The OAK-D is an open-source, full-color depth sensing camera with embedded AI capabilities, and there is now a crowdfunding campaign for a newer, lighter version called the OAK-D Lite. The new model does everything the previous one could do, combining machine vision with stereo depth sensing and an ability to run highly complex image processing tasks all on-board, freeing the host from any of the overhead involved.
The OAK-D Lite camera is actually several elements together in one package: a full-color 4K camera, two greyscale cameras for stereo depth sensing, and onboard AI machine vision processing with Intel’s Movidius Myriad X processor. Tying it all together is an open-source software platform called DepthAI that wraps the camera’s functions and capabilities together into a unified whole.
The goal is to give embedded systems access to human-like visual perception in real-time, which at its core means detecting things, and identifying where they are in physical space. It does this with a combination of traditional machine vision functions (like edge detection and perspective correction), depth sensing, and the ability to plug in pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) models for complex tasks like object classification, pose estimation, or hand tracking in real-time.
So how is it used? Practically speaking, the OAK-D Lite is a USB device intended to be plugged into a host (running any OS), and the team has put a lot of work into making it as easy as possible. With the help of a downloadable application, the hardware can be up and running with examples in about half a minute. Integrating the device into other projects or products can be done in Python with the help of the DepthAI SDK, which provides functionality with minimal coding and configuration (and for more advanced users, there is also a full API for low-level access). Since the vision processing is all done on-board, even a Raspberry Pi Zero can be used effectively as a host.
There’s one more thing that improves the ease-of-use situation, and that’s the fact that support for the OAK-D Lite (as well as the previous OAK-D) has been added to a software suite called the Cortic Edge Platform (CEP). CEP is a block-based visual coding system that runs on a Raspberry Pi, and is aimed at anyone who wants to rapidly prototype with AI tools in a primarily visual interface, providing yet another way to glue a project together.
Authorities in the United Arab Emirates have requested the US Department of Justice’s help in probing a case involving a bank manager who was swindled into transferring $35m to criminals by someone using a fake AI-generated voice.
The employee received a call to move the company-owned funds by someone purporting to be a director from the business. He also previously saw emails that showed the company was planning to use the money for an acquisition, and had hired a lawyer to coordinate the process. When the sham director instructed him to transfer the money, he did so thinking it was a legitimate request.
But it was all a scam, according to US court documents reported by Forbes. The criminals used “deep voice technology to simulate the voice of the director,” it said. Now officials from the UAE have asked the DoJ to hand over details of two US bank accounts, where over $400,000 from the stolen money were deposited.
Investigators believe there are at least 17 people involved in the heist.
Amazon.com Inc has been repeatedly accused of knocking off products it sells on its website and of exploiting its vast trove of internal data to promote its own merchandise at the expense of other sellers. The company has denied the accusations.
But thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters – including emails, strategy papers and business plans – show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.
The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform. The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results so that the company’s products would appear, as one 2016 strategy report for India put it, “in the first 2 or three … search results” when customers were shopping on Amazon.in.
Among the victims of the strategy: a popular shirt brand in India, John Miller, which is owned by a company whose chief executive is Kishore Biyani, known as the country’s “retail king.” Amazon decided to “follow the measurements of” John Miller shirts down to the neck circumference and sleeve length, the document states.
An Israeli researcher has demonstrated that LAN cables’ radio frequency emissions can be read by using a $30 off-the-shelf setup, potentially opening the door to fully developed cable-sniffing attacks.
Mordechai Guri of Israel’s Ben Gurion University of the Negev described the disarmingly simple technique to The Register, which consists of putting an ordinary radio antenna up to four metres from a category 6A Ethernet cable and using an off-the-shelf software defined radio (SDR) to listen around 250MHz.
“From an engineering perspective, these cables can be used as antennas and used for RF transmission to attack the air-gap,” said Guri.
His experimental technique consisted of slowing UDP packet transmissions over the target cable to a very low speed and then transmitting single letters of the alphabet. The cable’s radiations could then be picked up by the SDR (in Guri’s case, both an R820T2-based tuner and a HackRF unit) and, via a simple algorithm, be turned back into human-readable characters.
Nicknamed LANtenna, Guri’s technique is an academic proof of concept and not a fully fledged attack that could be deployed today. Nonetheless, the research shows that poorly shielded cables have the potential to leak information which sysadmins may have believed were secure or otherwise air-gapped from the outside world.
He added that his setup’s $1 antenna was a big limiting factor and that specialised antennas could well reach “tens of metres” of range.
“We could transmit both text and binary, and also achieve faster bit-rates,” acknowledged Guri when El Reg asked about the obvious limitations described in his paper [PDF]. “However, due to environmental noises (e.g. from other cables) higher bit-rate are rather theoretical and not practical in all scenarios.”
When asked in July, 2020, by US Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) whether Amazon ever mined data from its third-party vendors to launch competing products, founder and then CEO Jeff Bezos said he couldn’t answer “yes” or “no,” but insisted Amazon had rules disallowing the practice.
“What I can tell you is we have a policy against using seller-specific data to aid our private label business but I can’t guarantee that policy has never been violated,” Bezos said.
According to documents obtained by Reuters, Amazon’s employees in India flouted that policy by copying the products of Amazon marketplace sellers for its in-house brands and then manipulating search results on Amazon’s website to place its knockoffs at the top of search results lists.
“The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform,” said Reuters reporters Aditya Kalra and Steve Stecklow in a report published on Wednesday.
“The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results so that the company’s products would appear, as one 2016 strategy report for India put it, ‘in the first 2 or three … search results’ when customers were shopping on Amazon.in.”
Last year, the Wall Street Journal published similar allegations that the company used third-party merchant data to develop competing products, which prompted Rep. Jayapal’s question to Bezos. Such claims are central to the ongoing antitrust investigations of Amazon being conducted in the US, Europe, and India.
Load up the website This Person Does Not Exist and it’ll show you a human face, near-perfect in its realism yet totally fake. Refresh and the neural network behind the site will generate another, and another, and another. The endless sequence of AI-crafted faces is produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN) — a type of AI that learns to produce realistic but fake examples of the data it is trained on. But such generated faces — which are starting to be used in CGI movies and ads — might not be as unique as they seem. In a paper titled This Person (Probably) Exists (PDF), researchers show that many faces produced by GANs bear a striking resemblance to actual people who appear in the training data. The fake faces can effectively unmask the real faces the GAN was trained on, making it possible to expose the identity of those individuals. The work is the latest in a string of studies that call into doubt the popular idea that neural networks are “black boxes” that reveal nothing about what goes on inside.
To expose the hidden training data, Ryan Webster and his colleagues at the University of Caen Normandy in France used a type of attack called a membership attack, which can be used to find out whether certain data was used to train a neural network model. These attacks typically take advantage of subtle differences between the way a model treats data it was trained on — and has thus seen thousands of times before — and unseen data. For example, a model might identify a previously unseen image accurately, but with slightly less confidence than one it was trained on. A second, attacking model can learn to spot such tells in the first model’s behavior and use them to predict when certain data, such as a photo, is in the training set or not.
Such attacks can lead to serious security leaks. For example, finding out that someone’s medical data was used to train a model associated with a disease might reveal that this person has that disease. Webster’s team extended this idea so that instead of identifying the exact photos used to train a GAN, they identified photos in the GAN’s training set that were not identical but appeared to portray the same individual — in other words, faces with the same identity. To do this, the researchers first generated faces with the GAN and then used a separate facial-recognition AI to detect whether the identity of these generated faces matched the identity of any of the faces seen in the training data. The results are striking. In many cases, the team found multiple photos of real people in the training data that appeared to match the fake faces generated by the GAN, revealing the identity of individuals the AI had been trained on.
This platform, which is called Kinetic Soul, uses Posenet computer vision to track a dancer’s movements. Posenet detects the dancer’s joints and creates a point map to determine what body parts are moving where, and at what speed. Then the system translates and transmits the movements to the 32 pins on the surface, creating a touchable picture of what’s going on. Each 3D-printed pin is controlled with a solenoid, all of which are driven by a single Arduino.
We think it’s interesting that Kinetic Soul can speak to the user in two different languages. The first is more about the overall flow of a dance, and the second delves into the deconstructed details. Both methods allow for dances to be enjoyed in real time, or via video recording. So how does one deconstruct dance? [Shi Yun] turned to Laban Movement Analysis, which breaks up human locomotion into four broad categories: the body in relation to itself, the effort expended to move, the shapes assumed, and the space used.
[Shi Yun] has been user-testing their ideas at dance workshops for the visually impaired throughout the entire process — this is how they arrived at having two haptic languages instead of one. They plan to continue getting input as they work to fortify the prototype, improve the touch experience, and refine the haptic languages. Check out the brief demonstration video after the break.
Yes indeed, dance is a majestic way of expressing all kinds of things. Think you have no use for interpretive dance? Think again — it can help you understand protein synthesis in an amusing way.
Daily exposure to phthalates, a group of chemicals used in everything from plastic containers to makeup, may lead to approximately 100,000 deaths in older Americans annually, a study from New York University warned Tuesday.
The chemicals, which can be found in hundreds of products such as toys, clothing and shampoo, have been known for decades to be “hormone disruptors,” affecting a person’s endocrine system.
The toxins can enter the body through such items and are linked to obesity, diabetes and heart disease, said the study published in the journal Environmental Pollution.
The research, which was carried out by New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and includes some 5,000 adults aged 55 to 64, shows that those with higher concentrations of phthalates in their urine were more likely to die of heart disease.
It’s not a jailbreak, but [basti564]’s Oculess software nevertheless allows one the option to remove telemetry and account dependencies from Facebook’s Oculus Quest VR headsets. It is not normally possible to use these devices without a valid Facebook account (or a legacy Oculus account in the case of the original Quest), so the ability to flip any kind of disconnect switch without bricking the hardware is a step forward, even if there are a few caveats to the process.
To be clear, the Quest devices still require normal activation and setup via a Facebook account. But once that initial activation is complete, Oculess allows one the option of disabling telemetry or completely disconnecting the headset from its Facebook account.
A woman allegedly hacked into the systems of a flight training school in Florida to delete and tamper with information related to the school’s airplanes. In some cases, planes that previously had maintenance issues had been “cleared” to fly, according to a police report. The hack, according to the school’s CEO, could have put pilots in danger.
Lauren Lide, a 26-year-old who used to work for the Melbourne Flight Training school, resigned from her position of Flight Operations Manager at the end of November of 2019, after the company fired her father. Months later, she allegedly hacked into the systems of her former company, deleting and changing records, in an apparent attempt to get back at her former employer, according to court records obtained by Motherboard.
A new study by a team of university researchers in the UK has unveiled a host of privacy issues that arise from using Android smartphones.
The researchers have focused on Samsung, Xiaomi, Realme, and Huawei Android devices, and LineageOS and /e/OS, two forks of Android that aim to offer long-term support and a de-Googled experience
The conclusion of the study is worrying for the vast majority of Android users .
With the notable exception of /e/OS, even when minimally configured and the handset is idle these vendor-customized Android variants transmit substantial amounts of information to the OS developer and also to third parties (Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) that have pre-installed system apps. – Researchers.
As the summary table indicates, sensitive user data like persistent identifiers, app usage details, and telemetry information are not only shared with the device vendors, but also go to various third parties, such as Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Summary of collected data
Source: Trinity College Dublin
And to make matters worse, Google appears at the receiving end of all collected data almost across the entire table.
No way to “turn it off”
It is important to note that this concerns the collection of data for which there’s no option to opt-out, so Android users are powerless against this type of telemetry.
This is particularly concerning when smartphone vendors include third-party apps that are silently collecting data even if they’re not used by the device owner, and which cannot be uninstalled.
For some of the built-in system apps like miui.analytics (Xiaomi), Heytap (Realme), and Hicloud (Huawei), the researchers found that the encrypted data can sometimes be decoded, putting the data at risk to man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks.
Volume of data (KB/h) transmitted by each vendor
Source: Trinity College Dublin
As the study points out, even if the user resets the advertising identifiers for their Google Account on Android, the data-collection system can trivially re-link the new ID back to the same device and append it to the original tracking history..
The deanonymisation of users takes place using various methods, such as looking at the SIM, IMEI, location data history, IP address, network SSID, or a combination of these.
Potential cross-linking data collection points
Source: Trinity College Dublin
Privacy-conscious Android forks like /e/OS are getting more traction as increasing numbers of users realize that they have no means to disable the unwanted functionality in vanilla Android and seek more privacy on their devices.
However, the majority of Android users remain locked into never ending stream of data collection, which is where regulators and consumer protection organizations need to step in and to put an end to this.
Gael Duval, the creator of /e/OS has told BleepingComputer:
Today, more people understand that the advertising model that is fueling the mobile OS business is based on the industrial capture of personal data at a scale that has never been seen in history, at the world level. This has negative impacts on many aspects of our lives, and can even threaten democracy as seen in recent cases. I think regulation is needed more than ever regarding personal data protection. It has started with the GDPR, but it’s not enough and we need to switch to a “privacy by default” model instead of “privacy as an option”.
Update – A Google spokesperson has provided BleepingComputer the following comment on the findings of the study:
While we appreciate the work of the researchers, we disagree that this behavior is unexpected – this is how modern smartphones work. As explained in our Google Play Services Help Center article, this data is essential for core device services such as push notifications and software updates across a diverse ecosystem of devices and software builds. For example, Google Play services uses data on certified Android devices to support core device features. Collection of limited basic information, such as a device’s IMEI, is necessary to deliver critical updates reliably across Android devices and apps.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, whose high-profile antitrust lawsuit against Apple is now under appeal, is today calling out the iPhone maker for giving itself access to an advertising slot its competitors don’t have: the iPhone’s Settings screen. Some iOS 15 users noticed Apple is now advertising its own services at the top of their Settings, just below their Apple ID. The services being suggested are personalized to the device owner, based on which ones they already subscribe to, it appears.
For example, those without an Apple Music subscription may see an ad offering a free six-month trial. However, current Apple Music subscribers may instead see a prompt to add on a service they don’t yet have, like AppleCare coverage for their devices.
Sweeney suggests this sort of first-party advertising is an anticompetitive risk for Apple, as some of the services it’s pushing here are those that directly compete with third-party apps published on its App Store. But those third-party apps can’t gain access to the iPhone’s Settings screen, of course — they can only bid for ad slots within the App Store itself.
Writes Sweeney: “New from the guys who banned Fortnite: settings-screen ads for their own music service, which come before the actual settings, and which aren’t available to other advertisers like Spotify or Sound Cloud.”
A developer who created a browser extension designed to help Facebook users reduce their time spent on the platform says that the company responded by banning him and threatening to take legal action.
Louis Barclay says he created Unfollow Everything to help people enjoy Facebook more, not less. His extension, which no longer exists, allowed users to automatically unfollow everybody on their FB account, thus eliminating the newsfeed feature, one of the more odious, addictive parts of the company’s product. The feed, which allows for an endless barrage of targeted advertising, is powered by follows, not friends, so even without it, users can still visit the profiles they want to and navigate the site like normal.
The purpose of bucking the feed, Barclay says, was to allow users to enjoy the platform in a more balanced, targeted fashion, rather than being blindly coerced into constant engagement by Facebook’s algorithms.
How did Facebook reward Barclay for trying to make its user experience less toxic? Well, first it booted him off of all of its platforms—locking him out of his Facebook and Instagram accounts. Then, it sent him a cease and desist letter, threatening legal action if he didn’t shut the browser extension down. Ultimately, Barclay said he was forced to do so, and Unfollow Everything no longer exists. He recently wrote about his experience in an op-ed for Slate, saying:
If someone built a tool that made Facebook less addictive—a tool that allowed users to benefit from Facebook’s positive features while limiting their exposure to its negative ones—how would Facebook respond?
I know the answer, because I built the tool, and Facebook squashed it.
England’s National Data Guardian has warned that government plans to allow data sharing between NHS bodies and the police could “erode trust and confidence” in doctors and other healthcare providers.
The bill, set to go through the House of Lords this month, could force NHS bodies such as commissioning groups to share data with police and other specified authorities to prevent and reduce serious violence in their local areas.
Dr Byrne said the proposed law could “erode trust and confidence, and deter people from sharing information, and even from presenting for clinical care.”
Meanwhile, the bill [PDF] did not detail what information it would cover, she said. “The case isn’t made as to why that is necessary. These things need to be debated openly and in public.”
In a blog published last week, Dr Byrne said the bill imposes a duty on clinical groups in the NHS to disclose information to police without breaching any obligation of patient confidentiality.
“Whilst tackling serious violence is important, it is essential that the risks and harms that this new duty pose to patient confidentiality, and thereby public trust, are engaged with and addressed,” she said.
Microsoft said its Azure cloud service mitigated a 2.4 terabytes per second (Tbps) distributed denial of service attack this year, at the end of August, representing the largest DDoS attack recorded to date.
Amir Dahan, Senior Program Manager for Azure Networking, said the attack was carried out using a botnet of approximately 70,000 bots primarily located across the Asia-Pacific region, such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and China, as well as the United States.
Dahan identified the target of the attack only as “an Azure customer in Europe.”
The Microsoft exec said the record-breaking DDoS attack came in three short waves, in the span of ten minutes, with the first at 2.4 Tbps, the second at 0.55 Tbps, and the third at 1.7 Tbps.
Dahan said Microsoft successfully mitigated the attack without Azure going down.
Prior to Microsoft’s disclosure today, the previous DDoS record was held by a 2.3 Tbps attack that Amazon’s AWS division mitigated in February 2020.
Dahan said the largest DDoS attack that hit Azure prior to the August attack was a 1 Tbps attack the company saw in Q3 2020, while this year, Azure didn’t see a DDoS attack over 625 Mbps all year.
Record for largest volumetric DDoS attack broken days later too
Just days after Microsoft mitigated this attack, a botnet called Meris broke another DDoS record — the record for the largest volumetric DDoS attack.
According to Qrator Labs, the operators of the Meris botnet launched a DDoS attack of 21.8 million requests per second (RPS) in early September. Sources told The Record last month that the attack targeted a Russian bank that was hosting its e-banking portal on Yandex Cloud servers.
It is unclear if the Meris botnet was behind the attack detected and mitigated by Microsoft in August. An Azure spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Another day, another massive privacy breach nobody will do much about. This time it’s Neiman Marcus, which issued a statement indicating that the personal data of roughly 4.6 million U.S. consumers was exposed thanks to a previously undisclosed data breach that occurred last year. According to the company, the data exposed included login in information, credit card payment information, virtual gift card numbers, names, addresses, and the security questions attached to Neiman Marcus accounts. The company is, as they always are in the wake of such breaches, very, very sorry:
“At Neiman Marcus Group, customers are our top priority,” said Geoffroy van Raemdonck, Chief Executive Officer. “We are working hard to support our customers and answer questions about their online accounts. We will continue to take actions to enhance our system security and safeguard information.”
As is par for the course for this kind of stuff, the actual breach is likely much worse than what’s first being reported here. And by the time the full scope of the breach becomes clear, the press will have largely lost interest. The company set up a website for those impacted to get more information. In this case, impacted consumers didn’t even get free credit reporting, the standard mea culpa hand out after these kinds of events (which is worthless since consumers have received free credit reporting for countless hacks and leaks over the last five to ten years).
A US judge has temporarily blocked a new law in Texas that effectively bans women from having an abortion.
District Judge Robert Pitman granted a request by the Biden administration to prevent any enforcement of the law while its legality is being challenged.
The law, which prohibits women in Texas from obtaining an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, was drafted and approved by Republican politicians.
The White House praised the latest ruling as an important step.
“The fight has only just begun, both in Texas and in many states across this country where women’s rights are currently under attack,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.
Texan officials immediately appealed against the ruling, setting the stage for further court battles.
Judge Pitman, of Austin, wrote in an 113-page opinion that, from the moment the law came into effect on 1 September, “women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution”.
“This court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right,” he said on Wednesday.
Whole Woman’s Health, which runs a number of clinics in Texas, said it was making plans to resume abortions “as soon as possible”.
But the anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life, accused judges of “catering to the abortion industry” and called for a “fair hearing” at the next stage.
The fight against malaria, one of the world’s worst diseases for decades, is likely to get much easier as the World Health Organization has endorsed the wide use of a malaria vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline, the first ever to win such approval. The vaccine will be recommended for children in sub-Saharan Africa and other high-risk areas as a four-dose schedule starting at age 5 months.
[…]
“This is a historic moment. The long-awaited malaria vaccine for children is a breakthrough for science, child health and malaria control,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a statement announcing their endorsement of the vaccine. “Using this vaccine on top of existing tools to prevent malaria could save tens of thousands of young lives each year.”
Despite the good news, GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine, which is currently code-named RTS,S/AS01 but will be branded as Mosquirix, is only modestly effective. In the clinical trials evaluated for WHO approval, it was found to prevent around half of severe cases caused by P. falciparum malaria, compared to the control group. But this level of efficacy was only seen in the first year of vaccination, and by the fourth year, protection had waned to very low levels. At roughly 55% efficacy, the vaccine meets the bare minimum for WHO endorsement.
A major study this year did find that a combination of the vaccine and anti-malarial drugs can further reduce the risk of severe disease and death by 70%, a much more appealing target for public health programs. But even as is, one study has projected that the vaccine would prevent millions of cases and over 20,000 deaths annually in sub-Saharan Africa if deployed widely.
Like other vaccines before it, Mosquirix may also represent the first step toward more effective vaccines in the future. There are several other candidates in development already, including one from Moderna that’s relying on the same mRNA platform as the company’s successful covid-19 vaccine.
Apple’s decision to only allow Apple Pay to access the NFC chip in iPhones could result in the Silicon Valley giant paying hefty anti-monopoly fines in Europe.
The EU is set to file anti-competitive charges against Cupertino regarding its tap-to-pay system, Reuters reported, citing sources. Euro antitrust watchdogs are apparently not happy that the NFC chips in iPhones and iPads are restricted to the iGiant’s Pay software, unfairly locking out alternative wireless payment apps.
The charges will be the result of a European Commission investigation that started last year into Apple’s terms and conditions with merchants, the limited access to the NFC hardware, and more.
“It is important that Apple’s measures do not deny consumers the benefits of new payment technologies, including better choice, quality, innovation and competitive prices,” said Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager in 2020. “I have therefore decided to take a close look at Apple’s practices regarding Apple Pay and their impact on competition.”
To make the transition to low-carbon energy sources and address climate change we need open data on the global energy system. High-quality data already exists; it is published by the International Energy Agency. But despite being an international institution that is largely publicly funded, most IEA data is locked behind paywalls. This makes it unusable in the public discourse and prevents many researchers from accessing it. Beyond this, it hinders data-sharing and collaboration; results in duplicated research efforts; makes the data unusable for the public discourse; and goes against the principles of transparency and reproducibility in scientific research. The high costs of the data excludes many from the global dialogue on energy and climate and thereby stands in the way of the IEA achieving its own mission.
We suggest that the countries that fund the IEA drop the requirement to place data behind paywalls and increase their funding – the benefits of opening this important data are much larger than the costs.
[…]
In 2018, the annual budget of the IEA was EUR 27.8 million. According to the IEA’s budget figures, revenues from its data and publication sales finance “more than one-fifth of its annual budget”. That equates to EUR 5.6 million per year. To put this figure in perspective, it is equal to 0.03% of the total public energy RD&D budget for IEA countries in 2018, which was EUR 20.7 billion.2 Or on a per capita basis split equally across IEA member countries: 0.44 cents per person per year.3
We believe that the relatively small revenues that the paywalls generate do not justify the very large downsides that these restrictions cause.
[…]
The statistical work of the IEA is of immense value. It is the only source of energy data that captures the full range of metrics needed to understand the global energy transition: from primary energy through to final energy use by sub-sector. It is the go-to source for most researchers and forms the basis of the energy systems modelling in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports.4 It is also heavily utilised in energy policy, collaborating with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on developments in energy data and analytics.
Some alternative data sources on energy exist, but none come close to the coverage and depth of the IEA data. The BP Statistical Review of World Energy, published by the multinational oil and gas company BP is the most commonly used alternative. As a freely available dataset it is widely used in research and is where the IEA would want to be – ‘at the heart of the global dialogue on energy’. But as it is published by a private fossil fuel company it has some obvious drawbacks.
One is that it focuses on commercially-traded fuels; this means most high- and middle-income countries are included but lower-income countries are almost completely absent even from very basic metrics such as primary energy. It also focuses on primary energy statistics and does not offer insight into the breakdown in final energy or sector-specific allocations.
The series of maps show the comparative geographical coverage of primary and final energy between the publicly available dataset from BP, and the private licensed dataset from the IEA.
As detailed by Wowhead, there are a lot of changes, some of them leaving characters with as few as two lines of dialogue to cycle through. And while some are clearly the result of combing back through the archives and removing content that, in the wake of Blizzard’s current crisis, is clearly inappropriate, other cuts are simply down to the fact that it’s now 2021 and some of this stuff is either horribly dated or simply bad.
Some examples of jokes that are being removed are:
Draenei Male: If you could get your hands on my family jewels I would be deeply appreciative.
Goblin Female: I’m a modern goblin woman. Independent? I still let men do nice things to me. But I stopped giving them any credit.
Orc Female: What’s estrogen? Can you eat it?
Tauren Male: Homogenized? No way, I like the ladies.
Meanwhile here are some of the flirts being cut:
Blood Elf Demon Hunter Male: Are you sure you’re not part-demon? I find myself wanting to stalk you.
Blood Elf Female: Normally, I only ride on epic mounts… But, let’s talk.
Dwarf Male: You look pretty, I like your hair, here’s a drink… Are you ready now?
Goblin Male: I got what you need. *sound of zipper*
Highmountain Tauren Female: Are you staring at my rack?
Nightborn Male: Mmmm, I wanna tap that ley line.
Orc Male: Um… You look like a lady.
Troll Female: When enraged, and in heat, a female troll can mate over 80 times in one night. Be you prepared?
After Take-Two Interactive sent a legal letter to Github referencing a copyright infringement lawsuit against the people behind the popular re3 and reVC Grand Theft Auto fan projects, Github has now removed the repositories for a second time. Take-Two has also demanded the removal of many project forks and wants Github to take action under its repeat infringer policy. TorrentFreak reports: Just before the weekend, a new entry in Github’s DMCA repository revealed the existence of a letter (PDF) sent to Github from Take-Two’s legal team. Dated September 9, 2021 (a week after the copyright lawsuit was filed) it informs Github that legal action is underway and it has come to the company’s attention that the contentious content (and numerous ‘fork’ repositories) continue to be made available on Github’s website. “We request that Github take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the materials [in the attached exhibit], together with any other instances of the same materials available within the same primary ‘GTAmodding/re3’ fork network (e.g. in ‘private’ or newly-created repositories),” it reads.
In common with the first DMCA notice, Github has responded by taking the project’s repositories down. Given that the defendants in the case already stand accused of previously sending ‘bad faith’ counter-notices, it seems unlikely that they will follow up with another set of similar responses that will soon be under the scrutiny of the court. Take-Two also follows up with a line that is becoming more and more popular in copyright infringement matters, one that references so-called ‘repeat infringers.’ “Furthermore, it is requested that Github take appropriate measures to prevent further infringement by the parties responsible, including pursuant to any ‘repeat infringer’ policies maintained by Github.”
This means that if any of the contentious content is reposted to Github, Take-Two would like the code repository to implement its own ‘repeat infringer’ process. It states that “in appropriate circumstances and in its sole discretion, [Github will] disable and terminate the accounts of users who may infringe upon the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of GitHub or others.” The letter also provides a laundry list of repository forks that, on the basis they are also infringing, should be removed. While Github appears to have complied in many cases, there are two notable exceptions. After being targeted by earlier DMCA takedowns, Github users ‘td512‘ and ‘erorcun‘ filed DMCA counter-notices to have their repositories restored. The former previously informed TorrentFreak that he believed Take-Two’s infringement claims to be incorrect. At the time of writing, both repos are still online.
Police should be banned from using blanket facial-recognition surveillance to identify people not suspected of crimes. Certain private databases of people’s faces for identification systems ought to be outlawed, too.
That’s the feeling of the majority of members in the European Parliament this week. In a vote on Wednesday, 377 MEPs backed a resolution restricting law enforcement’s use of facial recognition, 248 voted against, and 62 abstained.
“AI-based identification systems already misidentify minority ethnic groups, LGBTI people, seniors and women at higher rates, which is particularly concerning in the context of law enforcement and the judiciary,” reads a statement from the parliament.
“To ensure that fundamental rights are upheld when using these technologies, algorithms should be transparent, traceable and sufficiently documented, MEPs ask. Where possible, public authorities should use open-source software in order to be more transparent.”
As well as this, most of the representatives believe facial-recognition tech should not be used by the police in automatic mass surveillance of people in public, and monitoring should be restricted to only those thought to have broken the law. Datasets amassed by private companies, such as Clearview AI, for identifying citizens should also be prohibited along with systems that allow cops to predict crime from people’s behavior and backgrounds.
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The vote is non-biding, meaning it cannot directly lead to any legislative change. Instead, it was cast to reveal if members might be supportive of upcoming bills like the AI Act, a spokesperson for the EU parliament told The Register.
“The resolution is a non-exhaustive list of AI uses that MEPs within the home affairs field find problematic. They ask for a moratorium on deploying new facial recognition systems for law enforcement, and a ban on the narrower category of private facial recognition databases,” the spokesperson added.
It also called for border control systems to stop using biometric data to track travelers across the EU, too.
In late September, Carbios, a French startup, opened a demonstration plant in central France to test this idea. The facility will use enzymes to recycle PET, one of the most common single-use plastics and the material used to make most beverage bottles.
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Carbios’s new reactor measures 20 cubic meters—around the size of a cargo van. It can hold two metric tons of plastic, or the equivalent of about 100,000 ground-up bottles at a time, and break it down into the building blocks of PET—ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid—in 10 to 16 hours.
The company plans to use what it learns from the demonstration facility to build its first industrial plant, which will house a reactor about 20 times larger than the demonstration reactor. That full-scale plant will be built near a plastic manufacturer somewhere in Europe or the US, and should be operational by 2025, says Alain Marty, Carbios’s chief science officer.
Carbios has been developing enzymatic recycling since the company was founded in 2011. Its process relies on enzymes to chop up the long chains of polymers that make up plastic. The resulting monomers can then be purified and strung together to make new plastics. Researchers at Carbios started with a natural enzyme used by bacteria to break down leaves, then tweaked it to make it more efficient at breaking down PET.
Carbios’s demonstration facility in Clermont-Ferrand, France. Image courtesy of SkotchProd.
Carbios estimates that its enzymatic recycling process reduces greenhouse gas emissions by about 30% compared to virgin PET. Marty says he expects that number to increase as they work out the kinks.
If you have an iPhone, and your friends mostly have iPhones, you probably use Apple’s Messages app to communicate with them. That’s the nature of things. And aside from the platform’s convenience and ubiquity, one of the iMessage platform’s selling points is that its end-to-end encryption should theoretically ensure that only you and those you text can read your conversations. However, that might not be the case: Apple can likely access the messages for many, many iMessage users, even with end-to-end encryption in place.
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How you back up your messages matters
So yes, your texts are encrypted as sent and received. But few of us delete every text as it comes in; we keep them around in case we want to revisit them later, which means we need to back them up somehow. And as it turns out, how you back up your messages might mean the difference between having an truly secure iMessage history, and giving Apple the key to unlock all your conversations.
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iCloud Backup is not a secure method for saving your messages
Here’s the tricky thing; Messages in iCloud is end-to-end encrypted, just as you’d expect—that’s why there’s no way to access your messages on the web, such as by logging in to icloud.com. There’s one big problem, though: your iCloud Backup isn’t end-to-end encrypted—and Apple stores the key to unlock your encrypted messages within that backup.
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It’s not just your messages; besides Keychain, Screen Time, and Health data, Apple has the key to decrypt all of your iCloud data
