Day: April 12, 2018

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Quantum Mechanics Creates a Totally Random Number Generator

Quantum Mechanics Creates a Totally Random Number Generator

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Peter Bierhorst’s machine is no pinnacle of design. Nestled in the Rocky Mountains inside a facility for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the photon-generating behemoth spans an entire building. Its lasers, mirrors, and lenses are split among three laboratories, two of them at opposite ends of the L-shaped building. The whole thing is strung together with almost 900 feet of optical fiber. “It’s a prototype system,” the mathematician explains. “Something might drift out of alignment, and the whole thing stops working. It might take a few days to figure out what went wrong.”

On a good day, the machine produces 1,024 bits of data every 10 minutes, equivalent to typing 13 letters per minute. But it promises what even monkeys on typewriters can’t: completely random text.

Which is much more important than you might think. Cryptography protocols, like the ones that secure your credit card info online and your encrypted e-mails, rely on long strings of random numbers. The less guessable the number, the higher the security.

But the numbers often aren’t as random as you’d hope. “There are a number of papers that show weaknesses in cryptography because keys don’t have enough randomness,” says Grégoire Ribordy, the CEO of ID Quantique, a Swiss company that makes commercial random number generators. Some devices actually encrypt information using algorithm-generated numbers—which means that if you guess the algorithm, the numbers are entirely predictable. Other random number generators might convert electrical noise, like small fluctuations in voltage, into strings of numbers. But over time, these generators deteriorate and end up producing numbers that exhibit patterns. (Typing monkeys would exhibit patterns too, dictated by the relative lengths of their fingers and the layout of the QWERTY keyboard.) Any discernible pattern is a security risk.

Which is why, a couple years ago, Bierhorst’s team decided to develop a number generator that was perfectly, provably random. In the cryptography world, that means “numbers that cannot be predicted,” says Ribordy. And what’s random? Quantum mechanics.

It’s like this: Even if you repeat a quantum experiment by preparing a quantum particle in exactly the same initial state, subjecting it to the exact same conditions, measuring its orientation after the same amount of time, you can still end up with totally different results. This is unlike flipping a quarter, where its initial conditions—the force of your thumb, the direction of the winds—determine the outcome before it lands. The outcome of “flipping” a tiny quantum particle only exists as probabilities until the moment it “lands.” Electrons, photons, and atoms are really, actually random.

For several years now, companies like Ribordy’s have sold quantum random number generators based on photons. The encoding scheme can get complicated, but more or less, photons oriented in one direction represent 1, while ones oriented in another direction represent 0. However, these products still have a potential vulnerability. Someone—or something, like environmental noise—could have infiltrated the machine and inserted bias into the photons’ states, a blemish on their perfect randomness. A user can’t prove that these generators are random, says Ribordy.

So Bierhorst’s team set out to design a machine that could prove its own randomness. This involved a lot of math. Using a quantum mechanics theorem known as Bell’s inequality, Bierhorst designed a test that could show whether anything could have tampered with the photons to introduce patterns or bias. You can apply this test every time you generate a number, and it spits out a number that tells you, for sure, whether anyone has messed with its representative photon.

They added an extra feature to ultra-certify the number generator’s randomness: In order to for someone to mess with output numbers, they’d also have to tamper with a detector in one lab while simultaneously signaling to someone else at another detector what they’d done.

That’s why they built the machine to be so huge. A hacker would have to send a message faster than the speed of light to signal opposite ends of the machine. Which is, according to the laws of physics, impossible. Their machine produces random signals encoded in photons, and nothing can alter the photons unless it can travel faster than light. QED.

It’s not clear whether this machine could eventually be marketable, says Ribordy. It’s too expensive right now, requiring a pricey cooling system—and it’s very large. For encryption, they’d also need to generate random numbers faster. Eventually, it would be great if they shrank the setup to fit on a chip, says Bierhorst: a random number generator in every laptop, so that nobody ever uses those algorithm-based numbers for encryption again.

But at NIST, he’s not worrying about commercializing the technology. Instead, they want to turn it into a public service: an online, government-run, reliably random number generator.

Beginning in 2013, they’ve actually offered a beta version of this service, called the NIST Randomness Beacon. It produces a 512-bit random number every minute and is currently based on commercial random number generators, but they want to incorporate Bierhorst’s machine into the system soon.

Since these numbers are public, they can’t be used for encryption. But Rene Peralta, a NIST computer scientist in charge of the service, says that governments are interested in using the random number generators to prevent corruption. For example, Peralta is working with the government of Chile to potentially use the Randomness Beacon for running government audits. They’d like to use random numbers to fairly choose which officials to audit, which will also help them avoid accusations of collusion. Brazil’s government, too, is interested in using random numbers to assign court cases to judges, in an effort to show the citizens that the judicial system is fair.

But for Bierhorst, the random number generator isn’t just a practical tool. His tests are further evidence that quantum mechanics particles really do exist in weird probabilities and can’t be predetermined. “It’s exciting to be able to say that randomness exists in the universe,” he says. And now, maybe—we can use that randomness to secure our digital destinies.

Quantum Cryptography

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via Wired Top Stories https://ift.tt/2uc60ci

April 11, 2018 at 12:03PM

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This Free And Easy App Can Prevent You From Getting Ripped Off At A Car Dealership

This Free And Easy App Can Prevent You From Getting Ripped Off At A Car Dealership

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There are all kinds of websites, platforms and startups that are supposed be “disrupting” the whole car buying process, yet every day people end up with bad deals. But the most powerful tool is something buyers have had for a while, and they don’t even have to download it.

It comes with pretty much every single smartphone, and has even existed in physical form for many, many years. It helps you do all sorts of calculations, from addition and subtraction to complex algebra.

It’s a calculator.

That’s right: the simple calculator is your first line of defense against a car deal that is either not competitive or will put you over your head when it comes to the payments.

Recently, our man Ryan Felton wrote up a fantastic investigative piece on an auto loan loophole in New York that legally allows dealers and lenders to charge astronomical interest rates to folks putting them in situations where the debt is absolutely crushing. It’s because it’s not a loan, but a “service contract”, even though they are effectively the same thing.

Here is an excerpt:

“Guerrero-Roa went to an auto dealer in Brooklyn to purchase a 2005 Lexus RX that was being advertised online for $6,900….What Guerrero-Roa didn’t realize was the transaction he’d signed off on actually required him to pay $18,998.40 for the car over 48 months.”

Don’t blame these folks, necessarily. The reason so many people get trapped by these outfits so often is because having a car is a crucial part of their financial survival, and if they lack the funds or the credit to get their car through a more legit means, they end up in places where the business model is built upon taking advantage of the desperate.

Obviously, these rules are intentionally predatory. But you can protect yourself.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, or even if you are buying a car from what seems like a legit establishment, the use of your calculator is key. Here is a quick way to find out if the deal is a bad one for you.

Take the monthly payment quoted to you and multiply it by the term of the loan. In the case of the gentleman above, he was purchasing a $6,900 used Lexus with payments that would have amounted to about $395 per month on a 48-month loan.

By multiplying $395 by 48 we get a total of $18,998. That is over twice the amount of the car!

Now that case was an extreme one, but even folks with good credit can get hooked into a raw deal if they don’t run the numbers. Not long ago I wrote a piece about dealers advertising prices without disclosing additional fees. Some friends of mine were shopping for a minivan and it had an advertised price of $14,995. But when the dealers pushed the papers on them they saw a payment of $283 per month on a 72-month loan that assumed a $3,000 down payment.

So they did what any smart buyer would do and got out their calculator and multiplied $283 by 72 to get a total of $20,376. Then they added that $3,000 downpayment in with a grand total of $23,376. If they had taken that deal they would have spent more than $23,000 on a car that supposedly retailed for under $15,000.

Of course, the reason for this vast difference was a bevy of unnecessary and overpriced extra dealer fees and an interest rate that they could have easily beaten through their credit union. Needless to say, they ended up buying elsewhere

A general rule of thumb is that if the total loan amount is vastly greater than the sale price of the vehicle you are buying, do not sign the contract. Walk away.

Now the advanced lifehack to this whole calculator trick is to run the numbers before you go car shopping, and this will require several calculations. The first is taking an honest, hard look at your monthly income and deciding how much of that money can you safely allocate for a car payment and also know how much you have for a down payment. If you ignore this step, the chances of you taking a loan that is beyond your means have increased dramatically.

The next step is knowing what your credit score is. There are several free resources that can give you a ballpark of your credit score. While your actual score may be different when it comes to getting a car loan, these numbers will give you a general idea on where you stand. If the FICO reads above 700, chances are you will get the best rates; if it’s in the 600s you will likely get approved but the rates can vary. Below 600 means that you are going to have a hard time getting a loan from a major lender, though it may not be impossible.

Once you know your credit, you should either download or find an auto loan calculator. This will allow you to plug in the three components of a loan: the principal, the term and the rate to get payment calculation. It can be tricky because it will require some trial and error to find the vehicle price range that will line up with your payment. For the sake of running some example calculations, let’s say you have a target payment of $400 per month, and available $2,500 down. A credit score in the high 600 range and you were looking to spend around $25,000 on a new or used car.

You would take $25,000 and subtract your $2,500 down for a remainder of $22,500. In the section for “loan amount,” you plug in $22,500. In the section for “loan term,” you have to decide how long you want your loan to be.

The longer the loan the higher the risk of being underwater, so no more than a five year loan (60 months) is usually recommended. On a new car with a solid resale value maybe you can stretch it to a six year (72 month) loan.

And finally, you need to plug in your interest rate, or APR. This takes a bit of guesswork, but someone within the 600 FICO range is probably going to be somewhere in the ballpark of eight percent. It could be lower or it could be higher; it’s best to use conservative numbers for this exercise.

Screenshot: AutoLoanCalculator.com

After all the values are put in, we get a payment of $456. That is $56 more than your target. Now you have two choices—put more money down, or get a cheaper car. If more money down is not an option, you need to reduce the cost of the vehicle. If you drop the loan amount down to $19,500 you hit a payment of $395.39 per month.

Screenshot: AutoLoanCalculator.com

That is pretty close, and remember you still have your $2,500 down payment, which means you now have a total spending budget of $22,000 inclusive of whatever taxes and fees are applicable in your area. So you should be looking at cars in the $20,000 or under range to keep a buffer for those extras.

What I described above takes time and work. But remember, the dealer does not care if you can pay your loan off or not. In fact, some really shady places bank on the fact that you can’t pay your loan so they can repossess the car and sell it to someone else.

I want to make clear that my tips on finance are in no way making excuses for dealerships and lenders that participate in predatory practices. I firmly believe that there should be an increase in regulations and enforcement to prevent those situations.

But until that happens every buyer should be using the trusty calculator before they sign a sales contract.

Tech

via Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com

April 11, 2018 at 09:24AM

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You Can Now Bundle Your Spotify and Hulu Together for $12.99/Month

You Can Now Bundle Your Spotify and Hulu Together for $12.99/Month

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If you’re already a Spotify Premium customer, have we’ve got a deal for you: now you can get both Spotify and a Hulu limited commercials plan bundled together for $12.99 per month.

The bargain is the result of an extended partnership between the two companies. For the time being, the deal is only available for current Spotify Premium customers, but it should be available for everyone by the summer, The Verge reports.

If you’re already a Spotify customer, you can add Hulu to your Spotify Premium plan for 3 months for $.99. Afterwards, if you want to keep it, you’ll pay $12.99 per month for both.

If all that sounds familiar, it’s because Spotify offered a similar deal in September, except it was for students only. Students can score the same package for just $4.99 per month.

Existing Hulu customers can take advantage of the deal as long as they switch their billing to Spotify and they don’t have premium add-ons to their account like HBO or Spotify. Spotify Premium currently runs $9.99 and Hulu $7.99, so the bundle equates to $5 a month in savings.

If you’re already a Spotify subscriber and you like TV, then it’s kind of a no-brainer. And if you’re just a Hulu subscriber, then you might want to consider adding a half-priced Spotify subscription to your shopping list come summertime.

Tech

via Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com

April 12, 2018 at 08:43AM

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These Are the Five States Where Adulthood Has Gotten Deadlier

These Are the Five States Where Adulthood Has Gotten Deadlier

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In many ways, the US has become a safer place to live, but not everyone’s reaping the benefits.
Image: Skitterphoto (Pixabay)

A comprehensive report published this week in JAMA finds that the US has overall become a safer place to live over the past 25 years. But the report also reveals that in several states and among certain age groups, it’s only become deadlier.

Researchers used data from the Global Burden of Disease Study, an annual research program that tracks how many people are killed and disabled by various ailments across 127 countries. They specifically looked, on a state by state level, at the mortality rate of Americans from 1990 all the way up to 2016.

Between that time period, deaths dropped significantly. In 1990, the overall annual death rate was estimated to be 745.2 deaths per every 100,000 people; by 2016, the rate had dropped by 578 deaths per every 100,000 people. The average life expectancy increased as well, from 71.9 years in 1990 to 76.5 in 2016. Death and injury rates of major chronic disorders, such as cardiovascular diseases and lung cancer, declined as well.

Behind the general rosy picture, though, they also found profound differences—and worse outcomes—depending on where people lived. While someone born in Hawaii in 2016 could be expected to live 81.3 years, for instance, someone else born that same year in Mississippi had a life expectancy of 74.7 years. And though people between the ages of 50 to 99 as well as people under the age of 20 were less likely to die in 2016 in every state than they were in 1990, the same wasn’t entirely true for adults between the ages of 20 to 55.

The probability of someone dying between those ages declined in 31 states and Washington DC. But in five states—Kentucky, Oklahoma, New Mexico, West Virginia, and Wyoming—the probability of death had increased by 10 percent or more from 1990 to 2016.

“The US has witnessed some improvements among youth under 20 and seniors over 55, but overall the nation and some of our states are falling behind other, less developed countries,” said co-author Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in a statement.“The strain on America’s health resources is getting worse, and the need for prevention services and greater access to and quality of medical care is increasing.”

As for what’s killing these adults, Mokdad and his team point to factors like the ongoing opioid crisis and mental health disorders. In 1990, they noted, opioid use disorder was the 11th leading cause of accumulated “Disability-Adjusted Life Years,” or DALYs, a measure that’s used to calculate the loss of one healthy year to disability. By 2016, it became the 7th leading cause. States such as West Virginia have tellingly reported some of the highest rates of opioid overdose deaths in recent years.

DALYs attributed to major depression and anxiety disorders also increased by 17.32 percent and 16.7 percent, respectively.

“These findings point to an urgent need to address mental health and drug use disorders in the United States,” the authors wrote. “There is a need for improved access to quality mental health care and screening to improve outcomes, as well as programs to prevent mental disorders and promote mental health.”

These programs, as well as those that address other chronic risk factors like a poor diet or sedentary behavior, should ideally be focused at reaching out to the public though their local doctors, the authors advocate.

“Primary care is our health system’s front line of defense, detection, and treatment,” Mokdad said. “Local, state, and federal dollars need to be targeted more effectively for primary care, especially for those millions of Americans not on Medicare.”

[JAMA]

Tech

via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

April 11, 2018 at 04:48PM

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Google Lens can identify dog and cat breeds

Google Lens can identify dog and cat breeds

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Now that the Android-first Google Lens feature has finally rolled out to the Photos app on iOS devices, nearly all mobile users can appreciate a recently-added feature: Identifying pet breeds. Also, a new wrinkle added this week will have Google Photos automatically create a book starring your pet. Yes, the might of artificial intelligence has been mustered to determine what kind of dog or cat is in the photo you just took. The only thing left for humans to decide is if they prefer a hardcover or softcover edition.

Last year Google announced that Photos search can comb through your library by particular breed, species (including animals that aren’t cats or dogs) or emoji. Which could be helpful if you want to find the latest pic of your sibling’s pet but don’t want to sift through your entire camera roll. The announcement came with a few reminders of what Google Lens could already do, like videos of your favorite weird animals.

Update:Android Police found notes about these features in Lens last month in the Google Support forums. It also can identify different plants and flowers, as well.

Source: Google Blog

Tech

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

April 11, 2018 at 04:54PM

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Putting CO? to use: 10 finalists named for Carbon XPrize

Putting CO? to use: 10 finalists named for Carbon XPrize

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On Monday, the XPrize organization announced that it had selected 10 finalists for its NRG COSIA Carbon Competition. These finalists will be given space near a power plant and pipes that will deliver some of the plant’s carbon-dioxide-rich exhaust. It’s up to the competitors to turn that carbon dioxide into marketable products.

For the finalists, those products range from concrete to carbon nanotubes. To get a better overview of the technologies and the competition itself, we talked with Marcius Extavour, the XPrize’s senior director of energy and resources.

Capture, no storage

The world remains committed to fossil fuels, despite our increasing knowledge of the risks they pose. These risks have raised interest in the idea of carbon capture and storage. Rather than shut down our fossil-fuel-burning hardware and all the infrastructure that feeds it, we simply remove the carbon dioxide from the plant’s exhaust, placing it in either long-term storage or reacting it with rocks to lock it away indefinitely.

But doing so costs energy, taking away from the output of the fossil fuel plants and costing money. “Carbon pollution is free today, and this is an expensive technology,” Extavour said. “That’s a fundamental challenge.”

As a result, there have been only a few small-scale tests of carbon capture and storage, and the few plans to expand to full-scale facilities have ended up cancelled. Viewed in that light, it could be difficult to understand what the XPrize hopes to accomplish here.

The answer is quite simple: they’re not doing carbon capture and storage. They’re doing carbon capture and conversion—conversion into products that there’s a market for. The challengers all have processes that can use carbon dioxide as a feedstock. The Carbon Competition is their opportunity to see which of these can scale.

Deployment

For the 10 finalists, the announcement signaled the start of a couple of years of hard work. “We have about another two years of runway for the finalists to scale up by 10x with respect to what they’ve already done,” Extavour told Ars. “A year to build up and test and develop, and another nine months to a year to actually run on site and collect data.”

In this case, “on site” means one of two locations: a natural gas plant in Alberta, Canada or a coal-fired power plant in Wyoming.

Getting the plants’ operators on board was one of the challenges faced by the XPrize itself, Extavour said: “There was a bit of hesitancy at first—we don’t see that type of innovation in the energy industry.”

The finalists being announced.
Enlarge /

The finalists being announced.

Prize

The exhaust streams differ in terms of the additional gases present, which could impact any processes that involve catalysts. There’s also a big difference in CO2 concentrations, with the natural gas plant exhaust carrying about five percent CO2, and the coal plant 12 percent. For those teams where this mattered, the XPrize tried to locate them at the appropriate site. But for many of them, the location didn’t matter much. “They need to purify it up to 90 [percent] anyway,” Extavour said.

The projects will be judged based on three sets of criteria. One is related to the goal’s primary task: what percentage of the carbon dioxide that’s sent through the system ends up in some form of product. Related to that, the processes should use more carbon than ends up released from powering them, resulting in a net reduction in emissions. Another set of criteria focus on energy and material efficiency. “How expensive are your catalysts? How much electricity does it cost? How much heat do you need?” Extavour asked. “The teams are competing to minimize the cost and use of materials and energy.”

Also in this category are any land use and resource issues, like water. Both of these, Extavour suggested, may be why there’s only one team that is focused on feeding the carbon dioxide to an organism that would incorporate it into useful molecules. While things like that can be done with photosynthetic algae, it requires a lot of space for growth ponds, as well as significant amounts of water.

The final set of criteria are economic. “It’s about transforming the carbon molecule into something useful,” Extavour told Ars. “Another way of describing useful is valuable or revenue generating.”

But there’s not one path to success on economic terms. One of the teams hopes to produce carbon nanotubes; although their market is small, they command a high price premium. At the other end, a couple of teams are focusing on concrete, where low prices are traded off against an enormous market.

Thermodynamics

Right now, the only use for captured carbon dioxide we’ve come up with is in oil extraction, where it can be pumped underground to force crude to the surface. The projects being pursued here all transform the carbon dioxide chemically. And that means almost all of them run into a big thermodynamic challenge, because carbon dioxide is an extremely stable molecule.

The one exception is carbonates, chemicals that typically involve a metal complexed with the negatively charged CO3 ion. These are energetically favorable compared to carbon dioxide and can find some uses in building materials. But most of the projects involve some sort of energy input to break the carbon-oxygen bonds. “It doesn’t matter where you get the energy from,” Extavour said, “As long as it’s low carbon if you’re trying to lower carbon emissions.”

But he said the plunge in price of renewable power has shifted the economics, and further developments there could open up additional possibilities.

Marcius Extavour.
Enlarge /

Marcius Extavour.

In some cases, the teams explicitly mention using solar power to provide the energy to break down carbon dioxide or to supply the hydrogen to react it with. In other cases, it’s part of a process that we’re already injecting energy into—like making carbon nanotubes, battery components, or plastics.

Ultimately, the price and efficiency will be critical determinants here. Otherwise, it will continue to be more economical to make our plastics from fossil fuels and to expend less energy by using alternate processes. But things like carbon taxes or emissions trading could also tilt things in favor of using carbon dioxide; Extavour spoke of situations where “Energetically, you’re losing, but if you’re focusing on minimizing carbon emissions, you might be winning.”

Why a competition?

If the challenge is a mix of thermodynamics and economics, why would a competition be necessary? For that, Extavour had a number of answers. One is that it could help overcome the (quite reasonable) conservatism of utilities. “I’m familiar with the mandate of ‘do not change anything, do not experiment with anything, do not let the lights flicker,'” he told Ars.

With large-scale demonstration projects, the XPrize could help demonstrate that the technology doesn’t interfere with the primary purpose of these power plants.

There’s also a catch-22 in operation here. These technologies need to be able to scale in order to make any dent in our carbon emissions. But, as Extavour notes, “the free market would never build a test center for the purpose of testing a new technology at industrial scale before the market was mature.”

The XPrize could provide a way out of this catch-22.

Beyond those practical concerns, Extavour sounded a bit like the Solar Impulse team in talking about their round-the-world trip in a solar-powered aircraft—terms like “moonshot” and “inspirational” peppered the conversation. Rather than having people listen to news about carbon capture plans that never get off the ground, “we’re trying to orient people’s minds to think ‘hey, this is possible,'” he told Ars. Two years from now, when the data is collected and analyzed, we’ll have a much better sense of what’s possible.

Tech

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

April 11, 2018 at 10:40AM

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Rocket Lab is about to win the small satellite launch space race

Rocket Lab is about to win the small satellite launch space race

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In January, Rocket Lab reached orbit for the first time with the second launch of its Electron vehicle.

Rocket Lab

Life is pretty good for Rocket Lab and its founder Peter Beck right now. With two test flights of its Electron rocket completed in the last 10.5 months, the company says it will move into commercial operations later this month. The 14-day launch window for the “It’s Business Time” mission, carrying two private payloads, opens on April 20.

In an interview, Beck said Rocket Lab hopes to fly eight missions in 2018 and reach a monthly launch cadence by the end of the year. The company’s initial test flight in May 2017 failed to reach orbit, but a second flight in January of this year was almost entirely successful. Rocket Lab will become the first of a number of small-satellite launch companies to begin serving customers.

Tech

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

April 12, 2018 at 09:31AM