Month: December 2019

Enlarge (credit: TVA.gov)

In the United States, electricity generation accounts for nearly 30% of our carbon emissions. Some states have responded to that by setting aggressive renewable energy standards; others are hoping to see coal propped up even as its economics get worse. Complicating matters further is the fact that many regional grids are integrated, meaning power generated in one location may be exported and used in a different state entirely.

Tracking these electricity exports is critical for understanding how to lower our national carbon emissions. In addition, power from a dirty source like coal has health and environment impacts where it's produced, and the costs of these aren't always paid by the parties using the electricity. Unfortunately, getting reliable figures on how electricity is produced and where it's used is challenging, leaving some of the best estimates with a time resolution of only a month.

Now, three Stanford researchers—Jacques A. de Chalendar, John Taggart, and Sally M. Benson—have greatly improved on that standard, and they have managed to track power generation and use on an hourly basis. The researchers found that, of the 66 grid balancing areas within the United States, only three have carbon emissions equivalent to our national average, and they have found that imports and exports of electricity have both seasonal and daily changes. de Chalendar et al. have found that the net results can be substantial, with imported electricity increasing California's emissions/power by 20%.

Enlarge / Virgil Griffith. (credit: Lulu Lorien / Wikimedia)

The prominent hacker and Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith was arrested by the US government Friday after he spoke at an April conference on blockchain technologies in North Korea. The US government considers his presentation to be a transfer of technology—and therefore a violation of US sanctions.

But Griffith's defenders, including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, describe the arrest as a massive over-reaction. Griffith worked for the Ethereum Foundation, and Buterin called him a friend.

"I don't think what Virgil did gave the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] any kind of real help in doing anything bad," Buterin tweeted on Sunday. "He delivered a presentation based on publicly available info about open source software."

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  The Samsung Galaxy S10. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Samsung is starting the slow and arduous process of updating its flagship smartphone to the latest version of Android: Android 10. This is just the beginning of the Android 10 rollout for Samsung, which, according to tracking from SamMobile, starts with Exynos-powered Galaxy S10s in European and Asian countries, including Germany, South Korea, the UK, India, Poland, and Spain.

Android 10 came out on September 3, and with the first devices landing the update on November 28, Samsung took 86 days to begin to rollout stable builds of Android 10 across its user base. Samsung still has a long way to go to release Android 10 to everyone with a Galaxy S10, though. Devices in Europe, Africa, and most of Asia ship with a Samsung Exynos SoC, while devices in North America, South America, and China ship with a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. So far only the Exynos units have gotten the update.

If Samsung follows last year's update timing, it will need another 40 days before its devices in the US get the update, which requires both a Qualcomm build of Samsung's software along with approval and "validation" meddling from US carriers. Samsung's direct "unlocked" customers get the worst end of the update stick and typically get the update last. In 2018, unlocked customers had to wait 55 days after the first rollout to get the update. For the record, Samsung's roadmap lists "January" as the Android 10 update timeframe for the Galaxy S10, but that does not specify SoC or carrier concerns.

Enlarge / A mass vaccinations campaign is now underway. (credit: Government of Samoa)

The government of Samoa will shut down for two days this week while officials try to curb a deadly measles outbreak that has sickened 3,728 and killed 53—48 of whom were children ages 0 to 4 years old.

The Pacific island nation of around 200,000 first declared an outbreak of measles on October 16. The highly contagious viral infection spread rapidly, and officials declared a state of emergency by mid-November. The outbreak has continued to flare, however. On Sunday, the government reported that there had been 198 new measles cases in the last 24 hours alone.

In response, officials there have closed schools, barred children from public gatherings, and begun an intensive vaccination campaign. Since November, the government has reported vaccinating over 58,000 people.

Enlarge (credit: portal gda / flickr)

A vulnerability in millions of fully patched Android phones is being actively exploited by malware that's designed to drain the bank accounts of infected users, researchers said on Monday.

The vulnerability allows malicious apps to masquerade as legitimate apps that targets have already installed and come to trust, researchers from security firm Promon reported in a post. Running under the guise of trusted apps already installed, the malicious apps can then request permissions to carry out sensitive tasks, such as recording audio or video, taking photos, reading text messages or phishing login credentials. Targets who click yes to the request are then compromised.

Researchers with Lookout, a mobile security provider and a Promon partner, reported last week that they found 36 apps exploiting the spoofing vulnerability. The malicious apps included variants of the BankBot banking trojan. BankBot has been active since 2017, and apps from the malware family have been caught repeatedly infiltrating the Google Play Market.

Archaeologists have rediscovered 143 more enormous drawings called geoglyphs etched on the rocky ground of Peru's Nazca Desert, with one of the finds coming courtesy of a machine-learning algorithm. The new images emphasize how much ancient art lies on the 450 square kilometer (280 square mile) Nazca Desert and how much of it archaeologists still need to find and document. Masato Sakai, an archaeologist from Yamagata University in Japan, and his colleagues say mapping the Nazca Lines could yield clues about their purpose.

No, it’s not an alien

It's almost poetic that the first Nazca geoglyph spotted by AI apparently depicts a human—or at least something that looks humanoid. The five-meter-long figure shows up very faintly in aerial photos; if you don't know it's there, you'd probably miss it. With a little digital image enhancement, though, the geoglyph is a solid figure in a tall headdress holding a stick. Two thousand years after the fact, archaeologists aren't yet sure what the stick is for; it could be a weapon or something used in a ritual. For that matter, the figure could turn out to be a god or a spirit, rather than a person.

IBM's Watson Machine Learning Community Edition learned what Nazca geoglyphs looked like by analyzing aerial photos of the ones archaeologists have already documented. Then Sakai and his colleagues handed the algorithm a massive set of high-resolution aerial photos of the desert floor. It searched for features—shapes, patterns of light and dark contrast, and others—that looked like those of the geoglyphs it had seen before. The algorithm pointed out several shapes that might be geoglyphs, and Sakai and his colleagues chose one—the person in the headdress—to investigate in person.