Olympic organizers may use facial recognition to manage guests

Japan is looking for a different way to confirm the identity of the hundreds of thousands of athletes, officials and journalists who will be attending the 2020 Olympics. The Japan Times reports that sources close to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic organizing committee say organizers are planning to utilize facial recognition technology. Not including spectators, attendees are expected to number in the 300,000 to 400,000 range and officials are concerned that ID sharing or theft will reduce the Games’ safety. Facial recognition technology could get around those issues while also reducing entrance waiting times.

The technology wouldn’t be used on spectators, say the sources, and it was tested at the Japan House during the 2016 Rio Olympics where it was used to manage journalists coming and going from the visitor center. NEC Corp is said to be the developer of the facial recognition program. Other NEC customers include the Department of Homeland Security, CaliBurger, Chicago police, and Georgia.

The program hasn’t been officially announced and therefore none of the concerns surrounding the use of this technology have been addressed yet. Along with the typical privacy worries that go along with facial recognition software, it’s currently unclear whether attendees could opt out of the system or even if the organizing committee has the authority to make it a requirement.

The Tokyo Olympics will take place between July 24th and August 9th of 2020.

Via: Gizmodo

Source: The Japan Times

Amazon hopes for major expansion of its online ad business

You probably don’t associate Amazon with online ads outside of sales pitches for Echo speakers, but you might think differently in the near future. CNBC sources claim that Amazon is aiming to expand its online ad business well beyond its own sites and products. It’s partnering with mobile ad houses to link promos on mobile and TV, for instance — you’d see a commercial on the big screen followed by a related ad on your phone. It reportedly wants to expand its video ads, as well, by creating “branded” videos with celebrity hosts.

The internet retailer would entice advertisers by giving them the one thing they want the most: user data. Two contacts told CNBC that Amazon was willing to share more info than rivals like Facebook and Google if an advertiser was willing to spend enough. And when Amazon already has both extensive knowledge of buying habits and a huge volume of online traffic, its offers could be tempting.

Amazon hasn’t commented on the apparent scoop. It has every reason to want to grow its ad efforts, mind you. Facebook and Google dominate the online ad world (more than 70 percent between the two, Pivotal estimates), and Amazon could seize on that by becoming a third major option that increases competition and forces prices down. Would-be advertisers might flock to Amazon simply to keep its ad rivals humble.

We’d add that Amazon may want to diversify its sources of income. Even with its growing cloud services, Amazon is still heavily dependent on its store (including Prime subscriptions) for revenue. A large ad business could give Amazon a cushion if the store struggles, and could help fund some of Amazon’s experiments, such as delivery drones.

Source: CNBC

LG unveils its first smart speaker with Google Assistant

LG is acting on its promise to unveil a slew of AI-powered gadgets at CES this January. The tech giant has unveiled a 2018 speaker lineup headlined by the ThinQ Speaker, a Google Assistant-powered device that promises “premium” sound alongside its smarts. It supports lossless high-resolution audio like LG’s more advanced phones, and uses Meridian Audio’s know-how to pump out “more natural and warm” music. The launch also hints that many of LG’s newer appliances will be Assistant-savvy — the company envisions turning on your air purifier with a voice command.

The rest of the lineup is led by the SK10Y soundbar, a 5.1.2-channel companion to your TV with Chromecast support, Dolby Atmos processing, lossless audio and Meridian-made Height Elevation to put the sound at the level of the screen, theoretically providing extra clarity. There’s also the PK-series Bluetooth speakers that use Meridian to produce “powerful and undistorted bass,” and party speakers that kick out as much as 1,800W of power while supporting features like DJ and karaoke modes.

As is usually the case with these pre-CES teases, LG hasn’t provided availability details for the ThinQ Speaker and other devices. And that may be important. We don’t know for sure whether it’s aimed at relatively low-cost speakers like the Sonos One or pricier models like Apple’s upcoming HomePod. However, LG is clearly trying to avoid directly competing with the Amazon Echo, Google Home and other speakers where audio fidelity clearly isn’t the top priority.

Source: LG Newsroom

WeChat accounts could double as state IDs in China

Some WeChat users in China will soon be able to use the chat app as a state-issued ID card. Financial Times reports that those living in Guangdong’s capital city Guangzhou will be able to use facial recognition to link their identities to the app in the Nansha district this week. The feature will apparently roll out across the country in January.

FT notes that the ID-linking system is a bit limited as far as on-device registrations go. You’ll be able to log into an internet cafe with the limited-function, on-device registration. For anything more involved that’d require state ID, however, you’ll need to hit a registration hard point in the city. After that, your phone will cover “most functions” you’d need a typical ID card for. Like registering a business, for example.

While this sounds like the type of future we’ve expected, the feature’s privacy implications can’t be understated. Linking someone’s face to what’s essentially the de facto way to communicate in China is a bit scary considering how heavily the government polices the app.

Source: Financial Times

Thousands of websites are quietly fighting ad blocking

Websites aren’t always conspicuous in their attempts to combat ad blockers. Researchers from the University of Iowa and UC Riverside have learned that 30.5 percent of the top 10,000 websites have measures to thwart ad blocking, and they’re frequently using methods you wouldn’t likely notice. Many use scripts to introduce ‘bait’ content that sets off ad blockers, prompting the site to relaunch ads in a way that blockers might not catch.

Previous estimates had acknowledged that these surreptitious methods were in use, but on no more than 5 percent of big sites. The data suggests that this is far more common.

There are ways for ad blockers to play cat-and-mouse: they can change their Javascript to fool anti-ad-blocking systems, or even detect bait material and refuse to block it. However, the discovery hints that there could be a mounting “arms race” where ad-dependent websites and ad blockers continuously try to one-up each other. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — while it could starve some sites of needed revenue, it might also discourage others from implementing annoying ads.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: University of Iowa (PDF)

What is a blockchain? Here’s everything you need to know

The world of cryptocurrencies is a complicated one. Although it’s become simpler to put money into it over the years, the underlying technology behind it all has only become more and more complicated. As hard as that makes it to get your head around though, as you’ll come to understand, that is actually a good thing.

Whether you’re simply looking to invest in bitcoin, trade some Ethereum, or are intrigued about what comes next for the blockchain, we’re going to help explain it to you. In this guide, we’ll help answer the core question at the heart of the cryptocurrency world: what is a blockchain?

Back to the genesis block

Tumisu/Pixabay

The first work on the technology began back in the early ’90s in a paper entitled “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document.” It was the very rudimentary idea of what the blockchain would eventually become, but it was the beginning of something that would spawn industries worth hundreds of billions of dollars and could very well reinvent many aspects of how our digital society operates.

Although you may associate blockchain technology specifically with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, it’s just as related to cryptography as it is to digital currencies. Blockchains utilize the mathematical securing technique to legitimize a record, confirming its authenticity. The blockchain is a growing chain of these records, or “blocks,” that allows for a confirmed trail back to the original block that’s heavily resistant to modification and tampering.

That chain begins at the “genesis block,” the very first record in that chain and continues unbroken through successive blocks. Each of them is proven through the use of cryptographic hash pointers, which link it with the previous block in the chain and prove its validity. They also contain a timestamp and transaction data, thereby offering the same function as a traditional middle-man institution but with public rather than private oversight.

A more colloquial description of it is that it’s effectively a ledger that notes down the details of a transaction. What makes a blockchain different from more traditional ledgers is that it’s entirely peer-to-peer and therefore unbiased and requires the time investment of the community involved in its usage, rather than a dedicated middleman.

That’s what makes the blockchain such an effective backbone for cryptocurrencies, which is where it made its first practical appearance in the creation of bitcoin in 2009. Developed by the still effectively anonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto,” the cryptocurrency allowed for a method of conducting transactions, effectively acting like an entirely digital currency, but protected from interference by the use of the blockchain.

Bitcoin and the alt-coins

Peter Verreussel / 123rf

Although bitcoin and the alternative currencies all utilize blockchain technology, they do so in differing manners. Since bitcoin was first invented it has undergone a few changes at the behest of its core developers and the wider community, and other alt-coins have been created to improve upon bitcoin, operating in slightly different ways.

In the case of bitcoin, a new block in its blockchain is created roughly every ten minutes. That block verifies and records, or “certifies” new transactions that have taken place. In order for that to happen, “miners” utilize powerful computing hardware to provide a proof-of-work — a calculation that effectively creates a number which verifies the block and the transactions it contains. Several of those confirmations must be received before a bitcoin transaction can be considered effectively complete, even if technically the actual bitcoin is transferred near-instantaneously.

This is where bitcoin has run into problems in recent months. As the number of bitcoin transactions increases, the relatively-hard 10-minute block creation time means that it can take longer to confirm all of the transactions and backlogs can occur.

With certain alt-coins, that’s a little different. With Litecoin it’s more like two and a half minutes, while with Ethereum the block time is just 10-20 seconds, so confirmations tend to happen far faster. There are obvious benefits of such a change, though by having blocks generate at a faster rate there is a greater chance of errors occurring. If 51 percent of computers working on the blockchain record an error, it becomes near-permanent, and generating faster blocks means fewer systems working on them.

Beyond cryptocurrencies

As much as blockchain technology has facilitated the creation of cryptocurrencies which have themselves had a considerable impact on a large number of institutions and industries, the blockchain itself has much greater potential. Its ability to secure trust in a digital commodity, to effectively make something that is infinitely reproducible, unique, has wide-reaching implications. It confirms a transaction in a manner that is both verified and publicly verifiable. Until now that’s not been possible at the speed and ease that the blockchain allows.

In comparison, traditional financial institutions operate at a snail’s pace and are far less compatible with public oversight. There is much less interoperability within financial systems and that’s why global financial transactions can be so time-consuming and prone to error.

Blockchain technology could theoretically make traditional accounting practices redundant, allowing for all financial transactions to be publicly viewable, thereby immune to cooking the books. Its decentralized nature could mean borrowing money from pools of peers rather than financial institutions or make it possible to confirm credit card transactions to altogether eliminate fraud.

Technologies currently being tested with cryptocurrencies, like smart-contracts, could mean the need to do away with costly lawyer fees or complicated contracts to guarantee a service or item is received in return for payment. Buying and selling houses could do away with estate agents and the aforementioned legal experts entirely if we knew the blockchain would confirm all aspects of our transactions.

At its core, blockchain technology spreads the responsibility for making sure something happens as intended to all of those involved in the system. It eliminates middle-men by creating a lot more of them. It has its detractors, but the blockchain has a very exciting future, whether you’re investing in cryptocurrencies or not.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Ethereum vs. bitcoin: What’s the difference?
• Go ahead, pass laws. Governments can’t kill bitcoin, even if they try
• The best bitcoin wallets
• How to buy Ethereum
• Bitcoin is still soaring. What’s the limit?

Researchers say life on Mars may have had a better chance underground

Mars is now a dry, cold planet, but whether it once supported life is still an open question. On Earth, areas that once hosted long dried-up bodies of water have been a rich source of evidence of ancient life and because of that, those sorts of areas have been the target of searches for ancient Martian life. But a paper published recently in Nature Geoscience says that might not be the best place to look.

“Given how little we understand about the origin of life on Earth, it makes sense to adopt a broader plan to seek signs of life,” say the paper’s authors. And they suggest going below the planet’s surface, looking in areas that may have hosted hydrothermal systems. “Mars is not Earth,” say the researchers, “We must recognize that our entire perspective on how life has evolved and how evidence of life is preserved is coloured by the fact that we live on a planet where photosynthesis evolved.”

By the time Earth saw photosynthesis, Mars had been a cold, atmosphere-less planet for about a billion years. Because Mars is so much less massive than Earth, its core cooled faster, leading to a loss of the planet’s magnetic field. So around four billion years ago, the planet lost most of its atmosphere and, therefore, its protection from radiation and solar winds. Thus, if Mars had developed life on its surface, it needed to have done that about a billion years earlier than Earth, which is unlikely. But subsurface life may have had a chance. “Mars may have been cold, arid, oxidizing and generally inhospitable at the surface for much of its history; however, hydrothermal conditions in the near surface or subsurface might have been considerably more clement,” said the researchers.

Mars certainly had ancient hydrothermal activity — the Spirit rover accidentally came across such a system in 2008. And in 2020, NASA plans to send another rover to our red neighbor that will gather, store and eventually ship back to Earth Martian rock samples. John Mustard, a professor at Brown University and an author of the paper, told Space.com that he hopes the rover samples sediment from “mineralized fracture zones” where different fluids in the crust carrying different elements would have mixed.

Whether Mars ever hosted life is still a big if and this proposed method certainly doesn’t guarantee we’ll find any evidence of it. But it’s an interesting new target and one that seems like it’s worth investigating.

Via: Popular Mechanics

Source: Nature Geoscience

Apple CEO Tim Cook Earned $102 Million in 2017, Must Now Fly Privately for Security Reasons

In fiscal 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook received a salary of $3.06 million plus $9.33 million in bonuses and stock worth $89.2 million for a total compensation package of approximately $102 million, reports Bloomberg.

The data was shared today by Apple in a proxy statement filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of the company’s annual shareholders meeting, which will take place on February 13, 2018.

Executive officers at Apple, which included Luca Maestri, Angela Ahrendts, Johny Srouji, Dan Riccio, and Bruce Sewell, all received bonuses of over $3 million, bringing their compensation, including salary and stock awards, to approximately $24.2 million each, provided each stays with the company long enough for awarded stock to vest. Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s retail chief, was the highest paid executive, bringing in $24,216,072.

In addition to covering executive compensation, today’s proxy statement also says that Apple’s board now requires Apple CEO Tim Cook use private aircraft “for all business and personal travel.” The flight policy was implemented in 2017 “in the interests of security and efficiency” based on Cook’s “highly visible” role as CEO.

Over the course of 2017, Cook’s personal air travel expenses amounted to $93,109, and Apple spent an additional $224,216 in personal security costs provided to Cook.

The proxy statement also includes six proposals that will require shareholder action at the upcoming shareholders meeting in February. Proposals cover standard actions like re-appointing Apple’s public accounting firm and re-electing board members, along with two shareholder proposals covering proxy access amendments and the establishment of a Human Rights Committee.

Apple’s board of directors is recommending shareholders vote against both shareholder proposals, with the full text of all of the proposals available in the proxy statement filed with the SEC.

Shareholders who wish to attend the shareholders meeting, which will be held at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park, will need to register using Proxyvote.com starting at 8:00 a.m. on January 22, 2018. Apple plans to accept registrations on a first-come, first-serve basis as space is limited.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tag: Tim Cook
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What’s on TV: ‘Black Mirror,’ ‘Bill Nye’ and bowl games

As the time ticks down until 2018, we have a few new debuts scheduled for this week. Netflix is coming out swinging, with a new season of Black Mirror, season two of its Bill Nye series, the third season of Lovesick (fka Scrotal Recall) and new comedy specials from Dave Chappelle (Equanimity & The Bird Revelation). The only game release of note is SteamWorld on Switch, while movie fans can pick up an Ultra HD copy of Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Oh, and yes, Netflix does have more New Year’s Eve specials that you can play whenever it’s time to put the kids to bed. Look after the break to check out each day’s highlights, including trailers and let us know what you think (or what we missed).

Blu-ray & Games & Streaming

• Terminator 2: Judgement Day (4K)
• The Mountain Between Us (4K)
• Mayhem (4K)
• Flatliners
• Fletch Lives
• The Paper
• Brawl in Cell Block 99 (4K)
• SteamWorld Heist (Switch)

Wednesday

• Foster Farms Bowl, Fox, 8 PM
• The Wall, NBC, 8 PM
• The Librarians,TNT, 8 PM
• Vikings, History, 9 PM
• Happy!, Syfy, 10 PM
• Knightfall, History, 10 PM
• Catfish, MTV, 10 PM

Thursday

• Apple Music’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story, Fox, 8 PM
• Van Helsing, Syfy, 9 PM
• Great News (winter premiere), NBC, 9:30 PM
• Beerland, Viceland, 10 PM
• Top Chef, Bravo, 10 PM
• Damnation, USA, 10 PM
• Ghost Wars, Syfy, 10 PM
• The Menendez Murders (season finale), A&E, 10 PM
• Beyond, Freeform, 10:30 PM
• Superstition, Syfy, 11 PM

Friday

• Black Mirror (S4), Netflix, 3 AM
• The Grand Tour, Amazon Prime, 3 AM
• Bill Nye Saves the World (S2), Netflix, 3 AM
• La Mante (S1), Netflix, 3 AM
• The Climb, Netflix, 3 AM
• Cotton Bowl, ESPN, 8:30 PM
• All Def Comedy (season finale), HBO, 10 & 10:30 PM
• 2017 ELeague Year in Review, TBS, 10 PM

Saturday

• Gator Bowl, ESPN, 12 PM
• Liberty Bowl, ABC, 12:30 PM
• Fiesta Bowl, ESPN, 4 PM
• Orange Bowl, ESPN, 8 PM

Sunday

• Dave Chappelle, Netflix, 3 AM
• No Activity (season finale), CBS AA, 3 AM
• Shameless, Showtime, 9 PM
• Smilf (season finale), Showtime, 10 PM
• Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2018, ABC, 10 PM
• Fox’s New Year’s Eve with Steve Harvey, Fox, 11 PM
• Lovesick (S3), Netflix, 3 AM
• Glacé, Netflix, 3 AM

[All times listed are in ET]

Source Code for Apple’s Lisa Operating System to be Released for Free in 2018

The Apple Lisa, released in 1983, was one of the first personal computers to come equipped with a graphical user interface, and soon the operating system that ran on the Lisa will available for free, courtesy of the Computer History Museum and Apple.

As noted by Gizmodo, Al Kossow, a software curator at the Computer History Museum, recently announced that both the source code for the Lisa operating system and the Lisa apps have been recovered. Apple is reviewing the source code, and once that’s done, the museum will be releasing the code publicly.

Just wanted to let everyone know the sources to the OS and applications were recovered, I converted them to Unix end of line conventions and spaces for Pascal tabs after recovering the files using Disk Image Chef, and they are with Apple for review. After that’s done, CHM will do an @CHM blog post about the historical significance of the software and the code that is cleared for release by Apple will be made available in 2018.

The only thing I saw that probably won’t be able to be released is the American Heritage dictionary for the spell checker in LisaWrite.

Back when the Lisa was first released, Apple charged $9,995, with the machine aimed at business users. It was equipped with a 5MHz Motorola 68000 CPU, 1MB of RAM, and a 5MB hard drive. Given its high price, Apple only managed to sell about 100,000 of the Lisa computers. Though Steve Jobs originally denied it, he later said the Lisa was named for his daughter, Lisa Brennan.

Apple’s Lisa operating system featured the text-based Workshop for developing software and the Lisa Office System, which had seven apps that included LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaProject, LisaList, and LisaTerminal.

The Lisa computer was followed by the Macintosh in 1984, and the Macintosh was essentially a more affordable, improved version of the Lisa, which allowed it to outsell the Lisa. Though Apple did introduce additional versions of the Lisa computer at a lower price tag, it was ultimately discontinued only a few short years after its introduction.

Tags: Steve Jobs, Computer History Museum
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