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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The team of researchers at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), in collaboration with the Department of Geriatrics at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LSMU), are developing a system that monitors the health conditions of the elderly. The system consists of several sensors and a controller—a portable device on a neck strap—that automatically calls for help in the time of need.

According to Eurostat, almost one in five persons in the European Union (EU) is aged 65 or over (19.4 percent). This represents a population of nearly 100 million people. It is estimated that by 2070 the number will reach 29 percent. Therefore, the need for technologies, which provide nonintrusive monitoring of the health of the increasing amount of population, are constantly growing.

"With this system, the elderly can feel at peace and safe at home. They don't need constant supervision. The developed technology is well suited for clinical treatment and can also be implemented in various geriatric institutions," says Egidijus Kazanavicius, a professor at the KTU Faculty of Informatics, one of the authors of the technology.

The system is consisting of stationary sensors mounted indoors and a small wearable 3-5 cm high device. It is constantly monitoring the health conditions and body position of a person. When it senses that the person has possibly collapsed, the system sends a signal to those listed as emergency contacts.

"We aimed to create a system that would record the patient's position, body posture, and movement indoors. If something goes wrong, the person falls, or any other problem occurs, the controller will record the patient's collapse and the alarm will automatically be transmitted," explains Prof Kazanavicius, the Director at KTU Centre of Real-Time Computer Systems.

The controller with the integrated Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) module identifies the location of a person as accurately as one meter. The system was primarily designed for the installation in medical facilities, but now it can be implemented at home.

"Having access to the Internet is required but not a necessity. Emergency calls and notifications can also be sent via GSM," says Prof Kazanavicius.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718

IBM and Google's race for quantum computing takes a mysterious turn

The battle for top-dog status in the emerging field of quantum computing took a strange turn last week when rivals IBM and Google both made important and—in Google's case—mysterious claims about where they are in a quest that most experts believe is still at least a decade away from the finish line.

IBM announced that it will add its 14th quantum computer to its fleet in October. This will be a new 53-qubit model which it says is the single largest universal quantum system made available for external access in the industry to date. IBM also announced the opening of the first IBM Quantum Computation Center in Poughkeepsie, NY, bringing the number of quantum computing systems available online via its IBM Q Experience platform to 10, with an additional four systems scheduled to come online in the next month.

Meanwhile, Google scientists posted, and then quickly took down, a research paper on a NASA web site that claimed that it had achieved a major milestone called "quantum supremacy," meaning it can solve problems that even the most powerful conventional supercomputers cannot.

According to a report in the FT, the report claimed that Google's 72-qubit quantum computer chip Bristlecone, introduced in March 2018, performed a calculation in just over 3 minutes that would take 10,000 years on IBM's Summit, the world's most powerful commercial computer. The report reportedly said:

To our knowledge, this experiment marks the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor.

If true, this would be a very big step in the advance toward quantum computing, but it appears that the researchers may have gotten a little too far out over their skis and the post was quickly taken down. Since then, Google PR and marketing has refused to discuss the topic and the paper has gone the way of the whistleblower's account of President Trump's phone call with Ukraine's president. In a puff of digital smoke.

[...] For all the kerfuffle and analyst excitement, we are some distance away from a quantum advantage. Most experts believe the first quantum computer that can do the miraculous things its advocates promise is still a decade off but that hasn't stopped IBM, Microsoft, Google, AT&T, and other heavyweights from pressing ahead in a race that represents the next Mt. Everest of computing challenges. As with the sudden disappearance of claims of 'supremacy,' keep on the lookout for more strange and mysterious turns before we get there.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

New research from King's College London suggests that depression and binge-drinking are more common among the female partners of UK military personnel than among comparable women outside the military community.

Researchers from the King's Centre for Military Health Research at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) collected data from 405 women in military families with at least one child, representing around a third of the military population.

The researchers used a screening tool for depression, rather than a diagnosis from a psychiatrist, and women reporting frequent symptoms were considered to have probable depression. Drinking behaviours were also recorded through a self-reported screening tool.

After controlling for other factors linked to poor alcohol behaviours, the researchers found military partners were twice as likely to binge-drink as women in the general population.

Overall, military partners reported consuming alcohol less frequently than women in the general population but reported binge-drinking more often. Binge-drinking was significantly higher when families were separated for more than 2 months due to deployment.

Military families experience various unique challenges, such as frequently moving location and the stress and separation caused by deployment. The researchers say binge-drinking may reflect poor coping strategies used by military partners during the long absences of serving personnel from the family home.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://news.osu.edu/a-new-way-to-turn-heat-into-energy/

An international team of scientists has figured out how to capture heat and turn it into electricity.

The discovery, published last week in the journal Science Advances, could create more efficient energy generation from heat in things like car exhaust, interplanetary space probes and industrial processes. "Because of this discovery, we should be able to make more electrical energy out of heat than we do today," said study co-author Joseph Heremans, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology at The Ohio State University. "It's something that, until now, nobody thought was possible."

The discovery is based on tiny particles called paramagnons -- bits that are not quite magnets, but that carry some magnetic flux. This is important, because magnets, when heated, lose their magnetic force and become what is called paramagnetic. A flux of magnetism -- what scientists call "spins" -- creates a type of energy called magnon-drag thermoelectricity, something that, until this discovery, could not be used to collect energy at room temperature.

"The conventional wisdom was once that, if you have a paramagnet and you heat it up, nothing happens," Heremans said. "And we found that that is not true. What we found is a new way of designing thermoelectric semiconductors -- materials that convert heat to electricity. Conventional thermoelectrics that we've had over the last 20 years or so are too inefficient and give us too little energy, so they are not really in widespread use. This changes that understanding."

Magnets are a crucial part of collecting energy from heat: When one side of a magnet is heated, the other side -- the cold side -- gets more magnetic, producing spin, which pushes the electrons in the magnet and creates electricity.

The paradox, though, is that when magnets get heated up, they lose most of their magnetic properties, turning them into paramagnets -- "almost-but-not-quite magnets," Heremans calls them. That means that, until this discovery, nobody thought of using paramagnets to harvest heat because scientists thought paramagnets weren't capable of collecting energy.

What the research team found, though, is that the paramagnons push the electrons only for a billionth of a millionth of a second -- long enough to make paramagnets viable energy-harvesters.

Y. Zheng, et. al. Paramagnon drag in high thermoelectric figure of merit Li-doped MnTe. Science Advances, 2019; 5 (9): eaat9461 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aat9461

Submitted from IRC by Bytram

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Facebook is only 15 years old, yet in that time it has become the world's dominant social media platform, boasting more than 2.4 billion users. It has also become the world's second-largest digital advertising platform, effectively the runner-up in a worldwide duopoly dominated by Google. Now, it is under a baker's dozen of investigations alleging that it rose to the top by using unfair, anticompetitive tactics—and at least one competitor kept records.

Snap, parent company of Snapchat, kept a dossier "for years" detailing Facebook's attempts to thwart it, sources told The Wall Street Journal.

The Department of Justice publicly confirmed that its antitrust division was actively investigating widespread "concerns that consumers, businesses, and entrepreneurs have expressed" about "market-leading online platforms." The agency didn't name names, but that list of "market-leading" platforms is generally considered to include Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/snapchat-reportedly-has-project-voldemort-dossier-on-facebooks-bad-behavior/

The wheels of justice may move slowly, but here's hoping the "with a computer" companies find that they do work.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for FatPhil

Black hole at the center of our galaxy appears to be getting hungrier

The enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy is having an unusually large meal of interstellar gas and dust, and researchers don't yet understand why.

"We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole," said Andrea Ghez, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-senior author of the research. "It's usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don't know what is driving this big feast."

A paper about the study, led by the UCLA Galactic Center Group, which Ghez heads, is published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The researchers analyzed more than 13,000 observations of the black hole from 133 nights since 2003. The images were gathered by the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. The team found that on May 13, the area just outside the black hole's "point of no return" (so called because once matter enters, it can never escape) was twice as bright as the next-brightest observation.

They also observed large changes on two other nights this year; all three of those changes were "unprecedented," Ghez said.

The brightness the scientists observed is caused by radiation from gas and dust falling into the black hole; the findings prompted them to ask whether this was an extraordinary singular event or a precursor to significantly increased activity.

"The big question is whether the black hole is entering a new phase—for example if the spigot has been turned up and the rate of gas falling down the black hole 'drain' has increased for an extended period—or whether we have just seen the fireworks from a few unusual blobs of gas falling in," said Mark Morris, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and the paper's co-senior author.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

In 2017, Airbus published a promotional article promoting an Airbus helicopter.

"Seventy years ago, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier,"
[...]
"By using Yeager's name, identity, and likeness and federal registered trademarks in the infringing material, Airbus impaired the ability of General Yeager to receive his established earning potential," Yeager's lawyers wrote.

The 96-year-old Yeager wasn't happy. Last week, he filed a lawsuit in federal court, arguing that Airbus had infringed his rights by using his name without permission.

Yeager says that he visited Airbus in 2008 and told Airbus it would cost at least $1 million to use his name and likeness in promotional materials.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/chuck-yeager-sues-airbus-for-mentioning-chuck-yeager-in-an-article/

Cool, I didn't know he was still alive. Which may also have been what they were thinking.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

"Like dogs, cats display social flexibility in regard to their attachments with humans," said Kristyn Vitale of Oregon State University. "The majority of cats are securely attached to their owner and use them as a source of security in a novel environment."

One revealing way to study human attachment behavior is to observe an infant's response to a reunion with their caregiver following a brief absence in a novel environment. When a caregiver returns, secure infants quickly return to relaxed exploration while insecure individuals engage in excessive clinging or avoidance behavior.

Similar tests had been run before with primates and dogs, so Vitale and her colleagues decided to run the same test, only this time with cats.

During the test, an adult cat or kitten spent two minutes in a novel room with their caregiver followed by two minutes alone. Then, they had a two-minute reunion. The cats' responses to seeing their owners again were classified into attachment styles.

[...] The findings show that cats' human attachments are stable and present in adulthood. This social flexibility may have helped facilitate the success of the species in human homes, Vitale says.

[...] This work was supported through a Nestlé Purina sponsorship for studies in cat and dog emotional well-being and by the National Science Foundation.

Journal Reference: Kristyn R. Vitale, Alexandra C. Behnke, Monique A.R. Udell. Attachment bonds between domestic cats and humans. Current Biology, 2019; 29 (18): R864 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.08.036

-- submitted from IRC

Also at Ars Technica.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Why is the brain disturbed by harsh sounds?

Why do the harsh sounds emitted by alarms or human shrieks grab our attention? What is going on in the brain when it detects these frequencies? Neuroscientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and Geneva University Hospitals (HUG), Switzerland, have been analysing how people react when they listen to a range of different sounds, the aim being to establish the extent to which repetitive sound frequencies are considered unpleasant. The scientists also studied the areas inside the brain that were stimulated when listening to these frequencies. Surprisingly, their results -- which are published in Nature Communications -- showed not only that the conventional sound-processing circuit is activated but also that the cortical and sub-cortical areas involved in the processing of salience and aversion are also solicited. This is a first, and it explains why the brain goes into a state of alert on hearing this type of sound.

Alarm sounds, whether artificial (such as a car horn) or natural (human screams), are characterised by repetitive sound fluctuations, which are usually situated in frequencies of between 40 and 80 Hz. But why were these frequencies selected to signal danger? And what happens in the brain to hold our attention to such an extent? Researchers from UNIGE and HUG played repetitive sounds of between 0 and 250 Hz to 16 participants closer and closer together in order to define the frequencies that the brain finds unbearable. "We then asked participants when they perceived the sounds as being rough (distinct from each other) and when they perceived them as smooth (forming one continuous and single sound)," explains Luc Arnal, a researcher in the Department of Basic Neurosciences in UNIGE's Faculty of Medicine.

Based on the responses of participants, the scientists were able to establish that the upper limit of sound roughness is around 130 Hz. "Above this limit," continues Arnal, "the frequencies are heard as forming only one continuous sound." But why does the brain judge rough sounds to be unpleasant? In an attempt to answer this question, the neuroscientists asked participants to listen to different frequencies, which they had to classify on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being bearable and 5 unbearable. "The sounds considered intolerable were mainly between 40 and 80 Hz, i.e. in the range of frequencies used by alarms and human screams, including those of a baby," says Arnal. Since these sounds are perceptible from a distance, unlike a visual stimulus, it is crucial that attention can be captured from a survival perspective. "That's why alarms use these rapid repetitive frequencies to maximise the chances that they are detected and gain our attention," says the researcher. In fact, when the repetitions are spaced less than about 25 milliseconds apart, the brain cannot anticipate them and therefore suppress them. It is constantly on alert and attentive to the stimulus.

Luc H. Arnal, Andreas Kleinschmidt, Laurent Spinelli, Anne-Lise Giraud, Pierre Mégevand. The rough sound of salience enhances aversion through neural synchronisation. Nature Communications, 2019; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11626-7

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Why are mountains so high? It doesn't add up

Over millions of years, Earth's summits and valleys have moved and shifted, resulting in the dramatic landscapes of peaks and shadows we know today. Mountains often form when pressure under Earth's surface pushes upward, yet many factors impact their ultimate height, including the erosion of the areas between mountains, known as channels.

Scientists have long assumed that as land is pushed faster upward to form a mountain, its height increases in a continuous and predictable way. But new research shows that these predictions may stop working for the steepest mountains and therefore limit their height -- and this may hold true for ranges on the entire planet.

"People have argued for a long time that as channels get steeper and steeper, the erosion rate keeps increasing," said George Hilley, a professor of geological sciences at Stanford University's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth) and lead author of a study published in Nature Geoscience Sept. 16. "We find that the theory works really well until a certain point and then it breaks down empirically -- it seems as though something else kicks in that we don't completely understand."

The researchers analyzed samples from a broad range of mountain landscapes across the tropics, including Venezuela, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Taiwan, controlling for rock type and climate conditions to assess parallel comparisons. They found that after mountains reach a certain elevation, channels between mountains suddenly become extremely sensitive to subtle changes in their inclines, thereby limiting the height of the mountains above. They added data from hundreds of mountain ranges worldwide and found they followed a similar pattern: the height, or relief, of the landscape is capped after crossing a threshold driven by channel steepness.

"Areas of land above channels are likely being controlled by how quickly a river can cut down -- this is the framework by which we understand how the height of mountains varies as a function of climate and the collision of continents," Hilley said. "The anomaly we observed is kind of a mystery and is not necessarily what conventional theory might predict."

[...] Hilley said the results of the study were surprising, as well as the fact that they remained consistent when compared with global data.

"In retrospect it makes sense when you look at it from the overall context of what our planet actually looks like," Hilley said. "It really speaks to the fact that there might be lots of fertile ground to explore why this might happen. It also points to the fact that there might be something about the way in which rivers incise that we just don't understand yet."

George E. Hilley, Stephen Porder, Felipe Aron, Curtis W. Baden, Samuel A. Johnstone, Frances Liu, Robert Sare, Aaron Steelquist, Holly H. Young. Earth's topographic relief potentially limited by an upper bound on channel steepness. Nature Geoscience, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-019-0442-3

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Wired reports that Tesla may soon have batteries with a one million mile lifespan.

From his hideout in a hollowed out volcano last April, Elon Musk promised us (3:10:00)

that Tesla would soon be able to power its electric cars for more than 1 million miles over the course of their lifespan. At the time, the claim seemed a bit much. That's more than double the mileage Tesla owners can expect to get out of their car's current battery packs, which are already well beyond the operational range of most other EV batteries. It just didn't seem real—except now it appears that it is.

Tesla affiliated battery researchers this month described in The Journal of the Electrochemical Society a moderate-energy-density Lithium-Ion Cell chemistry that "should be able to power an electric vehicle for over 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) and last at least two decades in grid energy storage."

Led by physicist Jeff Dahn, one of the world's foremost lithium-ion researchers, the Dalhousie group showed that its battery significantly outperforms any similar lithium-ion battery previously reported. They noted their battery could be especially useful for self-driving robotaxis and long-haul electric trucks, two products Tesla is developing.

In a significant break from the usual, complete details on the cells, including "electrode compositions, electrode loadings, electrolyte compositions, additives used, etc." were provided by the researchers "so that others can recreate these cells and use them as benchmarks for their own R+D efforts."

The team's results show that their batteries could be charged and depleted more than 4,000 times and lose only about 10 percent of their energy capacity. For the sake of comparison, a paper from 2014 showed that similar lithium-ion batteries lost half their capacity after only 1,000 cycles.

Side Note - Tesla, Musk, and the researchers have neither confirmed nor denied that the upcoming one million mile battery packs touted by Musk last year are the same as the paper describes.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Stories, fiction included, act as a kind of surrogate life. You can learn from them so seamlessly that you might believe you knew something—about ancient Greece, say—before having gleaned it from Mary Renault's novel The Last of the Wine. You'll also retain false information even if you didn't mean to. That seems like a liability: Philosophers have long concerned themselves with what they call "the paradox of fiction"—why would we find imagined stories emotionally arousing at all? The answer is that most of our mind does not even realize that fiction is fiction, so we react to it almost as though it were real.

At the same time, very young children "can rationally deal with the make-believe aspects of stories," distinguishing the actual, the possible, and the fantastical with sophistication, as Denis Dutton has written in The Art Instinct. "Not only does the artistic structure of stories speak to Darwinian sources: so does the intense pleasure taken in their universal themes of love, death, adventure, family conflict, justice, and overcoming adversity." That may help explain why, when stories are done well, we love them so much. Just as artificial sweeteners fool our minds into thinking we're eating sugar, stories—even weird ones like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—take advantage of our natural tendency to want to learn about real people, and how to treat them.

Our brains can't help but believe.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The brain may actively forget during dream sleep

Rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep is a fascinating period when most of our dreams are made. Now, in a study of mice, a team of Japanese and U.S. researchers show that it may also be a time when the brain actively forgets. Their results suggest that forgetting during sleep may be controlled by neurons found deep inside the brain that were previously known for making an appetite stimulating hormone. The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health.

"Ever wonder why we forget many of our dreams?" said Thomas Kilduff, Ph.D., director of the Center for Neuroscience at SRI International, Menlo Park, California, and a senior author of the study published in Science. "Our results suggest that the firing of a particular group of neurons during REM sleep controls whether the brain remembers new information after a good night's sleep."

REM is one of several sleep stages the body cycles through every night. It first occurs about 90 minutes after falling asleep and is characterized by darting eyes, raised heart rates, paralyzed limbs, awakened brain waves and dreaming.

For more than a century, scientists have explored the role of sleep in storing memories. While many have shown that sleep helps the brain store new memories, others, including Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, have raised the possibility that sleep – in particular REM sleep – may be a time when the brain actively eliminates or forgets excess information. Moreover, recent studies in mice have shown that during sleep – including REM sleep – the brain selectively prunes synaptic connections made between neurons involved in certain types of learning. However, until this study, no one had shown how this might happen.

"Understanding the role of sleep in forgetting may help researchers better understand a wide range of memory-related diseases like post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer's," said Janet He, Ph.D., program director, at NINDS. "This study provides the most direct evidence that REM sleep may play a role in how the brain decides which memories to store."

Izawa et al. REM sleep-active MCH neurons are involved in forgetting hippocampus-dependent memories. Science, September 20, 2019 DOI: 10.1126/science.aax9238

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Nine words to ruin your Monday: Emergency Internet Explorer patch amid in-the-wild attacks

Microsoft today issued a rare emergency security update for Internet Explorer to address a critical flaw in the browser that's being exploited right now in the wild.

Redmond says the vulnerability, a scripting-engine memory-corruption bug designated CVE-2019-1367, can be abused by a malicious webpage or email to achieved remote code execution: that means Windows PCs can be hijacked by viewing a suitably booby-trapped website, or message, when using Internet Explorer. Malware, spyware, and other software nasties can be injected to run on the computer, in that case.

Discovery of the flaw, and its exploitation in the wild by miscreants to commandeer systems, was attributed to Clément Lecigne of the Google Threat Analysis Group. The programming blunder is present in at least IE 9 to 11.

Such flaws are not uncommon, and Microsoft typically patches anywhere from 10-20 browser and scripting engine remote code execution each month with the Patch Tuesday bundle. Because they allow remote code execution with little or no user warning or interaction, Redmond considers such bugs to be critical security risks.

In this case, the severity of the flaw combined with the fact that vulnerability is being actively targeted has prompted Microsoft to break its normal patch cycle and release the update today, rather than wait until October 8 when the next Patch Tuesday drop is due to arrive.

[...] Microsoft also dropped a fix for a less-severe denial of service vulnerability in the Windows Defender security tool.

CVE-2019-1255 describes a file-handling error in Defender that will cause the security tool to generate a false positive when scanning an application. An attacker who already has access to the system could abuse the feature to make the tool block some applications.

"An attacker could exploit the vulnerability to prevent legitimate accounts from executing legitimate system binaries," Microsoft said.

Also at: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/microsoft-pushes-patch-of-ie-zeroday-thats-being-actively-exploited/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49800181

(Note: emphasis in original.)

Why is this important?

Mr Trump's most ardent critics accuse him of using the powers of the presidency to bully Ukraine into digging up damaging information on a political rival, Democrat Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, Mr Trump and his supporters the former vice-president abused his power to pressure Ukraine to back away from a criminal investigation that could implicate his son, Hunter.

Mr Biden is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination to take on Mr Trump next year.

In other words, it is nothing less than the White House at stake.

[...] What happened to the whistleblower's complaint?

Freeman writes:

AT&T is trying to force customers into arbitration in order to avoid a class-action complaint over the telecom's former practice of selling users' real-time location data.

[...] The class-action complaint [(pdf)] was filed in July against AT&T and two location data aggregators called LocationSmart and Zumigo. "AT&T used LocationSmart and Zumigo to manage the buying and selling of its customers' real-time location data," the lawsuit said. The lawsuit seeks monetary damages for customers, an injunction preventing AT&T from selling location data, and certification of a class including all AT&T wireless subscribers between 2011 and the present "whose carrier-level location data AT&T permitted or caused to be used or accessed by any third party without proper authorization."

The lawsuit says:

Despite vowing to its customers that it does not "sell [their] Personal Information to anyone for any purpose," AT&T has been selling its customers' real-time location data to credit agencies, bail bondsmen, and countless other third parties without the required customer consent and without any legal authority. AT&T's practice is an egregious and dangerous breach of Plaintiffs' and all AT&T customers' privacy, as well as a violation of state and federal law.

AT&T previously denied that selling phone location data was illegal, even though Section 222 of the Communications Act says phone companies may not use or disclose customer location information "without the express prior authorization of the customer." The lawsuit alleges that AT&T violated the Communications Act, the California Unfair Competition Law, the California Constitution's right to privacy, and the California Consumers Legal Remedies Act.