Terry Rudolph, a professor of quantum physics at Imperial College London, suggests that interstellar light could actually be harnessed by space faring aliens to form an encrypted quantum internet. Motherboard reports: This may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but Rudolph says it was actually a natural extension of what he does as co-founder of PsiQuantum, a Silicon Valley-based company on a mission to build a scalable photonic quantum computer. He laid out his idea in a paper recently published on the arXiv preprint server. Rudolph said the idea for the paper on aliens communicating with quantum starlight flowed from his work on quantum computers. Unlike the quantum computers being pursued by the likes of Google or Intel that use superconducting circuits or trapped ions at incredibly cold temperatures to create qubits (the quantum equivalent of a computer bit), photonic computers use light to accomplish the same thing. While Rudolph says this kind of quantum design is unconventional, it does also have advantages over its rival -- including being able to operate at room temperature and easy integration into existing fiber optic infrastructure.

The primary way the aliens would create this kind of quantum internet is through a quantum mechanics principle called entanglement, explains Rudolph. In a nutshell, entanglement is a phenomena in which the quantum states of particles (like photons) are linked together. This is what Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance" and means that disturbing one particle will automatically affect its partner, even if they're miles apart. This entanglement would allow aliens -- or even humans -- to send encrypted signals between entangled partners, or nodes. Now, scale that single computer system up to a network potentially spanning the entire cosmos.

Aliens aside, Rudolph says that his paper demonstrates that building a photon-based quantum internet here on Earth might be "much easier than we expected." As for the aliens, even if they were using this kind of technology to transform waves of light into their own personal chat rooms, we'd have no way of knowing, says Rudolph. And even if we could pick out these light patterns in the sky, we still wouldn't be able to listen in. This is due to the incredibly shy nature of quantum particles -- any attempt to observe them by an outside party would alter their state and destroy the information they were carrying.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have linked together, or "entangled," the mechanical motion and electronic properties of a tiny blue crystal, giving it a quantum edge in measuring electric fields with record sensitivity that may enhance understanding of the universe. The quantum sensor consists of 150 beryllium ions (electrically charged atoms) confined in a magnetic field, so they self-arrange into a flat 2D crystal just 200 millionths of a meter in diameter. Quantum sensors such as this have the potential to detect signals from dark matter -- a mysterious substance that might turn out to be, among other theories, subatomic particles that interact with normal matter through a weak electromagnetic field. The presence of dark matter could cause the crystal to wiggle in telltale ways, revealed by collective changes among the crystal's ions in one of their electronic properties, known as spin.

As described in the Aug. 6 issue of Science, researchers can measure the vibrational excitation of the crystal -- the flat plane moving up and down like the head of a drum -- by monitoring changes in the collective spin. Measuring the spin indicates the extent of the vibrational excitation, referred to as displacement. This sensor can measure external electric fields that have the same vibration frequency as the crystal with more than 10 times the sensitivity of any previously demonstrated atomic sensor. (Technically, the sensor can measure 240 nanovolts per meter in one second.) In the experiments, researchers apply a weak electric field to excite and test the crystal sensor. A dark matter search would look for such a signal.

Presto Vivace shares a report from The Intercept: The Senate's $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill proposes a national test program that would allow the government to collect drivers' data in order to charge them per-mile travel fees. The new revenue would help finance the Highway Trust Fund, which currently depends mostly on fuel taxes to support roads and mass transit across the country. Under the proposal, the government would collect information about the miles that drivers travel from smartphone apps, another on-board device, automakers, insurance companies, gas stations, or other means. For now, the initiative would only be a test effort -- the government would solicit volunteers who drive commercial and passenger vehicles -- but the idea still raises concerns about the government tracking people's private data.

The bill would establish an advisory board to guide the program that would include officials representing state transportation departments and the trucking industry as well as data security and consumer privacy experts. As the four-year pilot initiative goes on, the Transportation and Treasury departments would also have to keep Congress informed of how they maintain volunteers' privacy and how the per-mile fee idea could affect low-income drivers. Still, [Sean Vitka, policy counsel at Demand Progress] said the concept could put Americans' private data at risk. "We already know the government is unable to keep data like this secure, which is another reason why the government maintaining a giant database of travel information about people in the United States is a bad idea." "If you think this is a bad idea, NOW would be a good time to let your Senators and representative know," says Slashdot reader Presto Vivace.

Scammers are abusing Instagram's protections against suicide, self-harm, and impersonation to purposefully target and ban Instagram accounts at will, with some people even advertising professionalized ban-as-a-service offerings so anyone can harass or censor others, according to screenshots, interviews, and other material reviewed by Motherboard. From the report: It appears that in some cases, the same scammers who offer ban-as-a-service also offer or are at least connected to services to restore accounts for users who were unfairly banned from Instagram, sometimes for thousands of dollars. "Me (and my friend's) currently have the best ban service on-site/in the world," one advertisement for a ban service on the underground forum OG Users reads. "We have been professionally banning since 2020 and have top-tier experience. We may not have the cheapest prices, but trust me you are getting what you are paying for."

War, the pseudonymous user offering the ban service, told Motherboard in a Telegram message that banning "is pretty much a full time job lol." They claimed to have made over five-figures from selling Instagram bans in under a month. War charges $60 per ban, according to their listing. Another banner on a different underground forum offers the service for between 5 euros and 30 euros per account, depending on the number of followers. That listing advertised bans for accounts up to 5,000 followers, but claimed that higher follower accounts are also possible to ban. The first listing said it can impact accounts with up to 99,000 followers. War said they didn't know why particular customers may use their service, but added "obviously individuals who have money to throw around." Both listings say that a target account must have a human in the profile photo. In War's case, they said they ban users by filing a fraudulent impersonation complaint to Instagram.

For banned accounts, victims generally have to provide Instagram with several pieces of information such as their name, phone number, and linked email address [...]. [P]reviously, once an account was banned, the owner could try to restore it themselves straight away. Recently, Instagram introduced a 24 hour buffer window where a user has to wait before trying to restore the account, they said. But it appears that in other cases some of the people offering restore services are connected to those banning the accounts in the first place. [S]ome victims receive a message offering account restoration immediately after being banned, and that in their own case, the two accounts that launched the ban attack and the one offering the restore service follow each other on Instagram.

In addition to new hardware announced today, Google has made a big change to its new line of Nest cameras: they no longer require a monthly subscription fee to record video. Ars Technica reports: We'll get to the new models in a minute (editor's note: no we won't because this isn't a slashvertisement; you'll have to visit the article), but the biggest news is that Google is making the cameras more useful without a monthly subscription. Previously, core camera features like recording video were locked behind a $6-$12 monthly subscription plan called "Nest Aware," but the new cameras can now record local video. You only get three hours' worth of "events" (motion detection, as opposed to 24/7 video), but it's a start. Google has also moved activity zones and some image recognition features from the cloud-based pay-per-month service to on-device processing, so they work without a subscription, too.

If you still want to pay for the "Nest Aware" subscription, it comes in two tiers. There's the $6 "Nest Aware," which gives you 30 days of "event" video history and facial recognition. The free tier can detect and alert you about people, animals, and vehicles, but the subscription adds facial recognition for "familiar faces" so Nest can tell if a loved one or stranger is at the door and alert you accordingly. The $12-per-month tier is "Nest Aware Plus," which provides 60 days of event video history and 10 days of 24/7 video history if you have a wired (not battery-powered) Google Nest Cam (the doorbell can't record continuous video). Another big added quality-of-life feature is that the cameras can now work offline. Local storage and on-device processing mean the cameras can function without the Internet; previously, the cloud was the only way they had to process and store video.

Amazon told employees Thursday that it will delay its timeline for returning to regular work in the office until early next year. GeekWire reports: The new date: Jan. 3, 2022. Previously, Amazon had expected employees to start working in the office regularly the week of Sept. 7. However, Amazon stopped short of implementing a vaccine mandate for those who do work in the office, as companies including Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have done. Amazon said it requires employees to wear masks in the office, except for those who can verify they've been fully vaccinated. Earlier this week, Google told staff that it's approved 85% of employee requests to work remotely or relocate once its offices fully re-open. "Google is one the largest companies trying a hybrid approach to returning from the pandemic," reports Bloomberg. "It will ask most of its staff to go back to work in their previous offices, but let others do their jobs elsewhere."

Shockingly, only 10,000 of Google's 145,000+ employees asked to work from home.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: The number of Americans who renounced their citizenship in favor of a foreign country hit an all-time high in 2020: 6,707, a 237% increase over 2019. While the numbers are down this year, that's probably because many U.S. embassies and consulates remain closed for COVID-19, and taking this grave step requires taking an oath in front of a State Department officer. The people who flee tend to be ultra-wealthy, and many of them are seeking to reduce their tax burden. New tax and estate measures proposed by the Biden administration could, if implemented, accelerate this trend.

The IRS publishes a quarterly list of the names of people who have renounced their citizenship or given up their green cards, but it only includes people with global assets over $2 million. The numbers started swelling in 2010, when Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, which increased reporting requirements and penalties for expats. But the Wall Street Journal discovered that the lists aren't up to date: A lot of people who were reported to have renounced citizenship in 2020 actually did so years earlier. "Only the U.S. and Eritrea tax people based on citizenship rather than residency," notes Axios. "For most countries, if you are a citizen but don't reside there, you aren't taxed in that country."

ytene writes: CNN is claiming an exclusive scoop, with an article reporting that U.S. intelligence agencies have scored a massive trove of Covid-19 genetic data, which, CNN suggests, comes from the Wuhan research lab. More than the complex challenge of absorbing and understanding the "mountain" of raw data, U.S. researchers are going to have to translate the material from native Mandarin before the real work can begin. Whilst there has obviously been a lot of interest in a clear identification of the source, it isn't clear how such a revelation could have a material impact on the efficacy of vaccines or the take-up of the treatment. It might, however, give useful clues to help understand where or how the next deadly outbreak could develop. "It's unclear exactly how or when U.S. intelligence agencies gained access to the information, but the machines involved in creating and processing this kind of genetic data from viruses are typically connected to external cloud-based servers -- leaving open the possibility they were hacked," notes CNN, citing multiple people familiar with the matter.

The report also notes that senior intelligence officials are "genuinely split between the two prevailing theories on the pandemic's origins." The World Health Organization says wildlife farms in southern China are the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan is still being investigated. According to a CNN report last month, "[S]enior Biden administration officials overseeing the 90-day review now believe the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan is at least as credible as the possibility that it emerged naturally in the wild -- a dramatic shift from a year ago, when Democrats publicly downplayed the so-called lab leak theory."

$1 million worth of ether (ETH) has been removed from circulation, or "burned," in under three hours since the London hardfork and the implementation of EIP-1559 earlier today. Crypto Briefing reports: With the new update, the base fee from each Ethereum transaction gets burned, deflating the supply of ETH. In the meantime, the price of ETH has jumped more than 6% in the last hour. A few deflationary blocks have already been added to the chain, with the amount of ETH burned higher than the block rewards (2 ETH). At the time of writing, Ethereum has burned 408.84 ETH -- about $1.1 million at current market prices. According to data from ultrasound.money, some of the biggest ETH burners so far have been Uniswap, OpenSea, and Tether. The first on the leaderboard, though, is a mysterious "$LONDON Gift" project that seems to be dedicated to celebrating the London hardfork.

To understand how EIP-1559 works and what it means for Ethereum in the future, a recent Crypto Briefing interview with Ethereum researcher Justin Drake discusses the changes and what they mean for the network. Drake told Crypto Briefing that the update brings "pure improvement" in several areas with no drawbacks. While a sustained rate of over 2 ETH per block is necessary to see Ethereum's supply deflate, EIP-1559 is the first step on Ethereum's road to a deflationary monetary policy. While the current Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism still sees Ethereum pay miners more than 12,000 ETH every day, experts believe Proof-of-Stake will see validators receiving around 1,000 ETH every day. At that point, assuming similar network usage, ETH will become a deflationary asset.

Dr. Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, writing at The New York Times: The C.D.C. faces three major problems. The first is reality: a sustained campaign of misinformation against vaccines and other public health measures, originating mostly with right-wing commentators and politicians, and a new media environment that has upended traditional information flows.

Second, the C.D.C. is still mired in the fog of pandemic, with too little data, collected too slowly, leaving it chasing epidemic waves and trying to make sense of information from other countries. Epidemics spread exponentially, so delayed responses make problems much worse. If the response to a crisis comes after many people are already aware of it brewing, it leaves them confused and fearful if they look to the C.D.C. for guidance, and vulnerable to misinformation if they do not.

Third, the agency is simply not doing a good job at what the pamphlet advises: being first, right and credible, and avoiding mixed messaging, delays and confusion. It's hard not to have sympathy for its predicament. The previous administration undermined the C.D.C., and anti-vaxxers' deliberate misinformation assault has not made the agency's job any easier. The digital public sphere operates fast and furious, and that's difficult for traditional institutions to keep up with or to counter. All this makes it even more important that the C.D.C. properly handle what's under its control.

The response to the Delta variant has been too slow. Data from other countries made it clear months ago that it posed a great threat. Unfortunately, the United States already doesn't systematically collect the kind of data needed on many important indicators. Making things worse, in early May, the C.D.C. stopped tracking breakthrough infections among the vaccinated unless they were hospitalized or worse, even though the reason for continued surveillance is to see and understand changes in an outbreak as early as possible. June passed with little change in the government's response, despite multiple technical papers from Public Health England showing that the Delta variant was much more transmissible and possibly more severe and that it was able to cause more breakthrough infections among the vaccinated. Detailed contact tracing from Singapore also showed that some of the vaccinated were transmitting.

From a paper on PNAS [PDF]: Can entire societies become more or less depressed over time? Here, we look for the historical traces of cognitive distortions, thinking patterns that are strongly associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety, in millions of books published over the course of the last two centuries in English, Spanish, and German. We find a pronounced "hockey stick" pattern: Over the past two decades the textual analogs of cognitive distortions surged well above historical levels, including those of World War I and II, after declining or stabilizing for most of the 20th century. Our results point to the possibility that recent socioeconomic changes, new technology, and social media are associated with a surge of cognitive distortions.

Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual's mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

After Havana shut down online access for 72 hours, the battle is on to keep the country connected. From a report: Cubans used to joke about Napoleon Bonaparte chatting to Mikhail Gorbachev, George W Bush and Fidel Castro in the afterlife. "If I'd have had your prudence, I'd never have fought Waterloo," the French emperor tells the last Soviet leader. "If I'd have had your military might, I'd have won Waterloo," he tells the Texan. Turning last to Castro, the emperor says: "If I'd have had Granma [the Cuban Communist party daily], I'd have lost Waterloo but nobody would have known." The joke no longer does the rounds.

With millions of Cubans now online, the state's monopoly on mass communication has been deeply eroded. But after social media helped catalyse historic protests on the island last month, the government temporarily shut the internet down. Full connectivity returned 72 hours later, but the issue has become a hot potato in the US. Hundreds of Cuban-Americans marched against the regime in Washington last week, and politicians are trying to leverage political capital: Florida senator Marco Rubio has called for the US to beam balloon-supplied internet to the island nation, while Joe Biden said his administration is assessing whether it can increase Cuba's connectivity. Experts say it's unclear how internet access could be increased at scale if the host nation is unwilling to cooperate.

"I haven't seen anything other than pie in the sky," said Larry Press, professor of information systems at California State University. Past US government attempts to bolster connectivity in Cuba read like a John Le Carre novel. In 2009, Alan Gross, a subcontractor for the US Agency for International Development, was arrested for distributing satellite equipment. His work was funded thanks to a US law that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the Castro regime. (Gross was later released as part of the restoration of US-Cuban relations during Barack Obama's second term.) Attempts to smuggle satellite ground stations disguised as surf boards on to the island were similarly foiled.

Amazon struck an agreement with the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey to develop an air-cargo facility at Newark Liberty International Airport. From a report: Amazon Gobal Air, the company's cargo airline, plans to spend $125 million to transform two existing buildings at the airport, according to a Port Authority news release. The agency will receive $157 million in rent over a 20-year lease and an upfront payment of $150 million. The lease is expected to take effect later this year, the Port Authority said.

Apple will roll out a technology that will allow the company to detect and report known child sexual abuse material to law enforcement in a way it says will preserve user privacy. From a report: Apple told TechCrunch that the detection of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is one of several new features aimed at better protecting the children who use its services from online harm, including filters to block potentially sexually explicit photos sent and received through a child's iMessage account. Another feature will intervene when a user tries to search for CSAM-related terms through Siri and Search.

Most cloud services -- Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft to name a few -- already scan user files for content that might violate their terms of service or be potentially illegal, like CSAM. But Apple has long resisted scanning users' files in the cloud by giving users the option to encrypt their data before it ever reaches Apple's iCloud servers. Apple said its new CSAM detection technology -- NeuralHash -- instead works on a user's device, and can identify if a user uploads known child abuse imagery to iCloud without decrypting the images until a threshold is met and a sequence of checks to verify the content are cleared. News of Apple's effort leaked Wednesday when Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, revealed the existence of the new technology in a series of tweets. The news was met with some resistance from some security experts and privacy advocates, but also users who are accustomed to Apple's approach to security and privacy that most other companies don't have.