SoylentNews

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4408:

Plenty of Fish app leaked profile data set to private – TechCrunch:

Dating app Plenty of Fish has pushed out a fix for its app after a security researcher found it was leaking information that users had set to “private” on their profiles.

The app was always silently returning users’ first names and postal ZIP codes, according to The App Analyst, a mobile expert who writes about his analyses of popular apps on his eponymous blog.

The leaking data was not immediately visible to app users, and the data was scrambled to make it difficult to read. But using freely available tools designed to analyze network traffic, the researcher found it was possible to reveal the information about users as their profiles appeared on his phone.

In one case, the App Analyst found enough information to identify where a particular user lived, he told TechCrunch.

Plenty of Fish has more than 150 million registered users, according to its parent company IAC. In recent years, law enforcement has warned about the threats some people face on dating apps, like Plenty of Fish. Reports suggest sex attacks involving dating apps have risen in the past five years. And those in the LGBTQ+ community on these apps also face safety threats from both individuals and governments, prompting apps like Tinder to proactively warn their LGBTQ+ users when they visit regions and states with restrictive and oppressive laws against same-sex partners.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

Video analytics paves way for smart cities:

The dream of smart cities is bearing fruit in projects around the globe. In fact the global market was valued at $900 billion in 2018 and was projected to grow by 18 per cent between 2019 and 2029, as Persistence Market Research has suggested.

The Internet of Things is likewise, and in synchronicity, evolving and boasting a wide range of devices from industrial to home use. A recent report from Navigant solidifies this evolution as the market for smart home devices is forecasted to record a 21.6% growth between 2019 and 2028, which will result in an increase in annual revenue from $12.6 billion to $72.9 billion during the period. 

New sensor technology, which is one key component to IoT, is beginning to transform the way our cities function. Along with cloud services an entirely smart city is no longer a pipe-dream but a possible reality – and one of the keys to the evolution of our cities will be in the formation of a new experience for its users.

This can take many forms – we will see a whole host of sensors which can detect and report traffic incidents automatically, identify areas of overcrowding, route additional public transport to busy areas in real time; or in more dangerous areas, even detect gunfire.

While the applications of smart sensors will be numerous for our cities’ infrastructure, citizens are also likely to feel the change in our retail spaces where businesses are actively looking to offer extraordinary experiences and where technology can make a big difference. 

As smart city projects get off the ground they will create a virtuous circle by collecting and analysing citizen data in all sorts of ways, from vehicle and pedestrian traffic flows to energy consumption and waste management. Citizens and communities will be able to act with planned and optimised lives with utilities and shared or public services orchestrated for efficiency, sustainability, and wellbeing. 

Cloud Cities?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX ships Starship hardware from Florida to Texas to speed up production

After appearing unexpectedly at SpaceX's Port Canaveral docks last month, several large pieces of Starship flight and manufacturing hardware were successfully shipped from Florida to Texas, arriving at the company's Boca Chica build and launch site two weeks ago.

Previously discussed on Teslarati, the hardware transfer signals a significant shift in the development strategy for SpaceX's next-generation Starship-Super Heavy launch vehicle. Most notably, SpaceX has chosen to prioritize Texas in the near term while the company's Florida facilities instead aim for longer-tail milestones like the first Super Heavy-capable launch site and a new production facility located much closer to that launch site.

While the hardware SpaceX has sent over is relatively minor in the scope of producing a brand new Starship prototype, it will at least somewhat expedite the process thanks to the inclusion of what appears to be a completed propellant tank dome. Additionally, it's possible that this December 8th hardware delivery will not be the last – a large amount of hardware remains at SpaceX's Cocoa, Florida Starship production facility, including several ring sections and a nearly finished nose section, among a number of other parts.

As discussed last month, SpaceX has reportedly decided to more or less shutter its [Cocoa, FL] facilities, transferring all permanent employees who wished to stay to Boca Chica, TX, Cape Canaveral, FL, or Hawthorne, CA facilities. SpaceX's Starship presence in Florida is in no way done but it does sound like it's in for at least several months of downtime.

SpaceX is building a steel launch mount and water-cooled flame diverter for launching Starships at the Kennedy Space Center's LC-39A pad in Florida.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Giant surveillance balloons are lurking at the edge of space:

Founded in 2012 by Taber MacCallum and Jane Poynter of Biosphere 2 fame, World View was originally conceived as a platform for human journeys to the upper stratosphere. Given that only a handful of people have piloted stratospheric balloons and lived to tell the tale, it was an ambitious goal—but the company had the technical chops to back it up. In 2014, MacCallum and Poynter worked together on a mission to send Google executive Alan Eustace on a record-breaking space-diving journey to 136,000 feet suspended beneath a stratospheric balloon.

But it wasn't at all clear there was enough demand for ferrying humans to the upper stratosphere, so in February, World View tapped Ryan Hartman, the former president and CEO of the drone company Insitu, to retool the company as a data services platform. The idea is to use long-lasting stratospheric balloons to collect high-resolution images of Earth and sell this data to the government and private companies.

Given his background in drones, Hartman is intimately familiar with the concept of Earth surveillance as a service. He says World View aims to fill a niche that can't be met by more conventional technologies like drones and satellites, which involve compromises in the quality of images, the area these images cover, and the frequency with which images are collected. Stratospheric balloons promise cheap access to incredibly high-resolution images that can be collected anywhere on Earth. Using off-the-shelf imaging hardware, World View can take photos with 15-centimeter resolution from 75,000 feet, and its custom-made cameras will soon be capable of 5 centimeters.

According to Hartman, World View's system is sensitive enough to tell whether a person on the ground is "holding a shovel or a gun." Unsurprisingly, perhaps, World View has attracted the interest of the US Department of Defense, which Hartman says will be one of the company's first customers when it starts selling its data next year. He says the company has also received a lot of attention from the energy sector, which is interested in using the image data to monitor its oil and gas wells, transmission lines, and other critical assets.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and the University of Tokyo have developed a technique for the reversible conversion of 3-D lipid vesicles into 2-D ultra-thin nanosheets. Both the stable nanosheets and the reversible 2-D-3-D conversion process can find various applications in the pharmaceutical, bioengineering, food, and cosmetic sciences.

An astonishing number of recent technological advances and novel engineering applications go hand in hand with progress in the field of materials science. The design and manipulation of materials at the nanoscale (that is, on the order of billionths of a meter) has become a hot topic. In particular, nanosheets, which are ultra-thin 2-D planar structures with a surface ranging from several micrometers to millimeters, have recently attracted much attention because of their outstanding mechanical, electrical, and optical properties. For example, organic nanosheets have great potential as biomedical or biotechnological tools, while inorganic nanosheets could be useful for energy storage and harvesting.

But what about going from a 2-D nanosheet vesicle form by modifying specific conditions, such as pH, or using an enzyme (Fig. 1), and found that the reaction was reversible.

More information: Naohiko Shimada et al, Cationic Copolymer‐Chaperoned 2D–3D Reversible Conversion of Lipid Membranes, Advanced Materials (2019). DOI: 10.1002/adma.201904032

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Overspill of fat shown to cause Type 2 diabetes:

For the first time, scientists have been able to observe people developing Type 2 diabetes—and confirmed that fat over-spills from the liver into the pancreas, triggering the chronic condition.

The research, led by Professor Roy Taylor at Newcastle University, UK, is published today in the academic journal, Cell Metabolism.

The study involved a group of people from Tyneside who previously had Type 2 diabetes but had lost weight and successfully reversed the condition as part of the DiRECT trial, which was funded by Diabetes UK and led by Professors Roy Taylor and Mike Lean (Glasgow University).

The majority remained non-diabetic for the rest of the two year study, however, a small group went on to re-gain the weight and re-developed Type 2 diabetes.

Professor Roy Taylor, from the Newcastle University Institute of Translational and Clinical Research, explained what the advanced scanning techniques and blood monitoring revealed.

He said: "We saw that when a person accumulates too much fat, which should be stored under the skin, then it has to go elsewhere in the body. The amount that can be stored under the skin varies from person to person, indicating a 'personal fat threshold' above which fat can cause mischief.

"When fat cannot be safely stored under the skin, it is then stored inside the liver, and over-spills to the rest of the body including the pancreas. This 'clogs up' the pancreas, switching off the genes which direct how insulin should effectively be produced, and this causes Type 2 diabetes."

This research by Professor Taylor confirms his Twin Cycle Hypothesis—that Type 2 diabetes is caused by excess fat actually within both the liver and pancreas, and especially that this process is reversible.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

This startup claims its deepfakes will protect your privacy:

As the saying goes: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. Now, if someone in a video clip is the same race, gender, and age as you, has the same gestures and emotional expressions as you—and is, in fact, based on you—yet doesn't exactly look like you ... is it still you?

No, according to Gil Perry, co-founder of Israeli privacy company D-ID. And that, he claims, is why his startup works. D-ID takes video footage—captured by a camera inside a store, for example—and uses computer vision and deep learning to create an alternative that protects the subject's identity. The process turns the "you" in the video into an avatar that has all the same attributes but looks a little different. 

The upside for businesses is that this new, "anonymized" video no longer gives away the exact identity of a customer—which, Perry says, means companies using D-ID can "eliminate the need for consent" and analyze the footage for business and marketing purposes. A store might, for example, feed video of a happy-looking white woman to an algorithm that can surface the most effective ad for her in real time. (It's worth noting that the legitimacy of emotion recognition has been challenged, with a prominent AI research group recently calling for its use to be banned completely.) 

Examples of D-ID's "smart anonymization" service show varying levels of success at obscuring identity in video. In one demonstration, former British prime minister David Cameron looks a bit like David Cameron with a mustache. In another still image, a woman looks somewhat different, but the two images still seem disconcertingly similar. In a third, Brad Pitt does become unrecognizable. 

D-ID would not name particular customers that use its technology, but Perry said the company mainly works with retailers, car companies, and "large conglomerates that deploy CCTV in Europe." Ann Cavoukian, a D-ID advisory board member and former privacy commissioner for the Canadian province of Ontario, says the solution is "a total win-win." 

Other experts, however, say that the company misinterprets Europe's General Data Protection Rule, doesn't do what it's supposed to, and—even if it does—probably shouldn't be doing it anyway.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Arlington Archosaur Site (AAS) of Texas preserves remnants of an ancient Late Cretaceous river delta that once existed in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Known for discoveries of fossil crocodiles and dinosaurs, a multi-institution research team has described four extinct turtle species, including a new river turtle named after AAS paleontologist Dr. Derek Main and the oldest side-necked turtle in North America. These new turtles include an intriguing combination of native North American forms alongside Asian and Southern Hemisphere immigrants, suggesting extensive intercontinental migration of turtles during this time.

Originally discovered by amateur fossil hunter Art Sahlstein in 2003, the AAS is a prolific fossil locality found in the middle of a suburban subdivision. The AAS preserves remnants of an ancient Late Cretaceous river delta around 96 million years ago in what is today the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It preserves a record of a freshwater wetland that sat near the shore of a large peninsula, including a diverse assemblage of crocodile relatives, dinosaurs, amphibians, mammals, fish, invertebrates, and plants, several of which are also new species awaiting description. "Until this discovery, there were very few turtle fossils from this time period discovered in Appalachia," says Dr. Heather Smith, one of the authors of the paper.

Brent Adrian et al, A new baenid, "Trinitichelys" maini sp. nov., and other fossil turtles from the Upper Cretaceous Arlington Archosaur Site (Woodbine Formation, Cenomanian), Texas, USA, Palaeontologia Electronica (2019). DOI: 10.26879/1001

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Tasting terroir, or a sense of place, isn't only reserved for wine lovers drinking a glass of burgundy or champagne from France.

It's evident, too, in the U.S. craft beer boom and the growing preference for local hops.

Hops, a key ingredient in making beer, is a crop making a comeback on farms across the country thanks to the incredible rise of the craft brewing industry over the past decade.

Craft breweries and their customers' thirst for new, locally grown flavors are playing a big role in fueling an unprecedented geographic expansion of hop production across the U.S., according to researchers at The University of Toledo and Penn State University.

Their findings, which were recently published in the Journal of Wine Economics, suggest that as more craft breweries emerge around the country, so may new opportunities for farmers.

More information: Elizabeth A. Dobis et al. The Role of Craft Breweries in Expanding (Local) Hop Production, Journal of Wine Economics (2019). DOI: 10.1017/jwe.2019.17

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Smart Home Tech, Police, and Your Privacy: Year in Review 2019:

If 2019 confirmed anything, it is that we should not trust the microphones and cameras that large corporations sell us to put inside and near our homes. Thanks to the due diligence of reporters, public records requesters, and privacy researchers and activists, consumers have been learning more and more about how these "smart" home technologies can be hacked, exploited, or utilized by the police and other law enforcement agencies.

Because many technologies that record audio and video store their data on a cloud maintained by the company, police can gain access to stored content by presenting a warrant to those companies—bypassing consumers altogether. For instance, in November, police in Florida obtained a warrant for the recordings from an Amazon Echo that may have overheard a crime. This means that whether people think their Alexa is listening or not, their Alexa could be listening. Because Amazon stores and maintains that data, things said in the device's presence can be made accessible to police via a warrant presented to the company.

Law enforcement's access isn't the only concern associated with smart speakers.  Researchers recently learned you could hack an Alexa or Google Home by shooting a laser at it.

In 2019, however, no piece of household tech has worried privacy advocates more than Amazon's surveillance doorbell, Ring.

Original Submission

barbara hudson writes:

CBC is reporting that Boeing's CEO is gone. While offially he resigned, there's little doubt he had much say in the matter.

Boeing's chief executive officer has been forced out by the board of directors amid continuing problems with the company's troubled Max 737 aircraft.

The Chicago manufacturer said Monday that Dennis Muilenburg is stepping down immediately. Board chairman David Calhoun will take over as CEO on Jan. 13.

There's the usual platitudes about believing in the MAX8 and the company's future under "great new leadership ", but what else could they say?

See also: Boeing fires CEO after disastrous year with 737 MAX

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Boeing Starliner, one of two new spacecraft to take astronauts from US soil to the International Space Station (ISS), has returned to Earth safely after its somewhat shaky first Orbital Flight Test. The capsule blasted off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket without any drama, but soon after a timing glitch prevented the spacecraft from reaching its planned orbit, denying a rendezvous with the ISS. On Sunday, Starliner returned to Earth, deploying parachutes and airbags to land safely in New Mexico.

"You look at the landing, it was an absolute bulls-eye," said Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator, in a press conference Sunday. The capsule landed in the desert just before 5 a.m. PT, its trio of parachutes carrying it safely to the earth. It was the first time a capsule was safely brought back to US soil in history.

However, while the landing was on target, Starliner's journey in space was a different story.

Also at: Starliner makes a safe landing—now NASA faces some big decisions

Previously: Starliner Fails to Make Journey to ISS

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Scientists think they've found a sure signal of extra-terrestrial life. Phosphine is highly toxic and hails from the bowels of penguins, badgers and fish, among other places that you'd never want to visit. In general, most life-forms that need oxygen like we do stay far away from phosphine. But now scientists at MIT say that phosphine can only be produced in one way: by anaerobic organisms such as bacteria that can thrive without oxygen. This means that if astronomers were able to spot phosphine in the atmosphere of another rocky planet, "it would be an unmistakable sign of extraterrestrial life," according to a release from MIT.

"Here on Earth, oxygen is a really impressive sign of life," explained MIT research scientist Clara Sousa-Silva. "But other things besides life make oxygen too. It's important to consider stranger molecules that might not be made as often, but if you do find them on another planet, there's only one explanation."

Phosphine has been spotted in space, in the atmospheres of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, as well as in gas jets coming off the comet 67/P visited by the Rosetta spacecraft. But if it were spotted around a more Earth-like planet, it would be a sign of some sort of action below.

Sousa-Silva led a team that spent several years ruling out all possibilities that phosphine could be created by anything else but anaerobic organisms. Their conclusions were published in a paper in the journal Astrobiology in November. 

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a ruling hailed as an "immense victory for climate justice," the Netherlands' top court ruled Friday in favor of activists who have for years been seeking legal orders to force the Dutch government into cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Activists in a packed chamber of the Supreme Court in The Hague erupted into applause and cheers as Presiding Judge Kees Streefkerk rejected the government's appeal against earlier rulings ordering the government to cut emissions by at least 25% by the end of 2020 from benchmark 1990 levels.

The Supreme Court upheld lower courts' rulings that protection from the potentially devastating effects of climate change was a human right and that the government has a duty to protect its citizens.

Urgenda, the Dutch climate and sustainability organization that filed the original case, hailed the ruling as "a groundbreaking decision that confirms that individual governments must do their fair share to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

"I am extremely happy that the highest court in the Netherlands has confirmed that climate change is a real, severe problem and that government should do what they themselves have declared for more than 10 years is necessary, namely between 25% and 40% reduction of CO2," Urgenda director Marjan Minnesma told The Associated Press outside the court.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Apple could be exploring the idea of launching satellites. 

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg says that Apple has "a secret team working on satellites and related wireless technology, striving to find new ways to beam data such as internet connectivity directly to its devices." The team currently consists of roughly a dozen people, the outlet adds, with the company hoping to deploy "their results within five years." 

Bloomberg cautions that while CEO Tim Cook is interested in the project, it's still early days and could be scrapped as "a clear direction and use for satellites hasn't been finalized."

While the satellites could potentially provide internet, which could then allow Apple to have less reliance on traditional wireless carriers, the report says they could also be used for other purposes such as "more precise location tracking for its devices."

Original Submission