Month: August 2019

Enlarge / Ring video doorbell. (credit: Ring)

Amazon's Ring business has been drawing headlines for its partnerships with police departments nationwide. These arrangements are mutually beneficial: law enforcement gets access to a sprawling, growing surveillance network it doesn't have to maintain, and Ring gets a marketing boost to sell its products. Reporters and security researchers have been trying for months to figure out exactly how many of these partnerships Ring has, but the company has been mum on the matter⁠—until today.

The company in a blog post today said it has 405 agreements with police and sheriffs departments around the country, and it shared a map showing where all of them are. Ring also promises to update the map as new agencies sign on.

The blog post also hints at some of the controversy Ring has been courting with these partnerships lately, promising the company has "been thoughtful about designing how law enforcement engages with the Neighbors app to ensure users always stay in control of the information they share and that their privacy is protected."

Enlarge / Craig Wright, right, arrives at federal court in West Palm Beach, Florida, on June 28, 2019. (credit: Saul Martinez/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Australian Internet personality Craig Wright claims he is bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto. A lot of people don't believe him. But one person who does believe him is Ira Kleiman, the brother of deceased technologist Dave Kleiman. According to possibly forged emails published by Gizmodo in 2015, Wright and Kleiman worked together to develop and launch bitcoin in 2008 and 2009.

Those documents suggested that Wright and Kleiman collaborated to mine hundreds of thousands of bitcoins in 2009 and 2010. That would make Ira Kleiman the heir to a multibillion-dollar fortune. So last year, Kleiman sued Wright, seeking his share of the Nakamoto bitcoins.

Kleiman and Wright have been battling in a Florida courtroom ever since. In a Tuesday ruling, federal Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart savaged Wright for repeatedly misleading the court and generally wasting everyone's time.

Enlarge / Commercial oil tanker AbQaiq in 2003. (credit: US Navy)

Hackers working for the US government wiped out a database and computer systems that Iran’s paramilitary arm used to plan attacks against oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

The attack occurred on June 20, the same day that President Trump called off a retaliatory airstrike after Iran shot down a US drone. Iran is still trying to recover information destroyed in the attack and to restart Iranian computer systems and military communications networks that were taken offline, Wednesday’s report said.

The attack was part of a sustained and undeclared cyberconflict between the US and Iran. Both sides, the NYT said, calibrate their operations to ensure they don’t reach the threshold considered to be war. The US operations, which are carried out by the US Cyber Command, are designed to influence Iran’s actions without creating a broader conflict or prompting retaliation, a former senior intelligence official told the paper. Iran hasn’t escalated its attacks since the June 20 attack and has instead continued its cyber operations against the US government and corporations at its previous, steady rate.

The RV16X-NANO. (credit: MIT)

Our ability to continuously shrink the features of our silicon-based processors appears to be a thing of the past, which has materials scientists considering ways to move beyond silicon. The top candidate is the carbon nanotube, which naturally comes in semiconducting forms, has fantastic electrical properties, and is extremely small. Unfortunately, it has proven extremely hard to grow the nanotubes where they're needed and just as difficult to manipulate them to place them in the right location. There has been some progress in working around these challenges, but the results have typically been shown in rather limited demonstrations.

Now, researchers have used carbon nanotubes to make a general purpose, RISC-V-compliant processor that handles 32-bit instructions and does 16-bit memory addressing. Performance is nothing to write home about, but the processor successfully executed a variation of the traditional programming demo, "Hello world!" It's an impressive bit of work, but not all of the researchers' solutions are likely to lead to high-performance processors.

We can work around that

There are many problems with carbon nanotubes. To begin with, while nanotubes naturally come in a semiconducting form, they're produced as a mixture of that process and the use of metallic nanotubes. While it's possible to purify the semiconducting versions, purity levels tend to plateau in the neighborhood of 99.9% purity. That's great for many situations, but when a processor will have millions of nanotubes, it's obviously not going to cut it. Nanotubes don't naturally form p- or n-type semiconductors (partial to conveying positive or negative charges, respectively). In silicon, these properties are driven by the addition of small amounts of an additional element, a process called doping. But nanotubes are so small that they're extremely difficult to dope.

Enlarge / Screen capture of the Jetflicks website in 2016. (credit: Internet Archive)

A federal grand jury yesterday indicted eight people who allegedly ran two pirate streaming services that "offered more television programs and movies than legitimate streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime Video," the Department of Justice said.

Jetflicks, which operated from 2007 to 2017, obtained its video from torrent sites and Usenet sites "using automated programs and databases such as SickRage, Sick Beard, SABnzbd, and TheTVDB," the indictment said. Jetflicks made "those episodes available on servers in the United States and Canada to Jetflicks subscribers for streaming and/or downloading," the indictment said. Torrent sites that Jetflicks operators relied on allegedly included the Pirate Bay, RARBG, and Torrentz.

With this method, defendants often "provid[ed] episodes to subscribers the day after the shows originally aired on television," a DOJ announcement yesterday said. Jetflicks charged subscription fees as low as $9.99 per month, letting subscribers "watch an unlimited number of commercial-free television programs," the indictment said. The service claimed to have more than 37,000 subscribers.

Enlarge (credit: Smith Collection/Gado | Getty)

The core businesses of Uber and Lyft, despite everything else layered on top, spring from a fairly simple premise. Their apps connect people who have cars and are willing to drive them to people who need or want rides, and the companies facilitate payment in exchange for keeping a percentage of the fare. But the cut the companies take is increasing—and it's more than the companies tell drivers they take, according to a new report.

Jalopnik asked ride-hailing drivers to share fare receipts, and it received data from more than 14,756 real-world trips in response. On average, Jalopnik, found, Uber kept about 35% of the revenue from each ride, and Lyft kept about 38%.

In regulatory filings, however, Uber has reported that its global take rate—the percentage of the rate it takes, as you might guess—is closer to 20%. Lyft has not disclosed its take rate publicly, but Jalopnik pointed to prior reporting from Business Insider showing Lyft's rate to be closer to 26%.

(credit: Paramount/CBS)

There’s a “reasonable chance” that the US will soon lose its status as a country that has eliminated measles. That’s according to Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The World Health Organization considers a disease eliminated from a country or region if it has gone at least 12 months without continuous spread of said disease. (This is different from disease eradication, which is when a disease is completely stamped out globally. Humans have only managed to eradicate two diseases: smallpox and rinderpest, which infects cattle and other ruminants.)

The US triumphantly declared measles eliminated in 2000—after spending decades tenaciously working to promote widespread vaccination. (The CDC had originally hoped to have it eliminated by 1982.) And in 2016, the WHO declared measles eliminated from the Americas altogether. WHO’s Regional Office for the Americas (PAHO) celebrated the news with announcements titled, in part, “Bye, bye measles!”

Enlarge / The Lotus Evija electric hypercar will feature cameras instead of side mirrors. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

When Audi unveiled its electric e-tron SUV in San Francisco last year, much of the talk was about the car's side-view cameras. The feature, which replaced the traditional passive side-view mirrors, is an option in Europe and elsewhere, but here in the US, such a system is banned. But now the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is considering how to bring federal motor vehicle regulations into the 21st century to allow for side-view cameras, according to Reuters:

The planned test by the agency known as NHTSA would examine "driving behavior and lane change maneuver execution" in cars with traditional mirrors and camera-based visibility systems, the department said in a notice offering the public a chance to comment.

It's not the first time that automotive innovation has run headlong into the brick wall we call the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. Back in 2014, Audi was told it couldn't import cars that used the company's clever new laser headlight technology, and even today, US implementations of matrix LED headlights are significantly less effective than systems fitted to the same models of car in Europe, where the regulations are much less proscriptive.

Car designers have played with the idea of replacing side mirrors with a camera system for decades, but it's taken until now for camera and display technology to catch up to the idea. The appeal for an electric vehicle is obvious—side-view mirrors add frontal area, drag, and contribute plenty to wind noise while driving, so an EV with no side mirrors will cover more miles per kWh and be even quieter to ride in. In addition to the Audi e-tron and its side cameras, Lexus offers a similar system on its ES sedan, although, again, not in the US. Honda is developing a camera side-view system for the Honda E, a production version of the Urban EV concept from 2017, and Lotus has done away with traditional reflecting glass mirrors for its Evija hypercar.