Signal to Noise

Updates on the tech front. Devious stuff here.

More Android phones than ever are covertly listening for inaudible sounds in ads
May 2017, Ars Technica

There is a software called SilverPush that uses inaudible sounds embedded into TV commercials to secretly track you. This article says there are about 200 very popular Android apps that use it. (Very popular means downloaded millions of times.)

So your TV (and radio I assume? Wait, nobody listens to the radio anymore, Pandora, Spotify, etc.) emits "beacons," which are supersonic signatures of the commercial, which are then "heard" by this software via the microphone of your phone, but not heard by you.

This allows marketers to track the location of their listeners. Since the TV can't tell them who is listening to the commercials coming out of it, they let your phone do that instead. Now the advertisers who made the commercial can find out if you're near a retailer, for example, or exactly where you are in a department store.

I have to mention here, for folks who don't catch this - the fact that your phone is a -mobile- device has everything to do with its absolutely critical value to consumerism. You might not think it's important, but that data point (your location/time) is worth a lot to advertisers who are trying to understand their market. When you turn off your gps, or do-not-allow an app to access your location data, you're turning off the number one revenue channel for that app (which is why most apps simply won't work without it, or in this case, without accessing your microphone). I'm not trying to get people to disable their locations, or to not use apps that want your location, just saying - you should know how this ecosystem works, because you're a part of it!

This can also be used to push coupons to you when you're near a certian store. Nifty, huh? (?)

Oh, it gets way better, because they also use a cross-tracking application that ties your data with that of every other device around you. You remember those charts explaining what the NSA is doing with your data? It's like that, but for consumerism, not terrorism.

This info comes from a paper published at the 2nd annual IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy.


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How Burger King revealed the hackability of voice assistants
May 2017, phys.org

"Voice assistants such as Google Home, Apple's Siri and Amazon's Echo devices have always been susceptible to accidental hijack. A Google ad during the Super Bowl that used the phrase "OK, Google" reportedly set off people's devices. And in a January story that briefly turned a family into media celebrities, a woman's 6-year old daughter ordered a dollhouse and sugar cookies simply by asking Amazon's voice assistant Alexa for them."

Color Conspirators

Anybody remember when triangles brainwashed the entire world for like three years? And galaxy print, i.e. indigo-purple-pink.

The people who know what colour you'll like in 2019
Apr 2017, BBC

For those of your who like conspiracy theory, maybe you should know that there are people, in fact entire incorporated business ventures, who's sole purpose is to "offer information on current and future trends in fashion, interior design and lifestyle."

"Know what's next" is the tagline of WGSN, a London-based company. And one aspect of their prescience regards color. And in this linked article above, the woman spotlighted is working on 2019. So yes, there is a global conspiracy to predict and affect the colors you will like years from now.


A couple snips from the article:
Popular colours often reflect what's happening culturally and socially.

The growth of the sharing economy, in which people rent beds, cars and other assets directly from one another, means lighter colours such as pale blues could come into fashion.

"Sharing means lightness, you don't want to be bogged down so you're not looking at a heavy palette." -Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute

Colours such as brown, which a couple of decades ago was linked to the earth and dirt but is now associated with coffee and chocolate, reflects the growth of those industries, she says.

---No idea 'sharing was light-colored' but I do remember the world getting browner for a minute, like the whole back-to-the-earth movement, actually, the one that followed the green movement, when people were feeling all guilty that they couldn't live up to their sustainability expectations, and they decided to make all white things brown, to make it look like they were using shitty detergent. jk. But really, even Starbucks changed their paper cups from white to very, very, off-white.

A "vast movement of grey" began to emerge after the 2008 financial crisis.
-Mark Woodman, a product consultant and a former president of US-based colour forecasting trade body Color Marketing Group

The color purple became more popular circa the 2012 US presidential election, when undecided and neutral states began to be identified as purple by the media.


Further, about the practicality of choosing a color-of-the-year:
"Making sure the colours are easily achievable is critically important" -Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute

---What does she mean by this, "easily achievable?" I reviewed a book on the birth of color in the modern world, called the Color Revolution, which explains how we take for granted that products are colored consistently. For example, when you buy a telephone (haha) you don't think twice that the hard plastic handset and the flexible rubberized cord are the exact same color, but that was really, really hard to do, because all these things are made with different base materials, so the coloring agents interact differently with each of them.


Finally, favorite:
The names are important too. They (Pantone) almost chose "pea soup" as the color for 2017. Settled on "greenery" instead.


And some research for good measure:
ice hockey teams wearing darker-coloured tops were more likely to be penalised for aggressive fouls
-study link

wearing the colour red could increase the probability of winning sporting contests
-study link

Note that ultimately any link between color and behavior is bound to be culture-specific, because colors mean different things in different parts of the world. (And across time as well; don't forget that the pink/blue dichotomy was originally reversed.)


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Book Review of The Color Revolution
ReginaLee Blaszczyk, MIT Press 2012

Culture as Learned Probability System
2012, Network Address

Seeing Red
2013, Network Address

Cultural Evolution of Basic Color Terms
2013, Network Address

Please Hold While We Transfer Your Call

Trump's immigrant crime hotline trolled with calls about aliens and UFOs
May 2017, BBC

On the same day that I read a headline about a hotline that helps women trying to give themselves abortions, I see this one, about an illegal alien hotline that is being trolled by people reporting about actual aliens. Did someone say fake news? How the hell are you supposed to know what's even fake anymore?

So it turns out the abortion hotline, which I thought was a joke meant to draw attention to the lack of women's reproductive services, is real, and it is because - the abortion problem (as a result of lack of reproductive services) is already such a big deal that the hotline is necessary. Yup.

So many women are taking abortions into their own hands that they are dying as a result, and this is an available solution. Right.

But wait, there's more. A real hotline comes out that encourages people to report "criminal aliens" (this is the current terminology used to refer to what used to be called illegal aliens, but I guess now we're trying to specify illegal aliens that have also committed crimes). But like, come on, did you really think the term "criminal aliens" would not be the funniest thing ever to the entire internet? It actually sounds like a joke. Is there nobody up there who's job it is to go - "wait a minute, I know you know what you're talking about, but everyone else is gonna hear "criminal aliens" and just have a field day with this..." Nobody?

Sure enough, the hotline was brought to a standstill by people reciting X-Files episodes and all sorts of jewels from our cultural repository of alien encounters, with criminal aliens, that is.

Anyway, the next time you're reading the news, don't forget, the real news is so much better than the fake stuff.


POST SCRIPT

On the term "aliens" - Prior to 1940ish, the word alien meant foreigner.

Then what happened? HG Wells, that's what. He is the guy who wrote War of the Worlds, the narration of which was broadcast live on the radio, sparking mass hysteria, and ushering in the Little Green Man into the cultural imagination. Since then, the word alien means little green man, not foreigner.

Unfortunately, government moves about as fast as a 20th century spaceship (relatively, this is not very fast, like relative to the speed of light, for example), and so we're still using the word alien to refer to foreigners. Would somebody tell these guys??


see this post from Network Address on where "little green men" come from:

Culture Fail
July 2012, Network Address

It's A Wrap

Premature lambs kept alive in 'plastic bag' womb
April 2017, BBC

When you've got wombs like these, who needs humans?!

So being that humans have a hard time traveling in space, at the speed of light, etc., the way it works is that we put embryos in an artificial womb, complete with artificial moms and artificial breasts with you guessed it artificial milk. Then again, by the time this happens, we won't call any of this "artificial".

image source: Leonardo Da Vinci's study of a fetus in the womb

Who Fakes It Better

aka Fake China vs Fake North Korea

Just when you thought China was King Fake, you realize they aren't the only game in town.

This is pretty much a story about how North Korea does fake even more, but even worse, than China. It's true. Some weapons experts, or historians, or buffs, say that a showcasing parade of North Korea's military has fake weapons meant to look like real weapons that they don't actually have.

This link is to news.com.au, which is hungry for your potential consumerism, i.e., don't go here if you don't have ad-blockers because it will paralyze your browser.

Catch Em All

There's a lot about fake news and viral memes lately. That is exciting over here, because it's been a central theme at Network Address forever.

But wait...as I search the interwebs for a good image to go with this post, I am hit with an opportune eureka moment.

Viruses, memetic infection, etc., I'm looking for a picture of a kid getting vaccinated, or just jabbed with a needle. I knew I would have to contend with tempting distractions from both pro- and anti- vaccination data-bowels (just came up w that one, aka shit-spewing websites). And so, just one, I click on this chart which lists the characteristics of folks who do not vaccinate their kids. And, despite what you would think (unless everyone already knows this), those people tend to be wealthy and educated. I only point this out because it seems counter-intuitive that educated people would do something kinda stupid, like neglect the benefits of lifesaving medical treatment in lieu of the statistically benign chance of getting a totally pathologically-unknown condition of autism.

Anyway, the point is that the whole vaccines-thing is a meme, for sure, and memes are powerful, and they can even kill you. (Dan Dennett so eloquently points out in his talk about Dangerous Memes.) This meme has been spreading among a particular segment of the population. What is it that makes one person susceptible to one meme? How did this thing become a thing? Turns out there are some things happening like this. I want to know about how anti-vaccines became a thing, but in the meantime, we have this --

Researchers test 'social contagion' in laboratory setting

Apr 2017, phys.org

The results don't sound as interesting as the title, but I guess we should be happy nonetheless that these experiments are being done in a lab setting, instead of just observing any available social media data...

***

And here we have a good look at the effects of a viral campaign, what makes them work or not work; they're looking at the ALS ice bucket challenge, you remember that I'm sure --

Viral charity campaigns have a psychological 'recipe' and all-too-brief lifespan
Feb 2017, phys.org

This is just a clip, there's a better explanation in the article:
"Just as a flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long, so a rapid social consensus spike reaches an equally rapid saturation point.

"Once the social tipping point of a campaign has passed, momentum can decay quickly and the purpose can get diluted. Once the ALS campaign had reached peak virality, many people were just pouring cold water over their heads without necessarily referencing the charity."
-Dr Sander van der Linden, from Cambridge's Department of Psychology

image source: link

Liquid Crystals

I'm thinking the shapeshifting liquid nitrogen guy from Terminator, but this time it's made of crystals.

New quantum liquid crystals may play role in future of computers
Apr 2017, phys.org

"Liquid crystals fall somewhere in between a liquid and a solid: they are made up of molecules that flow around freely as if they were a liquid but are all oriented in the same direction, as in a solid. Liquid crystals can be found in nature, such as in biological cell membranes. Alternatively, they can be made artificially—such as those found in the liquid crystal displays commonly used in watches, smartphones, televisions, and other items that have display screens."