Tag: technology

Just The Facts On ‘Geofencing’: The Intrusive, App-Based ‘Dragnet’ That Sgt. Joe Friday Never Dreamed Of

As worshippers gathered at the Calvary Chapel in 2020, they were being watched from above.  

“We are in the space between the emergence of this technological practice and courts having ruled on its constitutionality,” said Alex Marthews, national chair for Restore the 4th, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the protection of the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans’ rights against “unreasonable search and seizure.” 

“Geofencing” often begins with an innocent click. Smartphone apps ask if they can access location to improve service. When users say they yes, they often don’t realize that the apps that help them drive, cook, or pray are likely reselling their information to far-flung for-profit entities. This and other information detailing people’s behaviors and preferences is valuable for businesses trying to target customers. The global location intelligence market was estimated at $16 billion last year, according to Grand View Research, which predicts that figure will grow to $51 billion by 2030.

While it is legal for private companies to broker this information, constitutional questions arise when government accesses data from a third party that it would be prohibited from collecting on its own. The lawsuit filed by Calvary Chapel in August argues that Santa Clara County carried out a warrantless surveillance of the church when it acquired information in 2020 on the church’s foot traffic patterns collected by a research team from Stanford University. Court documents show the researchers acquired the information, which originated with Google Maps, from the location data company SafeGraph, which is also being sued by Calvary. 

Nicole Berger, SafeGraph’s senior vice president of operations, has said the Stanford team violated the company’s terms of service and non-commercial research agreement. For its part, Google has since cracked down on third-party vendors, though it still uses location and other data for its own operations.

Google was recently ordered to pay $93 million in a settlement over its collection of location data even after users turned off their location history. The company is also involved in an ongoing dispute in an Oakland, Calif., U.S. District Court over the company’s “Real Time Bidding” process, whereby customers’ personal information is auctioned off to advertisers, so that they can place targeted ads. According to the Calvary Chapel lawsuit, it was this process, among others, which enabled SafeGraph to collect users’ location data. 

Geofencing allows users to build a fence around certain areas or points-of-interest such as Calvary Chapel or the area near the Capitol on Jan. 6 and see when people entered that space.

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Scientists Recover RNA From an Extinct Species for the First Time

The last known thylacine—the largest marsupial carnivore in recent times—died in Tasmania’s Beaumaris Zoo in 1936. But the animal has recently been the target of de-extinction efforts, and now, a team of researchers has managed to recover RNA from the creature—the first time such a feat has been accomplished for any extinct species.

The researchers extracted, sequenced, and analyzed RNA (Ribonucleic acid) from an approximately 130-year-old thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) specimen in the Stockholm Natural History Museum. The team’s research describing the recovery and its utility was published today in Genome Research.

“Our study is unique in this sense as we were able, for the first time, to sequence RNAs from an extinct species, the Tasmanian tiger,” said Emilio Mármol-Sánchez, a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University and the Centre for Paleogenetics in Stockholm, and the study’s lead author, in an email to Gizmodo. “This is the first time that we have been able to catch a glimpse of the actual biology and metabolism of Tasmanian tiger cells right before they died.”

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Pig kidney transplanted in a human lasted for TWO MONTHS in new record that could be a breakthrough for organ donations

A pig kidney transplanted into a brain-dead man continued to function for two months, marking the longest time a non-human organ has survived in a human.

The procedure, conducted on July 14, implanted the kidney in 58-year-old Maurice ‘Mo’ Miller, whose body was donated by his family after he was declared dead by neurologic criteria and maintained with a beating heart on ventilator support.

The experiment concluded Wednesday when doctors removed the genetically modified organ, and Miller’s sister said her final goodbyes.

‘I’m so proud of you,’ Mary Miller-Duffy said in a tearful farewell at her brother’s bedside.

Surgeons at NYU Langone Health, who performed the experiment, determined no differences in how the pig kidney reacted to human hormones, excreted antibiotics or experienced medicine-related side effects.

It is the latest in a string of developments renewing hope for animal-to-human transplants, or xenotransplantation, after decades of failure as people’s immune systems attacked the foreign tissue.

A previous attempt saw the organ only last for 72 hours before it was rejected. 

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Chinese researchers create dancing microrobots using lasers

A team of researchers has come up with a method that utilizes femtosecond lasers to make micromachined joints, showcased by tiny “dancing” micro robots that look like humans.

Inspired by the flexible joints of humans, the scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), of the Chinese Academy of Science, led by Prof. Wu Dong, proposed a two-in-one multi-material laser writing strategy that creates the joints from temperature-sensitive hydrogels as well as metal nanoparticles. 

What are femtosecond lasers? 

Femtosecond lasers are pulsed lasers that use short, intermittent irradiation. They feature the shortest pulse width, just one quadrillionth of a second (10-15 sec). Unlike a continuous wave laser, the material that’s affected by the pulse is instantly removed. 

The technique of femtosecond laser two-photon polymerization, a “true three-dimensional fabrication technique with nanoscale precision,” as the press release from USTC  describes it, has been widely used recently to create a number of functional microstructures. 

Such microstructures have been showing promise for applications in micro-nano optics, micro sensors, microelectromechanical systems. The study specifically mentions soft grippers, artificial muscles, and wearable devices as possibilities. The challenge lies in “integrating multiple microjoints into soft robots at the micrometer scale to achieve multi-deformation modalities,” as the scientists write in their paper, published in Nature Communications. 

One possibility would be to equip terrestrial robots with multiple shape memory alloy joints that can “realize linear/curvilinear crawling, walking, turning, and jumping by laser-inducing,” as the study proposes. Another use would be to create flexible hands with multiple joints as an aid to disabled people. This would allow them to grip different kinds of objects.

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Senators Call For Government Power To Hand Out Licenses To AI Companies, Curb “Deceptive” Election-Related AI and “Deepfakes”

This week, a Senate Judiciary hearing under the umbrella of the Privacy, Technology and Law Subcommittee became the stage for bipartisan senators to divulge plans aiming to focus on the allegedly looming threats of manipulative artificial intelligence, especially in the realm of elections. Visions for a framework proposed by Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), foresee a new government agency, tasked with issuing licenses to entities working with AI systems.

Simultaneously, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) unveiled preliminary details of upcoming legislation, crafted in tandem with Hawley, along with Senators Chris Coons (D-Del.), and Susan Collins (R-Maine). This new proposal targets the prospects of AI technologies pervading the electoral process.

Apprehension regarding deceptive generative AI undermining democratic elections took center stage during the Senate hearing, with Klobuchar expressing a sense of urgency given the rapidly approaching electoral calendar.

Specifically, the newly minted legislation, coined the Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act, is envisioned to clamp down on AI-assisted impersonation of federal political aspirants in campaign ads.

Rendered as an amendment to the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, this legislation provides a legal recourse in federal court for targeted candidates to counter harmful AI-generated deceptive content.

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Cars are collecting data on par with Big Tech, watchdog report finds

An internet and privacy watchdog has a warning: Your car is tracking you, and it’s collecting far more information than it needs just to get you where you’re going.

Mozilla, the nonprofit that develops the Firefox browser, released a report Wednesday detailing how the policies of more than two dozen car manufacturers allow for the collection, storage and sale of a wide range of sensitive information about auto owners.

Researchers behind the report said that cars now routinely collect data on par with tech companies, offer few details on how that data is stored and used, and don’t give drivers any meaningful way to opt out.

“Cars are a humongous privacy nightmare that nobody’s seemingly paying attention to,” said Jen Caltrider, who directs Privacy Not Included, a consumer privacy guide run by Mozilla. “And they’re getting away with it. It really needs to change because it’s only going to get worse as cars get more and more connected.”

Unlike Europe, the U.S has few meaningful regulations on how companies trade and store personal data. That’s led to a bustling industry of companies that buy and sell peope’s information, often without their knowledge.

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Scientists grow whole model of human embryo, without sperm or egg

Scientists have grown an entity that closely resembles an early human embryo, without using sperm, eggs or a womb.

The Weizmann Institute team say their “embryo model”, made using stem cells, looks like a textbook example of a real 14-day-old embryo.

It even released hormones that turned a pregnancy test positive in the lab.

The ambition for embryo models is to provide an ethical way of understanding the earliest moments of our lives.

The first weeks after a sperm fertilises an egg is a period of dramatic change – from a collection of indistinct cells to something that eventually becomes recognisable on a baby scan.

This crucial time is a major source of miscarriage and birth defects but poorly understood.

“It’s a black box and that’s not a cliche – our knowledge is very limited,” Prof Jacob Hanna, from the Weizmann Institute of Science, tells me.

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Ex-Google executive fears AI will be used to create ‘more lethal pandemics’

A former Google executive who helped pioneer the company’s foray into artificial intelligence fears the technology will be used to create “more lethal pandemics.”

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and former head of applied AI at Google’s DeepMind, said the use of artificial intelligence will enable humans to access information with potentially deadly consequences.

“The darkest scenario is that people will experiment with pathogens, engineered synthetic pathogens that might end up accidentally or intentionally being more transmissible,” Suleyman said The Diary of a CEO podcast on Monday.

“They can spread faster or [be] more lethal…They cause more harm or potentially kill, like a pandemic,” he added, calling for tighter regulation on AI software.

Suleyman said his biggest fear is that within the next five years a “kid in Russia” could genetically engineer a pathogen and unleash it so as to trigger a pandemic that’s “more lethal” than anything the world has seen thus far.

“That’s where we need containment. We have to limit access to the tools and the know-how to carry out that kind of experimentation,” he said.

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Amazon Is Filled with Bogus AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books that Could Cause Poisoning Deaths

A surge in AI-generated mushroom foraging books on Amazon has raised alarms among experts, who warn that such guides, filled with misinformation about poisonous mushrooms, could pose life-threatening risks to consumers.

404 Media reports that The New York Mycological Society has raised an alarm over the increasing number of AI-generated mushroom foraging books appearing on Amazon. According to the society, these books could pose serious risks to public health. “These AI-generated foraging books could actually kill people if they eat the wrong mushroom because a guidebook written by an AI prompt said it was safe,” the NYMS stated on social media.

Sigrid Jakob, president of the New York Mycological Society, elaborated on the risks involved in using AI-generated foraging guides. “There are hundreds of poisonous fungi in North America and several that are deadly,” Jakob said. “They can look similar to popular edible species. A poor description in a book can mislead someone to eat a poisonous mushroom.”

Text detection tools have indicated that many of these books are predominantly written by AI, with some showing more than 85 percent AI-generated content. Despite this, these books are often marketed as if they were written by humans, making it challenging for consumers to identify their true origin.

In response to the issue, Amazon has removed some of the flagged AI-generated books from its platform. “All publishers in the store must adhere to our content guidelines, regardless of how the content was created,” said Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek. “We’re committed to providing a safe shopping and reading experience for our customers and we take matters like this seriously.”

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Genetically Modified Soil Microbes May Have ‘Irreversible Consequences’

A plan by major agrochemical companies to develop genetically engineered (GE) soil microbes, including bacteria and fungi, to act as pesticides and fertilizers is raising concerns about the unknown and potentially disastrous risks associated with the new organisms, according to a report published Tuesday by Friends of the Earth.

Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta and BASF are among the chemical giants known to be developing the microbes which, according to the report, are fundamentally different from the already controversial genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that have existed for decades.

GE microbes are living organisms that share their genetic material easily with other species and travel vast distances in the wind. And because they are microscopic, their numbers are vast.

“An application of GE bacteria could release approximately 3 trillion genetically modified organisms every half an acre — that’s about how many GE corn plants there are in the entire U.S.,” said Dana Perls, food and technology manager at Friends of the Earth, in a press release.

Introducing GE microbes into agriculture represents an “unprecedented open air genetic experiment,” the report says. “The scale of release is far larger, and the odds of containment are far smaller than for other GE crops.”

Scientists understand the role and function of less than 1 percent of the billions of existing species of microbes or “biologicals.”

Yet the race is on by biotech and agrochemical companies to develop, modify and patent new microbes to capture a share of the biologicals market, which is set to triple in value to $29.31 billion by 2029.

At least two GE microbes, Pivot Bio’s Proven and BASF’s Poncho Votivo seed treatments, are already being used by U.S. farmers on millions of acres of farmland.

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