May 18 th , 2020 Volume 47 Issue 09
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This Week in Tech History .
176 Years Ago – May 24 th , 1844 – Samuel Morse sends the first telegraphic
message over a line from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore. The message, “What hath
God wrought!” was transmitted to his partner, Alfred Vail, who retransmitted the
same message back to Morse. This formally opened America’s first telegraph line,
launching America’s first form of instant communication in history. The biblical text
was selected by Annie Ellsworth, the teenage daughter of the U.S. Commissioner of
Patents.
114 Years Ago – May 22 nd , 1906 – Orville and Wilbur Wright are granted the first
airplane patent in the U.S. for their “new and useful improvements in Flying
Machines.” (US No. 821,393)
93 Years Ago – May 20 th , 1927 – First Solo Flight Across the Atlantic. the “Spirit of
St. Louis” monoplane, Charles Lindbergh takes off from Roosevelt Field in New
York on his historic first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. He will arrive in France
33.5 hours later.
88 Years Ago – May 20 th , 1932 – First Female to Fly Solo Across Atlantic. Five
years to the day after Charles Lindbergh took off on his historic first solo flight across
the Atlantic, Amelia Earhart takes off from Newfoundland. While her original
destination was France, weather and mechanical problems force her to land in
Ireland nearly 15 hours after she took off. She became the first woman and second
person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
14 Years Ago – May 19 th , 2006 – Apple opens their second store in New York City,
a 20,000 square-foot shop at the underground concourse of the General Motors
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building at 767 Fifth Avenue. Open 24-hours a day, the shop is visible at street level
through a 32-foot glass cube. Designed by Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs at a cost of $9
million, people stood on line for hours prior to the store’s opening.
40 Years Ago – May 13 th , 1979 –
This Week’s Topics
1. The secret to why some people get so sick from COVID could
lie in their genes
Source Link: 23andMe
Some people die from covid-19, and others who are infected don’t even show
symptoms. But scientists still don’t know why. consumer genomics company 23andMe
is going to offer free genetic tests to 10,000 people who’ve been hospitalized with the
disease, hoping to turn up genetic factors that could point to an answer.
In April the company, based in Sunnyvale, California, sent covid-19 questionnaires out
to a swath of its members. So far, says a company spokesman, about 400,000 have
enrolled, including 6,000 who say they have confirmed cases of the pandemic disease.
Scientists hope to find a gene that strongly influences, or even determines, how badly
people are affected by the coronavirus. There are well-known examples of such genetic
effects on other diseases: for example, sickle-cell genes confer resistance to malaria,
and variants of other genes are known to protect people from HIV or to norovirus, an
intestinal germ.
2. Dumping passwords can improve your security
Source Link: Screen Breaks
Security keys, biometrics and a technology called FIDO are upgrading today's feeble
security foundation. FIDO is short for Fast Identity Online
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Passwords suck! They're hard to remember, hackers exploit their weaknesses and
fixes often bring their own problems. Dashlane, LastPass, 1Password and other
password managers generate strong and unique passwords for every account you
have, but the software is complex. Services from Google, Facebook and Apple allow
you to use your passwords for their services at other sites, but you have to give them
even more power over your life online. Two-factor authentication, which requires a
second passcode sent by text message or retrieved from a special app each time you
log in, boosts security dramatically but can still be defeated.
A big change, however, could eliminate passwords altogether. The technology, called
FIDO, overhauls the log-in process, combining your phone; face and fingerprint
recognition; and new gadgets called hardware security keys. If it delivers on its
promise, FIDO will make cringeworthy passwords like "123456" relics of a bygone age.
A password is something you know. A device is something you have. Biometrics is
something you are.
Computer passwords have been fraught since at least the 1960s. Allan Scherr, an MIT
researcher, ferreted out the passwords of other researchers so he could use their
accounts to continue his "larceny of machine time" for his own project. In the 1980s,
University of California, Berkeley astrophysicist Clifford Stohl tracked a German hacker
across government and military computers left insecure because administrators didn't
change default passwords.
The nature of passwords prompts us to be lazy. Long, complex passwords, the ones
that are the most secure, are the hardest for us to create, remember and type. So many
of us default to recycling them.
That's a huge problem because hackers already have many of our passwords.
The Have I Been Pwned service includes 555 million passwords exposed by data
breaches. Hackers automate attacks by "credential stuffing," trying a long list of stolen
usernames and passwords to find ones that work.
Security keys for sale today include Yubico's Yubikeys and Google's Titan. Basic
models cost $20, but you'll spend $40 and up if you want ones supporting USB-C or
Lightning ports or wireless communications. Advanced models like Ensurity's ThinC,
the eWBM's Goldengate G320and Feitian's BioPass have built-in fingerprint readers, a
feature Yubico is working on, too.
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3. Ugly t-shirt makes you invisible to facial recognition tech
Source Link: T-Shirt
Researchers at Northeastern University have developed an adversarial example that
works even when printed onto a moving fabric In William Gibson’s novel Zero History, a
key character dons the ugliest T-shirt in the world – a ridiculous-looking garment that
magically renders the wearer invisible to CCTV.
Now, as states across the world deploy artificially intelligent surveillance systems to
track, trace and monitor citizens, we may find ourselves wearing ugly T-shirts of our
own. Researchers at Northeastern University, MIT and IBM have designed a top
printed with a kaleidoscopic patch of color that renders the wearer undetectable to AI.
It’s part of a growing number of "adversarial examples" – physical objects designed to
counteract the creep of digital surveillance.
“The adversarial T-shirt works on the neural networks used for object detection,”
explains Xue Lin, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at
Northeastern, and co-author of a recent paper on the subject. Normally, a neural
network recognizes someone or something in an image, draws a "bounding box"
around it, and assigns a label to that object.
By finding the boundary points of a neural network – the thresholds at which it decides
whether something is an object or not – Lin and colleagues have been able to work
backwards to create a design that can confuse the AI network’s classification and
labelling system.
Looking specifically at two object-recognition neural networks commonly used for
training purposes – YOLOv2 and Faster R-CNN – the team were able to identify the
areas of the body where adding pixel noise could confuse the AI, and in effect turn the
wearer invisible.
4. Chinese Spreading Fake COVID-19 Messages on US Social
Media.
Source Link: China Fake
Federal intelligence agencies have determine that Chinese operatives in March
amplified messages spread through texts and social media platforms that falsely
claimed the United States was about to undergo a total lockdown in response to
the coronavirus pandemic, according to six American officials, and several of
the officials said the reliance on texts to disseminate disinformation, in
particular, hasn't been seen before. The American officials also said Chinese
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operatives created fake social media accounts to peddle the information, much
like how Russia works with troll accounts.
5. FBI Probe Ties Florida Attack to al Qaeda, Faults Apple
Source Link: Encryption Debate
Top FBI and Department of Justice officials have concluded that a Saudi aviation
student who killed three people last year at a Florida Navy base had extensive ties to al
Qaeda. Those officials then went further and said that Apple stalled the probe by
refusing to help unlock the shooter’s phones.
Apple responded saying that it had responded within hours to the FBI’s first requests
for help in December and provided “every piece of information available to us,”
including iCloud backups, account information and transactional data, while also
lending continuing technical expertise to agents working the case.
Apple went on to say that the false claims made are an excuse to weaken encryption
and other security measures that protect millions of users and our national security,”
Apple said. “It is because we take our responsibility to national security so seriously
that we do not believe in the creation of a backdoor, one which will make every device
vulnerable to bad actors who threaten our national security and the data security of our
customers.”
The company and other major Silicon Valley firms, including Facebook, have said for
years that undermining their security protocols would make all of their users vulnerable
to malicious cyberactivity, a view most independent experts share.
Four years ago, in the final year of the Obama administration, the Justice Department
tried to force Apple to create a software update—a “backdoor”—that would allow law
enforcement to gain access to a phone linked to a dead gunman responsible for a 2015
terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif.
Apple refused, and it continues to refuse to grant access via a software update, saying
it could be exploited by others. The FBI turned to a third party, spending more than $1
million to obtain data from an encrypted Apple iPhone 5C.
Today, the bureau could likely obtain that data for $15,000 or less, thanks to new
forensics tools it has purchased over the past two years that have made breaking into
an iPhone much less daunting.
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United States law enforcement officials want tech companies to undermine encrypted
protections. The latest salvo is a fresh spin, but the underlying intent remains the same.
As does the fundamental danger it poses.
For decades, the DoJ and law enforcement agencies around the world have promoted
the idea that encrypted digital communications hinder investigations and that, if those
protections must exist, law enforcement needs a way to circumvent them.
Cryptographers and privacy advocates dispute, though, that such a “backdoor" can
exist without fundamentally undermining the protection encryption offers. Encryption
may create one danger in limiting law enforcement insight, but it protects people
around the world against many other pressing threats from repressive
governments, criminals, and abusers of all sorts.
Privacy proponents emphasize that there's no safe, foolproof way to implement
encryption backdoors. Any vulnerability in the scheme, no matter how hidden or secret,
can be discovered by others and potentially abused. The seminal 2015 paper "Keys
Under Doormats" written by a large group of top cryptographers outlines the inherent,
unavoidable dangers of such schemes. And the US government has proven itself to be
an unreliable steward of sensitive digital tools, having lost or mishandled them in the
past in ways that have enabled widespread havoc.
The Keys Under Doormats is a 2015 academic paper that is a great read and well
worth your time investment.
6. Coronavirus Finishes the Retail Reckoning That Amazon
Started
Source Link: Brick & Mortar
Amazon hurt many retailers. Coronavirus will finish some of them off.
Even as malls and stores begin to reopen, the Covid-19 pandemic has taken a toll
on an industry already battered by the shift to online shopping. More than two
million retail jobs disappeared in April as many stores closed. The damage will be
clear Friday when the U.S. government reports what is expected to be one of the
worst months for retailers since World War II.
Roughly 100,000 stores are expected to close over the next five years—more than
triple the number that shut during the previous recession—as e-commerce jumps
to a quarter of U.S. retail sales from 15% last year.
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The turbocharged shift to e-commerce is expected to further depress profit
margins and accelerate a shakeout in a country that already had too much bricks-
and-mortar space for an increasingly digital world.
Just this month, luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group Inc., apparel seller J.Crew
Group Inc., J.C. Penney Co., and Stage Stores Inc., an operator of rural
department stores, have filed for bankruptcy protection. Collectively, they operated
roughly 2,500 stores last year and employed nearly 120,000 people.
7. Army Deploys Videogames to Reach Recruits Amid
Pandemic
Source Link: Video Soldiers
Army recruiters, unable to head to high schools and set up booths at state fairs
because of the coronavirus, are turning to videogame tournaments to reach prospective
soldiers..
The Army is tapping into the expertise of a squad of soldiers whose unusual full-time
job is to compete in online gaming. The recruiters help organize large online
tournaments where Army gamers meet prospective soldiers while avoiding face-to-face
gatherings.
But the overall lack of in-person engagement has led the Army’s recruiting effort to fall
behind its goal of nearly 70,000 recruits for the fiscal year ending in September.
To advance the recruiting effort, the Army is calling upon a relatively new team of
soldiers called the Army Esports Team. The team competes full time, just as soldiers
who box, bobsled or play rugby on Olympic teams do so as their full-time jobs for a time
while in uniform. Other branches, like the Navy and Air Force, have also launched their
own esports teams.
Technology Tidbits (A New Feature)
Construction crew hits underground fiber line, causes outage of 'call before you
dig' hotline. It looks like someone may have forgotten to call before they started
digging and now others are unable to do so due to an outage of the Colorado
811 hotline caused by a busted fiber line. A message on the Colorado 811
website says there's an outage in the communication system. It says an
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underground fiber line was damaged and it's causing "significant" outages in the
Denver area.
California skate park filled with sand to enforce social distancing backfires as dirt
bikers show up.
