Featured in Nature Communications, this new research could result in the development of wearable tech that could sense, store, analyze, and infer the activity(s) of its wearers in real-time. The senior author of the study, Yeol Fink, believes that digital fibers like those developed in this study could help expand the possibilities for fabrics to “uncover the context of hidden patterns in the human body that could be used for physical performance monitoring, medical inference, and early disease detection.”
Applications for the technology could even expand into other areas of our lives like, for example, storing wedding music within the bride’s gown.
This study is important as, up to now, most electronic fibers have been analog. This means that they carry a continuous electronic signal rather than a purely digital one.
“This work presents the first realization of a fabric with the ability to store and process data digitally, adding a new information content dimension to textiles and allowing fabrics to be programmed literally,” explained Fink.
The fibers are made from chains of hundreds of tiny silicon chips
The fibers were created by chaining hundreds of microscale silicon digital chips into a preform to make a new “smart” polymer fiber. By using precision control, the authors of the study were able to create fibers with the continuous electrical connection between each chip of tens of meters.
These fibers are thin and flexible and can even be passed through the eye of a needle. This would mean they could be seamlessly (pun intended) woven into existing fabrics, and can even withstand being washed at least ten times without degrading.
This would mean this wearable tech could be retrofitted to existing clothing and you wouldn’t even know it’s there.
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The fiber also has a pretty decent storage capacity too — all things considered. During the research, it was found to be possible to write, store, and recall 767-kilobit full-color short movie files and a 0.48-megabyte music file. The files can be stored for two months without power.
The fibers have also been outfitted with their own neural network
The fibers also integrate a neural network with thousands of connections. This was used to monitor and analyze the surface body temperature of a test subject after being woven into the armpit of the shirt.
By training the neural network with 270-minutes of data the team got it to predict the minute-by-minute activity of the shirt’s wearer with 96% accuracy.
“This type of fabric could give quantity and quality open-source data for extracting out new body patterns that we did not know about before,” Loke added.
With their analytical capabilities, such fibers could, conceivably, provide real-time alerts about a person’s health (like respiratory or heart problems). It could even be used to help deliver muscle activation signals or heart rate data for athletes.
The fibers are also controlled using a small external device that could have microcontrollers added to it in the future.
A major internet blackout that hit many high-profile websites on Tuesday has been blamed on a software bug.
Fastly, the cloud-computing company responsible for the issues, said the bug had been triggered when one of its customers had changed their settings.
The outage has raised questions about relying on a handful of companies to run the vast infrastructure that underpins the internet.
Fastly apologised and said the problem should have been anticipated.
The outage, which lasted about an hour, hit some popular websites such as Amazon, Reddit, the Guardian and the New York Times.
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But a customer quite legitimately changing their settings had exposed a bug in a software update issued to customers in mid-May, causing “85% of our network to return errors”, it said.
Engineers had worked out the cause of the problem about 40 minutes after websites had gone offline at about 11:00 BST, Fastly said.
“Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating as normal,” it said.
The company has deployed a bug fix across its network and promised a “post mortem of the processes and practices we followed during this incident” and to “figure out why we didn’t detect the bug during our software quality assurance and testing processes”.
The FBI has revealed how it managed to hoodwink the criminal underworld with its secretly backdoored AN0M encrypted chat app, leading to hundreds of arrests, the seizure of 32 tons of drugs, 250 firearms, 55 luxury cars, more than $148M, and even cocaine-filled pineapples.
About 12,000 smartphones with AN0M installed were sold into organized crime rings: the devices were touted as pure encrypted messaging tools — no GPS, email or web browsing, and certainly no voice calls, cameras, and microphones. They were “designed by criminals, for criminals exclusively,” one defendant told investigators, Randy Grossman, Acting US Attorney for the Southern District of California, told a press conference on Tuesday.
However, AN0M was forged in a joint operation by Australian and US federal law enforcement, and was deliberately and surreptitiously engineered so that agents could peer into the encrypted conversations and read crooks’ messages. After Australia’s police broke the news that the messaging app had recorded everything from drug deals to murder plots — leading to hundreds of arrests — now the FBI has spilled its side of the story, revealing a complex sting dubbed Operation Trojan Shield.
The Dept of Justice’s Randy Grossman walks through journalists through Operation Trojan Shield at a press conference on Tuesday
“For the first time the FBI developed and operated its own hardened encrypted device company, called AN0M,” Grossman said.
“Criminal organizations and the individual defendants we have charged purchased and distributed AN0M devices in an effort to secretly plan and execute their crimes. But the devices were actually operated by the FBI.”
Playing the long game
According to court documents [PDF] this all came about after the shutdown of Phantom Secure, a Canadian biz selling Blackberry phones customized for encrypted chat to the criminal community. CEO Vincent Ramos pleaded guilty in 2018 to conspiring with drug traffickers and was sentenced to nine years behind bars and had $80M in assets seized.
The closure of Phantom Secure put the staff working there on the FBI’s radar. The bureau’s San Diego office recruited a developer at the company as a confidential human source (CHS), court documents state. This source had previously been sentenced to six years in the clink for importing illegal drugs, and agreed to cooperate with the Feds to reduce any future punishment potentially coming their way.
Crucially, not only had this programmer worked on the Phantom Secure’s encrypted messaging software, but they were also doing work on rival encrypted comms service Sky Global — which also sold modified handsets with secure messaging features — as well as developing their own secure customized phone called AN0M.
“The CHS … had invested a substantial amount of money into the development of a new hardened encrypted device,” the indictment by FBI Special Agent Nicholas Cheviron reads.
“The CHS offered this next generation device, named ‘AN0M,’ to the FBI to use in ongoing and new investigations. The CHS also agreed to offer to distribute AN0M devices to some of the CHS’s existing network of distributors of encrypted communications devices.”
And so, in October 2018, the three-year sting operation began.
The CHS — who was paid $120,000 plus $59,000 in living and travel expenses by the authorities — worked with the FBI and the Australian Federal Police to hide a master decryption key into the AN0M app. Messages sent by the software’s users were quietly copied and sent off to servers controlled by law enforcement, who were able to use the key to decrypt the texts.
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In this beta test, 50 handsets were passed out Down Under, and this phase of the operation was successful; two of the country’s biggest criminal gangs were successfully penetrated and the message copying system worked perfectly. Aussie police reviewing the texts said they found 100 per cent were related to crime. Everyone who used the app was assigned a unique ID, and these handles were known to the police.
Let’s go global
In the next phase, the CHS expanded the distribution network beyond Australia, and the FBI found itself in a position to collect the data. After negotiations with an unnamed third country, a message-relaying iBot server was set up in that nation to collect the BCC’d conversations, and on October 21, 2019, it began beaming copies of crooks’ chats from AN0M handhelds to an FBI-owned system every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The third country’s officials had secured a court order for the surveillance, and the FBI used a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, also known as an MLAT, to obtain the decrypted material.
Sales of AN0M grew steadily, and got a boost when French and Dutch police took down the EncroChat encrypted service in 2020. When a similar swoop shuttered Sky Global in 2021, demand skyrocketed. After the latter take-down, AN0M sales tripled to more than 9000 handsets, each costing $1700 with a six-month subscription to the AN0M encrypted messaging network, Grossman said.
The data haul from the application was immense: more than 27 million messages from 100 countries, and between 300 criminal gangs. This included more than 400,000 photos, typically of drugs or guns and, crucially, shipment plans.
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Police around the world have made 800 arrests from AN0M-gathered intelligence, including cuffing six US law enforcement officers. Of all of those detained, they primarily face charges of drug trafficking, money laundering, gun violations, and violent crime.
Grossman also announced Uncle Sam had indicted 17 suspects on RICO charges relating to the use and marketing of the AN0M handsets. Most of these people are said to be distributors, though the prosecutor said three were administrators who helped run the service. Eight of those RICO suspects have already been collared and detained.
ProPublica says it has seen the tax returns of some of the world’s richest people, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett.
The website alleges Amazon’s Mr Bezos paid no tax in 2007 and 2011, while Tesla’s Mr Musk paid nothing in 2018.
A White House spokeswoman called the leak “illegal”, and the FBI and tax authorities are investigating.
ProPublica said it was analysing what it called a “vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data” on the taxes of the billionaires, and would release further details over coming weeks.
While the BBC has not been able to confirm the claims, the alleged leak comes at a time of growing debate about the amount of tax paid by the wealthy and widening inequality.
media captionG7 global tax ‘levels the playing field’
ProPublica said the richest 25 Americans pay less in tax – an average of 15.8% of adjusted gross income – than most mainstream US workers.
Jesse Eisinger, senior reporter and editor at ProPublica, told the Today Programme: “We were pretty astonished that you could get [tax] down to zero if you were a multi-billionaire. Actually paying zero in tax really floored us. Ultra-wealthy people can sidestep the system in an entirely legal way.”
“They have enormous ability to find deductions, find credits and exploit loopholes in the system,” he said.
So while the value of their wealth grows enormously through their ownership of shares in their company, that’s not recorded as income.
But there’s more than that, he said: “They also take aggressive tax deductions, often because they have borrowed to fund their lifestyle.”
He said US billionaires buy an asset, build one or inherit a fortune, and then borrow against their wealth.
Because they don’t realise any gains or sell any stock, they’re not taking any income, which could be taxed.
“They then borrow from a bank at a relatively low interest rate, live off that and can use the interest expenses as deductions on their income,” he said.
Biden plans
The website said that “using perfectly legal tax strategies, many of the uber-rich are able to shrink their federal tax bills to nothing or close to it” even as their wealth soared over the past few years.
The wealthy, as with many ordinary citizens, are able to reduce their income tax bills via such things as charitable donations and drawing money from investment income rather than wage income.
ProPublica, using data collected by Forbes magazine, said the wealth of the 25 richest Americans collectively jumped by $401bn from 2014 to 2018 – but they paid $13.6bn in income tax over those years.
President Joe Biden has vowed to increase tax on the richest Americans as part of a mission to improve equality and raise money for his massive infrastructure investment programme.
He wants to raise the top rate of tax, double the tax on what high earners make from investments, and change inheritance tax.
However, ProPublica’s analysis concluded: “While some wealthy Americans, such as hedge fund managers, would pay more taxes under the current Biden administration proposals, the vast majority of the top 25 would see little change.”
