​Docker has a business plan headache, another showcase for FOSS money making failure

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We love containers. And, for most of us, containers means Docker. As RightScale observed in its RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud report, Docker’s adoption by the industry has increased to 49 percent from 35 percent in 2017.

All’s not well in Docker-land

There’s only one problem with this: While Docker, the technology, is going great guns, Docker, the business, isn’t doing half as well.

[…]

What’s the business plan?

Docker’s problem is simple: It doesn’t have a viable business plan.

It’s not the market. According to 451 Research, “the application container market will explode over the next five years. Annual revenue is expected to increase by 4x, growing from $749 million in 2016 to more than $3.4 billon by 2021, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35 percent.”

But to make that revenue, you need a business that can exploit containers. So, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and all the rest of the big public cloud companies, earn their dollars from customers eager to make the most of their server resources. Others, like Red Hat/CoreOS, Canonical, and Mirantis, provide easy-to-use container approaches for private clouds.

Docker? It provides the open-source framework for the most popular container format. That’s great, but it’s not a business plan.

[…]

Docker’s plan had been, according to former CEO Ben Golub, to build up a subscription business model. The driver behind its Enterprise Edition, with its three levels of service and functionality, was container orchestration using Docker Engine’s swarm mode. Docker, the company, also rebranded Docker, the open-source software, to Moby while continuing to use Docker as the name for its commercial software products.

This led to more than a little confusion. Quick! How many of you knew Moby was now the “official” name for Docker the program? Confusion is not what you want in sales.

Mere weeks later, Golub was out, and Steve Singh, from SAP, was in.

[…]

As Dave Bartoletti, a Forrester analyst, told The Register at the time: “The poor guy has to figure out how to make money at Docker. That’s not easy when a lot of people in the community just bristle at anyone trying to make money.”

The rise of Kubernetes

Making matters much harder for Docker’s business plans is that Docker swarm and all other orchestration programs have found themselves overwhelmed by the rise of Kubernetes.

Today, Kubernetes — whether it’s a grand Google plan to create a Google cloud stack or not — dominates cloud orchestration. Even Docker adopted Kubernetes because of customer demand in October 2017.

When your main value-add is container orchestration and everyone and their uncle has adopted another container orchestration program, what can you offer customers? Good question.

[…]

In the last few months, Docker raised another $75 million in venture capital. This brings the total capitalization of Docker to a rather amazing $250 million from ME Cloud Ventures, Benchmark, Coatue Management, Goldman Sachs, and Greylock Partners. That’s a lot of money, but I still don’t see how Docker will pay out.

Cash from investors is great, but what Docker really needs is cash from customers.

For most enterprise users, there are no real worries here. Docker or Moby, the container standard is both open source and an open standard. For Docker investors, well, that’s another story.

Source: ​Docker has a business plan headache | ZDNet

This article suggests that if Docker the company goes bust, it won’t be a problem for Docker users because it’s open source and the community will pick it up and continue development. Unfortunately it’s often the case that the “community” are just the people reporting the bugs and it’s the original handful of developers that are all the people writing the bugfixes and carrying the project forward. In this case it’s a great team of people, who – if they are out of a job – will probably disband and the project will be forked by an internet giant who will repurpose for their own needs and wants.

What is more important is that this is yet another showcase for a hugely popular FOSS project showcasing how ridiculously impossible it is to make money. FOSS needs to change.

ETSI launches specification group on Securing Artificial Intelligence

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ETSI is pleased to announce the creation of a new Industry Specification Group on Securing Artificial Intelligence (ISG SAI). The group will develop technical specifications to mitigate threats arising from the deployment of AI throughout multiple ICT-related industries. This includes threats to artificial intelligence systems from both conventional sources and other AIs.

The ETSI Securing Artificial Intelligence group was initiated to anticipate that autonomous mechanical and computing entities may make decisions that act against the relying parties either by design or as a result of malicious intent. The conventional cycle of networks risk analysis and countermeasure deployment represented by the Identify-Protect-Detect-Respond cycle needs to be re-assessed when an autonomous machine is involved.

The intent of the ISG SAI is therefore to address 3 aspects of artificial intelligence in the standards domain:

  • Securing AI from attack e.g. where AI is a component in the system that needs defending
  • Mitigating against AI e.g. where AI is the ‘problem’ or is used to improve and enhance other more conventional attack vectors
  • Using AI to enhance security measures against attack from other things e.g. AI is part of the ‘solution’ or is used to improve and enhance more conventional countermeasures.

The purpose of the ETSI ISG SAI is to develop the technical knowledge that acts as a baseline in ensuring that artificial intelligence is secure. Stakeholders impacted by the activity of ETSI’s group include end users, manufacturers, operators and governments.

Source: ETSI – ETSI launches specification group on Securing Artificial Intelligence

EU court of justice rules opt in is not on if the tickbox is pre ticked

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In a court case vs Planet 49 the EU has ruled that you can’t start collecting data just by showing a warning that you are doing so or by having a preselected tickbox stating it’s OK to collect data. The user has to actually go and click the tickbox or OK before any data collection is allowed.

the consent referred to in those provisions is not validly constituted if, in the form of cookies, the storage of information or access to information already stored in a website user’s terminal equipment is permitted by way of a pre-checked checkbox which the user must deselect to refuse his or her consent.

Source: CURIA – Documents

This is a good thing which fights off dark patterning – forcing users into things  they don’t consent to or understand, of which there is more than enough of thank you very much.

EC rules make household appliances more sustainable by forcing right to repair

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In a continued effort to reduce Europe’s carbon footprint and to make energy bills cheaper for European consumers, the Commission today adopted new eco-design measures for products such as refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers and televisions.Improving the ecodesign of products contributes to implementing the ‘Energy efficiency first’ principle of the EU’s Energy Union priority. For the first time the measures include requirements for repairability and recyclability, contributing to circular economy objectives by improving the life span, maintenance, re-use, upgrade, recyclability and waste handling of appliances.

[…]

After a consultation process, the Commission has adopted 10 ecodesign implementing Regulations, setting out energy efficiency and other requirements for the following product groups: refrigerators; washing machines; dishwashers; electronic displays (including televisions); light sources and separate control gears; external power supplies; electric motors; refrigerators with a direct sales function (e.g. fridges in supermarkets, vending machines for cold drinks); power transformers; and welding equipment.

Source: European Commission – PRESS RELEASES – Press release – New rules make household appliances more sustainable

Thousands of ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea

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Global shipping companies have spent billions rigging vessels with “cheat devices” that circumvent new environmental legislation by dumping pollution into the sea instead of the air, The Independent can reveal.

More than $12bn (£9.7bn) has been spent on the devices, known as open-loop scrubbers, which extract sulphur from the exhaust fumes of ships that run on heavy fuel oil.

This means the vessels meet standards demanded by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) that kick in on 1 January.

However, the sulphur emitted by the ships is simply re-routed from the exhaust and expelled into the water around the ships, which not only greatly increases the volume of pollutants being pumped into the sea, but also increases carbon dioxide emissions.

The change could have a devastating effect on wildlife in British waters and around the world, experts have warned.

Source: Thousands of ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea | The Independent

MS really really wants to know who is using Windows, make it very hard for Win 10 users to create local accounts.

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Microsoft has annoyed some of its 900 million Windows 10 device users after apparently removing the ‘Use offline account’ as part of its effort to herd users towards its cloud-based Microsoft Account.

The offline local account is specific to one device, while the Microsoft Account can be used to log in to multiple devices and comes with the benefit of Microsoft’s recent work on passwordless authentication with Windows Hello.

The local account doesn’t require an internet connection or an email address – just a username and password that are stored on the PC

[…]

A user on a popular Reddit thread notes that the local account option is now invisible if the device is connected to the internet.

“Either run the setup without being connected to the internet, or type in a fake phone number a few times and it will give you the prompt to create a local account,” Froggyowns suggested as a solution.

So there is a way around the obstacle but as Reddit user Old_Traveller noted: “It’s such a dick move. I’ll never tie my main OS with an online account.”

[…]

as a user on Hacker News wrote, Microsoft has changed the name of the local account option to ‘Domain join instead’, which then allows admins to create an offline account.

Windows 10 users are accusing Microsoft of employing ‘dark-pattern’ techniques to usher them off local accounts, referring to tricks on websites that software makers use to choose an option that benefits the seller.

Source: Windows 10 users fume: Microsoft, where’s our ‘local account’ option gone? | ZDNet

My PC is at home. Microsoft, who sell the OS, have no right to know who I am or what I am doing with MY PC.

House Antitrust Investigators Now Scrutinizing Google’s Plans to Add DNS Encryption to Chrome

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Antitrust investigators with the House Judiciary Committee are looking into Google’s plans to add Domain Name System over Transport Layer Security (DNS over TLS) to its Chrome browser, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, in the latest escalation of scrutiny over the company’s business practices. The Department of Justice has also heard complaints, a source told the paper.

DNS translates a domain name (such as Gizmodo.com) into an IP address. It’s essentially an internet phonebook. While encryption tech like HTTPS is already in place across much of the web, DNS is currently largely unencrypted by default, meaning it’s possible for service providers to ascertain which web sites a user is visiting and thus monetize traffic records.

Google has reportedly been integrating TLS, an additional layer of encryption, into DNS in Chrome—which the Journal notes could protect users against spoofing attacks or unauthorized snooping into their web traffic, but could also prevent the many “service providers who don’t support the new standard from observing user behavior in gathering data.” Opponents have also raised concerns that as Google controls 64 percent of the worldwide browser market and operates its own DNS system, Google Public DNS, the company could flip a switch transferring Chrome users away from service provider-operated DNS. That, the critics say, could allow Google to gain an unfair advantage over user behavior data invaluable for advertising purposes.

In a Sept. 13 letter to the company, investigators with the House committee asked Google for more information on why it is promoting DNS over TLS and whether any of the data collected or processed will be used for profit, the Journal wrote.

“Because the majority of world-wide internet traffic…runs through the Chrome browser or the Android operating system, Google could become the overwhelmingly predominant DNS lookup provider,” a coalition of service providers wrote in a letter to lawmakers this month, per the Journal. “Google would acquire greater control over user data across networks and devices around the world. This could inhibit competitors and possibly foreclose competition in advertising and other industries.”

“Right now, each internet service provider has insight into the traffic of their users, and that’s going to shift,” chief security officer Andy Ellis of Akamai, which does not support the new standard, told the Journal.

Google is planning on starting tests with the new protocol involving one percent of its user base, a less “aggressive strategy” than Mozilla’s Firefox, which the Journal wrote plans to switch users “to the new standard automatically, even if the change involves switching their DNS service providers.” Google denied that it has any plans to become “the centralized DNS provider,” while Mozilla has characterized the issue as griping by service providers who fear it will make it harder to track users for ad purposes,

[…]

Source: House Antitrust Investigators Now Scrutinizing Google’s Plans to Add DNS Encryption to Chrome

There are many problems and advantages with DNS over TLS – basically you make the browser the resolver instead of the (many) DNS providers. This means that you cannot add a private, secret, DNS provider or ISP and not let Google (or Mozilla) know. Countries where censorship exists only have to call these guys up for information on where their websurfing netizens are going. On the other hand, ISPs now have no idea where they are heading.

This happened when SSL/TLS was enforced and suddenly none of the other website statistics providers had any idea how the traffic on the site got there, with the result that almost all of them have died out. There is no real choice but Google Analytics any more for referral traffic, because such a large amount is referred from Google.

Flying Replacement Batteries Could Massively Boost a Drone’s Flight Time

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Borrowing a trick from the Air Force, whose planes can complete long-range missions thanks to in-flight refueling from tanker aircraft, researchers at UC Berkeley showed off a novel way to keep small drones in the air almost indefinitely: flying replacement batteries that can be swapped without landing.

The use of four propellers not only helps improve the stability of quadcopter drones while hovering in position, it also makes them incredibly maneuverable and fast. Drone racing has become a dizzying spectacle, but races rarely last longer than a few minutes because four propellers also require four electric motors which can quickly drain a battery. Adding more batteries adds weight, which requires stronger motors, and eventually you reach the point where the length of drone flights reaches a limit and fresh batteries are needed.

For drone racers, swapping in a new power pack between races isn’t a problem. But for other drone applications, like long-range reconnaissance missions or delivering parcels across a large city, having to land to recharge or grab a new battery can add unwanted complications and time delays. Seeking a different solution, researchers at UC Berkeley’s HiPeR Lab (High Performance Robotics Lab) came up with replacement batteries that can not only fly, but also connect to larger drones mid-flight.

To streamline the battery swapping process, which usually requires a cable to be unplugged and plugged back in, the researchers created a quadcopter with a landing pad featuring electrical contact pads on top. The replacement batteries have their own sets of propellers and motors and are designed to fly up and meet the larger drone and then touch down on the landing pad after the craft has stabilized itself. Power is then transferred through the battery’s landing legs, which feature electrical contacts.

Source: Flying Replacement Batteries Could Massively Boost a Drone’s Flight Time

Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K. Police, breaking encryption. Don’t they realises this gives criminals access too?

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Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty between the two countries, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The accord, which is set to be signed by next month, will compel social media firms to share information to support investigations into individuals suspected of serious criminal offenses including terrorism and pedophilia, the person said.

Priti Patel, the U.K.’s home secretary, has previously warned that Facebook’s plan to enable users to send end-to-end encrypted messages would benefit criminals, and called on social media firms to develop “back doors” to give intelligence agencies access to their messaging platforms.

The U.K. and the U.S. have agreed not to investigate each other’s citizens as part of the deal, while the U.S. won’t be able to use information obtained from British firms in any cases carrying the death penalty.

Source: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K. Police – BNN Bloomberg

Not being able to encrypt stuff ends up benifitting criminals just as much as it does the police, because they will also be able to access the poorly secured information.

Massive wave of account hijacks hits YouTube car community creators, bypassing 2FA

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Over the past few days, a massive wave of account hijacks has hit YouTube users, and especially creators in the auto-tuning and car review community, a ZDNet investigation discovered following a tip from one of our readers.

Several high-profile accounts from the YouTube creators car community have fallen victim to these attacks already. The list includes channels such as Built [Instagram post, YouTube channel], Troy Sowers [Instagram post, YouTube channel], MaxtChekVids [YouTube channel], PURE Function [Instagram post, YouTube Support post, YouTube channel], and Musafir [Instagram post, YouTube channel].

But the YouTube car community wasn’t the only one targeted. Other YouTube creatorss also reported having their accounts hijacked last week, and especially over the weekend, with tens of complaints flooding Twitter [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and many more] and the YouTube support forum [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and many more].

Coordinated campaign bypassed 2FA

The account hacks are the result of a coordinated campaign that consisted of messages luring users to phishing sites, where hackers logged account credentials.

According to a channel owner who managed to recover their account before this article’s publication and received additional information from YouTube’s staff, we got some insight into how the full attack chain might have gone down.

  • Hackers use phishing emails to lure victims on fake Google login pages, where they collect users’ account credentials
  • Hackers break into Google accounts
  • Hackers re-assign popular channels to new owners
  • Hackers change the channel’s vanity URL, giving the original account owner and his followers the impression that their account had been deleted.
youtube-hacked.png
mage: ZDNet

Some users reported receiving individual emails, while others said they received email chains that included the addresses of multiple YouTube creators, usually from the same community or niche.

This is what appears to have happened with the phishing attacks that targeted the YouTube creators car community, according to a YouTube video from Life of Palos, uploaded over the weekend — see 01:50 video mark.

The same Life of Palos also reported that hackers were capable of bypassing two-factor authentication on users’ accounts. He suggested that hackers might have used Modlishka, a reverse proxy-based phishing toolkit that can also intercept 2FA SMS codes.

However, this is only hearsay, and there is no actual evidence to confirm that hackers used Modlishka specifically. There are plenty of reverse proxy-based phishing toolkits around that can do the same.

Nevertheless, Ryan Scott, the owner of the PURE Function YouTube channel confirmed he used two-factor authentication on his account, validating that hackers did bypass 2FA on some of the hacked accounts.

Source: Massive wave of account hijacks hits YouTube creators | ZDNet

Both YouTube and Facebook allow politicians to ignore their community standards.

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Facebook this week finally put into writing what users—especially politically powerful users—have known for years: its community “standards” do not, in fact, apply across the whole community. Speech from politicians is officially exempt from the platform’s fact checking and decency standards, the company has clarified, with a few exceptions.

Facebook communications VP Nick Clegg, himself a former member of the UK Parliament, outlined the policy in a speech and company blog post Tuesday.

Facebook has had a “newsworthiness exemption” to its content guidelines since 2016. That policy was formalized in late October of that year amid a contentious and chaotic US political season and three weeks before the presidential election that would land Donald Trump the White House.

Facebook at the time was uncertain how to handle posts from the Trump campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported. Sources told the paper that Facebook employees were sharply divided over the candidate’s rhetoric about Muslim immigrants and his stated desire for a Muslim travel ban, which several felt were in violation of the service’s hate speech standards. Eventually, the sources said, CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in directly and said it would be inappropriate to intervene. Months later, Facebook finally issued its policy.

“We’re going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest—even if they might otherwise violate our standards,” Facebook wrote at the time.

Clegg’s update says that Facebook by default “will treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard.” Nor will it be subject to fact-checking, as the company does not believe that it is appropriate for it to “referee political debates” or prevent a polician’s speech from both reaching its intended audience and “being subject to public debate and scrutiny.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/facebook-confirms-its-standards-dont-apply-to-politicians/

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said today that content by politicians would stay up on the video-sharing website even if it violates the company’s standards, echoing a position staked out by Facebook this week.

“When you have a political officer that is making information that is really important for their constituents to see, or for other global leaders to see, that is content that we would leave up because we think it’s important for other people to see,” Wojcicki told an audience at The Atlantic Festival this morning.

Wojcicki said the news media is likely to cover controversial content regardless of whether it’s taken down, giving context to understand it. YouTube is owned by Google.

A YouTube spokesperson later told POLITICO that politicians are not treated differently than other users and must abide by its community guidelines. The company grants exemptions to some political speech if the company considers it to be educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic in nature.Morning Tech

Social media firms have seen their policies for reviewing and removing content come under fire in recent years, particularly when such content endorses hate-filled views or incites real-world violence. The issue is even more prickly when it involves world leaders like President Donald Trump, who has used bullying or violent language in social media posts.

YouTube CEO: Politicians can break our content rules

But what constitutes a politician? Anyone in or running for office? What about public servants? County sherrifs? And who decides which of these groups are exempt? That’s the problem with exceptions, you get to make more and more exceptions until almost everyone is an exception.

US immigration uses Google Translate to scan people’s social media for bad posts – Er, don’t do that, says everyone else, including Google

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Google recommends that anyone using its translation technology add a disclaimer that translated text may not be accurate.

The US government’s Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) nonetheless has been relying on online translation services offered by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to read refugees’ non-English social media posts and judge whether or not they should be allowed into the Land of the Free™.

According to a report from ProPublica, USCIS uses these tools to help evaluate whether refugees should be allowed into the US. In so doing, agency personnel are putting their trust in an untrustworthy algorithm to make entry decisions that may have profound consequences for the health and welfare of those seeking admission to the country.

“The translation of these social media posts can mean life or death for refugees seeking to reunite with their family members,” said Betsy Fisher, director of strategy for the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP),” in an email to The Register. “It is dangerous to rely on inadequate technology to inform these unreasonable procedures ostensibly used to vet refugees.”

IRAP obtained a USCIS manual through a public records request and shared it with ProPublica. The manual advises USCIS personnel to use free online translation tools and provides a walkthrough for using Google Translate.

Scanning social media posts for content that would disqualify entry into the US follows from a 2017 executive order and memorandum. The impact of social media scrutiny was made clear recently when Ismail Ajjawi, a resident of Lebanon admitted to Harvard’s class of 2023, was denied entry into America by US Customs and Border Protection because of anti-US posts apparently made by friends.

After ten days of pressure from student petitioners and advocacy groups, CBP determined Ajjawi met its requirements for US entry after all.

To demonstrate the inaccuracy of Google Translate, ProPublica asked Mustafa Menai, who teaches Urdu at the University of Pennsylvania, to translate a Twitter post written in Urdu. By Menai’s estimation, an accurate English translation would be, “I have been spanked a lot and have also gathered a lot of love (from my parents).”

Google Translate’s rendering of the post is, “The beating is too big and the love is too windy.”

Source: US immigration uses Google Translate to scan people’s social media for bad posts – Er, don’t do that, says everyone else • The Register

Card stealing MageCart infection swipes customers details and payment cards from fragrancedirect.co.uk

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Online merchant fragrancedirect.co.uk has confirmed a miscreant broke into its systems and made off with a raft of customers’ personal data, including payment card details.

The e-retailer, based in Macclesfield, England, wrote to punters this week to inform them of the digital burglary and the subsequent data leakage.

“We recently discovered that some of our user data may have been compromised as a result of unauthorised access to our website by a malicious third party,” the email states.

The online store then launched an investigation and “quickly identified the root cause and have taken the necessary steps to address the issue”, the note continues.

It added that “Fragrance Direct Username and Password”, along with “Name, Address and Phone Number”, and “Credit and Debit Card Details” spilled into the wrong hands.

Source: What’s that smell? Perfume merchant senses the scent of a digital burglary • The Register

Doordash  Food delivery services Latest Data Breach – 4.9m people have their physical addresses floating around the internet now

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Doordash is the latest of the “services you probably use, or at least have an account with” companies to suffer a large data breach. And while your passwords likely haven’t been compromised, it’s possible that your physical address is floating around in the Internet somewhere, among other identifying information.

As Doordash wrote yesterday, an unknown individual accessed data they shouldn’t have on May 4. Among the information that was compromised included:

“Profile information including names, email addresses, delivery addresses, order history, phone numbers, as well as hashed, salted passwords — a form of rendering the actual password indecipherable to third parties.”

Approximately 4.9 million Doordash customers were affected by the breach, but only those who joined the site prior to April 5, 2018. If you signed up for Doordash after that, you’re in the clear.

However, the leaked information doesn’t stop with emails, phone numbers, and names—to name a few. For a subset of those affected, the attacker was able to access the last four digits of their stored credit card, their bank account number, or their drivers’ license numbers.

Doordash is currently reaching out to those whose data might have been compromised; if you haven’t received an email yet, you might be in the clear, but it’s also taking the company a bit of time to send these, so it’s OK to be slightly anxious.

Source: Doordash’s Latest Data Breach: How to Protect Yourself

AI equal with human experts in medical diagnosis with images, study finds

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Artificial intelligence is on a par with human experts when it comes to making medical diagnoses based on images, a review has found.

The potential for artificial intelligence in healthcare has caused excitement, with advocates saying it will ease the strain on resources, free up time for doctor-patient interactions and even aid the development of tailored treatment. Last month the government announced £250m of funding for a new NHS artificial intelligence laboratory.

However, experts have warned the latest findings are based on a small number of studies, since the field is littered with poor-quality research.

One burgeoning application is the use of AI in interpreting medical images – a field that relies on deep learning, a sophisticated form of machine learning in which a series of labelled images are fed into algorithms that pick out features within them and learn how to classify similar images. This approach has shown promise in diagnosis of diseases from cancers to eye conditions.

However questions remain about how such deep learning systems measure up to human skills. Now researchers say they have conducted the first comprehensive review of published studies on the issue, and found humans and machines are on a par.

Prof Alastair Denniston, at the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS foundation trust and a co-author of the study, said the results were encouraging but the study was a reality check for some of the hype about AI.

Dr Xiaoxuan Liu, the lead author of the study and from the same NHS trust, agreed. “There are a lot of headlines about AI outperforming humans, but our message is that it can at best be equivalent,” she said.

Writing in the Lancet Digital Health, Denniston, Liu and colleagues reported how they focused on research papers published since 2012 – a pivotal year for deep learning.

An initial search turned up more than 20,000 relevant studies. However, only 14 studies – all based on human disease – reported good quality data, tested the deep learning system with images from a separate dataset to the one used to train it, and showed the same images to human experts.

The team pooled the most promising results from within each of the 14 studies to reveal that deep learning systems correctly detected a disease state 87% of the time – compared with 86% for healthcare professionals – and correctly gave the all-clear 93% of the time, compared with 91% for human experts.

However, the healthcare professionals in these scenarios were not given additional patient information they would have in the real world which could steer their diagnosis.

Prof David Spiegelhalter, the chair of the Winton centre for risk and evidence communication at the University of Cambridge, said the field was awash with poor research.

“This excellent review demonstrates that the massive hype over AI in medicine obscures the lamentable quality of almost all evaluation studies,” he said. “Deep learning can be a powerful and impressive technique, but clinicians and commissioners should be asking the crucial question: what does it actually add to clinical practice?”

Source: AI equal with human experts in medical diagnosis, study finds | Technology | The Guardian

Darknet cybercrime servers hosted in former NATO bunker in Germany busted in 600 policemen operation

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Police outside the darknet data servers in Traben-Trarbach

A cybercrime data center that was shut down by German authorities was housed inside a former NATO bunker in a sleepy riverside town, police revealed on Friday.

More than 600 law enforcement personnel including Germany’s elite federal police unit, the GSG 9, were involved in an anti-cybercrime operation that took place in the town of Traben-Trarbach on the banks of the Mosel river.

Police officers succeeded in penetrating the building, a 5,000 square meter former NATO bunker with iron doors that goes five floors deep underground. The building was located on a 1.3-hectare (3.2 acre) property secured with a fence and surveillance cameras.

“We had to overcome not only real, or analog, protections; we also cracked the digital protections of the data center,” said regional police chief Johannes Kunz.

Read more: Darknet operator gets six years in connection with 2016 German shooting rampage

The target of the operation was a so-called “bulletproof hosting” service provider. Bulletproof hosters provide IT infrastructure that protects online criminal activity from government intervention.

In the raid, police seized 200 servers along with documents, cell phones, and large quantities of cash. Thursday’s operation was the first time German investigators were able to apprehend a bulletproof hoster, according to German media outlets.

Watch video 01:35

German police claim victory against cyber crime

Cracking the security codes to access the contents of the servers was another difficult task for the police. On the servers, they found countless websites facilitating the illegal sale of drugs, weapons, counterfeit documents, and stolen data as well as sites distributing child pornography. The servers hosted Wall Street Market, formerly the second largest darknet market place for drugs in the word before law enforcement shut the platform down earlier this year.

The police arrested 13 people between the ages of 20 and 59 allegedly tied to the operation. Seven are held in custody. The ringleader is a 59-year-old Dutch man with ties to organized crime in the Netherlands. He established the server in Traben-Trarbach in 2013. While his official residency is listed in Singapore, he had been living in the bunker.

Source: Darknet cybercrime servers hosted in former NATO bunker in Germany | News | DW | 28.09.2019

GNOME is Being Sued Because Shotwell Photo Manager can wirelessly transfer images. The US Patent Office really gave a patent to transfer images and label them to a patent troll.

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The GNOME Foundation is facing a lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC. Rothschild allege that Shotwell, a free and open source personal photo manager infringes its patent.

Neil McGovern, Executive Director for the GNOME Foundation says “We have retained legal counsel and intend to vigorously defend against this baseless suit. Due to the ongoing litigation, we unfortunately cannot make any further comments at this time.”

While Neil cannot make any further comments on this issue, let me throw some lights on this matter.

The patent in the question deals with wireless image distribution. The patent is ridiculous because it could mean any software that transfers images from one device to another could be violating this patent.

And that’s what this lawsuit is about. If you read the lawsuit, you’ll see why Neil called it baseless:

Gnome Shotwell Lawsuite
GNOME Shotwell Lawsuit

Shotwell is not the only one being sued

I did a quick web search with “Rothschild Patent Imaging” and I couldn’t find their website. I am guessing that it doesn’t exist. However, I come across a number of “Rothschild Patent Imaging vs XYZ” lawsuits.

I dig a little deeper. As per patent litigation website RPX Insight, there are six active cases and forty two inactive cases involving Rothschild Patent Imaging.

Rothschiled Patent
Rothschild Patent Imaging Lawsuits

There are a number of companies being sued if there product mentions grouping photos based on date, location etc, facial recognition and transferring images from one device to another. Sounds crazy, right?

But it won’t be crazy if it’s someone’s full time job.

Patent Litigation Abuse aka Patent Trolling

Patent Troll Attacks Gnome Foundation

Rothschild Patent Imaging is owned by Leigh M Rothschild.

The modus operandi of ‘inventor’ Leigh M Rothschild is to get patents on obvious ideas. And that obvious idea would be so broad that they could sue a huge number of organizations. Defendants have two choices, either pay Rothschild to settle the lawsuit or pay even more to lawyers and fight the court battle.

Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC might be formed to sue companies dealing with grouping and transferring images. In 2017, Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations LLC also filed a number of patent infringement lawsuits against companies that hinted mixing drinks and connected devices.

Ars Technica called Rothschild a patent troll because he was demanding $75,000 from each defendant for settling the lawsuits.

Smaller companies might have been intimidated but when Rothschild targeted a giant like Garmin, they hit back. Rothschild backed out of the lawsuit but Garmin filed a counter and Rothschild was asked to pay the legal expenses to Garmin.

Unfortunately, patent trolling is a big business, specially in the United States of America. There are companies with the sole business model of suing other companies. They are almost exclusively based in East Texas where the laws favors such patent trolls. EFF has a dedicated page that lists the victims of patent trolls.

I am so glad that GNOME Foundation has decided to fight this lawsuit vigorously.

Source: GNOME is Being Sued Because of Shotwell Photo Manager

The US Air Force Is Deploying PHASER Microwave Weapon to kill drones

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Yesterday afternoon, the Pentagon notified Congress of its purchase of a microwave weapon system designed to knock down swarms of enemy drones with pulses of energy. The purchase comes with an intent to deploy the PHASER system overseas for a year-long assessment, making it the first directed energy defense weapon to ever be fielded.

[…]

The U.S. Air Force spent $16.28 million for one prototype PHASER high power microwave system for a “field assessment for purposes of experimentation” in an unspecified location outside the U.S. The test is “expected to be completed by Dec. 20, 2020,” making the overseas deployment “against real-world or simulated hostile vignettes” imminent.

A Growing Threat

There are several directed energy weapons that the Air Force is buying to test their effectiveness in the field, and officials say some will be on the frontlines in tense areas of the globe where enemy drones are becoming a threat, includes North Korea, Africa, the Ukraine and—most recently—the Middle East.

“At the moment we have awarded multiple DE systems for use in our field assessment overseas and are working to support multiple bases and areas of responsibility,” says Michael Jirjis, who is lead on the PHASER experiment, told Popular Mechanics. “We can’t say which specific locations at this time.”

[…]

The recent swarm attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities has highlighted the risk and drawn a stern response from the Pentagon.

“This is not the reaction of just a few events but the realization of a growing need over the past few years,” says Jirjis.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Friday that the U.S. would be moving enhanced air defenses into the region. He didn’t offer any specifics, saying the Pentagon is working with the Saudis to come up with a support plan. The PHASER system, by virtue of timing, could now land at the forefront of an international crisis.

“It is a remarkable coincidence because this has been in the works between the Air Force and Raytheon essentially since an experiment at White Sands [Missile Range] late last year,” says Don Sullivan, Raytheon missile systems’ chief technologist for directed energy.

Those who sell drone-killing weapons keep a sharp eye on the warning signs, and there were many that preceded the attack in Saudi Arabia.

“There are fairly recent incidents, for example in Yemen where a very large drone with a high explosive payload killed about 40 people, at a prayer ground of all places. And that was on YouTube,” Sullivan says. “It was a real eye-opener. What happened in Saudi over the weekend was kind of that raised to the nth degree.”

[…]

The system uses microwaves to disable Class One and Class Two drones, ones that are less than 55 pounds and fly at altitudes of 1,200 to 3,500 feet at speeds between 100 and 200 knots. Think RQ-11 Raven at the low end and a ScanEagle as the maximum-sized target.

There were an estimated 20 drones and cruise missiles used to attack Saudi Arabia, and some of the drones may have been small enough for PHASER to have disabled them. The HPM system is not known to work against cruise missiles, according the Air Force and Raytheon.

[…]

PHASER is high-powered microwaves cannon that emits radio frequencies in a conical beam. It doesn’t cook a drone with heat. Instead, the weapon disrupts or destroys their circuits with a burst of overwhelming energy.

“It’s not a thermal effect, it’s an electric field effect that is basically imposed on the electronics to either upset or permanently damage them,” says Sullivan. “And the effect is essentially instantaneous.”

[…]

PHASER frying a rotary drone mid-flight.

Microwave weapons have traditionally been hampered by the fact that they don’t discriminate targets—bathing an area with them could damage friendly hardware along with a foe’s. But with attacks involving swarms of small UAVs becoming popular, that vice has become a virtue since PHASER can attack multiple targets simultaneously and doesn’t run out of ammunition.

Source: PHASER Microwave Weapon – The Air Force Is Deploying PHASER

This Guy Made an Ad Blocker That Works on Podcasts and Radio

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Meet AdBlock Radio, an adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts. Its creator, Alexandre Storelli, told Motherboard he hopes to help companies “develop alternative business models for radio and podcast lovers that do not want ads.”

“Ads exploit the weaknesses of many defenseless souls,” Storelli told Motherboard. “Ads dishonestly tempt people, steal their time and promise them a higher social status. Blocking them will be a relieving experience for many.”

Most audio ads exploit “auditory artifacts” to produce an ad that can’t be ignored or tuned out because it feels louder than it actually is—this has gotten so bad that there has actually been a “sonic arms race” where ads have been made increasingly louder over the years.

[…]

He said he’s been working on it for more than three years and that it uses techniques such as speech recognition, acoustic fingerprinting, and machine learning to detect known ad formats. It uses a crowdsourced database of ads and “acoustic fingerprinting,” which converts audio features into a series of numbers that can be combed by an algorithm. Storelli says this is the same technology used by Shazam to identify songs. He notes that the algorithm isn’t perfect, and that hip-hop music, for example, is often misidentified as an advertisement. It also has trouble with “native” advertisements, in which a podcast host reads an ad (this type of advertisement has become increasingly popular.)

[…]

Storelli has made AdBlock Radio open-source and given detailed instructions on how to build on it, integrate it into user devices, and deploy it in a way that pressures radio stations (and podcasts) to self-regulate the quality of their ads.

James Williams, co-founder of the Time Well Spent movement, once made the case that “[the ultimate benefit of adblockers is] better informational environments that are fundamentally designed to be on our side, to respect our increasingly scarce attention, and to help us navigate under the stars of our own goals and values.” Storelli goes a little further, quoting Jean-Marc Jancovici, a French energy expert, to argue “Climate change being one of the consequences of the modern mass consumption lifestyle, wishing a firm action against this process implies, for a part, to question the perpetual increase of the material consumption otherwise encouraged by ads.”

It’s not likely that ad blocking will avert a climate apocalypse. Ad blocking, however, may serve as a good salvo in the war against consumerism.

Source: This Guy Made an Ad Blocker That Works on Podcasts and Radio

Xiaomi’s Mi Mix Alpha is almost entirely made of screen

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As for the phone’s more traditional specs, there’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ processor, 5G connectivity, 12GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, 40W wired fast-charging, and a 4,050mAh battery. That last spec would perhaps suggest that Xiaomi doesn’t imagine you having the whole screen turned on all the time.

Xiaomi describes the Mix Alpha as a “concept smartphone” and isn’t going to be mass-producing it any time soon. The phone will go into small-scale production this year and go on sale in December for 19,999 yuan, or about $2,800. The original Mi Mix was also given the “concept” label and released in small quantities, with the Mi Mix 2 following a year later as a more mainstream device.

On one hand, this design poses obvious issues with cost, durability, battery life, accidental touch recognition, privacy, and so on. On the other, well, just look at it:

Next Up In Tech

Source: Xiaomi’s Mi Mix Alpha is almost entirely made of screen – The Verge

DNA is held together by hydrophobic forces

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Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have disproved the prevailing theory of how DNA binds itself. It is not, as is generally believed, hydrogen bonds which bind together the two sides of the DNA structure. Instead, water is the key. The discovery opens doors for new understanding in research in medicine and life sciences. The findings are published in PNAS.

DNA is constructed of two strands consisting of sugar molecules and phosphate groups. Between these two strands are nitrogen bases, the compounds that make up genes, with hydrogen bonds between them. Until now, it was commonly thought that those hydrogen bonds held the two strands together.

But now, researchers from Chalmers University of Technology show that the secret to DNA’s helical structure may be that the molecules have a hydrophobic interior, in an environment consisting mainly of water. The environment is therefore hydrophilic, while the DNA molecules’ nitrogen bases are hydrophobic, pushing away the surrounding water. When hydrophobic units are in a hydrophilic environment, they group together to minimize their exposure to the water.

[…]

e have also shown that DNA behaves totally differently in a hydrophobic environment. This could help us to understand DNA, and how it repairs. Nobody has previously placed DNA in a hydrophobic environment like this and studied how it behaves, so it’s not surprising that nobody has discovered this until now.”

The researchers also studied how DNA behaves in an environment that is more hydrophobic than normal, a method they were the first to experiment with. They used the hydrophobic solution polyethylene glycol, and changed the DNA’s surroundings step-by-step from the naturally hydrophilic environment to a hydrophobic one. They aimed to discover if there is a limit where DNA starts to lose its structure, when the DNA does not have a reason to bind, because the environment is no longer hydrophilic. The researchers observed that when the solution reached the borderline between hydrophilic and hydrophobic, the DNA molecules’ characteristic spiral form started to unravel.

Upon closer inspection, they observed that when the base pairs split from one another (due to external influence, or simply from random movements), holes are formed in the structure, allowing water to leak in. Because DNA wants to keep its interior dry, it presses together, with the base pairs coming together again to squeeze out the water. In a hydrophobic environment, this is missing, so the holes stay in place.

“Hydrophobic catalysis and a potential biological role of DNA unstacking induced by effects” is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Source: DNA is held together by hydrophobic forces

Several months after the fact, and after public reporting, CafePress finally acknowledges huge data theft to its customers

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T-shirt flogger CafePress has finally informed its customers about a serious data loss dating back to February and first reported last month.

Several CafePress punters told us they had received an email this morning warning them the company had lost customer names, emails, physical addresses, phone numbers and unencrypted passwords. Some customers have also had the last four numbers of payment cards and expiry dates nabbed by hackers.

The email, addressed to “Dear Valued Customer”, says that the incident happened “on or about February 19”. But fear not: “We have been diligently investigating this incident with the assistance of outside experts.”

The email claims that CafePress “recently discovered” the security hole. But in early August, the company ran a mass-password reset following reports that some 23 million user details were floating around on hacker forums.

Security researcher Jim Scott told The Register at the time: “Out of the 23 million compromised users, roughly half of them had their passwords exposed encoded in base64 SHA-1.” The hack was originally spotted by Troy Hunt, operator of the Have I Been Pwned website.

Today’s email says that an unidentified third party accessed a CafePress database and customer data. They may also have had access to CafePress accounts for a limited time and the information “could have been used for fraudulent activity”.

[…]

The company has not responded to our questions, which include why passwords were not properly encrypted and why it has taken so long to warn customers.

Source: Several months after the fact, CafePress finally acknowledges huge data theft to its customers • The Register

Football Leaks: Possible Interest Conflict Dogs Probe

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Eurojust, the European Union agency that facilitates cooperation between EU prosectuors, had extended the invitation for a working meeting, the focus of which was on the probes into findings from Football Leaks, the largest data leak in history. But the meeting produced more controversy than expected.

Ten countries have expressed interest in the gigantic trove of data. Under the leadership of French authorities, the working meeting in The Hague had been set up to determine who and under what circumstances authorities would be permitted to work with the millions of files of data from the heart of the football industry. Investigators are hoping the information will provide evidence of serious tax evasion, collective fraud, embezzlement, corruption and money laundering.

[…]

Cluny was present as Portugal’s Eurojust representative at the press conference. And the fact that he didn’t disclose a personal conflict of interest in the course of these proceedings has been the source of significant irritation among his colleagues. Furthermore, it confirms the fears of the whistleblower who gathered the Football Leaks data. Because there are now suspicions Cluny may not be impartial.

But first things first.

Football Leaks is a raft of data that sheds light on the dirty side of the professional football business. The documents offer insights into the inner workings of numerous companies whose revenues end up taking circuitous routes through offshore countries. Financial authorities in Europe have often been kept in the dark about the nested corporate structures, but the documents reveal everything: articles of incorporation, ownership structures, payment flows, wire transfers and bank account numbers.

A source named “John” has been providing DER SPIEGEL with the data since the beginning of 2016. The newsmagazine shared more than 70 million documents with the journalist network European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) and those documents have provided the basis for more than 800 investigative articles over the past three years. The publication of the articles has led to numerous investigations and trials. Among others, Cristiano Ronaldo and José Mourinho were slapped with suspended sentences and fines for tax fraud.

But the whistleblower behind Football Leaks is facing his own trouble with the law following his arrest in mid-January. He has since discarded his pseudonym John and revealed his real name to the public: Rui Pinto. The 30-year-old Portuguese national is now under house arrest in Budapest after Portuguese investigators issued an arrest warrant against him on suspicion of attempted extortion and cybercrime. They are demanding Pinto’s extradition to Portugal. Pinto denies the accusations and is waging a legal fight to prevent his deportation.

Antonio Cluny, the inconspicuous man at the press conference in The Hague, used to be the deputy prosecutor general of Portugal and has been representing his country’s interests at Eurojust since 2014. He said at the press conference that Portugal is also interested in analyzing the data gathered by Pinto, but he also stressed that his country would continue to insist on Pinto’s extradition.

[…]

s it turns out, Cluny did not, in fact, share critical information that has now cast doubt on his independence.

What Cluny shared neither publicly nor with his colleagues at Eurojust is that he’s the father of João Lima Cluny, a top lawyer at the Portuguese law firm Morais Leitão. The firm represents Cristiano Ronaldo, José Mourinho and many other big names in the football world who ran into trouble with the judiciary following the publication of Football Leaks documents. In his private messages, Ronaldo affectionately calls one of the firm’s partners, Carlos Osório de Castro, “father.” Osório de Castro has served as Ronaldo’s legal adviser since the beginning of the football player’s career and the Porto-based lawyer has also coordinated Ronaldo’s defense strategy for the rape allegations that have been leveled against him.

Source: Football Leaks: Possible Interest Conflict Dogs Probe – SPIEGEL ONLINE

I didn’t know about the whole football leaks thing!

Der Spiegel’s site and reporting on the leaks content

The Football leaks data site. You can download player contracts, see how much agents make, what kind of sponsorships there are and much much much more!