How the device works: Just before you hit the beach, you mount the M&M-sized sensor on your fingernail. Then, at any point during the day, you swipe the wearable with your phone. The contact activates near-field communications and sends data about your sun exposure to your mobile device.
What do you think? Would you wear a fingernail UV sensor?
from NASA Tech Briefs http://ift.tt/2GALCbQ
via IFTTT
This week’s INSIDER featured a story about one company’s transition to Internet-enabled data logging. The deployed system allowed the repair center’s users to remotely analyze a part’s vibration measurements. We want to hear from you. Have you implemented Bluetooth- or Internet-enabled data logging?
from NASA Tech Briefs http://ift.tt/2EumRNS
via IFTTT
Uber’s piloting a new service in San Francisco alongside dockless bike-sharing startup Jump. Uber Bike will let users rent one of Jump’s 250 bikes, charging $2 for the first 30 minutes and an additional per-minute fee thereafter. Jump was granted a permit by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency earlier this month, which made it the first company to operate a dockless bike-sharing program in the city. Jump’s 250 bikes should launch around the city between now and March and the SFMTA may allow the company to release 250 more after nine months, depending on how things go. The permit was issued for 18 months, during which the SFMTA will evaluate the program and the public’s response.
Uber’s pilot program will initially be available to users who travel in the areas of San Francisco where Jump’s electric bikes will be available. Others will be able to join a wait list. "We’re always kind of searching for options to make transportation affordable and more accessible for people," Andrew Salzberg, Uber’s head of transportation policy, told TechCrunch. "It fits into this larger vision, we think, that there can be multiple modes of transportation that can be made available through the Uber app. There are lot of places where there are many trips that it’s probably going to be quicker and cheaper to hop on a bike. Strategically, it makes a lot of sense for us as a business."
This program certainly isn’t the only bike-sharing option in San Francisco. Ford launched a GoBike program in 2017 and its fleet should number 7,000 bikes by the end of this year. However, Ford’s bikes must be docked at a station whereas Jump’s can be left wherever it’s legal to park a bike. For now, Ford’s fleet is made up of traditional bikes, but by April it will have pedal-assist electric bikes as well. Last year, another dockless bike-sharing company, LimeBike, said it had applied for permits to operate in San Francisco, but while the city’s pilot program with Jump is ongoing, it won’t grant permits to any other dockless programs. LimeBike does have a program up and running in nearby South San Francisco.
Uber says that it’s focusing on the San Francisco pilot for now, but it could be adopted more widely in the future. "You don’t do a pilot if you don’t have hopes to make it a vision for the future," Salzberg told TechCrunch.
Google’s flight booking service just added two updates that could make flying slightly less frustrating—or at least help you manage your expectations.
Drug companies hosed tiny towns in West Virginia with a deluge of addictive and deadly opioid pills over the last decade, according to an ongoing investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
For instance, drug companies collectively poured 20.8 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills into the small city of Williamson, West Virginia, between 2006 and 2016, according to a set of letters the committee released Tuesday. Williamson’s population was just 3,191 in 2010, according to US Census data.
“These numbers are outrageous, and we will get to the bottom of how this destruction was able to be unleashed across West Virginia,†committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) said in a joint statement to the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
The letters released Tuesday are addressed to two regional drug distributors, Ohio-based Miami-Luken and Illinois-based HD Smith. Both companies have distributed eye-popping numbers of pills to small cities in the state. In the letters, the committee lays out distribution data it has collected and asks questions about the companies’ distribution practices, including why they increased distribution so sharply in some towns and why they didn’t flag suspicious orders.
But Miami-Luken and HD Smith are not the only distributors that have drawn the committee’s attention. The letters are just the latest in the committee’s ongoing probe into what it calls “pill dumping†amid the opioid crisis. Last year, the committee sent similar letters to three other drug companies, asking about their drug distribution in the state. The committee also sent a letter to Miami-Luken asking for information about its distribution practices and orders in West Virginia, among other things.
Miami-Luken followed through by providing some data and requested files, according to the committee. But those new pieces of information “raise a number of additional questions,†according to the committee.
Doused with doses
Combining data collected from the Drug Enforcement Administration and Miami-Luken, the House Energy and Commerce Committee dove into the situation in Williamson. Between 2006 and 2016, drug distributors collectively shipped 20.8 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to two pharmacies in the small city. Those pharmacies were located roughly four blocks apart from each other, the committee noted. Miami-Luken alone supplied 6.4 million of those pills to just one of the pharmacies between 2008 and 2015. And between 2008 and 2009, the company inexplicably increased the amount of pills it delivered by 350 percent. The committee pressed Miami-Luken to explain how a town of 3,191 people could require such massive supplies and why the increases didn’t raise alarms.
The letter also reveals that in Kermit, West Virginia, a town of just 406 people, the company delivered 6.3 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills between 2005 and 2011. For just the year of 2008, the numbers work out to Miami-Luken providing 5,624 opioid painkiller pills for every man, woman, and child in the town, the committee notes.
Likewise, Miami-Luken also delivered 4.4 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to the 1,394-person town of Oceana, West Virginia, between 2008 and 2015. And in Beckley, West Virginia, the company didn’t hesitate to fulfill a string of orders for tens of thousands of opioid doses placed by one pharmacy in the span of five days.
Craving answers
The House committee repeatedly asked if the company thought these orders were appropriate and what limits—if any—it would set on such small towns.
Miami-Luken did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars.
The committee had similar questions for HD Smith, who delivered 1.3 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to a pharmacy in Kermit—the 406-person town—in 2008.
“If these figures are accurate, HD Smith supplied this pharmacy with nearly five times the amount a rural pharmacy would be expected to receive,†the committee wrote. It noted that the owner of that Kermit pharmacy later spent time in federal prison for violations of the Controlled Substance Act. Still, the committee pressed the question of whether HD Smith thought its distribution practices were appropriate.
“We will continue to investigate these distributors’ shipments of large quantities of powerful opioids across West Virginia, including what seems to be a shocking lack of oversight over their distribution practices,†representatives Walden and Pallone told the Gazette-Mail.
The paper also noted that West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey was a former lobbyist for a trade group that represented Miami-Luken and other drug companies. In 2016, Morrisey ended several state lawsuits with drug companies, including one with Miami-Luken. The lawsuits, filed by the state’s former attorney general, Darrell McGraw, alleged that the companies flooded the state with opioid painkillers.
Quantum cryptography allows communication that is guaranteed to be secure, thanks to the laws of physics. And it is becoming increasingly important.
Physicists have long known that quantum computers will be able to break almost all other types of cryptography. Since these devices are becoming more capable, the writing is on the wall for conventional encryption. So commercial businesses, governments, and the military are all waiting with bated breath for practical quantum cryptography systems to be developed.
But there is a problem. The quantum cryptography relies on individual photons to carry quantum information. But even the best optical fibers can carry these photons only so far—around 200 kilometers—before light absorption makes the process impossible. So quantum cryptography has never worked over much longer distances.
Today that changes, thanks to an extraordinary Chinese satellite launched in in 2016. The Micius satellite has racked up a number of milestones in the year or so since it started operating. Last summer, it teleported the first object from Earth to orbit—a single photon.
Now the satellite has set up the first intercontinental quantum cryptography service. Researchers have tested the system by setting up a secure videoconference between Europe and China. For the first time, the security of this videoconference was guaranteed by the laws of physics.
The method is straightforward. Quantum cryptography relies on what’s called a one-time pad to guarantee privacy. This is a set of random numbers—a key—that can be used by two parties to encode and decode a message.
Traditionally, the problem with one-time pads is in ensuring that only the transmitter and the receiver have them. How can both parties be sure that no eavesdropper has copied the key while it is distributed?
This problem is neatly solved by sending the key using quantum particles such as photons, since it is always possible to tell whether a quantum particle has been previously observed. If it has, the key is abandoned and another sent until both parties are sure they are in possession of an unobserved one-time pad.
That’s quantum key distribution—the crucial process at the heart of quantum cryptography. After both parties have the key—the one-time pad—they can communicate over ordinary classic channels with perfect security.
The Micius satellite simply distributes this key from orbit. Because it is in a sun-synchronous orbit over the poles, the satellite passes over every part of the Earth’s surface at roughly the same local time each day.
So when the satellite is over the Chinese ground station at Xinglong in China’s northern Hebei province, it sends the one-time pad to the ground, encoded in single photons using a well-established protocol. As the Earth rotates beneath the satellite and as the ground station at Graz in Austria comes into view, Micius sends the same one-time pad to the receiver there.
The two locations then both possess the same key that allows them to initiate completely secure communication over a classic link.
However, the experiment goes one step further. The goal was to set up a videoconference between the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, so the key has to be distributed securely to both these locations. And for that the teams use ground-based quantum communication over optical fibers.
Finally, they set up a video link secured by the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) that is refreshed every second by 128-bit seed codes. In September, they held a pioneering videoconference that lasted for 75 minutes with a total data transmission of roughly two gigabytes.
“We have demonstrated intercontinental quantum communication among multiple locations on Earth with a maximal separation of 7,600 kilometers,†say the teams, which are led by Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna and by Jian-Wei Pan at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, China.
There are some potential weaknesses in the system to work on for the future. Perhaps the most significant is that the satellite is considered secure during the time it takes to connect the two ground stations. That may well be true—who could hack an orbiting satellite?—but this security is not guaranteed by the laws of physics. However, the teams say that this can be addressed in future designs with an end-to-end quantum relay.
Whatever the shortcomings, this is impressive work. It is a proof-of-principle demonstration of secure communication on a global scale. “Our work points towards an efficient solution for an ultralong-distance global quantum network, laying the groundwork for a future quantum Internet,†say Zeilinger, Jian-Wei, and their colleagues.
Plenty of governments, military operators, and commercial businesses are eager for a similar capability. So it surely won’t be long before commercial versions of the Micius satellite are selling this kind of secure communication around the world. With China leading the way.
Released in 2014, Monero was designed to keep its users anonymous. That’s made it a popular cryptocurrency for the dark web black market, where dealers accept it in exchange for guns, drugs and stolen credit cards, according to a Wired report in early 2017.
But in the past year Monero surged into the mainstream. It’s currently the 13th most valuable cryptocurrency in the world, and priced at $275 according to CoinMarketCap. It also popped up on a number of recentlists predicting Monero could be one of Bitcoin’s biggest rivals heading into 2018.
Here’s what you need to know about Monero, where it comes from, where it’s headed, and how to buy some.
What is Monero?
Like Bitcoin, Monero’s origins are a bit of a mystery. The cryptocurrency was first outlined in 2013 by Nicolas van Saberhagen, which is likely a pseudonym for the anonymous creator (or group of creators). It was coded into existence by another anonymous creator with the user name “thankful_for_today†and given the name “Bitmonero†(“monero†means coin in Esperanto). In 2014, the currency was forked, creating the Monero coin that’s popular today.
Monera was created to solve one particular issue with Bitcoin: anonymity. It’s possible to stay anonymous with Bitcoin, but because of the way the blockchain works all transactions can be tracked to the accounts involved. It’s also possible to see how much Bitcoin is stored in someone’s account.
As long as you keep your identity secret that’s not an issue, but once you attach your name to any Bitcoin-related deal it’s easy for other people to track you down. That’s a big problem if you’re using Bitcoin to do something illegal (like buy drugs on the dark web), and that’s where Monero comes in.
Monero uses a few methods to keep people anonymous. The first is “stealth addresses,†meaning your blockchain address is encrypted so it can’t be linked back to you. Monero also groups each transaction with hundreds of others, making it harder to trace one particular sale, and hides the amount of currency being spent in each deal.
What’s Next for Monero?
Beyond drug deals, Monero could help solve a lot of other issues facing Bitcoin as it becomes mainstream. In the future you may be able to pay your rent in cryptocurrency, but with Bitcoin the landlord could trace your account and see how much money you have. Monero keeps you anonymous so that people you pay won’t also be privy to your larger financial picture.
Monero may also be on the verge of partnering with another rising cryptocurrency with a little more name recognition. Litecoin founder Charlie Lee recently tweeted that he’s interested in working with Monero so the two currencies could be easily exchanged.
In the meantime, Monero has plenty of competition. Dash (currently valued at $685 per coin) uses a similar strategy of bundling transactions together to keep everyone anonymous. Zcash ($385 at the time of writing) takes anonymity a step further, claiming its encryption makes it mathematically impossible to trace.
How to Buy Monero
You can’t buy Monero on Coinbase (the most popular digital currency exchange in the U.S.), but there are plenty of other options.
A handful of exchanges will let you buy Monero with government-backed money, including popular service like Kraken and Bitfinex. You can also use a website like LocalMonero or MoneroForCash to find someone interested in selling to you directly.