171782352
submission
SonicSpike writes:
The federal government is reportedly funneling $22 million into developing ready-to-wear clothing that can record audio, video, and geolocation data through something its calling The Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems program, or SMART ePANTS, for short, according to The Intercept. Garments slated for the production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable, The Intercept reported.
The program "represents the largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles (AST) that feel, move, and function like any garment," according to an August 22 press release from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
SMART ePANTS is being developed under the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an agency that describes itself on its website as investing in "high-risk, high-payoff research programs to tackle some of the most difficult challenges of the agencies and disciplines in the Intelligence Community (IC)." In other words, funding moonshots like underwear that's as stretchable and washable as normal underwear, but can also record your every move.
If successful, though, the garments could significantly improve the capabilities of those working government agencies like the Department of Defense, first responders at the Department of Homeland Security, those in the Intelligence Community, or others working in high-stress environments like crime scenes and arms control, Dr. Dawson Cagle, the program manager for SMART ePANTS, explained in a press release from the IARPA.
171778248
submission
SonicSpike writes:
After complying with an FBI warrant and providing access to a safe, popular gun safe manufacturer Liberty Safe faced backlash from conservatives.
In a statement on Wednesday, Liberty Safe said it was asked by the FBI on August 30 for the access code to a safe, supplying it to the bureau after receiving proof of a warrant.
"Our company's protocol is to provide access codes to law enforcement if a warrant grants them access to a property," the company said. "After receiving the request, we received proof of the valid warrant, and only then did we provide them with an access code."
The safe belongs to Nathan Hughes, 34, of Arkansas, who has been charged with felony civil disorder and several misdemeanors in the January 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol.
The company added that it was unaware of any details surrounding the case and that it has repeatedly denied requests for access codes when a warrant wasn't present.
171724302
submission
SonicSpike writes:
In 2023, NASA is sending a technology demonstration known as the Integrated LCRD Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) to the space station. Together, ILLUMA-T and the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), which launched in December 2021, will complete NASA’s first two-way, end-to-end laser relay system.
The ILLUMA-T optical module covered by a white protective cover.
A close up of ILLUMA-T's optical module covered by a protective wrap.
With ILLUMA-T, NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program office will demonstrate the power of laser communications from the space station. Using invisible infrared light, laser communications systems send and receive information at higher data rates. With higher data rates, missions can send more images and videos back to Earth in a single transmission. Once installed on the space station, ILLUMA-T will showcase the benefits higher data rates could have for missions in low Earth orbit.
“Laser communications offer missions more flexibility and an expedited way to get data back from space,” said Badri Younes, former deputy associate administrator for NASA's SCaN program. “We are integrating this technology on demonstrations near Earth, at the Moon, and in deep space.”
In addition to higher data rates, laser systems are lighter and use less power — a key benefit when designing spacecraft. ILLUMA-T is approximately the size of a standard refrigerator and will be secured to an external module on the space station to conduct its demonstration with LCRD.
Currently, LCRD is showcasing the benefits of a laser relay in geosynchronous orbit – 22,000 miles from Earth – by beaming data between two ground stations and conducting experiments to further refine NASA’s laser capabilities.
“Once ILLUMA-T is on the space station, the terminal will send high-resolution data, including pictures and videos to LCRD at a rate of 1.2 gigabits-per-second,” said Matt Magsamen, deputy project manager for ILLUMA-T. “Then, the data will be sent from LCRD to ground stations in Hawaii and California. This demonstration will show how laser communications can benefit missions in low Earth orbit.”
ILLUMA-T is launching as a payload on SpaceX’s 29th Commercial Resupply Services mission for NASA. In the first two weeks after its launch, ILLUMA-T will be removed from the Dragon spacecraft’s trunk for installation on the station’s Japanese Experiment Module-Exposed Facility (JEM-EF), also known as “Kibo” — meaning “hope” in Japanese.
NASA's Laser Communications Roadmap. This image includes the 2013 LLCD mission, the 2021 LCRD mission, the 2022 TBIRD mission, the 2023 DSOC mission, the 2023 ILLUMA-T mission, and the 2024 O2O mission.
The ILLUMA-T team in front of the payload in a Goddard cleanroom.
Following the payload’s installation, the ILLUMA-T team will perform preliminary testing and in-orbit checkouts. Once completed, the team will make a pass for the payload’s first light — a critical milestone where the mission transmits its first beam of laser light through its optical telescope to LCRD.
Once first light is achieved, data transmission and laser communications experiments will begin and continue throughout the duration of the planned mission.
171686300
submission
SonicSpike writes:
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has given us a sneak peek of an intriguing patch of the sun that's not yet visible from Earth.
Perseverance photographs the sun daily with its Mastcam-Z camera system to gauge the amount of dust in the Martian atmosphere. Such an effort captured a big sunspot moving across the solar disk late last week and over the weekend, as SpaceWeather.com reported.
"Because Mars is orbiting over the far side of the sun, Perseverance can see approaching sunspots more than a week before we do," SpaceWeather.com wrote in a post highlighting the sunspot photos. "Consider this your one-week warning: A big sunspot is coming."
171640864
submission
SonicSpike writes:
The United States Space Force has activated its first and only unit dedicated to targeting other nations' satellites and the ground stations that support them.
The 75th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron (ISRS) was activated on Aug. 11 at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado. This unit is part of Space Delta 7, an element of the U.S. Space Force tasked with providing intelligence on adversary space capabilities. It'll do things like analyze the capabilities of potential targets, locate and track these targets as well as participate in "target engagement," which presumably refers to destroying or disrupting adversary satellites, the ground stations that support them and transmissions sent between the two.
Lt. Col. Travis Anderson, who leads the squadron, said in a Space Force statement that the idea of a dedicated space targeting unit has been years in the making. "Today is a monumental time in the history of our service," Anderson said. "The idea of this unit began four years ago on paper and has probably been in the minds of several U.S. Air Force intelligence officers even longer."
171627192
submission
SonicSpike writes:
Today, U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz (FL-01) reintroduced the ‘‘USPIS Surveillance Protection Act." The legislation, if passed, would defund the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP), an illegal domestic surveillance program operated by the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS).
In April 2021, a report from Yahoo News exposed USPIS’ iCOP surveillance government bulletin that was distributed by the Department of Homeland Security. The bulletin reported the program's findings of “inflammatory” posts on social media accounts, including on Facebook, Parler, and Telegram.
In March 2022, following pressure from the House Oversight and Reform Committee, the USPS Inspector General released a report stating that “certain proactive searches iCOP conducted using an open-source intelligence tool from February to April 2021 exceed the Postal Inspection Service’s law enforcement authority.” Since then, there has been no indication that USPIS has shut down iCOP, likely meaning that this surveillance program is still violating Americans’ privacy and seeking to curb their First Amendment rights.
Rep. Gaetz’s legislation would prohibit any federal funds, including amounts available in the Postal Service Fund, from being used by USPIS to carry out iCOP, or any other similar program.
“The Postal Service should be focused on delivering the mail on time and on budget, not running a covert surveillance program to monitor political behavior on social media. This program is not only outside USPIS' jurisdiction and infringes on American citizens' civil liberties but is more evidence of the government-sanctioned spying on its own citizens. Congress must immediately abolish this program,” Congressman Gaetz said.
171618914
submission
SonicSpike writes:
In May, the U.S. Supreme Court today to hear Moore v. United States, leaving in place a patchwork of lower court decisions on an important and recurring question about privacy rights in the face of advancing surveillance technology.
In this case, police secretly attached a small camera to a utility pole, using it to surveil a Massachusetts home 24/7 for eight months — all without a warrant. Law enforcement could watch the camera’s feed in real time, and remotely pan, tilt, and zoom close enough to read license plates and see faces. They could also review a searchable, digitized record of this footage at their convenience. The camera captured every coming and going of the home’s residents and their guests over eight months. As a result, the government targeted the home of a community pillar — a lawyer, respected judicial clerk, devoted church member, and a grandmother raising her grandkids — to cherry-pick images from months of unceasing surveillance in an effort to support unwarranted criminal charges against an innocent person.
Federal courts of appeals and state supreme courts have divided on the question of whether such sweeping surveillance is a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant. The highest courts of Massachusetts, Colorado, and South Dakota have held that long-term pole camera surveillance of someone’s home requires a warrant. In Moore v. United States, the members of the full en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit split evenly on the question, with three judges explaining that a warrant is required, and three judges expressing the belief that the Fourth Amendment imposes no limit on this invasive surveillance. This issue will continue to arise in the lower courts; the ACLU filed an amicus brief on the question in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit earlier this month.
171569824
submission
SonicSpike writes:
A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Biden administration to enforce regulations aimed at clamping down on so-called ghost guns — firearm-making kits available online that people can assemble at home.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, in a brief order put on hold a July 5 ruling by a federal judge in Texas that blocked the regulations nationwide.
The vote was 5-4, with conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberal justices in the majority.
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, commonly known as ATF, issued the regulations last year to tackle what it claims has been an abrupt increase in the availability of ghost guns. The guns are difficult for law enforcement to trace, with the administration calling them a major threat to public safety.
The rule clarified that ghost guns fit within the definition of "firearm" under federal law, meaning that the government has the power to regulate them in the same way it regulates firearms manufactured and sold through the traditional process.
The regulations require manufacturers and sellers of the kits to obtain licenses, mark the products with serial numbers, conduct background checks and maintain records.
171567918
submission
SonicSpike writes:
Payments giant PayPal (PYPL.O) said on Monday it has launched a U.S. dollar stablecoin, becoming the first major financial technology firm to embrace digital currencies for payments and transfers.
PayPal's announcement, which lifted its shares 2.66% on Monday, reflects a show of confidence in the troubled cryptocurrency industry that has over the last 12 months grappled with regulatory headwinds that were exacerbated by a string of high-profile collapses.
While stablecoins — crypto tokens whose monetary value is pegged to a stable asset to protect from wild volatility — have been around for years now, they are yet to successfully make headway into the mainstream consumer payments ecosystem.
Instead, consumers mostly use stablecoins as a means to trade other cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin and ether. The world's largest stablecoin is Tether, followed by USD Coin, which is issued by crypto provider Circle.
Prior attempts by major mainstream companies to launch stablecoins have met fierce opposition from financial regulators and policymakers. Meta's (META.O), then Facebook, 2019 plans to launch a stablecoin, Libra, were foiled after regulators raised fears it could upset global financial stability.
A string of major economies, from Britain to the European Union, have since laid out rules to govern stablecoins. The EU's policies will come into force in June 2024.
171552846
submission
SonicSpike writes:
A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%.
When Zoom was used for training the sound classification algorithm, the prediction accuracy dropped to 93%, which is still dangerously high, and a record for that medium.
Such an attack severely affects the target's data security, as it could leak people's passwords, discussions, messages, or other sensitive information to malicious third parties.
Moreover, contrary to other side-channel attacks that require special conditions and are subject to data rate and distance limitations, acoustic attacks have become much simpler due to the abundance of microphone-bearing devices that can achieve high-quality audio captures.
This, combined with the rapid advancements in machine learning, makes sound-based side-channel attacks feasible and a lot more dangerous than previously anticipated.
171535186
submission
SonicSpike writes:
On Tuesday, the Biden administration put the final nail in the coffin for incandescent light bulbs, the result of a decade-plus-long legislative path.
The journey began in 2007 when the Energy Independence and Security Act passed. That law required the Department of Energy to evaluate whether efficiency standards for light bulbs needed to be set or amended and required a minimum standard of energy efficiency for light bulbs of 45 lumens per watt to be considered.
Lumens are a measure of how much light is coming from a light bulb and is a more modern measure than watts, which measures energy usage, according to the DOE. A rule requiring the minimum standard efficiency of 45 lumens per watt for light bulbs effectively bans halogen and incandescent bulbs.
The 2007 law required that if the DOE determined a new energy efficiency standard was necessary, it should go into effect by January 1, 2017. But politics intervened as the Trump administration appealed those rules.
The Biden administration picked the issue back up. And in April 2022, the Biden administration issued a rule requiring the minimum standard efficiency of 45 lumens per watt, which became effective in July. At that time, the Department of Energy said it would have a gradual transition to the new rule so that stores with inventory would not be stuck with light bulbs they could no longer sell. In Department of Energy lingo, this is called “progressive enforcement.”
Full enforcement of the ban for retailers took effect on Tuesday.
The DOE does not disclose its techniques for enforcing these step-wise implementation of the rule. However, the agency’s new regulations will be enforced in “a fair and equitable manner,” and smaller retailers are advised to reach out to the DOE to speak about existing inventory they may still have on hand, a spokesperson told CNBC.
171377573
submission
SonicSpike writes:
Ripple’s XRP token surged on Thursday after a judge in the Southern District of New York ruled that it’s “not necessarily a security on its face.”
The price of XRP was last higher by 35% at about 64 cents a coin, according to Coin Metrics. The news gave hope to crypto investors, who breathed a sigh of relief that other altcoins may not be considered securities after all. Polygon’s matic token gained 11%. Litecoin and the token tied to Solana jumped 8%, and Cardano’s token advanced 7%. Bitcoin and ether
got a boost too, of 2% and 3%, respectively.
“The judgments today are a huge step forward for the industry,” Chris Martin, head of research at Amberdata, told CNBC. “By judging that XRP is not a security we’re starting to get clarity on what constitutes a security and what constitutes a commodity — the SEC will have to revise their tactics on several of their ongoing cases and I expect that this judgment will implicate several other tokens as non-securities.”
“The judgment that institutional sales of XRP by Ripple constitute securities also has massive implications for the industry with several ICO’s now likely in the spotlight,” he added. “For exchanges caught in ongoing SEC cases, it’s not clear how this judgment will affect them – they’ve only been involved in secondary sales for the most part. But as we can see with prices today, the market is very bullish on the judgments.”
The news marks the end of a three-year battle between Ripple and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which initiated a lawsuit against the company in 2020 for breaching U.S. securities laws by selling XRP without first registering it with the agency.
The decision was widely seen as a key hurdle to clear in the second half of 2023 as crypto assets are still still contending with a challenging macro environment and have spent the past several weeks under immense pressure from U.S. regulators. That scrutiny includes lawsuits by the SEC against Binance and Coinbase.
Coinbase shares were last up 11% after the ruling. Miners surged double digit percentages, with Marathon and Canaan up 11% and Riot Platforms up 12%. Hut 8 and Stronghold Digital rose 13%.
171376227
submission
SonicSpike writes:
Nearly 10 years ago, the sprawling dark-web drug market known as the Silk Road was torn offline in a law enforcement operation coordinated by the FBI, whose agents arrested the black market's boss, Ross Ulbricht, in a San Francisco library. It would take two years for Ulbricht's second-in-command—an elusive figure known as Variety Jones—to be tracked down and arrested in Thailand. Today, a decade after the Silk Road's demise, Clark has been sentenced to join his former boss in federal prison.
In a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday, Roger Thomas Clark—also known by his online handles including Variety Jones, Cimon, and Plural of Mongoose—was sentenced to 20 years behind bars for his role in building and running Silk Road. Clark, a 62-year-old Canadian national, will now likely spend much of the rest of his life incarcerated for helping to pioneer the anonymous, cryptocurrency-based model for online illegal sales of drugs and other contraband that still persists on the dark web today. The sentence is the maximum Clark faced in accordance with the plea agreement he made with prosecutors.
Clark “misguidedly turned his belief that drugs should be legal into material assistance for a criminal enterprise,” Judge Sidney Stein said in his sentencing statement. “These beliefs crossed over into patently illegal behavior.”
Stein added that Clark was “clear-eyed and intentional” in his work as Ulbricht's “right-hand man” in the Silk Road's operations. “The sentence must reflect the vast criminal enterprise of which he was a leader,” Stein said.
In his own statement, Clark said that his work on the Silk Road had always been motivated by his political belief that drugs should be legalized, and the hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of dark-web drug sales he helped to facilitate were safer than drug deals that took place in the physical world. He argued in his sentencing statement that the site helped reduce violence in the drug trade, and that the Silk Road's ratings and reviews prevented the sale of adulterated drugs that would have caused greater harm.
“I just kept preaching to myself ‘harm reduction.’ That's how I got to sleep at night,” Clark told the judge, standing before a sparse audience in the courtroom looking thin and gaunt in baggy khaki clothes. “I'm proud and ashamed at the same time.”
Clark was, as prosecutors noted in their memo arguing for the two-decade sentence, more than a lieutenant on the Silk Road. He served as the site's security consultant, PR adviser, and even a kind of executive coach and friend to the site's boss, Ulbricht. Clark, who Ulbricht initially encountered as a marijuana seeds dealer on the market, was “the biggest and strongest-willed character I had met through the site thus far,” Ulbricht wrote in his journal.
“He has advised me on many technical aspect of what we are doing, helped me speed up the site and squeeze more out of my current servers," Ulbricht wrote. “He also has helped me better interact with the community around Silk Road, delivering proclamations, handling troublesome characters, running a sale, changing my name, devising rules, and on and on. He also helped me get my head straight regarding legal protection, cover stories, devising a will, finding a successor, and so on. He’s been a real mentor.”
Clark was pivotal in key moments of the Silk Road’s history—including a particularly dark incident when he and Ulbricht resorted to violence, which loomed large in Clark’s sentencing. Clark played a crucial role in convincing Ulbricht that it was necessary to commission the murder of one of his employees who he believed had betrayed him and stolen bitcoins from the market. “At what point in time do we decide we’ve had enough of someone's shit and terminate them?” Clark wrote to Ulbricht at one point following the discovery of the theft, as recorded in chat logs that were recovered from Ulbricht's computer after his arrest. “We’re playing with big money with serious people, and that’s the world they live in.”
After Ulbricht agreed to have the staffer killed—in a bizarre turn, his death was instead faked by US federal agents investigating the Silk Road—Clark told Ulbricht that he had made the right move. "If you had balked, I would have seriously re-considered our relationship," he wrote. “We’re playing for keeps, this just drives it home. I’m perfectly comfortable with the decision, and I’ll sleep like a lamb tonight, and every night hereafter.”
Countering Clark's claims of interest in “harm reduction,” assistant US attorney Michael Neff pointed to those comments as evidence of Clark's “complete disregard for human life,” as he put it in Tuesday's sentencing hearing. For Clark, “the question of whether to end another man's life was simple and stress-free,” Neff told the judge in the prosecution's sentencing statement.
171370347
submission
SonicSpike writes:
Additions to Google’s Privacy Policy are making some observers worry that all of your content is about to be fed into Google's AI tools. Alterations to the T&Cs now explicitly state that your “publicly available information” will be used to train in-house Google AI models alongside other products.
Given the controversy over AI use generally, it might not seem like the best idea to have this information be easily missed on a page where it should perhaps be a lot more prominent.
What does this mean in plain terms? In pre-AI times, if you posted something online, whether a blog, a photograph, a piece of music or something else, there’s a good chance it would end up scraped by a search engine. This is how search engines work, and this is how you find the content you’re looking for when entering search terms.
But what Google is saying here is that from now on, all of the above will still happen. It’s just that the new addition means your text, photos, and music could end up helping to train its products and “AI models”.
As Gizmodo notes, previously it only referenced the popular Translate tool. Now Bard and Cloud AI are thrown into the mix. Bard is Google’s AI chat service, and if you were wondering: it does indeed make use of images. It ran into teething problems shortly after release, sharing false information in its own announcement. It’s no wonder that Google would try and make as much data as possible up for grabs with regard to feeding the ever-hungry AI tools with more information.
With so many AI tools doing things like falsely claiming that people have written articles or just running into copyright trouble generally, we have no real way to know if this will actually improve anything. You may have had some objections to search engines making bank from content you post online, but there is some positive return there in the form of your content being placed in front of people. Now we have AI spam posing a threat to said engines, while your content is potentially being monetised twice over with new AI policies coming into force.
Although the initial outlook for AI-generated content and scraping looks grim, it’s arguable if the current spam laden system is much better. The problem is we may just be trading one set of poor results and faulty tools for another.
171351291
submission
SonicSpike writes:
Threads, Meta’s Instagram-Twitter hybrid, had been met with confusion and skepticism. Then, when it launched yesterday, 30 million people signed up within hours.
Threads, the latest of Meta’s copycat innovations, faces a long slog in its bid to topple Twitter as the microblogging platform of choice. It has jumped into a feeding frenzy for users that has grown increasingly heated since Elon Musk bought the platform last year. But Threads comes with big potential, thanks to its polished tech, built-in user base, and a reputation for better moderation that’s likely to please big-money advertisers.
The platform also arrives at a particularly weak moment for Twitter. Musk’s recent announcement that free Twitter accounts would, temporarily, only be able to view 600 tweets per day was met with derision. Such moves will likely further hurt advertising on the platform—worsening a crisis that’s been ongoing throughout Musk’s tenure.
It’s a perfect storm: Technical troubles at Twitter converging with a slow news week have set the stage for Threads. “Suddenly, you have something that’s improbable: Meta has gotten into microblogging and people are actually digging it,” says John Wihbey, a professor in the School of Journalism and Media Innovation at Northeastern University who has worked as a contracted consultant for Twitter.
Threads, which is closely linked to Instagram but is actually a different app, has a major advantage over other Twitter copycats—it already has a huge potential pool of users on Instagram, and those people can choose to follow accounts they already follow on Instagram as they come onto Threads.
With the backing of Meta, Threads has a team of engineers that volunteer-run networks like Mastodon can’t rival. People can also post Threads directly to their Instagram stories. And, according to a post yesterday from Instagram head Adam Mosseri, Threads will eventually have support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, which would let people take their followers to another service if they leave Threads or the app ever shuts down.
Threads can’t do all that Twitter can—yet. People need an Instagram account to sign up, and Threads is not available in the European Union, which has strict privacy standards that the app may not meet. The feed defaults to a mix of accounts people follow and a slurry of posts selected by an algorithm; there’s no direct messaging feature; and the feed’s order is algorithmic, not chronological. Threads doesn’t have a trending topics section, and the search feature seems to only bring up accounts, not specific topics or posts, which makes it initially less appealing for anyone following big news events. There are also no ads—yet.
But Threads had a mostly smooth launch and largely positive reception, aside from a slight hiccup when Zuckerberg’s own Threads failed to load this morning. Still, microblogging remains a risky bet, as social platforms focusing on it haven’t been consistently profitable. At the same time, Threads may boost Meta’s brand as Twitter’s reputation falters. And it’s a chance to capitalize on advertisers that have ditched Twitter.
