The Air Force Research Laboratory demonstrated a new and ultra-responsive approach to turbine engine development with the initial testing of the Responsive Open Source Engine (ROSE) on Nov. 6, 2019, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
The Aerospace Systems Directorate’s ROSE is the first turbine engine designed, assembled, and tested exclusively in-house. The entire effort, from concept initiation to testing, was executed within 13 months. This program responds to Air Force’s desire for rapid demonstration of new technologies and faster, less expensive prototypes.
“We decided the best way to make a low-cost, expendable engine was to separate the development costs from procurement costs,” said Frank Lieghley, Aerospace Systems Directorate Turbine Engine Division senior aerospace engineer and project manager. He explained that because the design and development were conducted in-house, the Air Force owns the intellectual property behind it. Therefore, once the engine is tested and qualified, the Air Force can forego the typical and often slow development process, instead opening the production opportunity to lower-cost manufacturers better able to economically produce the smaller production runs needed for new Air Force platforms.
The applications for this class of engine are many and varied, but the development and advancement of platforms that could make use of it has typically been stymied because the engines have been too expensive. Through this effort, AFRL hopes to lower the engine cost to roughly one fourth of the cheapest current alternative, an almost unheard-of price for such technology, thus enabling a new class of air vehicles that can capitalize on the less expensive engine.
[…]
by working closely with other AFRL organizations, including the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate and the Air Force Institute of Technology, the team leveraged internal expertise that helped advance the project. Additionally, by starting from scratch and performing all the work themselves, the AFRL team developed new tools and models that will be available for use in future iterations and new engine design projects.
[…]
“There’s not an Air Force engine fielded today whose technology can’t be traced back to Turbine Engine Division in-house work,” he said. “We’ll eventually hand this off to a manufacturer, but this one is all AFRL on the inside.”
The rise of the internet and the advent of social media have fundamentally changed the information ecosystem, giving the public direct access to more information than ever before. But it’s often nearly impossible to distinguish between accurate information and low-quality or false content. This means that disinformation — false or intentionally misleading information that aims to achieve an economic or political goal — can become rampant, spreading further and faster online than it ever could in another format.
As part of its Truth Decay initiative, RAND is responding to this urgent problem. Researchers identified and characterized the universe of online tools developed by nonprofits and civil society organizations to target online disinformation. The tools in this database are aimed at helping information consumers, researchers, and journalists navigate today’s challenging information environment. Researchers identified and characterized each tool on a number of dimensions, including the type of tool, the underlying technology, and the delivery format.
When you’re scrolling through Facebook’s app, the social network could be watching you back, concerned users have found. Multiple people have found and reported that their iPhone cameras were turned on in the background while they were looking at their feed.
The issue came to light through several posts on Twitter. Users noted that their cameras were activated behind Facebook’s app as they were watching videos or looking at photos on the social network.
After people clicked on the video to full screen, returning it back to normal would create a bug in which Facebook’s mobile layout was slightly shifted to the right. With the open space on the left, you could now see the phone’s camera activated in the background.
This was documented in multiple cases, with the earliest incident on Nov. 2.
It’s since been tweeted a couple other times, and CNET has also been able to replicate the issue.
John de Mol has successfully sued FB and forced them to remove fake ads in which it seems he endorses bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies (he doesn’t). They will not be allowed in the future either and FB must give him the details of the parties who placed the adverts on FB. FB is liable for fines up to EUR 1.1 million if they don’t comply.
Between Oktober 2018 and at least March 2019 a series of fake ads were placed on FB and Instagram that had him endorsing the crypto. He didn’t endorse them at all and not only that, they were a scam: the buyers never received any crypto after purchasing from the sites. The scammers received at least EUR 1.7 million.
The court did not accept FB’s argument that they are a neutral party just passing on information. The court argues that FB has a responsibility to guard against breaches of third party rights. After John de Mol had contacted FB and the ads decreased drastically in frequency shows the court that it is well within FB’s technical possibilities to guard against these breaches.
The first human vaccine against the often-fatal viral disease Ebola is now an official reality. On Monday, the European Union approved a vaccine developed by the pharmaceutical company Merck, called Ervebo.
The stage for Ervebo’s approval was set this October, when a committee assembled by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) recommended a conditional marketing authorization for the vaccine by the EU. Conditional marketing authorizations are given to new drugs or therapies that address an “unmet medical need” for patients. These drugs are approved on a quicker schedule than the typical new drug and require less clinical trial data to be collected and analyzed for approval.
In Ervebo’s case, though, the data so far seems to be overwhelmingly positive. In April, the World Health Organization revealed the preliminary results of its “ring vaccination” trials with Ervebo during the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Out of the nearly 100,000 people vaccinated up until that time, less than 3 percent went on to develop Ebola. These results, coupled with earlier trials dating back to the historic 2014-2015 outbreak of Ebola that killed over 10,000 people, secured Ervebo’s approval by the committee.
“Finding a vaccine as soon as possible against this terrible virus has been a priority for the international community ever since Ebola hit West Africa five years ago,” Vytenis Andriukaitis, commissioner in charge of Health and Food Safety at the EU’s European Commission, said in a statement announcing the approval. “Today’s decision is therefore a major step forward in saving lives in Africa and beyond.”
Although the marketing rights for Ervebo are held by Merck, it was originally developed by researchers from the Public Health Agency of Canada, which still maintains non-commercial rights.
The vaccine’s approval, significant as it is, won’t tangibly change things on the ground anytime soon. In October, the WHO said that licensed doses of Ervebo will not be available to the world until the middle of 2020. In the meantime, people in vulnerable areas will still have access to the vaccine through the current experimental program. Although Merck has also submitted Ervebo for approval by the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S., the agency’s final decision isn’t expected until next year as well.
IT guru Bob Gendler took to Medium last week to share a startling discovery about Apple Mail. If you have the application configured to send and receive encrypted email—messages that should be unreadable for anyone without the right decryption keys—Apple’s digital assistant goes ahead and stores your emails in plain text on your Mac’s drive.
More frustrating, you can have Siri completely disabled on your Mac, and your messages will still appear within a Mac database known as snippets.db. A process known as suggested will still comb through your emails and dump them into this plaintext database. This issue, according to Gendler, is present on multiple iterations of macOS, including the most recent Catalina and Mojave builds.
“I discovered this database and what’s stored there on July 25th and began extensively testing on multiple computers with Apple Mail set up and fully confirming this on July 29th. Later that week, I confirmed this database exists on 10.12 machines up to 10.15 and behaves the same way, storing encrypted messages unencrypted. If you have iCloud enabled and Siri enabled, I know there is some data sent to Apple to help with improving Siri, but I don’t know if that includes information from this database.”
Consider keeping Siri out of your email
While Apple is currently working on a fix for the issues Gendler raised, there are two easy ways you can ensure that your encrypted emails aren’t stored unencrypted on your Mac. First, you can disable Siri Suggestions for Mail within the “Siri” section of System Preferences.
Screenshot: David Murphy
Second, you can fire up Terminal and enter this command:
Regardless of which option you pick, you’ll want to delete the snippets.db file, as disabling Siri’s collection capabilities doesn’t automatically remove what’s already been collected (obviously). You’ll be able to find this by pulling up your Mac’s drive (Go > Computer) and doing a quick search for “snippets.db.”
Screenshot: David Murphy
Apple also told The Verge that you can also limit which apps are allowed to have Full Disk Access on your Mac—via System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy tab—to ensure that they can’t access your snippets.db file. You can also turn on FileVault, which will prevent your emails from appearing as plaintext within snippets.db.
A large-scale academic study that analyzed more than 53,000 product pages on more than 11,000 online stores found widespread use of user interface “dark patterns”– practices meant to mislead customers into making purchases based on false or misleading information.
The study — presented last week at the ACM CSCW 2019 conference — found 1,818 instances of dark patterns present on 1,254 of the ∼11K shopping websites (∼11.1%) researchers scanned.
“Shopping websites that were more popular, according to Alexa rankings, were more likely to feature dark patterns,” researchers said.
But while the vast majority of UI dark patterns were meant to trick users into subscribing to newsletters or allowing broad data collection, some dark patterns were downright foul, trying to mislead users into making additional purchases, either by sneaking products into shopping carts or tricking users into believing products were about to sell out.
Of these, the research team found 234 instances, deployed across 183 websites.
Below are some of the examples of UI dark patterns that the research team found currently employed on today’s most popular online stores.
1. Sneak into basked
Adding additional products to users’ shopping carts without their consent.
Prevalence: 7 instances across 7 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
2. Hidden costs
Revealing previously undisclosed charges to users right before they make a purchase.
Prevalence: 5 instances across 5 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
3. Hidden subscription
Charging users a recurring fee under the pretense of a one-time fee or a free trial.
Prevalence: 14 instances across 13 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
4. Countdown timer
Indicating to users that a deal or discount will expire using a counting-down timer.
Prevalence: 393 instances across 361 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
5. Limited-time message
Indicating to users that a deal or sale will expire will expire soon without specifying a deadline, thus creating uncertainty.
Prevalence: 88 instances across 84 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
6. Confirmshaming
Using language and emotion (shame) to steer users away from making a certain choice.
Prevalence: 169 instances across 164 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
7. Visual interference
Using style and visual presentation to steer users to or away from certain choices.
Prevalence: 25 instances across 24 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
8. Trick questions
Using confusing language to steer users into making certain choices.
Prevalence: 9 instances across 9 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
9. Pressured selling
Pre-selecting more expensive variations of a product, or pressuring the user to accept the more expensive variations of a product and related products.
Prevalence: 67 instances across 62 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
10. Activity messages
Informing the user about the activity on the website (e.g., purchases, views, visits).
Prevalence: 313 instances across 264 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
11. Testimonials of uncertain origin
Testimonials on a product page whose origin is unclear.
Prevalence: 12 instances across 12 websites
Image: Arunesh et al.
12. Low-stock message
Indicating to users that limited quantities of a product are available, increasing its desirability.
Prevalence: 632 instances across 581 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
13. High-demand message
Indicating to users that a product is in high-demand and likely to sell out soon, increasing its desirability
Prevalence: 47 instances across 43 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
14. Hard to cancel
Making it easy for the user to sign up for a recurring subscription but cancellation requires emailing or calling customer care.
Prevalence: 31 instances across 31 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
15. Forced enrollment
Coercing users to create accounts or share their information to complete their tasks.
Prevalence: 6 instances across 6 websites.
Image: Arunesh et al.
The research team behind this project, made up of academics from Princeton University and the University of Chicago, expect these UI dark patterns to become even more popular in the coming years.
One reason, they said, is that there are third-party companies that currently offer dark patterns as a turnkey solution, either in the form of store extensions and plugins or on-demand store customization services.
The table below contains the list of 22 third-parties that the research team identified following their study as providers of turnkey solutions for dark pattern-like behavior.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
