Cheddar Man: Britains’ first men were black. And so were Europes’.

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New research into ancient DNA extracted from the skeleton has helped scientists to build a portrait of Cheddar Man and his life in Mesolithic Britain.The biggest surprise, perhaps, is that some of the earliest modern human inhabitants of Britain may not have looked the way you might expect.Dr Tom Booth is a postdoctoral researcher working closely with the Museum’s human remains collection to investigate human adaptation to changing environments.’Until recently it was always assumed that humans quickly adapted to have paler skin after entering Europe about 45,000 years ago,’ says Tom. ‘Pale skin is better at absorbing UV light and helps humans avoid vitamin D deficiency in climates with less sunlight.’However, Cheddar Man has the genetic markers of skin pigmentation usually associated with sub-Saharan Africa.This discovery is consistent with a number of other Mesolithic human remains discovered throughout Europe.

Source: Cheddar Man: Mesolithic Britain’s blue-eyed boy | Natural History Museum

PinMe: Tracking a Smartphone User around the World with GPS and WiFi off

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We describe PinMe, a novel user-location mechanism that exploits non-sensory/sensory data stored on the smartphone, e.g., the environment’s air pressure, along with publicly-available auxiliary information, e.g., elevation maps, to estimate the user’s location when all location services, e.g., GPS, are turned off.

Source: [1802.01468] PinMe: Tracking a Smartphone User around the World

The gender pay gap at Uber is small and has a reason

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Specifically, the study stated, drivers who make runs for Uber more frequently are more likely to know where and when to operate in order to get the highest-paying fares.

Thus, because women, on average, spend less time driving for Uber than their male counterparts, they are less likely to be around to grab the highest-paying fares.

“Men’s willingness to supply more hours per week (enabling them to earn more) and to target the most profitable locations shows that women continue to pay a cost for working reduced hours each week, even with no convexity in the hours-earning schedule,” the research team stated.

The study, which was based on data collected from 1,877,252 drivers operating in America from January 2015 to March 2017, examined factors including average hours worked per week, money earned over the whole week, and money earned per hour.
[…]
Overall, the gang concluded that those who drove an Uber car more often were able to make more per trip, and because on average the men surveyed drove 50 per cent more often, they were able to get on average $21.28 (£15.23) per hour compared to $20.04 (£14.35) logged by their female counterparts.

With more time driving, we’re told, comes a better idea of when and where the best fares are to be expected.
[…]
“A driver with more than 2,500 lifetime trips completed earns 14 per cent more per hour than a driver who has completed fewer than 100 trips in her time on the platform, in part because she learns where to drive, when to drive, and how to strategically cancel and accept trips.”

At least one other factor was cited in the gap: speed.

The study found that while driving for Uber, men tended to drive around 2.2 per cent faster than women. This meant that, over the long haul, they were able to rack up a few extra trips and make a bit more money.

“Increasing speed increases expected driver earnings in almost all Uber settings,” the research team concluded.

Source: Uber: Ah yeah, we pay women drivers less than men. We can explain!

Bug in Grammarly browser extension exposes virtually everything a user ever writes

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The Grammarly browser extension, which has about 22 million users, exposes its authentication tokens to all websites, allowing any to access all the user’s data without permission, according to a bug report from Google Project Zero’s Tavis Ormandy.

The high-severity bug was discovered on Friday and fixed early Monday morning, “a really impressive response time,” Ormandy wrote.

Grammarly, launched in 2009 by Ukrainian developers, looks at all messages, documents and social media posts and attempts to clean up errors so the user is left with the clearest English possible. The browser extension has access to virtually everything a user types, and therefore an attacker could access a huge trove of private data.

Exploitation is as simple as a couple of console commands granting full access to everything, as Ormandy explained. The company has no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited.

The vulnerability affected Chrome and Firefox. Updates are now available for both browsers.

Source: Bug in Grammarly browser extension exposes virtually everything a user ever writes

Japan successfully launches world’s smallest satellite-carrying rocket

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KAGOSHIMA – Japan successfully launched on Saturday the world’s smallest satellite-carrying rocket following a failed attempt in January last year, the nation’s space agency said.

The rocket about the size of a utility pole, measuring 10 meters in length and 50 centimeters in diameter, lifted off from the Uchinoura Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture and delivered its payload to its intended orbit, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The No. 5 vehicle of the SS-520 series carried a microsatellite weighing about 3 kilograms developed by the University of Tokyo to collect imagery of the Earth’s surface.

The launch was aimed at verifying JAXA’s technology used to launch small rockets made with commercially available components at lower cost amid growing global demand for microsatellites. The agency used components found in home electronics and smartphones for the rocket.

JAXA launched the No. 4 vehicle on Jan. 15 last year, but terminated its flight shortly after liftoff due to a communications problem. The agency found that vibrations during liftoff caused a short circuit, leading to a loss of power in the data transmitter.

For Saturday’s launch, the agency made more than 40 improvements to prevent a recurrence.

Source: Japan successfully launches world’s smallest satellite-carrying rocket | The Japan Times

Exoplanets from another galaxy spotted

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The Kepler Space Telescope has found oodles of exoplants, but now astroboffins have spotted the first exoplanets outside our galaxy.

A group of astroboffins from the University of Oklahoma has become the first to demonstrate exoplanet observations in another galaxy – one that’s 3.8 billion light years away, or one-third of the distance across the observable universe.

The discovery by a team led by professor Xinyu Dai and postdoc Eduardo Guerras, found the planets’ signatures in the spectrum of a gravitationally-microlensed galaxy behind the black hole quasar RXJ 1131−1231.

Gravitational microlensing refers to the phenomenon, predicted by Einstein, that gravity can bend light, resulting in an apparent magnification if the bodies are aligned the right way (from the point of view of the observer).

As the university explains, they believe the planets range in estimated mass from about the size of the moon, through to Jupiter-sized.

Their paper, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters and available here at the arXiv pre-print service, explains that the unbound planets they saw caused “Fe Kα line energy shifts” in the spectrum of RXJ 1131−1231.

They found the line shifts in Chandra X-ray Observatory images of the quasar, and in the paper said what they observed “has never been observed in a non-lensed AGN” [active galactic nucleus – El Reg].

The paper also explains that the researchers focussed on unbounded planets – that is, planets wandering around their galaxies rather than being part of a solar system – because planets orbiting stars don’t show up separately from their hosts.

There are around 2,000 moon-to-Jupiter sized planets for each main sequence star in their observations, the researchers wrote, which equates to trillions of stars per galaxy.

Source: Exoplanets from another galaxy spotted – take that, Kepler fatigue! • The Register

Intel’s new Vaunt smart glasses actually look good

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There is no camera to creep people out, no button to push, no gesture area to swipe, no glowing LCD screen, no weird arm floating in front of the lens, no speaker, and no microphone (for now).

From the outside, the Vaunt glasses look just like eyeglasses. When you’re wearing them, you see a stream of information on what looks like a screen — but it’s actually being projected onto your retina.

The prototypes I wore in December also felt virtually indistinguishable from regular glasses. They come in several styles, work with prescriptions, and can be worn comfortably all day. Apart from a tiny red glimmer that’s occasionally visible on the right lens, people around you might not even know you’re wearing smart glasses.

Like Google Glass did five years ago, Vaunt will launch an “early access program” for developers later this year. But Intel’s goals are different than Google’s. Instead of trying to convince us we could change our lives for a head-worn display, Intel is trying to change the head-worn display to fit our lives.

Source: Exclusive: Intel’s new Vaunt smart glasses actually look good – The Verge

Can’t login to Skype? You’re not alone. Chat app’s been a bit crap for five days now

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A bunch of Skype users are unhappy that they’re been unable to sign into the VoIP service for several days.The yakkity-yak app has fallen flat since January 24, leaving a number of punters with two-factor authentication enabled unable to get back into the software after signing out.”Skype users who are signed in are not affected,” Reg reader C. F. Heyns told us today. “Anyone signing out has almost no chance of getting back in.”

Source: Can’t login to Skype? You’re not alone. Chat app’s been a bit crap for five days now • The Register

Crooks make US ATMs spew million-plus bucks in ‘jackpotting’ hacks

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ash machines in the US are being hacked to spew hundreds of dollar bills – a type of theft dubbed “jackpotting” because the ATMs look like slot machines paying out winnings.A gang of miscreants have managed to steal more than $1m from ATMs using this attack, according to a senior US Secret Service official speaking to Reuters on Monday.Typically, crooks inject malware into an ATM to make it rapidly dole out large sums of money that doesn’t belong to the thieves. Anyone aware of the work by security researcher Barnaby Jack – who almost 10 years ago revealed various ways to force cash machines to cough up cash on demand – will know of jackpotting.

[…]

Since 2013, if not earlier, Ploutus has been a favorite of Mexican banditos raiding cash machines, as previous Reg stories document. Viewed from this perspective, the main surprise today is that it’s taken so long for the scam to surface north of the border, moving from Mexico to the United States.

To get Ploutus into an ATM, the crooks have to gain physical access to the box’s internals to swap its computer hard drive for an infected one. Once the disk is in place and the ATM rebooted, the villains have full control over the device, allowing them to order it to dispense the contents of its cartridges of dollar bills.

Source: Crooks make US ATMs spew million-plus bucks in ‘jackpotting’ hacks • The Register

Maybe you should’ve stuck with NetWare: Hijackers can bypass Active Directory controls

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“The idea of a rogue domain controller is not new and has been mentioned multiple times in previous security publications but required invasive techniques (like installing a virtual machine with Windows Server) and to log on a regular domain controller (DC) to promote the VM into a DC for the targeted domain.”That’s easily spotted, so Delsalle wrote that the attack described by Delpy and Le Toux has to “modify the targeted AD infrastructure database to authorise the rogue server to be part of the replication process.”

Source: Maybe you should’ve stuck with NetWare: Hijackers can bypass Active Directory controls • The Register

UK.gov mass data slurping ruled illegal – AGAIN

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In a judgment handed down this morning, judges backed a challenge brought by deputy Labour leader Tom Watson in a long-running battle against state surveillance rules.These laws allow for ISPs and telcos to retain communications data for up to a year and for public authorities to get access to this information. But campaigners have argued it fails to properly restrict this retention and access.Today’s ruling refers to the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act, which expired at the end of 2016, but will have significant implications for its successor, the Investigatory Powers Act.The so-called Snoopers’ Charter was already under pressure following a landmark 2016 ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union, and today’s judgment adds weight to this.In the document, the judges also note: “As [Ben] Jaffey QC, on behalf of the first respondent, pointed out in the course of his oral submissions, that the fact that DRIPA has been repealed does not make this a pointless exercise”.Their ruling was that DRIPA “was inconsistent with EU law” because it did not limit access to retained communications data solely to the purpose of fighting serious crime.It also broke the law because police forces and public authorities could themselves grant access to retained data – rather than access being subject to prior review by a court or an independent administrative authority.

Source: UK.gov mass data slurping ruled illegal – AGAIN • The Register

Especially the last bit: rather than access being subject to prior review by a court or an independent administrative authority.

Come on! How hard is it to ask a judge after proving some sort of probable cause? It’s investigation that gets the bad guys. Not being a police state.

AutoSploit searches shodan for weak machines and metasploit to hack them for you

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https://github.com/NullArray/AutoSploitAs the name might suggest AutoSploit attempts to automate the exploitation of remote hosts. Targets are collected automatically as well by employing the Shodan.io API. The program allows the user to enter their platform specific search query such as; Apache, IIS, etc, upon which a list of candidates will be retrieved.

After this operation has been completed the ‘Exploit’ component of the program will go about the business of attempting to exploit these targets by running a series of Metasploit modules against them. Which Metasploit modules will be employed in this manner is determined by programatically comparing the name of the module to the initial search query. However, I have added functionality to run all available modules against the targets in a ‘Hail Mary’ type of attack as well.

The available Metasploit modules have been selected to facilitate Remote Code Execution and to attempt to gain Reverse TCP Shells and/or Meterpreter sessions. Workspace, local host and local port for MSF facilitated back connections are configured through the dialog that comes up before the ‘Exploit’ component is started.

https://github.com/NullArray/AutoSploit

Stupid Truck Driver Drove Right Over the Nazca Lines

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Argentine newspaper Clarín reports that the driver said he didn’t know the area because he had never traveled there before and that he left the road because of a mechanical problem. The newspaper speculated that the driver actually drove off the Pan-American Highway to avoid paying a toll.

Flores Vigo left tire tracks in a football field-sized area of the geoglyphs, damaging three of them. Peruvian authorities released him, as they didn’t have evidence that he’d done it intentionally.
[…]
Artists from pre-Hispanic Peruvian societies between 500BC and 500AD created the massive drawings by removing the top layer of darker rock to reveal the lighter earth below, according to UNESCO. The dry desert environment has allowed the markings to remain for 2,000 years.

This isn’t the first time stupidity has led to someone damaging the lines. Greenpeace performed a stunt back in 2014 in which they laid large pieces of yellow cloth on the lines. I ignore Greenpeace canvassers on the street to this day, for this reason.

Source: Stupid Truck Driver Drove Right Over the Nazca Lines

Japanese cryptocurrency exchange loses more than $500 million to hackers

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Coincheck said that around 523 million of the exchange’s NEM coins were sent to another account around 3 a.m. local time (1 p.m. ET Thursday), according to a Google translation of a Japanese transcript of the Friday press conference from Logmi. The exchange has about 6 percent of yen-bitcoin trading, ranking fourth by market share on CryptoCompare.

The stolen NEM coins were worth about 58 billion yen at the time of detection, or roughly $534.8 million, according to the exchange. Coincheck subsequently restricted withdrawals of all currencies, including yen, and trading of cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin.

Bloomberg first reported the hack. A CNBC email sent to Coincheck’s listed address bounced back.

Cryptocurrency NEM, which intends to help businesses handle data digitally, briefly fell more than 20 percent Friday before recovering to trade about 10 percent lower near 85 cents, according to CoinMarketCap. Most other major digital currencies, including bitcoin, traded little changed on the day.

Source: Japanese cryptocurrency exchange loses more than $500 million to hackers

Lenovo Fingerprint Manager Pro for Windows has a hardcoded password

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A vulnerability has been identified in Lenovo Fingerprint Manager Pro. Sensitive data stored by Lenovo Fingerprint Manager Pro, including users’ Windows logon credentials, is encrypted using a weak algorithm, contains a hard-coded password, and is accessible to all users with local non-administrative access to the system it is installed in.

Source: Lenovo Fingerprint Manager Pro for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 only (not 10) Insecure Credential Storage

Heat Map Released by Fitness Tracker Reveals Location of Secret Military Bases

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Strava which markets itself as a “social-networking app for athletes” publicly made available the global heat map, showing the location of all the rides, runs, swims, and downhills taken by its users, as collected by their smartphones and wearable devices like Fitbit.

Since Strava has been designed to track users’ routes and locations, IUCA analyst Nathan Ruser revealed that the app might have unintentionally mapped out the location of some of the military forces around the world, especially some secret ones from the United States.

With a total of one billion activities logged on the Strava’s activity map, it is a whole lot of useful data from all over the world.

Although Strava’s publicly available activity map was live as of November 2017, Ruser recently noticed that the map includes the fitness routes of army soldiers and agents in secret base locations, including U.S. military bases in Afghanistan and Syria, a suspected CIA base in Somalia and even Area 51.

Source: Heat Map Released by Fitness Tracker Reveals Location of Secret Military Bases

NASA’s Long Dead (since 2007) ‘IMAGE’ Satellite is Alive! – how satellite hunters go to work.

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Over the past week the station has been dedicated to an S-band scan looking for new targets and refreshing the frequency list, triggered by the recent launch of the mysterious ZUMA mission. This tends to be a semi-annual activity as it can eat up a lot of observing resources even with much of the data gathering automated the data reviewing is tedious.

Upon reviewing the data from January 20, 2018, I noticed a curve consistent with an satellite in High Earth Orbit (HEO) on 2275.905MHz, darn not ZUMA… This is not uncommon during these searches. So I set to work to identify the source.

A quick identity scan using ‘strf’ (sat tools rf) revealed the signal to come from 2000-017A, 26113, called IMAGE.
[…]
So what was IMAGE? I did a little Googling and discovered that it had been ‘Lost in Space’ since December 18, 2005 after just dropping off the grid suddenly. The mission was designed to image the magnetosphere, more details about that can be found in the press kit.

NASA considered the spacecraft a total loss due to a design flaw that manifested while the spacecraft was in its extended mission. The NASA failure review did however conclude that it was possible for the spacecraft to be revived by permitting a ‘Transponder SSPC reset’ after it passed through eclipse in 2007. One must assume that didn’t occur in 2007 and they gave up.
[…]
Periodically the spacecraft will enter an eclipse and NASA surmised that this may trigger it to restart and apply power back to the communications system. That appears to have happened! As you will note from the plots below the Sun angles are presently good for IMAGE and it may just stay operational for some time to come.

Source: NASA’s Long Dead ‘IMAGE’ Satellite is Alive! – Riddles in the Sky

Dutch agencies provide crucial intel about Russia’s interference in US-elections, US burns the Dutch source

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The Cozy Bear hackers are in a space in a university building near the Red Square. The group’s composition varies, usually about ten people are active. The entrance is in a curved hallway. A security camera records who enters and who exits the room. The AIVD hackers manage to gain access to that camera. Not only can the intelligence service now see what the Russians are doing, they can also see who’s doing it. Pictures are taken of every visitor. In Zoetermeer, these pictures are analyzed and compared to known Russian spies.

The Dutch access to the Russian hackers’ network soon pays off. In November, the Russians prepare for an attack on one of their prime targets: the American State Department. By now, they’ve obtained e-mail addresses and the login credentials of several civil servants. They manage to enter the non-classified part of the computer network.

The AIVD and her military counterpart MIVD inform the NSA-liaison at the American embassy in The Hague. He immediately alerts the different American intelligence services.

What follows is a rare battle between the attackers, who are attempting to further infiltrate the State Department, and its defenders, FBI and NSA teams – with clues and intelligence provided by the Dutch. This battle lasts 24 hours, according to American media.

The Russians are extremely aggressive but do not know they’re being spied on. Thanks to the Dutch spies, the NSA and FBI are able to counter the enemy with enormous speed. The Dutch intel is so crucial that the NSA opens a direct line with Zoetermeer, to get the information to the United States as soon as possible.
[…]
President elect Donald Trump categorically refuses to explicitly acknowledge the Russian interference. It would tarnish the gleam of his electoral victory. He has also frequently praised Russia, and president Putin in particular. This is one of the reasons the American intelligence services eagerly leak information: to prove that the Russians did in fact interfere with the elections. And that is why intelligence services have told American media about the amazing access of a ‘western ally’.

This has led to anger in Zoetermeer and The Hague. Some Dutchmen even feel betrayed. It’s absolutely not done to reveal the methods of a friendly intelligence service, especially if you’re benefiting from their intelligence. But no matter how vehemently the heads of the AIVD and MIVD express their displeasure, they don’t feel understood by the Americans. It’s made the AIVD and MIVD a lot more cautious when it comes to sharing intelligence. They’ve become increasingly suspicious since Trump was elected president.

The AIVD hackers are no longer in Cozy Bear’s computer network. The Dutch espionage lasted between 1 and 2,5 years. Hacker groups frequently change their methods and even a different firewall can cut off access.

Source: Dutch agencies provide crucial intel about Russia’s interference in US-elections – Tech – Voor nieuws, achtergronden en columns

Hackers Hijacking CPUs to Mine Cryptocurrency Have Now Invaded YouTube Ads

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As Ars Technica first reported on Friday, users on social media started complaining earlier this week that YouTube ads were triggering their anti-virus software. Specifically, the software was recognizing a script from a service called CoinHive. The script was originally released as a sort of altruistic idea that would allow sites to make a little extra income by putting a visitor’s CPU processing power to use by mining a cryptocurrency called Monero. This could be used ethically as long as a site notifies its visitors of what’s happening and doesn’t get so greedy with the CPU usage that it crashes a visitor’s computer. In the case of YouTube’s ads running the script, they were reportedly using up to 80 percent of the CPU and neither YouTube nor the user were told what was happening.

Source: Hackers Hijacking CPUs to Mine Cryptocurrency Have Now Invaded YouTube Ads

Thanks to “consent” buried deep in sales agreements, car manufacturers are tracking tens of millions of US and EU cars

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Millions of new cars sold in the US and Europe are “connected,” having some mechanism for exchanging data with their manufacturers after the cars are sold; these cars stream or batch-upload location data and other telemetry to their manufacturers, who argue that they are allowed to do virtually anything they want with this data, thanks to the “explicit consent” of the car owners — who signed a lengthy contract at purchase time that contained a vague and misleading clause deep in its fine-print.

Car manufacturers are mostly warehousing this data (leaving it vulnerable to leaks and breaches, search-warrants, government hacking and unethical employee snooping), and can’t articulate why they’re saving it or how they use it.

Much of this data ends up in “marketplaces” where data-sets from multiple auto-makers are merged, made uniform, and given identifiers that allow them to be cross-referenced with the massive corporate data-sets that already exist, and then offered on the open market to any bidder.

Source: Thanks to “consent” buried deep in sales agreements, car manufacturers are tracking tens of millions of US cars / Boing Boing

Researchers find a way to link TOR / Silk Road BTC expenditure to people using two datasets

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To do so, the Qatari researchers first collected dozens of bitcoin addresses used for donations and dealmaking by websites protected by the anonymity software Tor, run by everyone from WikiLeaks to the now-defunct Silk Road. Then they scraped thousands of more widely visible bitcoin addresses from the public accounts of users on Twitter and the popular bitcoin forum Bitcoin Talk.

By merely searching for direct links between those two sets of addresses in the blockchain, they found more than 125 transactions made to those dark web sites’ accounts—very likely with the intention of preserving the senders’ anonymity—that they could easily link to public accounts. Among those, 46 were donations to WikiLeaks. More disturbingly, 22 were payments to the Silk Road. Though they don’t reveal many personal details of those 22 individuals, the researchers say that some had publicly revealed their locations, ages, genders, email addresses, or even full names. (One user who fully identified himself was only a teenager at the time of the transactions.) And the 18 people whose Silk Road transactions were linked to Bitcoin Talk may be particularly vulnerable, since that forum has previously responded to subpoeanas demanding that it unmask a user’s registration details or private messages. “You have irrefutable evidence mapping this profile to this hidden service,” says Yazan Boshmaf, another of the study’s authors.

Source: Your Sloppy Bitcoin Drug Deals Will Haunt You for Years

1.7-Billion-Year-Old Chunk of North America Found Sticking to Australia

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Geologists matching rocks from opposite sides of the globe have found that part of Australia was once attached to North America 1.7 billion years ago.

Researchers from Curtin University in Australia examinedrocks from the Georgetown region of northern Queensland. The rocks — sandstone sedimentary rocks that formed in a shallow sea — had signatures that were unknownin Australia but strongly resembled rocks that can be seen in present-day Canada.

The researchers, who described their findings online Jan. 17 in the journal Geology, concluded that the Georgetown area broke away from North America 1.7 billion years ago. Then, 100 million years later, this landmass collided with what is now northern Australia, at the Mount Isa region. […]
Previous research suggested that northeast Australia was near North America, Siberia or North China when the continents came together to form Nuna, Nordsvan and colleagues noted, but scientists had yet to find solid evidence of this relationship.

Source: 1.7-Billion-Year-Old Chunk of North America Found Sticking to Australia

Scientists Found a Way to Make Inexpensive, Solid-Looking 3D Holograms / volumetric displays

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Researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah made something they’re calling an Optical Trap Display (OTD). The device traps a tiny opaque particle in mid-air using an invisible laser beam, then moves the beam around a preset path in free space. At the same time, it illuminates the particle with red, green, or blue lights. When the particle moves fast enough, it creates a solid holographic image in the air. Move it even faster, and you can create the illusion of movement.
[…]
“We can think about this image like a 3D-printed object,” lead author Daniel Smalley, an assistant professor in electroholography at Brigham Young University, explained in a Nature video. “A single point was dragged sequentially through all these image points, and as it did, it scattered light. And the accumulated effect of all that scattering and moving was to create this 3D image in space that is visible from all angles.”

Scientifically, what Smalley and his team are creating are known as volumetric images, which differentiates them from 2D-hologram technologies. Other companies and scientists have made devices that create volumetric images, but the researchers say theirs is the first to generate free-floating images that can occupy the same space as other objects, as opposed to volumetric images that need to be contained inside a specially designed field. Other devices often require a much more elaborate set-up as well, while the OTD is relatively cheap, made with commercially available parts and low-cost lasers.
[…]
That said, the device does have its limitations. Namely, that the images produced right now are quite tiny: smaller than a fingernail. Making the images bigger will require the researchers learn how to manipulate more than one particle at a time. And it’s unlikely the device will be usable outdoors for the foreseeable future, since fast moving air particles can muck up the process. Video cameras also have a problem capturing the images the way our eyes or still cameras do—a video’s frame rate makes the image look like it’s flickering, while our eyes only see a solid image.

Source: Scientists Found a Way to Make Inexpensive, Solid-Looking 3D Holograms

Microsoft whips out tool so you can measure Windows 10’s data-slurping creepiness

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The software giant has produced a tool that’s claimed to show users how much personal information its Windows 10 operating system collects and sends back to Redmond for diagnostics.The application is dubbed Diagnostic Data Viewer, and is free from the Windows Store. It reveals that stuff like the computer’s device name, OS version, and serial number, as well as more detailed records such as installed apps, preference settings, and details on each application’s usage, are beamed back to Microsoft.
[…]
Microsoft says the Diagnostic Data Viewer will run separately from the Windows Privacy Dashboard that is bundled with Windows 10. That app will also be upgraded to provide users with more information on data collection, including activity history for the user’s Microsoft account.

Microsoft is also planning an update to the app to allow users to export dashboard reports, view media consumption information, and delete reported data (for some reason this isn’t already allowed).

The Dashboard and Data Viewer apps arrive after Microsoft was taken to task by governments for what many saw as overly intrusive data collection by Windows 10.

Source: Microsoft whips out tool so you can measure Windows 10’s data-slurping creepiness • The Register

Engineers design artificial synapse for “brain-on-a-chip” hardware

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engineers at MIT have designed an artificial synapse in such a way that they can precisely control the strength of an electric current flowing across it, similar to the way ions flow between neurons. The team has built a small chip with artificial synapses, made from silicon germanium. In simulations, the researchers found that the chip and its synapses could be used to recognize samples of handwriting, with 95 percent accuracy.
[…]
Most neuromorphic chip designs attempt to emulate the synaptic connection between neurons using two conductive layers separated by a “switching medium,” or synapse-like space. When a voltage is applied, ions should move in the switching medium to create conductive filaments, similarly to how the “weight” of a synapse changes.

But it’s been difficult to control the flow of ions in existing designs. Kim says that’s because most switching mediums, made of amorphous materials, have unlimited possible paths through which ions can travel — a bit like Pachinko, a mechanical arcade game that funnels small steel balls down through a series of pins and levers, which act to either divert or direct the balls out of the machine.

Like Pachinko, existing switching mediums contain multiple paths that make it difficult to predict where ions will make it through. Kim says that can create unwanted nonuniformity in a synapse’s performance.

“Once you apply some voltage to represent some data with your artificial neuron, you have to erase and be able to write it again in the exact same way,” Kim says. “But in an amorphous solid, when you write again, the ions go in different directions because there are lots of defects. This stream is changing, and it’s hard to control. That’s the biggest problem — nonuniformity of the artificial synapse.”

A perfect mismatch

Instead of using amorphous materials as an artificial synapse, Kim and his colleagues looked to single-crystalline silicon, a defect-free conducting material made from atoms arranged in a continuously ordered alignment. The team sought to create a precise, one-dimensional line defect, or dislocation, through the silicon, through which ions could predictably flow.

To do so, the researchers started with a wafer of silicon, resembling, at microscopic resolution, a chicken-wire pattern. They then grew a similar pattern of silicon germanium — a material also used commonly in transistors — on top of the silicon wafer. Silicon germanium’s lattice is slightly larger than that of silicon, and Kim found that together, the two perfectly mismatched materials can form a funnel-like dislocation, creating a single path through which ions can flow.

The researchers fabricated a neuromorphic chip consisting of artificial synapses made from silicon germanium, each synapse measuring about 25 nanometers across. They applied voltage to each synapse and found that all synapses exhibited more or less the same current, or flow of ions, with about a 4 percent variation between synapses — a much more uniform performance compared with synapses made from amorphous material.

They also tested a single synapse over multiple trials, applying the same voltage over 700 cycles, and found the synapse exhibited the same current, with just 1 percent variation from cycle to cycle.

Source: Engineers design artificial synapse for “brain-on-a-chip” hardware | MIT News