Month: July 2022

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Fake Reviews Online Might Make You Spend More on Lower Quality Products

https://gizmodo.com/reviews-amazon-online-shopping-1849318757


Fake reviews can run rampant on online marketplaces like Amazon.
Image: Quinn Rooney (Getty Images)

Fake reviews in online marketplaces are much more nefarious thank you might think. In addition to being annoying, a new working paper has found evidence that fake reviews on online stores like Amazon might get you to buy lower quality products as well as spend more money.

Marketplaces have long been a part of human history, from bartering over bread in the town square to the hyper-consumerism of Amazon, one main feature has evolved: reviews. In theory, online marketplaces exclusively publish honest reviews by real people who have actually purchased the product, but fake reviews run rampant, and a new paper has found evidence that these fake reviews could be seriously affecting consumers. The paper, which was presented this week at the National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute, found that not only do fake reviews get users to buy lower quality products but also get users to spend upwards of 12 extra cents per dollar.

The paper, which is authored by researchers at the Behavioralist, the University of Oxford, and the University of Southern California, describes an experiment in which 10,000 UK adults shopped on an Amazon-like platform for one of three products: headphones, dash-cams, or cordless vacuum cleaners. However, these shoppers were secretly broken into six groups, and shown different types of reviews for those products. For example, the control group saw informative reviews that were closely correlated with the quality of the product, while another group saw reviews with exaggerated star ratings, and another saw reviews that were suspicious and referred to a different product.

After analysis, the researchers found that the fake reviews were more likely to convince shoppers to purchase lower quality items, while also getting them to spend upwards of 12 extra cents for each dollar. On the flip side, the researchers also found that the effect that fake reviews have on shoppers is less when those shoppers are skeptical of how authentic those reviews are, and that education on how to spot fake reviews wound up making shoppers in the study more savvy.

The authors argue that this research is one of the first studies to characterize the negative effects of fake reviews on e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Facebook. Fake reviews are rampant in online stores, and Amazon is trying to get in front of them—the company announced earlier this week that it filed lawsuits against the administrators of over 10,000 Facebook groups that were a part of an effort to leave fake reviews on Amazon in exchange for financial compensation or free items.

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Clear and crisp TV
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July 22, 2022 at 11:15AM

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Saudi Arabia Wants to Build This Bizarre City Dubbed ‘The Line’

https://gizmodo.com/video-mbs-saudi-arabia-dystopian-city-utopia-line-1849331062


Promotional video for a new city planned to be built in Saudi Arabia from scratch, dubbed The Line.
Gif: YouTube

Saudi Arabia is developing a new city, 150-stories tall and built from scratch, that will serve as a semi-enclosed environment where people can live and work without ever stepping foot outside. And while the promotional videos released Monday are likely an attempt to give the development a utopian feel that recalls so many “intentional cities” of the 20th century, the project comes across as extremely dystopian.

The city, completely walled on four sides with some kind of ventilation on top, is planned to be about 546 yards tall (500 meters), 218 yards wide (200 meters), and 105 miles long (170 km), according to the promotional videos, and will feature cutting-edge technology along with high-speed transportation from end-to-end. Cars will be completely unnecessary.

A video uploaded to Twitter proclaims this new city will house 9 million residents to provide a more healthy and “sustainable” quality of life. And while it’s being advertised as an eco-friendly project, with water and power supplies billed as “100% renewable,” the details have yet to be provided.

“For too long, humanity has existed within dysfunctional and polluted cities that ignore nature. Now, a revolution in civilization is taking place. Imagine a traditional city and consolidating its footprint, designing to protect and enhance nature,” the narrator of the new video explains.

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The video shows what appears to be autonomous drones zipping around the new city, with plenty of greenery. And people who live there will supposedly be able to go from one end to another in just 20 minutes.

“Residents have access to all their daily needs within 5-minute walk neighborhoods,” the narrator continues.

Another promotional video, uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday and similar in content, shows the city from the perspective of a young woman literally flying through the environment. And its soundtrack definitely helps it sound dystopian—a dark and spooky cover of Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World.”

Why would they use a dark and spooky version of the song—something you’d be more likely to hear in the trailer for a 2010s movie about a serial killer? Your guess is as good as ours. But it’s certainly a choice.

As we mentioned earlier, this is far from the first time that an incredibly expansive planned community has taken shape on the drawing board. Even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos showed off something similar in 2019, albeit his plan is for a space colony.

Whether it was George Pullman’s hyper-capitalist town in Chicagoland, the drug-free cult of Synanon in California, or Upton Sinclair’s socialist cooperative in New Jersey, history has shown intentional communities are often ruined by the egos of the people building them. And there’s arguably no bigger ego on the planet than the developer of this city, Mr. Bone-saw himself, Mohammed bin Salman.

“We cannot ignore the livability and environmental crises facing our world’s cities, and NEOM is at the forefront of delivering new and imaginative solutions to address these issues,” MBS said in a press release about the project.

“NEOM is leading a team of the brightest minds in architecture, engineering and construction to make the idea of building upwards a reality,” the Saudi royal continued.

The question is whether MBS will be able to pull this one off. The country likely has enough money to make it happen, but as we’ve learned from countless utopian communities of the 19th and 20th centuries, you always need more than just money to make a utopian experiment work.

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July 26, 2022 at 06:06AM

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Here’s How Light Is Ruining Your Wine

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/heres-how-light-is-ruining-your-wine


Lightstrike may be ruining your wine before you even open the bottle. “The light is transforming some primary aromas into something normally not present in wine,” says Fulvio Mattivi, a wine chemist at the University of Trento in Italy.

He’s been looking into the lightstrike problem — which occurs when wine bottles are exposed to too much direct sunlight or artificial light — for several years now. These sources of light can cause chemical reactions in certain compounds, he says, which ultimately change the flavor of your favorite vino. At least 70 to 75 percent of all wine can be affected by this problem.

“It’s not something easily manageable by the wineries,” Mattivi says.

Read More: The Secret Science Behind Alcohol-Removed Wine

When your pinot gris or chardonnay is exposed to intense light, these chemical changes can result in a dulling of the pleasant flavors that wine drinkers most enjoy. In the worst-case scenario, it can even result in the off-putting aromas of boiled cabbage, corn nuts or wet dog — not exactly something that might pair well with a gourmet meal.

In a study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mattivi and his colleagues at the Edmund Mach Foundation describe the mechanism for this change in flavor.

Chemical Solutions

Of course, lightstrike doesn’t affect all wines equally. White wine is most affected because the clear liquid is penetrated by light more easily. A rosé can also be affected, while reds are usually relatively protected. Wine bottles also play a big role; earlier work by Mattivi and his colleagues showed that wine stored in green bottles is a little more resistant to lightstrike than that stored in clear flint bottles, for example. Wine stored in more opaque, brown bottles is even less vulnerable.

To find out what’s happening inside the bottle when too much light gets in, Mattivi’s team used techniques that separate the chemical components of a mixture then determine their relative quantity. They selected two dozen types of wine, including pinot gris, chardonnay, Müller-Thurgau and gewürztraminer, and exposed the beverages (1,052 bottles in total) to a light — tailed to mimic what the bottles might experience on a supermarket shelf.

The researchers found that wine stored in green bottles preserved its flavor profile for 50 days. But after just seven days of light exposure, wine stored in flint glass bottles lost between 10 and 30 percent of its terpenes and between 30 and 70 percent of its norisoprenoids compared to wine stored in colored bottles.

Terpenes are typically responsible for a pleasant floral fragrance. In gewürztraminers, for example, they often bring about a rose-like or lychee aroma, Mattivi says. Norisoprenoids, on the other hand, are an important group of aromas that typically increase with aging — assuming the wine doesn’t suffer from lightstrike, of course. Some norisoprenoids can bring about aromas of baked apple or dry plum, although they may also positively interact with other fruity compounds in the liquid.

The team also found that light increased the levels of 4-hepten-1-ol, a compound that can smell like rancid oil, in chardonnay and pinot gris wines stored for a week in clear flint glass bottles in supermarket lighting.

“In the end you are not sure anymore if that is a chardonnay or if it is something else,” Mattivi says. In the study, the authors write that the decrease in these components result in a lesser “aromatic bouquet” that is “naked of metabolites that could mask possible off-flavors.” These decreases could cause big problems for neutral or low-aromatic white wines in a relatively short period of time.

Why Bother?

For Mattivi and his team, the findings reveal the underlying issues with using clear flint glass bottles for any type of wine — although don’t let this stop you from purchasing one yourself. Many people might still enjoy their wine without noticing these problems. Gewurztraminers, for example, are so strongly aromatic that despite the loss of some pleasant compounds and the increase of negative aromas, the wine may not suffer too much.

Read More: Natural Wine and the Debate Over ‘Healthy’ Alcohol

Keeping the bottles out of the light at all times is nearly impossible for wineries, as there are so many potential exposure points in the distribution between the wine’s bottling and its consumption. If doesn’t happen on the supermarket shelf or while on display at a restaurant, wine bottles could also experience lightstrike during shipment or in your kitchen at home, for example.

“Very expensive bottles often remain on the shelf for a long time, and therefore are usually sold in dark green or amber bottle,” Mattivi explains.

As a result, he calls clear flint bottles “stupid packaging” — a problem compounded by the fact that this type of glass isn’t even cheaper than darker bottles, necessarily. “I would prefer to have a package that preserves the integrity,” he says, adding that he hopes his latest research will provide more information to consumers looking to buy wine, a supposedly non-perishable product.

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July 25, 2022 at 04:22PM

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Micron’s 232 Layer NAND Now Shipping: 1Tbit, 6-Plane Dies With 50% More I/O Bandwidth

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17509/microns-232-layer-nand-now-shipping

Ahead of next week’s Flash Memory Summit, Micron this morning is announcing that their next-generation 232 layer NAND has begun shipping. The sixth generation of Micron’s 3D NAND technology, 232L is slated to offer both improved bandwidth and larger die sizes – most notably, introducing Micron’s first 1Tbit TLC NAND dies, which at this point are the densest in the industry. According to the company, the new NAND is already shipping to customers and in Crucial SSD products in limited volumes, with further volume ramping to take place later in the year.

Micron first announced their 232L NAND back in May during their Investor Day event, revealing that the NAND would be available this year, and that the company intended to ramp up production by the end of the year. And while that yield ramp is still ongoing, Micron’s Singapore fab is already capable of producing enough of the new NAND that Micron is comfortable in announcing it is shipping, albeit clearly in limited quantities.

From a technical perspective, Micron’s 232L NAND further builds upon the basic design elements Micron honed in that generation. So we’re once again looking at a string stacked design, with Micron using a pair of 116 layer decks, up from 88 layers in the previous generation. 116 layer decks, in turn, are notable as this is the first time Micron has been able to produce a single deck over 100 layers, a feat previously limited to Samsung. This in turn has allowed Micron to produce cutting-edge NAND with just two decks, something that may not be possible for much longer as companies push toward designs with over 300 total layers.

Micron’s NAND decks continue to be built with their charge-trap, CMOS under Array (CuA) architecture, which sees the bulk of the NAND’s logic placed under the NAND memory cells. Micron has long cited this as giving them an ongoing advantage in NAND density, and that’s once again on show for their 232L NAND. According to the company they’ve achieved a density of 14.6 Gbit/mm2, which is about 43% denser than their 176L NAND. And, according to Micron, anywhere between 35% to 100% denser than competing TLC products.

Micron 3D TLC NAND Flash Memory
  232L
(B58R)		 176L
(B47R)
Layers 232 176
Decks 2 (x116) 2 (x88)
Die Capacity 1 Tbit 512 Gbit
Die Size (mm2) ~70.1mm2 ~49.8mm2
Density (Gbit/mm2) 14.6 10.3
I/O Speed 2.4 MT/s
(ONFi 5.0)		 1.6 MT/s
(ONFI 4.2)
Program Throughput ? ?
Planes 6 4
CuA / PuC Yes Yes

The improved density has allowed Micron to finally produce their first 1Tbit TLC die, which from a productization standpoint means that Micron can now also produce 2TB chip packages by stacking 16 of their 232L dies. This is good news for SSD capacities, which at the high-end are often limited by the number of packages that can be placed. Though it does mean that there’s a potential loss of performance at lower capacities due to a decrease parallelism from implementing fewer packages.

At the same time, Micron has also been working on the size of their chip packaging, and as a result while the larger capacity means that their die size has increased on a generational basis (we estimate ~70.1mm2 given Micron’s density figures), they’ve still shrunk their chip packaging by 28%. As a result, a single chip package is down from 12mm x 18mm (216mm2) to 11.5mm x 13.5mm (~155mm2). So for Micron’s downstream customers, the combination of the greater capacity and physically smaller packages for Micron’s NAND means that device manufacturers can cut down on the amount of space they allocate to NAND packages, or go the other direction and try to cram in even more packages into a similar amount of space.

Besides density improvements, the latest generation of Micron’s NAND is also allowing the company to upgrade their hardware to take advantage of newer I/O technologies, as well as to implement their own improvements to increase transfer speeds. The big news here is that Micron has increased the number of planes within their NAND die from 4 to 6, further improving the parallelism available within each die.  Quad (four) plane designs became common in the previous generation of NAND, and as the density of NAND grows, so too are the number of planes in order for transfer rates to keep up with these greater densities. Micron has confirmed that the planes in 232L NAND offer independent reads, though they aren’t being quite as explicit on what kind of wordline dependencies remain for writes.

This increase in parallelism, along with improved internal transfer rates, has allowed Micron to significantly improve their per-die read and write speeds. According to the company, read speeds have improved by over 75% over their 176L generation NAND, and meanwhile write speeds have outright doubled.

Coupled with this, Micron has also implemented the latest generation of ONFi on their peripheral logic. Finalized in 2021 and now rolling out in the first NAND products, ONFi increases controller-NAND transfer rates by 50%, bringing it to 2400MT/second. ONFi 5.0 also introduced a new NV-LPDDR4 signaling method, which is available with the same 2400MT/s rate but, as it’s based on LPDDR technology, consumes less power. According to Micron, they’re seeing per-bit energy transfer savings of over 30%, which makes for a significant reduction in energy consumption. Though as always with these sorts of comparisons, it’s worth noting that the bandwidth gains exceed the energy savings (50% vs. 30%), so our expectation is that overall energy consumption is going to go up for high-performance products that run at the fastest speeds supported by Micron’s 232L NAND.

As for productization, Micron is pitching 232L NAND as a full stack replacement for 176L NAND – meaning that Micron considers it suitable for everything from mobile and IoT to clients and data center products. To that end, the company is already making initial shipments to their customers, including their own Crucial subsidiary. As with past generations of Micron NAND, starting early with Crucial allows the company to get some hands-on experience in developing full-featured products with their new NAND before they roll it into their own enterprise equipment. Interestingly, however, Micron isn’t announcing any new Crucial products right now, which strongly implies that Crucial is going to begin implementing the new NAND in existing products. If that’s the case, then Crucial customers will want to pay attention to what’s going on and what revision of a drive they’re buying, as the larger 1Tb die could have performance implications for products originally designed around 512Gbit dies.

Wrapping things up, today’s announcement should be the tip of the iceberg for Micron’s 232L shipments. With volume ramping expected to continue through this end of this calendar year, Micron’s plans call for the company to significantly increase the amount of next-generation NAND they’re shipping, going well beyond these initial volumes. Ultimately, this means that products equipped with 232L NAND are going to be relatively sparse for this year, and will pick up in 2023 following the volume ramp. So while Micron’s 232L NAND is indeed shipping, from a consumer standpoint we’re likely still several months off (or more) from seeing it becoming a common fixture in SSDs and other products.

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July 26, 2022 at 08:09AM

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How Plants Might One Day Eliminate Shots [Science Video]

https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2022/07/25/how-plants-might-one-day-eliminate-shots-science-video/

For those with a fear of needles, edible vaccines seem like some distant utopian dream, but that dream may soon be a reality… for chickens.

[SciShow]

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July 25, 2022 at 12:06PM

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Study Shows Cooperation Among Strangers Is Increasing

https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/study-shows-cooperation-among-strangers-is-increasing


You’ve probably heard it before. Whether it’s about holding a door, helping locate a lost item or providing strangers with directions, you’ve encountered the idea that people aren’t as helpful as they once were. Is there any truth to this idea, despite its pervasiveness?

Denying the perception that people today aren’t as willing to assist one another, a study published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin shows that the inclination to cooperate has slightly increased among strangers in the U.S. in the years since the 1950s. This slight increase, the authors say, could indicate an improvement in people’s abilities to address global problems, such as pandemics and climate change.

Cooperation Increases

“Many people believe U.S. society is becoming less socially connected, less trusting and less committed to the common good,” says Yu Kou, one of the authors of the study and a professor of social psychology at Beijing Normal University, in a press release.

Kou and a team of social psychologists surveyed and analyzed studies from the past 61 years and found no indications of a decline in people’s willingness to cooperate and work with one another to solve their problems. Instead, the team found a slight increase in people’s willingness.

“We were surprised by our findings that Americans became more cooperative over the last six decades,” Kou says in a press release.

Ultimately, the study authors say that these findings offer an optimistic vision of the future. “Greater cooperation within and between societies may help us tackle global challenges, such as responses to pandemics, climate change and immigrant crises,” Kou says in a press release.

Calculating Cooperation

According to the team, only a small number of studies have investigated long-term cooperation changes, and those that have, tended to rely on self-report measures rather than experimental data. To address this gap in the research, the team surveyed and synthesized 511 experiments conducted in the U.S. in the years between 1956 and 2017. Restricting their analysis to experiments that focused on young adults, the team revealed a small increase in the rate of cooperation, from 0.38 in 1956 to 0.46 in 2017, after controlling other variables.

Though the study cannot prove what factors specifically caused this increase in cooperation, the team theorizes that the increase could connect to several changes in the society of the U.S. For instance, the findings do show that the increase in cooperative activity corresponds with increases in urbanization, in wealth and wealth disparities, and in the proportion of people living by themselves.

“It’s possible that people gradually learn to broaden their cooperation with friends and acquaintances to strangers, which is called for in more urban, anonymous societies,” says Paul Van Lange, another author of the study and a professor of social psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in a press release. “U.S. society may have become more individualistic, but people have not.”

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July 18, 2022 at 09:18AM

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A New Attack Can Unmask Anonymous Users on Any Major Browser

https://www.wired.com/story/web-deanonymization-side-channel-attack-njit/


Everyone from advertisers and marketers to government-backed hackers and spyware makers wants to identify and track users across the web. And while a staggering amount of infrastructure is already in place to do exactly that, the appetite for data and new tools to collect it has proved insatiable. With that reality in mind, researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology are warning this week about a novel technique attackers could use to de-anonymize website visitors and potentially connect the dots on many components of targets’ digital lives.

The findings, which NJIT researchers will present at the Usenix Security Symposium in Boston next month, show how an attacker who tricks someone into loading a malicious website can determine whether that visitor controls a particular public identifier, like an email address or social media account, thus linking the visitor to a piece of potentially personal data. 

When you visit a website, the page can capture your IP address, but this doesn’t necessarily give the site owner enough information to individually identify you. Instead, the hack analyzes subtle features of a potential target’s browser activity to determine whether they are logged into an account for an array of services, from YouTube and Dropbox to Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and more. Plus the attacks work against every major browser, including the anonymity-focused Tor Browser.

“If you’re an average internet user, you may not think too much about your privacy when you visit a random website,” says Reza Curtmola, one of the study authors and a computer science professor at NJIT. “But there are certain categories of internet users who may be more significantly impacted by this, like people who organize and participate in political protest, journalists, and people who network with fellow members of their minority group. And what makes these types of attacks dangerous is they’re very stealthy. You just visit the website and you have no idea that you’ve been exposed.”

The risk that government-backed hackers and cyber-arms dealers will attempt to de-anonymize web users isn’t just theoretical. Researchers have documented a number of techniques used in the wild and have witnessed situations in which attackers identified individual users, though it wasn’t clear how.

Other theoretical work has looked at an attack similar to the one NJIT researchers developed, but much of this past investigation has focused on grabbing revealing data that’s leaked between websites when one service makes a request to another. As a result of this prior work, browsers and website developers have improved how data is isolated and restricted when content loads, making these potential attack paths less feasible. Knowing that attackers are motivated to seek out techniques for identifying users, though, the researchers wanted to explore additional approaches.

“Let’s say you have a forum for underground extremists or activists, and a law enforcement agency has covertly taken control of it,” Curtmola says. “They want to identify the users of this forum but can’t do this directly because the users use pseudonyms. But let’s say that the agency was able to also gather a list of Facebook accounts who are suspected to be users of this forum. They would now be able to correlate whoever visits the forum with a specific Facebook identity.”

via Wired Top Stories https://www.wired.com

July 14, 2022 at 06:09AM