off the internet but that its official spokesman responds to such criticism by attacking and trolling journalists.”
TouchFree is a software application that runs on an interactive kiosk or advertising totem. It detects a user’s hand in mid-air and converts it to an on-screen cursor.
Easy to integrate, deploy, and use
• Runs invisibly on top of existing user interfaces
• Add touchless interaction without writing a single line of code
• Familiar touchscreen-style interactions
How users interact
• A user’s hand is detected, and shown as a cursor displayed on the screen
• Users can select items without touching the screen using a simple “air push” motion, similar to tapping a screen but in mid-air.
NVIDIA Research has invented a way to use AI to dramatically reduce video call bandwidth while simultaneously improving quality.
What the researchers have achieved has remarkable results: by replacing the traditional h.264 video codec with a neural network, they have managed to reduce the required bandwidth for a video call by an order of magnitude. In one example, the required data rate fell from 97.28 KB/frame to a measly 0.1165 KB/frame – a reduction to 0.1% of required bandwidth.
The mechanism behind AI-assisted video conferencing is breathtakingly simple. The technology works by replacing traditional full video frames with neural data. Typically, video calls work by sending h.264 encoded frames to the recipient, and those frames are extremely data-heavy. With AI-assisted video calls, first, the sender sends a reference image of the caller. Then, instead of sending a stream of pixel-packed images, it sends specific reference points on the image around the eyes, nose, and mouth.
A generative adversarial network (or GAN, a type of neural network) on the receiver side then uses the reference image combined with the keypoints to reconstruct subsequent images. Because the keypoints are so much smaller than full pixel images, much less data is sent and therefore an internet connection can be much slower but still provide a clear and functional video chat.
In the researchers’ initial example, they show that a fast internet connection results in pretty much the same quality of stream using both the traditional method and the new neural network method. But what’s most impressive is their subsequent examples, where internet speeds show a considerable degradation of quality using the traditional method, while the neural network is able to produce extremely clear and artifact-free video feeds.
The neural network can work even when the subject is wearing a mask, glasses, headphones, or a hat.
With this technology, more people can enjoy a greater number of features all while using monumentally less data.
But the technology use cases don’t stop there: because the neural network is using reference data instead of the full stream, the technology will allow someone to even change the camera angle to appear like they are looking directly at the screen even if they are not. Called “Free View,” this would allow someone who has a separate camera off-screen to seemingly keep eye contact with those on a video call.
NVIDIA can also use this same method for character animations. Using different keypoints from the original feed, they can add clothing, hair, or even animate video game characters.
Using this kind of neural network will have huge implications for the modern workforce that will not only serve to relieve strain on networks, but also give users more freedom when working remotely. However, because of the way this technology works, there will almost certainly be questions on how it can be deployed and lead to possible issues with “deep fakes” that become more believable and harder to detect.
