Post Consumer Product Phishing

A reversal of sorts, where the market used to have people who made things and people who bought things, but now it's just people taking things from other people, who get nothing in return.

The consumer became the product. Because let's face it, all DNA-testing sites are really just Ancestry dot com, which was based on early 20th century surveillance, similar to the very expensive advertising lists compiled from reams of public and non-public personal data. Think churches, governments and community organizations holding marriage certificates, military records, or payment accounting books. The DNA part was just like hanging a Store Closing All Items Half Price sign in the window. 

Granted, there are a few easy genes to tell you otherwise really obvious things about yourself. Are you Asian? That's ABCC11, called the 'no body odor' gene. I had no idea I was Asian until now actually, thank you DNA company. There'a another one for people of African origin, something related to sickle cell anemia and diabetes, called the HBB mutation.

Here's a better explanation:

"To understand the ancestry tests, you have to begin by looking at the fine print. This [type of test] says 'for recreational purposes only' or something very similar. It obviously is written by lawyers, not scientists, and it's a way of saying that the results have no scientific or legal standing. This is privatized, corporate science, not ordinary science. "How do they come up with numbers? They take DNA from people from disparate regions and compare yours to theirs. The numbers reflect a measure of your DNA similarity to those of the divergent gene pools. How do they calculate it? Don't know; the algorithms are protected intellectual property. Are they accurate? About as accurate as looking in the mirror."

--NPR, Why You Should Think Twice About Those DNA-By-Mail Results, 2017 [link]

It's not that the DNA-ancestry companies don't work at all, just that they work far, far less than they would have us believe (kind of like smart shoelaces or AI handlebars).  

In other words, when you give your DNA to a company for the purposes of discovering your ancestry, they're getting more usable information about you than you are about yourself. And then things like this happen:

 

DNA-testing site 23andMe fights for survival

Nov 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gm08nlxr3o

"Until we ban the trade in personal data, we are not well protected enough."

-Carissa Velez, author of Privacy is Power

Image credit: AI Art - Sandwich Man 3 - 2024

Something to consider - the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation has the Tabula Sapiens atlas of human tissue. (2022) [link]

I gave my DNA to tracking company - then it vanished

Nov 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7wl7rpndjo

A DNA-testing firm appears to have ceased trading - without telling its customers what has happened to the highly sensitive data they shared with it.

Atlas Biomed, which has offices in London, offered to provide insights into people's genetic make up as well as their predisposition to certain illnesses.

However, users are no longer able to access their personalised reports online and the company has not responded to the BBC's requests for comment.

Customers of the firm describe the situation as "very alarming" and say they want answers about what has happened to their "most personal information".

This next article seems different, but it's actually the same:

Smart gadgets’ failure to commit to software support could be illegal, FTC warns

Nov 2024, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/11/smart-gadgets-failure-to-commit-to-software-support-could-be-illegal-ftc-warns/

Makers of smart devices that fail to disclose how long they will support their products with software updates may be breaking the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned this week.

The FTC released its statement after examining 184 smart products across 64 product categories, including soundbars, video doorbells, breast pumps, smartphones, home appliances, and garage door opener controllers. Among devices researched, the majority—or 163 to be precise—"did not disclose the connected device support duration or end date" on their product webpage, per the FTC's report [PDF]. Contrastingly, 11.4 percent of devices examined shared a software support duration or end date on their product page.

Post Script on quality in the post-consumer era:

Majority of clothes being donated are exported or discarded: Study calls for city fashion waste shakeup

Nov 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-majority-donated-exported-discarded-city.html

Charities and collectors have been reporting the plummeting quality of garments over the past 15 to 20 years, decreasing resale potential

Further Reading: Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data, 2022

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/673341/privacy-is-power-by-carissa-veliz/

Artificial Reality Generator

New quantum random number generator achieves 2 Gbit/s speed

Jun 2024, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-06-quantum-random-generator-gbits.html

"The new photonic integrated circuit comprises two lasers that emit optical pulses with random phases due to quantum noise. 

PRNGs - pseudo random number generators (I think) refers to numbers produced by algorithm instead of a natural process like radio static, television fuzz, raindrops on a window, etc.

via Toshiba Europe Ltd: Davide G. Marangon et al, A fast and robust quantum random number generator with a self-contained integrated photonic randomness core, Nature Electronics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-024-01140-0.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41928-024-01140-0

Image credit: Beach sand - Zhang Chao Nikon Small World - 2024 [link]

The search for the random numbers that run our lives

Jul 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240704-the-search-for-the-random-numbers-that-run-our-lives

I'm mashing up the article here, and at this point I'm really not sure why it matters, if robots can do it (looking at you Apple-rewriting-BBC-headlines) why can't I?

Back in 1997, Haahr and three of his friends had been working on gambling software – digital slot machines and blackjack games that they wanted to host online, and he knew that they would need to be able to generate reliably random numbers. If these things weren't random, the digital casino wouldn't be very fair and players could even try to beat the system by looking for predictable patterns in the games. So they went and got a really crackly radio, a messy signal shaped by lightning and electromagnetic activity in the Earth's atmosphere, converted to ones and zeroes.

Computers aren't random because they rely on internal mechanisms that are at some level predictable. So people try other things, like listening to the racket of electrical storms, capturing pictures of raindrops on glass, and playing with the tiniest particles in the known Universe. 

The radio didn't make them rich, but it's still useful, and was made available to the public at random.org, where it has been churning out random numbers ever since the San Francisco Mayor's Office uses it to draw winners for affordable housing. Or scientists use it to randomise participants in experiments, marketing firms that give away prizes to consumers choose their winners, or employers use it for drug screening to select employees randomly, and one man uses it to choose which discs from his 700-strong CD collection to put into his car each week.

Cloudflare uses a wall of colourful lava lamps. Others use raindrops falling on glass, bubbles in a fish tank, the behaviour of a kitten, sequences in DNA, clicks of radioactive decay of a banana picked up with Geiger counters, wandering mooshroom cows in Minecraft, the movement of a mouse cursor on a computer screen, the time delay between key presses on a keyboard, the noise of traffic on a computer network, tiny particles of light arriving at a detector, photons emitted by a laser pulse.

But nothing is perfectly random, and we can never prove that something is perfectly random either. We can only prove that it's not random. 

But quantum randomness - a company called Quantum Dice is developing its own quantum-random-number-generating technology. But "If a photon hits the sensor, it will ever so slightly warm it up, possibly making it more or less sensitive to future strikes".

Also - When the chips are down, no matter how exquisite a random number generator is in principle, you still have to trust that the person running it hasn't lost their scruples.

Bonus: When random number generators don't do their jobs properly, you can expect that malicious people might try to exploit them. In 2017, Wired reported on the case of a Russian hacker who allegedly got people to film the activity of slot machines at casinos. Based on the results of each play, he was able to predict the workings of the machines' internal random number generators and, therefore, determine when they would next pay out.

Post Script:

Must Read - Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, by Natasha Dow Schüll, 2012

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_by_Design

To the Moon

The most dangerous place in the world for scientists to go is right in between fact and fiction, where the superstition meets the science, where the conspiracies become consensus. 

Granted, being that the purpose of science is to advance the perimeter of ignorance, all cutting edge science, all "new" science, exists in this liminal zone. Maybe this should be revised - it's not a scary place to be for the scientist, actually I'll bet it's pretty exciting. But it's a scary place for the person who has to explain said science to the general public, because it is confusing as hell. The truth is hard. Simple explanations for the fundamental rules of the universe are like military strategy - no plan survives first contact with the enemy. There are so many contingencies, that only the most deeply-steeped genius can tease them apart. And there's also the 'paradox of knowledge' to contend with, something about how the more you know about a thing the less able you are to talk about it in plain language, yet the less you know and the more you can talk about it easily, the lower the quality of your information. (I think nowadays we call that "low credibility information".)

And speaking of which, you've never had so much fun at a science lecture:

Sasquatch Distribution Modelling: Investigating patterns of Bigfoot sightings in North America

Annual Halloween lecture by Prof Joss Wright at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oct 31 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_upySOOzcI

So here we are - the origin of the word "lunatic" comes from "lunar" - suggesting to us, from generations long before we were even calling "science" "philosophy", that the moon makes us crazy. Yet behavioral scientists, neurologists, biologists, etc., all say that's ridiculous. The truth is between the two, and as usual it's complicated.  

Gravitational action of sun and moon influences behavior of animals and plants

Jan 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-01-gravitational-action-sun-moon-behavior.html

Gravitational cycles do not only affect the simplest organisms. Scientific studies have found that humans kept in the dark tend to establish a cyclical fluctuation lasting 24.4 - 24.8 hours, in harmony with the lunar cycle. This tendency has also been noted in people who spend long periods in caves. It conditions the alternation of sleep and wakefulness, meal times, and other metabolic functions.

via University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil: Cristiano de Mello Gallep et al, Are cyclic plant and animal behaviours driven by gravimetric mechanical forces?, Journal of Experimental Botany (2021). DOI: 10.1093/jxb/erab462

http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jxb/erab462

Image credit: Who am I kidding, this has become futile.

As for the rest of this post, just moon things in general:

Moon cave discovered that could one day house humans

Jul 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce784r9njz0o

Scientists have for the first time discovered a cave on the Moon.

At least 100m deep, it could be an ideal place for humans to build a permanent base, they say. Countries are racing to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, but they will need to protect astronauts from radiation, extreme temperatures, and space weather.

Humans could potentially be living in lunar pits in 20-30 years.

They found the cave by using radar to penetrate the opening of a pit on a rocky plain called the Mare Tranquillitatis. It is visible to the naked eye from Earth, and is also where Apollo 11 landed in 1969.

Moon landing live: US spacecraft Odysseus begins Moon landing descent

Feb 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/science-environment-68349490?src_origin=BBCS_BBC

Odysseus successfully landed on the surface of the Moon, officially making Intuitive Machines the first commercial company to successfully land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.

Odysseus is also carrying 125 tiny sculptures made by US artist Jeff Koons, making them the first artworks land on the lunar surface.

Researchers figure out how to keep clocks on the Earth, Moon in sync

Aug 2024, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/08/researchers-figure-out-how-to-keep-clocks-on-the-earth-moon-in-sync/

So, the International Astronomical Union has a resolution that calls for a "Lunar Celestial Reference System" and "Lunar Coordinate Time" to handle things there. On Monday, two researchers at the National institute of Standards and Technology, Neil Ashby and Bijunath Patla, did the math to show how this might work.

The Astronomical Journal, 2024. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ad643a

http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ad643a

Post Script:

1. We put reflectors on the moon, which you can still see from Earth.

2. The lunar calendar has 354 days, and the Egyptian calendar has 365. This averages to 360, which is coincidentally the number of degrees in a circle. (Is it really a coincidence?)

--via University of Glasgow: An Improved Calendar Ring Hole-Count for the Antikythera Mechanism. Graham Woan, Joseph Bayley. The Horological Journal, July 2024. bhi.co.uk; https://phys.org/news/2024-06-gravitational-antikythera-mechanism-mystery.html

The Face of the Dimensional Liberator

The fractals are coming. 

New study reveals brain's fractal-like structure near phase transition, a finding that may be universal across species

Jun 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-reveals-brain-fractal-phase-transition.html

Now, a new Northwestern University study has discovered that the brain's structural features reside in the vicinity of a similar critical point - either at or close to a structural phase transition. Surprisingly, these results are consistent across brains of humans, mice and fruit flies, which suggests the finding might be universal.

Although the researchers don't know between which phases the brain's structure is transitioning, they say this new information could enable new designs for computational models of the brain's complexity and emergent phenomena.

Brain cells are arranged in a fractal-like statistical pattern at different scales. Self-similarity, long-range correlations and broad size distributions are all signatures of a critical state, where features are neither too organized nor too random. 

"These are things we see in all critical systems in physics"

The researchers were amazed to find that all brain samples studied—from humans, mice and fruit flies—have consistent critical exponents across organisms, meaning they share the same quantitative features of criticality. The underlying, compatible structures among organisms hint that a universal governing principle might be at play. 

via Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences: Helen S. Ansell et al, Unveiling universal aspects of the cellular anatomy of the brain, Communications Physics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s42005-024-01665-y

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42005-024-01665-y

Image credit: Cross section of European beach grass Ammophila arenaria leaf - Gerhard Vlcek Nikon Small World 7th Place - 2024 [link]

Can a computer chip have zero energy loss in 1.58 dimensions?

Jul 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-chip-energy-loss-dimensions.html

Many states without energy loss might exist somewhere in between one and two dimensions. At 1.58 dimensions - By growing a chemical element (bismuth) on top of a semiconductor (indium antimonide), the scientists in China obtained fractal structures that were spontaneously formed, upon varying the growth conditions. The scientists in Utrecht then theoretically showed that, from these structures, zero-dimensional corner modes and lossless one-dimensional edge states emerged.

"The fractals behave like two dimensional topological insulators at finite energies and at the same time exhibit, at zero energy, a state at its corners that could be used as a qubit, the building blocks of quantum computers. Hence, the discovery opens new paths to the long-wished qubits."

In follow-up research, the experimental group in China will try to grow a superconductor on top of the fractal structure. These fractals have many holes, and there are lossless currents running around many of them. Those could be used for energy efficient processing of information. They also exhibit zero-energy modes at their corners, thus combining the best of the one-dimensional and two-dimensional worlds. "If this works, it might reveal even more unexpected secrets hidden at dimension 1.58."

via the QuMAT consortium at Utrecht University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University: Canyellas, R., et al. Topological edge and corner states in bismuth fractal nanostructures. Nature Physics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-024-02551-8

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02551-8

Required Post Script:

If you didn't think you'd be getting an obligatory Isaac Asimov lesson here then I don't know where you think you are: Isaac Asimov wrote a story called Robot Dreams, and that's where we get our Laws of Robotics. Seriously, and this is why science and art need each other to continue to be relevant to humans. In the story, a robot named Elvex (LVX-1) is updated with "fractal geometry" because they thought it would "produce a brain pattern with more complexity, possibly closer to that of a human". The robot begins to dream about self-preservation, in direct opposition to the Laws of Robots, and is subsequently killed ("killed").

Physicists explain how fractional charge in pentalayer graphene could work

Nov 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-physicists-fractional-pentalayer-graphene.html

Fractal Man, explained:

They found that the moiré arrangement of pentalayer graphene, in which each lattice-like layer of carbon atoms is arranged atop the other and on top of the boron-nitride, induces a weak electrical potential. When electrons pass through this potential, they form a sort of crystal, or a periodic formation, that confines the electrons and forces them to interact through their quantum correlations.

This electron tug-of-war creates a sort of cloud of possible physical states for each electron, which interacts with every other electron cloud in the crystal, in a wavefunction, or a pattern of quantum correlations, that gives the winding that should set the stage for electrons to split into fractions of themselves.

"This is a completely new mechanism, meaning in the decades-long history, people have never had a system go toward these kinds of fractional electron phenomena."

Note: Two other research teams - one from Johns Hopkins University, and the other from Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - have each published similar results in the same issue.

via MIT: Zhihuan Dong et al, Theory of Quantum Anomalous Hall Phases in Pentalayer Rhombohedral Graphene Moiré Structures, Physical Review Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.206502.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.206502

The Economy of Self Ingestion and Digital Replica Management

The self-replicate never sounded so good. 

Senate’s NO FAKES act hopes to make unauthorized “digital replicas” illegal

Aug 2024, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/senates-no-fakes-act-hopes-to-make-unauthorized-digital-replicas-illegal/

Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act of 2024. [link]

The NO FAKES Act would create legal recourse for people whose digital representations are created without consent. It would hold both individuals and companies liable for producing, hosting, or sharing these unauthorized digital replicas, including those created by generative AI. Due to generative AI technology that has become mainstream in the past two years, creating audio or image media fakes of people has become fairly trivial, with easy photorealistic video replicas likely next to arrive.

To protect a person's digital likeness, the NO FAKES Act introduces a "digital replication right" that gives individuals exclusive control over the use of their voice or visual likeness in digital replicas. This right extends 10 years after death, with possible five-year extensions if actively used. It can be licensed during life and inherited after death, lasting up to 70 years after an individual's death. Along the way, the bill defines what it considers to be a "digital replica":

DIGITAL REPLICA - The term "digital replica" means a newly created, computer-generated, highly realistic electronic representation that is readily identifiable as the voice or visual likeness of an individual that - (A) is embodied in a sound recording, image, audiovisual work, including an audiovisual work that does not have any accompanying sounds, or transmission - (i) in which the actual individual did not actually perform or appear; or (ii) that is a version of a sound recording, image, or audiovisual work in which the actual individual did perform or appear, in which the fundamental character of the performance or appearance has been materially altered; and (B) does not include the electronic reproduction, use of a sample of one sound recording or audiovisual work into another, remixing, mastering, or digital remastering of a sound recording or audiovisual work authorized by the copyright holder.

Image credit: AI Art - Holding Hands 2 - 2023

Post Script:

Digital twin method can boost wireless network speed and reliability

Jul 2024, phys.org and written by Matt Shipman the original

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-digital-twin-method-boost-wireless.html

"Systems can't put everything in edge caches, and storing too much redundant data on an edge server can slow down the server if the data are using too many computational resources. As a result, systems are constantly making decisions about which data packages to store and which data packages can be evicted.

The new edge caching optimization method, called D-REC, uses a digital twin to take real-time data from the wireless network and uses it to conduct simulations to predict which data are most likely to be requested by users. These predictions are then sent back to the network to inform the network's edge caching decisions. Because the simulations are performed by a computer that is outside of the network, this does not slow down network performance.

via North Carolina State University: Zifan Zhang et al, Digital Twin-Assisted Data-Driven Optimization for Reliable Edge Caching in Wireless Networks, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1109/JSAC.2024.3431575

https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2024.3431575

Graphene's End

Since its discovery in 2004, graphene has been heralded as the wonder material of the 21st century, and has been featured here quite often. It's spawned a whole new field of science basically, and it's called metameterials science, based on what's called two-dimensional materials. Twenty years later, we've reached peak graphene, with the news now being taken over by all things -ene, such as goldene or borophene, as seen below:

'Better than graphene' material development may improve implantable technology

May 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-05-graphene-material-implantable-technology.html

Borophene - It's the new graphene, impregnated with boron atoms, which makes it do even crazier things than graphene.

via Pennsylvania State University: Teresa Aditya et al, Chiral Induction in 2D Borophene Nanoplatelets through Stereoselective Boron–Sulfur Conjugation, ACS Nano (2024). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.4c01792

https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.4c01792

Image credit: I can find no other credits except for a "3D-news" but this image is possibly related to 2010 Nobel Prize winner Andre Geim, who discovered graphene at University of Manchester in 2004. 

Electric fields boost graphene's potential, study shows

Jun 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-electric-fields-boost-graphene-potential.html

From the home of graphene, Manchester University:

"We demonstrate that electric field effects can disentangle and accelerate electrochemical processes in 2D crystals. This could be combined with state-of-the-art catalysts to efficiently drive complex processes like CO2 reduction, which remain enormous societal challenges."

"Control of these processes gives our graphene devices dual functionality as both memory and logic gate. This paves the way for new computing networks that operate with protons. This could enable compact, low-energy analog computing devices."

via University of Manchester National Graphene Institute: Jincheng Tong et al, Control of proton transport and hydrogenation in double-gated graphene, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07435-8.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07435-8

Post Script: Moiré lattices is where you go when graphene ends, so:

Twist-angle in moiré lattice controls valley polarization switching in heterostructures

May 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-05-angle-moir-lattice-valley-polarization.html

In case you were wondering, "they demonstrated for the first time the dependence of valley polarization switching and polarization degree on the moiré period by twist engineering in electrically controlled transition metal dichalcogenide heterobilayers". 

via Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. Xu Xiulai of Peking University: Danjie Dai et al, Twist angle–dependent valley polarization switching in heterostructures, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ado1281

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ado1281

Artificial Omnipotence

But it's a good idea to allow third-party servicers of municipal parking payment applications to store our license plates in their probably completely unsecured databases:

Flaw in Kia’s web portal let researchers track, hack cars

Sep 2024, Ars Technica from Wired

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/09/flaw-in-kia-web-portal-let-researchers-track-hack-cars/

They were able to scan virtually any Internet-connected Kia vehicle’s license plate and within seconds gain the ability to track that car’s location, unlock the car, honk its horn, or start its ignition at will.

Post Script: The Kia-hacking research group first began to assemble in late 2022 when they accidentally triggered rental scooters across their collge campus to honk and flash their lights for 15 minutes. At that point, the group “became super interested in trying more ways to make more things honk.