Researchers Mount Successful GPS Spoofing Attack Against Road Navigation Systems
July 17th, 2018Via: Bleeping Computer:
Academics say they’ve mounted a successful GPS spoofing attack against road navigation systems that can trick humans into driving to incorrect locations.
The research is of note because previous GPS spoofing attacks have been unable to trick humans, who, in past experiments, often received malicious driving instructions that didn’t make sense or were not in sync with the road infrastructure —for example taking a left on a straight highway.
New research successfully fools humans
But a research team formed from academics from Virginia Tech and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, along with experts from Microsoft Research, have come with an improved method of carrying out GPS spoofing attacks that take into account the road layout.
To perform the attack researchers developed an algorithm that works in near real-time, along with a portable GPS-spoofing device that costs about $223, which can be easily attached to a car or put on a vehicle tailing the target’s car at distances of up to 50 meters.
14,400-Year-Old Flatbread Remains That Predate Agriculture
July 17th, 2018Via: Atlas Obscura:
BREAD-MAKING AROUND THE WORLD HAS evolved from a similar, ancient approach of combining flour, water, and sometimes yeast. But for prehistoric societies with limited tools, making bread wasn’t so simple. Given how laborious it was to make bread thousands of years ago, it’s long been associated with settled Neolithic societies—and only after the advent of agriculture.
That’s no longer the case. Today, a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, the University College London, and the University of Cambridge released a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences detailing their discovery of 14,400-year-old crumbs from a flatbread. The archaeological site, known as Shubayqa 1, is located in the Black Desert of northeastern Jordan and was home to Natufian hunter-gatherers. The flatbread remains are not only the oldest instance of bread found to date, but also preeminent examples of how bread-making existed even before agriculture developed some 4,000 years later.
“Nobody had found any direct evidence for production of bread, so the fact that bread predates agriculture is kind of stunning,” says Tobias Richter, a University of Copenhagen archaeologist who co-authored the paper. “Because making bread is quite labor-intensive, and you don’t necessarily get a huge return for it. So it doesn’t seem like an economical thing to do.” That’s because breadmaking doesn’t just involve baking: Back then, it would have also involved kneading, grinding cereals into fine grains, and dehusking plants.
Digital Ads Are Starting to Feel Psychic
July 17th, 2018Via: The Outline:
Earlier this year, my friend Max gave me a knife from Japan as a gift. That evening, as I was lying in bed looking at Instagram, I scrolled passed an ad of what looked like exactly the same knife. I did a double take, got out of bed, retrieved the knife from the kitchen and compared it to the one my screen—it was a perfect match, a Masomoto KS. I hadn’t Googled the knife, taken a picture of it, or event sent a text about it. The only interaction I had about the knife was face to face with Max when he gave it to me. This felt like more than a coincidence — it felt like I was being listened to.
Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, two Brooklyn-based artists whose work explores the intersections of technology and society, have been hearing a lot of stories like mine. In June, they launched a website called New Organs, which collects first-hand accounts of these seemingly paranoiac moments. The website is comprised of a submission form that asks you to choose from a selection of experiences, like “my phone is eavesdropping on me” to “I see ads for things I dream about.” You’re then invited to write a few sentences outlining your experience and why you think it happened to you.
The Twitch Streamers Who Spend Years Broadcasting to No One
July 16th, 2018Via: The Verge:
When John Hopstead first descended into the virtual world of Dark Souls in 2013, his mission was to save a decaying world. Famed for its brutal and exacting gameplay, Dark Souls is a popular game to live stream: if you’re going to die hundreds of times, you might as well perish with some digital company to lighten the mood. What Hopstead didn’t know then was that this would be the start of an even more difficult journey to make connections with other people. Hopstead has been streaming to largely nobody for the last five years, and he’s not alone in this pursuit.
…
Perhaps the biggest motivator for people who stream for extended periods of time without a viewer is the possibility of meeting like-minded people.“The reason I started streaming was that I was kind of looking for human connections,” said Richárd Szélesy, a streamer who has spent the last few years mostly broadcasting hardcore games to zero viewers. Szélesy says he grew up feeling isolated, largely spending time in front of the glow of a computer. “[I streamed to] escape loneliness and depression,” he said. While he has mostly been streaming without an audience, every so often an errant person will drop by and stick around. Even if this person never comes back — and they often don’t — the small spark is enough to keep Szélesy going.
1981: ‘Notes On NSA ESP Concerns/Guidelines’
July 15th, 2018URL of source at CIA:
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/nsa-rdp96x00790r000100030037-5
Local copy on Cryptogon (avoids a visit to CIA, in case you care).
Via: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Electronic Reading Room:
The number of NSA persons with operating ESP capabilities should be isolated by type and quality.
Trump: “I Think the European Union Is a Foe”
July 15th, 2018
Via: CBS:
Coming off a contentious NATO summit and a trip to the U.K. in which he seemed to undercut the government of America’s closest ally, President Trump took aim at another Western institution just days before his high-stakes meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In an interview with “CBS Evening News” anchor Jeff Glor in Scotland on Saturday, President Trump named the European Union — comprising some of America’s oldest allies — when asked to identify his “biggest foe globally right now.”
“Well, I think we have a lot of foes. I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now, you wouldn’t think of the European Union, but they’re a foe. Russia is foe in certain respects. China is a foe economically, certainly they are a foe. But that doesn’t mean they are bad. It doesn’t mean anything. It means that they are competitive,” Mr. Trump said at his golf club in Turnberry, Scotland.
“I respect the leaders of those countries. But, in a trade sense, they’ve really taken advantage of us and many of those countries are in NATO and they weren’t paying their bills,” he added.
All Ears: Always-On Listening Devices Could Soon Be Everywhere
July 13th, 2018Via: Wall Street Journal:
If every tree falling in every forest might soon be heard by an internet-connected microphone, what hope is there for our privacy?
Already when you’re sitting in a room with an iPhone, an Apple Watch and a smart assistant like Amazon Echo or Google Home, you’re surrounded by a dozen microphones. (Newer iPhones have four and the Echo has seven, while the smartwatch has just one, for now.)
Add in the latest smart wireless headphones—Apple’s expected next-generation AirPods or competing ones from Bose or Shure—along with talking microwave ovens and TVs from Samsung, LG and others, and anyone at home or in an open-plan office could soon be within earshot of hundreds of microphones. Most of them will be listening for a wake word like “Alexa,” “Hey Siri,” or “OK Google,” just as our phones and smart assistants do now.
Walmart Patents Surveillance Tool That Can Eavesdrop on Workers and Customers
July 12th, 2018Via: Engadget:
The audio surveillance system Walmart designed is composed of several sensors that can collect all kinds of audio data, including beeps and the rustling of paper bags. Any data it gathers can be used to assess an employee’s performance — for instance, the sounds items make when they’re placed inside a bag can tell the company how efficient someone is at bagging purchases. Customers’ voices can also indicate how long a line is and how quickly a cashier can get through all of them.
As BuzzFeed News points, though, the most invasive feature is the system’s ability to understand conversations and use them to judge an employee’s performance: “If however the performance metric is based on the content of the conversation (e.g., was a specific greeting used or script followed), the system can process the audio detected by the sound sensors 102 (e.g., using speech recognition) to determine the performance metric.” It could get chattier cashiers in trouble even if they’re customer favorites for being helpful and friendly.
Trash Piles Up in U.S. as China Closes Door to Recycling
July 12th, 2018Via: AFP:
Globally, since 1992, 72 percent of plastic waste has ended up in China and Hong Kong, according to a study in the journal Science Advances.
But since January, China has closed its borders to most paper and plastic waste in line with a new environmental policy pushed by Beijing, which no longer wants to be the world’s trash can, or even its recycle bin.
For other waste products such as cardboard and metal, China has set a contamination level of 0.5 percent — a threshold too low for most current US technology to handle.
US waste handlers say they expect China will close its doors to all recycled materials by 2020 — an impossibly short deadline.
“There is no single and frankly, probably not even a group of countries, that can take in the volume that China used to take,” warns Adina Renee Adler of the Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.
AI Startups and the ‘Wizard of Oz Technique’
July 11th, 2018Via: Guardian:
It’s hard to build a service powered by artificial intelligence. So hard, in fact, that some startups have worked out it’s cheaper and easier to get humans to behave like robots than it is to get machines to behave like humans.
“Using a human to do the job lets you skip over a load of technical and business development challenges. It doesn’t scale, obviously, but it allows you to build something and skip the hard part early on,” said Gregory Koberger, CEO of ReadMe, who says he has come across a lot of “pseudo-AIs”.
“It’s essentially prototyping the AI with human beings,” he said.
This practice was brought to the fore this week in a Wall Street Journal article highlighting the hundreds of third-party app developers that Google allows to access people’s inboxes.
In the case of the San Jose-based company Edison Software, artificial intelligence engineers went through the personal email messages of hundreds of users – with their identities redacted – to improve a “smart replies” feature. The company did not mention that humans would view users’ emails in its privacy policy.
The third parties highlighted in the WSJ article are far from the first ones to do it. In 2008, Spinvox, a company that converted voicemails into text messages, was accused of using humans in overseas call centres rather than machines to do its work.
In 2016, Bloomberg highlighted the plight of the humans spending 12 hours a day pretending to be chatbots for calendar scheduling services such as X.ai and Clara. The job was so mind-numbing that human employees said they were looking forward to being replaced by bots.
