Category: technology

Cyber Currencies’ Fatal flaw

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You can never be sure that someone won’t come after your assets via the blockchain.

When you realize that almost every square inch of the earth (Antarctica excepted) was stolen at some point, and the same applies to most assets in the modern world.

With Bitcoin and its ilk, there is no statute of limitations:

An interesting little observation by Izzy Kaminska over in the FT about a problem that Bitcoin faces. It’s a legal problem that leads to an economic one. And the problem Bitcoin faces is one that is based upon the very existence of the blockchain itself. There’s a good reason that all functioning economic systems have something akin to a market ouvert rule, or something like squatters’ rights. Note that I say something like, not exactly either of those rules. For example, if you find money in the street then you can’t and shouldn’t just keep it. But if you hand it in to the police, no one then claims if for some period of time, then it does become yours. No, you can’t just move into someone elses’ house and insist that it belongs to you. But move in for long enough (the time period varies) and no one complains or does anything and it becomes yours. You don’t get title when you buy stolen goods. But something you bought in good faith, in an open marketplace, does become yours eventually. Even if it had been stolen some point further down the ownership chain.

 The reason for these rules, and yes they vary across places and concerning different specific items, is that at some point we’ve got to give up on historic unfairnesses and or illegalities and just get on with the current allocation of scarce resources. We just don’t want to wall off something that may or may not have been stolen in, say, 1820, from being put to use today. We almost certainly would want to make sure that something stolen yesterday was returned to its rightful owner. But at some point between those two dates we’ve got to have a cut off point.

………

And that’s where Bitcoin has the problem, in that very existence of the blockchain:

The first relates to the ongoing legal recourse rights of Bitfinex victims. Even though they may have lost their right to pursue Bitfinex for compensation, they are still going to be entitled to track the funds across the blockchain to seek recourse from whomsoever receives the bitcoins in their accounts. That’s good news for victims, but mostly likely very bad news for bitcoin’s fungible state and thus its status as a medium of exchange.

Just one successful claim by a victim who tracks his funds to an identifiable third party, and the precedent is set. Any exchanges dealing with bitcoin in a legitimate capacity would from then on be inclined to do much stronger due diligence on whether the bitcoins being deposited in their system were connected to ill-gotten gains. This in turn would open the door to the black-listing of funds that can not prove they were originated honestly via legitimate earnings.

Of course, people should not steal things. And yet for a currency to work it has to be possible to take the currency at its face value. Thus it may well be that the bank robber paid you for his beer with stolen money but you got it fair and square and thus the bank doesn’t get it back as and when they find out. Another way to put this is that the crime dies with the criminal. And yet the blockchain upends all of that. Because every transaction which any one bitcoin has been involved in is traceable.

The problem with cyber currencies and the rest of the internet enabled Libertarian-Utopian is that they believe that computer code developed over a few months can somehow trump contract law and record keeping that has been developed over the past 1000+ years.

Ask yourself, what happens if you have a fruit tree with branches that cross a property line.  Who owns the fruit on those branches?

It is very complicated.

In some places, the branches, and fruit, belong to the property owner over whose property it extends.

In others, it belongs to the property owner of the location of the trunk, but  the owner of the property can prune branches over their yard and dig up roots under the yard.

In some places, it belongs to one person when it on the branch, and another when the fruit falls.

In some places, a landowner can sue for trespass for branches over their yard.

This is just a fruit tree.

Recording property transactions are far more significant, and potentially far more complex, and we saw what happened when the banks decided to create MERS to “streamline” fraud real estate transactions.

I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit, * but is clear to me that the people behind these efforts have only the vaguest idea of how society works, and how long it took to get society works.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Microflaccid Screws the Pooch

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A court in France has ruled that Windows 10 illegally invades user privacy, as well as being too insecure:

A French regulator has issued Microsoft a formal warning over Windows 10, saying the operating system collects excessive amounts of personal data, ships that information illegally out of the EU, and has lousy security.

The warning comes from the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), an independent data privacy watchdog with the power to levy fines against companies. The CNIL has been investigating Windows 10 since its launch and has now drawn up a damning list of criticisms.

“The CNIL has decided to issue a formal notice to Microsoft Corporation to comply with the Act within three months,” said the group on Wednesday.

………

Chief among the regulator’s concerns is the amount of information Windows 10 slurps up about its users and sends back to Microsoft’s servers. While all recent flavors of Windows send some information back to Redmond, Windows 10 harvests much more and the CNIL considers this intrusive and also not needed to run the OS.

It could also be breaking the law. The collapse of the Safe Harbor agreement last year didn’t stop this flow of data from French users back to the US, and the CNIL is concerned that Microsoft made no attempt to comply with the law. The watchdog estimates that there are at least 10 million Windows users in the Euro nation.

This in addition to buying Nokia’s cell phone business, where they wrote down over 7 billion dollars , and then they sold off the Nokia brand.

And then there is the whole ribbon thing in the more recent versions of Office.

Why is this company still a going concern?

Peter Parker, Eat Your Heart Out

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The US army is looking at using spider silk generated from genetically modified silkworms:

Spider silk is one of nature’s toughest substances, similar in strength to the Kevlar plastic found in bulletproof vests but much more flexible. Kraig Biocraft, a company out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, genetically altered silkworms to produce a fiber that’s similar to pure spider silk. Today, they announced an Army contract to test this so-called Dragon Silk for possible use in body armor.

 There’s a reason that silk from worms is cheap but you can’t buy pajamas made from spider fabric: spiders are territorial and cannibalistic, which makes farming them for fabric production almost exorbitant.

 ………

 The technology behind Dragon Silk is based in part on the work of Malcolm J. Fraser, Donald L. Jarvis, and their colleagues. As they explain in this paper, they introduce specific pieces of spider DNA into silkworm eggs, creating an entirely new type of silkworm that can spin spider silk.

 ………

 Rice doesn’t anticipate that Dragon Silk will be a direct replacement for Kevlar, which has a strength of 3 gigapascals. [425,000 psi] Spider silk has a strength of 2 gigapascals, [290,000 psi] only about two-thirds as strong.

 “But Kevlar has an elasticity of 3 percent,” says Rice. “If you have a Kevlar fiber, it’s not going to move at all. Our fibers have a 30 to 40 percent elasticity before they break.”


FWIW, the additional deformation that spider silk can take means that it is absorbing a lot more energy than the Kevlar.  (The very crude sketch depicts energy as the area under the various curves)

I am not sure of how spider silk could be used in a structural context, but given my experience with the material, it’s relatively low modulus would indicate that any design would be driven by stiffness issues rather than strength issues, which would make it rather similar to handle to fiberglass.

Where There’s a Wool, There’s a Way*

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It appears that the people fo the Faroe Islands want to have Google cameras taking pictures of them when they are unaware so that the island is covered by Google Street View™.

I find this odd, but who am I to judge them?

What is odd is that they have a shortage of motor vehicles, so they mounted the Street View™ equipment on sheep:

Living across 18 tiny sub-polar islands in the north Atlantic, Faroe islanders are used to working in difficult conditions. So tired of waiting for Google Street View to come and map the roads, causeways and bridges of the archipelago, a team has set up its own mapping project – Sheep View 360.

With the help of a local shepherd and a specially built harness built by a fellow islander, Durita Dahl Andreassen of Visit Faroe Islands has fitted five of the island’s sheep with a 360-degree camera.

As the sheep walk and graze around the island, the pictures are sent back to Andreassen with GPS co-ordinates, which she then uploads to Google Street View.

“Here in the Faroe Islands we have to do things our way,” says Andreassen. “Knowing that we are so small and Google is so big, we felt this was the thing to do.”

My mind is officially blown.

Clearly

*H/t Emptywheel for the joke, which she described as a, “Baaad joke.”  Ouch.

And the Con Continues to Unravel

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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has been banned from running labs for 2 years:

In a severe turn of events for former blood testing darling Theranos, which has been defending itself against accusations of wrongdoing for months, U.S. regulators slapped strong sanctions against the company and its owner.

Theranos said in a statement issued late Thursday that the certificate for its lab in Newark, Calif., had been revoked, its approval to receive Medicare and Medicaid payments “cancelled,” and that it would have to pay an unspecified fine. In addition, chief executive Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s founder, will be banned from owning, operating or directing a lab for at least two years.

………

Theranos was perhaps the most celebrated of these young companies. Holmes was at one time compared to Apple’s Steve Jobs, and the company’s valuation was estimated to be a staggering $9 billion at its peak.

I still don’t understand how this company was ever seen as a success.

Their technology never worked., but supposedly sophisticated investors showered them with hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is nuts.

Might Make a Faster Pig

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GE’s entry


Pratt & Whitney’s version

Or they might make a pig with longer range.

But it will still be a pig.

The pig in question is the F-35, and the addition of a variable cycle engine might increase its performance:

The U.S. Air Force is poised to award General Electric and Pratt & Whitney contracts for adaptive cycle technology development that will pave the way toward an active procurement program for a sixth-generation fighter engine as well as the potential reengining of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Contracts for the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP) are expected to be valued at up to $1 billion apiece for the two engine-makers, setting the stage for a 21st-century version of the “great fighter engine war” between GE and Pratt over dual-sourced engines for the F-15 and F-16. Although Pratt now runs both key U.S. military development programs with the F135 for the F-35 and the engine for Northrop Grumman’s B-21 Long-Range Strike Bomber, AETP opens up potential competition for both the reengining of F-35s as well as proposed sixth-generation fighters for the U.S. Navy and Air Force.

AETP is specifically aimed at maturing three-stream engine technology now considered vital to achieving the high-speed, long-endurance performance requirements of the Navy’s future F/A-XX and the Air Force’s F-X sixth-generation fighters. Although it remains unknown whether the F/A-XX will emerge as a twin-engine design, the three-stream concept is designed to be scalable across a wide thrust range. The AETP is, however, targeted initially at a 45,000-lb.-thrust-class engine baselined to fit within the existing confines of the F-35A engine bay. This makes it a contender to replace the F135 from the mid-2020s onward.

………

The third stream provides an extra source of air flow that, depending on the phase of the mission, is designed to provide either additional mass flow for increased propulsive efficiency and lower fuel burn, or additional core flow for higher thrust and cooling air. It also can be used to cool fuel that provides a heat sink for aircraft systems. The third stream can also swallow excess air damming up around the inlet, improving flow holding and reducing spillage drag.

At the heart of adaptive engines are variable-geometry devices that dynamically alter the fan pressure ratio and overall bypass ratio, the two key factors influencing specific fuel consumption and thrust. Fan pressure ratio is changed by using an adaptive, multistage fan. This increases fan pressure ratio to fighter engine performance levels during takeoff and acceleration, and, in cruise, lowers it to airliner-like levels for improved fuel efficiency. The third stream, which is external to both the core and standard bypass duct, is used to alter the bypass ratio.

I think that the cooling application might be the most important.

Both the F-22 and F-35 are basically thermos bottles which rely on their fuel as a heat sink for cooling other systems, which creates issues when the aircraft sits on the tarmac too long, or when the fuel becomes hot sitting in the sun, which has the USAF repainting all their fuel trucks white.

Any potential improvement in range or performance would be important for the F-35, which is shaping up to be a major pig.

Finally a Small Reason to Buy Windows 10

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Microsoft has added a (still Beta) feature to Windows 10, which will allow users to do a clean install of the OS to remove crapware that manufacturers install in their PC’s:

Windows 10 already includes ways to clear out applications and data to repair misbehaving systems or prepare them to be sold, courtesy of the Refresh and Reset features added in Windows 8. Microsoft is now adding a third option: a new refresh tool.

Currently available only for Windows Insiders, the new tool fetches a copy of Windows online and performs a clean installation. The only option is whether or not you want to preserve your personal data. Any other software that’s installed will be blown away, including the various applications and utilities that OEMs continue to bundle with their systems.

This is an upgrade from Microsoft that actually is an improvement, as opposed to, for example, the abomination that is ribbon.

So Now Clippy will Be In Charge of My Online Job Search

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Microsoft is buying LinkedIn:

Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, a deal in which one of the world’s biggest social networks will join a software and computing giant as it tries to broaden its reach in online services.

Under the agreement the two companies announced Monday, LinkedIn will continue to operate independently, and LinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner will report to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. The deal with Microsoft values each of LinkedIn’s shares at $196; LinkedIn’s stock was up nearly 47 percent at the end of Monday trading.

The two companies cater to similar customers. Under Nadella’s tenure, Microsoft has sought to become a cloud-computing powerhouse that largely serves businesses. LinkedIn also primarily targets professionals and is the United States’ 11th-largest website by traffic and visitors, according to the online index Alexa. In a sign of LinkedIn’s importance to corporations, executives have been known to publish blog posts on the platform that act as corporate statements.

Monday’s deal will allow Microsoft to infuse its professional software and services with LinkedIn’s technology, a move that could give users of Windows, Microsoft Office and even the company’s personal assistant, Cortana, access to new features and elevate Microsoft’s suite of enterprise products. Meanwhile, by tapping into Microsoft Office’s user base of 1.2 billion people, LinkedIn hopes to become a central player in many companies’ day-to-day business, increasing engagement with the platform.

LinkedIn is kind of a roach motel, and deleting your account difficult, but thanks to Kevin Drum, here is the primer on how to deactivate your account.

Considering what Microflaccid tid to Skype, expect the crapification of LinkedIn to commence.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS

This is Our Dystopian Future

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Couldn’t adjust my air conditioning today because my thermostat was offline. The future is amazing! pic.twitter.com/hlMgaImAiz

— Adam Driscoll (@adamdriscoll) May 31, 2016

People in tech talk about the “Internet of Things” all the time.

They think it will make our lives a paradise.

I think that it will mean that the technology will be less reliabl.

I am also not particularly keen on my regrigerator spying on me when I raid it at 1 in he morning. 

I want to be alone with my fruit stuffed pasties, thank you very much.

H/t naked capitalism.

PICTURES: Saab rolls out first Gripen E fighter

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Saab has rolled out its first Gripen NG, which structurally is pretty much a new plane.

As compared to the travails of the F-22, where upgrades and modernization have been expensive and difficult, and the F-35, which is late, expensive, under performing, and unreliable.

By comparison, all the major systems for the new Gripen have flown, the first aircraft is a production unit, and it is expected to start flight testing this year:

Saab is targeting the on-schedule delivery of its new Gripen E fighter to the Swedish and Brazilian air forces late this decade, as it steps up export campaigns involving both the advanced model and its earlier C/D-model jet.

 The first of three Swedish test aircraft to be involved in the project was unveiled at the manufacturer’s Linköping facility on 18 May, in front of an international audience of current and prospective Gripen users.

 Lead aircraft 39-8 will be handed over to Saab’s flight test department “this summer”, and should make its flight debut at the end of the year, the company says. It will be used initially to verify the general systems, airframe and aerodynamics of the evolved design, which – while visually resembling earlier iterations – is entirely new.

 Powered by a GE Aviation F414 turbofan engine capable of generating 22,000lb (98kN) of thrust, the Gripen E has an empty weight of 8,000kg (17,600lb) and a maximum take-off weight of 16.5t. The latter represents a 2.5t increase over the C/D. At 15.2m (49.8ft), it is also 30cm longer than its predecessor, while its wingspan has increased by 20cm, to 8.6m. With 40% more internal fuel, the new model has increased range, payload and endurance, and features an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, other updated avionics and new electronic warfare equipment.

 Saab chief executive Håkan Buskhe reveals the cost of developing the Gripen E and producing its three Swedish test aircraft will be less than $2 billion.

This is chump change by the standards of modern fighter development.

………

 Stressing that aircraft 39-8 is not a prototype, Ydreskog says: “Assembly of the first test aircraft – with 60,000, mostly new parts – was shorter than number 204 for the C/D.” The programme’s other test units are in different stages of structural assembly and only minor adjustments are expected as the shift to series production occurs. “There is some optimisation to do – we can reduce some weight,” he notes.

 But Saab believes one of the biggest advances with the Gripen E comes through its use of an all-new integrated modular avionics system, which splits flight-critical and tactical management software. It says the latter’s software, hardware and algorithms can be rapidly changed – like apps on a smartphone – to keep pace with evolved operational requirements or technological advances in computing over the life of the type’s use.

(emphasis mine)

The updated software has been in development for far less time than the (still not up to snuff) avionics package for the F-35 JSF, and it will be trivial for countries using the aircraft.

The reason is that critical functions are segregated from one another, which, as any programmer can tell you, simply works better than tightly integrated all in one software as used in the JSF, even after billions of dollars have been spent.

Of course, for Lockheed Martin, their hairball of a software platform is not a bug, it’s a feature, because it allows charge tolls on users who want to make upgrades.

As Aviation Week notes:

………

Gripen E is scaled up from the early Gripen C/D with 40% additional fuel capacity, more thrust from its General Electric F414 engine and more weapon stations. Internally the aircraft has been given a new sensor suite, with active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar and infrared search and track (IRST).

Key to the aircraft is a federated software system that separates critical flight control systems from the tactical systems. Saab claims this will make the Gripen E’s avionics and mission systems more easily and quickly upgradable. Just 10% of the aircraft’s system code will be devoted to flight-critical systems; the remaining 90% will be mission-system related. Saab officials say tactical upgrades could be tested and introduced in weeks rather than months.

(emphasis mine)

The direct operating cost, as well as the fly away cost, of the Gripen looks to be less than that of its competitors.

Compared to its competitors, the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Dassault Rafale, and the Lockheed-Martin Lightning II, this aircraft should better suit the needs of most countries out there, but Sweden lacks the connections behind the other platforms, so it looks likely that while it will be a market success, it will be a only a modest success.

Yet Another of My Cousin’s* Brilliant Ideas

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As you may be aware, Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein* (D-CA) have proposed a bill requiring that all encryption include a back door for the authorities. It appears that the bill as written also outlaws things like MP3 and JPEG files:

The proposed bill put forward by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to force US companies to build backdoors into their encryption systems has quickly run into trouble.

Less than 24 hours after the draft Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016 was released, more than 43,000 signatures have been added to a petition calling for the bill to be withdrawn. The petition, organized by CREDO Action, calls for Congress to block the proposed law as a matter of urgency.

Meanwhile, in the technical world, experts have been going through the legislation and pointing out glaring holes in the draft bill. Bruce Schneier, the guy who literally wrote the books on modern cryptography, noted that the bill would make most of what the NSA does illegal, unless No Such Agency is willing to backdoor its own encrypted communications.

“This is the most braindead piece of legislation I’ve ever seen,” Schneier – who has just been appointed a Fellow of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard – told The Reg. “The person who wrote this either has no idea how technology works or just doesn’t care.”

He pointed out that it isn’t just cryptographic code that would be affected by this poorly written legislation. Schneier, like pretty much everyone, uses lossy compression algorithms to reduce the size of images for sending via email but – as it won’t work in reverse and add back the data removed – this code could be banned by the law, too. Files that can’t be decrypted on demand to their original state, and files that can’t be decompressed back to their exact originals, all look the same to this draft law.

In the, “Has no idea how technology works or just doesn’t care,” issue, I will go for both.

This bill is a mindbogglingly stupid idea.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

So Not a Surprise

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And in what might be the last chapter of the lack of investor due diligence that is the blood testing firm Theranos, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced that it will ban the top three executives at the firm from the test business:

Theranos, the high-profile clinical laboratory company, had a day of reckoning yesterday. That’s when The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a story revealing that Theranos was sent a letter by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) providing notice of sanctions.

In a letter to Theranos executives, CMS said it is prepared to:

  • revoke the company’s CLIA certificate;
  • impose a fine of $10,000 per day;
  • suspend and cancel the lab’s approval to receive Medicare payments; and
  • impose a two-year ban on the owner, operator, and laboratory director for owning or operating a clinical laboratory.

Pathologists and medical laboratory professionals will recognize that these are among the most severe sanctions that CMS can impose on a laboratory under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA). Further, clinical pathologists who currently serve as medical directors of CLIA laboratories will find it useful to read the entire letter sent to Theranos on March 18, as it describes how CMS viewed the responses that Theranos provided following a January 25, 2016, letter from CMS describing deficiencies identified during an inspection of the Theranos CLIA lab facility in Newark, California.

………

“After careful review, we have determined that the laboratory’s submission does not constitute a credible allegation of compliance and acceptable evidence of correction for the deficiencies cited during the CLIA recertification and complaint survey completed December 23, 2015, and does not demonstrate that the laboratory has come into Condition-level compliance and abated immediate jeopardy. In general, we find that the statements made in the allegation of compliance and evidence of correction: 1) failed to adequately address the deficient practice cited; 2) are incomplete and failed to meet the criteria of acceptable evidence of correction; 3) do not ensure sustained compliance; and 4) show a lack of understanding of the CLIA requirements.

Less than a year ago, Theranos had a valuation in the billions, because it was promising a new technology that would allow for inexpensive blood tests on just a drop of blood. (A little finger stick)

The technology has never worked, even under the most controlled conditions, like demonstrations to investors, but it was treated like the next big thing for reasons that have never made sense to me.

My guess is that the founder of the company, Elizabeth Holmes, dazzled people with a rather spot on impersonation of Steve Jobs (she only wears black turtle necks), which convinced people who knew better that the nothing-burger business model of dot-coms could be applied to healthcare.

Why You Cannot Rely on the Cloud

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Google, or more accurately its evil twin Alphabet, bought the a leader in the “smart home” industry, Nest.  

Flush with money, Nest bought competitor Revolv, but they didn’t want the technology, they just wanted the staff.

And now Google/Alphabet/Nest has announced that they will be shutting down all Revolv home control units.

I don’t mean that they will stop supporting the units, I mean that they will shut the units down.

They will go dark.

They are now door stops:

Nest, a smart-home company owned by Google’s holding company Alphabet, is dropping support for a line of products — and will make customers’ existing devices completely useless.

It’s a move that has infuriated some customers, and raises worrying questions about the rights of consumers in the ever-more connected future.

In October 2014, Nest acquired Revolv, a smart-home device maker, nine months after it was itself bought by Google. The terms of the Revolv deal were not disclosed, and as Re/code reported at the time, the deal was an acqui-hire — buying a company for its talent rather than its products or users.

Nest cofounder Matt Rogers praised Revolv as “the best team out there,” and Revolv immediately stopped selling its $300 (£210) home hub, which could be used to control lights, doors, alarms, and so on.

Revolv’s team was to work on “Work with Nest,” Nest’s API program, but customers’ existing Revolv products continued to be supported — until recently.

Just over a month ago, Revolv updated its website to announce that it is closing down completely, pulling the plug on its existing products in May. “We’re pouring all our energy into Works with Nest and are incredibly excited about what we’re making,” wrote Revolv founders Tim Enwall and Mike Soucie. “Unfortunately, that means we can’t allocate resources to Revolv anymore and we have to shut down the service.”

Shutting down Revolv does not mean that Nest is ceasing to support its products, leaving them vulnerable to bugs and other unpatched issues. It means that the $300 devices and accompanying apps will stop working completely.

As one customer puts it, Google parent company Alphabet is “intentionally bricking” the devices on May 15, 2016.

Arlo Gilbert, CEO of medical app company Televero, is infuriated by Nest’s decision. He has written a Medium post about the impending closure, labelling it a “pretty blatant ‘f–k you’ to every person who trusted in them and bought their hardware.”

I’ve experienced this on a smaller scale, when “upgrades” to blogger have made the product less capable and less powerful.

But this is just a blog, and until such time I own/rent my own server, I have to live with this.

If you let Google or cloud type company control your business or your phone, they are going to f%$# like a drunk sorority girl, whether it is product shutdowns, or upgrades that you hate.

I still use Office 2003, but if I used Google docs, I would be forced to work when they changed their interface and went with their low contrast “flat design”, and it would no longer support Office 2003 formats.

If you want to control how you get your work done, you cannot rely on the cloud.

Welcome to the Internet

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Microsoft released an AI chatbot to Twitter. Hilarity ensues:

Microsoft has apologised for creating an artificially intelligent chatbot that quickly turned into a holocaust-denying racist.

But in doing so made it clear Tay’s views were a result of nurture, not nature. Tay confirmed what we already knew: people on the internet can be cruel.

Tay, aimed at 18-24-year-olds on social media, was targeted by a “coordinated attack by a subset of people” after being launched earlier this week.

Within 24 hours Tay had been deactivated so the team could make “adjustments”.

But on Friday, Microsoft’s head of research said the company was “deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets” and has taken Tay off Twitter for the foreseeable future.

What the hell were they thinking?

What part of 4Chan don’t you get?

Adventures in Bureaucracy

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In Santa Clara, California, the sheriff, sick and tired of delays and costs of upgrading her jail’s camera system, set up a system with about $750 of equipment purchased from Costco:

Told it would take two more years and up to $20 million to install more security cameras in Santa Clara County’s troubled jails, Sheriff Laurie Smith decided Wednesday to whip out her Costco card and buy a few herself.

The cost for 12 cameras to test: $761.24 — which Smith put on her personal American Express.

The sheriff’s shopping spree came as three of her correctional officers appeared in court Wednesday on charges of beating a mentally ill inmate to death in August — an incident that wasn’t captured by the jail’s existing cameras and exposed troubling surveillance gaps. Smith headed to the store after she learned that the county’s plan to buy cameras through official channels could drag on for two years. She denied it was a publicity stunt.

“It’s imperative we act swiftly,” Smith said Wednesday after returning from her trip to the Costco on Coleman Avenue. “There cannot be a delay because of bureaucracy. That’s unacceptable. Anything we can do to bring additional transparency, we want to do right away.”

A county work crew was set to install them by Thursday morning in maximum-security housing pod 4A, on the fourth floor of Main Jail South.

If the Lorex high-definition 1080-pixel system is as effective as advertised at capturing details like the faces of guards and inmates, the sheriff plans to buy more to bridge the gap until the county installs a better system in 2018. She said she consulted with county building department officials before going shopping and expects to be reimbursed.

Just reimbursed?

They should crown her Queen of Santa Clara as well.

The FBI Probably Never Needed Apple’s Help to Read That iPhone

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The Department of Justice has asked for a recess in the court proceedings to force Apple to write a hacking tool for the iPhone:

The Justice Department said on Monday that it might no longer need Apple’s assistance in opening an iPhone used by a gunman in the San Bernardino, Calif., rampage last year.

The disclosure led a judge to postpone a court hearing over the issue and temporarily sidesteps what has become a bitter clash with the world’s most valuable company.

In a new court filing, the government said an outside party had demonstrated a way for the F.B.I. to possibly unlock the phone used by the gunman, Syed Rizwan Farook. The hearing in the contentious case — Apple has loudly opposed opening the iPhone, citing privacy concerns and igniting a heated debate — was originally set for Tuesday.

While the Justice Department must test this method, if it works “it should eliminate the need for the assistance from Apple,” it said in its filing. The Justice Department added that it would file a status report by April 5 on its progress.

This happened because they think that the case is going against them.

None of this would happened if the FBI hadn’t “mistakenly” reset the iCloud password for the phone, which would have allowed them to access the phoe.

My take is that the FBI attempted to sandbag the judge, and deliberately f%$#ed up the analysis of the phone to have a court case and create a precedent.

What a Surprise. The Terrorists in Paris Did Not Use Encryption

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They used burner phones and made calls instead of texting and emailing:

New details of the Paris attacks carried out last November reveal that it was the consistent use of prepaid burner phones, not encryption, that helped keep the terrorists off the radar of the intelligence services.

As an article in The New York Times reports: “the three teams in Paris were comparatively disciplined. They used only new phones that they would then discard, including several activated minutes before the attacks, or phones seized from their victims.”

The article goes on to give more details of how some phones were used only very briefly in the hours leading up to the attacks. For example: “Security camera footage showed Bilal Hadfi, the youngest of the assailants, as he paced outside the stadium, talking on a cellphone. The phone was activated less than an hour before he detonated his vest.” The information come from a 55-page report compiled by the French antiterrorism police for France’s Interior Ministry.

Outside the Bataclan theatre venue, the investigators found a Samsung phone in a dustbin: “It had a Belgian SIM card that had been in use only since the day before the attack. The phone had called just one other number—belonging to an unidentified user in Belgium.”

As police pieced together the movements of the attackers, they found yet more burner phones: “Everywhere they went, the attackers left behind their throwaway phones, including in Bobigny, at a villa rented in the name of Ibrahim Abdeslam. When the brigade charged with sweeping the location arrived, it found two unused cellphones still inside their boxes.” At another location used by one of the terrorists, the police found dozens of unused burner phones “still in their wrappers.”

As The New York Times says, one of the most striking aspects of the phones is that not a single e-mail or online chat message from the attackers was found on them. That seems to be further evidence that they knew such communications were routinely monitored by intelligence agencies. But rather than trying to avoid discovery by using encryption—which would in itself have drawn attention to their accounts—they seem to have stopped using the Internet as a communication channel altogether, and turned to standard cellular network calls on burner phones.
 
………

As Ars has reported, along with other countries the UK government is pushing for ways to circumvent or weaken encryption because it claims strong crypto creates a “safe space” for terrorists. This new information that the Paris attackers did not routinely use encryption, if at all, but turned instead to the tried-and-tested technique of burner phones, undermines the argument that everyone’s communications must be weakened in order to tackle terrorism.

………

Until we have stronger evidence to the contrary, it seems likely that encryption played little or no part in the Paris terrorist attacks.

The various agencies of various state security apparatuses have been trying to sell the idea that the terrorists will kill us all if we don’t let them.

It does not make us safer.

They intend to use this to go after ordinary criminals and dissidents.

She’s Fundraising with Theranos? Seriously?!?!?

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For a while, I have been talking about the smoke and mirrors show that is the lab test company Theranos.

The short version is that they have a multibillion dollar valuation for a technology that allows one to make blood tests from a drop of blood from a finger tip.

Unfortunately, they have not been able to make the technology work, and so they have been doing conventional tests to generate some revenue.

But they are f%$#ing this up too, having been cited by the FDA.

And now the Clinton campaign is having this den of fraud hold a fund raiser for them.

I guess that Enron was busy:

Theranos is a unicorn that may soon be sent to the glue factory. The biotech start-up was once the toast of Silicon Valley. Its signature technology — a blood-testing machine so sensitive it requires a mere pinprick of blood to make accurate diagnoses — attracted a $9 billion valuation. ……… And then, last October, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the company’s breakthrough technology doesn’t actually work.

In recent days, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that the company’s lab in Newark, California, was in violation of five federal regulations, thereby posing “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.” Last week, the release of that investigation’s full report revealed that “quality control issues” may have compromised the blood-test results of 81 patients.

……… But for god knows what reason, it hasn’t cost the company the chance to host a fund-raiser for the Democratic front-runner. Next week, Chelsea Clinton will join Holmes at Theranos’s Palo Alto headquarters to help raise money for her mother’s campaign. According to an email obtained by Re/code, the event will be held next Monday night and will cost most attendees $2,700 a head.

One of Clinton’s primary liabilities in her race against Bernie Sanders is the perception that she is overly friendly with corrupt corporate interests. So it’s pretty bizarre that she has decided to have a (reportedly) corrupt corporation host her next big fund-raiser. And it’s only one of several unforced errors the campaign has made since last Friday. 

Someone in the Clinton sure picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

On the bright side for the Campaign, at least this time Hillary was not caught on camera doing it, so she can blame some lowly staffer.

This really is a complete cock up.

First Civil Application will be on Car Bras

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A car bra

Researchers at Iowa State University claim to have developed a flexible skin that absorbs radar:

Iowa State University engineers have developed a new flexible, stretchable and tunable “meta-skin” that uses rows of small, liquid-metal devices to cloak an object from the sharp eyes of radar.

The meta-skin takes its name from metamaterials, which are composites that have properties not found in nature and that can manipulate electromagnetic waves. By stretching and flexing the polymer meta-skin, it can be tuned to reduce the reflection of a wide range of radar frequencies.

The journal Scientific Reports recently reported the discovery online. Lead authors from Iowa State’s department of electrical and computer engineering are Liang Dong, associate professor; and Jiming Song, professor. Co-authors are Iowa State graduate students Siming Yang, Peng Liu and Qiugu Wang; and former Iowa State undergraduate Mingda Yang. The National Science Foundation and the China Scholarship Council have partially supported the project.

“It is believed that the present meta-skin technology will find many applications in electromagnetic frequency tuning, shielding and scattering suppression,” the engineers wrote in their paper.

Dong has a background in fabricating micro and nanoscale devices and working with liquids and polymers; Song has expertise in looking for new applications of electromagnetic waves.

Working together, they were hoping to prove an idea: that electromagnetic waves – perhaps even the shorter wavelengths of visible light – can be suppressed with flexible, tunable liquid-metal technologies.

What they came up with are rows of split ring resonators embedded inside layers of silicone sheets. The electric resonators are filled with galinstan, a metal alloy that’s liquid at room temperature and less toxic than other liquid metals such as mercury.

Those resonators are small rings with an outer radius of 2.5 millimeters and a thickness of half a millimeter. They have a 1 millimeter gap, essentially creating a small, curved segment of liquid wire.

The rings create electric inductors and the gaps create electric capacitors. Together they create a resonator that can trap and suppress radar waves at a certain frequency. Stretching the meta-skin changes the size of the liquid metal rings inside and changes the frequency the devices suppress.

Galinstan is the metal in modern “Mercury” thermometers.

If this works, I expect to see covers on cars to absorb the radar frequencies used by speed radars.

Because these radars operate over a fairly narrow bands, it’s not a particularly demanding application, and radar absorbent car bras has been a kind of holy grail in the industry.

A Little Rocketry Factoid

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I was reading an article about how France is looking into creating a reusable rocket engine powered by Lox/CH4. (Methane)

I was wondering why they would go with Methane as a fuel, so I did some reasons.

These days, there are 4 basic options for launcher fuel, Liquid Hydrogen, Kerosene (RP-1), Hydrazine, and Methane.

Hydrazine has fallen out of favor for boosters, though it is still used in thrusters of various sorts. It has low impulse, and it’s toxic, but the fact that it can be used as a monopropellant means that it is convenient to use for orbital maneuvering, since it requires half the parts, and you don’t need to make sure that the flow of a separate fuel and oxidizer are synchronized for short the “blip” that would be needed for an orbital rendezvous or station keeping.

The commonly used propellants are LH2 and RP-1 each have distinct advantages:

  • Hydrogen has the highest impulse (fuel economy).
  • RP-1 is denser, and requires smaller tanks.
  • RP-1 can be stored at room temperature.

Methane falls in between Hydrogen and RP-1. It’s less dense than RP-1, and more dense than LH2, and is more fuel efficient than RP-1 and less so than LH2.

Methane is also a lot easier to handle than LH2, with hydrogen condensing at -252.9°C, while liquefies at a relatively balmy -161.6°C, much closer to the boiling point of LOX. (-183°C)

Additionally, for reusable and restartable engines, Methane has the advantage that it does not coke up, so recycling the engine for another use is more straightforward than RP-1.

Additionally, if you want to go to Mars or the outer planets, it is relatively trivial to manufacture or extract Methane, while manufacturing LH2 would be extremely difficult, and manufacturing RP-1 would be nigh impossible.

So, now you know more than you want to about why a number of rocket manufacturers are looking into Methane as a propellant.