Ebay, Etsy, Microsoft and others vow to ban illegal wildlife trading

A smattering of internet merchants, services and tech titans have spoken: no trading of live animals or their illegally-sourced body parts, like rhino horns or turtle meat, on their watch. Etsy, eBay, Gumtree, Microsoft, Yahoo and Tencent have all signed a compact to standardize practices across social media and ecommerce platforms. Ideally, these uniform practices will tighten up loopholes that permit trading of illicit wildlife goods.

The guidelines only cover animals and parts that are illegally-sourced, which are threatened with extinction or which are protected by national law. Thus the pledged companies won’t block backdoor deals between Facebook users for dogs, cats or chickens.

The World Wildlife Fund, The International Fund For Animal Welfare and TRAFFIC collaborated to write the initiative and announced today for World Elephant Day. Although the partner companies don’t include a few tech heavy hitters like Facebook and Amazon where some of these illicit peer-to-peer transactions take place, the coalition is in talks with some other possible signatories, a senior TRAFFIC official told Mashable.

Source: Mashable

The European Space Agency will land on Mars in October

Nearly 13 years after the British spacecraft Beagle 2 went missing on Mars, the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli module will touch down on the red planet — assuming everything goes according to plan, that is. The module, which launched with the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in March, will serve primarily as a test bed for the descent and landing systems and is expected reach the surface on October 19th.

Unlike NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been exploring Mars for four years now, Schiaparelli’s mission is a short and immobile one. The module relies on a battery source that is expected to last somewhere between two and eight Martian sols. (At about 24 hours and 37 minutes, a sol is slightly longer than an Earth day.) The ESA plans to land Schiaparelli in the Meridiani Planum, which NASA’s other long-running rover Opportunity explored in 2004. During it’s short time on the surface, Schiaparelli will study the electrical fields that trigger Martian dust storms and weather patterns, then upload the data back to the Trace Gas Orbiter to transmit back to Earth.

Even after the module runs out of juice, the TGO will remain in low orbit until at least 2022, searching the Martian atmosphere for methane and other rare gases that may hint at the presence of organic life. Altogether, the data from the TGO and Schiaparelli will help guide ExoMars’ next mission to Mars in 2018.

Via: The Guardian

Source: European Space Agency

Intel should buy Jawbone just for its fitness app

If recent reports are to be believed, Jawbone is in serious trouble after missing a payment to a creditor. Sources close to the company have denied it, but this isn’t the first time we’ve heard such rumors. The Information reported earlier this week that the firm is running out of money and has put itself up for sale. If that’s the case, then I can think of the perfect suitor: Intel. After all, the chipmaker has both the money and a smartwatch division in need of a win, while Jawbone has arguably the best fitness app on the market. From the position of an armchair quarterback, it’s a match made in heaven — at least on paper.

Why is Jawbone’s mobile app worth saving?

Up, by Jawbone, is an iOS and Android app that seems more determined than its rivals to help you develop healthier habits. The key selling point is that it will proactively do things to help you reach the goals that you’ve set. Motivation, after all, is the key to sticking with life changes, but most apps assume you’re capable of pushing yourself every morning. As well as eschewing the usual 10,000-step target for something more tailored to your body type, it offers something beyond just inactivity alerts. Up is great for proactively identifying problems in your activity patterns over longer periods of time and suggesting ways to remedy it. For instance, if you spend a long week sitting down, it’ll give you a prod to counter that laziness. Basically, the advice is more personalized than an hourly buzz to the wrist.

On the surface, Up is friendly and unthreatening with clean, colorful, easy-to-read graphs. Its unintimidating design belies a hidden strength, with the more granular data hidden away unless you want to see it. If want to closely examine your stats much more exhaustively, you can do so in the trends menu, which lets you compare two sets of data against one another over time. So, for instance, if wanted to look for a correlation between calorie burn and sleep, or carbs consumed vs. resting heart rate, you could.

Intel has great hardware and bad software. Jawbone has the opposite problem. Merging the two together would see two fine products become one class leader.

There’s also a robust social component that lets you compete with friends and colleagues in so-called duels, or just keep an eye on their progress. Many apps don’t have much in the way of social features, and there’s little to create a sense of community with your friends. With Up, meanwhile, Duels allow you to engage in one-on-one challenges that’ll see you and a friend going head-to-head. There’s also diet tracking, which is clumsy in practice, but still effective for making you more aware of what you’re eating. More than once I wanted more detail on outlining portions, since it’s hard to quantify “1.5 servings” of bolognese sauce.

Why Intel needs it

Until a few weeks ago, the Basis Peak was one of the best — and most underrated — wearables in the market. Unfortunately, the company found an issue whereby a handful of devices were overheating and burning users’ skin, which forced Intel to issue a recall. Earlier this week I outlined what otherwise made the Peak such a great device. Rather than trying to replicate the experience of a smartphone on your wrist, it stuck to the basics: fitness and sleep tracking, smartphone notifications, not to mention vibrating alarms. Hell, it was even able to automatically detect exercise down to the type of action you were doing. That made it effective and seamless, with a battery that could last almost a working week between charges.

But, thanks to these overheating concerns, Peak has been taken off the market, and may never return. But what Basis can do in hardware can’t be overstated: Its main issue (aside from dodgy batteries) was that its companion app was awful. As good as the watch was, the app was ugly, unfriendly and designed for gym nerds who obsessed over minutiae. Intel has great hardware and bad software. Jawbone has the opposite problem. Merging the two together would see two fine products become one class leader.

Then there’s the fact that Intel really could do with a hit, something that will help the company with its long-overdue reinvention. Intel’s fate has always been inexorably bound to that of the PC market, and as people buy fewer desktops and laptops, its financial dominance will begin to wither. Back in 2013, then-CEO Paul Otellini admitted that it was a mistake not to build ARM-designed chips for smartphones, namely the iPhone. The move effectively tied Intel to the mast of a sinking ship, and allowed Samsung, Qualcomm and TSMC to become the chipmakers of the 21st century.

Earlier this year, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich conceded that the company will have to fire 12,000 people as it begins to refocus. Intel is making inroads into other businesses, like consumer hardware — wearables and drones — as well as the internet of things. Buying Jawbone would give it a quirky, reasonably decent consumer hardware maker that could benefit from Intel’s backing. It also, crucially, has the Up app, and Up is such a good piece of software that it could form the center of Intel’s wearables universe.

Intel is also one of the few companies that could afford to buy Jawbone. The struggling company raised $165 million at the start of the year, and at the time was valued at around a billion. Even with banks cutting their expectations for Jawbone, it’ll still cost Intel a few hundred million to pick up the business, but that’s pocket change for a company that still generates $1.3 billion in quarterly profit.

Why this is all a fantasy

For starters, spending hundreds of millions on a company to get at one component of its business makes iffy sense to most CEOs. As we’ve seen with Snapchat and Instagram Stories, if you’re really committed to building a competing product, you can easily build something similar in house. I’m not suggesting Intel rip off the concept behind Up — just that it wouldn’t be the first time such a thing has happened. Intel could, theoretically, hire some software designers and build a comparable app for significantly less than Jawbone’s asking price. (Though to be fair, it hasn’t yet.)

Jawbone doesn’t make much sense as an acquisition target because of the baggage it carries as a troubled company. It has constantly over-promised and under-delivered on its devices and struggled to produce reliable hardware. Search for any combination of “Jawbone,” “Up” and “broken” and you’ll find the internet awash with disgruntled users. The Jawbone patent portfolio isn’t worth much either, now that judges have ruled several of them invalid in the company’s ongoing lawsuit with Fitbit.

Plus, Intel would have to deal with the messy business of deconstructing Jawbone to get at the meat it really wants. That would require layoffs (expensive, bad PR) and sales (time-sapping) that it could otherwise avoid. Plus, it would inherit a Bluetooth audio division that’s tangential to Intel’s current and future plans. Besides, Jawbone has reportedly already tried several times to sell its speaker arm to little avail, so Intel would likely have to sell it at a knock-down rate.

Fundamentally, this is pure speculation on my part, and Jawbone has too many problems to make a rescue worthwhile. But it deserves repeating that the Up software is a great app that deserves to live on in the face of whatever corporate drama is unfolding at Jawbone. It’d be nice if some white knight would come and rescue Up from possible death. And it’d be especially nice if Intel were the one on the back of the horse.

The New York Times has acquired a VR agency

The New York Times is acquiring an experiential agency known as Fake Love, which specializes in virtual and augmented reality.

The purchase is part of a bid for the Times to increase its revenue by offering additional ad agency services, and the most expedient way to do this was by purchasing existing agencies rather than creating new ones. The Times had worked with Fake Love previously on a special VR video ad to promote a Weinstein Company film Carol.

Fake Love is a smaller company, only housing about 50 employees, and will be helping the Times fill special requests it’s receiving on a regular basis, such as the market clamoring for chatbots and augmented reality projects thanks to the popularity of Pokemon Go.

Fake Love will retain its Brooklyn-based operation and branding while operating separately of The New York Times, while fulfilling the special needs unique to the publication.

Via: DigiDay

The hysterical hacking headlines of Def Con 24

You might’ve noticed that your regular news outlets have way more hysterical, random-seeming and utterly terrifying articles about hacking this week. That’s because hacking conference Def Con happened last weekend, where a fair number of journalists had the pee scared out of them and decided to share their irrational reactions with everyone.

This year’s big American hacking conference was bursting at the seams. By 2 PM on Friday, Def Con had unexpectedly sold out of its 20,000 specialty badges and started selling paper badges. The sprawling event straddled both the Bally’s and Paris casino hotels in Las Vegas, and packed enough attendees, speakers, staff and press under those combined electric skies to bring its double-wide causeways to a standstill.

In years past, only outliers like me would be writing about going to Def Con, and all the various and sundry exploits, attacks, demonstrations, vendors, workshops and talks about all things hacking. That’s because, until recently, journalists have been allowed at Def Con but have not exactly been welcomed.

This year it’s safe to say that Def Con has become much more media friendly, for better and for worse. The conference has gotten friendlier to journalists only in the past couple of years, and last weekend journalists flooded the venue. But prior to this year, Def Con could best be described as flat-out hostile to the media — especially major and mainstream news outlets.

This was heightened by an episode at Def Con 15, in 2007, when Dateline NBC associate producer and reporter Michelle Madigan acted … like a “reporter.” Thinking she’d do a shock piece on evil criminal hackers, she hid a camera in her bag to catch attendees confessing to felonies on video.

Def Con staff had actually spotted her bag with a hole in it and reached out to her several times to offer her press credentials. She was able to avoid them and was instead seen panning her bag around the “Capture the Flag” (CTF) room.

After that, she attended a talk by Def Con founder Jeff Moss. During the presentation, Moss announced a new game called “spot the undercover reporter.” If one was spotted in the room, he or she would be invited up to the stage to be presented with press credentials. At which point Madigan bolted from the room and out of the Riviera Hotel and Casino, chased by a pack of (an estimated) 150 attendees — plus other reporters and photographers, who recorded the whole mess.

While in the past taking photos was not allowed, this year not only did people take photos, but journos panned cameras across rooms — exactly what NBC got chased out for doing.

This year my fellow journalists didn’t do much better. Despite all the advisories not to use the conference WiFi on what’s been described as “the world’s most hostile network,” one reporter paid the price for ignoring even his own outlet’s guide and was hacked within 20 minutes. A pair of journalists tried to pass themselves off as “consultants” in hopes of getting hackers to talk, and failed. And pretty much all of them totally, completely freaked out about how everything is hackable, even though we’ve known this for decades.

Many journalists were attending a decades-old hacking conference for the very first time, and a good number of them were covering infosec for the first time, too. So while for some of us it just felt like the Walking Dead tryouts brought to you by DARPA, to the people writing your news it was a funhouse of horrors from which they may never recover.

When it came to differentiating between what was theoretical and what was real, most journalists really screwed up. Facts ran naked and unashamed away from the chaos, unchecked. The really important issues we should be warned about got lost in the miasma of what streamed out of the hacker panic clickbait factory.

And panicked it was. Glancing at “Your ‘intimate personal massager’ – cough – is spying on you,” one might think that vibrators with cameras were watching your every move. Er, no. Rather than a Def Con talk revealing a conspiratorial surveillance state in your pants, the researchers’ findings were actually about one “smart vibrator” company playing fast and loose with user data, an issue that truly needs to be addressed and fixed.

ReadWrite said “Future hackers might freeze you out til you pay up,” making a talk about connected thermostats sound like you could be frozen or fried in your home by malicious hackers at any moment. The Memo even assured us, “Gold-digging hackers will seize your smart home heating.” In reality, this was a proof of concept showing that it’s possible for skilled attackers to hack into a Nest Thermostat, but only if people actively download and transfer malware to their thermostats.

By the time you got to reading “Hackers Could Break Into Your Monitor To Spy on You and Manipulate Your Pixels,” you were probably scared shitless, and understandably so. Plenty of journalists were ready to buy in to the irrational fears brought on by a lack of nuanced understanding about active threats and possibilities. The Ledger and PhysOrg concluded that the only way to stay safe is to turn off your computer. The Guardian literally gave up and told its readers “we’re all screwed.”

I won’t blame you for associating Def Con with an urge to run for the hills and live in a shack without electricity, lined in tinfoil, just like your hats and Faraday pajamas. But … but … this conference and everything it has been trying to tell people has been going on for two decades.

It’s definitely annoying to see my industry unable to separate the important talks and real issues from the hackerfluff, or miss the real point of these presentations and demos. But it’s also really great to see hackers being taken seriously, finally, and being heard by people who can amplify their messages.

Images: Violet Blue

Aukey is offering its Quick Charge 2.0 chargers for as little as $5

Aukey is currently offering a bunch of its Quick Charge 2.0 accessories for as little as $5 at Amazon. Whether you need a new charger for the home, car or one to travel with, there is something for you. The company has its single port and three port wall chargers on sale, as well as a car charger. You’ll save between $5 and $7 on the purchase with a simple coupon code.

The deals include:

• Quick Charge 2.0 Wall Charger – $5 with coupon code C398PPH5 (Save $7)
• Quick Charge 2.0 Car Charger – $6 with coupon code GGRY6CCZ (Save $5)
• Quick Charge 2.0 3-Port Charger – $9 with coupon code SFF78BMY (Save $7)

If you are looking for a new charger, you’ll want to grab one of these quickly. We don’t know how long the deal will last, so don’t wait too long to place your order.

A computer program that can replicate your handwriting

Handwriting is a skill that feels personal and unique to all of us. Everyone has a slightly different style — a weird quirk or a seemingly illegible scrawl — that’s nearly impossible for a computer to replicate, especially as our own penmanship fluctuates from one line to the next. A team at University College London (UCL) is getting pretty close, however, with a new system it’s calling “My Text in Your Handwriting.” A custom algorithm is able to scan what you’ve written on a piece of paper and then reproduce your style, to an impressive degree, using whatever words you wish.

To capture your scrawl, the team will ask you to write on four A4-sized sheets of paper (as little as one paragraph can deliver passable results, however). The text is then scanned and converted into a thin, skeletal line. It’s broken down by a computer and a human moderator, assigning letters and their position within a word. They also look for “splits,” where the line changes from a letter into a “ligature,” — the extra bits you need for joined-up handwriting. Finally, there are “links” which indicate that two separate marks are part of the same letter, for instance when crossing a “t.”

The algorithm then works to replicate your handwriting style by referencing and adapting your previously scanned examples. You will have written the same letter on a number of different occasion, so the computer will look for the one that works best for the word or phrase it’s trying to sketch out. A degree of randomness is then applied to ensure that the same letters and combinations aren’t used more than once (an easy way for humans to figure out if a computer has written something).

Once your written examples or “glyphs” have been selected, the computer will figure out the appropriate spacing in between each letter. The height of each character and where it sits on the line is also taken into consideration. Finally, the “ligatures” are added to the computer-generated piece, along with some basic texturing to mimic the pen and ink you were using.

The results are fairly believable. As an experiment, the team asked a group to decide which envelopes — all seemingly handwritten — were produced by a computer. They chose incorrectly 40 percent of the time.

“Up until now, the only way to produce computer-generated text that resembles a specific person’s handwriting would be to use a relevant font,” Dr Oisin Mac Aodha, a member of the UCL team said. “The problem with such fonts is that it is often clear that the text has not been penned by hand, which loses the character and personal touch of a handwritten piece of text. What we’ve developed removes this problem and so could be used in a wide variety of commercial and personal circumstances.”

The ability to scan and interpret handwriting isn’t new — plenty of apps let you sketch with a stylus or finger, and then convert this into text. Similarly, it’s possible for software to reproduce digital text in a variety of seemingly human, handwritten styles. But the ability to reproduce your personal penmanship — with words and sentences you might not have shown the computer — is unprecedented. It could be used to help elderly people who are starting to lose their writing ability, or translate handwritten text into new languages while keeping the personality of the author.

If you’re wondering if this sort of technology could be used to forge signatures and documents, the answer is yes, it’s possible. The team at UCL has stressed, however, that their system works both ways, meaning it could be used by law enforcers to spot computer-aided forgeries too. Still, it’s best to be wary the next time someone tries to sell you an autograph.

Via: BBC

Source: UCL, My Text In Your Handwriting (Paper)