Royal Navy Tests Quantum Navigation

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GPS has changed the way we get around the globe. But if you command a warship, you must think about what you would do if an adversary destroyed or compromised your GPS system. The Royal Navy and Imperial College London think a quantum navigation system might be the answer.

[…]

The quantum sensors in question are essentially accelerometers. Unlike conventional accelerometers, though, these devices use ultracold atoms to make very precise measurements using a laser optical ruler, which means they do not drift as rapidly

[…]

You can see a Sky News report on the trial below.The tests were done in a rapid prototyping pod carried onboard XV Patrick Blackett, a fitting name for an experimental ship since Lord Blackett was a Nobel laureate and head of the physics department at Imperial College for a decade ending in 1963. The underlying tech came out of the university back in 2018, but making it work in a real-world environment onboard a ship is another matter.

[…]

 

Source: Royal Navy Tests Quantum Navigation | Hackaday

Study finds sleep coaching app can help recover an extra hour of rest without drugs

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The makers of an app called Sleep Reset claim it can help you get more (and better) sleep without the use of drugs — and they have the study to prove it. A group of researchers from the University of Arizona’s Sleep and Health Research Program, some of whom also serve as the company’s medical advisors, have just published a paper in peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Sleep. The paper details the results of a 12-week program that used Sleep Reset, which apparently increased the average participant’s sleep time by 44 minutes.

Those who were getting less than six hours of sleep a night increased their sleep time by 85 minutes. Some of them likely improved their time because they were able to fall asleep much earlier: The paper says participants who typically lie awake for more than 30 minutes before dozing off managed to reduce that time by 53 percent. And those who usually spend more than an hour trying to fall asleep were able to reduce their time awake by 41 percent. Meanwhile, those’d wake up more than three times overnight found themselves experiencing two fewer nightly awakenings. The researchers also said that nearly half of the participants stopped using sleep aids after completing the program.

The study involved 564 participants (65 percent of whom were female) aged 30 to 60 years old who followed a standardized curriculum for three months. They used Sleep Reset in the way it’s meant to be used in that its sleep coaches gave them personalized recommendations and feedback via text messages within the app. They also used the app’s sleep diary, mindfulness exercises and trackers to monitor their progress. To use Sleep Reset, a user needs to answer a series of questions on what kind of sleep they’re getting and what they’re having trouble with. They’re also asked to state what their goals are, such as whether they’re looking to feel more well-rested or to look more youthful.

[…]

Dr. Michael Grandner, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and Sleep Reset’s Lead Scientific advisor said: “Many popular sleep solutions like Trazadone, Benadryl and Melatonin don’t even have the clinical evidence to increase total sleep time much at all. Ambien and Lunesta are known to increase sleep time by around 30 minutes, but that’s much less than what we’ve seen from Sleep Reset. What’s even better is that Sleep Reset is a non-medication intervention, thus non-habit forming and devoid of troubling side effects.”

Source: Study finds sleep coaching app can help recover an extra hour of rest

Redditor creates working anime QR codes using Stable Diffusion

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On Tuesday, a Reddit user named “nhciao” posted a series of artistic QR codes created using the Stable Diffusion AI image-synthesis model that can still be read as functional QR codes by smartphone camera apps. The functional pieces reflect artistic styles in anime and Asian art.

QR codes, short for Quick Response codes, are two-dimensional barcodes initially designed for the automotive industry in Japan. These codes have since found wide-ranging applications in various fields including advertising, product tracking, and digital payments, thanks to their ability to store a substantial amount of data. When scanned using a smartphone or a dedicated QR code scanner, the encoded information (which can be text, a website URL, or other data) is quickly accessed and displayed.

In this case, despite the presence of intricate AI-generated designs and patterns in the images created by nhciao, we’ve found that smartphone camera apps on both iPhone and Android are still able to read these as functional QR codes. If you have trouble reading them, try backing your camera farther away from the images.

Stable Diffusion is an AI-powered image-synthesis model released last year that can generate images based on text descriptions. It can also transform existing images using a technique called “img2img.” The creator did not detail the exact technique used to create the novel codes in English, but based on this blog post and the title of the Reddit post (“ControlNet for QR Code”), they apparently trained several custom Stable Diffusion ControlNet models (plus LoRA fine tunings) that have been conditioned to create different-styled results. Next, they fed existing QR codes into the Stable Diffusion AI image generator and used ControlNet to maintain the QR code’s data positioning despite synthesizing an image around it, likely using a written prompt.

Other techniques exist to make artistic-looking QR codes by manipulating the positions of dots within the codes to make meaningful patterns that can still be read. In this case, Stable Diffusion is not only controlling dot positions but also blending picture details to match the QR code.

This interesting use of Stable Diffusion is possible because of the innate error correction feature built into QR codes. This error correction capability allows a certain percentage of the QR code’s data to be restored if it’s damaged or obscured, permitting a level of modification without making the code unreadable.

In typical QR codes, this error correction feature serves to recover information if part of the code is damaged or dirty. But in nhciao’s case, it has been leveraged to blend creativity with utility. Stable Diffusion added unique artistic touches to the QR codes without compromising their functionality.

An AI-generated image that still functions as a working QR code.
Enlarge / An AI-generated image that still functions as a working QR code.
nhciao / Stable Diffusion

The codes in the examples seen here all point to a URL for qrbtf.com, a QR code-generator website likely run by nhciao based on their previous Reddit posts from years past. The technique could technically work with any QR code, although someone on the Reddit thread said that it may work best for shorter URLs due to how QR codes encode data.

This discovery opens up new possibilities for both digital art and marketing. Ordinary black-and-white QR codes could be turned into unique pieces of art, enhancing their aesthetic appeal. The positive reaction to nhciao’s experiment on social media may spark a new era in which QR codes are not just tools of convenience but also interesting and complex works of art.

Source: Redditor creates working anime QR codes using Stable Diffusion | Ars Technica

Posted in Art

electric VTOL Pilot Training Outlined in US FAA Proposal (which could be used as urban air taxis, maybe)

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US aviation regulators on Wednesday unveiled their first framework for how to train pilots for the expected new breed of electric-powered urban air taxis designed to revolutionize short-hop travel in cities. From a report: The Federal Aviation Administration published a proposed set of regulations that attempt to create an orderly process for building a pipeline of pilots on the devices, which don’t currently fit into existing regulations. It would allow flight crews trained on existing aircraft to take credit for that experience as they transition to the new devices known as electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVOTLs, the FAA said in a statement. It also creates a pathway for pilots to receive FAA sign-off for specific new aircraft and attempts to merge the new technology into existing rules as much as possible, the agency said.

“These proposed rules of the sky will safely usher in this new era of aviation and provide the certainty the industry needs to develop,” David Boulter, FAA’s acting associate administrator for aviation safety, said in the release. The proposal is a key step in allowing the new aircraft — which take off vertically like helicopters, but can fly with the efficiency of fixed-wing planes — to be introduced into the US aviation system. The agency has estimated that it will approve a handful of the devices as early as 2025.

Source: Urban Air-Taxi Pilot Training Outlined in US FAA Proposal – Slashdot

Lung cancer pill cuts risk of death by half, says study

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[…] Taking the drug osimertinib after surgery dramatically reduced the risk of patients dying by 51%, results presented at the world’s largest cancer conference showed.

[…]

“Fifty per cent is a big deal in any disease, but certainly in a disease like lung cancer, which has typically been very resistant to therapies.”

The Adaura trial involved patients aged between 30 and 86 in 26 countries and looked at whether the pill could help non-small cell lung cancer patients, the most common form of the disease.

Everyone in the trial had a mutation of the EGFR gene, which is found in about a quarter of global lung cancer cases, and accounts for as many as 40% of cases in Asia. An EGFR mutation is more common in women than men, and in people who have never smoked or have been light smokers.

[…]

After five years, 88% of patients who took the daily pill after the removal of their tumour were still alive, compared with 78% of patients treated with a placebo. Overall, there was a 51% lower risk of death for those who received osimertinib compared with those who received placebo.

[…]

 

Source: Lung cancer pill cuts risk of death by half, says ‘thrilling’ study | Cancer research | The Guardian

Scientists Beam Space-Based Solar Power to Earth for First Time

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[…] The experiment is a part of Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project, and the institute announced a successful transmission via press release yesterday. The researchers conducted the power transfer experiment using the Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment, or MAPLE, which is a small prototype aboard the in-orbit Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1) that launched this past January.

The researchers say that, in a first, MAPLE’s array of transmitters successfully beamed solar power collected in space using microwaves to a receiver on the rooftop of Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering on Caltech’s campus in Pasadena.

“Through the experiments we have run so far, we received confirmation that MAPLE can transmit power successfully to receivers in space,” said Space Solar Power Project co-director Ali Hajimiri in the press release. “We have also been able to program the array to direct its energy toward Earth, which we detected here at Caltech. We had, of course, tested it on Earth, but now we know that it can survive the trip to space and operate there.”

How Does Wireless Power Transfer Work?

The SSPD-1, attached to a Vigoride spacetug from Momentus Space, consists of two panels used to collect solar power. An array of transmitters within MAPLE sends that energy across a given distance using constructive and destructive interference. Located about a foot away from its transmitter, MAPLE has two receivers that collect solar energy and convert it to DC electricity which, during the experiment, was used to light up two LEDs inside MAPLE. The researchers were able to light up one LED at a time by shifting the transmissions between the receivers, demonstrating the accuracy of the array. MAPLE also has a window that can allow the transmitters to beam energy to a target outside the spacecraft, like Earth.

“In the same way that the internet democratized access to information, we hope that wireless energy transfer democratizes access to energy,” Hajimiri said in the release. “No energy transmission infrastructure will be needed on the ground to receive this power. That means we can send energy to remote regions and areas devastated by war or natural disaster.”

The ability to wirelessly transmit solar power from space has huge implications for renewable energy, so much so that Japan plans to start using it by the mid-2030’s. A Japanese research team is looking to pilot the technology in 2025 with a public-private partnership.

As humanity’s growing need for energy continues, a powerful solution like space-based solar power collection and transmission could be a huge step in the right direction. Space-based power collection would be able to operate 24-hours a day—whereas night pauses ground-based solar power collection—and would be to able to beam power to remote or disaster-stricken areas, assuming they have the requisite infrastructure.

Source: Scientists Beam Space-Based Solar Power to Earth for First Time

Of course, if the sender is pushed slightly off course…

US judge grants final approval to Apple’s $50m broken ‘butterfly’ keyboard settlement

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A US federal court this week gave final approval to the $50 million class-action settlement Apple came to last July resolving claims the company knew about and concealed the unreliable nature of keyboards on MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro computers released between 2015 and 2019. Per Reuters (via 9to5Mac), Judge Edward Davila on Thursday called the settlement involving Apple’s infamous “butterfly” keyboards “fair, adequate and reasonable.” Under the agreement, MacBook users impacted by the saga will receive settlements between $50 and $395. More than 86,000 claims for class member payments were made before the application deadline last March, Judge Davila wrote in his ruling.

Apple debuted the butterfly keyboard in 2015 with the 12-inch MacBook. At the time, former design chief Jony Ive boasted that the mechanism would allow the company to build ever-slimmer laptops without compromising on stability or typing feel. As Apple re-engineered more of its computers to incorporate the butterfly keyboard, Mac users found the design was susceptible to dust and other debris. The company introduced multiple revisions to make the mechanism more resilient before eventually returning to a more conventional keyboard design with the 16-inch MacBook Pro in late 2019.

[…]

Source: US judge grants final approval to Apple’s $50 million ‘butterfly’ keyboard settlement | Engadget

Air New Zealand to weigh passengers before they board the airplane

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That’s right: New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority is asking that its national airline weigh passengers departing on international flights from Auckland International Airport through July 2, 2023.

The program, which Air New Zealand calls a passenger weight survey, is a way to gather data on the weight load and distribution for planes, the airline said.

“We weigh everything that goes on the aircraft – from the cargo to the meals onboard, to the luggage in the hold,” Alastair James, the airline’s load control improvement specialist said in a statement. “For customers, crew and cabin bags, we use average weights, which we get from doing this survey.”

Still, weight is a personal thing that not everyone wishes to disclose. In order to protect individuals’ privacy, the airline says it has made the data anonymous.

Source: Air New Zealand to weigh passengers before they board the airplane | CNN

This is pretty relevant because the standard passenger weight is given in tables which are  slightly outdated. So if there are > adult 30 passengers, they are expected to weigh 84kg each including hand luggage. Holiday charters can calculate using 76kg. Baggage is expected to be 13kg within the EU. These figures seem extremely light to me.

Millions of Gigabyte Motherboards Were Sold With a Firmware Backdoor for updates

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[…] Researchers at firmware-focused cybersecurity company Eclypsium revealed today that they’ve discovered a hidden mechanism in the firmware of motherboards sold by the Taiwanese manufacturer Gigabyte,

[…]

the hidden code is meant to be an innocuous tool to keep the motherboard’s firmware updated, researchers found that it’s implemented insecurely, potentially allowing the mechanism to be hijacked and used to install malware instead of Gigabyte’s intended program. And because the updater program is triggered from the computer’s firmware, outside its operating system, it’s tough for users to remove or even discover.

[…]

In its blog post about the research, Eclypsium lists 271 models of Gigabyte motherboards that researchers say are affected.

[…]

Gigabyte’s updater alone might have raised concerns for users who don’t trust Gigabyte to silently install code on their machine with a nearly invisible tool—or who worry that Gigabyte’s mechanism could be exploited by hackers who compromise the motherboard manufacturer to exploit its hidden access in a software supply chain attack. But Eclypsium also found that the update mechanism was implemented with glaring vulnerabilities that could allow it to be hijacked: It downloads code to the user’s machine without properly authenticating it, sometimes even over an unprotected HTTP connection, rather than HTTPS. This would allow the installation source to be spoofed by a man-in-the-middle attack carried out by anyone who can intercept the user’s internet connection, such as a rogue Wi-Fi network.

In other cases, the updater installed by the mechanism in Gigabyte’s firmware is configured to be downloaded from a local network-attached storage device (NAS), a feature that appears to be designed for business networks to administer updates without all of their machines reaching out to the internet. But Eclypsium warns that in those cases, a malicious actor on the same network could spoof the location of the NAS to invisibly install their own malware instead.

[…]

Source: Millions of Gigabyte Motherboards Were Sold With a Firmware Backdoor | WIRED

Amazon’s Ring used to spy on customers, children, FTC says in privacy settlement

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A former employee of Amazon.com’s Ring doorbell camera unit spied for months on female customers in 2017 with cameras placed in bedrooms and bathrooms, the Federal Trade Commission said in a court filing on Wednesday when it announced a $5.8 million settlement with the company over privacy violations.

Amazon also agreed to pay $25 million to settle allegations it violated children’s privacy rights when it failed to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents and kept them longer than necessary, according to a court filing in federal court in Seattle that outlined a separate settlement.

The FTC settlements are the agency’s latest effort to hold Big Tech accountable for policies critics say place profits from data collection ahead of privacy.

The FTC is also probing Amazon.com’s $1.7 billion deal to buy iRobot Corp (IRBT.O), which was announced in August 2022 in Amazon’s latest push into smart home devices, and has a separate antitrust probe underway into Amazon.

[…]

The FTC said Ring gave employees unrestricted access to customers’ sensitive video data: “As a result of this dangerously overbroad access and lax attitude toward privacy and security, employees and third-party contractors were able to view, download, and transfer customers’ sensitive video data.”

In one instance in 2017, an employee of Ring viewed videos made by at least 81 female customers and Ring employees using Ring products. “Undetected by Ring, the employee continued spying for months,” the FTC said.

[…]

In May 2018, an employee gave information about a customer’s recordings to the person’s ex-husband without consent, the complaint said. In another instance, an employee was found to have given Ring devices to people and then watched their videos without their knowledge, the FTC said.

[…]

rules against deceiving consumers who used Alexa. For example, the FTC complaint says that Amazon told users it would delete voice transcripts and location information upon request, but then failed to do so.

“The unlawfully retained voice recordings provided Amazon with a valuable database for training the Alexa algorithm to understand children, benefiting its bottom line at the expense of children’s privacy,” the FTC said.

Source: Amazon’s Ring used to spy on customers, FTC says in privacy settlement

The total settlement of $30m is insanely low considering the scale of the violations and the continuing nature of them.

Supreme Court Limits EPA’s Authority Under the Clean Water Act – yay, trash the USA!

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The U.S. Supreme Court Court on Thursday significantly curtailed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the nation’s wetlands and waterways. It was the court’s second decision in a year limiting the ability of the agency to enact anti-pollution regulations and combat climate change. The challenge to the regulations was brought by Michael and Chantell Sackett, who bought property to build their dream house about 500 feet away from Idaho’s Scenic Priest Lake, a 19-mile stretch of clear water that is fed by mountain streams and bordered by state and national parkland. Three days after the Sacketts started excavating their property, the EPA stopped work on the project because the couple had failed to get a permit for disturbing the wetlands on their land. Now a conservative Supreme Court majority has used the Sackett’s case to roll back longstanding rules adopted to carry out the 51-year-old Clean Water Act. While the nine justices agreed that the Sacketts should prevail, they divided 5-to-4 as to how far to go in limiting the EPA’s authority.

Writing for the court majority (PDF), Justice Samuel Alito said that the navigable waters of the United States regulated by the EPA under the statute do not include many previously regulated wetlands. Rather, he said, the CWA extends to only streams, oceans, rivers and lakes, and those wetlands with a “continuous surface connection to those bodies.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by the court’s three liberal members, disputed Alito’s reading of the statute, noting that since 1977 when the CWA was amended to include adjacent wetlands, eight consecutive presidential administrations, Republican and Democratic, have interpreted the law to cover wetlands that the court has now excluded. Kavanaugh said that by narrowing the act to cover only adjoining wetlands, the court’s new test will have quote “significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.” In addition to joining Kavanaugh’s opinion, the court’s liberals, signed on to a separate opinion by Justice Elena Kagan. Pointing to the air and water pollution cases, she accused the majority of appointing itself instead of Congress as the national policymaker on the environment. President Biden, in a statement, called the decision “disappointing.” It “upends the legal framework that has protected America’s waters for decades,” he said. “It also defies the science that confirms the critical role of wetlands in safeguarding our nation’s streams, rivers, and lakes from chemicals and pollutants that harm the health and wellbeing of children, families, and communities.”

“I don’t think its an overstatement to say its catastrophic for the Clean Water act,” said Jim Murphy of the National Wildlife Federation. Wetlands play an “enormous role in protecting the nation’s water,” he said. “They’re really the kidneys of water systems and they’re also the sponges. They absorb a lot of water on the landscape. So they’re very important water features and they’re very important to the quality of the water that we drink, swim, fish, boat and recreate in.”

Source: Supreme Court Limits EPA’s Authority Under the Clean Water Act – Slashdot

Virgin Galactic flies final test before opening for business

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At 0915 Mountain Time (1515 UTC), the VMS Eve mothership took off from New Mexico’s Spaceport America, carrying its spacecraft to an altitude of 44,500 feet (over 13.5km). Pilots on VSS Unity, which rides along with VMS Eve, then fired its rockets to take its six passengers even higher – to 54.2 miles (over 87.2km) at nearly three times the speed of sound.

After a few minutes of weightlessness, during which the crew could gawp at Earth’s totally not flat surface from suborbital space, the craft descended and landed back safely at 1037 MT (1647 UTC).

The entire crew consisted of Virgin Galactic employees. Pilot Nicola Pecile and commander Jameel Janjua flew VMS Eve, whilst Unity’s crew was another pilot and commander pair – CJ Sturckow and Mike Masucci – plus astronaut instructors Beth Moses and Luke Mays, and mission specialists Christopher Huie and Jamila Gilbert.

CEO Michael Colglazier said the latest flight – the 25th test conducted by Richard Branson’s space tourism venture – was the last before Virgin Galactic opens for business next month.

[…]

Tickets for a seat on the VSS Unity spacecraft aren’t cheap. Space fans hoping to experience brief weightlessness and a taste of space will have to fill out an application form, and fork over $10,000 upfront just to get Virgin Galactic to consider them for a ticket. The lucky few should expect to pay a total of $450,000 for a ride aboard the VSS Unity.

[…]

Source: Virgin Galactic flies final test before opening for business • The Register

New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI

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Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover a new antibiotic that can kill a deadly species of superbug.

The AI helped narrow down thousands of potential chemicals to a handful that could be tested in the laboratory.

The result was a potent, experimental antibiotic called abaucin, which will need further tests before being used.

The researchers in Canada and the US say AI has the power to massively accelerate the discovery of new drugs.

It is the latest example of how the tools of artificial intelligence can be a revolutionary force in science and medicine.

[…]

To find a new antibiotic, the researchers first had to train the AI. They took thousands of drugs where the precise chemical structure was known, and manually tested them on Acinetobacter baumannii to see which could slow it down or kill it.

This information was fed into the AI so it could learn the chemical features of drugs that could attack the problematic bacterium.

The AI was then unleashed on a list of 6,680 compounds whose effectiveness was unknown. The results – published in Nature Chemical Biology – showed it took the AI an hour and a half to produce a shortlist.

The researchers tested 240 in the laboratory, and found nine potential antibiotics. One of them was the incredibly potent antibiotic abaucin.

Laboratory experiments showed it could treat infected wounds in mice and was able to kill A. baumannii samples from patients.

However, Dr Stokes told me: “This is when the work starts.”

The next step is to perfect the drug in the laboratory and then perform clinical trials. He expects the first AI antibiotics could take until 2030 until they are available to be prescribed.

Curiously, this experimental antibiotic had no effect on other species of bacteria, and works only on A. baumannii.

Many antibiotics kill bacteria indiscriminately. The researchers believe the precision of abaucin will make it harder for drug-resistance to emerge, and could lead to fewer side-effects.

[…]

Source: New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI – BBC News

Google bans Downloader app after TV firms complain it can load a pirate website – Firefox, Opera, IE, Chrome, Safari: look out!

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The Google Play Store suspended an app that combines a web browser with a file manager after a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint pointed out that the app is capable of loading a piracy website—even though that same pirate website can be loaded on any standard browser, including Google Chrome.

The free app, which is designed for Android TV devices and is called Downloader, had been installed from Google Play over 5 million times before its suspension on Friday, an Internet Archive capture shows. The suspension notice that Google sent to Downloader app developer Elias Saba cites a complaint from several Israeli TV companies that said the app “allows users to view the infamous copyright infringing website known as SDAROT.”

Saba provided us with a copy of the suspension notice.

“You can see in the DMCA description portion that the only reason given is the app being able to load a website,” Saba told Ars. “My app is a utility app that combines a basic file manager and a basic web browser. There is no way to view content in the app other than to use the web browser to navigate to a website. The app also doesn’t present or direct users to any website, other than my blog at www.aftvnews.com, which loads as the default homepage in the web browser.”

Saba also detailed his frustrations with the takedown in a blog post and a series of tweets. “Any rational person would agree that you can’t possibly blame a web browser for the pirated content that exists on the Internet, but that is exactly what has happened to my app,” he wrote on his blog.

Downloader is still available on the Amazon app store for devices such as Fire TVs, or from the Downloader app’s website as an APK file.

It’s a “standard web browser,” developer says

Before being pulled from Google Play, the app’s description said that Downloader “allows Android TV owners to easily download files from the Internet onto their device. You can enter a URL which directly points to a file, or you can sideload the web browser plugin to download files from websites.”

“If loading a website with infringing content in a standard web browser is enough to violate DMCA, then every browser in the Google Play Store including @googlechrome should also be removed. It’s a ridiculous claim and an abuse of the DMCA,” Saba wrote on Twitter.

[…]

Source: Google bans Downloader app after TV firms complain it can load a pirate website | Ars Technica

Brute-force attack bypasses Android biometric fingerprint defense

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Chinese researchers say they successfully bypassed fingerprint authentication safeguards on smartphones by staging a brute force attack.

Researchers at Zhejiang University and Tencent Labs capitalized on vulnerabilities of modern smartphone fingerprint scanners to stage their break-in operation, which they named BrutePrint. Their findings are published on the arXiv preprint server.

A flaw in the Match-After-Lock feature, which is supposed to bar authentication activity once a device is in lockout mode, was overridden to allow a researcher to continue submitting an unlimited number of fingerprint samples.

Inadequate protection of biometric data stored on the Serial Peripheral Interface of fingerprint sensors enables attackers to steal fingerprint images. Samples also can be easily obtained from academic datasets or from biometric data leaks.

[…]

All Android devices and one HarmonyOS (Huawei) device tested by researchers had at least one flaw allowing for break-ins. Because of tougher defense mechanisms in IOS devices, specifically Apple iPhone SE and iPhone 7, those devices were able to withstand brute-force entry attempts. Researchers noted that iPhone devices were susceptible to CAMF vulnerabilities, but not to the extent that successful entry could be achieved.

To launch a successful break-in, an attacker requires physical access to a targeted phone for several hours, a easily obtainable for $15, and access to fingerprint images.

Fingerprint databases are available online through academic resources, but hackers more likely will access massive volumes of images obtained through data breaches.

[…]

More information: Yu Chen et al, BrutePrint: Expose Smartphone Fingerprint Authentication to Brute-force Attack, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2305.10791

Source: Brute-force test attack bypasses Android biometric defense

A Paralyzed Man Can Walk Naturally Again With ML Brain and Spine Implants

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Gert-Jan Oskam was living in China in 2011 when he was in a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the hips down. Now, with a combination of devices, scientists have given him control over his lower body again. “For 12 years I’ve been trying to get back my feet,” Mr. Oskam said in a press briefing on Tuesday. “Now I have learned how to walk normal, natural.” In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers in Switzerland described implants that provided a “digital bridge” between Mr. Oskam’s brain and his spinal cord, bypassing injured sections. The discovery allowed Mr. Oskam, 40, to stand, walk and ascend a steep ramp with only the assistance of a walker. More than a year after the implant was inserted, he has retained these abilities and has actually showed signs of neurological recovery, walking with crutches even when the implant was switched off. “We’ve captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement,” Gregoire Courtine, a spinal cord specialist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, who helped lead the research, said at the press briefing.

In the new study, the brain-spine interface, as the researchers called it, took advantage of an artificial intelligence thought decoder to read Mr. Oskam’s intentions — detectable as electrical signals in his brain — and match them to muscle movements. The etiology of natural movement, from thought to intention to action, was preserved. The only addition, as Dr. Courtine described it, was the digital bridge spanning the injured parts of the spine. […] To achieve this result, the researchers first implanted electrodes in Mr. Oskam’s skull and spine. The team then used a machine-learning program to observe which parts of the brain lit up as he tried to move different parts of his body. This thought decoder was able to match the activity of certain electrodes with particular intentions: One configuration lit up whenever Mr. Oskam tried to move his ankles, another when he tried to move his hips.

Then the researchers used another algorithm to connect the brain implant to the spinal implant, which was set to send electrical signals to different parts of his body, sparking movement. The algorithm was able to account for slight variations in the direction and speed of each muscle contraction and relaxation. And, because the signals between the brain and spine were sent every 300 milliseconds, Mr. Oskam could quickly adjust his strategy based on what was working and what wasn’t. Within the first treatment session he could twist his hip muscles. Over the next few months, the researchers fine-tuned the brain-spine interface to better fit basic actions like walking and standing. Mr. Oskam gained a somewhat healthy-looking gait and was able to traverse steps and ramps with relative ease, even after months without treatment. Moreover, after a year in treatment, he began noticing clear improvements in his movement without the aid of the brain-spine interface. The researchers documented these improvements in weight-bearing, balancing and walking tests. Now, Mr. Oskam can walk in a limited way around his house, get in and out of a car and stand at a bar for a drink. For the first time, he said, he feels like he is the one in control.

Source: A Paralyzed Man Can Walk Naturally Again With Brain and Spine Implants – Slashdot

SkyFi lets you order up fresh satellite imagery in real time with a click

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Commercial Earth-observation companies collect an unprecedented volume of images and data every single day, but purchasing even a single satellite image can be cumbersome and time-intensive. SkyFi, a two-year-old startup, is looking to change that with an app and API that makes ordering a satellite image as easy as a click of a few buttons on a smartphone or computer.

SkyFi doesn’t build or operate satellites; instead, it partners with over a dozen companies to deliver various kinds of satellite images — including optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and hyperspectral — directly to the customer via a web and mobile app. A SkyFi user can task a satellite to capture a specific image or choose from a library of previously captured images. Some of SkyFi’s partners include public companies like Satellogic, as well as newer startups like Umbra and Pixxel.

[…]

SkyFi’s mission has resonated with investors. The company closed a $7 million seed round led by Balerion Space Ventures, with contributions from existing investors J2 Ventures and Uber alumna’s VC firm Moving Capital. Bill Perkins also participated. SkyFi has now raised over $17 million to date.

The startup is targeting three types of customers: individual consumers; large enterprise customers, from verticals spanning agriculture, mining, finance, insurance and more; and U.S. government and defense customers. SkyFi’s solution is appealing even these latter customers, who may have plenty of experience working with satellite companies already and could afford the high costs in the traditional marketplace.

[…]

Looking ahead, the Austin, Texas–based startup is planning on integrating insight and analytics capabilities into the SkyFi app. This feature will be especially useful for customers interested in hyperspectral or SAR images. The company also plans to do more feature updates as it integrates more providers — from satellites, to stratospheric balloons, to drones — to the platform.

“I think of SkyFi as the Netflix of the geospatial world, where I think of Umbra, Satellogic and Maxar as the movie studios of the world,” Fischer said. “I just want them to produce great content and put it on the platform.”

Source: SkyFi lets you order up fresh satellite imagery in real time with a click | TechCrunch

Samsung Display demos long rollable and a health-sensing OLED

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The Rollable Flex is an interesting new flexible screen from Samsung Display that can be unrolled from just 49mm to 254.4mm, over five times its length. The display is being shown off at the annual Display Week trade show in Los Angeles alongside another Samsung panel that the company says offers fingerprint and blood pressure sensing in the OLED panel without the need for a separate module.

Aside from its maximum and minimum lengths, details on the Rollable Flex in Samsung Display’s press release are relatively slim, and it’s unclear what its overall size or resolution might be. The company says the panel unrolls on an “O-shaped axis like a scroll,” allowing it to “turn a difficult-to-carry large-sized display into a portable form factor.”

[…]

Source: Samsung Display demos long rollable and a health-sensing OLED – The Verge

Samsung’s new Sensor OLED display can read fingerprints anywhere on the screen

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Samsung has unveiled a new display technology that could lead to new biometric and health-related capabilities in future phones and tablets. The tech giant has debuted what it calls the Sensor OLED Display that can read your fingerprints regardless of what part of the screen you touch at this year’s SID Display Week in LA. While most smartphones now have fingerprint readers on the screen, their sensors are attached under the panel as a separate module that only works within a small designated area. For Sensor OLED, Samsung said it embedded the fingerprint sensor into the panel itself.

Since the display technology can read fingerprints anywhere on the screen, it can also be used to monitor your heart rate and blood pressure. The company said it can even return more accurate readings than available wearables can. To measure your blood pressure, you’d need to place two fingers on the screen. OLED light is apparently reflected differently depending on your blood vessels’ contraction and relaxation. After that information is returned to the panel, the sensor converts it into health metrics.

Samsung explained in its press release: “To accurately measure a person’s blood pressure, it is necessary to measure the blood pressure of both arms. The Sensor OLED display can simultaneously sense the fingers of both hands, providing more accurate health information than existing wearable devices.” The company has yet to announce if it’s planning to use this new technology on devices it’s releasing in the future, but the exhibit at SID Display already shows it being able to read blood pressure and heart rate.

[…]

Source: Samsung’s new Sensor OLED display can read fingerprints anywhere on the screen

Meta’s open-source speech AI recognizes over 4,000 spoken languages | Engadget

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Meta has created an AI language model that (in a refreshing change of pace) isn’t a ChatGPT clone. The company’s Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project can recognize over 4,000 spoken languages and produce speech (text-to-speech) in over 1,100. Like most of its other publicly announced AI projects, Meta is open-sourcing MMS today to help preserve language diversity and encourage researchers to build on its foundation. “Today, we are publicly sharing our models and code so that others in the research community can build upon our work,” the company wrote.

[…]

Speech recognition and text-to-speech models typically require training on thousands of hours of audio with accompanying transcription labels. (Labels are crucial to machine learning, allowing the algorithms to correctly categorize and “understand” the data.) But for languages that aren’t widely used in industrialized nations — many of which are in danger of disappearing in the coming decades — “this data simply does not exist,” as Meta puts it.

Meta used an unconventional approach to collecting audio data: tapping into audio recordings of translated religious texts. “We turned to religious texts, such as the Bible, that have been translated in many different languages and whose translations have been widely studied for text-based language translation research,” the company said. “These translations have publicly available audio recordings of people reading these texts in different languages.” Incorporating the unlabeled recordings of the Bible and similar texts, Meta’s researchers increased the model’s available languages to over 4,000.

[…]

“While the content of the audio recordings is religious, our analysis shows that this does not bias the model to produce more religious language,” Meta wrote. “We believe this is because we use a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) approach, which is far more constrained compared with large language models (LLMs) or sequence-to-sequence models for speech recognition.” Furthermore, despite most of the religious recordings being read by male speakers, that didn’t introduce a male bias either — performing equally well in female and male voices.

[…]

After training an alignment model to make the data more usable, Meta used wav2vec 2.0, the company’s “self-supervised speech representation learning” model, which can train on unlabeled data. Combining unconventional data sources and a self-supervised speech model led to impressive outcomes. “Our results show that the Massively Multilingual Speech models perform well compared with existing models and cover 10 times as many languages.” Specifically, Meta compared MMS to OpenAI’s Whisper, and it exceeded expectations. “We found that models trained on the Massively Multilingual Speech data achieve half the word error rate, but Massively Multilingual Speech covers 11 times more languages.”

Meta cautions that its new models aren’t perfect. “For example, there is some risk that the speech-to-text model may mistranscribe select words or phrases,” the company wrote. “Depending on the output, this could result in offensive and/or inaccurate language. We continue to believe that collaboration across the AI community is critical to the responsible development of AI technologies.”

[…]

Source: Meta’s open-source speech AI recognizes over 4,000 spoken languages | Engadget

Establishing a wildflower meadow bolstered biodiversity and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, study finds

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A new study examining the effects of planting a wildflower meadow in the historic grounds of King’s College, Cambridge, has demonstrated its benefits to local biodiversity and climate change mitigation.

 

The study, led by King’s Research Fellow Dr. Cicely Marshall, found that establishing the meadow had made a considerable impact to the wildlife value of the land, while reducing the associated with its upkeep.

Marshall and her colleagues, among them three King’s undergraduate students, conducted biodiversity surveys over three years to compare the , abundance and composition supported by the meadow and adjacent .

They found that, in spite of its small size, the wildflower meadow supported three times as many species of plants, spiders and bugs, including 14 species with conservation designations.

Terrestrial invertebrate biomass was found to be 25 times higher in the meadow, with bat activity over the meadow also being three times higher than over the remaining lawn.

The study is published May 23 in the journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence.

As well as looking at the benefits to biodiversity, Marshall and her colleagues modeled the impact of the meadow on efforts, by assessing the changes in reflectivity, soil carbon sequestration, and emissions associated with its maintenance.

The reduced maintenance and fertilization associated with the meadow was found to save an estimated 1.36 tons CO2-e per hectare per year when compared with the grass lawn.

Surface reflectance increased by more than 25%, contributing to a reduced urban heat island effect, with the meadow more likely to tolerate an intensified drought regime.

[…]

Source: Establishing a wildflower meadow bolstered biodiversity and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, study finds

Brain waves can tell us how much pain someone is in

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Brain signals can be used to detect how much pain a person is experiencing, which could overhaul how we treat certain chronic pain conditions, a new study has suggested.

The research, published in Nature Neuroscience today, is the first time a human’s chronic-pain-related brain signals have been recorded. It could aid the development of personalized therapies for the most severe forms of pain.

[…]

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, implanted electrodes in the brains of four people with chronic pain. The patients then answered surveys about the severity of their pain multiple times a day over a period of three to six months. After they finished filling out each survey, they sat quietly for 30 seconds so the electrodes could record their brain activity. This helped the researchers identify biomarkers of chronic pain in the brain signal patterns, which were as unique to the individual as a fingerprint.

Next, the researchers used machine learning to model the results of the surveys. They found they could successfully predict how the patients would score the severity of their pain by examining their brain activity, says Prasad Shirvalkar, one of the study’s authors.

“The hope is that now that we know where these signals live, and now that we know what type of signals to look for, we could actually try to track them noninvasively,” he says. “As we recruit more patients, or better characterize how these signals vary between people, maybe we can use it for diagnosis.”

The researchers also found they were able to distinguish a patient’s chronic pain from acute pain deliberately inflicted using a thermal probe. The chronic-pain signals came from a different part of the brain, suggesting that it’s not just a prolonged version of acute pain, but something else entirely.

Source: Brain waves can tell us how much pain someone is in | MIT Technology Review

Meta ordered to suspend Facebook EU data flows as it’s hit with record €1.2BN privacy fine under GDPR – 10 years and 3 court cases later

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[…]

Today the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) announced that Meta has been fined €1.2 billion (close to $1.3 billion) — which the Board confirmed is the largest fine ever issued under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). (The prior record goes to Amazon which was stung for $887 million for misusing customers data for ad targeting back in 2021.)

Meta’s sanction is for breaching conditions set out in the pan-EU regulation governing transfers of personal data to so-called third countries (in this case the US) without ensuring adequate protections for people’s information.

European judges have previously found U.S. surveillance practices to conflict with EU privacy rights.

[…]

The decision emerging out of the Irish DPC flows from a complaint made against Facebook’s Irish subsidiary almost a decade ago, by privacy campaigner Max Schrems — who has been a vocal critic of Meta’s lead data protection regulator in the EU, accusing the Irish privacy regulator of taking an intentionally long and winding path in order to frustrate effective enforcement of the bloc’s rulebook.

On the substance of his complaint, Schrems argues that the only sure-fire way to fix the EU-U.S. data flows doom loop is for the U.S. to grasp the nettle and reform its surveillance practices.

Responding to today’s order in a statement (via his privacy rights not-for-profit, noyb), he said: “We are happy to see this decision after ten years of litigation. The fine could have been much higher, given that the maximum fine is more than 4 billion and Meta has knowingly broken the law to make a profit for ten years. Unless US surveillance laws get fixed, Meta will have to fundamentally restructure its systems.”

[… ]

This suggests the Irish regulator is routinely under-enforcing the GDPR on the most powerful digital platforms and doing so in a way that creates additional problems for efficient functioning of the regulation since it strings out the enforcement process. (In the Facebook data flows case, for example, objections were raised to the DPC’s draft decision last August — so it’s taken some nine months to get from that draft to a final decision and suspension order now.) And, well, if you string enforcement out for long enough you may allow enough time for the goalposts to be moved politically that enforcement never actually needs to happen. Which, while demonstrably convenient for data-mining tech giants like Meta, does make a mockery of citizens’ fundamental rights.

As noted above, with today’s decision, the DPC is actually implementing a binding decision taken by the EDPB last month in order to settle ongoing disagreement over Ireland’s draft decision — so much of the substance of what’s being ordered on Meta today comes, not from Dublin, but from the bloc’s supervisor body for privacy regulators.

[…]

n further public remarks today, Schrems once again hit out at the DPC’s approach — accusing the regulator of essentially working to thwart enforcement of the GDPR. “It took us ten years of litigation against the Irish DPC to get to this result. We had to bring three procedures against the DPC and risked millions of procedural costs. The Irish regulator has done everything to avoid this decision but was consistently overturned by the European Courts and institutions. It is kind of absurd that the record fine will go to Ireland — the EU Member State that did everything to ensure that this fine is not issued,” he said.

[…]

Earlier reports have suggested the European Commission could adopt the new EU-U.S. data deal in July, although it has declined to provide a date for this since it says multiple stakeholders are involved in the process.

Such a timeline would mean Meta gets a new escape hatch to avoid having to suspend Facebook’s service in the EU; and can keep relying on this high level mechanism so long as it is stands.

If that’s how the next section of this torturous complaint saga plays out it will mean that a case against Facebook’s illegal data transfers which dates back almost ten years at this point will, once again, be left twisting in the wind — raising questions about whether it’s really possible for Europeans to exercise legal rights set out in the GDPR? (And, indeed, whether deep-pocketed tech giants, whose ranks are packed with well-paid lawyers and lobbyists, can be regulated at all?)

[…]

Analysis on five years of the GDPR, put out earlier this month by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), dubs the enforcement situation a “crisis” — warning: “Europe’s failure to enforce the GDPR exposes everyone to acute hazard in the digital age and fingering Ireland’s DPA as a leading cause of enforcement failure against Big Tech.”

And the ICCL points the finger of blame squarely at Ireland’s DPC.

“Ireland continues to be the bottleneck of enforcement: It delivers few draft decisions on major cross-border cases, and when it does eventually do so other European enforcers routinely vote by majority to force it to take tougher enforcement action,” the report argues — before pointing out that: “Uniquely, 75% of Ireland’s GDPR investigation decisions in major EU cases were overruled by majority vote of its European counterparts at the EDPB, who demand tougher enforcement action.”

The ICCL also highlights that nearly all (87%) of cross-border GDPR complaints to Ireland repeatedly involve the same handful of Big Tech companies: Google, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), Apple, TikTok, and Microsoft. But says many complaints against these tech giants never even get a full investigation — thereby depriving complaints of the ability to exercise their rights.

The analysis points out that the Irish DPC chooses “amicable resolution” to conclude the vast majority (83%) of cross-border complaints it receives (citing the oversight body’s own statistics) — further noting: “Using amicable resolution for repeat offenders, or for matters likely to impact many people, contravenes European Data Protection Board guidelines.”

[…]

The reality is a patchwork of problems frustrate effective enforcement across the bloc as you might expect with decentralized oversight structure which factors in linguistic and culture differences across 27 Member States and varying opinions on how best to approach oversight atop big (and very personal) concepts like privacy which may mean very different things to different people.

Schrems’ privacy rights not-for-profit, noyb, has been collating information on this patchwork of GDPR enforcement issues — which include things like under-resourcing of smaller agencies and a general lack of in-house expertise to deal with digital issues; transparency problems and information blackholes for complainants; cooperation issues and legal barriers frustrating cross-border complaints; and all sorts of ‘creative’ interpretations of complaints “handling” — meaning nothing being done about a complaint still remains a common outcome — to name just a few of the issues it’s encountered.

[…]

Source: Meta ordered to suspend Facebook EU data flows as it’s hit with record €1.2BN privacy fine under GDPR | TechCrunch

The article contains the history of the court cases Schrems had to enter to get the Ireland and the EU to do anything about data sharing problems – it’s an interesting read.

HP Can’t Fix Bricked Printers After Faulty Firmware Update which bricked non HP-ink cartridges

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Last week the Telegraph reported that a recent firmware update to HP printers “prevents customers from using any cartridges other than those fitted with an HP chip, which are often more expensive. If the customer tries to use a non-HP ink cartridge, the printer will refuse to print.”

Some HP “Officejet” printers can disable this “dynamic security” through a firmware update, PC World reported earlier this week. But HP still defends the feature, arguing it’s “to protect HP’s innovations and intellectual property, maintain the integrity of our printing systems, ensure the best customer printing experience, and protect customers from counterfeit and third-party ink cartridges that do not contain an original HP security chip and infringe HP’s intellectual property.”

Meanwhile, Engadget now reports that “a software update Hewlett-Packard released earlier this month for its OfficeJet printers is causing some of those devices to become unusable.” After downloading the faulty software, the built-in touchscreen on an affected printer will display a blue screen with the error code 83C0000B. Unfortunately, there appears to be no way for someone to fix a printer broken in this way on their own, partly because factory resetting an HP OfficeJet requires interacting with the printer’s touchscreen display. For the moment, HP customers report the only solution to the problem is to send a broken printer back to the company for service.
BleepingComputer says the firmware update “has been bricking HP Office Jet printers worldwide since it was released earlier this month…” “Our teams are working diligently to address the blue screen error affecting a limited number of HP OfficeJet Pro 9020e printers,” HP told BleepingComputer… Since the issues surfaced, multiple threads have been started by people from the U.S., the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Poland, New Zealand, and France who had their printers bricked, some with more than a dozen pages of reports.

“HP has no solution at this time. Hidden service menu is not showing, and the printer is not booting anymore. Only a blue screen,” one customer said.

“I talked to HP Customer Service and they told me they don’t have a solution to fix this firmware issue, at the moment,” another added.

Source: HP Rushes to Fix Bricked Printers After Faulty Firmware Update – Slashdot

How a 35-year-old weed smoker behind 10 million scam calls made his fortune

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Millions of people get phone calls from scammers and wonder who is at the other end.

Now we know: rather than someone in a call centre far away, a “bright young man” living in a lush flat in London has been unmasked as the mastermind behind so many of these calls.

Tejay Fletcher’s trial exposed how criminals with a simple website bypassed police, phone operators and banks to facilitate “fraud on an industrial scale”, scamming victims out of £100m of their hard earned cash.

Fletcher, 35, who ran the website iSpoof.cc, was jailed for 13 years and four months earlier this week following his arrest in 2019 in what is the biggest anti-fraud operation mounted in the UK.

The website allowed criminals to disguise their phone numbers in a process known as “spoofing” and trick unsuspecting people to believe they were being called by their bank or other institutions.

[…]

In 2020, he co-founded iSpoof.cc, which he built into what he called “the most sophisticated client spoofing platform available”, allowing scammers to change the number or identity displayed when they made calls so they appeared to be calling from a trusted organisation, often a bank or a bank’s fraud department.

[…]

His website was used for a large proportion of fraudulent activity in the UK – but copycats have since taken its place, and others are still falling victim to these types of scams, experts have warned.

How victims were scammed

The number of people using iSpoof swelled to 69,000 at its peak, with as many as 20 people per minute targeted by callers using the site.

More than 10 million fraudulent calls were made using iSpoof in the year to August 2022 – 3.5 million of them in the UK, the prosecution said.  More than 200,000 victims in the UK – many of them elderly – lost £43m, while global losses exceeded £100m.

For a basic subscription fee of £150 a month, users got a set number of minutes to make automated bot calls using the website or app version. They could then pay extra for additional features

[…]

Often, victims would get an automated call prompting them to confirm a transaction on an account.

The website allowed them to intercept one-time passwords, which were “ironically” introduced by banks to increase their security measures, noted John Ojakovoh, prosecuting.

iSpoof offered scammers extra features that allowed victims to type in a telephone pincode after being prompted to do so by an automated call.

Users could also pay for the ability to monitor calls live, or place calls pretending to be from an establishment that had old card details on file and wanted new ones.

Scammers could control what the automated call would say to recipients and access tools such as voice recognition.

[…]

iSpoof had a channel on Telegram, a social media platform, which it used to communicate with its customers and promote itself, the prosecution said.

The Telegram channel also displayed advertisements from companies selling bank details.

Fletcher would use it to conduct “market research”, running polls to find out which features users wanted most.

[…]

Fletcher was not particularly tech-savvy, but he used a website called freelancer.com to hire programmers to make the “building blocks” of the site

[…]

His lawyer said he had initially set out to create a simple website, but his co-founder suggested ways the technology could be made more sophisticated, which spurred him on. In 2021, he and his co-founder “fell out” and Fletcher ousted him, replacing him with three other administrators that he appeared to be supervising.

[…]

When Fletcher assumed control of iSpoof, the profits received had a “meteoric rise” from 5 Bitcoin to 117, prosecutors said. Fletcher received 64.38 Bitcoin, worth just short of £2m.

How police cracked the case

Posing as iSpoof customers, police paid for a trial subscription in Bitcoin and tested the website. They traced the money they paid to iSpoof and eventually discovered that the “lion’s share” of the profits were going to Fletcher.

They obtained a copy of the website’s server, which revealed call logs that further incriminated Fletcher and the scammers using his website.

[…]

others are also being investigated. Some 120 suspected phone scammers have been arrested, 103 of them in London.

[…]

 

Source: How a 35-year-old weed smoker behind 10 million scam calls made his fortune