Author Archives: Robin Edgar

About Robin Edgar

Organisational Structures | Technology and Science | Military, IT and Lifestyle consultancy | Social, Broadcast & Cross Media | Flying aircraft

40k Tesla cars recalled over patch that broke power steering

Posted on by

Tesla has initiated a voluntary recall of more than 40,000 Model S and Model X vehicles thanks to a bad firmware update that could cause the cars to lose power steering “due to forces from external road dynamics,” also known as bumps.

According to a recall report [PDF] filed with the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Tesla believes around 1 percent of the 40,168 affected vehicles have the bug, which it said only affects Model S and Model X vehicles manufactured between August 2017 and December 2020 (which includes model year 21).

Those vehicles, when updated to firmware release 2022.36, got new calibration data for their electronic power assist steering (EPAS) system. The offending software rolled out on October 11 and was intended to update the EPAS system “to better detect unexpected steering assist torque,” instead of doing the exact opposite.

Per Tesla’s own investigations as reported to the NHTSA, the software caused at least 314 vehicles to misclassify bumps and potholes as unexpected torque on the EPAS system, leading to “reduced or lost power steering assist,” Tesla said in its NHTSA report.

As anyone who has driven without power steering knows, its absence doesn’t make a vehicle undrivable, but it does make it much more difficult, which Tesla said is the big risk from leaving the firmware unpatched. “Reduced or lost power steering assist does not affect steering control, but could require greater steering effort from the driver, particularly at low speeds,” Tesla said.

[…]

In February the company was forced to recall 578,607 Model S, X and Y vehicles due to potential misuse of the vehicle’s “Boombox” feature that allows Tesla owners to play custom sounds on the outside of the car. The NHTSA forced Tesla to issue a software update that disabled the feature.

Another recall this past September saw Tesla recalling more than one million vehicles because, despite the fact that it’s been a common safety feature for decades, the windows on affected vehicles weren’t properly calibrated to stop and reverse when a limb was inserted.

Tesla even had issues with its $1,900 made-for-kids Cyberquad mini, which was recalled last month due to safety concerns and a lack of compliance with Consumer Product Safety Commission guidelines.

[…]

Source: 40k Tesla cars recalled over patch that broke power steering • The Register

Dutch foundation launches mass privacy claim against Twitter – DutchNews.nl

Posted on by
A Dutch foundation is planning to take legal action against social media platform Twitter for illegally collecting and trading in personal details gathered via free apps such as Duolingo and Wordfeud as well as dating apps and weather forecaster Buienradar. Twitter owned advertising platform MoPub between 2013 and January 2022 and that is where the problem lies, the SDBN foundation says. It estimates 11 million people’s information may have been illegally gathered and sold. Between 2013 and 2021, MoPub had access to information gleaned via 30,000 free apps on smartphones and tablets, the foundation says. In essence, the foundation says, consumers ‘paid with their privacy’ without giving permission.

The foundation is demanding compensation on behalf of the apps’ users and if Twitter refuses to pay, the foundation will start a legal case against the company.

Source: Dutch foundation launches mass privacy claim against Twitter – DutchNews.nl

Also Shazam was busy with this – that’s an Apple company. It’s pretty disturbing that this kind of news isn’t a surprise at all any more.

But who is SDBN to collect for Dutch people? I don’t recall them starting up a class action for people to subscribe to and I doubt they will be dividing the money out to the Dutch people either.

LG’s Stretchable bendable scrunchable Screen Promises a Future of Shatter-Proof Tech

Posted on by

LG is working to bring the flexibility of OLEDs to smaller devices, and today revealed the world’s first 12-inch panel that’s both flexible and stretchable, like a giant piece of rubber band, improving its ability to survive wear and tear.

A person demonstrating the stretchability of LG's new 12-inch high-res OLED panel.
Image: LG

The 12-inch panel can display full-color RGB images (LG doesn’t specify exactly how many colors it’s capable of reproducing) and a resolution of 100PPI. That’s a bit behind the resolution of screens like the 12.9-inch panel in the iPad Pro, which hits 264PPI, but drop that iPad onto a sidewalk and you’ll probably wish you had LG’s latest and greatest inside it.

Outside of the rigid frame of a tablet or a desktop display, this 12-inch panel can be stretched a full two inches to 14 inches diagonally, and then snap back to its original size without requiring a warranty claim. Its underlying structure uses S-shaped micro wire structures that act like springs to accommodate the stretching, and while the technology isn’t quite at the point where you can crumble up a tablet and stuff it in your pocket like a handkerchief—it’s tethered by a ribbon cable to electronics that provide power and drive the image on-screen—LG believes it’s one step-closer to expanding the potential use cases for OLED displays.

Source: LG’s Stretchable Screen Promises a Future of Shatter-Proof Tech

Greece To Ban Sale of Spyware After Government Is Accused of Surveillance of opposition party leader

Posted on by

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has announced that Greece would ban the sale of spyware, after his government was accused in a news report of targeting dozens of prominent politicians, journalists and businessmen for surveillance, and the judicial authorities began an investigation. From a report: The announcement is the latest chapter in a scandal that erupted over the summer, when Mr. Mitsotakis conceded that Greece’s state intelligence service had been monitoring an opposition party leader with a traditional wiretap last year. That revelation came after the politician discovered that he had also been targeted with a spyware program known as Predator.

The Greek government said the wiretap was legal but never specified the reasons for it, and Mr. Mitsotakis said it was done without his knowledge. The government has also asserted that it does not own or use the Predator spyware, and has insisted that the simultaneous targeting with a wiretap and Predator was a coincidence.

Source: Greece To Ban Sale of Spyware After Government Is Accused of Surveillance – Slashdot

Former Apple employee admits to defrauding the company out of $17 million

Posted on by

A former Apple employee has pled guilty to defrauding the company out of over $17 million. Dhirendra Prasad, who spent most of his decade at Apple working as a buyer in the Global Service Supply Chain department, admitted to “taking kickbacks, inflating invoices, stealing parts and causing Apple to pay for items and services never received,” according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. Prasad started these schemes in 2011 and continued them until 2018.

In one scam, Prasad shipped motherboards from Apple’s inventory to CTrends, a company run by a co-conspirator, Don M. Baker (who previously admitted to taking part in the fraudulent schemes). Baker harvested components from the motherboards, then Prasad organized purchase orders for those parts. After Baker shipped the components back to Apple, CTrends filed invoices for which Prasad arranged payment. In the end, the pair got Apple to pay for its own components and they split the proceeds of the scam.

In addition to fleecing Apple, Prasad confessed to engaging in tax fraud. He directed payments from Robert Gary Hansen (another co-conspirator who has admitted to taking part in the schemes) straight to his creditors. In addition, Prasad arranged for a shell company to send sham invoices to CTrends with the aim of covering up illicit payments Baker made to him. This enabled Baker “to claim hundreds of thousands of dollars of unjustified tax deductions,” the US Attorney’s Office said. All told, prosecutors claim that the scams resulted in the IRS losing over $1.8 million.

Prasad will be sentenced in March. He pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. Prasad also pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, which has a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment. Moreover, Prasad agreed to forfeit around $5 million worth of assets he accrued as a result of his criminal actions, including real estate properties.

Source: Former Apple employee admits to defrauding the company out of $17 million | Engadget

Environmentally friendly ‘biofoam’ could address plastic pollution crisis

Posted on by

[…]

Dr. Jiang, an assistant professor in the UBC faculty of forestry and the Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Functional Biomaterials, started developing a “biofoam” many years ago both to find new uses for and reduce pollution from packaging foam.

“Styrofoam waste fills up to 30 percent of global landfills and can take more than 500 years to break down. Our biofoam breaks down in the soil in a couple of weeks, requires little heat and few chemicals to make, and can be used as substitute for packaging foams, packing peanuts and even thermal insulation boards,” says Dr. Jiang.

[…]

“Our Nation was trying to create a new economy out of what was left of our forest after the wildfires and the damage caused by the mountain pine beetle epidemic in the 1990s and early 2000s. The amount of timber available for harvest in the next 20 to 60 years was significantly reduced. I have often asked why, when trees are harvested, up to 50 percent of the tree is left behind to just burn. As a Nation, we were also concerned about the losses in habitat, , decline in moose and salmon populations and the acceleration in climate change,”

[…]

“A unique feature of this project is that the intellectual property is shared between UBC and First Nations,”

[…]

 

Source: Environmentally friendly ‘biofoam’ could address plastic pollution crisis

BYU profs create new micro nuclear reactor to produce nuclear energy more safely

Posted on by

[…] in Memmott’s new reactor, during and after the nuclear reaction occurs, all the radioactive byproducts are dissolved into molten salt. Nuclear elements can emit heat or radioactivity for hundreds of thousands of years while they slowly cool, which is why nuclear waste is so dangerous (and why in the past, finding a place to dispose of it has been so difficult). However, salt has an extremely high melting temperature — 550°C — and it doesn’t take long for the temperature of these elements in the salt to fall beneath the melting point. Once the salt crystalizes, the radiated heat will be absorbed into the salt (which doesn’t remelt), negating the danger of a nuclear meltdown at a power plant.

Another benefit of the molten salt nuclear reactor design is that it has the potential to eliminate dangerous nuclear waste. The products of the reaction are safely contained within the salt, with no need to store them elsewhere. What’s more, many of these products are valuable, and can be removed from the salt and sold.

[…]

“As we pulled out valuable elements, we found we could also remove oxygen and hydrogen,” Memmott said. “Through this process, we can make the salt fully clean again and reuse it. We can recycle the salt indefinitely.”

[…]

Memmott’s molten salt nuclear reactor is 4 ft x 7ft, and because there is no risk of a meltdown there is no need for a similar large zone surrounding it. This small reactor can produce enough energy to power 1000 American homes. The research team said everything needed to run this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck bed; meaning this reactor can make power accessible to even very remote places.

[…]

[…]

Source: BYU profs create new micro nuclear reactor to produce nuclear energy more safely – BYU News

Billionaires Are Funding Climate Destruction

Posted on by

The world’s wealthiest people are responsible for about a million times more emissions than the world’s lowest earners when you take into account their investments, a new report has found. The report, issued Sunday by Oxfam, finds that the world’s 125 wealthiest people—including American billionaires Bill Gates, Jim Walton, Warren Buffett, and Elon Musk—have a combined carbon footprint roughly equivalent to that of the entire country of France.

There’s lots of academic work out there calculating how the personal carbon footprints of the ultra-wealthy differ from the average Joe, and the habits of the world’s superrich certainly jack up their personal emissions. But where billionaires put all that excess money may actually be more important than their private jets or expensive car collections. Past research has shown that financial investments from the world’s top 1% are largely responsible for the size of their overall emissions, rather than their personal lifestyles—between 50% and 70% of their emissions, the Oxfam report estimates. This new report takes into consideration the investments the world’s super rich make and how those investments can enable dirty industries and create even more emissions.

“Emissions from billionaire lifestyles – due to their frequent use of private jets and yachts – are thousands of times the average person, which is already completely unacceptable,” Nafkote Dabi, Climate Change Lead at Oxfam, said in a statement. “But if we look at emissions from their investments, then their carbon emissions are over a million times higher.”

To calculate powerful billionaires’ emissions, researchers at Oxfam first pulled together a list of the world’s wealthiest 220 people, then identified corporations that these people held investments in of at least a 10% equity stake. (Holding a 10% equity stake in a company, as defined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, makes a person a principal shareholder in that company and much more influential than a normal shareholder in the company’s overall decisions and direction.) Using data from financial services firm Exerica, Oxfam then also calculated the Scope 1 and 2 emissions—direct emissions from operations and indirect emissions from energy, heating, and cooling—of those corporations, and used each billionaire’s investment with these overall emissions to figure out how much they were responsible for.

There were some gaps in the analysis, thanks to a lack of transparency from some of the world’s wealthiest on their investments as well as a similar lack of transparency from corporations on their emissions. However, with the numbers they were able to work with, the Oxfam researchers were still able to figure out that each billionaire out of a final list of 125 was responsible for funding around 3.3 million tons (3 million tonnes) of CO2 emissions in average each year, thanks to their oversize investments in 183 global corporations. The average person in the UK has a pension that finances around 25.4 tons (23 tonnes) of CO2 emissions each year; the world’s poorest 10% of people, meanwhile, produce on average just 3 tons (2.76 tonnes) of CO2 each year.

There are some obvious flaws with this assessment. For one thing, the lack of transparency around emissions as well as missing public information on billionaire equity stakes in certain companies means that the numbers contained here are certainly low, and there’s some notable billionaires missing. (Jeff Bezos, for instance, is not on the final list; we have to wonder what the numbers on his emissions look like.) And someone who is in favor of green capitalism swooping in to save the planet could argue that someone like Gates or Musk’s carbon-intensive investments deserve context, given that their money has gone toward technological solutions to climate change. But the report does emphasize how runaway capitalism and the influence of a powerful and wealthy few can keep the world careening toward disaster, even as the rest of us are increasingly affected—and how relying on the rich and powerful to kick climate action into gear is a losing game.

Source: Billionaires Are Funding Climate Destruction

AstraZeneca puts username and password on Github, exposes patient data in test environment for a year

Posted on by

Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has blamed “user error” for leaving a list of credentials online for more than a year that exposed access to sensitive patient data.

Mossab Hussein, chief security officer at cybersecurity startup SpiderSilk, told TechCrunch that a developer left the credentials for an AstraZeneca internal server on code sharing site GitHub in 2021. The credentials allowed access to a test Salesforce cloud environment, often used by businesses to manage their customers, but the test environment contained some patient data, Hussein said.

[…]

Due to an [sic] user error, some data records were temporarily available on a developer platform. We stopped access to this data immediately after we have been [sic] informed. We are investigating the root cause as well as assessing our regulatory obligations.”

Barth declined to say for what reason patient data was stored on a test environment, and if AstraZeneca has the technical means, such as logs, to determine if anyone accessed the data and what, if any, data was exfiltrated.

[…]

Source: AstraZeneca password lapse exposed patient data | TechCrunch

Wi-Peep drone locates all your wifi devices and maps them in your home, can tell if your watch is moving around

Posted on by

We present Wi-Peep – a new location-revealing privacy attack on non-cooperative Wi-Fi devices. Wi-Peep exploits loopholes in the 802.11 protocol to elicit responses from Wi-Fi devices on a network that we do not have access to. It then uses a novel time-of-flight measurement scheme to locate these devices. Wi-Peep works without any hardware or software modifications on target devices and without requiring access to the physical space that they are deployed in. Therefore, a pedestrian or a drone that carries a Wi-Peep device can estimate the location of every Wi-Fi device in a building. Our Wi-Peep design costs $20 and weighs less than 10 g. We deploy it on a lightweight drone and show that a drone flying over a house can estimate the location of Wi-Fi devices across multiple floors to meter-level accuracy. Finally, we investigate different mitigation techniques to secure future Wi-Fi devices against such attacks.

Source: Non-cooperative wi-fi localization & its privacy implications | Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing And Networking

British govt is scanning all Internet devices hosted in UK

Posted on by

The United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the government agency that leads the country’s cyber security mission, is now scanning all Internet-exposed devices hosted in the UK for vulnerabilities.

The goal is to assess UK’s vulnerability to cyber-attacks and to help the owners of Internet-connected systems understand their security posture.

“These activities cover any internet-accessible system that is hosted within the UK and vulnerabilities that are common or particularly important due to their high impact,” the agency said.

“The NCSC uses the data we have collected to create an overview of the UK’s exposure to vulnerabilities following their disclosure, and track their remediation over time.”

NCSC’s scans are performed using tools hosted in a dedicated cloud-hosted environment from scanner.scanning.service.ncsc.gov.uk and two IP addresses (18.171.7.246 and 35.177.10.231).

The agency says that all vulnerability probes are tested within its own environment to detect any issues before scanning the UK Internet.

“We’re not trying to find vulnerabilities in the UK for some other, nefarious purpose,” NCSC technical director Ian Levy explained.

“We’re beginning with simple scans, and will slowly increase the complexity of the scans, explaining what we’re doing (and why we’re doing it).”

How to opt out of vulnerability probes

Data collected from these scans includes any data sent back when connecting to services and web servers, such as the full HTTP responses (including headers).

Requests are designed to harvest the minimum amount of info required to check if the scanned asset is affected by a vulnerability.

If any sensitive or personal data is inadvertently collected, the NCSC says it will “take steps to remove the data and prevent it from being captured again in the future.”

British organizations can also opt out of having their servers scanned by the government by emailing a list of IP addresses they want to be excluded at scanning@ncsc.gov.uk.

In January, the cybersecurity agency also started releasing NMAP Scripting Engine scripts to help defenders scan for and remediate vulnerable systems on their networks.

The NCSC plans to release new Nmap scripts only for critical security vulnerabilities it believes to be at the top of threat actors’ targeting lists.

Source: British govt is scanning all Internet devices hosted in UK

Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot Sued Over ‘Software Piracy on an Unprecedented Scale’

Posted on by

“Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot is being sued in a class action lawsuit that claims the AI product is committing software piracy on an unprecedented scale,” reports IT Pro.

Programmer/designer Matthew Butterick filed the case Thursday in San Francisco, saying it was on behalf of millions of GitHub users potentially affected by the $10-a-month Copilot service: The lawsuit seeks to challenge the legality of GitHub Copilot, as well as OpenAI Codex which powers the AI tool, and has been filed against GitHub, its owner Microsoft, and OpenAI…. “By training their AI systems on public GitHub repositories (though based on their public statements, possibly much more), we contend that the defendants have violated the legal rights of a vast number of creators who posted code or other work under certain open-source licences on GitHub,” said Butterick.

These licences include a set of 11 popular open source licences that all require attribution of the author’s name and copyright. This includes the MIT licence, the GNU General Public Licence, and the Apache licence. The case claimed that Copilot violates and removes these licences offered by thousands, possibly millions, of software developers, and is therefore committing software piracy on an unprecedented scale.

Copilot, which is entirely run on Microsoft Azure, often simply reproduces code that can be traced back to open-source repositories or licensees, according to the lawsuit. The code never contains attributions to the underlying authors, which is in violation of the licences. “It is not fair, permitted, or justified. On the contrary, Copilot’s goal is to replace a huge swath of open source by taking it and keeping it inside a GitHub-controlled paywall….” Moreover, the case stated that the defendants have also violated GitHub’s own terms of service and privacy policies, the DMCA code 1202 which forbids the removal of copyright-management information, and the California Consumer Privacy Act.
The lawsuit also accuses GitHub of monetizing code from open source programmers, “despite GitHub’s pledge never to do so.”

And Butterick argued to IT Pro that “AI systems are not exempt from the law… If companies like Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI choose to disregard the law, they should not expect that we the public will sit still.” Butterick believes AI can only elevate humanity if it’s “fair and ethical for everyone. If it’s not… it will just become another way for the privileged few to profit from the work of the many.”

Reached for comment, GitHub pointed IT Pro to their announcement Monday that next year, suggested code fragments will come with the ability to identify when it matches other publicly-available code — or code that it’s similar to.

The article adds that this lawsuit “comes at a time when Microsoft is looking at developing Copilot technology for use in similar programmes for other job categories, like office work, cyber security, or video game design, according to a Bloomberg report.”

Source: Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot Sued Over ‘Software Piracy on an Unprecedented Scale’ – Slashdot

Qualcomm v Arm: The bizarro quotient just went off the scale

Posted on by

[…]

Qualcomm and Arm have been engaged in one of those very entertainingly bitter court fist-fights that the industry throws up when friends fall out over money. Briefly, Qualcomm builds its mobile device chips around Arm, for which it pays Arm a lot of money. Qualcomm bought another Arm-licensed company, Nuvia, and inherited Nuvia’s own Arm deals and derived IP. Arm said ‘Nu-uh, can’t do that.’ And into court they tumbled.

This sort of thing is normally lawyers locking horns over profit. Sometimes, though, it feels more like a fight to the death – and in this case, Qualcomm is making the case that a lot more than the details of per-chip licensing costs are involved. It says that Arm is about to make huge changes to its business model, imposing savage new restrictions on how its IP is used and making all its money from device makers, not chip companies. Which would cut Qualcomm off at the knees, if true.

[…]

The move to license device makers instead of chip makers would be massively complicated for everyone, and would give Arm much more power by not having to negotiate with a few very large concerns but a much more diverse market with many smaller clients. Doubtless the market regulators would be very interested in that, but it’s not quite world-beating suicidal madness.

World-beating suicidal madness comes with the other idea – that Arm would refuse to license a design that didn’t use purely Arm intellectual property. You want a GPU design to go with the CPU? Arm. An AI accelerator? Arm or nothing.

The chip industry has always had a fondness for these sorts of shenanigans, but has known better than to write them down. You want a particular CPU? Terribly sorry, but there’s a really long lead time on that part – unless you also buy the rest of our support chips… then we can do business. It’s unethical, usually illegal, and even the biggest names look the other way when their sales teams do it.

[…]

Source: Qualcomm v Arm: The bizarro quotient just went off the scale • The Register

[…] Qualcomm’s amended response to Arm’s lawsuit against the US chip giant. Arm is right now trying to stop Qualcomm from developing custom Arm-compatible processors using CPU core designs Qualcomm obtained via its acquisition of Nuvia. According to Arm, Qualcomm should have got, and failed to get, Arm’s permission to absorb Nuvia’s technologies, which were derived from Arm-licensed IP.

Qualcomm counterclaimed that Arm tried to demand at least “tens of millions” of dollars in transfer fees and extra royalties for using the newly acquired Nuvia designs.

[…]

Qualcomm states in its filing [PDF] that Arm has signaled it “will no longer license CPU technology to semiconductor companies” once existing agreements expire.

This would be an incredible transformation for Softbank-owned Arm: how exactly would Arm-based chips get into devices if no more Arm technology licenses are issued to chip designers … unless, perhaps, Arm starts making its own chips, which it’s previously said it has no appetite for, or it gets certain chip designers to make pure Arm-designed processors for it, and the makers of the end products using these components get charged a royalty per device.

In response to Qualcomm’s filing, Arm’s veep of external communication Phil Hughes didn’t directly address the allegations about licensing changes, but said the filing is “riddled with inaccuracies, and we will address many of these in our formal legal response that is due in the coming weeks.”

[…]

Thus, Qualcomm is claiming a whole range of manufacturers – from those in the embedded electronics space to personal computing – using Arm-compatible chips may need to directly pay Arm a royalty for every device sold. And if they don’t, they’ll need to shop elsewhere for a system-on-chip architecture, which could be unfortunate for them because Arm has few rivals. In fields like smartphones, few alternatives exist. Ironically, Qualcomm acquired Nuvia to make itself a better alternative to Intel and AMD in laptops.

[…]

The language in Qualcomm’s filing is specific and nuanced. It talks of threats by Arm, and Arm indicating it intends to do certain things. At first read, Qualcomm’s filing appears to state outright that Arm will change its business model; on second read, it appears more that Qualcomm is claiming Arm is threatening it will overhaul its licensing approach – to the detriment of Qualcomm – so as to scare Qualcomm into agreeing to Arm’s terms regarding the Nuvia acquisition and its licensed technologies.

Qualcomm previously complained Arm is trying to steer it onto higher royalty rates, by making it renegotiate its licensing agreements following the acquisition of Nuvia and its Arm-derived technologies.

Meanwhile, no matter how unfair Qualcomm believes Arm has acted, Qualcomm still has to answer Arm’s initial complaint: that Qualcomm transferred Nuvia’s Arm license and Arm-derived technology to itself after the acquisition, whereas the fine print of Nuvia’s agreement with Arm is that any such transfer must be negotiated with Arm, and that Qualcomm allegedly failed to do so and is in breach of contract.

Qualcomm says this assertion is simply wrong.

Whatever happens, this case has the potential to shine a light into some dark corners of the semiconductor industry – and this filing suggests whatever we find down there will be fascinating

Source: Qualcomm: Arm threatens to end CPU licensing, charge device makers instead

Fast Fashion Waste Is Choking Developing Countries With Mountains of Trash

Posted on by

Less than 1% of used clothing gets recycled into new garments, overwhelming countries like Ghana with discards. From a report: It’s a disaster decades in the making, as clothing has become cheaper, plentiful and ever more disposable. Each year the fashion industry produces more than 100 billion apparel items, roughly 14 for every person on Earth and more than double the amount in 2000. Every day, tens of millions of garments are tossed out to make way for new, many into so-called recycling bins. Few are aware that old clothes are rarely recycled into new ones because the technology and infrastructure don’t exist to do that at scale.

Instead, discarded garments enter a global secondhand supply chain that works to prolong their life, if only a little, by repurposing them as cleaning rags, stuffing for mattresses or insulation. But the rise of fast fashion — and shoppers’ preference for quantity over quality — has led to a glut of low-value clothing that threatens to tank the economics of that trade and inordinately burdens developing countries. Meanwhile, the myth of circularity spreads, shielding companies and consumers from the inconvenient reality that the only way out of the global textile waste crisis is to buy less, buy better and wear longer. In other words, to end fast fashion.

[…] Globally, less than 1% of used clothing is actually remade into new garments, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a UK nonprofit. (In contrast, 9% of plastic and about half of paper gets recycled.) The retailers have vowed that what they collect will never go to landfill or waste. But the reality is far messier. Garments dropped at in-store take-back programs enter the multibillion-dollar global secondhand supply chain, joining a torrent of discards from charity bins, thrift stores and online resale platforms like ThredUp and Sellpy. The complex task of sorting through that waste stream falls to a largely invisible global industry of brokers and processors. Their business depends on exporting much of the clothing to developing countries for rewear. It’s the most profitable option and, in theory, the most environmentally responsible, because reusing items consumes less resources than recycling them.

Source: Fast Fashion Waste Is Choking Developing Countries With Mountains of Trash – Slashdot

For the First Time Ever, People Are Getting Transfusions of Lab-Grown Blood Cells

Posted on by

[…]An important clinical trial is now underway in the UK. The study is the first to transfuse red blood cells grown in the lab from donated stem cells into humans. Should this research pay off, these blood cells would be incredibly valuable for people with rare blood types, though they wouldn’t replace the need for traditional blood donation.

The RESTORE trial, as it’s known, is being conducted by scientists from the UK’s National Health Services and various universities. At least 10 healthy volunteers are expected to be enrolled in the study. All of them will receive two mini-transfusions, spaced four months apart and in random order, of the lab-grown blood cells and standard cells, both of which are derived from the same donor. As of early Monday, two participants have already gotten the lab-grown blood cells and so far appear to have experienced no side-effects.

The first-of-its-kind experiment is a Phase I trial, meaning that it’s primarily designed to test the safety of a novel or experimental treatment. But the lab-grown cells are theoretically fresher than the mix of newer and older blood cells taken from a typical blood donation (on average, red blood cells live for about 120 days). So the researchers are hoping that the lab-grown cells survive longer than the standard cells in their recipients.

“If our trial, the first such in the world, is successful, it will mean that patients who currently require regular long-term blood transfusions will need fewer transfusions in [the] future, helping transform their care,” said chief researcher Cedric Ghevaert, a hematologist and a professor in transfusion medicine at the University of Cambridge, in a statement released by the NHS.

[…]

Should this project turn out to be a success, lab grown blood cells still won’t replace the donated supply anytime soon. The team’s process is much less efficient than what the human body can do. Currently, for instance, they need about 24 liters of their nutrient solution to filter out one to two tablespoons of red blood cells. Meanwhile, about 45% of our blood is composed of red blood cells.

Even if mass-produced lab-grown blood cells are a far off possibility, they may still be able to help many people in the near future. This technology could one day provide a more reliable and longer-lasting supply of blood cells to people who have a rare mix of blood types or who have developed conditions that make it difficult to receive standard transfusions, such as sickle cell disease.

[…]

Source: For the First Time Ever, People Are Getting Transfusions of Lab-Grown Blood Cells

Scientists zap clouds with electricity to make them rain

Posted on by

A new experiment has shown that zapping clouds with electrical charge can alter droplet sizes in fog or, potentially, help a constipated cloud to rain.

Last year Giles Harrison, from the University of Reading, and colleagues from the University of Bath, spent many early mornings chasing fogs in the Somerset Levels, flying uncrewed aircraft into the gloop and releasing charge. Their findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, showed that when either positive or negative charge was emitted, the fog formed more water droplets.

“Electric charge can slow evaporation, or even – and this is always amazing to me – cause drops to explode because the electric force on them exceeds the surface tension holding them together,” said Harrison.

The findings could be put to good use in dry regions of the world, such as the Middle East and north Africa, as a means of encouraging clouds to release their rain. Cloud droplets are larger than fog droplets and so more likely to collide, and Harrison and his colleagues believe that adding electrical charge to a cloud could help droplets to stick together and become more weighty.

Source: Scientists zap clouds with electricity to make them rain | Environment | The Guardian

The world’s first offshore floating wind-solar pilot just came online in China

Posted on by

China’s government-owned utility State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC) has launched the world’s first commercial offshore floating solar that’s paired with an offshore wind turbine.

 

SPIC is one of five major electrical utility companies in China, and the world’s largest photovoltaic power generation enterprise. The pilot is located off the coast of Haiyang, a city in Shandong, eastern China.

The project uses Norway-based Ocean Sun‘s patented floating solar power technology.

The two solar floaters (see the photo above) have an installed capacity of 0.5 megawatts peak. They’re connected to a transformer on a SPIC-owned wind turbine and then a subsea cable runs from the wind turbine to the power grid.

If the pilot is successful, the plan is to build a 20 MW floating wind-solar farm in 2023 using Ocean Sun’s technology.

Ocean Sun signed an agreement to license its proprietary floating solar technology for the project in July. This project is fully funded by SPIC, and Ocean Sun’s first “truly offshore installation.”

In July, Børge Bjørneklett, CEO and founder of Ocean Sun, said [translation edited for clarity]:

Shandong Province is projecting 42GW of floating solar installations in the next few years, and Ocean Sun will now be a contender for some of this volume. These waters see challenging annual typhoons, and all involved parties are aware of the risks. Ocean Sun will improve our product with learnings from this exposed site.

A wind-solar hybrid system potentially offers the advantage of improving power output reliability. Solar peaks during the day, and whereas offshore wind turbines typically generate most of their power in the afternoon and evening.

Source: The world’s first offshore floating wind-solar pilot just came online in China

Multi-factor authentication bombing fatigue can blow open security

Posted on by

The September cyberattack on ride-hailing service Uber began when a criminal bought the stolen credentials of a company contractor on the dark web.

The miscreant then repeatedly tried to log into the contractor’s Uber account, triggering the two-factor login approval request that the contractor initially denied, blocking access. However, eventually the contractor accepted one of many push notifications, enabling the attacker to log into the account and get access to Uber’s corporate network, systems, and data.

[…]

Microsoft and Cisco Systems were also victims of MFA fatigue – also known as MFA spamming or MFA bombing – this year, and such attacks are rising rapidly. According to Microsoft, between December 2021 and August, the number of multi-factor MFA attacks spiked. There were 22,859 Azure Active Directory Protection sessions with multiple failed MFA attempts last December. In August, there were 40,942.

[…]

In an MFA fatigue situation, the attacker uses the stolen credentials to try to sign into an protected account over and over, overwhelming the user with push notifications. The user may initially tap on the prompt saying it isn’t them trying to sign in, but eventually they wear down from the spamming and accept it just to stop their phone going off. They may assume it’s a temporary glitch or an automated system causing the surge in requests.

[…]

sometimes the attacker will pose as part of the organization’s IT staff, messaging the employee to accept the access attempt.

[…]

Ensuring authentication apps can’t be fat-fingered and requests wrongly accepted before they can be fully evaluated, for instance, would be handy. Adding intelligent handling of logins, so that there’s a cooling off period after a bout of MFA spam, is, again, useful, too.

And on top of this, some forms of MFA, such as one-time authentication tokens, can be phished along with usernames and passwords to allow a miscreant to login as their victim. Finding and implementing a phish-resistant MFA approach is something worth thinking about.

[…]

Some companies are on the ball. Microsoft, for instance, is making number matching a default feature in its Authenticator app. This requires a user who responds to an MFA push notification using the tool to type in a number that appears on their device’s screen to approve a login. The number will only be sent to users who have been enabled for number matching, according to Microsoft.

They’re also adding other features to Authenticator, including showing users what application they’re signing into and the location of the device, based on its IP address, that is being used for signing in. If the user is in California but the device is in Europe, that should raise a big red flag. That also ought to be automatically caught by authentication systems, too.

[…]

As to limiting the number of unsuccessful MFA authentication requests: Okta limits that number to five; Microsoft and Duo offer organizations the ability to implement it in their settings and adjust the number of failed attempts before the user’s account is automatically locked. With Microsoft Authenticator, enterprises also can set the number of minutes before an account lockout counter is reset.

[…]

Source: Multi-factor authentication fatigue can blow open security • The Register

Finally: Countries Start To Rebel Against Corporate Sovereignty, But Ten Years Too Late

Posted on by

Back in 2013, Techdirt wrote about “the monster lurking inside free trade agreements”. Formally, the monster is known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), but here on Techdirt we call it “corporate sovereignty“, because that is what it is: a system of secret courts that effectively places companies above a government, by allowing them to sue a nation if the latter takes actions or brings in laws that might adversely affect their profits.

In 2015, we warned that corporate sovereignty would threaten EU plans to protect the environment in the TAFTA/TTIP trade deal between the US and the EU. TAFTA/TTIP never happened, but fossil fuel companies were able to to use other treaties to demand over $18 billion as “compensation” for the potential loss of future profits as the result of increasing government action to tackle climate change.

Chief among those treaties with corporate sovereignty provisions was the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), which is designed to protect investments in the energy sector. Research by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) shows that the fossil fuel industry accounts for almost 20% of known ISDS cases, making it the most litigious group. Recently there has been a wave of corporate sovereignty cases brought by fossil fuel companies, with most settled in their favor. The average amount awarded was over $600 million, almost five times the amount given in non-fossil fuel cases.

It has become clear that corporate sovereignty represents a serious threat to countries’ plans to tackle the climate crisis. The obvious solution is simply to withdraw from the ECT, but there’s a problem. Article 47 of the treaty states:

The provisions of this Treaty shall continue to apply to Investments made in the Area of a Contracting Party by Investors of other Contracting Parties or in the Area of other Contracting Parties by Investors of that Contracting Party as of the date when that Contracting Party’s withdrawal from the Treaty takes effect for a period of 20 years from such date.

This “sunset clause” means any of the 53 signatories to the ECT can be sued in the secret ISDS courts for 20 years after withdrawing from the treaty. As a result of this, the EU in particular has been pushing for the ECT to be “modernized”, and recently announced an “agreement in principle” to achieve that. However, it still contains a corporate sovereignty tribunal system:

The modernised ECT will allow the Contracting Parties to exclude new fossil fuel related investments from investment protection and to phase out protection for the already existing investments. This phasing out of protection for fossil fuel investments will take place within a shorter timeframe than in the case of a withdrawal from the ECT, for both existing and new investments: existing fossil fuel investments will be phased out after 10 years under modernised rules (instead of 20 years under current rules) and new investment in fossil fuels will be excluded after 9 months.

Countries that later withdraw from the modernized ECT can be sued for 10 years, rather than the current 20 years. Several EU countries have decided that is not good enough, and have announced their intention to withdraw from the treaty immediately, as Politico reports:

Spain, the Netherlands and Poland have all declared their intention to exit the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT). Italy left in 2015. Germany, France and Belgium are examining their options, officials from those countries said.

France has confirmed that it will be pulling out, as has Belgium.  For those countries that leave before the “modernized” ECT comes into force, companies can potentially use the sunset clause to sue them during the full 20 years afterwards. The only solution that addresses the serious threat of corporate sovereignty is to remove the sunset clause completely from the ECT. According to one analysis from the IISD, that’s possible if a group of ECT’s contracting parties agree to the move amongst themselves (“inter se”) as part of a joint withdrawal:

There is a legal basis for a withdrawal from the ECT with an inter se neutralization of the survival clause. In contrast to the continued protection of existing and certain future fossil fuel investments under the EU’s amendment proposal, such a withdrawal would put an immediate end to treaty-based fossil fuel protection and ISDS among all withdrawing states. In the short term, this would significantly reduce ISDS risks, given that 60% of the cases based on the ECT are intra-EU. It would also enable the EU and its member states to comply with the EU’s climate objectives and EU law. If further contracting states were to join, the ISDS risk to strong climate action would be further reduced and could pave the way for a fresh, unencumbered negotiation of a truly modern energy treaty that would support the expedited phase-out from fossil fuels and the transition to renewable energy.

It’s an imperfect solution, but better than the half-hearted “modernized” ECT proposed by the EU. The current mess shows that the issue should have been addressed ten years ago, when the problems of the “lurking monster” of corporate sovereignty first became apparent.

Source: Finally: Countries Start To Rebel Against Corporate Sovereignty, But Ten Years Too Late | Techdirt

Science Has a Nasty Photoshopping Problem

Posted on by

Dr. Bik is a microbiologist who has worked at Stanford University and for the Dutch National Institute for Health who is “blessed” with “what I’m told is a better-than-average ability to spot repeating patterns,” according to their new Op-Ed in the New York Times.

In 2014 they’d spotted the same photo “being used in two different papers to represent results from three entirely different experiments….” Although this was eight years ago, I distinctly recall how angry it made me. This was cheating, pure and simple. By editing an image to produce a desired result, a scientist can manufacture proof for a favored hypothesis, or create a signal out of noise. Scientists must rely on and build on one another’s work. Cheating is a transgression against everything that science should be. If scientific papers contain errors or — much worse — fraudulent data and fabricated imagery, other researchers are likely to waste time and grant money chasing theories based on made-up results…..

But were those duplicated images just an isolated case? With little clue about how big this would get, I began searching for suspicious figures in biomedical journals…. By day I went to my job in a lab at Stanford University, but I was soon spending every evening and most weekends looking for suspicious images. In 2016, I published an analysis of 20,621 peer-reviewed papers, discovering problematic images in no fewer than one in 25. Half of these appeared to have been manipulated deliberately — rotated, flipped, stretched or otherwise photoshopped. With a sense of unease about how much bad science might be in journals, I quit my full-time job in 2019 so that I could devote myself to finding and reporting more cases of scientific fraud.

Using my pattern-matching eyes and lots of caffeine, I have analyzed more than 100,000 papers since 2014 and found apparent image duplication in 4,800 and similar evidence of error, cheating or other ethical problems in an additional 1,700. I’ve reported 2,500 of these to their journals’ editors and — after learning the hard way that journals often do not respond to these cases — posted many of those papers along with 3,500 more to PubPeer, a website where scientific literature is discussed in public….

Unfortunately, many scientific journals and academic institutions are slow to respond to evidence of image manipulation — if they take action at all. So far, my work has resulted in 956 corrections and 923 retractions, but a majority of the papers I have reported to the journals remain unaddressed.
Manipulated images “raise questions about an entire line of research, which means potentially millions of dollars of wasted grant money and years of false hope for patients.” Part of the problem is that despite “peer review” at scientific journals, “peer review is unpaid and undervalued, and the system is based on a trusting, non-adversarial relationship. Peer review is not set up to detect fraud.”

But there’s other problems. Most of my fellow detectives remain anonymous, operating under pseudonyms such as Smut Clyde or Cheshire. Criticizing other scientists’ work is often not well received, and concerns about negative career consequences can prevent scientists from speaking out. Image problems I have reported under my full name have resulted in hateful messages, angry videos on social media sites and two lawsuit threats….

Things could be about to get even worse. Artificial intelligence might help detect duplicated data in research, but it can also be used to generate fake data. It is easy nowadays to produce fabricated photos or videos of events that never happened, and A.I.-generated images might have already started to poison the scientific literature. As A.I. technology develops, it will become significantly harder to distinguish fake from real.

Science needs to get serious about research fraud.
Among their proposed solutions? “Journals should pay the data detectives who find fatal errors or misconduct in published papers, similar to how tech companies pay bounties to computer security experts who find bugs in software.”

Source: ‘Science Has a Nasty Photoshopping Problem’ – Slashdot

Behavior of star clusters challenge Newton’s laws of gravity, point at MOND theory

Posted on by

Certain star clusters do not seem to be following current understandings of Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity, according to new research published on Wednesday.

The study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, analyzed open star clusters which are formed when thousands of stars are born in a short time period in a huge gas cloud.

As the stars are born, they blow away the remnants of the gas cloud, causing the cluster to expand and create a loose formation of dozens to thousands of stars held together by weak gravitational forces.

As the clusters dissolve, the stars accumulate on two “tidal tails:” one pulled behind the cluster and the other pushed forward.

“According to Newton’s laws of gravity, it’s a matter of chance in which of the tails a lost star ends up,” explains Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. “So both tails should contain about the same number of stars. However, in our work we were able to prove for the first time that this is not true: In the clusters we studied, the front tail always contains significantly more stars nearby to the cluster than the rear tail.”

Dr. Tereza Jerabkova, a co-author of the paper, explained that it is very difficult to determine which stars belong to which tail.

“To do this, you have to look at the velocity, direction of motion and age of each of these objects,” said Jerabkova, who managed to develop a method to accurately count the stars for the first time using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission.

The perks of a modified theory

When the researchers looked at the data, they found that it did not fit Newton’s law of gravity and instead fit better with an alternate theory called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND).

“Put simply, according to MOND, stars can leave a cluster through two different doors,” explained Prof. Dr. Pavel Kroupa of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics. “One leads to the rear tidal tail, the other to the front. However, the first is much narrower than the second – so it’s less likely that a star will leave the cluster through it. Newton’s theory of gravity, on the other hand, predicts that both doors should be the same width.”

The researchers simulated the stellar distribution expected according to the MOND theory and found that it lined up well with what they observed in the data from the Gaia mission.

Dr. Ingo Thies, who played a key role in the simulations, explained that the researchers needed to rely on relatively simple computational methods in the study since currently there are no mathematical tools for more detailed analyses of the MOND theory.

The simulations also coincided with the Gaia data in terms of how long the star clusters typically survive, which is much shorter than would be expected according to Newton’s laws.

“This explains a mystery that has been known for a long time,” said Kroupa. “Namely, star clusters in nearby galaxies seem to be disappearing faster than they should.”

The MOND theory is controversial as modifications to Newton’s laws of gravity would have far-reaching consequences for other areas of physics as well, although they would solve many problems facing cosmology.

[…]

Source: Behavior of star clusters challenge Newton’s laws of gravity – The Jerusalem Post

Paper: Asymmetrical tidal tails of open star clusters: stars crossing their cluster’s práh† challenge Newtonian gravitation

Whoops! Amazon Left Prime Video DB with viewing habits (Named ‘Sauron’) Unprotected – yup Elasticsearch

Posted on by

Amazon didn’t protect one of its internal servers, allowing anyone to view a database named “Sauron” which was full of Prime Video viewing habits.

As TechCrunch reports(Opens in a new window), the unprotected Elasticsearch database was discovered by security researcher Anurag Sen(Opens in a new window). Contained within the database, which anyone who knew the IP address could access using a web browser, were roughly 215 million records of Prime Video viewing habit information. The data included show/movie name, streaming device used, network quality, subscription details, and Prime customer status.

[…]

Source: Whoops! Amazon Left a Prime Video Database Named ‘Sauron’ Unprotected | PCMag

Suspected Kremlin hack on Liz Truss’s mobile sparks security clampdown

Posted on by

Spy chiefs have ordered ministers to stop using their personal phones to conduct government business following a suspected Kremlin hack on Liz Truss’s mobile.

A Whitehall source said all ministers involved in national security would be expected to attend fresh training with the security services this week ‘to ensure everyone is aware how this material should be handled’.

Ministers will be warned they should never use their personal mobile phones to conduct Government business as they are likely to be the target of hostile states such as Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.

Pauline Neville-Jones, former chairman of Britain’s joint intelligence committee, yesterday said she was ‘not at all tolerant of the notion that it’s OK for ministers to use private mobile phones’.

The warnings follow astonishing revelations in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday that Miss Truss’s personal mobile was spied on by hackers thought to be working for Moscow while she was foreign secretary.

Spy chiefs have ordered ministers to stop using their personal phones to conduct government business following a suspected Kremlin hack on Liz Truss¿s mobile

Spy chiefs have ordered ministers to stop using their personal phones to conduct government business following a suspected Kremlin hack on Liz Truss’s mobile

The hack was discovered during the Tory leadership contest in the summer, but a news blackout was ordered by Boris Johnson and Cabinet Secretary Simon Case. Even MPs and officials with top level security clearance were kept in the dark.

Miss Truss is said to have been so worried about the potential damage to her leadership bid that she ‘had trouble sleeping’ until the news was suppressed.

Messages dating back up to a year are thought to have been downloaded, including highly sensitive discussions with fellow foreign ministers about issues such as arms shipments to Ukraine.

Hacked messages are said to have included private criticisms of Mr Johnson by Miss Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, potentially opening them up to blackmail attempts at a time when they were both senior ministers in his government.

Parliamentary sources yesterday said the shocking incident was now likely to be investigated by the Intelligence and Security Committee, which oversees the work of the security services.

[…]

Source: Suspected Kremlin hack on Liz Truss’s mobile sparks security clampdown  | Daily Mail Online

Pebble smartwatches gain Pixel 7 support in ‘one last update’ – they’re only 10 years old, hardware still works fine, but being dumped

Posted on by

It’s been nearly a decade since the Pebble smartwatch started shipping to backers of its wildly successful initial Kickstarter campaign, but there’s still life in the ol’ dog yet. The wearables are now compatible with Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro, as well as 64-bit-only Android devices that will arrive later.

As noted by Ars Technica, Katharine Berry, who works on Wear OS and is a prominent member of the Rebble group that’s keeping the Pebble ecosystem alive, wrote that the latest Pebble update comes four years after the previous one. The last update allowed for many of the Pebble app’s functions to run on independent servers. Fitbit, which Google has since bought, shut down Pebble’s servers in 2018, two years after buying some of the smartwatch maker’s assets.

Along with Pixel 7 compatibility, the latest update also improves Caller ID reliability on recent versions of Android. While the app isn’t available on the Google Play Store, the APK is signed with official Pebble keys and retains Google Fit integration, Berry noted.

[…]

Source: Decade-old Pebble smartwatches gain Pixel 7 support in ‘one last update’ | Engadget

It’s amazing how amazed the writer of this article is that there are still updates for 10 year old hardware. Shouldn’t it be the norm that hardware is supported for as long as it works – and that should be in the 30/40 year range instead of the 2/3 year range?

Light-analyzing ‘lab on a chip’ opens door to widespread use of portable spectrometers

Posted on by

The study, published today in Science, was led by Finland’s Aalto University and resulted in a powerful, ultra-tiny that fits on a microchip and is operated using artificial intelligence.

The research involved a comparatively new class of super-thin materials known as two-dimensional semiconductors, and the upshot is a proof of concept for a spectrometer that could be readily incorporated into a variety of technologies—including quality inspection platforms, security sensors, biomedical analyzers and space telescopes.

[…]

Traditional spectrometers require bulky optical and mechanical components, whereas the new device could fit on the end of a human hair, Minot said. The new research suggests those components can be replaced with novel semiconductor materials and AI, allowing spectrometers to be dramatically scaled down in size from the current smallest ones, which are about the size of a grape.

[…]

The device is 100% electrically controllable regarding the colors of light it absorbs, which gives it massive potential for scalability and widespread usability

[…]

In medicine, for example, spectrometers are already being tested for their ability to identify subtle changes in human tissue such as the difference between tumors and healthy tissue.

For , Minot added, spectrometers can detect exactly what kind of pollution is in the air, water or ground, and how much of it is there.

[…]

“If you’re into astronomy, you might be interested in measuring the spectrum of light that you collect with your telescope and having that information identify a star or planet,” he said. “If geology is your hobby, you could identify gemstones by measuring the spectrum of light they absorb.”

[…]

More information: Hoon Hahn Yoon et al, Miniaturized spectrometers with a tunable van der Waals junction, Science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.add8544. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add8544

Source: Light-analyzing ‘lab on a chip’ opens door to widespread use of portable spectrometers