Watching This Artist Paint on Water Is Like a Relaxing Massage for My Brain
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Popular in Turkey and parts of Asia, ebru is a unique form of painting that swaps a canvas for a liquid-filled pan that’s sprinkled and splattered with vibrant colored pigments. Using specialized tools, unique patterns can be created by carefully mixing the floating pigments through a process that might be even more satisfying than the resulting artwork.
Once a pattern has been perfected, the pigments are transferred to a blank canvas by simply dunking it face down into the mixture, producing a permanent piece that more often than not looks like an expensive marble. But I’m less interested in the final product, which probably takes a lot more skill and patience than I have to perfect. I just want to spend the rest of my days as stress-free as possible, dribbling paints and smearing colors. It’s like finger painting for adults.
Chinese Police Confiscate 600 Bitcoin Mining Rigs in ‘Largest Power Theft Case’ in Years
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Earlier this year, the Chinese government reportedly outlined plans to limit energy use by cryptocurrency miners and encourage their “orderly” exit from the industry. In the wake of intensified crackdown efforts, some of China’s largest miners opened operations abroad, but it seems at least one mining group tried to operate underground instead.
On Tuesday, police in the city of Tianjin said they seized 600 bitcoin mining computers and eight high-power fans, according to a report from Chinese news agency Xinhua. Authorities took action after the local electricity company noticed unusual electricity consumption on one line. At its peak, there was a 28 percent increase in line loss, indicating increased load. Police reportedly called it “the largest power theft case in recent years.”
Investigators say that the electricity meter for the suspected cryptocurrency mining operation had been short-circuited, which was likely an attempt to dodge the electricity bill. Five people are reportedly currently under investigation and another person has been detained.
According to Reuters, the central bank of China told a government internet banking group around the beginning of this year that the agency can instruct municipalities to regulate cryptocurrency mining operations’ power use, as mining requires large amounts of energy and computing power. This followed action in September, when the country banned ICOs and domestic cryptocurrency exchanges.
Before China’s government began cracking down on cryptocurrency mining, the country was a haven for mining operations, thanks largely to an abundance of hardware manufacturers, cheap labor, and cheap electricity. It seems the Chinese government is most interested in regulating that last factor in its quest to rid the country of cryptocurrency mining operations.
Netflix’s ‘Follow This’ chronicles the BuzzFeed news cycle
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Netflix
Netflix and BuzzFeed have teamed up to do short-form documentaries on BuzzFeed’s own reporters. Follow This will consist of a 20-episode weekly series that will premiere on July 9th, according to Variety. Each episode will run about 15 minutes. A trailer, which you can see below, previews the first episode. It follows Scaachi Koul as she follows a story on autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR.
The show will be produced by BuzzFeed News and will be aimed at users on mobile devices. BuzzFeed also has an investigative TV series premiering on Oxygen this year.
BuzzFeed isn’t the only online news outlet to make this kind of deal. Vice‘s Motherboardrecently produced a documentary that will make its debut on Netflix after a theatrical run. And Vice also has a daily news series on HBO called Vice News Tonight. Rather than focusing on the journalists investigating stories, like BuzzFeed’s documentary series, Vice News Tonight is a news show that bills itself as “completely different from the news shows you’re used to, and we think that’s a good thing,” according to Vice.
loot box is now criminal in Belgium, according to the country’s gambling regulators.
The Belgian Gaming Commission has determined that randomized loot boxes in at least three games count as “games of chance,” and publishers could therefore be subject to fines and prison sentences under the country’s gaming legislation.
A statement by Belgian Minister of Justice Koen Geens (machine translation) identifies loot boxes in Overwatch, FIFA 18, and Counter Strike: Global Offensive as meeting the criteria for that “game of chance” definition: i.e., “there is a game element [where] a bet can lead to profit or loss and chance has a role in the game.” The Commission also looked at Star Wars: Battlefront II and determined that the recent changes EA made to the game means it “no longer technically forms a game of chance.”
Beyond that simple definition, the Gaming Commission expressed concern over games that draw in players with an “emotional profit forecast” of randomized goods, where players “buy an advantage with real money without knowing what benefit it would be.” The fact that these games don’t disclose the odds of receiving specific in-game items is also worrisome, the Commission said.
The three games noted above must remove their loot boxes or be in criminal violation of the country’s gaming legislation, Geens writes. That law carries penalties of up to €800,000 and five years in prison, which can be doubled if “minors are involved.” But Geens says he wants to start a “dialogue” with loot box providers to “see who should take responsibility where.”
“Paying loot boxes are not an innocent part of video games that present themselves as games of skill,” Gaming Commission Director Peter Naessens added in a statement. “Players are tempted and misled, and none of the protective measures for gambling are applied.”
Belgium was one of the first European countries to publicly turn its attention to loot boxes following the controversy surrounding Star Wars Battlefront II. The country launched its investigation of the practice back in November, when Geens said he was seeking to ban the practice throughout Europe.
Belgium’s decision follows on a similar finding in the Netherlands, which specifically called out loot boxes in FIFA 18, Dota 2, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and Rocket League for illegal gambling activities. In the United States, legislators in Hawaii, Washington state, and the US Senate continue to look into loot box regulations, even as industry bodies like the Entertainment Software Rating Board downplay the need for such actions.
While you’re staring at your new phone, scientists are finding ways to recycle your old one
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How often do you swap out your old smartphone for a new one? Every two or three years? Every year? Today, phone companies make it easy with deals to trade in your old phone for the newest version. But those discarded phones are becoming a huge source of waste, with many components ending up in landfills or incinerators.
When a cell phone gets tossed, only a few materials get recycled, mostly useful metals like gold, silver, copper and palladium, which can be used in manufacturing other products. But other materials?—?especially fiberglass and resins?—?which make up the bulk of cellphones’ circuit boards, often end up at sites where they can leak dangerous chemicals into our groundwater, soil, and air.
Consumer demand for the latest electronic devices contributes to the large amount of e-waste, and cell phones are the biggest problem. In 2006, the United Nations estimated annual global e-waste to be about 50 million metric tons. When these products are dumped or incinerated, they release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere?—?moreover, so does making those products in the first place.
“Manufacturing a new product requires water, soil, power, fuel, and other natural resources,” said Amit Kumar, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia. “Dumping end-of-life electronics into landfills without recycling is a waste of those resources. It is of paramount importance that we keep raising awareness for recycling, reprocessing and make a zero-waste scenario as the final goal in recycling of not only e-waste but other wastes as well.”
Looking initially at cell phone circuit boards, Kumar and his colleagues?—?including Maria Holuszko, a mining engineering professor and leader of the research team?—?developed a process to separate fiberglass from resin. This was a task that had proved nearly impossible earlier?—?and the primary reason the two substances are nearly impossible to recycle. They must be separated to make them reusable. Scientists hope their research will be used to develop a “zero-waste” cell phone. They describe their work in a study published in the journal Waste Management.
Previous attempts by other scientists to separate fiberglass from resin used chemicals, heat or physical means, which are “energy consuming,” Kumar said. With those approaches, “the value of the material is low and the process not cost effective,” he said. Their process, on the other hand, uses a technique known as “gravity separation” to cleanly lift organic resins from inorganic fiberglass in a way “that doesn’t harm the environment,” Holuszko said.
Their technology, known as Ronin8, uses sound to achieve the separation. The scientists first calculate the density of the materials and then circulate the materials in recycled water through a sonic chamber?—?the sonic vibrations essentially “liberate” the materials from each other.
“The key here is gravity separation, which efficiently separates the fiberglass from the resin by using the differences in their densities,” Kumar said. “The separated fiberglass can then be used as a raw material for construction and insulation. In the future, if we can find a way to improve the quality of the recycled fiberglass, it may even be suitable for manufacturing new circuit boards.”
The research has become even more important in the aftermath of China’s recent ban on waste imports, they said. “We need a better way to manage our electronic hardware recycling, and a cost-effective, environmentally responsible method of mining e-waste for valuable materials would be a good step in that direction,” Holuszko said.
The researchers are working with the Canada-based Ronin8 facility to develop a large-scale commercial model of the process. The company seeks to promote an environmentally friendly method that will separate different plastics, fibers, and metals in electronic waste streams without using toxic chemicals or losing precious metals. The company’s aim is “to address the intrinsic faults in traditional e-waste processes today,” by achieving zero-waste solutions for electronics, said Travis Janke, director of engineering at Ronin8.
Kumar said they focused on cell phones because of their higher value and lower lifespan compared to other products. “However, the materials used in this research were circuit boards obtained from cell phones, laptops, desktops, printers, and other small household electronic devices,” he said.
Despite the growing waste problem, “we do not believe we can stop progress, meaning technological advancement. We do not believe we can turn the wheel back where it was,” he said. “There are many benefits from using these technologies. The impact is enormous, including educational, communication, social and political.”
However, consumers, manufacturers and others must begin working together to find solutions?—?including those beyond the scope of the research, he said. This means manufacturers must become more responsible for what happens after consumers abandon old products for new ones, and they must develop sustainable reprocessing technology. Also, consumers must become more aware of the impact that comes from throwing out electronics.
“Do we really need to change our gadgets that often? We need to be more aware of how to dispose of them safely at the end of their life and develop technologies that can turn them into secondary raw materials for manufacturing new products,” Kumar said. “As scientists and engineers, we need to look for the solution to our new-age addiction to our electronic devices that we love and almost can’t live without. It will not happen overnight, but we need to get on that path, or we will never reach there.”
Marlene Cimons writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.
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‘Unpatchable Exploit’ on Nintendo Switch Opens the Door to Jailbreaks
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Photo: Alex Cranz/Gizmodo
On Monday, anyone looking to hack their Switch or run their own software on it got some good news and more good news. An exploit has been released that opens the homebrew floodgates—and because it’s hardware-based, Nintendo can’t just patch it.
The news of the unpatchable exploit first broke when Katherine Temkin and her colleagues at the ReSwitched hacking team dropped the outline for the “Fusée Gelée” vulnerability. “The relevant vulnerability is the result of a ‘coding mistake’ in the read-only bootrom found in most Tegra devices,” Temkin explained in an accompanying FAQ. “This bootrom can have minor patches made to it in the factory (‘ipatches’), but cannot be patched once a device has left the factory.”
The fact is, it’s far from a plug and play hack. You’d need some technical savvy to pull this off yourself, but that’s what’s great about the DIY community: they’ll keep figuring out how to make it easier for everyone else.
In short, the exploit takes advantage of a flaw in the Nvidia Tegra X1 chip. Normally, the chip would prevent access to its bootROM, but you can get around that by forcing the system into USB recovery mode and overflowing a direct memory access (DMA) buffer. That’s where things start to make the casual Switch-owner nervous. To force the USB recovery mode requires shorting out a single pin on the right Joy-Con connector.
It just so happens that Temkin isn’t the only group that found this flaw. Hacking team fail0verflow tweeted that they were observing a 90-day responsible disclosure window that would’ve ended on April 25th, but since the cat is already out of the bag, they were moving forward with their release. First, fail0verflow tweeted a pic of a little device that would make shorting the USB pin a simple procedure:
Then, the team dropped their own explanation of the flaw as well as a tethered bootROM exploit and Linux for the Switch. They’ve been working on this for a while, and they previously showed off video of the operating system running on Nintendo’s hardware. Fail0verflow also teased the hell out of gamers by tweeting an image of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker running on the Switch, suggesting they got the Dolphin emulator working on the device.
On its blog, fail0verflow explained that it began the responsible disclosure process with Google 90 days ago because Tegra chips are often used in Android devices. It’s a nasty vulnerability, but it’s mitigated by the fact that a bad actor would need physical access to a device to compromise it. That also means that for Nintendo to fix the issue, it will have to do so in the manufacturing process for future consoles. Software exploits can be nullified by Nintendo with a simple update. However, Nintendo could also shut off online functions for a device if it detects that it has been hacked.
Fail0verflow emphasized that it was releasing this info for the homebrew crowd that wants to tinker with their Switches and make new things, rather than encouraging piracy. I can’t emphasize strongly enough that you shouldn’t try this if destroying your Switch isn’t something you’d be comfortable with. In the readme file for the bootROM, fail0verflow writes, “If your Switch catches fire or turns into an Ouya, it’s not our fault.”
The Switch hacking crowd is already extremely excited about developing this thing further. A bootloader known as Atmosphère has been in the works for some time and its developer tweeted that Monday’s release means that anyone who is interested can now help contribute to its development. If nerve-wracking hardware hacks continue to be required, you can expect to see devices that are all set up and ready to go being sold by third-parties. For those who are ready to jump in today, happy hacking.
AI Could Dramatically Increase Risk of Nuclear War by 2040, Says New Report
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The mushroom cloud from the Ivy Mike nuclear test on November 1, 1952. Photo: AP
The common conception of a technologically enabled apocalypse foresees a powerful artificial intelligence that, either deliberately or by accident, destroys human civilization. But as a new report from the RAND Corporation points out, the reality may be far subtler: As AI slowly erodes the foundations that made the Cold War possible, we may find ourselves hurtling towards all-out nuclear war.
There’s a “significant potential” for artificial intelligence to undermine the foundations of nuclear security, according to a new report published today by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. This grim conclusion was the product of a RAND workshop involving experts in AI, nuclear security, government, and military. The point of the workshop, which is part of RAND’s Security 2040 project, was to evaluate the coming impacts of AI and advanced computing on nuclear security over the course of the next two decades. In light of its findings, RAND is now calling for international dialogue on the matter.
At the very core of this discussion is the concept of nuclear deterrence, in which the guarantee of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD), or “assured retaliation,” prevents one side from launching its nuclear weapons at an equally armed adversary. It’s a cold, calculating logic that has—at least to this stage in our history—prevented an all-out nuclear war, with rational, self-preservational powers opting to fight a Cold War instead. As long as no nuclear power maintains significant first-strike capabilities, the MAD concept reigns supreme; if a weapons system can survive a first strike and hit back with equal force, assured destruction remains in effect. But this arrangement could weaken and become destabilized in the event that one side loses its ability to strike back, or even if it starts to believe that it runs of the risk of losing that capability.
This equation incentivizes state actors to avoid steps that could destabilize the current geopolitical equilibrium, but, as we’ve seen repeatedly over the past several decades, nuclear powers are still willing to push the first-strike envelope. See: the development of stealth bombers, nuclear-capable submarines, and most recently Russian president Vladimir Putin’s unveiling of an invincible ballistic missile.
Thankfully, none of these developments have truly ended a superpower’s ability to hit back after a first strike, but as the new RAND report makes clear, advanced artificial intelligence, in conjunction with surveillance technologies such as drones, satellites, and other powerful sensors, could erode the technological equilibrium that maintains the delicate Cold War balance. AI will achieve this through the mass surveillance of an adversary’s security infrastructure, finding patterns invisible to the human eye, and revealing devastating vulnerabilities, according to the report.
“This isn’t just a movie scenario,” said Andrew Lohn, an engineer at RAND who co-authored the paper, in a statement. “Things that are relatively simple can raise tensions and lead us to some dangerous places if we are not careful.”
An exposed adversary—suddenly aware of its vulnerability to a first strike, or aware that it could soon lose its ability to hit back—would be put into a very challenging position. Such a scenario might compel the disadvantaged actor into finding ways of restoring the balanced playing field, and it may start to act like a wolverine that’s been backed into a corner. Advanced AI could introduce a new era of distrust and competition, with desperate nuclear powers willing to take catastrophic-scale, and possibly even existential-scale, risks.
Disturbingly, the pending loss of assured destruction could lead to a so-called preventative war, whereby a war is started to prevent an adversary from attaining a capability for attacking. In the years leading up to the First World War, for example, Germany watched with grave concern as its rival, Russia, began to emerge as significant regional power. Its experts predicted that Russia would be able to defeat Germany in armed conflict within 20 years, prompting calls for a preventative war. And in the immediate post-WWII era, some thinkers in the United States, including philosopher Bertrand Russell and the mathematician John von Neumann, called for a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union before it could develop its own bomb.
As these examples show, the period in which developments are poised to disrupt a military advantage or a state of equilibrium (i.e., MAD) can be a very dangerous time, prompting all sorts of crazy ideas. As the authors of the new RAND report point out, we may be heading into another one of these transition periods. Artificial intelligence has “the potential to exacerbate emerging challenges to nuclear strategic stability by the year 2040 even with only modest rates of technical progress,” write the authors in the report.
Edward Geist, an associate policy researcher at RAND and a co-author of the new report, says autonomous systems don’t need to kill people to undermine stability and make catastrophic war more likely. “New AI capabilities might make people think they’re going to lose if they hesitate,” he said in a statement. “That could give them itchier trigger fingers. At that point, AI will be making war more likely even though the humans are still in ‘control’.”
In conclusion, the authors warn of grim future scenarios, but concede that AI could also usher in an era of unprecedented stability. They write:
Some experts fear that an increased reliance on AI could lead to new types of catastrophic mistakes. There may be pressure to use it before it is technologically mature; it may be susceptible to adversarial subversion; or adversaries may believe that the AI is more capable than it is, leading them to make catastrophic mistakes. On the other hand, if the nuclear powers manage to establish a form of strategic stability compatible with the emerging capabilities that AI might provide, the machines could reduce distrust and alleviate international tensions, thereby decreasing the risk of nuclear war.
The authors said it’s impossible to predict which of these two scenarios will come to pass, but the global community has to act now to mitigate the potential risks. In terms of solutions, the RAND authors propose international discussions, new global institutions and agreements, acknowledgement by rival states of the problem, and the development of innovative technological, diplomatic, and military safeguards.
Such is the double-edged sword of technology. AI could either lubricate the gears to our doom, or, as it did in such films as Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) and War Games (1983), protect us from ourselves. In this case, it’s best to adopt the old adage in which we’re reminded to hope for the best while planning for the worst.
