Tag: technology

Saudis Use Orwellian App to Identify Dissidents, Imprisoning Some for Decades

Saudi Arabians are using a mobile app sold by both Apple and Google to snitch on their fellow citizens for dissenting against government authorities. As a result, activists and others are going to prison for more than 30 years in some cases, Business Insider reported on Friday.

On August 16, Saudi national Salma el-Shabab, a PhD student at Leeds University, was sentenced to 34 years in prison for tweets “in support of activists and members of the kingdom’s political opposition in exile,” the report said. Though the posts were made while she was in the UK, el-Shabab was nonetheless reported through the “Kollona Amn” app and immediately arrested upon returning home. 

“Every day we wake up to hear news, somebody has been arrested, or somebody has been taken,” Real, a Saudi women’s-rights activist using an alias, told Insider.

Kollona Amn – which roughly translates to “We Are All Security” in Arabic – was launched by the Saudi Interior Ministry in 2017, but the last few years have seen a “dramatic” surge in court cases referencing the app, according to legal-rights activists.

The app “encourages everyday citizens to play the role of police and become active participants in their own repression. Putting the state’s eyes everywhere also creates a pervasive sense of uncertainty – there is always a potential informant in the room or following your social media accounts,” said Noura Aljizawi, a researcher at Citizen Lab, which focuses on threats to free speech online.

The Orwellian nature of the app is such that users often report on people “defensively,” fearing they could face punishment themselves for merely overhearing speech deemed offensive to the regime. In some cases, the app has also been used for “blackmail” and to “settle scores,” Insider noted.

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Chinese scientists claim to have engineered the world’s first mouse with fully reprogrammed genes

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) claim to have found a novel technique for programmable chromosome fusion successfully producing mice with genetic changes “that occur on a million-year evolutionary scale” in the laboratory.

The findings could shed light on how chromosome rearrangements—the tidy packages of organized genes provided in equal numbers by each parent, which align and trade or blend traits to produce offspring—influence evolution, reported Phys.org on Thursday.

“The laboratory house mouse has maintained a standard 40-chromosome karyotype—or the full picture of an organism’s chromosomes—after more than 100 years of artificial breeding,” said Li Zhikun, a researcher at CAS’s Institute of Zoology.

“Over longer time scales, however, karyotype changes caused by chromosome rearrangements are common. Rodents have 3.2 to 3.5 rearrangements per million years, whereas primates have 1.6,” added Li, co-first author of the study.

The mouse, known as Xiao Zhu, or “Little Bamboo,” was the world’s first mammal with fully reprogrammed genes, according to the South China Morning Post.

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Dominion Voting Machine Bought for $7.99 at Goodwill and Sold on eBay For $1,200

A Dominion voting machine was purchased for $7.99 on Goodwill’s website and sold on eBay for $1,200 last month.

Authorities are now investigating how the machine ended up for sale in the first place.

The machine was first purchased by Ohio-based Uber driver Ean Hutchison, who resells tech items on eBay.

Though the machine was only listed as “AVALUE TECHNOLOGY Touch Panel SID-15V-Z37-B1R,” Hutchinson knew that it was a voting machine.

“Own a piece of history!” Hutchison’s eBay listing read, according to a report from CNN. “This voting machine was one of thousands used in the 2020 United States presidential election and included in one of the many lawsuits against Dominion that were thrown out.”

Hutchinson started the bidding at $250, but included an option to skip the auction and purchase it for $1,200.

It was purchased for the “Buy It Now” price by Harri Hursti, a Connecticut cybersecurity expert, who was in HBO’s documentary “Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections.”

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A Guided Tour of How Cops Can Browse Your Location Data

In Part 1 of our series on Fog Data Science, we saw how when you give some apps permission to view your location, it can end up being packaged and sold to numerous other companies. Fog Data Science is one of those companies, and it has created a sleek search engine called Fog Reveal that allows cops to browse through that location data as if they were Google Maps results.

In this article, we’ll be taking a deep dive into Fog Reveal’s features. Although accounts for Reveal are typically only available to police departments, we were able to analyze the app’s public-facing code to get a better understanding of how it works, how it’s used, and what it looks like when cops get warrantless access to your location data.

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Transhumanism: The Dominant Ideology Of The Fourth Industrial Revolution

In this volume dedicated to transhumanism, it is important to slip in, however furtively, a few words from political science. In essence, political science is the study of power relations and how they are justified and contested. Viewed from this perspective, “transhumanism” takes on a crucial significance. In fact, transhumanist thought is all about transcending our “natural” human condition by embracing cutting-edge technologies. The movement has already passed through various stages of development, after first emerging in the early 1980s—although “transhumanist” as an adjective was deployed as early as 1966 by the Iranian-American futurist Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, then a lecturer at the New School of Social Research in New York, and in works by Abraham Maslow (Toward a Psychology of Being, 1968) and Robert Ettinger (Man into Superman, 1972). However, it was Esfandiary’s conversations with the artist Nancie Clark, John Spencer of the Space Tourism Society, and, later, the British philosopher Max More (born Max O’Connor) in southern California that prompted the first attempts to unify these ideas into a coherent whole. Esfandiary’s renown had grown rapidly since he changed his legal name, becoming the enigmatic FM-2030, while Clark decided she would henceforth be known by the alias Natasha Vita-More, and went on to pen the Transhumanist Arts Statement in 1982.

Within about ten years, the movement had drawn in a clutch of academic philosophers such as the Swede Nick Bostrom, who lectures at the University of Oxford, the Brits David Pearce and Richard Dawkins, and the American James Hughes. By now, it had gathered sufficient critical mass to be taken seriously in academic debate. Meanwhile, a strand of political activism was beginning to make itself heard, initially through specialist journals like Extropy (first published in 1988) and the Journal of Transhumanism. A number of national and international associations were then formed, including the Extropy Institute (1992), the World Transhumanist Association (1998, rebranded as Humanity+ in 2008), Technoprog in France, the Associazione Italiana Transumanisti in Italy, Aleph in Sweden, and Transcedo in the Netherlands. This political activism was organized entirely online, through a multitude of discussion forums, email newsletters, and the once-highly anticipated biennial conference, Extro.

In recent years, transhumanism has become markedly politicized, invigorated by the arrival of the first political parties on a mission to influence decision-making and political agendas. In the United States, the Transhumanist Party fielded a candidate, Zoltan Istvan, in the 2016 presidential election. The United Kingdom has a party of the same name, while Germany has the Transhumane Partei. Next came private universities entirely devoted to the transhumanist cause—Google’s Singularity University was founded in California in 2008, and the camp near Aixen-Provence opened its doors in late 2017—and various private institutes and foundations, including the XPRIZE Foundation and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Numerous civil society groups also sprang up around the world.

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Laser manipulation turns white blood cells into medicinal microrobots

White blood cells can be harnessed as natural, biocompatible microrobots through the use of lasers, researchers from China have reported. The finding, which the team demonstrated in living zebrafish, could pave the way towards a new method of targeted drug delivery for precision treatment of diseases.

Medical microrobots have attracted considerable attention for their potential to deliver drugs to particular sites in the body and to help clear pathogens from the circulatory system.

In most medical microrobot concepts, the tiny tools are fabricated outside of the body and then either injected into the patient or packaged up in capsules and then swallowed. Trials in small animals, however, have revealed a problem – namely that these foreign objects have a tendency to trigger an immune response in their host body, with the result that the microrobots end up being removed from the body before they can fulfil their intended purpose.

To get around this, an alternative approach lies in taking cells that are already present in the body – and are therefore not at risk of setting off an immune response – and press ganging them into service as natural microrobots.

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Synthetic embryo with brain and beating heart is grown from mouse stem cells for the first time – and the technique could one day be used to create artificial human organs for transplantation

Researchers have created ‘synthetic’ embryos from mouse stem cells that have beating hearts as well as the foundations of brains and all other organs.

The models are intended to help the scientists at the University of Cambridge better understand the mechanisms of embryo development. 

While the research was carried out in mouse models, it is hoped the results could increase understanding of why some human embryos fail while others go on to develop into a healthy pregnancy.

Additionally, they could be used to guide the repair and development of synthetic human organs for transplantation, the experts suggest.

Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, said: ‘Our mouse embryo model not only develops a brain, but also a beating heart, all the components that go on to make up the body.

‘It’s just unbelievable that we’ve got this far.

‘This has been the dream of our community for years, and a major focus of our work for a decade and finally we’ve done it.’

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New Research Reveals Tiktok, Instagram And Meta Can Monitor Keystrokes, Seize Passwords And Credit Card Information

Recent research has revealed that social media platforms Tiktok, Instagram, and Meta, can pry on users’ personal information when it is entered into the in-app browser.

Felix Krause, a software engineer, and security researcher looked into the coding built into Tiktok, the Chinese-produced app’s infrastructure, which led to his shocking revelation.

Users who click on links on Tiktok are led to a native in-app browser produced by Tiktok, and not default browsers like Safari or Google Chrome.

The JavaScript code in Tiktok’s in-app browser can allow the company to monitor every keystroke. This means the social media company could access every action taken on the screen, even passwords or credit card information.

Krause explained that while Tiktok allegedly does not have the feature enabled at this moment, the infrastructure is in place. “Installing a keylogger is obviously a huge thing… according to TikTok it’s disabled at the moment. The problem is they do have the infrastructure and the systems in place to be able to track all these keystrokes… that on its own is a huge problem.”

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