Day: June 9, 2018

When it comes to high-tech surveillance, identity theft, and financial crimes, humanity lives in a hell of its own making. Technology here in the second decade of the 21st century has created a world where our personal information is constantly getting exposed. And for what benefit? The “convenience” of being able to pay our bills online. But we can’t say we weren’t warned. People in 1966 saw where all of this automation was heading.

A short editorial in the September 19, 1966 issue of the Sandusky Register newspaper in Sandusky, Ohio predicted that life was about to get worse as information, especially financial information, became more centralized.

The editorial noted that although the “com­puter age” was “in its infancy,” the computerization of financial information would lead to more robbery, more embezzlement, and a complete “assault on personal privacy.” And we can’t say they were wrong.

From the September 19, 1966 issue of the Sandusky Register in Ohio:

It had to happen sooner or later in this age of industrial espionage, but it is still disquieting to learn that spies already are at work pick­ing the brains of electronic compu­ters.

This revelation came from a meeting on computer privacy spon­sored by the Federal Bar Associa­tion in Washington. One instance cited was a computer expert who programmed his firm’s computer to provide himself with thousands of dollars in free communications services. His embezzlement by computer was not discovered until a friend tipped the firm.

Sufficient numbers of other cases have been uncovered to cause concern that the revolution in infor­mation storage has opened new vis­tas for the unscrupulous. The com­puter age is in its infancy. By the time it is in full bloom a few years from now, most written records will have been replaced by central banks which can divulge the inner­most secrets of an individual or a firm literally at the push of a but­ton.

Banks have never been able to completely safeguard against rob­bery or embezzlement, but they protect their customers with insur­ance. What insurance can compen­sate a person whose life’s secrets have been spilled to a blackmailer, or a firm whose secret processes or customer list have been sold to a competitor?

Many persons are concerned by the assault on personal privacy by electronic listening devices. These instruments are child’s play com­pared to the possibilities in compu­ter espionage.

The Internal Revenue Service, which has a questionable history of divulging its records to many feder­al and state agencies anyway, now has 68 million tax returns stored in one computer operated by a 30-man team. The IRS has found certain of its confidential tax information being passed to private investiga­tors.

Every man, it is said, has his price. That goes double for compu­ters controlled by men.

Yes, it sounds a little dated. But this was 1966, three full years before the first host-to-host connection of the ARPANET between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. And the issues being raised are some of the exact issues that we’re living through today. We were warned in 1966, and 1971, and 1975. Humanity was repeatedly warned and we didn’t take note.

Electronic surveillance through “listening devices”? Check. Financial institutions having too much control of your private data? Check. The IRS leaking confidential tax information? Well, that one wouldn’t be so bad if it allowed the American people to learn about President Trump’s tax returns and his many conflicts of interest around the globe. But we’re not that lucky.

It turns out we got all of the worst parts of their prediction except for the one that might help Americans the most. It seems like something to keep in mind the next time someone predicts that technology will only help humanity as we crawl our way to the 2020s.

When it comes to high-tech surveillance, identity theft, and financial crimes, humanity lives in a hell of its own making. Technology here in the second decade of the 21st century has created a world where our personal information is constantly getting exposed. And for what benefit? The “convenience” of being able to pay our bills online. But we can’t say we weren’t warned. People in 1966 saw where all of this automation was heading.

A short editorial in the September 19, 1966 issue of the Sandusky Register newspaper in Sandusky, Ohio predicted that life was about to get worse as information, especially financial information, became more centralized.

The editorial noted that although the “com­puter age” was “in its infancy,” the computerization of financial information would lead to more robbery, more embezzlement, and a complete “assault on personal privacy.” And we can’t say they were wrong.

From the September 19, 1966 issue of the Sandusky Register in Ohio:

It had to happen sooner or later in this age of industrial espionage, but it is still disquieting to learn that spies already are at work pick­ing the brains of electronic compu­ters.

This revelation came from a meeting on computer privacy spon­sored by the Federal Bar Associa­tion in Washington. One instance cited was a computer expert who programmed his firm’s computer to provide himself with thousands of dollars in free communications services. His embezzlement by computer was not discovered until a friend tipped the firm.

Sufficient numbers of other cases have been uncovered to cause concern that the revolution in infor­mation storage has opened new vis­tas for the unscrupulous. The com­puter age is in its infancy. By the time it is in full bloom a few years from now, most written records will have been replaced by central banks which can divulge the inner­most secrets of an individual or a firm literally at the push of a but­ton.

Banks have never been able to completely safeguard against rob­bery or embezzlement, but they protect their customers with insur­ance. What insurance can compen­sate a person whose life’s secrets have been spilled to a blackmailer, or a firm whose secret processes or customer list have been sold to a competitor?

Many persons are concerned by the assault on personal privacy by electronic listening devices. These instruments are child’s play com­pared to the possibilities in compu­ter espionage.

The Internal Revenue Service, which has a questionable history of divulging its records to many feder­al and state agencies anyway, now has 68 million tax returns stored in one computer operated by a 30-man team. The IRS has found certain of its confidential tax information being passed to private investiga­tors.

Every man, it is said, has his price. That goes double for compu­ters controlled by men.

Yes, it sounds a little dated. But this was 1966, three full years before the first host-to-host connection of the ARPANET between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. And the issues being raised are some of the exact issues that we’re living through today. We were warned in 1966, and 1971, and 1975. Humanity was repeatedly warned and we didn’t take note.

Electronic surveillance through “listening devices”? Check. Financial institutions having too much control of your private data? Check. The IRS leaking confidential tax information? Well, that one wouldn’t be so bad if it allowed the American people to learn about President Trump’s tax returns and his many conflicts of interest around the globe. But we’re not that lucky.

It turns out we got all of the worst parts of their prediction except for the one that might help Americans the most. It seems like something to keep in mind the next time someone predicts that technology will only help humanity as we crawl our way to the 2020s.

The Facebook timeline is about to get dark, my friends. That is, if you are not stoked for your mom and your cousin and that kid from high school to start posting live videos of themselves lip syncing to “God’s Plan” by Drake.

Facebook announced on Tuesday that it is rolling out a new feature—Lip Sync Live—which lets users… lip sync live. The feature isn’t groundbreaking. In fact, it’s ripped straight from Musical.ly, an app popular with teens that lets you upload video selfies lip syncing to popular songs. The app has reportedly acquired and retained 60 million monthly active users, so it’s not hard to imagine why Facebook might want to roll out a nearly identical feature to its own platform that’s apparently being swiftly dumped by the youths.

But just because the teens liked something on one app doesn’t mean they’ll come running back to Facebook for something identical. It’s hard to capitalize on a culture that happened organically in a space free from the olds.

Like Musical.ly, Facebook is working with artists and music companies to ensure the songs used on Lip Sync Live don’t lead to copyright violations. If they do, Facebook will mute your video—unless you dispute the copyright and it’s approved by Facebook’s rights manager tool, TechCrunch reported.

Facebook’s blog post announcing the new feature noted that songs like “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses, “Havana” by Camila Cabello, “Happier” by Ed Sheeran, and “God’s Plan” by Drake will be available for users to impressively open and close their mouths to.

With the success of Musical.ly, it’s clear that this is a feature the people (read: the teens) want. But on Facebook, it’ll probably be the feature that pushes the teens away in droves after they see their feeds flooded with parents pretending to rap Drake.

This weekend, news broke in the New York Times that Facebook’s habit of giving extensive user data to third parties extended to “at least 60 device makers” who were granted access to private Facebook APIs over the past decade. The social media giant has been trying to quash the story by insisting developers were only allowed to use the data to provide “the Facebook experience” before the market dominance of Android and Apple made it less necessary for manufacturers to make custom apps, but a new development may have just made it a lot harder to sweep under the rug.

Now, the Times reported on Tuesday, it turns out the list of device makers included four Chinese companies: Lenovo, Oppo, TCL, and Huawei, the last of which has been flagged by US intelligence officials as a potential national security threat:

The deals gave Facebook an early foothold in the mobile market starting in 2007, before stand-alone Facebook apps worked well on phones, and allowed device makers to offer some Facebook features, such as address books, “like” buttons and status updates.

Facebook officials said the agreements with the Chinese companies allowed them access similar to what was offered to BlackBerry, which could retrieve detailed information on both device users and all of their friends—including work and education history, relationship status and likes.

Facebook officials said that the data shared with Huawei stayed on its phone, not the company’s servers.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, told the paper that congressional investigators had publicly floated concerns about the “close relationships between the Chinese Communist Party and equipment makers like Huawei” since 2012, so Facebook should have been aware of them. He added, “I look forward to learning more about how Facebook ensured that information about their users was not sent to Chinese servers.”

Facebook vice president Francisco Varela told the Times that “All Facebook’s integrations with Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL were controlled from the get-go—and Facebook approved everything that was built. Given the interest from Congress, we wanted to make clear that all the information from these integrations with Huawei was stored on the device, not on Huawei’s servers.”

Concern over Huawei has built in Congress as Chinese state banks funded its massive overseas expansion selling both phones and telecom equipment across the globe. As the Washington Post noted, though the company denies that it shares any user data with the Chinese government, the Pentagon took the fairly unusual move of banning the sale of devices from both Huawei and another Chinese manufacturer, ZTE, on military bases. Like Huawei, US intelligence officials suspect ZTE is stealthily spying on its international customers (though they have yet to provide any specific evidence).

For the record, ZTE is the same company that was facing a seven-year ban on buying or using components made by US firms after it allegedly violated sanctions on Iran and North Korea—until Chinese President Xi Jinping whispered a few sweet nothings into Donald Trump’s ear and the duo agreed to some kind of plan to lift the ban with undisclosed “security guarantees.”

ZTE is not believed to have had access to the Facebook API, a source told the Post. However, the Federal Communications Commission is mulling a ban on using federal subsidies to purchase telecom equipment from either firm. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, while it would be easy for Huawei and ZTE to build backdoors capable into their networking equipment, it would be very difficult for them to build in anything more complicated than a kill switch—such as surveillance systems—without tipping off wireless carriers and internet service providers. However, it would be much simpler for the companies to spy on anyone using their smartphones.

“Could they have the capability that’s tapping into a call or recording a call?” Ribbon Communications Inc. chief technology officer Kevin Riley told the Journal. “Absolutely. They own that software.”

In the Times’ prior report, University of California, Berkeley privacy researcher Serge Egelman commented “You might think that Facebook or the device manufacturer is trustworthy. But the problem is that as more and more data is collected on the device—and if it can be accessed by apps on the device—it creates serious privacy and security risks.”

Whoops! There’s that Facebook experience for ya.

Facebook said it began “winding down” the manufacturer partnerships in April (conveniently right about the time the Cambridge Analytica scandal was reaching full steam). According to the Times, all four Chinese partnerships are currently active, but “Facebook officials said in an interview that the company would wind down the Huawei deal by the end of the week.”

[New York Times]

The pace at which hurricanes move across the planet is slowing, according to new research. This suggests Hurricane Harvey, which stalled over Texas last summer, may not have been an anomaly, and that highly destructive, slow-moving tropical storms are becoming more common.

The reason Hurricane Harvey was so bad? It got stuck.

Harvey dumped more than 50 inches of rain on Houston and its surrounding areas in the five days it spent loitering over the area. Some places received as much as two feet of rain in two days. Around 90 people were killed in Southeast Texas, and over 200,000 homes and business were ruined. In addition to being the wettest tropical storm to ever hit the United States, it matched Hurricane Katrina in terms of cost, inflicting some $126 billion in economic losses.

James Kossin, a scientist at NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information in Madison, Wisconsin, says Harvey’s slow pace may be symptomatic of a troubling larger trend. His new paper, published today in Nature, provides evidence showing that the speed at which hurricanes move across the planet, a phenomenon known as translation speed, is slowing. And we’re not talking about minuscule amounts; his data shows that, on average, hurricanes around the globe have slowed by about 10 percent over the past seven decades.

Looking at historic hurricane data from 1949 to 2016, Kossin found that tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic have slowed down by six percent over the period observed. In the Eastern North Pacific and the Madagascar region, it was closer to four percent, but Australian waters have witnessed slowdowns amounting to 15 percent, and in the Western North Pacific the decrease in translation speed was down a whopping 20 percent. Tropical cyclones have slowed in both hemispheres and in every ocean except the North Indian Ocean, according to the new research, but the effect is more pronounced in the northern hemisphere.

Of particular concern was the observation that the slowdown effect gets worse when hurricanes reach land, allowing more time for precipitation to fall over a given area. Statistically significant slowdowns of 20 to 30 percent were documented over land regions next to the western North Pacific Ocean, the North Atlantic Ocean, and around Australia. As Harvey demonstrated, “stalled” hurricanes produce more storm-related damage, particularly flooding. “These trends are almost certainly increasing local rainfall totals and freshwater flooding, which is associated with very high mortality risk,” said Kossin in a press release.

The reason for the global slowdown, says Kossin, may have something to do with changes to the steering winds that regulate the direction and speed of tropical storms. He fears that global warming is changing—and weakening—the way air circulates within the atmosphere, an effect that many other studies have found. Climate change is already considered a factor for increasing the severity of the strongest tropical cyclones, and a warming world is also leading to greater rates of precipitation. There’s now added potential for a double-whammy effect with the arrival of slower tropical storms.

“The observed 10 percent global slowdown occurred in a period when the planet warmed by 0.5°C, but this does not provide a true measure of climate sensitivity, and more study is needed to determine how much more slowing will occur with continued warming,” said Kossin. “Still, it’s entirely plausible that local rainfall increases could actually be dominated by this slowdown rather than the expected rain-rate increases due to global warming.”

Writing in an accompanying Nature News and Views article, Berkeley climatologist Christina Patricola says one limitation of the study is that it doesn’t fully explain what’s going on with the rate of tropical cyclone rainfall.

“The laws of thermodynamics reveal that, as the atmosphere warms by 1°C, the amount of moisture it can hold increases by 7%. This suggests that global warming can enhance rainfall,” writes Patricola. “However, it is unclear whether there are statistically robust trends in the total amount of regional tropical-cyclone rainfall, or how much the translation-speed slowdowns reported by Kossin could contribute to them.” Limited data, she says, prevents us from fully understanding the connection and what’s truly going on. And on the topic of “stalled” hurricanes like Harvey, Patricola says these types of storms “are relatively rare, making it difficult to evaluate whether there are statistically significant trends in the limited observations available,” adding that, “Statistical methods can help to quantify trends, but are sometimes less suitable for understanding the physical drivers.”

In other words, the new study is producing an alarming result, and global warming may very well account for the apparent cyclone slowdown, but more research is needed, both for figuring out if this is part of a larger trend, and to determine if and how climate change is contributing to this phenomenon. In the meantime, it would be wise for federal and local governments to invest in storm preparation and hurricane- and flood-resistant architecture.

[Nature]

Comcast’s Xfinity landline service has been experiencing issues across the U.S. since this morning, with thousands of problems still being reported this afternoon, according to DownDetector.com. The outage map indicates that customers throughout the U.S. have encountered issues, with the most recent reports coming from San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Mountain View, Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, Houston, New York, and Philadelphia.

The support account for Comcast’s Xfinity services tweeted Wednesday afternoon that landline phone service “customers may still be experiencing an issue with their Voice service.”

A number of customers, including businesses with Xfinity’s phone service Voice, have been tweeting that their phone lines are down with the hashtag #comcastoutage. But perhaps most troubling are emergency responder lines impacted by the massive outage. The Epping Police Department and Kingston Fire Department in New Hampshire have said their phone lines were down, and while Schuylkill County Emergency Management in Pennsylvania said it wasn’t having trouble fielding calls, it informed locals to use their mobile phones in the event of an emergency while the landlines were down.

[The Verge]

Comcast’s Xfinity landline service has been experiencing issues across the U.S. since this morning, with thousands of problems still being reported this afternoon, according to DownDetector.com. The outage map indicates that customers throughout the U.S. have encountered issues, with the most recent reports coming from San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Mountain View, Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, Houston, New York, and Philadelphia.

The support account for Comcast’s Xfinity services tweeted Wednesday afternoon that landline phone service “customers may still be experiencing an issue with their Voice service.”

A number of customers, including businesses with Xfinity’s phone service Voice, have been tweeting that their phone lines are down with the hashtag #comcastoutage. But perhaps most troubling are emergency responder lines impacted by the massive outage. The Epping Police Department and Kingston Fire Department in New Hampshire have said their phone lines were down, and while Schuylkill County Emergency Management in Pennsylvania said it wasn’t having trouble fielding calls, it informed locals to use their mobile phones in the event of an emergency while the landlines were down.

[The Verge]