A new use for McDonald’s used cooking oil: 3D printing

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Simpson had bought a 3D printer for the lab in 2017. He hoped to use it to build custom parts that kept organisms alive inside of the NMR spectrometer for his research.
But the commercial resin he needed for high-quality light projection 3D printing (where light is used to form a solid) of those parts was expensive.
This could be America’s smallest restaurant
The dominant material for light projection printing is liquid plastic, which can cost upward of $500 a liter, according to Simpson.
Simpson closely analyzed the resin and spotted a connection. The molecules making up the commercial plastic resin were similar to fats found in ordinary cooking oil.
“The thought came to us. Could we use cooking oil and turn it into resin for 3D printing?” Simpson said.

Only one restaurant responded — McDonald’s

What came next was the hardest part of the two-year experiment for Simpson and his team of 10 students — getting a large sample batch of used cooking oil.
“We reached out to all of the fast-food restaurants around us. They all said no,” said Simpson.
Except for McDonald’s (MCD).
In the summer of 2017, the students went to a McDonald’s location near the campus in Toronto, Ontario, that had agreed to give them 10 liters of waste oil.

Back in the lab, the oil was filtered to take out chunks of food particles.
[…]
The team successfully printed a high-quality butterfly with details as minute as 100 micrometers in size.
A 3D printed butterbly made from McDonald's waste cooking oil.

A 3D printed butterbly made from McDonald’s waste cooking oil.
“We did analysis on the butterfly. It felt rubbery to touch, with a waxy surface that repelled water,” said Simpson. He described the butterfly as “structurally stable.” It didn’t break apart and held up at room temperature. “We thought you could possibly 3D print anything you like with the oil,” he said.
The experiment yielded a commercially viable resin that Simpson estimates could be sourced as cheaply as 30 cents a liter of waste oil.
Simpson was equally excited about another benefit of the butterfly the team had created.”The butterfly is essentially made from fat, which means it is biodegradable,” he said.
To test this, he buried a sample butterfly in soil and found that 20% of it disappeared in a two-week period.
“The concept of sustainability has been underplayed in 3D printing,” said Tim Greene, a research director for global research firm IDC who specializes in the 3D printing market. “The melted plastic currently being used as resin is not so great for the environment.”

Source: A new use for McDonald’s used cooking oil: 3D printing – CNN

Vodafone: Yes, we slurp data on customers’ network setups, but we do it for their own good. No, you can’t opt out.

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Seeking to improve its pisspoor customer service rating, UK telecoms giant Vodafone has clarified just how much information it slurps from customer networks. You might want to rename those servers, m’kay?

The updates are rather extensive and were noted by customers after a headsup-type email arrived from the telco.

One offending paragraph gives Vodafone an awful lot of information about what a customer might be running on their own network:

For providing end user support and optimizing your WiFi experience we are collecting information about connected devices (MAC address, Serial Number, user given host names and WiFi connection quality) as well as information about the the WiFi networks (MAC addresses and identifiers, radio statistics).

More accurately, it gives a third party that information. Airties A.S. is the company responsible for hosting information that Vodafone’s support drones might use for diagnostics.

With Vodafone topping the broadband and landline complaint tables, according to the most recent Ofcom data (PDF), the company would naturally want to increase the chances of successfully resolving a customer’s problem. However, there is no way to opt out.

Source: Vodafone: Yes, we slurp data on customers’ network setups, but we do it for their own good • The Register

Shipping is so insecure we could have driven off in an oil rig, says Pen Test Partners

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Penetration testers looking at commercial shipping and oil rigs discovered a litany of security blunders and vulnerabilities – including one set that would have let them take full control of a rig at sea.

Pen Test Partners (PTP), an infosec consulting outfit that specialises in doing what its name says, reckoned that on the whole, not many maritime companies understand the importance of good infosec practices at sea. The most eye-catching finding from PTP’s year of maritime pentesting was that its researchers could have gained a “full compromise” of a deep sea drilling rig, as used for oil exploration.

PTP’s Ken Munro explained, when The Register asked the obvious question, that this meant “stop engine, fire up thrusters (dynamic positioning system), change rudder position, mess around with navigation, brick systems, switch them off, you name it.”

The firm’s Nigel Hearne explained that many maritime tech vendors have a “variable” approach to security.

Making heavy use of the word “poor” to summarise what he had seen over the past year, Hearne wrote that he and his colleagues had examined everything from a deep water exploration and the aforementioned drilling rig to a brand new cruise ship to a Panamax container vessel, and a few others in between.

Munro also published a related blog post this week.

Among other things the team found were clandestine Wi-Fi access points in non-Wi-Fi areas of ships (“they want to stream tunes/video in a work area that they can’t get crew Wi-Fi in,” said Munro), and crews bridging designed gaps between ships’ engineering control systems and human interface systems.

Why were seafarers doing something that seems so obviously silly to an infosec-minded person? Munro told us: “Someone needs to administrate or monitor systems from somewhere else in the vessel, saving a long walk. Ships are big!”

Another potential explanation proferred by Munro could apply to cruise ship crews where Wi-Fi is generally a paid-for, metered commodity: “Their personal satellite data allowance has been used up, so they put a rogue Wi-Fi AP on to the ship’s business network where there are no limits.”

A Panamax vessel (the largest size of ship that can pass through the Panama Canal, the vital central American shipping artery between the Atlantic and Pacific) can be up to 294 metres (PDF, page 8 gives the measurements) from stem to stern. A crew member needing to move from, say, bow thruster to main machinery control room in the aft part of the ship and back again will spend significant amounts of time doing so. It’s far easier to jury-rig remote access than do all that walking.

PTP also found that old infosec chestnut, default and easy-to-guess passwords – along with a smattering of stickers on PCs with passwords in plaintext.

Default passwords aboard ships. Pic: Pen Test Partners

Default passwords aboard ships. Pic: Pen Test Partners

“One of the biggest surprises (not that I should have been at all surprised in hindsight) is the number of installations we still find running default credentials – think admin/admin or blank/blank – even on public facing systems,” sighed Hearne, detailing all the systems he found that were using default creds – including an onboard CCTV system.

The pentesters also found “hard coded credentials” embedded in critical items including a ship’s satcom (satellite comms mast) unit, potentially allowing anyone aboard the ship to log in and piggyback off the owners’ paid-for internet connection – or to cut it off

Source: Shipping is so insecure we could have driven off in an oil rig, says Pen Test Partners • The Register

The Paywalled Garden: iOS is Adware

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Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and iCloud data subscriptions, they expanded to Apple Music a few years ago, only to dramatically ramp up their offerings last year with TV+, News+, Arcade, and Card. Their services business, taken as a whole, is quickly becoming massive; Apple reported $12.7 billion in Q1 2020 alone, nearly a sixth of its already gigantic quarterly revenue.

All that money comes from the wallets of 480 million subscribers, and their goal is to grow that number to 600 million this year. But to do that, Apple has resorted to insidious tactics to get those people: ads. Lots and lots of ads, on devices that you pay for. iOS 13 has an abundance of ads from Apple marketing Apple services, from the moment you set it up and all throughout the experience. These ads cannot be hidden through the iOS content blocker extension system. Some can be dismissed or hidden, but most cannot, and are purposefully designed into core apps like Music and the App Store. There’s a term to describe software that has lots of unremovable ads: adware, which what iOS has sadly become.

If you don’t subscribe to these services, you’ll be forced to look at these ads constantly, either in the apps you use or the push notifications they have turned on by default. The pervasiveness of ads in iOS is a topic largely unexplored, perhaps due to these services having a lot of adoption among the early adopter crowd that tends to discuss Apple and their design. This isn’t a value call on the services themselves, but a look at how aggressively Apple pushes you to pay for them, and how that growth-hack-style design comes at the expense of the user experience. In this post, I’ll break down all of the places in iOS that I’ve found that have Apple-manufactured ads. You can replicate these results yourself by doing a factory reset of an iPhone (backup first!), installing iOS 13, and signing up for a new iCloud account.

Source: The Paywalled Garden: iOS is Adware – Steve Streza

This Bracelet Prevents Smart Speakers From Spying on You

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You probably don’t realize just how many devices in your home or workplace are not only capable of eavesdropping on all your conversations but are specifically designed to. Smartphones, tablets, computers, smartwatches, smart speakers, even voice-activated appliances that have access to smart assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant feature built-in microphones that are constantly monitoring conversations for specific activation words to bring them to life. But accurate voice recognition often requires processing recordings in the cloud on faraway servers, and despite what giant companies keep assuring us, there are obvious and warranted concerns about privacy.

You could simply find yourself a lovely cave deep in the woods and hide out the rest of your days away from technology if you don’t want to be the victim of endless eavesdropping, but this wearable jammer, created by researchers from the University of Chicago, is a (slightly) less drastic alternative. It’s chunky, there’s no denying it, but surrounding an inner core of electronics and batteries are a series of ultrasonic transducers blasting sound waves in all directions. While inaudible to human ears, the ultrasonic signals take advantage of a flaw found in sensitive microphone hardware that results in these signals being captured and interfering with the recordings of lower parts of the audio spectrum where the frequencies of human voices fall.

The results are recordings that are nearly incomprehensible to both human ears and the artificial intelligence-powered voice recognition software that smart assistants and other voice-activated devices rely on.

But why pack the technology into a wearable bracelet instead of creating a stationary device you could set up in the middle of a room for complete privacy? An array of transducers pointing in all directions are needed to properly blanket a room in ultrasonic sound waves, but thanks to science, wherever the signals from two neighboring transducers overlap, they cancel each other out, creating dead zones where microphones could continue to effectively operate.

By incorporating the jamming hardware into a wearable device, the natural and subconscious movements of the wearer’s arms and hands while they speak keep the transducers in motion. This effectively eliminates the risk of dead zones being created long enough to allow entire words or sentences to be detected by a smart device’s microphone. For those who are truly worried about their privacy, the research team has shared their source code for the signal generator as well as 3D models for the bracelet on GitHub for anyone to download and build themselves. You’ll need to supply your own electronics, and if you’re going to all the trouble, you might as well build one for each wrist, all but ensuring there’s never a dead zone in your silencing shield.

Source: This Punk Bracelet Prevents Smart Speakers From Hearing You

This is nice  because Project Alias / Parasite is aimed at a very specific machine, whereas this will protect you wherever you go. It’s just a bit clunky.

Generating electricity ‘out of thin air’ using a protein and moisture in the air

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Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a device that uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air, a new technology they say could have significant implications for the future of renewable energy, climate change and in the future of medicine.

As reported today in Nature, the laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley at UMass Amherst have created a device they call an “Air-gen.” or air-powered generator, with electrically conductive nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter. The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere.

“We are literally making electricity out of thin air,” says Yao. “The Air-gen generates 24/7.” Lovely, who has advanced sustainable biology-based electronic materials over three decades, adds, “It’s the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet.”

The new technology developed in Yao’s lab is non-polluting, renewable and low-cost. It can generate power even in areas with extremely low humidity such as the Sahara Desert. It has significant advantages over other forms of renewable energy including solar and wind, Lovley says, because unlike these other renewable energy sources, the Air-gen does not require sunlight or wind, and “it even works indoors.”

The Air-gen device requires only a thin film of protein nanowires less than 10 microns thick, the researchers explain. The bottom of the film rests on an electrode, while a smaller electrode that covers only part of the nanowire film sits on top. The film adsorbs from the atmosphere. A combination of the electrical conductivity and surface chemistry of the protein nanowires, coupled with the fine pores between the nanowires within the film, establishes the conditions that generate an between the two electrodes.

The researchers say that the current generation of Air-gen devices are able to power small electronics, and they expect to bring the invention to commercial scale soon. Next steps they plan include developing a small Air-gen “patch” that can power electronic wearables such as health and fitness monitors and smart watches, which would eliminate the requirement for traditional batteries. They also hope to develop Air-gens to apply to cell phones to eliminate periodic charging.

[…]

Source: New green technology generates electricity ‘out of thin air’

Internet Society told to halt .org sale to dodgy companies… by its own advisory council

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The Internet Society’s own members are now opposing its sale of the .org internet registry to an unknown private equity firm.

The Chapters Advisory Council, the official voice of Internet Society (ISOC) members, will vote this month on whether to approve a formal recommendation that the society “not proceed [with the sale] unless a number of conditions are met.”

Those conditions largely comprise the publication of additional details and transparency regarding ISOC’s controversial sell-off of .org. Despite months of requests, neither the society nor the proposed purchaser, Ethos Capital, have disclosed critical elements of the deal, including who would actually own the registry if the sale went through.

Meanwhile, word has reached us that Ethos Capital attempted to broker a secret peace treaty this coming weekend in Washington DC by inviting key individuals to a closed-door meeting with the goal of thrashing out an agreement all sides would be happy with. After Ethos insisted the meeting be kept brief, and a number of those opposed to the sale declined to attend, Ethos’s funding for attendees’ flights and accommodation was suddenly withdrawn, and the plan to hold a confab fell apart, we understand.

ISOC – and .org’s current operator, the ISOC-controlled Public Interest Registry (PIR) – are still hoping to push DNS overseer ICANN to make a decision on the .org sale before the end of the month. But that looks increasingly unlikely following an aggressive letter from ICANN’s external lawyers last week insisting ICANN will take as much time as it feels necessary to review the deal.

The overall lack of transparency around the $1.13bn deal has led California’s Attorney General to demand documents relating to the sale – and ISOC’s chapters are demanding the same information as a pre-condition to any sale in their proposed advice to the ISOC board.

That information includes: full details of the transaction; a financial breakdown of what Ethos Capital intends to do with .org’s 10 million internet addresses; binding commitments on limiting price increases and free speech protections; and publication of the bylaws and related corporate documents for both the replacement to the current registry operator, PIR, and the proposed “Stewardship Council” which Ethos claims will give .org users a say in future decisions.

Disregarded

“There is a feeling amongst chapters that ISOC seems to have disregarded community participation, failed to properly account for the potential community impact, and misread the community mindset around the .ORG TLD,” the Chapters Advisory Council’s proposed advice to the ISOC board – a copy of which The Register has seen – states.

Although the advisory council has no legal ability to stop ISOC, if the proposed advice is approved by vote, and the CEO and board of trustees push ahead with the sale regardless, it could have severe repercussions for the organization’s non-profit status, and would further undermine ISOC’s position that the sale will “support the Internet Society’s vision that the Internet is for everyone.”

[…]

That lack of transparency was never more clear than when the ISOC board claimed to have met for two weeks in November to discuss the Ethos Capital offer to buy .org, but made no mention of the proposal and only made ISOC members and chapters aware of the decision after it had been made.

With a spotlight on ISOC’s secretive deliberations – and with board members now claiming they are subject to a non-disclosure agreement over the sale – the organization has added skeleton minutes that provide little or no insight into deliberations. It is not clear when those minutes were added – no update date is provided.

“The primary purpose of the Chapters Advisory Council shall be to channel and facilitate advice and recommendations to and from the President and Board of Trustees of the Internet Society in a bottom up manner, on any matters of concern or interest to the Chapter AC and ISOC Chapters,” reads the official description of the council on ISOC’s website.

With Ethos having failed to broker a secret deal, and ICANN indicating that it will consider the public interest in deciding whether to approve the sale, if ISOC’s advisory council does vote to advise the board not to move forward with the sale, the Internet Society will face a stark choice: stick by the secretive billionaires funding the purchase of .org with the added risk of blowing up the entire organization; or walk away from the deal.

Source: Revolution, comrades: Internet Society told to halt .org sale… by its own advisory council • The Register

Google allows random company to DMCA sites with the word ‘Did’ in it, de-indexes (deletes) them without warning or recourse.

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In 2018, Target wrote an article about Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron who some credit as being the world’s first computer programmer, despite being born in 1815. Unfortunately, however, those who search for that article today using Google won’t find it.

As the image below shows, the original Tweet announcing the article is still present in Google’s indexes but the article itself has been removed, thanks to a copyright infringement complaint that also claimed several other victims.

While there could be dozens of reasons the article infringed someone’s copyrights, the facts are so absurd as to be almost unbelievable. Sinclair’s article was deleted because an anti-piracy company working on behalf of a TV company decided that since its title (What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?) contained the word ‘DID’, it must be illegal.

This monumental screw-up was announced on Twitter by Sinclair himself, who complained that “Computers are stupid folks. Too bad Google has decided they are in charge.”

At risk of running counter to Sinclair’s claim, in this case – as Lovelace herself would’ve hopefully agreed – it is people who are stupid, not computers. The proof for that can be found in the DMCA complaint sent to Google by RightsHero, an anti-piracy company working on behalf of Zee TV, an Indian pay-TV channel that airs Dance India Dance.

Now in its seventh season, Dance India Dance is a dance competition reality show that is often referred to as DID. And now, of course, you can see where this is going. Because Target and at least 11 other sites dared to use the word in its original context, RightsHero flagged the pages as infringing and asked Google to deindex them.

But things only get worse from here.

Look up the word ‘did’ in any dictionary and you will never find the definition listed as an acronym for Dance India Dance. Instead, you’ll find the explanation as “past of do” or something broadly along those lines. However, if the complaint sent to Google had achieved its intended effect, finding out that would’ve been more difficult too.

Lo, here it is in its full glory.

As we can see, the notice not only claims Target’s article is infringing the copyrights of Dance India Dance (sorry, DID), but also no less than four online dictionaries explaining what the word ‘did’ actually means. (Spoiler: None say ‘Dance India Dance’).

Perhaps worse still, some of the other allegedly-infringing articles were published by some pretty serious information resources including:

-USGS Earthquake Hazards Program of the U.S. Geological Survey (Did You Feel It? (DYFI) collects information from people who felt an earthquake and creates maps that show what people experienced and the extent of damage)

– The US Department of Education (Did (or will) you file a Schedule 1 with your 2018 tax return?)

– Nature.com (Did pangolins spread the China coronavirus to people?)

Considering the scale of the problem here, we tried to contact RightsHero for comment. However, the only anti-piracy company bearing that name has a next-to-useless website that provides no information on where the company is, who owns it, who runs it, or how those people can be contacted.

In the absence of any action by RightsHero, Sinclair Target was left with a single option – issue a counterclaim to Google in the hope of having his page restored.

“I’ve submitted a counter-claim, which seemed to be the only thing I could do,” Target told TorrentFreak.

“Got a cheery confirmation email from Google saying, ‘Thanks for contacting us!’ and that it might be a while until the issue is resolved. I assume that’s because this is the point where finally a decision has to be made by a human being. It is annoying indeed.”

Finally, it’s interesting to take a line from Target’s analysis of Lovelace’s program. “She thought carefully about how operations could be organized into groups that could be repeated, thereby inventing the loop,” he writes.

10 DELETE “DID”
20 PROFIT?
30 GOTO 10

Source: Don’t Use the Word ‘Did’ or a Dumb Anti-Piracy Company Will Delete You From Google – TorrentFreak

Facebook was repeatedly warned of security flaw that led to biggest data breach in its history

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Facebook knew about a huge security flaw that let hackers to steal personal data from millions of its users almost one year before the crime, yet failed to fix it in time, the Telegraph can reveal.

Legal documents show that the company was repeatedly warned by its own employees as well as outsiders about a dangerous loophole that eventually led to the massive data breach in September 2018.

Despite this, the loophole remained open for nine months after it was first raised, leading employees to later speak of their “guilt” and “hurt” at knowing that the attack “could have been prevented”.

The breach, which involved stealing digital “access tokens” used by Facebook to verify users’ identity without needing their passwords, exposed the names, phone numbers and email addresses of 29 million people and a host of more intimate data for 14 million of them, putting users around the world at risk of identity theft….

Source: Facebook was repeatedly warned of security flaw that led to biggest data breach in its history

Booknooks Bookshelf Inserts Add Mystery to Your Bookshelf

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Suddenly in December 2019, booknooks were discovered:

Take a look behind the ‘small doors to imaginary spaces’ within bookshelves – BBC News

A "book nook" - a small diorama of an alleyway visible between books on a bookshelf
Post image

Twitter post by @monde55212068: 路地裏bookshelf 文庫本サイズを作りました。両面を開くことはできませんが小さくて可愛らしいです。電源スイッチを表面につけました。制作2018年 材質 木#design #art #bookend #路地裏#文庫

Image Copyright @monde55212068 @monde55212068

A book nook. It is a bookcase model with a light

And Bored Panda had a look at 33 Bookshelf Inserts That Book Lovers Will Appreciate

I Made A Booknook For A Christmas Gift, My Inspiration Was Blade Runner. It's 11" X 6"
Witch Is Watching You
Post image

Unfortunately the term Booknook is not yet a keyword, so when searching you will find loads of other stuff you’re not looking for. So here Is some stuff I have found for you:

To Buy

Etsy:

Old town Japan miniature diorama bookend booknook shelf insert

Old town Japan miniature diorama bookend booknook shelf insert image 0

Book Nook – Book Shelf Insert – Book Shelf Decoration – Bookend (Wood)

Book Nook Book Shelf Insert Book Shelf Decoration image 4

Book nook bookshelf insert art Hidden world of old Italy patio – Booknook alley is original book lover gift

Book nook bookshelf insert art Hidden world of old Italy patio image 0

Whimsical themed booknook shelf insert.

Whimsical themed booknook shelf insert. image 0

Ebay

LEMAX Caddington Village Joseph Marley Antiques Victors Book Nook Lighted House

LEMAX-Caddington-Village-Joseph-Marley-Antiques-Victors-Book-Nook-Lighted-House

LEMAX 2004 Sutton’s Folk Art and Crafts + Marley Antiques/Victor’s Book Nook

LEMAX-2004-Sutton-039-s-Folk-Art-and-Crafts-Marley-Antiques-Victor-039-s-Book-Nook

Smaller sellers

TECHARGE

Japan Old Town Booknook Shelf Insert

Wizard Alley Booknook – A cozy wizard shopping alley on your bookshelf (Kickstarter)

Making your Own

People seem to make these mainly from wood or plastic. 3D printing is a thing, so on Thingiverse, some people are sharing their designs so you can print your own (and then paint it yourself)

3D Models

AlphaLyr’s Booknook contains a right wall, left wall, lantern and 2 signs

kborisov’s Fantasy Bookshelf Insert includes two bridge halves, cobbles, objects and left and right walls.

FiveNights has a Bookshelf Insert – Magic Book

FiveNights also has a different version, Magic Book II

Cardboard and plastics

A Cardboard Alley Bookshelf Howto

Warhammer 40k plastic model

Inspiration

Reddit has a few subreddits worth visiting:

/r/guidebooknook/ A guidebook for booknooks. DIY, design tips, STL files and ideas

/r/booknook/ Booknooks

How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails

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The popular Edison email app, which is in the top 100 productivity apps on the Apple app store, scrapes users’ email inboxes and sells products based off that information to clients in the finance, travel, and e-Commerce sectors. The contents of Edison users’ inboxes are of particular interest to companies who can buy the data to make better investment decisions, according to a J.P. Morgan document obtained by Motherboard.

On its website Edison says that it does “process” users’ emails, but some users did not know that when using the Edison app the company scrapes their inbox for profit. Motherboard has also obtained documentation that provides more specifics about how two other popular apps—Cleanfox and Slice—sell products based on users’ emails to corporate clients.

Source: How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails – VICE

The advertising industry is systematically breaking the law says Norweigan consumer council

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Based on the findings, more than 20 consumer and civil society organisations in Europe and from different parts of the world are urging their authorities to investigate the practices of the online advertising industry.

The report uncovers how every time we use apps, hundreds of shadowy entities are receiving personal data about our interests, habits, and behaviour. This information is used to profile consumers, which can be used for targeted advertising, but may also lead to discrimination, manipulation and exploitation.

– These practices are out of control and in breach of European data protection legislation. The extent of tracking makes it impossible for us to make informed choices about how our personal data is collected, shared and used, says Finn Myrstad, director of digital policy in the Norwegian Consumer Council.

The Norwegian Consumer Council is now filing formal complaints against Grindr, a dating app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people and companies that were receiving personal data through the app;  Twitter`s MoPub, AT&T’s AppNexus, OpenX, AdColony and Smaato. The complaints are directed to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority for breaches of the General Data Protection Regulation.

[…]

Every time you open an app like Grindr advertisement networks get your GPS location, device identifiers and even the fact that you use a gay dating app. This is an insane violation of users’ EU privacy rights, says Max Schrems, founder of the European privacy non-profit NGO noyb.

The harmful effects of profiling

Many actors in the online advertising industry collect information about us from a variety of places, including web browsing, connected devices, and social media. When combined, this data provides a complex picture of individuals, revealing what we do in our daily lives, our secret desires, and our most vulnerable moments.

–  This massive commercial surveillance is systematically at odds with our fundamental rights  and can be used to discriminate, manipulate and exploit us. The widespread tracking also has the potential to seriously degrade consumer trust in digital services, says Myrstad.

– Furthermore, in a recent Amnesty International report, Amnesty showed how these data-driven business models are a serious threat to human rights such as freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought, and the right to equality and non-discrimination.

[…]

– The situation is completely out of control. In order to shift the significant power imbalance between consumers and third party companies, the current practices of extensive tracking and profiling have to end, says Myrstad.

– There are very few actions consumers can take to limit or prevent the massive tracking and data sharing that is happening all across the internet. Authorities must take active enforcement measures to protect consumers against the illegal exploitation of personal data.

Source: New study: The advertising industry is systematically breaking the law : Forbrukerrådet

Confusing car autopilots using projections

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The absence of deployed vehicular communication systems, which prevents the advanced driving assistance systems (ADASs) and autopilots of semi/fully autonomous cars to validate their virtual perception regarding the physical environment surrounding the car with a third party, has been exploited in various attacks suggested by researchers. Since the application of these attacks comes with a cost (exposure of the attacker’s identity), the delicate exposure vs. application balance has held, and attacks of this kind have not yet been encountered in the wild. In this paper, we investigate a new perceptual challenge that causes the ADASs and autopilots of semi/fully autonomous to consider depthless objects (phantoms) as real. We show how attackers can exploit this perceptual challenge to apply phantom attacks and change the abovementioned balance, without the need to physically approach the attack scene, by projecting a phantom via a drone equipped with a portable projector or by presenting a phantom on a hacked digital billboard that faces the Internet and is located near roads. We show that the car industry has not considered this type of attack by demonstrating the attack on today’s most advanced ADAS and autopilot technologies: Mobileye 630 PRO and the Tesla Model X, HW 2.5; our experiments show that when presented with various phantoms, a car’s ADAS or autopilot considers the phantoms as real objects, causing these systems to trigger the brakes, steer into the lane of oncoming traffic, and issue notifications about fake road signs. In order to mitigate this attack, we present a model that analyzes a detected object’s context, surface, and reflected light, which is capable of detecting phantoms with 0.99 AUC. Finally, we explain why the deployment of vehicular communication systems might reduce attackers’ opportunities to apply phantom attacks but won’t eliminate them.

​

Source: Phantom of the ADAS

In Trump fascist playbook, Johnson trying to kill BBC licence fee in favour of a subscription model due to BBC being critical, independent

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Claims were made on Sunday that No 10may be preparing a new onslaught on the BBC with a threat to scrap the television licence fee and turn it into a subscription service.

The Sunday Times quoted a senior source as saying that the broadcaster could be forced to sell off most of its radio stations in a “massive pruning back” of its activities.

The source told the paper that Boris Johnson was “really strident” on the need for serious reform. They said there would be a consultation on replacing the licence fee with a subscription model, adding: “We will whack it.”

The paper said that the number of BBC television channels could also be reduced, the website scaled back and stars banned from cashing in on well-paid second jobs.

This potential attack will be seen as a further escalation of the hostilities between No 10 and the corporation, with many Tories still angry at its coverage of last year’s general election. The government is already consulting on proposals to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee, and ministers have suggested it could be abolished altogether when the BBC’s charter comes up for renewal in 2027.

It was reported that the review will be led by former culture secretary John Whittingdale, who was reappointed to his old department in last week’s reshuffle.

The Sunday Times quoted one source as saying: “We are not bluffing on the licence fee. We are having a consultation and we will whack it. It has got to be a subscription model. They’ve got hundreds of radio stations, they’ve got all these TV stations and a massive website. The whole thing needs massive pruning back.

“They should have a few TV stations, a couple of radio stations and massively curtailed online presence and put more money and effort into the World Service which is part of its core job. The PM is firmly of the view that there needs to be serious reform. He is really strident on this.”

The warning comes after the BBC chairman, Sir David Clementi, last week mounted a strong defence of the licence fee system. He warned that putting the broadcaster behind a paywall would undermine its ability to “bring the country together”.

Meanwhile the prime minister’s aides also turned their fire on highly paid BBC stars who made huge sums from outside work, suggesting they should be forced to donate the money to charity.

“It’s an outrage that people who make their profile at public expense should seek to give themselves further financial rewards and personal gain,” one source told the paper. “They’re basically making their names on the taxpayer and cashing in. The BBC should immediately halt this practice and give the money to good causes.”

Source: No 10 could scrap BBC licence fee in favour of a subscription model | Media | The Guardian

Not giving out interviews and destroying critical thought are hallmarks of fascism. In order for democracy to work, people need as much information as they can get, from as many informed angles as they can get. And this is something the BBC can do, due to it’s independent money source. It doesn’t have to pander to the Love Island crowd.

Car ‘splatometer’ tests reveal 80% decline in number of insects in last decade

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Two scientific studies of the number of insects splattered by cars have revealed a huge decline in abundance at European sites in two decades.

The research adds to growing evidence of what some scientists have called an “insect apocalypse”, which is threatening a collapse in the natural world that sustains humans and all life on Earth. A third study shows plummeting numbers of aquatic insects in streams.

The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects.

The second survey, in the UK county of Kent in 2019, examined splats in a grid placed over car registration plates, known as a “splatometer”. This revealed 50% fewer impacts than in 2004. The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects.

“This difference we found is critically important, because it mirrors the patterns of decline which are being reported widely elsewhere, and insects are absolutely fundamental to food webs and the existence of life on Earth,” said Paul Tinsley-Marshall from Kent Wildlife Trust. “It’s pretty horrendous.”

[…]

The Danish research, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, used data from an average of 65 car journeys a year on the same stretch of road and at the same speed between 1997 and 2017. Møller took account of the time of day, temperature, wind speed and date of the journey and found an 80% decline in insect abundance over the 21-year period. Checks using insect nets and sticky traps showed the same trend.

Møller said the causes were likely to be “a bit of everything”, but noted significant changes due to global heating. “In my 50 years, the temperature in April, May and June has increased by 1.5C [2.7F] on average in my study area,” he said. “The amount of rain has increased by 50%. We are talking about dramatic differences.”

The stream research, published in the journal Conservation Biology, analysed weekly data from 1969 to 2010 on a stream in a German nature reserve, where the only major human impact is climate change.

“Overall, water temperature increased by 1.88C and discharge patterns changed significantly. These changes were accompanied by an 81.6% decline in insect abundance,” the scientists reported. “Our results indicate that climate change has already altered [wildlife] communities severely, even in protected areas.”

Source: Car ‘splatometer’ tests reveal huge decline in number of insects | Environment | The Guardian

Netflix Loses Bid to Dismiss $25 Million Lawsuit Over ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’ because someone feels they own the phrase: choose your own adventure

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Chooseco LLC, a children’s book publisher, filed its complaint in January 2019. According to the plaintiff, it has been using the mark since the 1980s and has sold more than 265 million copies of its Choose Your Own Adventure books. 20th Century Fox holds options for movie versions, and Chooseco alleges that Netflix actively pursued a license. Instead of getting one, Netflix released Bandersnatch, which allows audiences to select the direction of the plot. Claiming $25 million in damages, Chooseco suggested that Bandersnatch viewers have been confused about association with its famous brand, particularly because of marketing around the movie as well as a scene where the main character — a video game developer — tells his father that the work he’s developing is based on a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

In reaction to the lawsuit, Netflix raised a First Amendment defense, particularly the balancing test in Rogers v. Grimaldi, whereby unless a work has no artistic relevance, the use of a mark must be misleading for it to be actionable.

U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions agrees that Bandersnatch is an artistic work even if Netflix derived profit from exploiting the Charlie Brooker film.

And the judge says that use of the trademark has artistic relevance.

“Here, the protagonist of Bandersnatch attempts to convert the fictional book ‘Bandersnatch’ into a videogame, placing the book at the center of the film’s plot,” states the ruling. “Netflix used Chooseco’s mark to describe the interactive narrative structure shared by the book, the videogame, and the film itself. Moreover, Netflix intended this narrative structure to comment on the mounting influence technology has in modern day life. In addition, the mental imagery associated with Chooseco’s mark adds to Bandersnatch’s 1980s aesthetic. Thus, Netflix’s use of Chooseco’s mark clears the purposely-low threshold of Rogers’ artistic relevance prong.”

Thus, the final question is whether Netflix’s film is explicitly misleading. Judge Sessions doesn’t believe it’s appropriate to dismiss the case prematurely without exploring factual issues in discovery.

“Here, Chooseco has sufficiently alleged that consumers associate its mark with interactive books and that the mark covers other forms of interactive media, including films,” continues the decision. “The protagonist in Bandersnatch explicitly stated that the fictitious book at the center of the film’s plot was a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book. In addition, the book, the videogame, and the film itself all employ the same type of interactivity as Chooseco’s products. The similarity between Chooseco’s products, Netflix’s film, and the fictitious book Netflix described as a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book increases the likelihood of consumer confusion.”

Netflix also attempted to defend its use of “Choose Your Own Adventure” as descriptive fair use. Here, too, the judge believes that factual exploration is appropriate.

Writes Sessions, “The physical characteristics and context of the use demonstrate that it is at least plausible Netflix used the term to attract public attention by associating the film with Chooseco’s book series.”

The decision adds that while Netflix contends that the phrase in question has been used by others to describe a branch of storytelling, that argument entails consideration of facts outside of Chooseco’s complaint, which at this stage must be accepted as true.

“Additionally, choose your own adventure arguably is not purely descriptive of narrative techniques — it requires at least some imagination to link the phrase to interactive plotlines,” writes Sessions. “Moreover, any descriptive aspects of the phrase may stem from Chooseco’s mark itself. In other words, the phrase may only have descriptive qualities because Chooseco attached it to its popular interactive book series. The Court lacks the facts necessary to determine whether consumers perceive the phrase in a descriptive sense or whether they simply associate it with Chooseco’s brand.”

Here’s the full decision allowing Chooseco’s Lanham Act and unfair competition claims to proceed.

The ruling may be surprising to some, particularly as there’s a line of cases where studios have escaped trademark claims over content. For example, see Warner Bros.’ win a few years ago over “Clean Slate” in The Dark Knight Rises. If Netflix and Chooseco can’t come to a settlement, many of these issues may be re-explored at the summary judgment round.

Source: Netflix Loses Bid to Dismiss $25 Million Lawsuit Over ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’ | Hollywood Reporter

Wow, copyright law is beyond strange.

Plastic surgery images and invoices leak from unsecured database

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Thousands of images, videos and records pertaining to plastic surgery patients were left on an unsecured database where they could be viewed by anyone with the right IP address, researchers said Friday. The data included about 900,000 records, which researchers say could belong to thousands of different patients.

The data was generated at clinics around the world using software made by French imaging company NextMotion. Images in the database included before-and-after photos of cosmetic procedures. Those photos often contained nudity, the researchers said. Other records included images of invoices that contained information that would identify a patient. The database is now secured.

Researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found the exposed database. They published their research with vpnMentor, a security website that rates VPN services and earns commissions when readers make purchases. Rotem said he sees exposed health care databases all too often as part of his web-mapping project, which looks for exposed data.

“The state of privacy protection, especially in health care, is really abysmal,” Rotem said.

NextMotion, which says on its website that it has 170 clinics as customers in 35 countries, said in a statement to its clients that it had addressed the problem.”We immediately took corrective steps and this same company formally guaranteed that the security flaw had completely disappeared,” said NextMotion CEO Emmanuel Elard in the statement. “This incident only reinforced our ongoing concern to protect your data and your patients’ data when you use the Nextmotion application.”

Elard went to apologize for the “fortunately minor incident.”

While NextMotion said the photos and videos don’t include names or other identifying information, many of the images show patients’ faces, according to vpnMonitor. Some of the invoices detail the types of procedures patients received, such as acne scar removal and abdominoplasty, and contain patients’ names and other identifying information.

Source: Plastic surgery images and invoices leak from unsecured database – CNET

Google’s Autoflip Can Intelligently Crop Videos

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Google has released an open-source tool, Autoflip, that could make bad cropping a thing of the past by intelligently reframing video to correctly fit alternate aspect ratios.

In a blog post, Google’s AI team wrote that footage shot for television and desktop computers normally comes in a 16:9 or 4:3 format, but with mobile devices now outpacing TV in terms of video consumption, the footage is often displayed in a way that looks odd to the end-user. Fixing this problem typically requires “video curators to manually identify salient contents on each frame, track their transitions from frame-to-frame, and adjust crop regions accordingly throughout the video,” soaking up time and effort that could be better spent on other work.

Autoflip aims to fix that with a framework that applies video stabilizer-esque techniques to keep the camera focused on what’s important in the footage. Using “ML-enabled object detection and tracking technologies to intelligently understand video content” built on the MediaPipe framework, Google’s team wrote, it’s able to adjust the frame of a video on the fly.

Gif: Google AI

What’s more, Autoflip automatically adjusts between scenes by identifying “changes in the composition that signify scene changes in order to isolate scenes for processing,” according to the company. Finally, it analyzes each scene to determine whether it should use a static frame or tracking mode.

Illustration for article titled Googles Autoflip Can Intelligently Crop Videos on the Fly to Fit Any Aspect Ratio
Graphic: Google AI

This is pretty neat and offers obvious advantages over static cropping of videos, though it’s probably better suited to things like news footage and Snapchat videos than movies and TV shows (where being able to view an entire shot is more important).

For a more technical explanation of how all this works, the Google AI team explained the various technologies involved in its blog post. The project’s source code is also available to view on Github, along with instructions on how to take it for a spin.

Source: Google’s Autoflip Can Intelligently Crop Videos

Printing tiny, high-precision objects in a matter of seconds

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Researchers at EPFL have developed a new, high-precision method for 3D-printing small, soft objects. The process, which takes less than 30 seconds from start to finish, has potential applications in a wide range of fields, including 3D bioprinting.

It all starts with a translucent liquid. Then, as if by magic, darker spots begin to form in the small, spinning container until, barely half a minute later, the finished product takes shape. This groundbreaking 3D-printing method, developed by researchers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices (LAPD), can be used to make tiny objects with unprecedented precision and resolution – all in record time. The team has published its findings in the journal Nature Communications, and a spin-off, Readily3D, has been set up to develop and market the system.

The technology could have innovative applications in a wide range of fields, but its advantages over existing methods – the ability to print solid parts of different textures – make it ideally suited for medicine and biology. The process could be used, for instance, to make soft objects such as tissue, organs, hearing aids and mouthguards.

“Conventional 3D printing techniques, known as additive manufacturing, build parts layer by layer,” explains Damien Loterie, the CEO of Readily3D. “The problem is that soft objects made that way quickly fall apart.” What’s more, the process can be used to make delicate cell-laden scaffolds in which cells can develop in a pressure-free 3D environment. The researchers teamed up with a surgeon to test 3D-printed arteries made using the technique. “The trial results were extremely encouraging,” says Loterie.

Hardened by light

The new technique draws on the principles of tomography, a method used mainly in medical imaging to build a model of an object based on surface scans.

The printer works by sending a laser through the translucent gel – either a biological gel or liquid plastic, as required. “It’s all about the light,” explains Paul Delrot, Readily3D’s CTO. “The laser hardens the liquid through a process of polymerization. Depending on what we’re building, we use algorithms to calculate exactly where we need to aim the beams, from what angles, and at what dose.”

The system is currently capable of making two-centimeter structures with a precision of 80 micrometers, about the same as the diameter of a strand of hair. But as the team develops new devices, they should be able to build much bigger objects, potentially up to 15 centimeters. “The process could also be used to quickly build small silicone or acrylic parts that don’t need finishing after printing,” says Christophe Moser, who heads the LAPD. Interior design could be a potentially lucrative market for the new printer.

References“High-resolution tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing”, Damien Loterie, Paul Delrot, Christophe Moser, published in Nature Communication on February 12, 2020.

Source: Printing tiny, high-precision objects in a matter of seconds – EPFL

Apple’s Mac computers now outpace Windows in malware and virus

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Think your Apple product is safe from malware? That only people using Windows machines have to take precautions? According to cybersecurity software company Malwarebytes’ latest State of Malware report, it’s time to think again. The amount of malware on Macs is outpacing PCs for the first time ever, and your complacency could be your worst enemy.

“People need to understand that they’re not safe just because they’re using a Mac,” Thomas Reed, Malwarebytes’ director of Mac and mobile and contributor to the report, told Recode.

Windows machines still dominate the market share and tend to have more security vulnerabilities, which has for years made them the bigger and easier target for hackers. But as Apple’s computers have grown in popularity, hackers appear to be focusing more of their attention on the versions of macOS that power them. Malwarebytes said there was a 400 percent increase in threats on Mac devices from 2018 to 2019, and found an average of 11 threats per Mac devices, which about twice the 5.8 average on Windows.

“There is a rising tide of Mac threats hitting a population that still believes that ‘Macs don’t get viruses,’” Reed said. “I still frequently encounter people who firmly believe this, and who believe that using any kind of security software is not necessary, or even harmful. This makes macOS a fertile ground for the influx of new threats, whereas it’s common knowledge that Windows PCs need security software.”

Now, this isn’t quite as bad as it may appear. First of all, as Malwarebytes notes, the increase in threats could be attributable to an increase in Mac devices running its software. That makes the per-device statistic a better barometer. In 2018, there were 4.8 threats per Mac device, which means the per-device number has more than doubled. That’s not great, but it’s not as bad as that 400 percent increase.

Source: Apple’s Mac computers now outpace Windows in malware and virus – Vox

From models of galaxies to atoms, simple AI shortcuts speed up simulations by billions of times

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Modeling immensely complex natural phenomena such as how subatomic particles interact or how atmospheric haze affects climate can take many hours on even the fastest supercomputers. Emulators, algorithms that quickly approximate these detailed simulations, offer a shortcut. Now, work posted online shows how artificial intelligence (AI) can easily produce accurate emulators that can accelerate simulations across all of science by billions of times.

“This is a big deal,” says Donald Lucas, who runs climate simulations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was not involved in the work. He says the new system automatically creates emulators that work better and faster than those his team designs and trains, usually by hand. The new emulators could be used to improve the models they mimic and help scientists make the best of their time at experimental facilities. If the work stands up to peer review, Lucas says, “It would change things in a big way.”

[…]

creating training data for them requires running the full simulation many times—the very thing the emulator is meant to avoid.

[…]

with a technique called neural architecture search, the most data-efficient wiring pattern for a given task can be identified.

The technique, called Deep Emulator Network Search (DENSE), relies on a general neural architecture search co-developed by Melody Guan, a computer scientist at Stanford University. It randomly inserts layers of computation between the networks’ input and output, and tests and trains the resulting wiring with the limited data. If an added layer enhances performance, it’s more likely to be included in future variations. Repeating the process improves the emulator.

[…]

The researchers used DENSE to develop emulators for 10 simulations—in physics, astronomy, geology, and climate science. One simulation, for example, models the way soot and other atmospheric aerosols reflect and absorb sunlight, affecting the global climate. It can take a thousand of computer-hours to run, so Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at Oxford and study co-author, sometimes uses a machine learning emulator. But, he says, it’s tricky to set up, and it can’t produce high-resolution outputs, no matter how many data you give it.

The emulators that DENSE created, in contrast, excelled despite the lack of data. When they were turbocharged with specialized graphical processing chips, they were between about 100,000 and 2 billion times faster than their simulations. That speedup isn’t unusual for an emulator, but these were highly accurate: In one comparison, an astronomy emulator’s results were more than 99.9% identical to the results of the full simulation, and across the 10 simulations the neural network emulators were far better than conventional ones. Kasim says he thought DENSE would need tens of thousands of training examples per simulation to achieve these levels of accuracy. In most cases, it used a few thousand, and in the aerosol case only a few dozen.

Source: From models of galaxies to atoms, simple AI shortcuts speed up simulations by billions of times | Science | AAAS

Data Protection Authority Investigates Avast for Selling Users’ Browsing and Maps History

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On Tuesday, the Czech data protection authority announced an investigation into antivirus company Avast, which was harvesting the browsing history of over 100 million users and then selling products based on that data to a slew of different companies including Google, Microsoft, and Home Depot. The move comes after a joint Motherboard and PCMag investigation uncovered details of the data collection through a series of leaked documents.

“On the basis of the information revealed describing the practices of Avast Software s.r.o., which was supposed to sell data on the activities of anti-virus users through its ‘Jumpshot division’ the Office initiated a preliminary investigation of the case,” a statement from the Czech national data protection authority on its website reads. Under the European General Protection Regulation (GDPR) and national laws, the Czech Republic, like other EU states, has a data protection authority to enforce things like mishandling of personal data. With GDPR, companies can be fined for data abuses.

“At the moment we are collecting information on the whole case. There is a suspicion of a serious and extensive breach of the protection of users’ personal data. Based on the findings, further steps will be taken and general public will be informed in due time,“ added Ms Ivana Janů, President of the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection, in the statement. Avast is a Czech company.

Motherboard and PCMag’s investigation found that the data sold included Avast users’ Google searches and Google Maps lookups, particular YouTube videos, and people visiting specific porn videos. The data was anonymized, but multiple experts said it could be possible to unmask the identity of users, especially when that data, sold by Avast’s subsidiary Jumpshot, was combined with other data that its clients may possess.

Days after the investigation, Avast bought back a 35 percent stake in Jumpshot worth $61 million, and shuttered Jumpshot. Avast’s valuation fell by a quarter, will incur costs between $15 and $25 million, and the closure Jumpshot will cut annual revenues by around $36 million and underlying profits by $7 million, The Times reported.

Source: Data Protection Authority Investigates Avast for Selling Users’ Browsing History – VICE

A Map of Every Object in Our Solar System

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View the high resolution version of this incredible map by clicking here

In this stunning visualization, biologist Eleanor Lutz painstakingly mapped out every known object in Earth’s solar system (>10km in diameter), hopefully helping you on your next journey through space.

Data-Driven Solar System

This particular visualization combines five different data sets from NASA:

Objects in solar system

Source: Tabletop Whale

From this data, Lutz mapped all the orbits of over 18,000 asteroids in the solar system, including 10,000 that were at least 10km in diameter, and about 8,000 objects of unknown size.

This map shows each asteroid’s position on New Year’s Eve 1999.

The Pull of Gravity

When plotting the objects, Lutz observed that the solar system is not arranged in linear distances. Rather, it is logarithmic, with exponentially more objects situated close to the sun. Lutz made use of this observation to space out their various orbits of the 18,000 objects in her map.

What she is visualizing is the pull of the sun, as the majority of objects tend to gravitate towards the inner part of the solar system. This is the same observation Sir Isaac Newton used to develop the concept of gravity, positing that heavier objects produce a bigger gravitational pull than lighter ones. Since the sun is the largest object in our solar system, it has the strongest gravitational pull.

If the sun is continually pulling at the planets, why don’t they all fall into the sun? It’s because the planets are moving sideways at the same time.

orbiting around the sun

Without that sideways motion, the objects would fall to the center – and without the pull toward the center, it would go flying off in a straight line.

This explains the clustering of patterns in solar systems, and why the farther you travel through the solar system, the bigger the distance and the fewer the objects.

The Top Ten Non-Planets in the Solar System

We all know that the sun and the planets are the largest objects in our corner of the universe, but there are many noteworthy objects as well.

Rank Name Diameter Notes
1 Ganymede 3,273 mi (5,268 km) Jupiter’s largest moon
2 Titan 3,200 mi (5,151 km) Saturn’s largest moon
3 Callisto 2,996 mi (4,821 km) Jupiter’s second largest moon
4 Io 2,264 mi (3,643 km) Moon orbiting Jupiter
5 Moon 2,159 mi (3,474 km) Earth’s only moon
6 Europa 1,940 mi (3,122 km) Moon orbiting Jupiter
7 Triton 1,680 mi (2,710 km) Neptune’s largest moon
8 Pluto 1,476 mi (2,376 km) Dwarf planet
9 Eris 1,473 mi (2,372 km) Dwarf planet
10 Titania 981 mi (1,578 km) Uranus’ largest moon

Source: Ourplnt.com

While the map only shows objects greater than 10 kilometers in diameter, there are plenty of smaller objects to watch out for as well.

An Atlas of Space

This map is one among many of Lutz’s space related visualizations. She is also in the process of creating an Atlas of Space to showcase her work.

As we reach further and further beyond the boundaries of earth, her work may come in handy the next time you make a wrong turn at Mars and find yourself lost in an asteroid belt.

Source: A Map of Every Object in Our Solar System – Visual Capitalist

FTC finally wakes up: American watchdog to probe decade of Big Tech takeovers

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An American biz watchdog has stepped up its probe into possible market abuse by Big Tech – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft – by demanding information on all acquisitions not reported to antitrust authorities in the past decade.

The FTC issued “special orders” to the big five on Tuesday requesting “the terms, scope, structure, and purpose of transactions that each company consummated between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2019.” That will amount to information on hundreds of deals, the FTC said during a press conference.

If the federal regulator finds a pattern of wrongdoing or abuse of market dominance, it will use its full range of enforcement actions, from a warning all the way up to a “full divestiture of assets” i.e. breaking a company up, FTC chair Joe Simons warned.

The watchdog is adopting a “very broad definition” of the term acquisition including minority investments in companies, licensing transactions, rights to appoint someone to a board. Notably it will also treat data “as an asset that could have competitive effects.”

The goal behind the request is to help the FTC “deepen its understanding of large technology firms’ acquisition activity,” the regulator explained. But Simons was at pains to note that the information is not related to law enforcement actions and will not be shared with other agencies.

That’s relevant because the Department of Justice and a large number of state attorneys general are currently suing the same tech giants over anti-competitive behavior; the FTC data will not be shareable with them under the “unique” authority that the FTC is invoking, it stated.

However, Simons noted, if the FTC does find activity it feels is anti-competitive it will use it as a start point for further investigation; something that could result in the “unwinding” of deals made in the past decade.

Snuffing out competition

There have been numerous reports in the past 10 years of big tech giants buying out competitors that threaten their market and then shuttering them in order to maintain effective monopolies in specific markets.

Simons said the impetus behind today’s order was a series of hearings the FTC held at the tail-end of 2018 where a number of panelists warned large tech platforms were buying up “nascent” companies in order to shut them down.

He painted the special orders as a “follow-up” to those hearings. “We heard at the hearings that there were a lot of transactions by major tech platforms that are not reportable,” Simons said. “What we want to know is why they were not reportable and whether there is anything we should do about it.”

Under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act (HSR Act), companies are required to report acquisitions of other companies if the size of that acquisition is greater than $94m (the exact figure has changed over time; in 2010 it was $60m). There are, however, exemptions that tech giants may have used to make larger acquisitions without reporting them.

As a result, dozens and possibly hundreds of market-altering purchases have never been made public – and that’s how the tech giants like it. They will often refuse to even acknowledge if they have bought a company. Many of the deals come with a non-compete clause, Simons noted, pointing to possible market interference.

[…]

The investigation could result in a change to the current rules on reporting acquisitions, the regulator noted – something that would not require Congressional authority. It also dismissed concerns that the tech giants could question the FTC’s authority to even issue such orders – something that AT&T successfully did during a five-year legal battle over misleading consumers – saying that it “does not expect any meaningful challenge” to the orders.

The regulator even suggested that if it finds anti-competitive behavior as a result of its information requests it could issue an order in future that would require tech giants to provide full details of any and all future acquisitions.

Judging by the impact of the announcement on the companies’ stock prices, the FTC investigation is only expected to impact Facebook – no doubt because the agency made it clear that it now views user data as a competitive asset.

Source: Oh good, the FTC has discovered acqui-hires… American watchdog to probe decade of Big Tech takeovers • The Register