Lithium Sulfur Battery Project Aims To Double The Range Of Electric Airplanes – good to see another new type of battery apparently maturing, but is it as green as alu-air?

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Today’s Tesla Model 3’s lithium-ion battery pack has an estimated 168 Wh/kg. And important as this energy-per-weight ratio is for electric cars, it’s more important still for electric aircraft.

Now comes Oxis Energy, of Abingdon, UK, with a battery based on lithium-sulfur chemistry that it says can greatly increase the ratio, and do so in a product that’s safe enough for use even in an electric airplane. Specifically, a plane built by Bye Aerospace, in Englewood, Colo., whose founder, George Bye, described the project in this 2017 article for IEEE Spectrum.

The two companies said in a statement that they were beginning a one-year joint project to demonstrate feasibility. They said the Oxis battery would provide “in excess” of 500 Wh/kg, a number which appears to apply to the individual cells, rather than the battery pack, with all its packaging, power electronics, and other paraphernalia. That per-cell figure may be compared directly to the “record-breaking energy density of 260 watt-hours per kilogram” that Bye cited for the batteries his planes were using in 2017.

[…]

One reason why lithium-sulfur batteries have been on the sidelines for so long is their short life, due to degradation of the cathode during the charge-discharge cycle. Oxis expects its batteries will be able to last for 500 such cycles within the next two years. That’s about par for the course for today’s lithium-ion batteries.

Another reason is safety: Lithium-sulfur batteries have been prone to overheating. Oxis says its design incorporates a ceramic lithium sulfide as a “passivation layer,” which blocks the flow of electricity—both to prevent sudden discharge and the more insidious leakage that can cause a lithium-ion battery to slowly lose capacity even while just sitting on a shelf. Oxis also uses a non-flammable electrolyte.

Presumably there is more to Oxis’s secret sauce than these two elements: The company says it has 186 patents, with 87 more pending.

Source: Lithium Sulfur Battery Project Aims To Double The Range Of Electric Airplanes IEEE Spectrum – IEEE Spectrum

But is it recyclable? See: non toxic recyclable Aluminium Air battery with nine times more density than li-ion batteries finally entering production. Tech has been around since around 1999, Navy veteran refused to accept a ‘no’ to his battery invention

Which is also clean, green technology.

Google Reportedly Amassed Private Health Data on Millions of People Without Their Knowledge – a repeat of October 2019 and 2017 in the UK

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The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the tech giant partnered with Ascension, a non-profit and Catholic health systems company, on the program code-named “Project Nightingale.” According to the Journal, Google began its initiative with Ascension last year, and it involves everything from diagnoses, lab results, birth dates, patient names, and other personal health data—all of it reportedly handed over to Google without first notifying patients or doctors. The Journal said this amounts to data on millions of Americans spanning 21 states.

“By working in partnership with leading healthcare systems like Ascension, we hope to transform the delivery of healthcare through the power of the cloud, data analytics, machine learning, and modern productivity tools—ultimately improving outcomes, reducing costs, and saving lives,” Tariq Shaukat, president of Google Cloud, said in a statement.

Beyond the alarming reality that a tech company can collect data about people without their knowledge for its own uses, the Journal noted it’s legal under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). When reached for comment, representatives for both companies pointed Gizmodo to a press release about the relationship—which the Journal stated was published after its report—that states: “All work related to Ascension’s engagement with Google is HIPAA compliant and underpinned by a robust data security and protection effort and adherence to Ascension’s strict requirements for data handling.”

Still, the Journal report raises concerns about whether the data handling is indeed as secure as both companies appear to think it is. Citing a source familiar with the matter as well as related documents, the paper said at least 150 employees at Google have access to a significant portion of the health data Ascension handed over on millions of people.

Google hasn’t exactly proven itself to be infallible when it comes to protecting user data. Remember when Google+ users had their data exposed and Google did nothing to alert in order to shield its own ass? Or when a Google contractor leaked more than a thousand Assistant recordings, and the company defended itself by claiming that most of its audio snippets aren’t reviewed by humans? Not exactly the kind of stuff you want to read about a company that may have your medical history on hand.

Source: Google Reportedly Amassed Private Health Data on Millions of People Without Their Knowledge

Google has been given the go-ahead to access five years’ worth of sensitive NHS patient data.

In a deal signed last month, the internet giant was handed hospital records of thousands of patients in England.

New documents show the data will include medical history, diagnoses, treatment dates and ethnic origin.

The news has raised concerns about the privacy of the data, which could now be harvested and commercialised.

It comes almost a year after Google absorbed the London-based AI lab DeepMind Health, a leading health technology developer.

DeepMind was bought by Google’s parent company Alphabet for £400 million ($520m) in 2014 and up until November 2018 had maintained independence.

But as of this year DeepMind transferred control of its health division to the parent company in California.

DeepMind had contracts to process medical record from three NHS trusts covering nine hospitals in England to develop its Streams mobile application.

From Google gets green light to access FIVE YEARS’ worth of sensitive patient data from NHS, sparking privacy fears

a data-sharing agreement between Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust – gives the clearest picture yet of what the company is doing and what sensitive data it now has access to.

The agreement gives DeepMind access to a wide range of healthcare data on the 1.6 million patients who pass through three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust – Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free – each year. This will include information about people who are HIV-positive, for instance, as well as details of drug overdoses and abortions. The agreement also includes access to patient data from the last five years.

“The data-sharing agreement gives Google access to information on millions of NHS patients”

DeepMind announced in February that it was working with the NHS, saying it was building an app called Streams to help hospital staff monitor patients with kidney disease. But the agreement suggests that it has plans for a lot more.

This is the first we’ve heard of DeepMind getting access to historical medical records, says Sam Smith, who runs health data privacy group MedConfidential. “This is not just about kidney function. They’re getting the full data.”

The agreement clearly states that Google cannot use the data in any other part of its business. The data itself will be stored in the UK by a third party contracted by Google, not in DeepMind’s offices. DeepMind is also obliged to delete its copy of the data when the agreement expires at the end of September 2017.

All data needed

Google says that since there is no separate dataset for people with kidney conditions, it needs access to all of the data in order to run Streams effectively. In a statement, the Royal Free NHS Trust says that it “provides DeepMind with NHS patient data in accordance with strict information governance rules and for the purpose of direct clinical care only.”

source: Revealed: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data (2017)

EU beurocracy, One man’s mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: What we can figure out about Europe’s Galileo satellites going dark

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While one key official has sought to blame a single individual for the system going dark, insiders warn that organizational chaos, excessive secrecy and some unusual self-regulation is as much to blame.

Combined with those problems, a battle between European organizations over the satellite system, and a delayed independent report into the July cock-up, means things aren’t looking good for Europe’s answer to America’s GPS system. A much needed shake-up may be on its way.

In mid-July, the agency in charge of the network of 26 satellites, the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency (EGSA), warned of a “service degradation” but assured everyone that it would quickly be resolved.

It wasn’t resolved however, and six days later the system was not only still down but getting increasingly inaccurate, with satellites reporting that they were in completely different positions in orbit than they were supposed to be – a big problem for a system whose entire purpose is to provide state-of-the-art positional accuracy to within 20 centimeters.

Billions of organizations, individuals, phones, apps and so on from across the globe simply stopped listening to Galileo. It’s hard to imagine a bigger mess, aside from the satellites crashing down to Earth.

But despite the outage and widespread criticism over the failure of those behind Galileo to explain what was going on and why, there has been almost no information from the various space agencies and organizations involved in the project.

Source: One man’s mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe’s Galileo satellites going dark • The Register

The rest is in the article itself

Sure, we made your Wi-Fi routers phone home with telemetry, says Ubiquiti. What of it?

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Ubiquiti Networks is fending off customer complaints after emitting a firmware update that caused its UniFi wireless routers to quietly phone HQ with telemetry.

It all kicked off when the US-based manufacturer confirmed that a software update released this month programmed the devices to establish secure connections back to Ubiquiti servers and report information on Wi-Fi router performance and crashes.

Ubiquiti told customers all of the information is being handled securely, and has been cleared to comply with GDPR, Europe’s data privacy rules. Punters are upset they weren’t warned of the change.

“We have started to gather crashes and other critical events strictly for the purpose of improving our products,” the hardware maker said. “Any data collected is completely anonymized, GDPR compliant, transmitted using end-to-end encryption and encrypted at rest. The collection of this data does not and should not ever impact performance of devices.”

The assurance was of little consolation to UniFi owners who bristled at the idea of any of their data being collected, particularly without any notification nor permission. In particular, enterprise customers were less than thrilled to learn diagnostic data was being exfiltrated off their network.

“Undisclosed backdooring of my network is completely unacceptable and will result in no longer recommending, using, or selling of Ubiquiti gear,” remarked one netizen using the alias Private_.

“I realize that UBNT is too big to care about the few tens of $K per year that I generate for them, but I want to formally and clearly disclose my privacy policy/EULA, so that we understand each other. This is a stealth network intrusion and I don’t/won’t accept it.”

Source: Sure, we made your Wi-Fi routers phone home with telemetry, says Ubiquiti. What of it? • The Register

Oh dear, you really can’t be doing that Ubiquity!

Amazon Ring doorbells exposed home Wi-Fi passwords over cleartext

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Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in Ring doorbells that exposed the passwords for the Wi-Fi networks to which they were connected.

Bitdefender said the Amazon-owned doorbell was sending owners’ Wi-Fi passwords in cleartext as the doorbell joins the local network, allowing nearby hackers to intercept the Wi-Fi password and gain access to the network to launch larger attacks or conduct surveillance.

“When first configuring the device, the smartphone app must send the wireless network credentials. This takes place in an unsecure manner, through an unprotected access point,” said Bitdefender. “Once this network is up, the app connects to it automatically, queries the device, then sends the credentials to the local network.”

But all of this is carried out over an unencrypted connection, exposing the Wi-Fi password that is sent over the air.

Amazon fixed the vulnerability in all Ring devices in September, but the vulnerability was only disclosed today.

Source: Amazon Ring doorbells exposed home Wi-Fi passwords to hackers | TechCrunch

DHS expects to have detailed biometrics on 260 million people by 2022 – and will keep them in the cloud, where they will never be stolen or hacked *cough*

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The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expects to have face, fingerprint, and iris scans of at least 259 million people in its biometrics database by 2022, according to a recent presentation from the agency’s Office of Procurement Operations reviewed by Quartz.

That’s about 40 million more than the agency’s 2017 projections, which estimated 220 million unique identities by 2022, according to previous figures cited by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a San Francisco-based privacy rights nonprofit.

A slide deck, shared with attendees at an Oct. 30 DHS industry day, includes a breakdown of what its systems currently contain, as well as an estimate of what the next few years will bring. The agency is transitioning from a legacy system called IDENT to a cloud-based system (hosted by Amazon Web Services) known as Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology, or HART. The biometrics collection maintained by DHS is the world’s second-largest, behind only India’s countrywide biometric ID network in size. The traveler data kept by DHS is shared with other US agencies, state and local law enforcement, as well as foreign governments.

The first two stages of the HART system are being developed by US defense contractor Northrop Grumman, which won the $95 million contract in February 2018. DHS wasn’t immediately available to comment on its plans for its database.

[…]

Last month’s DHS presentation describes IDENT as an “operational biometric system for rapid identification and verification of subjects using fingerprints, iris, and face modalities.” The new HART database, it says, “builds upon the foundational functionality within IDENT,” to include voice data, DNA profiles, “scars, marks, and tattoos,” and the as-yet undefined “other biometric modalities as required.” EFF researchers caution some of the data will be “highly subjective,” such as information gleaned during “officer encounters” and analysis of people’s “relationship patterns.”

EFF worries that such tracking “will chill and deter people from exercising their First Amendment protected rights to speak, assemble, and associate,” since such specific data points could be used to identify “political affiliations, religious activities, and familial and friendly relationships.”

[…]

EFF researchers said in a 2018 blog post that facial-recognition software, like what the DHS is using, is “frequently…inaccurate and unreliable.” DHS’s own tests found the systems “falsely rejected as many as 1 in 25 travelers,” according to EFF, which calls out potential foreign partners in countries such as the UK, where false-positives can reportedly reach as high as 98%. Women and people of color are misidentified at rates significantly higher than whites and men, and darker skin tones increase one’s chances of being improperly flagged.

“DHS is also partnering with airlines and other third parties to collect face images from travelers entering and leaving the US,” the EFF said. “When combined with data from other government agencies, these troubling collection practices will allow DHS to build a database large enough to identify and track all people in public places, without their knowledge—not just in places the agency oversees, like airports, but anywhere there are cameras.”

Source: DHS expects to have biometrics on 260 million people by 2022 — Quartz

House plants have little effect on indoor air quality, study concludes

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New research from a duo of environmental engineers at Drexel University is suggesting the decades-old claim that house plants improve indoor air quality is entirely wrong. Evaluating 30 years of studies, the research concludes it would take hundreds of plants in a small space to even come close to the air purifying effects of simply opening a couple of windows.

Back in 1989 an incredibly influential NASA study discovered a number of common indoor plants could effectively remove volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the air. The experiment, ostensibly conducted to investigate whether plants could assist in purifying the air on space stations, gave birth to the idea of plants in home and office environments helping clear the air.

Since then, a number of experimental studies have seemed to verify NASA’a findings that plants do remove VOCs from indoor environments. Professor of architectural and environmental engineering at Drexel University Michael Waring, and one of his PhD students, Bryan Cummings, were skeptical of this common consensus. The problem they saw was that the vast majority of these experiments were not conducted in real-world environments.

“Typical for these studies a potted plant was placed in a sealed chamber (often with a volume of a cubic meter or smaller), into which a single VOC was injected, and its decay was tracked over the course of many hours or days,” the duo writes in their study.

To better understand exactly how well potted plants can remove VOCs from indoor environments, the researchers reviewed the data from a dozen published experiments. They evaluated the efficacy of a plant’s ability to remove VOCs from the air using a metric called CADR, or clean air delivery rate.

“The CADR is the standard metric used for scientific study of the impacts of air purifiers on indoor environments,” says Waring, “but many of the researchers conducting these studies were not looking at them from an environmental engineering perspective and did not understand how building air exchange rates interplay with the plants to affect indoor air quality.”

Once the researchers had calculated the rate at which plants dissipated VOCs in each study they quickly discovered that the effect of plants on air quality in real-world scenarios was essentially irrelevant. Air handling systems in big buildings were found to be significantly more effective in dissipating VOCs in indoor environments. In fact, to clear VOCs from just one square meter (10.7 sq ft) of floor space would take up to 1,000 plants, or just the standard outdoor-to-indoor air exchange systems that already exist in most large buildings.

Source: House plants have little effect on indoor air quality, study concludes

This Trippy T-Shirt Makes You Invisible to AI

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In modern cities, we’re constantly surveilled through CCTV cameras in both public and private spaces, and by companies trying to sell us shit based on everything we do. We are always being watched.

But what if a simple T-shirt could make you invisible to commercial AIs trying to spot humans?

A team of researchers from Northeastern University, IBM, and MIT developed a T-shirt design that hides the wearer from image recognition systems by confusing the algorithms trying to spot people into thinking they’re invisible.

[…]

A T-shirt is a low-barrier way to move around the world unnoticed by AI watchers. Previously, researchers have tried to create adversarial fashion using patches attached to stiff cardboard, so that the design doesn’t distort on soft fabric while the wearer moves. If the design is warped or part of it isn’t visible, it becomes ineffective.

No one’s going to start carrying cardboard patches around, and most of us probably won’t put Juggalo paint on our faces (at least not until everyone’s doing it), so the researchers came up with an approach to account for the ways that moving cloth distorts an image when generating an adversarial design to print on a shirt. As a result, the new shirt allows the wearer to move naturally while (mostly) hiding the person.

It would be easy to dismiss this sort of thing as too far-fetched to become reality. But as more cities around the country push back against facial recognition in their communities, it’s not hard to imagine some kind of hypebeast Supreme x MIT collab featuring adversarial tees to fool people-detectors in the future. Security professional Kate Rose’s shirts that fool Automatic License Plate Readers, for example, are for sale and walking amongst us already.

Source: This Trippy T-Shirt Makes You Invisible to AI – VICE

The ‘Three-Body Problem’ Has Perplexed Astronomers Since Newton Formulated It. A.I. Just Cracked It in Under a Second.

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The mind-bending calculations required to predict how three heavenly bodies orbit each other have baffled physicists since the time of Sir Isaac Newton. Now artificial intelligence (A.I.) has shown that it can solve the problem in a fraction of the time required by previous approaches.

Newton was the first to formulate the problem in the 17th century, but finding a simple way to solve it has proved incredibly difficult. The gravitational interactions between three celestial objects like planets, stars and moons result in a chaotic system — one that is complex and highly sensitive to the starting positions of each body.

[…]

The algorithm they built provided accurate solutions up to 100 million times faster than the most advanced software program, known as Brutus.

[…]

Neural networks must be trained by being fed data before they can make predictions. So the researchers had to generate 9,900 simplified three-body scenarios using Brutus, the current leader when it comes to solving three-body problems.

They then tested how well the neural net could predict the evolution of 5,000 unseen scenarios, and found its results closely matched those of Brutus. However, the A.I.-based program solved the problems in an average of just a fraction of a second, compared with nearly 2 minutes.

The reason programs like Brutus are so slow is that they solve the problem by brute force, said Foley, carrying out calculations for each tiny step of the celestial bodies’ trajectories. The neural net, on the other hand, simply looks at the movements those calculations produce and deduces a pattern that can help predict how future scenarios will play out.

That presents a problem for scaling the system up, though, Foley said. The current algorithm is a proof-of-concept and learned from simplified scenarios, but training on more complex ones or even increasing the number of bodies involved to four of five first requires you to generate the data on Brutus, which can be extremely time-consuming and expensive.

Source: The ‘Three-Body Problem’ Has Perplexed Astronomers Since Newton Formulated It. A.I. Just Cracked It in Under a Second. | Live Science

T-Mobile says it owns exclusive rights to the color magenta and the letter T. German court agrees.

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Startup insurance provider Lemonade is trying to make the best of a sour situation after T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom claimed it owns the exclusive rights to the color magenta.

New York-based Lemonade is a 3-year-old company that lives completely online and mostly focuses on homeowners and renter’s insurance. The company uses a similar color to magenta — it says it’s “pink” — in its marketing materials and its website. But Lemonade was told by German courts that it must cease using its color after launching its services in that country, which is also home to T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom. Although the ruling only applies in Germany, Lemonade says it fears the decision will set a precedent and expand to other jurisdictions such as the U.S. or Europe.

“If some brainiac at Deutsche Telekom had invented the color, their possessiveness would make sense,” Daniel Schreiber, CEO and co-founder of Lemonade, said in a statement. “Absent that, the company’s actions just smack of corporate bully tactics, where legions of lawyers attempt to hog natural resources – in this case a primary color—that rightfully belong to everyone.”

A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom confirmed that it “asked the insurance company Lemonade to stop using the color magenta in the German market,” while adding that the “T” in “Deutsche Telekom” is registered to the brand. “Deutsche Telekom respects everyone’s trademark rights but expects others to do the same,” the spokesman said in an emailed statement to Ad Age.

Although Lemonade has complied with the ruling by removing its pink color from marketing materials in Germany, it’s also trying to turn the legal matter into an opportunity. The company today began throwing some shade in social media under the hashtag “#FreeThePink,” though a quick check on Twitter shows it’s gained little traction thus far: Schreiber, the company’s CEO, holds the top tweet under “#FreeThePink” with 13 retweets and 42 likes. 

Lemonade also filed a motion today with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, or EUIPO, to invalidate Deutsche Telekom’s magenta trademark.

Source: T-Mobile says it owns exclusive rights to the color magenta | AdAge

What. The. Fuck.

Facebook says 100 developers may have improperly accessed user data, like Cambridge Analytica did

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Facebook on Tuesday disclosed that as many as 100 software developers may have improperly accessed user data, including the names and profile pictures of people in specific groups on the social network.

The company recently discovered that some apps retained access to this type of user data despite making changes to its service in April 2018 to prevent this, Facebook said in a blog post. The company said it has removed this access and reached out to 100 developer partners who may have accessed the information. Facebook said that at least 11 developer partners accessed this type of data in the last 60 days.

“Although we’ve seen no evidence of abuse, we will ask them to delete any member data they may have retained and we will conduct audits to confirm that it has been deleted,” the company said in the blog post.

The company did not say how many users were affected.

Facebook has been restricting software developer access to its user data following reports in March 2018 that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly accessed the data of 87 million Facebook users, potentially to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Source: Facebook says 100 developers may have improperly accessed user data

Boeing whistleblower raises doubts over 787 oxygen system

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A Boeing whistleblower has claimed that passengers on its 787 Dreamliner could be left without oxygen if the cabin were to suffer a sudden decompression.

John Barnett says tests suggest up to a quarter of the oxygen systems could be faulty and might not work when needed.

He also claimed faulty parts were deliberately fitted to planes on the production line at one Boeing factory.

Boeing denies his accusations and says all its aircraft are built to the highest levels of safety and quality.

The firm has come under intense scrutiny in the wake of two catastrophic accidents involving another one of its planes, the 737 Max – the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March and Lion Air disaster in Indonesia last year.

Mr Barnett, a former quality control engineer, worked for Boeing for 32 years, until his retirement on health grounds in March 2017.

[…]

In 2016, he tells the BBC, he uncovered problems with emergency oxygen systems. These are supposed to keep passengers and crew alive if the cabin pressurisation fails for any reason at altitude. Breathing masks are meant to drop down from the ceiling, which then supply oxygen from a gas cylinder.

Without such systems, the occupants of a plane would rapidly be incapacitated. At 35,000ft, (10,600m) they would be unconscious in less than a minute. At 40,000ft, it could happen within 20 seconds. Brain damage and even death could follow.

Although sudden decompression events are rare, they do happen. In April 2018, for example, a window blew out of a Southwest Airlines aircraft, after being hit by debris from a damaged engine. One passenger sitting beside the window suffered serious injuries and later died as a result – but others were able to draw on the emergency oxygen supplies and survived unharmed.

[…]

Mr Barnett says that when he was decommissioning systems which had suffered minor cosmetic damage, he found that some of the oxygen bottles were not discharging when they were meant to. He subsequently arranged for a controlled test to be carried out by Boeing’s own research and development unit.

This test, which used oxygen systems that were “straight out of stock” and undamaged, was designed to mimic the way in which they would be deployed aboard an aircraft, using exactly the same electric current as a trigger. He says 300 systems were tested – and 75 of them did not deploy properly, a failure rate of 25%

Mr Barnett says his attempts to have the matter looked at further were stonewalled by Boeing managers. In 2017, he complained to the US regulator, the FAA, that no action had been taken to address the problem. The FAA, however, said it could not substantiate that claim, because Boeing had indicated it was working on the issue at the time.

Source: Boeing whistleblower raises doubts over 787 oxygen system – BBC News

Hottest October ever: Earth just experienced its hottest October ever

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Last month was the hottest ever October on record globally, according to data released Friday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, an organization that tracks global temperatures. The month, which was reportedly 1.24 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average October from 1981-2010, narrowly beat October 2015 for the top spot.

According to Copernicus, most of Europe, large parts of the Arctic and the eastern U.S. and Canada were most affected. The Middle East, much of Africa, southern Brazil, Australia, eastern Antarctica and Russia also experienced above-average temperatures.

Parts of tropical Africa and Antarctica and the western U.S. and Canada felt much colder than usual, however.

Source: Hottest October ever: Earth just experienced its hottest October ever – CBS News

A network of ‘camgirl’ sites exposed millions of users and sex workers data

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A number of popular “camgirl” sites have exposed millions of sex workers and users after the company running the sites left the back-end database unprotected.

The sites, run by Barcelona-based VTS Media, include amateur.tv, webcampornoxxx.net, and placercams.com. Most of the sites’ users are based in Spain and Europe, but we found evidence of users across the world, including the United States.

According to Alexa traffic rankings, amateur.tv is one of the most popular in Spain.

The database, containing months-worth of daily logs of the site activities, was left without a password for weeks. Those logs included detailed records of when users logged in — including usernames and sometimes their user-agents and IP addresses, which can be used to identify users. The logs also included users’ private chat messages with other users, as well as promotional emails they were receiving from the various sites. The logs even included failed login attempts, storing usernames and passwords in plaintext. We did not test the credentials as doing so would be unlawful.

None of the data was encrypted.

The exposed data also revealed which videos users were watching and renting, exposing kinks and private sexual preferences.

In all, the logs were detailed enough to see which users were logging in, from where, and often their email addresses or other identifiable information — which in some cases we could match to real-world identities.

Not only were users affected, the “camgirls” — who broadcast sexual content to viewers — also had some of their account information exposed.

Source: A network of ‘camgirl’ sites exposed millions of users and sex workers | TechCrunch

NL ISP Ziggo doesn’t have to share customer details of downloaders

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Dutch Filmworks demanded the subscriber data linked to 377 IP adresses they determined illegally downloaded a movie. The judge said no, due to a complete lack of transparency by DFW on how their decision tree works and the amount of money they want to fine the suspects.

Source: Ziggo hoeft geen klantgegevens downloaders te delen – Emerce

Hooray for someone not letting the movie mafia take the law into their own hands!

Thousands of Scientists Declare a Climate Emergency

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It only Tuesday, but more than 11,000 scientists around the world have come together to declare a climate emergency. Their paper, published Tuesday in the journal Bioscience, lays out the science behind this emergency and solutions for how we can deal with it.

Scientists aren’t the first people to make this declaration. A tribal nation in the Canadian Yukon, the U.K., and parts of Australia have all come to the same grim conclusion. In the U.S., members of Congress have pushed the federal government to do the same, but y’know, we got Donald Trump. Ain’t shit happening with this fool in office. Anyway, this proclamation from scientists is significant because they’re not doing it out of a political agenda or as an emotional outcry. They’re declaring a climate emergency because the science supports it.

The signatories, who come from 153 countries, note that societies have taken little action to prevent climate disaster. It’s been business as usual, despite scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels and driving cars is gravely harming the environment—you know, the environment we all have to live in for the foreseeable future. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to enter the atmosphere, and if we don’t stop quickly, we’re doomed.

Source: Thousands of Scientists Declare a Climate Emergency

How to Automatically Delete some of Your Google Data

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How to auto-delete your Google data

This process is almost identical on both mobile and web. We’ll focus on the latter, but the former is easy to figure out, too:

  1. Go to your Google activity dashboard (you’ll need to sign in to your Google account first).
  2. Click “Activity controls” from the left-hand sidebar.
  3. Scroll down to the data type you wish to manage, then select “Manage Activity.”
  4. On this next page, click on “Choose how long to keep” under the calendar icon.
  5. Select the auto-deletion time you wish (three or 18 months), or you can choose to delete your data manually.
  6. Click “Next” to save your changes.
  7. Repeat these steps for each of the types of data you want to be auto-deleted. For your Location History in particular, you’ll need to click on “Today” in the upper-left corner first, and then click on the gear icon in the lower-right corner of your screen. Then, select “Automatically delete Location History,” and pick a time.

Source: How to Automatically Delete Your Google Data, and Why You Should

Tech and mobile companies want to monetise your data … but are scared of GDPR  – good, that means GDPR works!

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The vast majority of technology, media and telecom (TMT) companies want to monetise customer data, but are concerned about regulations such as Europe’s GDPR, according to research from law firm Simmons & Simmons.

The outfit surveyed 350 global business leaders in the TMT sector to understand their approach to data commercialisation. It found that 78 per cent of companies have some form of data commercialisation in place but only 20 per cent have an overarching plan for its use.

Alex Brown, global head of TMT Sector at Simmons & Simmons, observed that the firm’s clients are increasingly seeking advice on the legal ways they can monetise data. He said that can either be for internal use, how to use insights into customer behaviour to improve services, or ways to sell anonymised data to third parties.

One example of data monetisation within the sector is Telefónica’s Smart Steps business, which uses “fully anonymised and aggregated mobile network data to measure and compare the number of people visiting an area at any time”.

That information is then sold on to businesses to provide insight into their customer base.

Brown said: “All mobile network operators know your location because the phone is talking to the network, so through that they know a lot about people’s movement. That aggregated data could be used by town planners, transport networks, retailers work out best place to site new store.”

However, he added: “There is a bit of a data paralysis at the moment. GDPR and what we’ve seen recently in terms of enforcement – albeit related to breaches – and the Google fine in France… has definitely dampened some innovation.”

Earlier this year France’s data protection watchdog fined Google €50m for breaching European Union online privacy rules, the biggest penalty levied against a US tech giant. It said Google lacked transparency and clarity in the way it informs users about its handling of personal data and failed to properly obtain their consent for personalised ads.

But Brown pointed out that as long as privacy policies are properly laid out and the data is fully anonymised, companies wanting to make money off data should not fall foul of GDPR.

Source: Tech and mobile companies want to monetise your data … but are scared of GDPR • The Register

Use a laser to command voice assistants such as lexa, google assistant, siri

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Light Commands is a vulnerability of MEMS microphones that allows attackers to remotely inject inaudible and invisible commands into voice assistants, such as Google assistant, Amazon Alexa, Facebook Portal, and Apple Siri using light.

In our paper we demonstrate this effect, successfully using light to inject malicious commands into several voice controlled devices such as smart speakers, tablets, and phones across large distances and through glass windows.

The implications of injecting unauthorized voice commands vary in severity based on the type of commands that can be executed through voice. As an example, in our paper we show how an attacker can use light-injected voice commands to unlock the victim’s smart-lock protected home doors, or even locate, unlock and start various vehicles.

Read the Paper Cite

Source: Light Commands

Android bug lets hackers plant malware via NFC beaming

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Google patched last month an Android bug that can let hackers spread malware to a nearby phone via a little-known Android OS feature called NFC beaming.

NFC beaming works via an internal Android OS service known as Android Beam. This service allows an Android device to send data such as images, files, videos, or even apps, to another nearby device using NFC (Near-Field Communication) radio waves, as an alternative to WiFi or Bluetooth.

Typically, apps (APK files) sent via NFC beaming are stored on disk and a notification is shown on screen. The notification asks the device owner if he wants to allow the NFC service to install an app from an unknown source.

But, in January this year, a security researcher named Y. Shafranovich discovered that apps sent via NFC beaming on Android 8 (Oreo) or later versions would not show this prompt. Instead, the notification would allow the user to install the app with one tap, without any security warning.

While the lack of one prompt sounds unimportant, this is a major issue in Android’s security model. Android devices aren’t allowed to install apps from “unknown sources” — as anything installed from outside the official Play Store is considered untrusted and unverified.

Source: Android bug lets hackers plant malware via NFC beaming | ZDNet

Best Buy’s Insignia ‘smart’ home gear will become very dumb this Wednesday – showing you why ‘cloud’ products are not a great plan

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US mega-retailer Best Buy will switch off the “smart” portion of its Insignia-branded smart home gadgets this coming Wednesday, rendering them just plain old dumb gear.

Folks who’ve bought these soon-to-be-internet-less Internet-of-Things gizmos can apply for some money back in the form of a gift card, though a full refund is off the cards, literally.

“As the Insignia Connect platform will be discontinued on November 6, 2019, this process will determine your eligibility for compensation for your eligible Insignia Connect products,” Best Buy stated on its webpage about the shutdown. An FAQ with more details is here.

“The compensation will not be a full refund of your product, and will be determined by product type.”

The affected Insigna Connect line includes smart power plugs, in-wall light switches, security cameras, and a God-damn freezer. Yes, a freezer. Being Wi-Fi-connected, these devices can be remote-controlled via an iOS or Android smartphone app, allowing you to turn lights off and on, monitor power usage, schedule stuff to turn on, view camera footage, and so on, wherever you are. They can also be directed via Amazon’s voice-powered assistant Alexa or Google Assistant.

However, when the Insigna line’s backend systems are shut down for good, and the phone apps withdrawn, on Wednesday, this gear will degrade to normal non-smart stuff. Crucially, though, the camera will be completely useless – and the footage inaccessible from the apps by the time you read this – and while the NS-SP1XM8 smart plug with metering will work with Apple’s Home app, via HomeKit, the other plugs will just be normal plugs.

Source: Heads up from Internet of S*!# land: Best Buy’s Insignia ‘smart’ home gear will become very dumb this Wednesday • The Register

Microsoft finds workers are more productive with a 4-day workweek

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a recent experiment by Microsoft Japan suggests with a 4-day workweek we may be more productive if we work less.

In particular, it shows that a shorter workweek can actually impact productivity positively.

In August this year, Microsoft Japan ran an experiment where for one month they had a 3 day weekend, taken Friday off. This was paid leave and did not impact the worker’s usual vacation allocation.

Some results were predictable.

Workers were happier and took  25.4 percent fewer days off during the month.

There were also savings from spending less time at work.  23.1 percent less electricity was used and 58.7 percent fewer pages were printed.

More importantly from a bottom-line standpoint, however, productivity went up 39.9%, as fewer and shorter meetings were held, often virtually rather than in person.

In the end, the project had 92.1 percent employee approval, suggesting workers were happy with getting more done in less time.

The trial involved 2,300 employees, and Microsoft is looking to repeat it next summer.

Source: Microsoft finds workers are more productive with a 4-day workweek

Facebook, Mozilla, and Cloudflare announce new TLS Delegated Credentials standard

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The new standard will work as an extension to TLS, a cryptographic protocol that underpins the more widely-known HTTPS protocol, used for loading websites inside browsers via an encrypted connection.

The TLS Delegate Credentials extension was specifically developed for large website setups, such as Facebook, or for website using content delivery networks (CDNs), such as Cloudflare.

How TLS Delegate Credentials works

For example, a big website like Facebook has thousands of servers spread all over the world. In order to support HTTPS traffic on all, Facebook has to place a copy of its TLS certificate private key on each one.

This is a dangerous setup. If an attacker hacks one server and steals the TLS private key, the attacker can impersonate Facebook servers and intercept user traffic until the stolen certificate expires.

The same thing is also valid with CDN services like Cloudflare. Anyone hosting an HTTPS website on Cloudflare’s infrastructure must upload their TLS private key to Cloudflare’s service, which then distributes it to thousands of servers across the world.

The TLS Delegate Credentials extension allows site owners to create short-lived TLS private keys (called delegated credentials) that they can deploy to these multi-server setups, instead of the real TLS private key.

The delegated credentials can live up to seven days and can be rotated automatically once they expire.

TLS Delegated Credentials shortens MitM attack window

The most important security improvement that comes with this new TLS extension is that if — in the worst-case scenarios — an attacker does manage to hack a server, the stolen private key (actually a delegated credential) won’t work for more than a few days, rather than weeks, months, or even a year, as it does now.

You can read more in-depth technical explanations about the new TLS Delegated Credentials extensions on the Facebook, Mozilla, and Cloudflare blogs.

The IETF draft specification is available here. TLS Delegated Credentials will be compatible with the TLS protocol v1.3 and later.

Source: Facebook, Mozilla, and Cloudflare announce new TLS Delegated Credentials standard | ZDNet