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Daily Archives: April 7, 2025

Speech now streaming from brains in real-time, code open sourced

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Described in a paper published in Nature Neuroscience this week, the neuroprosthesis is intended to allow patients with severe paralysis and anarthria – loss of speech – to communicate by turning brain signals into synthesized words.

“Our streaming approach brings the same rapid speech decoding capacity of devices like Alexa and Siri to neuroprostheses,” said Gopala Anumanchipalli – assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at University of California, Berkeley and co-principal investigator of the study, done in conjunction with UC San Francisco – in a statement.

“Using a similar type of algorithm, we found that we could decode neural data and, for the first time, enable near-synchronous voice streaming. The result is more naturalistic, fluent speech synthesis.”

The project improves on work published in 2023 by reducing the latency to decode thought and turn it into speech, which at the time took about eight seconds to produce a sentence.

As demonstrated in this video, below, the new process works roughly 8x faster, operating in near real-time.

It begins by reading the patient’s electrical brain signals after the intent to speak has been formed but before the thought has produced a vocal muscle response.

“We are essentially intercepting signals where the thought is translated into articulation and in the middle of that motor control,” said co-lead author Cheol Jun Cho, UC Berkeley PhD student in electrical engineering and computer sciences, in a statement.

“So what we’re decoding is after a thought has happened, after we’ve decided what to say, after we’ve decided what words to use and how to move our vocal-tract muscles.”

The neuroprosthesis works by passing 80ms chunks of electrocorticogram (ECoG) data through a neural encoder and then using a deep learning recurrent neural network transducer model to convert brain signals to sounds. The researchers used a recording of the patient’s pre-injury voice to make the model’s output sound more like natural speech.

While this particular neuroprosthesis requires a direct electrical connection to the brain, the researchers believe their approach is generalizable to other interfaces, including surgically implanted microelectrode arrays (MEAs) and non-invasive surface electromyography (SEMG).

The work builds on research funded by Facebook that the social media biz abandoned four years ago to pursue more market-friendly SEMG wrist sensors. Edward Chang, chair of neurosurgery at the UCSF, who oversaw the Facebook-funded project is the senior co-principal investigator of this latest study.

Code for the Streaming Brain2Speech Decoder has been posted to GitHub, in case anyone is looking to reproduce the researchers’ results.

Source: Speech now streaming from brains in real-time • The Register

Unique Study Is Latest to Show Shingles Vaccine Can Help Prevent Dementia

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[…] Scientists at Stanford University led the research, published in Nature. They compared people born before and after they were eligible to take the shingles vaccine in a certain part of the UK, finding that vaccinated people were 20% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia over a seven year period. More research is needed to understand and confirm this link, but the findings suggest shingles vaccination can become a cost-effective preventative measure against dementia.

[…]

the researchers took advantage of a natural experiment that occurred in Wales, UK, over a decade ago. In September 2013, a shingles vaccination program officially began in Wales, with a well-defined age eligibility. People born on or after September 2, 1933 (80 years and under) were eligible for at least one year for the shingles vaccine, whereas people born before then were not.

The clear cutoff date (and the UK’s well-maintained electronic health records) meant that the researchers could easily track dementia rates across the two groups born before or after September 1933. And because the people in these groups were so close together in age, they also shared many other factors in common that could potentially affect dementia risk, such as how often they saw doctors regularly. This divide, in other words, allowed the researchers to study older people in Wales during this time in a manner similar to a randomized trial.

The researchers analyzed the health records of 280,000 residents born between 1925 and 1942. As expected, many vaccine-eligible people immediately took advantage of the new program: 47% of people born after the first week of the eligibility date were vaccinated, while practically no one born before the cutoff date received the vaccine, the researchers noted.

All in all, the researchers calculated that shingles vaccination in Wales was associated with a 20% decline in people’s relative risk of developing dementia over a seven-year period (in absolute terms, people’s risk of dementia dropped by 3.5%). They also analyzed data from England, where a similar cutoff period was enacted, and found the same pattern of reduced dementia risk (and deaths related to dementia) among those vaccinated against shingles.

[…]

“For the first time, we now have evidence that likely shows a cause-and-effect relationship between shingles vaccination and dementia prevention,” Geldsetzer said. “We find these protective effects to be large in size—substantially larger than those of existing pharmacological tools for dementia.”

There are still unanswered aspects about this link. Researchers aren’t sure exactly why the vaccine seems to lower dementia risk, for instance. Some but not all studies have suggested that herpes zoster and other germs that linger in our bodies can overtly cause or worsen people’s dementia, so the vaccine might be having a direct preventative effect there. But it’s also possible the vaccine is triggering changes in the immune system that more broadly keep the brain sharper, and that other vaccines could do the same as well.

Importantly, this latest study only looked at the earlier Zostavax vaccine, which has largely been replaced by the more effective Shingrix vaccine. This might mean that the results seen here are an underestimate of the benefits people can expect today. Just last July, for instance, a study from researchers in the UK found evidence that the Shingrix vaccine reduced people’s risk of dementia noticeably more than Zostavax. This finding, if further supported, would also support the idea that the herpes zoster virus is contributing to dementia.

[…]

Source: Unique Study Is Latest to Show Shingles Vaccine Can Help Prevent Dementia

Using the Earth’s atmosphere as a global sensor shows promise

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AtmoSense, which began in late 2020, set out to understand the fundamentals of energy propagation from the Earth’s surface to the ionosphere to determine whether the atmosphere can be used as a sensor. A fundamental science effort, AtmoSense aimed to measure acoustic and electromagnetic waves propagating through the atmosphere to see if they could provide clues about the nature, location, and size of a disturbance event that occurred on Earth. Precisely locating illicit underground explosions by a rogue nation or identifying other national security-relevant events could be done in the future just by using signals detected and modeled from the atmosphere. The open-source tools developed under AtmoSense may be the first step toward “reading” — from extended distances — information contained in atmospheric waves propagating from an event happening anywhere in the world.

Benefits for a range of computationally complex problems

“High-resolution surface-to-space simulation of acoustic waves was considered impossible before the program began, but we accomplished it,” said Michael “Orbit” Nayak, DARPA AtmoSense program manager. “We used to call the ionosphere the ‘ignorosphere,’ but AtmoSense made some key interdisciplinary breakthroughs to address what used to be a massively intractable problem. We can now model across six orders of magnitude, in 3D, what happens to the energy emanating from a small, meters-scale disturbance as it expands up into the atmosphere to propagate over thousands of kilometers, and potentially around the world.”

[…]

An unplanned discovery: SpaceX Falcon 9 re-entries detected

Following one of the New Mexico test-range detonations in 2024, a performer team noticed something unusual in their analysis of sensor data.

“As the team was looking at the data, they saw a huge drop in what’s called total electron content that puzzled them,” Nayak said. “Imagine that you have water going through a hose. That’s a flow of electrons, and if you put your fist in front of the hose, you’ll notice a significant drop in water volume coming out of the hose.”

In preparing to analyze their field test data, the team noticed a similar sizable dip in the electron content compared to the background electron readings at a specific location in the atmosphere. As they did more forensics, they correlated the disturbance to a SpaceX Falcon 9 re-entry that happened the same day of the detonation test. Their sensor data had unexpectedly captured the SpaceX reentry into the atmosphere, resulting in the specific drop in electron content.

“Then they decided to pull other SpaceX reentry data, across dozens of launches, to see if they could spot a similar electron drop,” Nayak said. “The phenomenon is highly repeatable. We discovered an unplanned new technique for identifying objects entering the earth’s atmosphere.” The Embry-Riddle University team, led by Jonathan Snively and Matt Zettergren, in collaboration with Pavel Inchin of Computational Physics, Inc., have submitted their novel results for peer-reviewed publication.

[…]

Source: Using the Earth’s atmosphere as a global sensor shows promise | DARPA

EU: These are scary times – let’s backdoor encryption and make everyone unsafe!

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The EU has shared its plans to ostensibly keep the continent’s denizens secure – and among the pages of bureaucratese are a few worrying sections that indicate the political union wants to backdoor encryption by 2026, or even sooner.

While the superstate has made noises about backdooring encryption before, the ProtectEU plan [PDF], launched on Monday, says the European Commission wants to develop a roadmap to allow “lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement in 2025” and a technology roadmap to do so by the following year.

“We are working on a roadmap now, and we will look at what is technically also possible,” said Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-president of the EC for tech sovereignty, security and democracy. “The problem is now that our law enforcement, they have been losing ground on criminals because our police investigators, they don’t have access to data,” she added.

“Of course, we want to protect the privacy and cyber security at the same time; and that’s why we have said here that now we have to prepare a technical roadmap to watch for that, but it’s something that we can’t tolerate, that we can’t take care of the security because we don’t have tools to work in this digital world.”

She claimed that in “85 percent” of police cases, law enforcement couldn’t access the data it needed. The proposal is to amend the existing Cybersecurity Act to allow these changes. You can watch the response below.

According to the document, the EC will set up a Security Research & Innovation Campus at its Joint Research Centre in 2026 to, somehow, work out the technical details. Since it’s impossible to backdoor encryption in a way that can’t be potentially exploited by others, it seems a very odd move to make if security’s your goal.

China, Russia, and the US certainly would spend a huge amount of time and money to find the backdoor. Even American law enforcement has given up on the cause of backdooring, although the UK still seems to be wedded to the idea.

In the meantime, for critical infrastructure (and presumably government communications), the EC wants to deploy quantum cryptography across the state. They want to get this in place by 2030 at the latest.

[…]

Source: EU: These are scary times – let’s backdoor encryption! • The Register

Proton may roll away from the Swiss

The EC’s not alone in proposing changes to privacy – new laws outlined in Switzerland could force privacy-focused groups such as Proton out of the country.

Under today’s laws, police can obtain data from services like Proton if they can get a court order for some crimes. But under the proposed laws a court order would not be required and that means Proton would leave the country, said cofounder Andy Yen.

“Swiss surveillance would be significantly stricter than in the US and the EU, and Switzerland would lose its competitiveness as a business location,” Proton’s cofounder told Swiss title Der Bund. “We feel compelled to leave Switzerland if the partial revision of the surveillance law planned by the Federal Council comes into force.”

The EU keeps banging away at this. They tried in 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024. And fortunately they keep getting stopped by people with enough brains to realise that you cannot have a safe backdoor. For security to be secure it needs to be unbreakable.

https://www.linkielist.com/?s=eu+encryption

 

T-Mobile SyncUP Bug Reveals Names, Images, and Locations of Random Children

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T-Mobile sells a little-known GPS service called SyncUP, which allows users who are parents to monitor the locations of their children. This week, an apparent glitch in the service’s system obscured the locations of users’ own children while sending them detailed information and the locations of other, random children.

404 Media first reported on the extremely creepy bug, which appears to have impacted a large number of users. The outlet notes an outpouring of consternation and concern from web users on social platforms like Reddit and X, many of which claimed to have been impacted. 404 also interviewed one specific user, “Jenna,” who explained her ordeal with the bug:

Jenna, a parent who uses SyncUP to keep track of her three-year-old and six-year-old children, logged in Tuesday and instead of seeing if her kids had left school yet, was shown the exact, real-time locations of eight random children around the country, but not the locations of her own kids. 404 Media agreed to use a pseudonym for Jenna to protect the privacy of her kids.

“I’m not comfortable giving my six-year-old a phone, but he takes a school bus and I just want to be able to see where he is in real time,” Jenna said. “I had put a 500 meter boundary around his school, so I get an alert when he’s leaving.”

Jenna sent 404 Media a series of screenshots that show her logged into the app, as well as the locations of children located in other states. In the screenshots, the address-level location of the children are available, as is their name and the last time the location was updated.

Even more alarmingly, the woman interviewed by 404 claims that the company didn’t show much concern for the bug. “Jenna” says she called the company and was referred to an employee who told her that a ticket had been filed in the system on the issue’s behalf. A follow-up email from the concerned mother produced no response, she said.

[…]

When reached for comment by Gizmodo, a T-Mobile spokesperson told us: “Yesterday we fully resolved a temporary system issue with our SyncUP products that resulted from a planned technology update. We are in the process of understanding potential impacts to a small number of customers and will reach out to any as needed. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

The privacy implications of such a glitch are obvious and not really worth extrapolating on. That said, it’s also a good reminder that the more digital access you give a company, the more potential there is for that access to fall into the wrong hands.

Source: T-Mobile Bug Reveals Names, Images, and Locations of Random Children

Wealthy Americans have death rates on par with poor Europeans

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It’s well-established that, on the whole, Americans die younger than people in most other high-income countries. For instance, an analysis from 2022 found that the average life expectancy of someone born in Switzerland or Spain in 2019 was 84 years. Meanwhile, the average US life expectancy was 78.8, lower than nearly all other high-income countries, including Canada’s, which was 82.3 years. And this was before the pandemic, which only made things worse for the US.

[…]

It is true that money buys you a longer life in the US. In fact, the link between wealth and mortality may be stronger in the US than in any other high-income country. But, if you think American wealth will put life expectancy in league with Switzerland, you’re dead wrong, according to a study in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

A stark finding

The study, led by researchers at Brown University, found that the wealthiest Americans lived shorter lives than the wealthiest Europeans. In fact, wealthy Northern and Western Europeans had death rates 35 percent lower than the wealthiest Americans, whose lifespans were more like the poorest in Northern and Western Europe—which includes countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

“The findings are a stark reminder that even the wealthiest Americans are not shielded from the systemic issues in the US contributing to lower life expectancy, such as economic inequality or risk factors like stress, diet or environmental hazards,” lead study author Irene Papanicolas, a professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown, said in a news release.

The study looked at health and wealth data of more than 73,000 adults across the US and Europe who were 50 to 85 years old in 2010. There were more than 19,000 from the US, nearly 27,000 from Northern and Western Europe, nearly 19,000 from Eastern Europe, and nearly 9,000 from Southern Europe. For each region, participants were divided into wealth quartiles, with the first being the poorest and the fourth being the richest. The researchers then followed participants until 2022, tracking deaths.

The US had the largest gap in survival between the poorest and wealthiest quartiles compared to European countries. America’s poorest quartile also had the lowest survival rate of all groups, including the poorest quartiles in all three European regions.

While less access to health care and weaker social structures can explain the gap between the wealthy and poor in the US, it doesn’t explain the differences between the wealthy in the US and the wealthy in Europe, the researchers note. There may be other systemic factors at play that make Americans uniquely short-lived, such as diet, environment, behaviors, and cultural and social differences.

“If we want to improve health in the US, we need to better understand the underlying factors that contribute to these differences—particularly amongst similar socioeconomic groups—and why they translate to different health outcomes across nations,” Papanicolas said.

Source: Wealthy Americans have death rates on par with poor Europeans – Ars Technica

NSA warns about “fast flux” – cycling IP addresses quickly lets attackers keep attacking

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[…] fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure. It also provides redundancy. By the time defenders block one address or domain, new ones have already been assigned.

[…]

A key means for achieving this is the use of Wildcard DNS records. These records define zones within the Domain Name System, which map domains to IP addresses. The wildcards cause DNS lookups for subdomains that do not exist, specifically by tying MX (mail exchange) records used to designate mail servers. The result is the assignment of an attacker IP to a subdomain such as malicious.example.com, even though it doesn’t exist.

Fast flux comes in two variations. Single flux creates DNS A records or AAAA records to map a single domain to many IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, respectively. Here’s a diagram illustrating the structure.

 

 

Double flux provides an additional layer of obfuscation and resiliency by, in addition to changing IP addresses, cycling through the DNS name servers used in domain lookups. Defenders have observed double flux using both Name Server (NS) and Canonical Name (CNAME) DNS records. Here’s an illustration of the technique.

 

 

“Both techniques leverage a large number of compromised hosts, usually as a botnet from across the Internet that acts as proxies or relay points, making it difficult for network defenders to identify the malicious traffic and block or perform legal enforcement takedowns of the malicious infrastructure,”

[…]

Source: NSA warns “fast flux” threatens national security. What is fast flux anyway? – Ars Technica

Yes.. And there’s a solution for this one too. Use DNS Pinning on your local DNS resolvers.

Web browsers themselves had to look at this a number of decades ago due to DNS Rebinding Attacks [wikipedia.org]. And the answer I’m pretty sure was to Pin DNS records whose TTL was less than 10 minutes or so to make sure DNS records will be cached for a minimum length of time, even if the TTL has been configured less.

You can handle this on your organization’s DNS servers as well:

For example; if your DNS resolver is Unbound, then set the cache-min-ttl to 24 hours.

cache-min-ttl: seconds
Time to live minimum for RRsets and messages in the cache. If the minimum kicks in, the data is cached for longer than the domain owner intended, and thus less queries are made to look up the data. Zero makes sure the data in the cache is as the domain owner intended, higher values, especially more than an hour or so, can lead to trouble as the data in the cache does not match up with the actual data any more.

Then the “fast flux” attackers can’t be so effective against your infrastructure. Because the DNS records are pinned upon the first lookup.
At least they won’t be able to use DNS for their fast flux network in this case – if your DNS resolvers’ policy prevents fast flux.

Source: Re:It’s been ages (Score:5, Informative)