People on the receiving end of addled smartphone navigation deal with the lost; 'Somebody backed into our mailboxes.' From a report: Everett Ogden's dream house was a three-bedroom at the end of a quiet dead-end road along a river in Jacksonville, Fla. It wasn't long after moving in about a year ago that the strangers started to pull up, sometimes eight a day. The driveway is narrow, so they often do U-turns on the lawn and sometimes run over the sprinklers. "Just yesterday," said Mr. Ogden, 42, "somebody backed into our mailboxes." Drivers have made news for relying too much on navigation apps like those from Alphabet's Google Maps and Apple's maps app. They've driven onto airport runways, through muddy fields, into lakes. Then there are the other victims of addled navigation, those living on the receiving end of ill-conceived directions the algorithms deal out.

Mr. Ogden, who works in sales, spent time with Google Maps and cracked the issue: When people wanted to travel from town to streets in a nearby naval base, the mapping service routed them through Mr. Ogden's lot. He made a spreadsheet, and "there were 47 different streets that would point to our house." He reported them to Google and 20 were fixed, he said. Google said it is working to resolve Mr. Ogden's routes. [...] Google Maps and Apple Maps have support pages and app functions that let users submit edits to directions for review. Some users say corrections can take months to be approved, if they're accepted at all. Residents sometimes must take matters into their own hands.

A new report from Belgian broadcaster VRT News describes the process by which Google Home recordings end up being listened to by contractors -- and the scary part is that it apparently doesn't take much, if anything, to start a recording. While the recordings are not listened to live, audio clips are sent to subcontractors. The Next Web reports: VRT, with the help of a whistleblower, was able to listen to some of these clips and subsequently heard enough to discern the addresses of several Dutch and Belgian people using Google Home -- in spite of the fact some hadn't even uttered the words "Hey Google," which are supposed to be the device's listening trigger. The person who leaked the recordings was working as a subcontractor to Google, transcribing the audio files for subsequent use in improving its speech recognition. They got in touch with VRT after reading about Amazon Alexa keeping recordings indefinitely.

According to the whistleblower, the recordings presented to them are meant to be carefully annotated, with notes included about the speakers presumed identity and age. From the sound of the report, these transcribers have heard just about everything. Personal information? Bedroom activities? Domestic violence? Yes, yes, and yes. While VRT only listened to recordings from Dutch and Belgian users, the platform the whistleblower showed them had recordings from all over the world -- which means there are probably thousands of other contractors listening to Assistant recordings. The VRT report states that the Google Home Terms of Service don't mention that recordings might be listened to by other humans. The report says that the recordings are identified by numbers rather than user names, but VRT "was able to pick up enough data from the recordings to find the addresses of the users in question, and even confront some of the users in the recordings -- to their great dismay," reports The Next Web.

What does Google have to say about all this? That they only transcribe and use "about 0.2% of all audio clips" to improve their voice recognition technology.

Zorro shares a report from The Register: Smart speakers are always listening for wake words, and recording everything they hear to improve their neural networks and target their masters with marketing. It's, frankly, creepy. Academics at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, however, believe there are benefits to installing a cyber-assistant at home that listens in all the time. "A lot of people have smart speakers in their homes, and these devices have amazing capabilities that we can take advantage of," said Shyam Gollakota, coauthor of the research published this week in npj Digital Medicine. "We envision a contactless system that works by continuously and passively monitoring the bedroom for an agonal breathing event, and alerts anyone nearby to come provide CPR. And then if there's no response, the device can automatically call 911." "When the researchers tested their system on samples from the positive dataset, the devices correctly identified the noises associated with heart attacks about 96 percent of the time when they were placed six meters away from the source of the sound," the report adds. "But there's a catch: it only really works when the researchers apply a noise cancellation algorithm to drown out background noise. The percentage for identifying heart attacks rapidly drops to just below five per cent if a noise cancellation algorithm isn't applied."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Architectural Digest on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' $80 million New York City bachelor pad: "Jeff Bezos is not only taking over the internet but is also ruling the real-estate world too. It was just revealed that he purchased not one but three Manhattan apartments overlooking Madison Square Park for $80 million. Included in the sale was a three-floor penthouse apartment [video], in addition to the two units below, giving the Amazon founder and CEO the potential to create a palatial 17,000-square-foot, 12-bedroom pad. [...] This is just the billionaire's latest purchase. He already owns an apartment overlooking Central Park, four California homes, and homes in Texas, Washington state, and Washington, D.C."

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: A judge in Ecuador has jailed a Swedish software developer whom authorities believe is a key member of WikiLeaks and close to Julian Assange, while prosecutors investigate charging him with hacking as part of an alleged plot to "destabilise" the country's government. Ola Bini, 36, was ordered to held in preventive detention on Saturday pending possible cyber-attack charges and his bank accounts were frozen. Prosecutors were examining dozens of hard drives and other material he had in his possession, according to local media reports...

On Thursday, Ecuador's interior minister, Maria Paula Romo, said they had identified a "key member of WikiLeaks" who was "close to Mr Julian Assange". Secret visitors' logs seen by the Guardian show that Bini was one of Assange's many visitors in Ecuador's embassy in Knightsbridge, west London.... Speaking to local media on Thursday, Romo said Ecuador was at risk of cyber attack, hinting Wikileaks could retaliate for the termination of Assange's asylum. She added the government did not want the country "to turn into an international [cyber] piracy centre"...

Last week, the government of president Lenin Moreno, 66, accused WikiLeaks of being involved in a campaign implicating Moreno and his family in corruption. Moreno, who has long expressed his unhappiness over Assange's asylum status, complained that "photos of my bedroom, what I eat and how my wife and daughters and friends dance" had been circulating on social media.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Appeal: On March 29, court officials in Chicago strapped an ankle monitor onto Shawn, a 15-year-old awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery. They explained that the device would need to be charged for two hours a day and that it would track his movements using GPS technology. He was told he would have to be given permission to leave his house, even to go to school. But he found out that through his monitor, officers wouldn't just be able to track his location, as most electronic monitors do. They would also be able to speak -- and listen -- to him. Shawn, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, is one of hundreds of children in Chicago whose ankle monitors are now equipped with microphones and speakers. The stated purpose of these devices is to communicate with the children, but they are raising concerns among civil liberties watchers that they are actually a mechanism for surveilling the conversations of these kids and those around them -- and potentially for using the recordings in criminal cases.

In January, Cook County, home of Chicago, awarded a contract to the electronic monitoring company Track Group, which will lease 275 ankle monitors to keep tabs on children awaiting trial. The devices, known as ReliAlert XC3, have two-way communication capabilities that allow both electronic monitoring officers at the criminal court and employees at Track Group's monitoring center to call an individual wearing a monitor at any time. The wearer can press a button on the device to reach the monitoring center, but there is no way to decline an incoming call. Cook County officials said juvenile probation began using the new devices in February because of their extended battery life and more secure band. The devices were also selected because of their built-in communication, as some children on probation are difficult to reach by phone. But Pat Milhizer, the director of communications for the office of the chief judge in the Circuit Court of Cook County, said the county would now review concerns about privacy. "I can't quite even start down the parade of horribles in terms of all the ways this could be a problem," said Sarah Staudt, senior policy analyst and staff attorney for Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice and a former juvenile defense attorney in Cook County. "The idea that an adult can turn on a listening device while a child is, say, in the bathroom or in their bedroom is not good."

Airbnb says it's cracking down on hosts who record guests. But is it doing enough? From a report: Airbnb's rules allow cameras outdoors and in living rooms and common areas, but never in bathrooms or anywhere guests plan to sleep, including rooms with foldout beds. Starting in early 2018, Airbnb added another layer of disclosure: If hosts indicate they have cameras anywhere on their property, guests receive a pop-up informing them where the cameras are located and where they are aimed. To book the property, the guests must click "agree," indicating that they're aware of the cameras and consent to being filmed.

Of course, hosts have plenty of reason to train cameras on the homes they rent out to strangers. They can catch guests who attempt to steal, or who trash the place, or who initially say they're traveling alone, then show up to a property with five people. A representative for Airbnb's Trust & Safety communications department told me the company tries to filter out hosts who may attempt to surveil guests by matching them against sex-offender and felony databases. The company also uses risk scores to flag suspicious behavior, in addition to reviewing and booting hosts with consistently poor scores.

If a guest contacts Airbnb's Trust & Safety team with a complaint about a camera, employees offer new accommodations if necessary and open an investigation into the host. [...] But four guests who found cameras in their rentals told The Atlantic the company has inconsistently applied its own rules when investigating their claims, providing them with incorrect information and making recommendations that they say risked putting them in harm's way. "There have been super terrible examples of privacy violations by AirBnB hosts, e.g., people have found cameras hidden in alarm clocks in their bedrooms," wrote Jeff Bigham, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon whose claim was initially denied after he reported cameras in his rental. "I feel like our experience is in some ways more insidious. If you find a truly hidden camera in your bedroom or bathroom, Airbnb will support you. If you find an undisclosed camera in the private living room, Airbnb will not support you."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The median rent for a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco has reached a new peak of $3,690, according to survey data from Zumper, a home and apartment rental app. That's also a rise of nearly 9 percent from the same time last year, the survey found. Not only are those figures high enough to make your bank account cringe, but they're also nearly 30 percent higher than New York City and more than double the prices in Miami. Seattle, home to Amazon and Microsoft, rang in at $1,970 and Washington, DC, hit $2,150.

Oh, and by the way, while San Francisco's prices rose, the median price of one bedroom apartments across the US dropped nearly half a percent during this same time. That means while San Francisco's prices climbed, the country's prices fell. "Though there may be a ton of cash flowing through the city and surrounding areas soon, many of these workers will not immediately invest in a home and may, instead, take their money to both travel and upgrade their rental situation," Zumper wrote in a blog post Thursday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC New York: Colin Kroll, the co-founder of HQ Trivia and Vine, died of an accidental overdose, the city's medical examiner announced Tuesday. According to the autopsy results, Kroll died of "acute intoxication due to the combined effects of fentanyl, fluoroisobutyryl fentanyl, heroin, and cocaine." Kroll, 34, was found dead in his SoHo, Manhattan, apartment on Dec. 16, 2018. Police responded to a 911 call for a welfare check at the Spring Street apartment where they found Kroll unconscious and unresponsive in a bedroom of the apartment, a New York Police Department spokesman previously told NBC News. Kroll was named the chief executive of HQ Trivia, a phone-based trivia platform, in September. Prior to that, Kroll co-founded Vine, the popular short-form video service acquired in 2012 by Twitter. Vine was discontinued four years later.

If you've been dreaming of moonlight in Vermont -- and getting a re-location subsidy -- "the time has come to make your maple-syrup-coated dreams a reality," reports Fast Company: [F]or those who relocate this year and can prove that they have full-time remote jobs, it's possible to get paid back for moving expenses, internet bills, or membership in a coworking space... The program offers up to $5,000 a year for two years. For the state, the program is one way to try to address its shrinking population. "We're the second-to-smallest state in the nation, and we're also getting older, so we really need to make sure there's more of a workforce here," says Joan Goldstein, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Economic Development, which is running the Remote Worker Grant Program. The entire state has a population of a little more than 600,000, roughly the size of Louisville, Kentucky.

Vermont also recognized that a growing number of Americans work remotely -- nearly two-thirds of companies today have remote workers, and one recent survey found that hiring managers think it will continue to become even more common -- and that many city dwellers elsewhere are struggling with rent on increasingly overpriced apartments... The median home value in Brattleboro, roughly two hours from Boston, is less than $200,000; a one-bedroom apartment a short walk from the local co-op (and a small coworking space) goes for $850 a month.
The budget for 2019 is $125,000, and will be given out "on a first come, first served basis."

iRobot and Google are looking for ways to integrate the Roomba-maker's home maps with Google Assistant to extend instructions to other gadgets. "The collaboration centers on iRobot's Roomba i7+ vacuum models' ability to map home floor plans and remember room names," notes TechCrunch. From the report: As it is, Google Home users or anyone with Google Assistant can give a voice command like, "Hey Google, clean the kitchen," and a Roomba carries out the task. The integration supports the task across multiple rooms that have been assigned a name, such as the bedroom, living room, and other named areas. According to iRobot, the home-mapping data could also be used to make it easier to set up new smart home gadgets and create new ways to automate the home.

In a statement to The Verge, Google said iRobot's maps could help locate wifi-connected lights and automatically assign names and locations to them within the house. Google stressed that Assistant only learns the names people have given to areas in the home so it can then instruct Roomba i7+ to go to that area. Google doesn't receive information about the layout of the home. Colin Angle, chairman and CEO of iRobot, told the publication that the partnership could help users in future tell Assistant to control other smart home gadgets using the same naming and location information used by the Roomba.

At its Pixel 3 launch event, Google announced a smart speaker called the Google Home Hub, featuring a 7-inch display to give you visual information, making it easier to control smart home devices and view photos and the weather. Interestingly, Google decided not to include a camera in this device for privacy reasons, as they want you to feel comfortable placing it in an intimate location, such as a bedroom. PhoneDog reports: Google explains that Home Hub will be able to recognize who is speaking to it using Voice Match to provide info for that specific person, which should help to make the device more useful in homes with multiple people. And when you're not using Home Hub, a feature called Live Albums will let you select certain people and have Google Photos create albums with images of these people. Another feature of Google's Home Hub is the Home View. With it, you can easily see and control your smart home devices. And then there's Ambient EQ, which uses a sensor that'll adjust the color and brightness of the Home Hub screen based on the ambient lighting. That includes dimming the screen at night when it's time for bed. Google Home Hub will be available for $149 in four colors -- Chalk, Charcoal, Aqua, and Sand. It will launch on October 22nd and each purchase will come with six months of YouTube Premium.

Rachel Metz reports via MIT Technology Review: Imagine a box, similar to a Wi-Fi router, that sits in your home and tracks all kinds of physiological signals as you move from room to room: breathing, heart rate, sleep, gait, and more. Dina Katabi, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, built this box in her lab. And in the not-so-distant future, she believes, it will be able to replace the array of expensive, bulky, uncomfortable gear we currently need to get clinical data about the body. Speaking at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, Katabi said the box she's been building for the last several years takes advantage of the fact that every time we move -- even if it's just a teeny, tiny bit, such as when we breathe -- we change the electromagnetic field surrounding us.

Her device transmits a low-power wireless signal throughout a space the size of a one- or two-bedroom apartment (even through walls), and the signal reflects off people's bodies. The device then uses machine learning to analyze those reflected signals and extract physiological data. So far, it has been installed in over 200 homes of both healthy people and those with conditions like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, depression, and pulmonary diseases, she said. Katabi cofounded a startup called Emerald Innovations to commercialize the technology and has already made the device available to biotech and pharmaceutical companies for studies.

A study, published Friday in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and funded by the European Research Council, suggests that high speed internet access is causing people to lose up to 25 minutes of sleep per night compared to those without high speed internet. From a report: It's the first study to causally link broadband access to sleep deprivation. The so-called "digitalization of the bedroom," defined by our inability to part with our phones/laptops/televisions before bed, has already been linked to various sleep disorders. [...] As the researchers found, high speed internet access "promotes excessive electronic media use," which has already been shown to have detrimental effects on sleep duration and quality. The effects of high speed internet access were particularly noticeable in younger age demographics.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Open Culture: Every artist explores dimensions of space and place, orienting themselves and their works in the world, and orienting their audiences. Then there are artists like Vincent van Gogh, who make space and place a primary subject. [...] The opportunity to see all of Van Gogh's bedroom paintings in one place may have passed us by for now -- an exhibit in Chicago brought them together in 2016. But we can see the original bedroom at the yellow house in Arles in a virtual space, along with almost 1,000 more Van Gogh paintings and drawings, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam's site. The digitized collection showcases a vast amount of Van Gogh's work -- including not only landscapes, but also his many portraits, self-portraits, drawings, city scenes, and still-lifes.

The Van Gogh Museum houses the largest collection of the artist's work in the world. On their website you can read essays about his life and work, plan a visit, or shop at the online store. But most importantly, you can experience the stunning breadth of his art through your screen -- no replacement for the physical spaces of galleries, but a worthy means nonetheless of communing with Van Gogh's vision.

An anonymous reader writes: The Netherlands' first functional 3D-printed home will be ready to welcome occupants as early as next year. According to The Guardian's Daniel Boffey, the one-story, two-bedroom house is the first and smallest of five 3D-printed concrete homes set for construction in the Dutch city of Eindhoven. The five-year initiative, known as Project Milestone, aims to combat the country's shortage of skilled bricklayers and revitalize the architectural industry. Project Milestone emerged as a collaboration between the Eindhoven University of Technology, a global leader in 3D printing, and Dutch construction company Van Wijnen. Real estate manager Vesteda, materials company Saint Gobain-Weber Beamix and engineering firm Witteveen+Bos also contributed to the project.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: Researchers are proposing an idea to make your computer bigger. They are suggesting an extreme and awesome form of co-processing. They want to turn your entire house into a co-processor using the local Wi-Fi signal. Why, you may be asking, do we even want to do this in the first place? The real answer is to see if we can. But the answer given to funding agencies is thermal management. In a modern processor, if all the transistors were working all the time, it would be impossible to keep the chip cool. Instead, portions of the chip are put to sleep, even if that might mean slowing up a computation. But if, like we do with video cards, we farm out a large portion of certain calculations to a separate device, we might be able to make better use of the available silicon.

So, how do you compute with Wi-Fi in your bedroom? The basic premise is that waves already perform computations as they mix with each other, it's just that those computations are random unless we make some effort to control them. When two waves overlap, we measure the combination of the two: the amplitude of one wave is added to the amplitude of the other. Depending on the history of the two waves, one may have a negative amplitude, while the other may have a positive amplitude, allowing for simple computation. The idea here is to control the path that each wave takes so that, when they're added together, they perform the exact computation that we want them to. The classic example is the Fourier transform. A Fourier transform takes an object and breaks it down into a set of waves. If these waves are added together, the object is rebuilt. You can see an example of this in the animation here.

Japanese researchers have found that even the slightest slither of light when trying to sleep could be linked to a heightened risk of depression, according to a new study published in The American Journal of Epidemiology. IFLScience reports: The reason behind this link is unclear, but the researchers believe it might be to do with the human circadian rhythm, the 24-hour cycle that tells us when to sleep and wake up, among other things, that is "programmed" by environmental factors. In the case of humans and many other creatures, light influences how much of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin is pumped into our bodies, meaning we feel awake when the Sun rises and get sleepy when the Sun sets. This system works like a charm when there's only sunlight, moonlight, and a campfire to think about. However, the modern world is beaming with almost constant exposure to artificial light. Light at night (LAN) in a bedroom -- even a flash of a digital clock or streetlight creeping in from a crack in the curtains -- could screw with our natural sleep/wake cycle. The team behind the recent study assessed the sleep of almost 900 elderly people with no signs of depression. They found that people who slept in a room with 5 lux of light or more at night showed a "significantly higher depression risk" than those who slept in a completely dark room. For perspective, a household room with its lights on is around 80 lux and 10 lux is a single candle from 0.3 meters (1 foot) away.

"Airbnb has a scary problem on their hands: People keep finding hidden cameras in their rental homes," reports the New York Post. "Another host was busted last month trying to film guests without their knowledge -- marking the second time since October that the company has had to publicly deal with this sort of incident." BuzzFeed reports: In October, an Indiana couple visiting Florida discovered a hidden camera disguised as a smoke detector in their Airbnb's master bedroom. Earlier that same year Airbnb was forced to investigate and suspend a Montreal listing after one of the renters discovered a camera in the bedroom of the property... Hidden cameras aren't just an issue for Airbnb -- it's been a hot-button topic in hospitality for years. There are hundreds of stories about hotels using unlawful surveillance. [For example, this one.]

Airbnb recommends its customers read the reviews of the host of any rental property they might be interested in, and also offers an on-platform messaging tool that allows communication between host and guests... "Cameras are never allowed in bathrooms or bedrooms; any other cameras must be properly disclosed to guests ahead of time," Airbnb spokesperson Jeff Henry told BuzzFeed News.
This time the couple discovered hidden cameras that were disguised as a motion detectors. Airbnb says they've permanently banned the offending host -- and offered his guests a refund -- adding that this type of incident was "incredibly rare."

Joshua Topolsky, writing for The Outline: The stuff Google showed off on October 4 was brazenly designed and strangely, invitingly touchable. These gadgets were soft, colorful... delightful? They looked human, but like something future humans had made; people who'd gotten righteously drunk with aliens. You could imagine them in your living room, your den, your bedroom. Your teleportation chamber. A fuzzy little donut you can have a conversation with. A VR headset in stunning pink. A phone with playful pops of color and an interface that seems to presage what you want, when you want it. It's weird. It's subtle. It's... good. It's Google? It's Google.

It was only a few years ago that Google was actually something of a laughing stock when it came to design. As an aggressively engineer-led company, the Mountain View behemoth's early efforts, particularly with its mobile software and devices, focused not on beauty, elegance, or simplicity, but rather concentrated on flexibility, iteration, and scale. These are useful priorities for a utilitarian search engine, but didn't translate well to many of the company's other products. Design -- the mysterious intersection of art and communication -- was a second-class citizen at Google, subordinate to The Data. That much was clear from the top down.

Enter Matias Duarte, the design impresario who was responsible for the Sidekick's UI (a wacky, yet strangely prescient mobile-everything concept) and later, the revolutionary (though ill-fated) webOS -- the striking mobile operating system and design language that would be Palm's final, valiant attempt at reclaiming the mobile market. Duarte was hired by Google in 2013 (initially as Android's User Experience Director, though he is now VP of design at the company), and spearheaded a complete reset of the company's visual and functional instincts. But even Duarte was aware of the design challenges his new role presented. "I never thought I'd work for Google," he told Surface Magazine in August. "I had zero ambition to work for Google. Everybody knew Google was a terrible place for design." Duarte went to work on a system that would ultimately be dubbed Material Design -- a set of principles that not only began to dictate how Android should look and work as a mobile operating system, but also triggered the march toward a unified system of design that slowly but surely pulled Google's disparate network of services into something that much more closely resembled a singular vision. A school of thought. A family.