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October 15, 2018 at 12:57AM

igloohome reveals Smart Padlock

The humble home has gotten ever smarter these days, thanks to the integration with voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa into everyday appliances, not to mention the smartphone which seems to have an app for virtually everything. Since the house is meant to be a safe space for the family to rest and relax in, why not consider beefing up your home’s security with igloohome’s latest offering, the aptly named Smart Padlock?

The Smart Padlock is a versatile, remotely-managed security solution which will offer homeowners with a convenient access method in order to control to their properties and assets. Airbnb hosts would certainly find the built-in innovative PIN code technology useful, since it enables owners to grant remote access without requiring the users to download an app before that. Visitors and guests would also find it convenient, since not everyone would have a data plan ready at hand, especially if they are a tourist in the area.

Touted to be the ideal security tool for granting time-sensitive access, the Smart Padlock is currently targeting an Indiegogo campaign launch. Property owners will be able to grant access to their homes, yards, facilities, and other rooms armed with it to virtually anyone: from guests to handymen or other family members through a couple of unique options: PIN codes or Bluetooth keys. PIN codes can be sent over any communication mode including SMS, email or Facebook Messenger. Upon receipt, the user just needs to key in the PIN code on the padlock, and they will work immediately as long as it is within the set time window.

Alternatively, Bluetooth keys can be sent over smartphone, but this will only work if the users are within proximity of it. Upon receiving the Bluetooth key from the owner, all users need to do is to tap ‘unlock’ on the app, and the Smart Padlock will unshackle. We do hope to see more variants of such smart padlocks make their way to the market in the future.

Press Release

Facebook has confirmed that millions of users did in fact have personal data accessed during a serious security breach disclosed late last month.

Initially, the social media giant estimated that 50 million accounts were affected by the hack, but said it was not clear whether any information had actually been stolen.

Facebook has revised the total number of affected users down to around 30 million. But it has also confirmed that hackers accessed personal details in most of those cases — including, for about half of those users, recent searches and locations.

Facebook would not discuss a suspect or a motive, at the FBI’s request. The bureau is actively investigating the breach.

As NPR has previously reported, the hack exploited three separate bugs in Facebook’s code. No passwords were actually compromised, but the hackers were able to gain “access tokens” that let them use accounts as though they were logged in as another person. In late September, Facebook detected unusual activity, discovered the bugs and disabled them.

Facebook says the attacks were carried out between September 14 and 27. The attackers moved within social networks, controlling one account at first and from there, accessing that account’s friends, to initially steal access tokens for 400,000, and ultimately 30 million more accounts.

Fifteen million of those users had their names and contact details — which could be email addresses or phone numbers — accessed.

In a more serious breach, 14 million people had a wider array of data accessed, including their gender, religion, relationship status, birthday, current city and hometown, device types, education and work history. Hackers also had access to those users’ last 15 searches, and the last 10 locations they either checked into or were tagged in by someone else.

The 400,000 people whose accounts were first hacked were most seriously compromised, with hackers viewing their posts, their friend lists, their group memberships and the names of recent message conversations (though not, in most cases, the contents of those messages).

“We have no reason to believe the attackers were interested in that information” from those 400,000 users, Guy Rosen, vice president of product management at Facebook, told reporters on Friday. “They were [doing] that in order to get the access tokens for those people’s friends.”

Hackers also gained access to the accounts of about 1 million users, but did not steal any data, Facebook says.

Users can visit Facebook’s help site to determine if their account was among those hacked.

Facebook says they do not believe the attackers created any posts while imitating other users.

The company also says that the hackers would hypothetically have been able to view the last four characters of users’ credit card numbers, but there is no evidence they sought out that information.

Sears — the iconic American retailer that has sold everything from clothing and toys to refrigerators and socket wrenches over its more than 130 year history — may have reached the end. The Sears Holdings company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday, after failing to make a $134 million debt payment.

The bankruptcy filing is the latest and most significant milestone in a long decline for the company once best-known for pioneering the mail-order catalog that featured nearly everything the American consumer might desire.

Today, however, Sears is drowning in $5.5 billion of outstanding debt.

Hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert took over the company in 2013. He was both the company’s biggest investor and a major lender, and tasked with orchestrating a difficult turnout.

Under Lampert’s guidance, the company sold off valuable assets such as the Lands’ End clothing line and legendary Craftsman brand in attempts to increase its cash flow. As part of Monday’s filing, he was removed as the company’s CEO.

Last year, Sears’ stock tumbled after the company acknowledged in an annual filing that its future viability was uncertain. It closed dozens of stores that same year, citing non-profitability. In August, its stock fell from about $6 to below the minimum $1 level Nasdaq stocks must maintain in order to avoid being delisted.

Its Chapter 11 filing will allow Sears to reorganize, and perhaps emerge from bankruptcy with a portion of its business still alive.

“The Chapter 11 process will give Holdings the flexibility to strengthen its balance sheet, enabling the Company to accelerate its strategic transformation, continue right sizing its operating model, and return to profitability,” Lampert said in a statement.

Sears was founded in 1887. It evolved into an American one-stop shop for everything related to the home. Its annual Christmas catalog was immensely popular — at its height, it spanned over 500 pages. In the first half the 20th century, the company even sold about 70,000 pre-cut kit houses — a small part of its then-booming sales. Its strategy of offering all the home merchandise one could dream of in accessible catalogs was path-making.

“Sears is an American institution,” Jerry Hancock, self-proclaimed Sears scholar and historian, told NPR on Sunday. “There are actually a number of communities in North Carolina where almost the entire town is Sears houses that were purchased through the catalog.”

“Sears taught America about the modern world through this catalog,” he said. “It completely changed American life. That catalog was sort of a window into this new consumer world, and it really made a connection with people.”

The company’s recent stature has been far smaller than it was in its heyday, amid a constantly changing retail landscape dominated by Amazon, e-commerce and big-box discount retailers.

Nancy Koehn of the Harvard Business School told NPR in 2017 that in its early days, Sears was like Amazon is today — a retailer of great disruption.

“It wasn’t the Internet, but it was the same idea that no matter where you are you can touch and feel and imagine what these different products could mean in your life by virtue of an outreach, a distribution channel that an imaginative and gutsy retailer — in this case Sears — had created and then invested in and then enlarged,” Koehn said.

The company, which also owns discount retailer Kmart, will close 142 stores by the end of the year as part of the bankruptcy. As of an Aug. 4 filing, Sears Holdings still had 506 Sears locations and 360 Kmart locations.

The Federal Communications Commission opened its defense of its net neutrality repeal yesterday, telling a court that it has no authority to keep the net neutrality rules in place.

Chairman Ajit Pai’s FCC argued that broadband is not a “telecommunications service” as defined in federal law, and therefore it must be classified as an information service instead. As an information service, broadband cannot be subject to common carrier regulations such as net neutrality rules, Pai’s FCC said. The FCC is only allowed to impose common carrier regulations on telecommunications services.

“Given these classification decisions, the Commission determined that the Communications Act does not endow it with legal authority to retain the former conduct rules,” the FCC said in a summary of its defense filed yesterday in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The FCC is defending the net neutrality repeal against a lawsuit filed by more than 20 state attorneys general, consumer advocacy groups, and tech companies. The FCC’s opponents in the case will file reply briefs next month, and oral arguments are scheduled for February.

Rules were upheld in 2016

The FCC’s argument that its net neutrality rules are illegal is notable for a couple reasons. Judges at the DC Circuit appeals court ruled in 2016 that the rules were legal, allowing them to remain in place despite the broadband industry’s attempt to overturn them.

The FCC repealed the net neutrality rules anyway after the majority changed hands from Democrats to Republicans. In defending that repeal, Pai’s FCC isn’t merely claiming that the rules were a bad idea—the FCC is claiming it has no authority to impose such rules at all.

The FCC’s claim that it has no authority to impose net neutrality rules could be important in determining whether state governments such as California’s may impose net neutrality rules similar to those repealed by the FCC. Pai claims the FCC can both repeal its own rules and preempt states from enacting similar ones, because broadband is an interstate service and state rules conflict with the “federal policy of nonregulation.”

But defenders of state rules say that the FCC cannot preempt state laws regulating conduct over which the FCC claims it has no regulatory authority.

Defining broadband

The FCC’s argument that broadband isn’t “telecommunications” hinges on Pai’s interpretation of the Communications Act.

The Communications Act specifically defines telecommunications as “the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received.” A telecommunications service is “the offering of telecommunications for a fee directly to the public.”

An information service, by contrast, is defined in the Act as “the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications.” The information service definition “includes electronic publishing, but does not include any use of any such capability for the management, control, or operation of a telecommunications system or the management of a telecommunications service.”

Here’s how the FCC’s new brief argues that broadband is an information service:

The Commission reasonably classified broadband Internet access as an information service because, among other things, it offers users the “capability” for “‘acquiring’ and ‘retrieving’ information” from websites and applications “and ‘utilizing’ information by interacting with stored data.” The Supreme Court held in Brand X that it was reasonable for the Commission to conclude that Internet access is an information service, given that “subscribers can reach third-party Web sites via ‘the World Wide Web, and browse their contents, [only] because their [broadband] provider offers the capability for … acquiring, [storing] … retrieving [and] utilizing … information.'”. The agency made the same reasonable finding here.

Broadband isn’t a “distinct transmission service”

Broadband is an information service in part because it “inextricably intertwines high-speed transmission with the information processing capabilities provided by Domain Name Service (DNS) and caching,” the FCC said.

“[B]roadband providers do not make a stand-alone offering of telecommunications,” the FCC also said. “[B]roadband providers generally market and provide information processing capabilities and transmission together as a single service, and consumers perceive that service to include more than mere transmission.”

Broadband customers “expect to receive (and pay for) a finished, functionally integrated service that provides access to the Internet,” rather than a “separate” and “distinct transmission service,” the FCC said.

The FCC continued:

In any event, regardless of consumer perception, the Commission found that broadband providers in fact offer a single, inextricably intertwined information service. Because information processing must be combined with transmission for users to reach the Internet, the Commission reasonably determined that the information processing capabilities are an integral part of the service and make broadband an information service under the Act. Finally, the Commission found that public policy considerations, including the costs of Title II regulation compared to its uncertain benefits, supported the Commission’s classification decision.

If broadband is “in fact” an information service as the FCC claims, then the commission cannot impose net neutrality rules. The FCC in 2010 tried to impose net neutrality rules without classifying broadband as a telecommunications service, but Verizon sued and got the rules thrown out. The net neutrality rules were upheld in court only after the FCC decided in 2015 to classify broadband as telecommunications.

The Verizon court decision showed that the Communication Act “forbids common-carriage regulation of information services,” Pai’s FCC said in its brief. “Verizon further confirms that the Title II Order’s conduct rules effectively require broadband providers to operate as common carriers. Maintaining the conduct rules would therefore contravene the Act.”

Pai’s FCC says the 2016 court decision upholding the net neutrality rules doesn’t prevent the FCC from changing its classification of broadband. That ruling upheld the FCC’s 2015 determination that broadband is telecommunications, but it recognized that the FCC has some leeway to define broadband as it wishes.

“A divided panel of this Court upheld that decision as a permissible exercise of the agency’s discretion, but specifically recognized that, under Brand X, ‘classification of broadband as an information service was permissible,'” the FCC said.

Broadband “simply transmit[s] information”

The state attorneys general and other entities suing the FCC have until November 16 to file reply briefs. Final briefs are due November 27, and oral arguments are scheduled for February 1.

In an earlier brief, Mozilla and other tech companies and consumer advocacy groups argued that broadband is by definition telecommunications.

Broadband providers “simply transmit information between users,” they wrote. “None of Comcast, AT&T or Verizon adds scenes to the movies we watch online or embellishes our friends’ notes on a social media ‘wall.’ [Broadband] is a transmission conduit; its nature is unchanged by the fact that it intentionally allows reaching others’ information services.”

Using a technique called reinforcement learning, a researcher at Google Brain has shown that virtual robots can redesign their body parts to help them navigate challenging obstacle courses—even if the solutions they come up with are completely bizarre.

Embodied cognition is the idea that an animal’s cognitive abilities are influenced and constrained by its body plan. This means a squirrel’s thought processes and problem-solving strategies will differ somewhat from the cogitations of octopuses, elephants, and seagulls. Each animal has to navigate its world in its own special way using the body it’s been given, which naturally leads to different ways of thinking and learning.

“Evolution plays a vital role in shaping an organism’s body to adapt to its environment,” David Ha, a computer scientist and AI expert at Google Brain, explained in his new study. “The brain and its ability to learn is only one of many body components that is co-evolved together.”

This phenomenon has been observed in the real world, but Ha wanted to know if similar processes might also apply to the digital realm. To that end, Ha conducted a series of experiments to see if reinforcement learning could coax virtual robots, called walkers, into designing their body plans to better accommodate their environment and the challenges confronting them. Reinforcement learning is a tool used in artificial intelligence to steer agents toward a desired goal or direction, by awarding them points for “good” behavior.

Using the OpenAI Gym framework, Ha was able to provide an environment for his walkers. This framework looks a lot like an old-school, 2D video game, but it uses sophisticated virtual physics to simulate natural conditions, and it’s capable of randomly generating terrain and other in-game elements.

As for the walker, it was endowed with a pair of legs, each consisting of an upper and lower section. The bipedal bot had to learn how to navigate through its virtual environment and improve its performance over time. Researchers at DeepMind conducted a similar experiment last year, in which virtual bots had to learn how to walk from scratch and navigate through complex parkour courses. The difference here is that Ha’s walkers had the added benefit of being able to redesign their body plan—or at least parts of it. The bots could alter the lengths and widths of their four leg sections to a maximum of 75 percent of the size of the default leg design. The walkers’ pentagon-shaped head could not be altered, serving as cargo. Each walker used a digital version of LIDAR to assess the terrain immediately in front of it, which is why (in the videos) they appear to shoot a thin laser beam at regular intervals.

Using reinforcement-learning algorithms, the bots were given around a day or two to devise their new body parts and come up with effective locomotion strategies, which together formed a walker’s “policy,” in the parlance of AI researchers. The learning process is similar to trial-and-error, except the bots, via reinforcement learning, are rewarded when they come up with good strategies, which then leads them toward even better solutions. This is why reinforcement learning is so powerful—it speeds up the learning process as the bots experiment with various solutions, many of which are unconventional and unpredictable by human standards.

For the first test (above), Ha placed a walker in a basic environment with no obstacles and gently rolling terrain. Using its default body plan, the bot adopted a rather cheerful-looking skipping locomotion strategy. After the learning stage, however, it modified its legs such that they were thinner and longer. With these modified limbs, the walker used its legs as springs, quickly hopping across the terrain.

The introduction of more challenging terrain (above), such as having to walk over obstacles, travel up and down hills, and jump over pits, introduced some radical new policies, namely the invention of an elongated rear “tail” with a dramatically thickened end. Armed with this configuration, the walkers hopped successfully around the obstacle course.

By this point in the experiment, Ha could see that reinforcement learning was clearly working. Allowing a walker “to learn a better version of its body obviously enables it to achieve better performance,” he wrote in the study.

Not content to stop there, Ha played around with the idea of motivating the walkers to adopt some design decisions that weren’t necessarily beneficial to its performance. The reason for this, he said, is that “we may want our agent to learn a design that utilizes the least amount of materials while still achieving satisfactory performance on the task.”

So for the next test, Ha rewarded an agent for developing legs that were smaller in area (above). With the bot motivated to move efficiently across the terrain, and using the tiniest legs possible (it no longer had to adhere to the 75 percent rule), the walker adopted a rather conventional bipedal style while navigating the easy terrain (it needed just 8 percent of the leg area used in the original design).

But the walker really struggled to come up with a sensible policy when having to navigate the challenging terrain. In the example shown above, which was the best strategy it could muster, the walker used 27 percent of the area of its original design. Reinforcement learning is good, but it’s no guarantee that a bot will come up with something brilliant. In some cases, a good solution simply doesn’t exist.

“By allowing the agent’s body to adapt to its task within some constraints, it can learn policies that are not only better for its task, but also learn them more quickly,” wrote Ha in the paper. His experiment showed that embodied cognition can apply to the virtual realm, and that agents can be motivated to devise body structures more suitable for a given task.

More practically, this application of reinforcement learning could be used for machine learning-assisted design, in which computers are tasked with designing aerodynamic shapes, testing materials under stressful conditions, or building super-agile robots (the corporeal kind). It could also help with computer graphics and improved video gameplay—imagine having to face off against an AI-enabled adversary that can continually redesign itself as it learns from its mistakes and your strengths.

Best of all, reinforcement learning requires minimal human intervention. Sure, many of the solutions conceived by these virtual bots are weird and even absurd, but that’s kind of the point. As the abilities of these self-learning systems increase in power and scope, they’ll come up with things humans never would have thought of. Which is actually kind of scary.

[Google Brain via New Scientist]