Potential for Ultrasonic Beacons to Trigger Smartphone Apps
May 4th, 2017Apparently, you have to open some app for the this to happen:
The situation isn’t that worrisome, as users have to open an app with the Shopkick SDK for the beacon to be picked up.
Even so, here’s another one for your already herniating Mobile Phones Are Creepy as Hell file folder.
Via: Bleeping Computer:
A team of researchers from the Brunswick Technical University in Germany has discovered an alarming number of Android applications that employ ultrasonic tracking beacons to track users and their nearby environment.
Their research paper focused on the technology of ultrasound cross-device tracking (uXDT) that became very popular in the last three years.
uXDT is the practice of advertisers hiding ultrasounds in their ads. When the ad plays on a TV or radio, or some ad code runs on a mobile or computer, it emits ultrasounds that are picked up by the microphone of nearby laptops, desktops, tablets or smartphones.
SDKs embedded in apps installed on those devices relay the beacon back to the online advertiser, who then knows that the user of TV “x” is also the owner of smartphone “Y” and links their two previous advertising profiles together, creating a broader picture of the user’s interests, device portfolio, home, and even family members.
Related: More Android Phones Than Ever Are Covertly Listening for Inaudible Sounds in Ads
Tesla Loses $13,000 Per Car Made Ahead Of Model 3 Launch
May 4th, 2017*meh* Amazon lost money for years. Now look at it.
With Tesla, the Model 3 might be a make or break moment, but fear of repeating the Model X debacle was ingrained from the start. They might not blow it again.
That said, having to get that new assembly line up and running from nothing is no joke. Here, have some robots. Those were still in their shipping materials as of a few days ago.
I wouldn’t be surprised if multiple automation engineers read Cryptogon, so maybe they can let us know: Can all of that be set up into a functional automobile assembly line in less than three months, even assuming any number of guys working 24/7?
Via: ZeroHedge:
Finally, no matter how Tesla wants to spin it, the cash burn remains historic, and after the record nearly $1 billion in cash out the door in Q4, the company burned “only” $622 in freeh cash flow in Q1, the second most on record.
Research Credit: Duras
Puerto Rico Files for Biggest Ever U.S. Local Government Bankruptcy
May 4th, 2017Via: Reuters:
Puerto Rico announced a historic restructuring of its public debt on Wednesday, touching off what may be the biggest bankruptcy ever in the $3.8 trillion U.S. municipal bond market.
While it was not immediately clear just how much of Puerto Rico’s $70 billion of debt would be included in the bankruptcy filing, the case is sure to dwarf Detroit’s insolvency in 2013.
The move comes a day after several major creditors sued Puerto Rico over defaults its bonds.
Bankruptcy may not immediately change the day-to-day lives of Puerto Rico’s people, 45 percent of whom live in poverty, but it may lead to future cuts in pensions and worker benefits, and possibly a reduction in health and education services.
The island’s economy has been in recession for nearly 10 years, with an unemployment rate of about 11.0 percent, and the population has fallen by about 10 percent in the past decade.
Even Oil Companies Say Electric Car Boom Is Coming; Oil Demand Peaks in 2020s or 2030s
May 3rd, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
Electric cars are coming fast — and that’s not just the opinion of carmakers anymore. Total SA, one of the world’s biggest oil producers, is now saying EVs may constitute almost a third of new-car sales by the end of the next decade.
The surge in battery powered vehicles will cause demand for oil-based fuels to peak in the 2030s, Total Chief Energy Economist Joel Couse said at Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s conference in New York on Tuesday. EVs will make up 15 percent to 30 percent of new vehicles by 2030, after which fuel “demand will flatten out,” Couse said. “Maybe even decline.”
Couse’s projection for electric cars is the highest yet by a major oil company and exceeds BNEF’s own forecast, said Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
“That’s big,” McKerracher said. “That’s by far the most aggressive we’ve seen by any of the majors.”
Other oil companies have been trimming their long-term forecasts for oil demand. Royal Dutch Shell Plc Chief Executive Officer Ben van Beurden said in March that oil demand may peak in the late 2020s. It set up a business unit to identify the clean technologies where it could be most profitable.
UN Using Ethereum Blockchain and Iris Scanning Technologies to Distribute Funds to Refugees
May 1st, 2017Via: CoinDesk:
Starting today, the United Nations (UN) will begin distributing funds to thousands of people in Jordan as part of a trial using the ethereum blockchain.
For the next month, cryptographically unique coupons representing an undisclosed number of Jordanian dinars will be sent to dozens of shops in five refugee camps across the nation. Then, instead of using a smartphone or a paper wallet to access to the funds, recipients will rely on yet another emerging technology.
Eye-scanning hardware made by London-based IrisGuard, already in place to verify the identity of some of the 500,000 recipients currently receiving traditional aid, is being repurposed to grant access to coupons.
Multiple cashiers at each of the shops will then use technology co-developed by the UN Innovation Accelerator, ethereum development startup Parity Technologies and blockchain big data firm Datarella to redeem the entitlements at the point of checkout.
From the ground up, the solution was designed to scale, not just within Jordan, but beyond its borders to some of the 80 other countries served by the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP).
Research Credit: RB
Facebook Conducted Research to Target Emotionally Vulnerable and Insecure Youth
May 1st, 2017Via: news.com.au:
FACEBOOK has come under fire over revelations it is targeting potentially vulnerable youths who “need a confidence boost” to facilitate predatory advertising practices.
The allegation was revealed this morning by The Australian which obtained internal documents from the social media giant which reportedly show how Facebook can exploit the moods and insecurities of teenagers using the platform for the potential benefit of advertisers.
The confidential document dated this year detailed how by monitoring posts, comments and interactions on the site, Facebook can figure out when people as young as 14 feel “defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “stressed”, “anxious”, “nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless”, and a “failure”.
Such information gathered through a system dubbed sentiment analysis could be used by advertisers to target young Facebook users when they are potentially more vulnerable.
While Google is the king of the online advertising world, Facebook is the other major player which dominates the industry worth about $80 billion last year.
But Facebook is not one to rest on its laurels. The leaked document shows it has been honing the covert tools its uses to gain useful psychological insights on young Australian and New Zealanders in high school and tertiary education.
Trump-Epstein Links
April 30th, 2017Via: Corbett Report:
Nonsupported Windows Operating Systems Running on Pentagon Computers
April 30th, 2017Via: DefenseOne:
Building and electrical systems, HVAC equipment and other critical infrastructure laden with internet-connected sensors often run on operating systems unsupported by vendors. Even as the Pentagon pushes to upgrade its information systems to Windows 10 by this year, its critical infrastructure remains woefully behind.
“About 75 percent of the devices that are control systems are on Windows XP or other nonsupported operating systems,” said Daryl Haegley, program manager for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations and Environment.
Haegley, speaking Thursday at an event hosted by OSIsoft, said the assessment was based on visits to 15 military sites. Microsoft stopped providing support for Windows XP in 2014. Haegley, however, said some of the systems that run DOD facilities are far older.
“A lot of these systems are still Windows 95 or 98, and that’s OK—if they’re not connected to the internet,” Haegley added.
Increasingly, though, sensors in these kinds of systems do connect to the internet, or at least newer components of them do.
Why Deutsche Bundesbank Had to Promise to Leave 1200 Tons of Gold in New York
April 30th, 2017Via: Norbert Häring:
With big fanfare, Deutsche Bundesbank announced on February 9 that ahead of plan they had repatriated 300 tons of gold from New York. This put a positive spin on a rather disturbing fact –1236 tons of gold that is supposed to be part of Germany’s currency reserve will continue to be kept outside of German control in New York – indefinitely.
The German gold in question is being kept in storage at the New York Fed, an institution that is owned and controlled by Wall-Street-banks, in a country, whose current president considers it an imposition that the law and so-called judges tell him what he is allowed to do and not allowed to do.
I am not criticizing the Bundesbank for storing 37 percent of Germany’s official gold in in a place there it has no control over it. It seems clear that they negotiated hard with the US and acted rather shrewdly. Their negotiation position was much enhanced in 2012 by the leakage of a report of the German Court of Auditors, which was very critical of the conditions under which German gold was being held in New York. This created public and political pressure on the Bundesbank to renegotiate and to get that gold out of New York. At the same time, the US-side could hardly afford to snub this demand, because there was lots of speculation, even in the US, that something was amiss with the gold reserves of the US and the rest of the world that were stored in the country. The way in which the official gold of the US, and the gold held in custody for other countries, is guarded against public scrutiny and shielded from its owners, gives fodder to any number of conspiracy theories. Had the New York Fed refused to let a foreign central bank, which was under such obvious pressure, retrieve some of their gold, these conspiracy theories around official gold might very well have become intense enough to damage trust in the dollar.
Musk: Level 5 Autonomy About Two Years Away
April 29th, 2017Via: Electrek:
The best timeline he mentioned was based on a coast-to-coast demo drive from California to New York without the driver touching the wheel.
During his TED talk yesterday, Musk reiterated that this demo drive is still planned for 2017:
“November or December of this year, we should be able to go from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York, no controls touched at any point during the entire journey.”
But Musk also said that while the driver wouldn’t have to touch the controls, he doesn’t think that it would be at a level where someone could just fall asleep at the wheel. When asked when he thinks that will be, he said about 2 years away.
