Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz’s patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit

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Remember Theranos? The blood-testing company worth billions whose CEO Elizabeth Holmes became a celebrity right up until the point when it became clear its revolutionary testing machines didn’t actually work as described?

Well, Theranos is dead, and Holmes is still dealing with the legal repercussions, but her vampire company has come alive again – and in the very worst way: its reincarnation is suing another medical testing company for patent infringement.

It gets worse. While Theranos’ patents, obtained by an outfit called Fortress Investment Group in 2018, do not relate to a testing machine that actually works, they are being used to sue a manufacturer whose medical-testing machine not only works but is being used to detect the presence of the COVID-19 coronavirus.

That’s right: a private-equity-turned-investment group is using patents it picked up from a collapsed testing company – which imploded because its tech didn’t work – to sue a company whose machines actually do work and which is on the front-line of tackling the worst pandemic that the world has known for 100 years.

The lawsuit [PDF] comes by a company called Labrador Diagnostics, which is a part of Fortress, which is itself a part of investment monster Softbank. It’s worth noting that Apple and Intel sued Fortress late last year for stockpiling patents with sole aim of suing other companies.

“Labrador is informed and believes, and on that basis alleges, that Defendants individually and collectively have infringed and, unless enjoined will continue to infringe, one or more claims of the ‘155 [US 8,283,155] Patent, in violation of 35 U.S.C. § 271, by, among other things, making, using, offering to sell, and selling within the United States, and/or supplying or causing to be supplied in or from the United States, without authority or license, the Accused Products for use in an infringing manner,” the lawsuit reads.

The other patent in question is US 10,533,994.

Short life

It’s dense legal language designed solely to extract money out of a legitimate business. And while Labrador Diagnostics may sound like a legitimate testing company, there is no evidence that it exists on anything but paper. It was created as a limited liability company in Delaware literally this month. Within three days of it existing, it sued the testing equipment maker in question: BioFire.

BioFire, meanwhile, is a real company with real people doing actual work. The technology that “Labrador” claims is infringing its patent – which it calls FilmArray technology – is being used to develop three much-needed tests for COVID-19.

Since the lawsuit was filed in America on March 9, Labrador/Fortress has claimed it had no idea BioFire was working on COVID-19 tests; although that claim is questionable given that on March 3 there was an article in the Wall Street Journal specifically identifying BioFire and the fact it was working in two diagnostic tests for the coronavirus.

Faced with a wave of extremely critical commentary from the diagnostics industry, the IP industry, and now the press, Labrador/Fortress put out a statement on Tuesday in which it said it would “offer to grant royalty-free licenses to third parties to use its patented diagnostics technology for use in tests directed to COVID-19.”

But it continues to claim that the “lawsuit was not directed to testing for COVID-19. The lawsuit focuses on activities over the past six years that are not in any way related to COVID-19 testing.” It also claims that as soon as it learned of BioFire’s COVID-19 testing it “promptly wrote to the defendants offering to grant them a royalty-free license for such tests.”

In other words, we’ll give you a free license for COVID-19 testing machines, but the lawsuit against BioFire’s tech in general is still going ahead.

And more depressing news

And if all that wasn’t enough, there is another infringement case that could delay vital medical treatment in COVID-19-slammed Italy. The manufacturer of critical breathing equipment has threatened to sue a man, technician Christian Fracassi, for 3D-printing a valve for the machine after the company said it was unable to provide a replacement due to demand.

The valve normally costs $11,000, but Fracassi was able to reproduce it in plastic using 3D printing for just $1 and get the machines working again. The 3D-printed version is not going to last very long, and may need to be swiftly replaced and discarded, but it will work long enough to keep someone alive until a replacement is delivered. And, according to local reports, his swift actions have already saved 10 people.

But despite hospitals asking for the 3D plans, Fracassi is wary about providing them because the manufacturer has threatened to sue. And has refused to share the blueprints too.

“I am holding my hands because in a world where money matters more than someone’s health, nothing else can be done,” he said, according to UK paper Metro. ®

Bootnote

As noted by tech journalist Mike Masnick, the law firm representing Labrador is Irell & Manella, the same legal eagles who represented the monkey in that obnoxious macaque selfie copyright battle.

Source: Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz’s patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit • The Register

Wow. What a shining example of how well the patent system doesn’t work.

Pervasive digital locational surveillance of citizens deployed in COVID-19 fight

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Pervasive surveillance through digital technologies is the business model of Facebook and Google. And now governments are considering the web giants’ tools to track COVID-19 carriers for the public good.

Among democracies, Israel appears to have gone first: prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced “emergency regulations that will enable the use of digital means in the war on Corona. These means will greatly assist us in locating patients and thereby stop the spread of the virus.”

Speaking elsewhere, Netanyhau said the digital tools are those used by Israeli security agency Shin Bet to observe terrorists. Netanyahu said the tools mean the government “will be able to see who they [people infected with the virus] were with, what happened before and after [they became infected].”

Strict oversight and a thirty-day limit on the use of the tools is promised. But the tools’ use was announced as a fait accompli before Israel’s Parliament or the relevant committee could properly authorise their use. And that during a time of caretaker government!

The idea of using tech to spy on COVID-carriers may now be catching.

The Washington Post has reported that the White House has held talks with Google and Facebook about how the data they hold could contribute to analysis of the virus’ spread. Both companies already share some anonymised location with researchers. The Post suggested anonymised location data be used by government agencies to understand how people are behaving.

Thailand recently added a COVID-19-screening form to the Airports of Thailand app. While the feature is a digital replica of a paper registration form offered to incoming travellers, the app asks for location permission and tries to turn on Bluetooth every time it is activated. The Register has asked the app’s developers to explain the permissions it seeks, but has not received a reply in 48 hours.

Computer Emergency Response Team in Farsi chief incident response officer Nariman Gharib has claimed that the Iranian government’s COVID-diagnosis app tracks its users.

China has admitted it’s using whatever it wants to track its people – the genie has been out of the bottle there for years.

If other nations follow suit, will it be possible to put the genie back in?

Probably not: plenty of us give away our location data to exercise-tracking apps for the sheer fun of it and government agencies gleefully hoover up what they call “open source intelligence

Source: Pervasive digital surveillance of citizens deployed in COVID-19 fight, with rules that send genie back to bottle • The Register

Fake News sites pull in around $72m over the EU in advertising

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Research Brief: Ad Tech Fuels Disinformation Sites in Europe – The Numbers and Players

The report shows how adverts for high street brands are inadvertently funding some of the most well-known sites for spreading disinformation in Europe.

Five companies account for 97% of ad revenues paid to EU disinformation sites: Google, Criteo, OpenX, Taboola and Xandr.

Source: Research – GDI

Scientists have discovered the origins of the building blocks of life

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Rutgers researchers have discovered the origins of the protein structures responsible for metabolism: simple molecules that powered early life on Earth and serve as chemical signals that NASA could use to search for life on other planets.

Their study, which predicts what the earliest proteins looked like 3.5 billion to 2.5 billion years ago, is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists retraced, like a many thousand piece puzzle, the evolution of enzymes (proteins) from the present to the deep past. The solution to the puzzle required two missing pieces, and life on Earth could not exist without them. By constructing a network connected by their roles in metabolism, this team discovered the missing pieces.

“We know very little about how life started on our planet. This work allowed us to glimpse deep in time and propose the earliest metabolic proteins,” said co-author Vikas Nanda, a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and a resident faculty member at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine. “Our predictions will be tested in the laboratory to better understand the origins of life on Earth and to inform how life may originate elsewhere. We are building models of proteins in the lab and testing whether they can trigger reactions critical for early metabolism.”

[…]

“We think we have found the building blocks of life—the Lego set that led, ultimately, to the evolution of cells, animals and plants.”

The Rutgers team focused on two “folds” that are likely the first structures in early metabolism. They are a ferredoxin fold that binds iron-sulfur compounds, and a “Rossmann” fold, which binds nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA and RNA). These are two pieces of the puzzle that must fit in the evolution of life.

[…]

There is evidence the two folds may have shared a common ancestor and, if true, the ancestor may have been the first metabolic enzyme of life.

Explore further

Scientists identify protein that may have existed when life began

More information: Hagai Raanan el al., “Small protein folds at the root of an ancient metabolic network,” PNAS (2020). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1914982117

Source: Scientists have discovered the origins of the building blocks of life

Universal to release movies online while they are in theaters, starting with ‘Trolls World Tour’

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With the spreading coronavirus pandemic forcing movie theaters to close, Comcast is breaking with tradition and making a number of new movies available to watch at home.

Universal’s “Trolls World Tour” will be the first movie it will simultaneously debut online and in theaters on April 10. Other films that are currently in theaters, like “The Invisible Man,” “The Hunt” and “Emma” will be available for a 48-hour rental as soon as Friday with the suggested price of $19.99.

Typically, movie studios wait 90 days for a film to run in theaters before putting it out to home viewing, but the company will be releasing new films online while they are still in cinemas.

Notably, Universal has decided to implement this new policy for its low-to-mid-tier budgeted films. The budget for “Trolls World Tour” is half that figure, “Invisible Man” was around $7 million and “The Hunt” was around $14 million.

Meanwhile, the release of the upcoming “F9” was pushed from May 2020 to April 2021. The budget for “F9″ is likely on par of that of its predecessor “The Fate of the Furious,” which cost $250 million to make, excluding marketing.

“NBCUniversal will continue to evaluate the environment as conditions evolve and will determine the best distribution strategy in each market when the current unique situation changes,” Jeff Shell, CEO of NBCUniversal, said in a statement Monday.

“Trolls World Tour” is the sequel to Dreamworks and Universal’s animated hit from 2016 “Trolls.” With schools around the country closing and more people seeking to self-quarantine or being ordered to stay at home, “Trolls World Tour” wasn’t likely to draw big crowds. Many theaters that remain open in the U.S. have capped the number of people who can attend.

Making this kid’s film available online allows parents to keep their kids safe from the transmission of COVID-19, but also entertained.

Source: Universal to release movies online while they are in theaters, starting with ‘Trolls World Tour’

Brave Browser Delivers on Promise, Files GDPR Complaint Against Google

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Earlier today, March 16, Brave filed a formal complaint against Google with the lead General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enforcer in Europe.

In a February Cointelegraph interview, Dr. Johnny Ryan, Brave’s chief policy and industry relations officer, explained that Google is abusing its power by sharing user data collected by dozens of its distinct services, creating a “free for all” data warehouse. According to Ryan, this was a clear violation of the GDPR.

Aggravated with the situation and the lack of enforcement against the giant, Ryan promised to take Google to court if things don’t change for the better.

Complaint against Google

Now, the complaint is with the Irish Data Protection Commission. It accuses Google of violating Article 5(1)b of the GDPR. Dublin is Google’s European headquarters and, as Dr. Ryan explained to Cointelegraph, the Commission “is responsible for regulating Google’s data protection across the European Economic Area”.

Article 5(1)b of the GDPR requires that data be “collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes”. According to Dr. Ryan:

“Enforcement of Brave’s GDPR ‘purpose limitation’ complaint against Google would be tantamount to a functional separation, giving everyone the power to decide what parts of Google they chose to reward with their data.”

Google is a “black box”

Dr. Ryan has spent six months trying to elicit a response from Google to a basic question: “What do you do with my data?” to no avail.

Alongside the complaint, Brave released a study called “Inside the Black Box”, that:

“Examines a diverse set of documents written for Google’s business clients, technology partners, developers, lawmakers, and users. It reveals that Google collects personal data from integrations with websites, apps, and operating systems, for hundreds ill-defined processing purposes.”

Brave does not need regulators to compete with Google

Cointelegraph asked Dr. Ryan how Google’s treatment of user data frustrates Brave as a competitor, to which  Dr. Ryan replied:

“The question is not relevant. Brave does not —  as far as I am aware — have direct frustrations with Google. Brave is growing nicely by being a particularly fast, excellent, and private browser. (It doesn’t need regulators to help it grow.)”

A recent privacy study indicated that Brave protects user privacy much better than Google Chrome or any other major browser.

In addition to filing a formal complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission, Brave has reportedly written to the European Commission, German Bundeskartellamt, UK Competition & Markets Authority, and French Autorité de la concurrence.

If none of these regulatory bodies take action against Google, Brave has suggested that it may take the tech giant to court itself.

Source: Brave Browser Delivers on Promise, Files GDPR Complaint Against Google

Former Refrigerator Manufacturer Says Companies Using Open Source, Royalty-Free Video Technology Must Pay To License 2,000 Patents – wait what?!

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Partly in response to this licensing mess, and HEVC’s high per-device cost, the Alliance for Open Media was formed in September 2015:

Seven leading Internet companies today announced formation of the Alliance for Open Media — an open-source project that will develop next-generation media formats, codecs and technologies in the public interest. The Alliance’s founding members are Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix.

In contrast to the proprietary and expensive H.265, the new video standard, called AOMedia Video 1 (AV1), is open source and royalty-free. Those features, and the backing of many of the top Internet companies, would seem to make it an obvious choice for manufacturers to build into their devices, leading to better-quality video streaming for end users at no extra cost.

Life is never that simple. Back in March last year, Sisvel announced a “patent licensing program” for AV1. Sisvel is an Italian company that began as a manufacturer of white goods, particularly refrigerators, and has morphed into a group that “identifies, evaluates and maximizes the value of IP assets for its partners around the world”. The AOMedia group wrote in response:

AOMedia is aware of the recent third-party announcement attempting to launch a joint patent licensing program for AV1. AOMedia was founded to leave behind the very environment that the announcement endorses — one whose high patent royalty requirements and licensing uncertainty limit the potential of free and open online video technology. By settling patent licensing terms up front with the royalty-free AOMedia Patent License 1.0, AOMedia is confident that AV1 overcomes these challenges to help usher in the next generation of video-oriented experiences.

But refrigerator companies don’t give up that easily. Sisvel has just announced that more companies have added patents to its pool. There are currently 1,050 patents that Sisvel says must be licensed, but in due course it expects that number will rise to around 2,000. The fact that people can claim that there are 2,000 separate patents involved in a video encoding format is an indication of how far the patenting madness has gone. The sheer number claimed for a single technology is an indication of how trivial most of them must be — and thus by definition undeserving of monopoly protection.

According to an article on c|net, Sisvel is “willing to pursue companies that don’t pay its AV1 licensing fees”. This probably means we are in for another few years of utterly pointless legal battles over who “owns” certain ideas. That’s bound to cast a chill over this whole area, and to negate some of the benefits that would otherwise flow from an open source, royalty-free video standard. Companies will waste money paying lawyers, and end users will miss out on exciting applications of the technology. And all “because patents”.

Source: Former Refrigerator Manufacturer Says Companies Using Open Source, Royalty-Free Video Technology Must Pay To License 2,000 Patents | Techdirt

This Clever Trick Embeds Holographic Patterns In Your 3D Prints

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Apparently you can use textured sheets on your 3d printer’s print bed to imprint that texture on the first layer of your print. Sounds obvious right? Well, what if that textured sheet is fine enough to give an irridescent or holographic effect? Yup, that works too!

“Kryvian” shared this example where you can clearly see the original sheet they used, and then the resulting effect on prints. Simply stunning. Be sure to click through all 4 videos to see the full results.

In the Reddit thread, they share that they purchased the sheet from “Tectonitor”. After some googling I found this shop, though I can not vouch for the shop itself. Please note that the price is in Taiwanese dollars, so it converts to roughly $20 bucks USD.

Source: This Clever Trick Embeds Holographic Patterns In Your 3D Prints

Apple hit with record-breaking $1.2 billion antitrust price fixing fine in France together with Ingram Micro ($79.2m) and Tech Data ($85m)

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Apple has been hit with a record-breaking fine for antitrust practices. French competition authority Autorité de la Concurrence has found Apple and its wholesale distribution partners Ingram Micro and Tech Data guilty of running a cartel for Apple products, and has fined the companies €1.1 billion ($1.2 billion), €62.9 million ($70.2 million) and €76.1 million ($85 million) respectively.According to the authority, Apple and its partners agreed not to compete with one another and to prevent other distributors from competing on price, “thereby sterilizing the wholesale market for Apple products.” This subsequently meant that premium distributors had no choice but to keep prices high to match those of integrated distributors.Finally, the authority says that Apple “abused the economic dependence” of these premium distributors by subjecting them to unfair and unfavorable commercial conditions compared to its network of integrated distributors. The ruling takes into consideration all Apple products — including computers and tablets — except iPhones, which are frequently sold via separate carriers.Isabelle de Silva, president of the authority, said in a statement that “given the strong impact of these practices on competition in the distribution of Apple products via Apple premium resellers, the Authority imposes the highest penalty ever pronounced in a case. It is also the heaviest sanction pronounced against an economic player, in this case Apple, whose extraordinary dimension has been duly taken into account.”The ruling marks the conclusion of a case dating back years, stemming from a complaint by store chain eBizcuss, which prompted the competition authority to raid Apple offices in France back in 2013. Apple is certainly no stranger to antitrust complaints — most recently, France’s Competition and Fraud body fined Apple €25 million ($27.3 million) for intentionally slowing the performance of older iPhones.

Source: Apple hit with record-breaking $1.2 billion antitrust fine in France | Engadget

Nanostructured rubber-like material with optimal properties could replace human tissue

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Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have created a new, rubber-like material with a unique set of properties that could act as a replacement for human tissue in medical procedures. The material has the potential to make a big difference to many people’s lives. The research was recently published in the highly regarded scientific journal ACS Nano.

In the development of medical technology products, there is a great demand for new naturalistic materials suitable for integration with the body. Introducing materials into the body comes with many risks, such as serious infections, among other things. Many of the substances used today, such as Botox, are very toxic. There is a need for new, more adaptable materials.

In the new study, the Chalmers researchers developed a material consisting solely of components that have already been shown to work well in the body.

The foundation of the material is the same as plexiglass, a material used in many medical technology applications. By redesigning its makeup, and through a process called nanostructuring, the researchers gave the material a unique combination of properties. Their initial intention was to produce a hard, bone-like material, but they had unexpected results.

“We were really surprised that the material turned out to be very soft, flexible and extremely elastic. It would not work as a bone replacement material, we concluded. But the new and unexpected properties made our discovery just as exciting,” says Anand Kumar Rajasekharan, Ph.D. in Materials Science and one of the researchers behind the study.

The results showed that the new rubber-like material may be appropriate for many applications that require an uncommon combination of properties—high elasticity, easy processability, and suitability for medical uses.

“The first application we are looking at now is urinary catheters. The material can be constructed in such a way that prevents bacteria from growing on the surface, meaning it is very well suited for medical uses,” says Martin Andersson, research leader for the study and Professor of Chemistry at Chalmers.

The structure of the new nano-rubber material allows its surface to be treated so that it becomes antibacterial, in a natural, non-toxic way. This is achieved by sticking antimicrobial peptides—small proteins that are part of the innate immune system—onto its surface. This can reduce the need for antibiotics, an important contribution to the fight against growing antibiotic resistance.

The foundation of the material is the same as plexiglass, a material which is common in medical technology applications. Through redesigning its makeup, and through a process called nanostructuring, they gave the newly patented material a unique combination of properties, incuding high elasticity, as demonstrated in the image. Credit: Anna Lena Lundqvist/Chalmers

Because the new material can be injected and inserted via keyhole surgery, it can also help reduce the need for drastic surgery and operations to rebuild parts of the body. The material can be injected via a standard cannula as a viscous fluid, so that it forms its own elastic structures within the body. Or the material can also be 3-D printed into specific structures as required.

“There are many diseases where the cartilage breaks down and friction results between bones, causing great pain for the affected person. This material could potentially act as a replacement in those cases,” Martin Andersson continues.

A further advantage of the material is that it contains three-dimensionally ordered nanopores. This means it can be loaded with medicine for various therapeutic purposes such as improving healing and reducing inflammation. This allows for localized treatment, avoiding, for example, having to treat the entire with drugs, something that could help reduce problems associated with side effects. Since it is non-toxic, it also works well as a filler—the researchers see plastic surgery therefore as another very interesting potential area of application for the new material.

“I am now working full time with our newly founded company, Amferia, to get the research out to industry. I have been pleased to see a lot of real interest in our material. It’s promising in terms of achieving our goal, which is to provide real societal benefit,” Anand concludes.

Source: Nanostructured rubber-like material with optimal properties could replace human tissue

Data of millions of eBay and Amazon shoppers exposed by VAT analysing 3rd party

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Researchers have discovered another big database containing millions of European customer records left unsecured on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for anyone to find using a search engine.

A total of eight million records were involved, collected via marketplace and payment system APIs belonging to companies including Amazon, eBay, Shopify, PayPal, and Stripe.

Discovered by Comparitech’s noted breach hunter Bob Diachenko, the AWS instance containing the MongoDB database became visible on 3 February, where it remained indexable by search engines for five days.

Data in the records included names, shipping addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, items purchased, payments, order IDs, links to Stripe and Shopify invoices, and partially redacted credit cards.

Also included were thousands of Amazon Marketplace Web Services (MWS) queries, an MWS authentication token, and an AWS access key ID.

Because a single customer might generate multiple records, Comparitech wasn’t able to estimate how many customers might be affected.

About half of the customers whose records were leaked are from the UK; as far as we can tell, most if not all of the rest are from elsewhere in Europe.

How did this happen?

According to Comparitech, the unnamed company involved was a third party conducting cross-border value-added tax (VAT) analysis.

That is, a company none of the affected customers would have heard of or have any relationship with:

This exposure exemplifies how, when handing over personal and payment details to a company online, that info often passes through the hands of various third parties contracted to process, organize, and analyze it. Rarely are such tasks handled solely in house.

Amazon queries could be used to query the MWS API, Comparitech said, potentially allowing an attacker to request records from sales databases. For that reason, it recommended that the companies involved should immediately change their passwords and keys.

Watch This SpaceX Rocket Abort Its Launch at the Last Second

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket aborted a planned launch on Sunday morning at the last second due to an engine power issue. The event produced confusion at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where countdown appeared to be proceeding normally. However, the rocket stayed where it was.

In a video published by SpaceX, you can hear a commentator begin to count down. At this moment, the rocket still looks like it’s getting ready to take off, and no one seems to suspect that something is wrong. Once the commentator gets to zero and says liftoff, they immediately add, “Disregard. We have an abort.”

According to Space.com, apparently, the Falcon 9’s onboard computer aborted the launch just before liftoff because it detected an issue with one of the rocket’s nine Merlin 1D engines. Michael Andrews, a supply chain supervisor at SpaceX, said in the launch commentary that they had a “condition regarding engine power that caused us to abort today’s launch.”

Andrews added that the vehicle appeared to be in good health, but the company would no longer try to launch today.

SpaceX itself weighed in on the matter on Twitter shortly after.

“Standing down today; standard auto-abort triggered due to out of family data during engine power check,” SpaceX said. “Will announce next launch date opportunity once confirmed on the Range.”

SpaceX was planning to launch a batch of 60 new Starlink satellites, part of an initiative to provide low-cost Internet to remote locations worldwide where it’s hard to obtain online services. CEO Elon Musk has said that the Starlink constellation system will be available once 400 satellites are in orbit and activated. He claims that it will achieve “significant operational capacity” with 800 satellites.

Today’s launch was significant because it would have been the first Falcon 9 rocket booster, or first stage, to launch five times. The first time this booster launched was in 2018, per Ars Technica. SpaceX had also announced that it would be reusing the rocket’s payload fairing. Overall, this meant that the only part of this Falcon 9 rocket that was not being reused was the second stage.

SpaceX aims to reduce the price of rocket launches by reusing parts of its rockets. There isn’t any word yet on when the company will try to launch this Falcon 9 rocket again. Even though it’s a small bummer, it’s better safe than sorry when you’re launching an expensive rocket, even if you do plan to reuse it. Better luck next time.

Source: Watch This SpaceX Rocket Abort Its Launch at the Last Second

TensorFlow Quantum

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TensorFlow Quantum (TFQ) is a quantum machine learning library for rapid prototyping of hybrid quantum-classical ML models. Research in quantum algorithms and applications can leverage Google’s quantum computing frameworks, all from within TensorFlow.

TensorFlow Quantum focuses on quantum data and building hybrid quantum-classical models. It integrates quantum computing algorithms and logic designed in Cirq, and provides quantum computing primitives compatible with existing TensorFlow APIs, along with high-performance quantum circuit simulators. Read more in the TensorFlow Quantum white paper.

Source: TensorFlow Quantum

How Koenigsegg’s 2-Liter 3 cylinder No-Cam Engine Makes 600 Horsepower

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You can always count on Koenigsegg to do things differently. Take the Swedish brand’s newest car, the Gemera, a 1700-hp four-seat hybrid grand tourer that can crest 250 mph. In a world filled with more ultra-high-dollar supercars than ever, the Gemera stands out. And perhaps the most interesting thing about the car is its engine.

Related Story
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Koenigegg Gemera: 1700-HP Hybrid Four-Seater

Koenigsegg calls the engine the Tiny Friendly Giant, or TFG for short, and it’s an apt name. The TFG is a 2.0-liter twin-turbo three-cylinder that makes 600 horsepower. At 300 horsepower per liter, the TFG’s specific output is far higher than anything ever seen in a road car. Koenigsegg says this is “light-years ahead of any other production three-cylinder today,” and he’s not wrong: The next most powerful triple is the 268-hp engine in the Toyota GR Yaris.

What’s even more unusual is that the TFG doesn’t have a camshaft. Instead, the engine uses technology from Koenigsegg’s sister company, Freevalve, with pneumatic actuators opening and closing each valve independently. I called company founder Christian von Koenigsegg to learn exactly how this unconventional engine works.

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Freevalve

The Tiny Friendly Giant was designed specifically for the Gemera. Koenigsegg wanted something compact and lightweight, with big horsepower. Koenigsegg also decided to reverse the setup found in the hybrid Regera, where internal combustion provides the bulk of the total power output. In the Gemera, the majority of the power comes from electric motors, with the Gemera contributing some driving force as well as charging the hybrid drivetrain’s batteries.

Given this criteria, Koenigsegg arrived at a 2.0-liter, three-cylinder configuration. “We were kind of scratching our heads a little bit,” Koenigsegg says. “A three-cylinder is not the most exclusive… but then we realized, per cylinder, this is the most extreme engine on the planet, technically. And why should we have more than we need to make the car as lightweight as possible, as roomy as possible?”

The rest has to do with the engine’s character. “It’s a big-bore, big-stroke engine, and it doesn’t sound puny like some three-cylinders do,” Koenigsegg says. “Imagine a Harley with one more cylinder. That kind of sensation.” Despite the 95mm bore and 93.5mm stroke dimensions, the TFG is quite high-revving. Peak power comes at 7500 rpm and redline is set at 8500. “We have a tendency to engineer these rotating parts lighter than anyone else,” Koenigsegg explains, “but really focusing on strength at the same time. And if you do that, you can rev higher.” The tiny engine also delivers big torque—443 lb-ft from just below 3000 rpm all the way to 7000.

The sequential turbo setup is ingenious. The TFG has two exhaust valves per cylinder, one of which is dedicated to the small turbo, the other to the big turbo. At low revs, only the small-turbo exhaust valve opens, giving sharp boost response. Past 3000 rpm, the big-turbo exhaust valves start opening, building huge boost and lots of midrange power and torque. (Even without the turbos, the TFG is impressive: Koenigsegg says, in theory, a naturally aspirated TFG could make 280 horsepower.)

“It’s called Freevalve for a reason,” Koenigsegg says. “Each individual valve has total freedom. How much to open, when to open, how long to stay open.” At low loads, only one of the two intake valves per cylinder opens, distributing atomized fuel more evenly. With the Freevalve system constantly fine-tuning intake valve lift and duration, there’s no need for a conventional throttle, and the engine can shut down individual cylinders on the fly. Freevalve also allows the TFG to switch between traditional Otto cycle and Miller cycle operation, where intake valves are left open longer to help reduce pumping losses, increasing power and efficiency. And that’s not even the craziest thing. “With the help of the turbos, this engine can run two-stroke up to somewhere around 3000 rpm. It’ll sound like a straight-six at 6000 rpm,” Koenigsegg says. Beyond 3000 rpm, the TFG would have to switch back to four-stroke operation, because there’s not enough time for gas exchange at higher revs. This is just in theory, though—the company hasn’t tested the TFG in two-stroke mode yet. Koenigsegg says it’s still “early days.”

Koenigsegg is also working with a Texas artificial intelligence company, SparkCognition, to develop AI engine management software for Freevalve engines like the TFG. “The system will learn over time the best ways to operate the valves, what’s most frugal, what’s cleanest… It will eventually start doing things we’ve never thought of,” Koenigsegg says. “It’ll float in and out of different ways of combusting by itself, eventually in ways not completely understandable to us.” But that’s way out. Koengisegg says that the TFG will rely on human-coded valve operation for now.

The TFG makes “only” about 500 horsepower on regular pump gas. This is a flexible-fuel engine optimized to burn alcohol—ethanol, butanol, or methanol, or any combination thereof. Alcohol fuels are great for performance, but Koenigsegg says their use is also a key part of making the TFG clean, since they generate fewer harmful particulates than gasoline. And with sustainably-sourced fuel, the TFG can be effectively carbon-neutral.

Of course, a complex system like Freevalve is more expensive than a conventional cam setup—but Koenigsegg points out that the system uses less raw material, offsetting some of the cost and shaving weight from the engine. All in all, the TFG engine is about half as costly to build as Koenigsegg’s 5.0-liter twin-turbo V-8.

image
Koenigsegg

The rest of the Gemera drivetrain is equally unconventional. The TFG sits behind the passenger compartment, driving the front wheels through Koenigsegg’s outrageous direct-drive system, no gearbox necessary. When asked about the unusual mid-engine front-drive setup, Koenigsegg replies, “Why do many traditional cars have an engine in the front, a propshaft, and drive on the rear axle?” An electric motor/generator attached to the TFG’s crankshaft charges the hybrid drivetrain’s batteries and contributes up to 400 hp of additional power, while each rear wheel is driven by a 500-hp electric motor. Peak total output is 1700 hp.

“Koenigsegg cars are mid-engine cars,” the founder explains. “We don’t make pure electric cars because for the time being, we think they’re too heavy, and they don’t make a cool sound. And as long as we can be CO2 neutral and frugal and clean comparatively, we will push the combustion engine.”

image
Koenigsegg

The TFG is a technology showcase, an alternate vision for the automotive future. Koenigsegg posits that with some left-field thinking, the internal-combustion engine can still have a place in the electrified automotive world. “In my mind, it’s kind of the engine,” Koenigsegg says. “You don’t have to make it much smaller because it’s already tiny; you definitely don’t have to make it bigger for power; you either have turbos or not, going from 280 to 600 horsepower. And if that’s not enough, you put an electric motor on it, then you have a hybrid with [more than] 1000 horsepower.”

Koenigsegg once again has produced something remarkable with the Tiny Friendly Giant. And I think you’ll agree, the name is apt.

Source: How Koenigsegg’s 2-Liter No-Cam Engine Makes 600 Horsepower

Your data was ‘taken without permission’, customers told, after personal info accessed in O2 UK partner Aerial Direct database

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Hackers have slurped biz comms customers’ data from a database run by one of O2’s largest UK partners.

In an email sent to its customers, the partner, Aerial Direct, said that an unauthorised third party had been able to access customer data on 26 February through an external backup database, which included personal information on both current and expired subscribers from the last six years.

The data accessed included personal information, such as names, dates of birth, business addresses, email address, phone numbers, and product information. The company said no passwords or financial information was taken.

“As soon as we became aware of this unauthorised access we shut down access to the system and launched a full investigation, with assistance from experts, to determine what happened and what information was affected. We immediately reported this matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office and are actively working on fully exploring the details of how it happened.”

Source: Your data was ‘taken without permission’, customers told, after personal info accessed in O2 UK partner’s database • The Register

Carnival Corp. (Holland America / Princess Cruises) Discloses nasty customer Data Breach Amid Covid-19 Panic

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Earlier this month, the multibillion-dollar cruise conglomerate Carnival Corp. announced that two of its most popular lines—Holland America and Princess Cruises—were respectively slammed with hacks compromising the sensitive personal intel of cruise-goers and cruise-workers alike. Even though neither announcement makes mention of when each respective breach was disclosed, pulling up the source code for the Princess line’s disclosure reveals that the post happened midday on March 2—just as the U.S. began to learn of the country’s first deaths from covid-19—which is probably why the breach news slipped past most of our radars.

Per Carnival, its cruise companies were hit sometime between April and July of last year, when “an unsanctioned third party gained unauthorized access to some employee email accounts that contained personal information regarding our employees, crew, and guests.”

What kind of information did the “unsanctioned third party” access? All the bad types. Carnival offers a brief rundown:

The types of data potentially impacted varies by individual but can include: name, address, Social Security number, government identification number, such as passport number or driver’s license number, credit card and financial account information, and health-related information.

While neither cruise line has released any hard evidence of any of these details being misused (yet), Holland America’s notice makes sure to mention that guests should consider contacting the major credit bureaus in their respective countries to put fraud alerts on their credit reports. The line also offered to set people up with free credit monitoring and identity protection services to give their guests some “peace of mind.”

Source: Carnival Corp. Discloses Data Breach Amid Covid-19 Panic

139 minor planets were spotted at the outer reaches of our Solar System.

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Astronomers have discovered 139 minor planets lurking at the edge of the Solar System after examining a dataset collected to study dark energy in the universe.

Small worlds that circle our Sun in orbits further out than Neptune are labelled trans-Neptunian objects (TNO), with one being the relegated-planet Pluto. Eggheads, led by those at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) in the US, identified 316 TNOs in the dark-energy dataset, of which 139 bodies were previously unknown. That’s according to a study published in The Astrophysical Journal this week.

Specifically, the dataset features images snapped by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), a project that used the Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to study the role of dark energy in the universe’s rate of expansion. The pictures were taken of the southern hemisphere for six years, from 2013 to 2019.

“The number of TNOs you can find depends on how much of the sky you look at and what’s the faintest thing you can find,” said Gary Bernstein, co-author of the study and a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UPenn.

Unlike stars or supernovas, TNOs don’t emit a lot of light. The trick to spotting TNOs among all the other stuff in the images is to look for things that move. TNOs orbit the Sun whereas stars and distant galaxies appear more fixed. “Dedicated TNO surveys have a way of seeing the object move, and it’s easy to track them down,” said Pedro Bernardinelli, first author of the paper and a graduate student at UPenn. “One of the key things we did in this paper was figure out a way to recover those movements.”

The academics began with seven billion objects in the DES dataset. After they removed static objects – things that appeared in the same spot on multiple nights – they were left with a list of 22 million transient objects.

Each one looks like a dot, and the goal was to track each dot as it traveled across the sky to see if it really was an individual object. That narrowed the list down to 400 candidates that warranted further study and verification.

“We have this list of candidates, and then we have to make sure that our candidates are actually real things,” Bernardinelli said. They then realized 316 of the 400 candidates were TNOs – and 139 of that 316 were previously undetected minor worlds.

The boffins only rifled through four years’ worth of data, and they believe that, by using their method, many more TNOs can be uncovered in the future.

Source: We’re not saying Earth is doomed… but 139 minor planets were spotted at the outer reaches of our Solar System. Just an FYI, that’s all • The Register

900 Million Secrets From 8 Years of ‘Whisper’ App Were Left Exposed Online

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Whisper, the secret-sharing app that called itself the “safest place on the Internet,” left years of users’ most intimate confessions exposed on the Web tied to their age, location and other details, raising alarm among cybersecurity researchers that users could have been unmasked or blackmailed.

The data exposure, discovered by independent researchers and shown to The Washington Post, allowed anyone to access all of the location data and other information tied to anonymous “whispers” posted to the popular social app, which has claimed hundreds of millions of users. The records were viewable on a non-password-protected database open to the public Web. A Post reporter was able to freely browse and search through the records, many of which involved children: A search of users who had listed their age as 15 returned 1.3 million results.

The cybersecurity consultants Matthew Porter and Dan Ehrlich, who lead the advisory group Twelve Security, said they were able to access nearly 900 million user records from the app’s release in 2012 to the present day. The researchers alerted federal law-enforcement officials and the company to the exposure.

Shortly after researchers and The Post contacted the company on Monday, access to the data was removed.

Source: 900 Million Secrets From 8 Years of ‘Whisper’ App Were Left Exposed Online – Slashdot

Why are workers getting smaller pieces of the pie?

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It’s one of the biggest economic changes in recent decades: Workers get a smaller slice of company revenue, while a larger share is paid to capital owners and distributed as profits. Or, as economists like to say, there has been a fall in labor’s share of gross domestic product, or GDP.

A new study co-authored by MIT economists uncovers a major reason for this trend: Big companies that spend more on capital and less on workers are gaining market share, while smaller firms that spend more on workers and less on capital are losing market share. That change, the researchers say, is a key reason why the labor share of GDP in the U.S. has dropped from around 67 percent in 1980 to 59 percent today, following decades of stability.

“To understand this phenomenon, you need to understand the reallocation of economic activity across firms,” says MIT economist David Autor, co-author of the paper. “That’s our key point.”

To be sure, many economists have suggested other hypotheses, including new generations of software and machines that substitute directly for workers, the effects of international trade and outsourcing, and the decline of labor union power. The current study does not entirely rule out all of those explanations, but it does highlight the importance of what the researchers term “superstar firms” as a primary factor.

“We feel this is an incredibly important and robust fact pattern that you have to grapple with,” adds Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics in MIT’s Department of Economics.

The paper, “The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms,” appears in advance online form in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

[…]

For much of the 20th century, labor’s share of GDP was notably consistent. As the authors note, John Maynard Keynes once called it “something of a miracle” in the face of economic changes, and the British economist Nicholas Kaldor included labor’s steady portion of GDP as one of his often-cited six “stylized facts” of growth.

To conduct the study, the researchers scrutinized data for the U.S. and other countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The scholars used U.S. Economic Census data from 1982 to 2012 to study six economic sectors that account for about 80 percent of employment and GDP: manufacturing, retail trade, wholesale trade, services, utilities and transportation, and finance. The data includes payroll, total output, and total employment.

The researchers also used information from the EU KLEMS database, housed at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, to examine the other OECD countries.

The increase in market dominance for highly competitive top firms in many of those sectors is evident in the data. In the retail trade, for instance, the top four firms accounted for just under 15 percent of sales in 1981, but that grew to around 30 percent of sales in 2011. In utilities and transportation, those figures moved from 29 percent to 41 percent in the same time frame. In manufacturing, this top-four sales concentration grew from 39 percent in 1981 to almost 44 percent in 2011.

At the same time, the average payroll-to-sales ratio declined in five of those sectors—with finance being the one exception. In manufacturing, the payroll-to-sales ratio decreased from roughly 18 percent in 1981 to about 12 percent in 2011. On aggregate, the labor share of GDP declined at most times except the period from 1997 to 2002, the final years of an economic expansion with high employment.

But surprisingly, labor’s share is not falling at the typical firm. Rather, reallocation of between firms is the key. In general, says Autor, the picture is of a “winner-take-most setting, where a smaller number of firms are accounting for a larger amount of economic activity, and those are firms where workers historically got a smaller share of the pie.”

A key insight provided by the study is that the dynamics within industry sectors has powered the drop in the labor share of GDP. The overall change is not just the result of, say, an increase in the deployment of technology in manufacturing, which some economists have suggested. While manufacturing is important to the big picture, the same phenomenon is unfolding across and within many sectors of the economy.

As far as testing the remaining alternate hypotheses, the study found no special pattern within industries linked to changes in trade policy—a subject Autor has studied extensively in the past. And while the decline in union power cannot be ruled out as a cause, the drop in labor share of GDP occurs even in countries where unions remain relatively stronger than they do in the U.S.

Source: Why are workers getting smaller pieces of the pie?

He then goes on to say:

“We shouldn’t presume that just because a market is concentrated—with a few leading firms accounting for a large fraction of sales—it’s a market with low productivity and high prices,” Autor says. “It might be a market where you have some very productive leading firms.” Today, he adds, “more competition is platform-based competition, as opposed to simple price competition. Walmart is a platform business. Amazon is a platform business. Many tech companies are platform businesses. Many financial services companies are platform businesses. You have to make some huge investment to create a sophisticated service or set of offerings. Once that’s in place, it’s hard for your competitors to replicate.”

With this in mind, Autor says we may want to distinguish whether market concentration is “the bad kind, where lazy monopolists are jacking up prices, or the good kind, where the more competitive firms are getting a larger . To the best we can distinguish, the rise of superstar firms appears more the latter than the former. These firms are in more innovative industries—their productivity growth has developed faster, they make more investment, they patent more. It looks like this is happening more in the frontier sectors than the laggard sectors.”

Still Autor adds, the paper does contain policy implications for regulators.

“Once a firm is that far ahead, there’s potential for abuse,” he notes. “Maybe Facebook shouldn’t be allowed to buy all its competitors. Maybe Amazon shouldn’t be both the host of a market and a competitor in that market. This potentially creates regulatory issues we should be looking at. There’s nothing in this paper that says everyone should just take a few years off and not worry about the issue.”

I’d completely disagree – platform businesses are behaving like monopolists, but you need to look beyond product price to understand that selling at a loss is called undercutting and there are many many other reasons that monopoly is a bad thing, as I explain below.

Engineers rediscover electric control of atomic nuclius, get it working. Means easy quantum computer control among other things.

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A happy accident in the laboratory has led to a breakthrough discovery that not only solved a problem that stood for more than half a century, but has major implications for the development of quantum computers and sensors.In a study published today in Nature, a team of engineers at UNSW Sydney has done what a celebrated scientist first suggested in 1961 was possible, but has eluded everyone since: controlling the nucleus of a single atom using only electric fields.

“This discovery means that we now have a pathway to build quantum computers using single-atom spins without the need for any oscillating magnetic field for their operation,” says UNSW’s Scientia Professor of Quantum Engineering Andrea Morello. “Moreover, we can use these nuclei as exquisitely precise sensors of electric and magnetic fields, or to answer fundamental questions in quantum science.”

That a nuclear spin can be controlled with electric, instead of magnetic fields, has far-reaching consequences. Generating magnetic fields requires large coils and high currents, while the laws of physics dictate that it is difficult to confine magnetic fields to very small spaces—they tend to have a wide area of influence. Electric fields, on the other hand, can be produced at the tip of a tiny electrode, and they fall off very sharply away from the tip. This will make control of individual atoms placed in nanoelectronic devices much easier.

[…]

Prof Morello uses the analogy of a billiard table to explain the difference between controlling nuclear spins with magnetic and electric fields.

“Performing magnetic resonance is like trying to move a particular ball on a billiard table by lifting and shaking the whole table,” he says. “We’ll move the intended ball, but we’ll also move all the others.”

[…]

After demonstrating the ability to control the nucleus with electric fields, the researchers used sophisticated computer modelling to understand how exactly the electric field influences the spin of the nucleus. This effort highlighted that nuclear electric is a truly local, microscopic phenomenon: the electric field distorts the atomic bonds around the nucleus, causing it to reorient itself.

“This landmark result will open up a treasure trove of discoveries and applications,” says Prof Morello. “The system we created has enough complexity to study how the classical world we experience every day emerges from the quantum realm. Moreover, we can use its quantum complexity to build sensors of electromagnetic fields with vastly improved sensitivity. And all this, in a simple electronic device made in silicon, controlled with small voltages applied to a metal electrode!”

Source: Engineers crack 58-year-old puzzle on way to quantum breakthrough

US Rule Waiver Will Reduce Empty Planes During Virus Outbreak (after in EU) and then closes US airspace to EU flights after blaming EU for Corona

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Federal regulators waived a rule Wednesday that was causing airlines to fly nearly empty planes just to avoid losing takeoff and landing rights at major airports.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it would suspend the rule through May 31 to help airlines that are canceling flights because of the new virus outbreak.

The FAA assigns takeoff and landing rights, or “slots,” at a few big, congested airports. Airlines must use 80% of their highly coveted slots or risk forfeiting them.

That FAA requirement — and especially a similar rule in Europe — led airlines to operate flights using those slots even if there were very few passengers.

The FAA’s decision affects flights at John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports in New York and Reagan Washington National Airport outside Washington, D.C.

The FAA said it also would not punish airlines that cancel flights through May 31 at four other airports where the agency approves schedules: Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey; Los Angeles International Airport and San Francisco International Airport.

The FAA waiver covers U.S. and foreign airlines. The agency’s announcement came a day after the European Commission promised to move quickly to waive its similar rule.

It could take weeks or even months for the European Commission to adopt the proposal, but it is likely to have immediate effect. It is a signal to airlines that they can stop flying mostly empty planes and still be confident that the emergency rules change will be approved before airport slots are allotted again.

Source: Rule Waiver Will Reduce Empty Planes During Virus Outbreak | Time

Donald Trump has suspended all travel to the US from Europe for 30 days to try and tackle the coronavirus crisis.

The draconian measures come into effect from midnight Friday, but do not apply to the United Kingdom. Trump revealed his plans in a rare Oval Office address on Wednesday night while criticizing the European Union for allowing the virus to take hold.

He said: ‘The European Union failed to take the same precautions (as the US) and restrict travel from China and other hotspots. As a result, a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe.

‘After consulting with our top government health officials I have decided to take several strong but necessary actions to protect the health of all Americans. To stop new cases from entering our shores we will be suspending all travel from Europe to our shores for 30 days.’

Source: Donald Trump bans all travel from Europe to US for 30 days to stop coronavirus

Blasting Airplane With Lasers Makes It Harder For Ice to Stick

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researchers from Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS, aircraft manufacturer Airbus, and the Dresden University of Technology in Germany have co-developed a better way to keep planes free of ice and snow. It uses a technology called Direct Laser Interference Patterning (DLIP), where a laser is split into multiple beams that overlap each other creating complex etched patterns on a surface where the beams are focused.

Illustration for article titled Blasting Airplanes With Lasers Makes It Much Harder For Ice to Stick to Wings
Photo: Fraunhofer Institute

By adapting the DLIP technique to create three-dimensional structures at the microscopic level, the laser etching technique is able to turn an airplane’s wing into a material with reduced surface area that ice simply has a hard time holding onto. As a result, after reaching a certain thickness and weight, built up ice simply falls off a wing all on its own. It could not only reduce the need for de-icing procedures at airports, but it could also remove the need for antifreeze and other chemical agents altogether.

Waiting for ice to spontaneously fall off on its own isn’t always an option, like when you’re cruising along at 500+ miles per hour, 30,000 feet in the air. So additional testing by the researchers found that while it took over a minute for ice to melt off a wing surface with 60 watts of heat applied, the same material, treated with the laser etching process, saw ice completely vanish after just five seconds with the same amount of heat. Not only does it mean an aircraft could be cleared of ice much faster without the use of chemicals, but it also means that aircraft manufacturers could include smaller heating systems that were just as effective, but with drastically reduced fuel consumption.

The new use for the DLIP technology isn’t only useful for keeping aircraft safe and free of ice, it could be applied to everything from the blades on giant power-generating windmills, to the hulls of ships braving icy waters. The biggest benefit could be applying it to the windows of a car, making scraping them clean on a cold winter’s morning as easy as wiping away raindrops—assuming, of course, that the etching process still lets you actually see through the glass.

Source: Blasting Airplane With Lasers Makes It Harder For Ice to Stick

Banjo, the company that will use an AI to spy on all of Utah through all their cams Used a Secret Company and Fake Apps to Scrape Social Media

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Banjo, an artificial intelligence firm that works with police used a shadow company to create an array of Android and iOS apps that looked innocuous but were specifically designed to secretly scrape social media, Motherboard has learned.

The news signifies an abuse of data by a government contractor, with Banjo going far beyond what companies which scrape social networks usually do. Banjo created a secret company named Pink Unicorn Labs, according to three former Banjo employees, with two of them adding that the company developed the apps. This was done to avoid detection by social networks, two of the former employees said.

Three of the apps created by Pink Unicorn Labs were called “One Direction Fan App,” “EDM Fan App,” and “Formula Racing App.” Motherboard found these three apps on archive sites and downloaded and analyzed them, as did an independent expert. The apps—which appear to have been originally compiled in 2015 and were on the Play Store until 2016 according to Google—outwardly had no connection to Banjo, but an analysis of its code indicates connections to the company. This aspect of Banjo’s operation has some similarities with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, with multiple sources comparing the two incidents.

“Banjo was doing exactly the same thing but more nefariously, arguably,” a former Banjo employee said, referring to how seemingly unrelated apps were helping to feed the activities of the company’s main business.

[…]

Last year Banjo signed a $20.7 million contract with Utah that granted the company access to the state’s traffic, CCTV, and public safety cameras. Banjo promises to combine that input with a range of other data such as satellites and social media posts to create a system that it claims alerts law enforcement of crimes or events in real-time.

“We essentially do most of what Palantir does, we just do it live,” Banjo’s top lobbyist Bryan Smith previously told police chiefs and 911 dispatch officials when pitching the company’s services.

[…]

Motherboard found the apps developed by Pink Unicorn Labs included code mentioning signing into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Russian social media app VK, FourSquare, Google Plus, and Chinese social network Sina Weibo.

[…]

One of the former employees said they saw one of the apps when it was still working and it had a high number of logins.

“It was all major social media platforms,” they added. The particular versions of the apps Motherboard obtained, when opened, asked a user to sign-in with Instagram.

Business records for Pink Unicorn Labs show the company was originally incorporated by Banjo CEO Damien Patton. Banjo employees worked directly on Pink Unicorn Labs projects from Banjo’s offices, several of the former employees said, though they added that Patton made it clear in recent years that Banjo needed to wind down Pink Unicorn Labs’ work and not be linked to the firm.

“There was something about Pink Unicorn that was important for Damien to distance himself from,” another former employee told Motherboard.

[…]

ome similar companies, like Dataminr, have permission from social media sites to use large amounts of data; Twitter, which owns a stake in Dataminr, gives the firm exclusive access to its so-called “fire hose” of public posts.

Banjo did not have that sort of data access. So it created Pink Unicorn Labs, which one former employee described as a “shadow company,” that developed apps to harvest social media data.

“They were shitty little apps that took advantage of some of the data that we had but the catch was that they had a ton of OAuth providers,” one of the former employees said. OAuth providers are methods for signing into apps or websites via another service, such as Facebook’s “Facebook Connect,” Twitter’s “Sign In With Twitter,” or Google’s “Google Sign-In.” These providers mean a user doesn’t have to create a new account for each site or app they want to use, and can instead log in via their already established social media identity.

But once users logged into the innocent looking apps via a social network OAuth provider, Banjo saved the login credentials, according to two former employees and an expert analysis of the apps performed by Kasra Rahjerdi, who has been an Android developer since the original Android project was launched. Banjo then scraped social media content, those two former employees added. The app also contained nonstandard code written by Pink Unicorn Labs: “The biggest red flag for me is that all the code related to grabbing Facebook friends, photos, location history, etc. is directly from their own codebase,” Rahjerdi said.

[…]

“Banjo was secretly farming peoples’ user tokens via these shadow apps,” one of the former employees said. “That was the entire point and plan,” they added when asked if the apps were specifically designed to steal users’ login tokens.

[…]

The apps request a wide range of permissions, such as access to location data, the ability to create accounts and set passwords, and find accounts on the device.

Multiple sources said Banjo tried to keep Pink Unicorn Labs a secret, but Motherboard found several links between the two. An analysis of the Android apps revealed all three had code that contained web links to Banjo’s website; each app contained a set of identical data that appeared to be pulled from social network sites, including repeatedly the Twitter profile of Jennifer Peck, who works for Banjo and is also married to Banjo’s Patton. In registration records for the two companies, both Banjo and Pink Unicorn Labs shared the same address in Redwood, California; and Patton is listed as the creator of Pink Unicorn Labs in that firm’s own public records.

Source: Surveillance Firm Banjo Used a Secret Company and Fake Apps to Scrape Social Media – VICE

US Navy flies two EA-18G Growlers autonomously; third Growler used as controller

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The US Navy (USN) flew two Boeing EA-18G Growlers as autonomous unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), using a third Growler as a flight controller.

In total, four flights were conducted at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, with tests starting in September 2019, says manufacturer Boeing on 4 February. The aircraft demonstrated 21 missions during flights that took place toward the end of 2019, says Boeing. The type of missions were not disclosed.

Two US Navy EA-18G Growlers over Afghanistan

Source: US Air Force

Two US Navy EA-18G Growlers fly over Afghanistan in January 2020

The flights are a forerunner to using the EA-18G as a mission-controlling platform for autonomous Loyal Wingman UAVs. Unmmaned-manned teaming is a new US Department of Defense concept in aerial combat where some work would be offloaded to UAVs, especially dangerous missions.

“This demonstration allows Boeing and the Navy the opportunity to analyse the data collected and decide where to make investments in future technologies,” says Tom Brandt, Boeing manned-unmanned teaming demonstration lead. “It could provide synergy with other US Navy unmanned systems in development across the spectrum and in other services.”

Boeing says the flights were conducted during the USN Warfare Development Command’s annual fleet experiment exercises.

[…]

The USN has said previously that it is planning on upgrading some, if not all, of its 160-example Growler fleet to a Block II configuration, which includes an advanced cockpit system, conformal fuel tanks, improved sensors and an upgraded electronic attack package. The upgrades would also include the ability to control Loyal Wingman aircraft, Boeing said.

Boeing Airpower Teaming System flying with EA-18G Growler

Source: Boeing

Rendering of Boeing Airpower Teaming System flying with EA-18G Growler

Boeing has not said previously that the Block II upgrade package would include the ability to fly the EA-18G autonomously.

“This technology allows the Navy to extend the reach of sensors while keeping manned aircraft out of harm’s way,” Brandt of Boeing says. “It’s a force multiplier that enables a single aircrew to control multiple aircraft without greatly increasing workload. It has the potential to increase survivability as well as situational awareness.”

The EA-18Gs were modified over summer 2019, says Boeing.

”Three Growlers were modified to support an open architecture processor and advanced networking, which allowed for two of the Growlers to be transformed into unmanned air system surrogate aircraft,” the company says. Those two pieces of technology were prototypes that are also planned as part of Boeing’s Block III upgrades for the Super Hornet, the Distributed Targeting Processor-Networked and the Rockwell Collins Tactical Targeting Network Technology radio.

Source: US Navy flies two EA-18G Growlers autonomously; third Growler used as controller | News | Flight Global

a tiny swarm 🙂

Whisper App Exposes Entire History of Chat Logs, personal details and location

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Whisper, the anonymous messaging app beloved by teens and tweens the world over, has a problem: it’s not as anonymous as we’d thought. The platform is only the latest that brands itself as private by design while leaking sensitive user data into the open, according to a damning Washington Post report out earlier today. According to the sleuths that uncovered the leak, “anonymous” posts on the platform—which tackle everything from closeted homosexuality, to domestic abuse, to unwanted pregnancies—could easily be tied to the original poster.

As is often the case, the culprit was a leaky bucket, that housed the platform’s entire posting history since it first came onto the scene in 2012. And because this app has historically courted a ton of teens, a lot of this data can get really unsavory, really fast. The Post describes being able to pull a search for users that listed their age as fifteen and getting more than a million results in return, which included not only their posts, but any identifying information they gave the platform, like age, ethnicity, gender, and the groups they were a part of—including groups that are centered around delicate topics like sexual assault.

Whisper told the Post that they’d shut down the leak once being contacted—a point that Gizmodo independently confirmed. Still, the company has yet to come around to cracking down on its less-than-satisfying policies surrounding location data. In 2014, Whisper was caught sharing this data with federal researchers as part of research on personnel stationed at military bases. In the years since then, it looks like a lot of this data is still up for grabs. While some law enforcement officials might need to get their hands on it, Gizmodo’s own analysis found multiple targeted advertising partners that are scooping up user location data as recently as this afternoon.

Source: Whisper App Exposes Entire History of Chat Logs: Report