MIT Develops Portable Device That Spits Out Drugs On-Demand

Researchers at MIT have developed a portable system that can produce biologic drugs on-demand, obviating the need for expensive centralized manufacturing and potentially enabling doctors working in remote or developing parts of the world to create biopharmaceuticals that may be otherwise inaccessible. The DARPA-funded work is described this week in the journal Nature Communications.

Biopharmaceuticals, or biologics, are pharmaceutical drugs produced from biological rather than chemical sources. They may consist of proteins, sugars, and-or nucleic acids, or they may involve entire living cells. Examples include most vaccines, antibody therapies, and viral gene therapies (where viruses are genetically manipulated to have some medical benefit). The earliest example is biosynthetic insulin, created in 1982 and sold under the name Humulin, crafted using recombinant DNA.

Creating and manufacturing biologics is, however, expensive, owing largely the complexity and time scales involved; the MIT study notes that biologics represent a key driver in escalating health-care expenditures. Deploying biologics in developing regions of the world, in battlefield scenarios, and in emergency situations is a formidable challenge with consequences for basic drug availability.

"Currently, manufacturing of biologic drugs in the biopharmaceutical industry relies heavily on large-scale fermentation batches that are frequently monitored offline, to ensure a robust process and consistent quality of product," the paper explains. "However, as personalized medicines, single-use technologies and the desire for global and decentralized access to biologics are becoming increasingly important, there is a growing need for rapid, flexible, scalable and portable biomanufacturing systems that can be monitored/controlled online for affordable, safe and consistent production of biologics."

The platform developed by the MIT group is based on two basic components. The first is a system engineered to kick out multiple therapeutic proteins in response to programmed (chemical) cues, while the second is a millimeter-scale microfluidics production platform for actually producing the biologic end product. The result is a microbioreactor that is so far able to produce near-single dose levels of human growth hormone and the antiviral interferon-α2b.

Image: MIT

The platform is based on a programmable variety of yeast known as Pichia pastoris. When exposed to estrogen β-estradiol, the cells are engineered to spit out growth hormones, while methanol causes them to produce interferon. Because the yeast cells can be grown in very high densities on top of relatively simple and expensive carbon substrates, it's possible to achieve large protein yields.

Within the microbioreactor, yeast cells are confined to a microfluidic chip where they live within the tiniest amount of liquid—which delivers the chemical signals—surrounded on three-sides by an impermeable polycarbonate wall, and, on the fourth, by a gas-permeable membrane. The membrane is used to both "massage" the cell-containing liquid to ensure it remains homogeneously mixed and to pass oxygen in and carbon-dioxide out. To ensure the optimal environment for cell growth, the system constantly monitors oxygen levels, temperature, and pH within the chamber.

When it comes time to produce a new biogenic, the liquid surrounding the yeast cells is flushed out and filtered to ensure that no cells escape. New liquid containing the new signal is piped in and the yeast cells begin producing a new protein. This flushing process—particularly the retaining of old cells for reuse—has apparently been a difficulty in prior microbioreactor research.

Future work will focus on making combinatorial therapeutics, e.g. treatments in which multiple biogenics are used together. With each one requiring its own production line, this is currently an expensive proposition. "But if you could engineer a single strain," offers MIT bioengineer Tim Lu in a statement, "or maybe even a consortia of strains that grow together, to manufacture combinations of biologics or antibodies, that could be a very powerful way of producing these drugs at a reasonable cost."

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MIT Develops Portable Device That Spits Out Drugs On-Demand

'God Hand' Mod for 'Doom' Lets You Punch Your Way Through Hell

Even if your direct experience with video games remains limited to the likes of Candy Crush Saga and Angry Birds, there's still a good chance you've at least heard of the seminal first person shooter Doom. Only those fans familiar with the deep cuts, though, will likely recall God Hand, the 2006 cult favorite for the PlayStation 2 that's based on beatin' up the bad guys with a healthy dose of humor. And as a testament to the seemingly limitless appeal of modding Doom, modder Edy Pagaza has gone and mashed the two together in a new mod appropriately called God Hand Doom.

Unfortunately, unlike the mod that injects Duke Nukem into Doom or the one that recreates Goldeneye 007with Doom's engine, we can't actually play this one yet. It's just a video, although the "Coming Soon" at the end suggests a real release is presumably on the way for the ZDoom port used for the mod.

I'd like to be one of the first to play it when it drops. Doom may be a legendary shooter, but I find the thought of running around and punching the same demons with the music, interface, and hero of God Hand all the more cathartic. In fact, if anything, I want more. God Hand may have placed a heavy emphasis on solving problems with kicks and punches, but it was also a game about clobberin' goons with six-foot 4"x4"s and button-prompt attacks. Here's there's none of that, although Pazaga's Patreon page says he plans to bring in the '"fatalities thing' from God Hand (a.k.a. spanking, pummel, supplex, etc.)" in the future.

Maybe we'll see it in the real release, if it ever shows up. Pagaza's YouTube page showcases a few other Doom-related mods he's made, such as one that imported the weapons from Killing Floor 2 that he had to abandon after a lightning strike ruined his computer. Here's to hoping he finishes it, as God Hand Doom might then evolve into that precious rarity—the cult classic of a cult classic.

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'God Hand' Mod for 'Doom' Lets You Punch Your Way Through Hell

Why the Rumor That Facebook Is Listening to Your Conversations Won’t Die

Not long ago I watched a video in my Facebook timeline—I don’t remember what it was, only that it was something very sad. Whatever it was, I felt overwhelmed, and I put my head down on the bed beside my computer and did about sixty seconds of crying.

When I lifted my head I saw something new at the top of my timeline: some garbage ad, like any one of thousands of garbage ads that speckle my social media usage with background noise. But this one was worrying: It was for “online counseling services”, or something like that. I was alarmed.

Did Facebook hear me crying? No, Facebook has said clearly, but it really felt like it did, which is probably why this rumor won’t die.

It’s not even that crazy of a conspiracy theory. Two years ago Facebook began experimenting with using your phone and your computer’s inbuilt microphone to recognize and predict what you were listening to or watching at the time you made a status update. For example, if you’re listening to a certain artist or watching a certain film, rather than typing about it, Facebook would “hear” and identify the source of the sound and supply it for you. When the feature launched in 2014 Facebook promised that the feature was “entirely optional,” that it didn’t record or store any of the audio it captured, including personal conversations, and that it mainly just uses your audio data to harmlessly note popular matches.

Image: Shutterstock.

The feature saw a massive backlash—one online petition against it gained more than 500,000 signatures, according to reports, forcing Facebook to backpedal and clarify. But “backpedal and clarify” is de rigeur for lots of apps and networks that overreach. The same thing happened to pro-social anti-sedition psyop Pokémon Go, which supposedly just had no idea that people wouldn’t like allowing Pikachu a totalitarian look into their Google accounts until they had to amend it later. Wow, we’re from Silicon Valley and we are wildly educated and make millions of dollars but shucks, understanding this whole “privacy concerns” stuff that arises literally every time we launch something sure is tuff!

Eventually, Facebook denied in plain language that it spies on your microphone to serve you ads. But it took two years after the initial backlash for it to get to that, which seems a little long. And there are still some considerable “ifs” in its official statement after we only access your microphone if. Maybe amid some of those ifs, it spies on your microphone not even for ads, but for some other reason entirely. I just don’t trust it.

The truth is out there, says University of South Florida professor and fellow tinfoil-hatter Kelli Burns, who warns that despite the party line that Facebook only listens to certain things for certain reasons, it does appear to adapt based on things you discuss in its earshot. In fact, it seems lots of people have had these anecdotal, eerie experiences—I made one exploratory Tweet, and tons of replies came in reporting similar suspicions. One user was talking to a family member on the phone about another relative’s cancer diagnosis, only to find ads for treatment centers. Another was offered a coupon for a restaurant they were chatting about with coworkers.

Maybe I cannot face the fact I am simply dangling in the adept crosshairs of demographic targeting like a motionless red apple. I am easy.

Even if I don’t trust Facebook, this whole listening thing is probably not happening. The tech muscle required to continuously capture all that audio and run it through voice recognition systems is supposedly infeasible. With all the metadata it has already to target you with ads—and it’s working—why would Facebook or Google need to spend processing power on that scale just to listen to you talking, too?

There are a lot of other logical explanations for these experiences, too. It could be that by the time you think to discuss something with someone, you’ve probably Googled or chatted online about the same topic, or similar ones, recently—and those in-platform chat logs are often used to suggest ads. There’s also a sort of confirmation bias known as the “Frequency Illusion”, or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, defined in 2006 as a principle whereby something you heard about recently just suddenly seems to be everywhere. When something new occurs to you, you unconsciously start looking for signs of it in your environment—even, let’s say, an event related to a movie you just watched, or a dress branded with a character from a game you just played.

Image: Shutterstock.

Maybe I began to suspect Facebook of spying on me, and therefore now I see correlations between my advertisements and my conversations everywhere. Maybe I feel stupid because I’ve been tricked—I’m an adult and I bought a Pikachu dress!—so now I need to believe the trick is global and massive. Maybe. Maybe I cannot face the fact I am simply dangling in the adept crosshairs of demographic targeting like a motionless red apple. I am easy.

This column of mine, Oracles of the Web, seeks to capture moments of magic, haunting, faith and belief within the technology space. But as they say at dialogue hub Haunted Machines, any system we don’t fully understand is fundamentally “magic”, or divine, or haunted—that is how the human mind works. I have an idea of how Google and Facebook could be listening to us, following us, but I don’t yet know exactly how, where it ends and begins. To test it out once and for all, I have been saying the phrase “motorcycles” into my laptop and phone mic alike all day. I called my partner while he was sitting right next to me to artificially discuss “motorcycles” over the phone. I opened a status window and chanted “motorcycles” softly at it, like a mad prayer. I opened a YouTube tab and murmured “motorcycles” to it, typed and erased “motorcycles” in the search field.

Still, even my most computer-savvy colleagues, those who’ve been the most dismissive of my paranoia, will eventually admit to switching off microphones and taping up cameras “just to be safe”.

I’m not interested in motorcycles at all, so any sign of motorcycle ads on my page would be absolute proof. Yet so far, nothing. Maybe it’s onto me and it knows I’m trying to catch it. Maybe it knows enough about me to know I can’t afford a motorcycle and my driver’s license has lapsed. Who can tell? Without facts, this is just a belief—a paranoid conspiracy theory.

And like all systems of belief, maybe it sprung up in me in response to a subconscious need to believe there is an orderly force behind it all, a definitive map across the great, starlit night that these technology mega conglomerates have stealthily draped over me and my life while I wasn’t looking.

Still, even my most computer-savvy colleagues, those who’ve been the most dismissive of my paranoia, will eventually admit to switching off microphones and taping up cameras “just to be safe”. Many sites offered instructions like these for how to shut those microphone permissions off on your phone, so my unease must be popular enough. We may know certain things are unlikely, but it is enough to know they are possible. Mark Zuckerberg himself has sealed his camera and his microphone with tape. He, better than us all, maybe, knows what is possible.

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Why the Rumor That Facebook Is Listening to Your Conversations Won’t Die

Ransomware Is So Hot Criminals Are Sabotaging Each Other's Ransomware

Ransomware, the strain of malware which cryptographically locks a victim's hard drive until they pay the author an electronic ransom, is super popular among cybercriminals right now. The strategy is so successful, in fact, that some ransomware-makers have apparently begun sabotaging each other's ransomware to try and take out their competition.

Earlier this week, 3,500 keys for a ransomware known as “Chimera” leaked online, purportedly allowing anyone targeted by it to safely decrypt their ransomed files without having to pony up bitcoins. The decryption keys were apparently posted by the authors of a rival ransomware package called Petya and Mischa, who claimed they had hacked Chimera's development system, pilfered the keys, and stolen parts of the code.

"Earlier this year we got access to big parts of their deveolpment [sic] system, and included parts of Chimera in our project," the authors write in a post on Pastebin. "Additionally we now release about 3500 decryption keys from Chimera."

Chimera is a particularly nasty strain of ransomware which not only locks a victim's hard drive but threatens to leak their private files online if the ransom isn't paid. It’s still not clear whether the supposedly-leaked keys will actually decrypt machines affected by the malware, however—the security firm MalwareBytes, which first noticed the leak, says that verifying all the keys will take some time.

In any case, Petya and Mischa's authors seem to have timed the leak to promote their own ransomware, which is based on the stolen Chimera code and is now being offered as a service to any two-bit cybercriminal willing to shell out bitcoins for it.

The in-fighting seems to indicate another significant, albeit predictable shift in the criminal hacking economy. Previously, ransomware authors have expressed anger at a recent rash of fake ransomware, which display scary messages but don't actually lock or unlock a victim's hard drive when the ransom is paid; the thinking is that enough of this fake ransomware could cause people to stop believing they can get their files back when they're hit with the real thing, endangering future profits.

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Ransomware Is So Hot Criminals Are Sabotaging Each Other's Ransomware

Watch This Flying Ring Propel Itself Around the 'Flying Machine Arena'

That ring flying in circles around the room looks like it has a life of its own. It's going at 1.4 meters per second, and engineered from a quadrotor (also known as a quadcopter or quadrotor helicopter), a helicopter propelled by four rotors.

In this video by Rajan Gill from the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zurich, he explains that while quadrotors are agile and have high load carrying capabilities, they're not very efficient in forward flight. Their lift to drag ratios are comparable to that of a fruit fly, he says. The flying ring, on the other hand, can fly on its side, allowing the blades to propel it forward faster than a typical quadcopter.

The flying ring in the video is the first prototype of the augmented quadrotor with an angular wing, acting as a lifting surface which also conceals propeller blades for safety. The prototype's autonomous controlled flights, as seen in the video, allowed researchers to identify its aerodynamic properties.

The ring flies inside a "flying machine arena," described as a "sandbox environment" for testing mobile robots. The size of the room allows the machines enough space for fast-paced experimental motion, in the air or on the ground. "The Flying Machine Arena offers ideal conditions to test novel concepts thanks to a high-precision localization system, high-performance radio links, easy-to-use software structure, and safety nets enclosing the space," its website describes. The space is used in various projects by various research labs, including the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control.

With more efficient forward flight, speed and carrying capacity, the quadrotor, as shown in the video, can be used for various lifting and transportation tasks to assist humans.

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Watch This Flying Ring Propel Itself Around the 'Flying Machine Arena'

This Crazy Lizard Is the Mascot of the Latest US Spy Satellite Launch

Image: National Reconnaissance Office.

The US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has become known for branding its spy satellite launches with strange and sometimes menacing imagery. But unlike the Office's infamous world-devouring octopus, the logo adorning NROL-61, which carried yet another classified payload into geosynchronous orbit on Thursday, is just flat-out bizarre.

Launched from Cape Canaveral at 1237 GMT on Thursday, NROL-61 sent up a classified NRO satellite innocuously designated USA-269. The launch featured the image of a wild-eyed lizard straddling a rocket Major Kong-style as it blasts The lizard mascot's name is “Spike,” which also serves as the mission's code name.

But what's really interesting about the mission patch is that it shows Spike riding what seems to be the cargo-launching Ares V rocket, rather than the mission's actual launch vehicle, the Atlas V. The Ares was a cargo-carrying rocket designed for NASA's now-defunct Constellation program, which planned to replace the space shuttle before being scrapped in 2010.

That suggests that Spike's designer either made the logo as a tribute to the abandoned program, or that it was originally designed for Constellation and was simply re-appropriated for the NRO launch after that program was canceled.

Just like with the launch of NRO's Mentor-7 eavesdropping satellite in late June, amateur satellite-spotters wasted no time tracking down Spike. Paul Camilleri, a hobbyist in Australia, was able to spot both the NROL-61 payload and its separated upper-stage Centaur rocket booster in the night sky just an hour after launch.

It's also worth noting that the Atlas V 421 configuration deployed by NROL-61 has not previously been used in any of the surveillance agency's missions. While the purpose of NRO satellites can normally be puzzled out by carefully analyzing the size and details of its launch vehicle, this unusual configuration means that the satellite's exact function remains a mystery.

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This Crazy Lizard Is the Mascot of the Latest US Spy Satellite Launch

There's a Fan-Made 'StarCraft' MMO, and Blizzard Isn't Going to Shut It Down

It's been a fascinating year for Blizzard Entertainment as regards player creations using its properties. Earlier this year the celebrated gamemaker ended up looking like a big, bad bully when it forced the closure of the popular World of Warcraft private server Nostalrius Begins, and there was much gnashing of digital teeth.

Flash forward a couple of months, and now we have the open beta release of StarCraft Universe, a massively multiplayer game using assets from StarCraft II. It's got the "third-person action RPG elements of World of Warcraft, the combat mechanics of Diablo, and the starship mechanics of FTL with the StarCraft setting." And wonder of wonders, even after the Nostalrius fiasco, Blizzard's apparently okay with it.

It wasn't always this way. The tale of StarCraft Universe goes way back to 2011, when a group of modders headed by Ryan Winzen announced that they'd made a mod for StarCraft II that turned the real-time strategy game into a MMO kind of like that other game of Blizzard's with orcs and purple elves. Appropriately enough, they even called it World of StarCraft. Blizzard bristled, and within hours YouTube pulled Winzen's videos showing his progress. In the uproar, League of Legends developer Riot even offered Winzen to apply for a position at the studio.

It all kind of blew over, and Blizzard even gave its blessing to the project after Winzen changed the name and learning that Winzen really did intend for his creation to be a mod and not a separately existing game. They invited him out to the studio, and Winzen followed up with a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2013 that reached $84,000.

And now it's finally here in open beta form, with the proper release scheduled for next month and with an Indiegogo campaign to raise more money for maintenance (since Winzen can't actually sell the game proper). It looks, ahem, stellar. Just look at that announcement trailer above—it's the kind of thing Blizzard itself could have made, and it proves they've got the right person heading this. If you want to play, you'll need either StarCraft II installed or the free Starter edition and then download it from this link to the Battle.net shell.

You can check out some of the gameplay below:

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There's a Fan-Made 'StarCraft' MMO, and Blizzard Isn't Going to Shut It Down

Brexit Is Making VR More Expensive in the UK

Thanks to Brexit, Vive virtual reality just got more expensive in the United Kingdom. Already, one of the biggest obstacles for the VR adoption is the price, so this certainly doesn't help.

The previously £689 ($911) HTC Vive, the VR headset using Valve's technology, comes with a visor, dual hand controls, and two sensors that track the user's movement. The price is high, as compared with the £500 ($660) Oculus Rift and £300 ($400) PlayStation VR, and some question whether or not it's worth it. With the new Brexit-heavy price tag, that question mark becomes even more pronounced.

In a July 29 message to its UK customers, the HTC said:

"HTC continuously monitors and adjusts pricing to ensure we are providing our customers with the best value possible. Due to recent currency valuation changes and the current value of the GBP [Great Britain Pound] we are adjusting the price of the HTC Vive in the UK to £759 + P&P [postage and packaging]. The adjustment will come into effect on Monday 1st August."

In American dollars, the new price is equivalent to about a grand.

Over July, as the value of the pound dropped to its lowest level against the US dollar in three decades, many companies raised their prices to maintain their British margins. For example, Dell also raised the price of its PCs, and OnePlus raised the price of the OnePlus 3, the company's latest phone.

Because Brexit has reduced the UK's growth prospects, the value of the pound has fallen. A strong economy with a strong currency hinges on the country's growth prospects, and whether investors are investing there, the Telegraph reports. With lower growth comes lower interest rates, and a rate cut for markets, bringing about domestic inflation, while businesses have to pay more for imports from foreign markets.

This is not good news, especially for VR. This year, VR headsets became more available, but only the most enthusiastic early adopters have been buying them so far. For starters, VR requires a high-end PC, which itself costs at least another $500. There's also not much content for VR, so the payoff for the hefty price isn't exactly there yet.

There's hope for VR, but its market in the UK may take a solid hit until the pound recovers.

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Brexit Is Making VR More Expensive in the UK

Preserving the Ancient Art of Getting Pwned

Image: danooct1.

Getting infected with a computer virus used to be so much more fun. Take the Caterpillar virus, for example, which back in 1991 quietly infected .COM and .EXE files on MS-DOS. After lying in wait for two months, a line of ASCII characters in the shape of a caterpillar would begin to crawl across the screen, kind of like the game Snake, eating white characters as it goes and pooping them out in yellow.

That’s so much more entertaining than finding a mysterious charge on your credit card, only to realize that you were one of millions of people who were victim to a massive security breach at Target, or one of the many other sites that are hacked on a regular basis.

That’s what getting pwned usually feels like these days, but thanks to Daniel White, a YouTuber who goes by the name danooct1, we can see Caterpillar in action, as well as other viruses from back in the day when getting pwned came with a little bit of flair.

“I started recording videos because I wanted to see some of the stuff I read about for myself rather than just imagining it in my head,” White told me over chat. “So I used an old computer I had lying around. Shortly after that I figured maybe I'd put some videos of it on YouTube, just for myself really. I didn't expect anyone else to find it interesting.”

White’s fascination with old malware started with an internet worm called Sasser, which he was infected with in 2004. Sasser would spread itself across networks by launching an FTP server on infected computers and immediately scanning for other vulnerable targets. Once infected, Sasser would use up all system resources, forcing the user to restart the computer, which didn’t help much since Sasser would relaunch.

To demonstrate how Sasser jumped from machine to machine without any human interaction, White set up a network of five Windows XP and Windows 2000 machines with hardware from the time the virus first appeared.

It’s an elaborate setup, but one that White is used to putting together after years of uploading similar videos to his channel.

“There's a lot of preparation that goes into it,” he said. “One video in particular, for a virus called CIH, requires a pentium MMX processor. The virus exploits a bug in the architecture to gain write access to the BIOS and overwrite it, causing the computer to fail to boot until the BIOS chip is reflashed. So I sacrificed an old computer for that video which was really neat.”

In addition to running old hardware and hunting down old malware—White’s main source is the Ukrainian site VX Heaven—capturing these videos also involves a certain amount of risk. It’s a very low risk, White admits, since it’s unlikely any of these ancient viruses will be able to make the leap to a modern computer, but he isn’t taking any chances—he has off-site backups for everything.

Either way, it’s a lot of effort for a YouTube channel with a growing but still modest following of 124,000 subscribers.

“I think it's something not a lot of people really give much thought to,” he said. “Computer viruses are this sort of threat that always lingers around but isn't quite tangible. Most people experience malware at some point or another but it's usually nothing more than your antivirus picking something up and telling you about it.”

Older viruses had a personal touch, White said, because they were made by enthusiasts, many of them teenagers, who were learning how to program. They were more interested in finding interesting ways to infect files, hide infections, and taunt their rivals in the community (or even antivirus industry professionals), then they were in making money. It was just a hobby.

“Authors like Spanska wrote a few viruses where he talked about viruses being art and that coding them can be fun, and often had non-damaging payloads with a really neat graphical component,” White said.

That visual component inspired what is my favorite part of White’s channel: viewer-made viruses. Since he started the channel in 2008, White has received 200 viruses his viewers have made and asked him show off in a video. These, much like Spanska’s work, aren’t so much concerned with spreading and damaging users, but in creating the trippiest visuals possible.

The best example of this is from White’s most recent user-made virus video, a creation called MEMZ, which led us to discover his channel earlier this month.

The Trojan—a type of malware which infects a computer by masquerading as a non-malicious program—begins by informing the user that their computer “has been fucked by the MEMZ Trojan” and that any attempt to kill the Trojan will cause their “system to be destroyed instantly.”

It then opens web pages for Club Penguin and Google searches "how to buy weed," but things get weird when the screen starts inverting its colors to a soundtrack composed of Windows XP error pings. At this point the Trojan begins taking dozens of screenshots to create a tunneling effect, which prompts White to attempt to restart his computer. As promised by the Trojan’s original note, the computer was totaled and now is good for nothing besides running an animation of the Nyan cat.

Since they’re coming from his viewers, viruses like MEMZ focus on the least malicious part of malware. Like the scene in the ‘80s and ‘90s they try to emulate, they’re more focused on creative, artistic aspects of getting pwned, and that’s exactly what White hopes to inspire.

“I figure whether I condone it or not, people are still going to be writing things to send to me to make them into videos, so I might as well try it out to give back to the people who have followed the channel so loyally,” White said. “And maybe if they have this creative outlet then they won't be swayed by the dark side…”

The Hacks We Can’t See is Motherboard’s theme week dedicated to the future of security and the hacks no one’s talking about. Follow along here.

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Preserving the Ancient Art of Getting Pwned

What’s the Future of Chinese Hacking?

Adam Segal, the Ira A Lipman Chair for Emerging Technologies and National Security and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age,

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After years of public reporting on the theft of intellectual property, business strategies, and trade secrets, last month the cybersecurity firm FireEye issued a report headlining a steep decline in Chinese cyber espionage against organizations in the US and 25 other countries.

The number of network compromises by 72 suspected China-based groups dropped from 60 in February 2013 to less than 10 by May 2016. While FireEye did not rule out the possibility that improvements in tradecraft were leading to less detection (FBI Director James Comey once compared Chinese hackers to drunk burglars who kick in the door and knock over a vase on their way out with the TV), US Assistant Attorney General John Carlin confirmed the company’s findings that attacks were less voluminous but more focused and calculated.

A combination of the threat of US sanctions, a diplomatic accord signed by President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping, and internal reforms of the People’s Liberation Army may have temporarily produced a dramatic decline in cyber espionage, but is it time to shut down the firewall, send the threat intelligence analysts home, and declare victory? Very unlikely.

China hacks because it wants to move its economy from labor intensive manufacturing to high technology innovation.

For Beijing, cyberspace is essential to economic growth, sustaining and strengthening the Chinese Communist Party, and maintaining domestic stability and national security. As a result, China hacks because it wants to move its economy from labor intensive manufacturing to high technology innovation; defeat foreign ideologies and weaken opponents of the regime; and counter the technological advantages of the US military in the Pacific.

These fundamental motivations direct state-backed hackers to a set of high value targets. Because Chinese leaders do not want to be dependent on foreign technology suppliers, and are impatient with the results produced so far by massive investments in education and scientific research, Chinese hackers steal intellectual property from high technology companies as well as business secrets from the pharmaceutical, financial, energy, legal, and other sectors. “The situation that our country is under others' control in core technologies of key fields has not changed fundamentally, and the country's S&T foundation remains weak," President Xi Jinping told a gathering of the nation’s top scientists in May 2016. The companies breached are global, with victims identified in Germany, Australia, Japan, India, and the United Kingdom.

Worried about the spread of ideologies that threaten regime legitimacy, and the ability of domestic opponents to organize and foment dissent, Beijing supports cyber attacks on Tibetan and Uighur activists, NGOS and think tanks, and the diplomatic, military, and political agencies of all the major powers. When the New York Times and Bloomberg published stories about the massive wealth amassed by the families of China’s top leaders, they, along with other media outlets, were hacked.

Chinese hackers also conduct intelligence and counterintelligence operations. The theft of 22 million records from servers of the Office of Personnel Management included information perfect for blackmail, and might also allow Chinese counterintelligence agencies to identify spies working undercover at US embassies around the world.

Chinese defense planners are preparing the PLA to fight "informationized local wars": short, technologically-intense regional wars. The potential enemy in these future wars is usually referred to as a “technologically advanced” adversary but is clearly a stand-in for the United States and its allies. As a result, these planners want to both understand and disrupt US weapons platforms. Two PLA groups, Units 61938 and 61486, have reportedly stolen information from over two dozen Defense Department weapons programs, including the Patriot missile system, the US Navy’s new littoral combat ship, and the F-35 and F-22 stealth fighter jets.

Cyberspace remains central to all of Beijing’s predominant economic and political interests, and cyber attacks are, and will continue to be, a potent tool.

If a conflict breaks out over Taiwan or the South China Sea, the PLA will want to disrupt communication, transportation, intelligence, and reconnaissance systems, so hackers have mapped these networks. In addition, Chinese leaders want to signal to US policymakers that the conflict may not stay regional, and so PLA operators have penetrated into banking, energy, and other critical infrastructure networks, and may have intentionally left evidence of the intrusions as a reminder that the US homeland is not immune to attack.

Given Beijing’s long-term strategic concerns about technological innovation, domestic stability, and national security, Chinese hackers may change tactics and organization, but they will remain focused on a similar set of targets.The creation of the Strategic Support Forces, a move intended to centralize space, cyber and information warfare troops, will result in greater coordination among the many different hacking groups and better tradecraft overall.

Continued tension over China’s sovereignty claims in the South China Sea mean that the networks of the US military and its regional allies will remain prime targets. As the economy moves up the value chain, and as Chinese technology companies like Xiaomi, Huawei, and AliBaba compete in global markets, cyber economic espionage will be narrower and more tailored to specific technologies. The attacks on domestic opponents and outside ideological threats are will become more sophisticated and increase in pace as the Chinese Communist Party appears increasingly worried about domestic stability, regime legitimacy, and the spread of information within China.

Chinese leaders will also be watching closely how the Obama administration responds to the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Like Moscow, Beijing also believes that it is in an ideological contest with the West and it has tried to shape the information space, though in a more limited way, for example by trolling Tibetan independence activists on Twitter and using distributed denial of service attacks to knock GitHub offline for hosting anti-censorship technology.

However, the complex interdependence of the Chinese and US economies and a greater slate of shared interests in global affairs make a hack as brazen as an effort to influence the US election highly improbable. Still, cyberspace remains central to all of Beijing’s predominant economic and political interests, and cyber attacks are, and will continue to be, a potent tool.

The Hacks We Can’t See is Motherboard’s theme week dedicated to the future of security and the hacks no one’s talking about. Follow along here.

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What’s the Future of Chinese Hacking?

Mathematicians Still Years from Verifying Nightmare 500-Page Proof

In 2012, the mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki published four papers on his own website with little fanfare. Together, they totalled more than 500 pages—a hyperdense labyrinth of symbols invoking a brutal new mathematical framework known as inter-universal Teichmüller Theory. Via said framework, Mochizuki claimed to have solved the abc conjecture—a simple-seeming statement about prime numbers that has nonetheless eluded mathematicians since first being proposed in 1985. The catch? No other mathematician could understand the thing.

Mochizuki had unleashed an impenetrable mathematical hellscape. Understanding it is not simply a matter of being a really great number theorist, one has to become an expert in an entirely new mathematical field as defined in Mochizuki's papers. The only preparation for verifying the new proof is to understand inter-universal Teichmüller Theory, which no one really does. Thus, a paradox is raised: verifying the proof means fully committing to it for years even though it might be wrong.

In a verification progress report published in December of 2014, Mochizuki bemoaned: “With the exception of the handful of researchers already involved in the verification activities concerning IUTeich (inter-universal Teichmüller Theory) discussed in the present report, every researcher in arithmetic geometry throughout the world is a complete novice with respect to the mathematics surrounding IUTeich, and hence, in particular, is simply not qualified to issue a definitive (i.e., mathematically meaningful) judgment concerning the validity of IUTeich on the basis of a ‘deep understanding’ arising from his/her previous research achievements.”

Mathematicians have nonetheless taken up the challenge. At a workshop last week at the University of Kyoto, the normally reclusive Mochizuki presented his work in-person to a gathering of believers, several of whom noted significant progress in untangling the proof. UC San Diego number theorist Kiran Kedlaya at least sees a light at the end of the tunnel, however distant. He told Nature News that we can expect a verification no less than three years from now, but that mathematicians have begun to uncover a general strategy unlying Mochizuki's proof and have isolated passages that seem particularly key.

Moreover, there are now 10 mathematicians committed to the cause, up from three at the time of a workshop last December at Oxford.

Skepticism remains, however. “The constructions are generally clear, and many of the arguments could be followed to some extent, but the overarching strategy remains totally elusive for me,” Yale mathematician Vesselin Dimitrov told Nature. “Add to this the heavy, unprecedentedly indigestible notation: these papers are unlike anything that has ever appeared in the mathematical literature.”

Proving the abc conjecture may prove to be worth the effort. A paper by Dimitrov earlier this year showed how a reduction of Mochizuki's proof, if it is eventually verified, should offer solutions to a large number of other mathematical problems, including a new proof of Fermat's last theorem.

As for what the abc conjecture actually is, here's what I wrote in 2015:

Take three (whole) numbers—a, b, and c—of the form a + b = c. These three numbers are what’s known as coprime. This just means that they don’t share any divisors (except for 1, but every number is divisible by 1). If one of the numbers is divisible by, say, 13, none of the others are divisible by 13. It’s an interesting relationship, like three people with no shared ancestors all the way back to the very first human/number (which is 1).

What we need to prove is that for some other, fourth number d, there will be a finite (countable) number of abc triplet sets (as, bs, and cs fitting the above equation) such that c is greater than d raised to some positive power that is not 1 (a “perfect power”). Finally, this extra number d isn’t just anything; it must be the product of the prime factors of a, b, and c. That’s it. Somehow, these three numbers that aren’t linked by common factors (coprime) are, after all, linked by their factors. It’s weird.

You could even say that the conjecture is kind of elegant: three seemingly perfect mathematical strangers are related in the end. A simple statement, but with a proof that turns out to be anything but.

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Mathematicians Still Years from Verifying Nightmare 500-Page Proof

Bulldogs Are Genetic Monstrosities, DNA Study Finds

When it comes to dogs, few sights are sadder than a tired bulldog, gasping for precious oxygen. You’ve probably seen one—its watery eyes drooping under folds of skin, while stubby little legs buckle under the weight of its body.

Bulldogs are abominations of nature, and it’s definitely our fault.

A new study shows just how deeply we've warped this canine’s genetic makeup. Purebred English bulldogs will never be healthy, thanks to generations of calculated inbreeding in pursuit of “ideal” characteristics. The paper’s findings, which were published today in Canine Genetics and Epidemiology, mark the first time the breed’s diversity has ever been investigated on a DNA level, rather than by pedigree.

“Just as it took decades, and maybe centuries, to breed the bulldog to its present form, it may take a very long time to reverse what has been done. English bulldogs have lost so much genetic diversity, and the bad traits have become so universal to the breed, that either such positive traits no longer exist, or that they exist in a very small proportion,” lead author Niels Pedersen, a professor at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine’s Center for Companion Animal Health, told me.

A bulldog who looks mad about being so inbred. Image: Flickr/Paul Hudson

A team of veterinary researchers analyzed the DNA of 102 registered, or “show quality,” English bulldogs, both from the US and other countries. After their genes were sequenced, they were compared to those of puppy mill dogs, based on the notion that commercial bulldog breeders were responsible for propagating health issues common to the breed.

Among both groups, it was clear that large portions of the English bulldog’s genome have affected by centuries of selective breeding. Researchers identified a significant loss of genetic diversity in the region responsible for normal immune responses. And in regard to problematic traits like skin wrinkling and hip dysplasia, the lack of diversity left in bulldog DNA leaves little hope for “weeding out” issues from within the existing gene pool.

Additionally, the study revealed that breathing problems associated with brachycephaly—the flat, wide skull emblematic of most bulldogs—are a product of complex changes to the dog’s head structure, and can’t be fixed simply by “lengthening” the face.

A 2015 survey conducted by The Kennel Club discovered inbreeding among pedigree bulldogs skyrocketed during the 1980s and 1990s. This genetic bottleneck, or loss of diversity, is thought to have occurred when several popular sire dogs were repeatedly used to build up the population.

In a separate study, published in the Public Library of Science Genetics, Swedish researchers also found genes that predispose bulldogs to a certain type of brain cancer called canine glioma, which is cancer of the brain’s glial cells. According to their results, the repeated selection of brachycephalic breed traits (basically, a smooshed face with an underbite), which appear in the same region of the genome linked to glioma, could be to blame for its diffusion.

English bulldogs originated somewhere in the British Isles, and were used for the now-outlawed sport of bull baiting. Technically “working” dogs, the breed soon outgrew its usefulness as humans selected for debilitating traits, such as stockiness, wide jaws, and massive heads. Today, more than 80 percent of bulldog litters are delivered by Caesarean section.

Most English bulldog owners can expect their animals to die of cancer or cardiac arrest, if not old age. A small cohort of breeders is attempting to resurrect the original bulldog, which they call the “Olde English Bulldogge,” though researchers warn that rapidly introducing new diversity into the gene pool could be harmful.

“I think that the attempt to create a dog with many of the desired attributes and physical features of the bulldog, but free of the serious health problems, is laudable. They obviously saw the writing on the wall many years ago, and had the foresight to break away from the established English bulldog breed and make the necessary changes,” Pedersen added.

When I asked Pedersen whether a hybrid would be a good compromise for people who want bulldogs, but not the health issues, his reply was hopeful.

“If the cross was to a non-brachycephalic, non-chondrodystrophic dog with a normal tail and unwrinkled skin, I would definitely say that the cross would be healthier than its bulldog parent.”

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Bulldogs Are Genetic Monstrosities, DNA Study Finds

Become the Best Hacker 1980 Has to Offer in ‘Quadrilateral Cowboy’

I’m pushing a vault out of a window. Due to my line of work, cyber-espionage and sabotage, I’d assume the vault’s full of valuable documents. The moment I touch the vault I trigger a turret, meaning I have about ten seconds before it make some melty Swiss cheese out of me. This is exactly what happened during the previous simulation, where I also had to hop across rooftops and use a termite-looking “Weevil” drone to jack into the door controls. I did that laying on my stomach between the floor and the ceiling, placing my computer console and a CCTV (to see through the Weevil’s eyes) among the ventilation pipes. All to get into this room and get torn up by bullets. I’ve failed but I will try again, to do better, and after I succeed I will try again, to do it better, because in Quadrilateral Cowboy you don’t just have to be a good hacker: you have to be the best hacker.

Created by Brendon Chung, Quadrilateral Cowboy takes place in his surreal, recurring fictional city of Nuevos Aires, scattered with the debris of odd books and ramen packages and where everyone has a flat face on a square body, like papercraft South Park characters. But unlike Chung’s previous games like Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving, Quadrilateral Cowboy isn’t an experimental narrative game but one more rooted in the more familiar grit of conspiracy, quick wit, and competitiveness.

It's set in alternative 1980 where buildings vine their way into the sky and flying motorcycles exist, but technology is otherwise stuck in the bog of cassette tapes and manual input. You're part of a trio of women, freelance hackers who work in the cover of night. Every gig requires surgical planning and craftiness, using coding to hack the planet and ensure you don’t get caught or killed. Most of the game is set within simulations of your heists, where you time yourself to get in and out, leaving less than footprints and taking nothing but corporate secrets.

Framing the game around training scenarios means you're not only trying to set records against other players, but so is your character. It’s Chung’s least plot-centric game yet, but even the time trials are part of the story.

Being the best hacker in 1980, of course, means using a lot of cool tech. You’ll have the Weevil drone, a remote controlled turret of your own, a launchpad, but your most essential gadget is a central computer terminal that controls all your own tools as well as hack the doors and security hurdles around you. A popular security service ensures that most of these obstacles cannot be hacked for more than three seconds at a time. Hacking these things is more than just button pushes on your end.

Your clicking computer rig needs you to be specific. If you open a door or turn off a laser you have to type in how long. If you want your Weevil to turn or move forward, you need to type in how far or to what degree. If you want your turret to shoot, you have to boot up the program and type “fire.” From the outside this might sound like secretary work, but in practice it actually feels like programming.

If you want to merely get by you can go step by step, but players who want to demolish every leaderscore will need to come up with entire command chains, sequences created by separating each function with a semicolon. This means that, on certain levels, you can begin by typing in a single elaborate code command on your computer terminal and then sprint through the entire stage without stopping.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is about being extremely efficient with outdated machines. If video games are about power fantasies, this one is for players who want to fiddle around with manual objects in a virtual space, flip switches, loosen screws, control ye olde drones with every clunky command, and type on old, loud keyboards. If you ever wanted to be a hacker—not a real one, but the cool idea of being hacker you got from a cheesy movie—it's bliss.

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Become the Best Hacker 1980 Has to Offer in ‘Quadrilateral Cowboy’

This Guy is the Lance Armstrong of Pigeon Racing

The world of British pigeon racing is aflutter today over the scandalous revelation that Eamon Kelly, a preeminent fancier and reigning champion, cheated in the Tarbes National. Did he dope his avian athletes? Or kneecap another competitor using a very tiny baton?

No, folks. Kelly, aka “Feather Daddy,” pulled off an even more elaborate hoax to win the 580-mile-race’s bounty: a pretty £11,500 ($15,220 US). In an act that can only be compared to the antics of Tour de France swindler, Lance Armstrong, the seasoned pigeon racer microchipped a bird and calculated its record-setting time without ever setting it free from his Oxfordshire apartment.

According to The Guardian, race officials were initially suspicious when one of the 14 birds that Kelly registered in the marathon clocked in at faster-than-average speeds. The journey was supposed to take the bird from Oxfordshire to the south of France, however, the pigeon that actually made the trek to Tarbes wasn’t the one that was microchipped. When referees realized that Kelly’s winged winner, who averaged speeds of 40 miles per hour, was leagues away from other birds flying at similar speeds, they knew they had a cheater on their hands.

“I, Eamon Kelly, sincerely apologise to all my friends and fanciers over my stupid actions relating to the recent Tarbes race.”

“I was tempted and fell,” Kelly told The Sun in a statement. “A decision I will regret for the rest of my life. A sport that I love so much, that has given me untold pleasure and above all friendship I have thrown all away.”

Pigeon racing isn’t a stranger to the the dirty underbelly of international sport. In 2013, European fans of the sport were aghast when six Belgian birds tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. Elsewhere, in 2014, someone set a Newcastle aviary on fire, killing 400 champion birds.

In fancier forums, complaints from flyers underscore the seedy tactics used by cheaters. “Over the years, I have encountered many great flyers who I considered a true champion, but right now, in our club, we have a ‘gentleman’ [who] goes way beyond winning out of turn… I believe that he is somehow manipulating the electronic timer,” said a user named “derf.”

But Kelly seemed above all of this. He was described by peers as a “true worker,” and was even a race controller for the National Flying Club. Like so many other esteemed sportsmen, Kelly’s passion for pigeon racing dates back to his childhood, when he was taken under the wing of renowned fancier Frank Lloyd.

I can’t help but wonder if, perhaps, Kelly is the victim here. In an effort to make sense of my feelings, I Googled “why do athletes cheat,” and found a helpful article from CNN that said many scammers do so because of national, financial, and individual pressures. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization offered another explanation, saying money and fame can often push players into risky behavior.

Maybe Kelly just spent so much time at the top, he couldn’t fathom the eventual journey back down. We might never know why he chose the low road that day, but if he’s anything like his protégés, he’ll be flying high in the sky in no time.

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This Guy is the Lance Armstrong of Pigeon Racing

Big Telecom Wants a DC Circuit Net Neutrality Review. Here’s Why That’s Unlikely

The nation’s largest cable and telecom industry trade groups on Friday asked a federal court for a rare “en banc” review of last month’s decision upholding US rules protecting net neutrality, the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible to consumers.

The industry petitions come six weeks after a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued a landmark ruling affirming Federal Communications Commission rules barring cable and phone companies from favoring certain internet services over others.

Friday’s petitions, which request a hearing by the full DC Circuit Court of Appeals, were filed by USTelecom, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the American Cable Association, and wireless trade group CTIA, which collectively represent the nation’s largest cable and phone companies.

The filings represent the latest skirmish in a decade-long conflict between the nation’s telecom titans, federal regulators, and public interest groups over how best to regulate companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. US broadband giants have long argued that the FCC’s net neutrality policy is an example of regulatory overreach that will stifle innovation and reduce their appetite to invest in next-generation services.

“USTelecom has asked for an en banc review to help ensure that the FCC does not give itself authority—which Congress has not granted—to impose heavy-handed regulation on internet access,” USTelecom President Walter McCormick said in a statement.

En banc reviews are extremely rare, and “are not favored and ordinarily will not be ordered except to secure or maintain uniformity of decisions among the panels of the Court, or to decide questions of exceptional importance,” according to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 35(a), as cited in the DC Circuit’s Handbook of Practice and Internal Procedures.

Such reviews “consistently make up less than 1 percent of the caseload of the federal circuit courts. In 2010, for example, en banc decisions accounted for only 0.146 percent of the cases decided by the federal circuit courts,” according to a 2014 Fordham Law Review article by Alexandra Sadinsky, then a J.D. Candidate at Fordham Law School.

“The likelihood that the full DC Circuit would agree to rehear the case, much less reverse the panel’s decision, is extremely remote,” Andrew Schwartzman, Benton Senior Counselor at the Public Interest Communications Law Project at Georgetown University Law Center's Institute for Public Representation, wrote in a recent article.

“The DC Circuit typically agrees to rehear a case only a few times each year, at most, usually where there is a sharp split on an important issue on which other circuits have taken a different stance,” Schwartzman wrote. “This case doesn’t meet those criteria and thus starts out as a particularly poor candidate for rehearing.”

If the DC Circuit refuses to grant an en banc hearing, the broadband industry will then have 90 days to file petitions for certiorari asking for the Supreme Court to review the case.

The FCC’s rules prohibit cable and wireless companies from blocking or throttling internet content, and from striking paid prioritization deals favoring certain content. In a statement, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler expressed confidence that the agency’s rules will withstand the latest industry challenge.

“It comes as no surprise that the big dogs have challenged the three-judge panel’s decision,” Wheeler said. “We are confident that the full court will agree with the panel’s affirmation of the FCC’s clear authority to enact its strong Open Internet rules, the reasoned decision-making upon which they are based, and the adequacy of the record from which they were developed.”

Open internet advocates argue that without net neutrality, the emergence of the next Netflix or Skype might be imperiled, because broadband providers could discriminate against such services in favor of their own offerings. Free speech advocates say that the FCC’s policy is necessary to maintain the internet as an open platform for political organizing and activism.

The broadband industry is particularly opposed to the FCC’s decision to reclassify broadband companies as “common carriers” under Title II of the Communications Act. By doing so, the FCC claimed the authority to apply utility-style regulations originally intended for traditional phone companies to broadband firms.

In his statement, McCormick said the DC Circuit “failed to recognize the significant legal failings of the FCC’s decision to regulate the internet as a public utility.” He added that “reclassifying broadband access as a public utility service reverses decades of established legal precedent which has been upheld by the Supreme Court.”

Matt Wood, policy director at DC-based public interest group Free Press, blasted the broadband industry’s latest attempt to overturn the FCC’s rules. “These requests for en banc review are sour grapes from industry dead-enders who are determined to dismantle the FCC’s successful Net Neutrality rules in spite of their many failed attempts,” Wood said in a statement.

There is no fixed timeline for the DC Circuit to respond to the broadband industry’s petitions. Federal courts typically respond to en banc requests within a few weeks, but given the fact that August is a slow month for the federal bench, the court could wait until September or even October to respond, according to Schwartzman.

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Big Telecom Wants a DC Circuit Net Neutrality Review. Here’s Why That’s Unlikely

The_Donald Claims Twitter Is Artificially Promoting the ‘ImWithHer’ Hashtag

Members of The_Donald, the “high energy” subreddit where Trump supporters exchange racist inside jokes and uncouth memes with each other, are now accusing Twitter of actively promoting Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over their beloved “God Emperor,” Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump.

“BREAKING: Twitter is manipulating their algorithm to falsely create #ImWithHer as trending,” one “centipede,” as members of the subreddit refer to themselves, claimed earlier on Friday. “There’s only 80 total tweets with the hashtag #ImWithHer in the last 1 hour yet it’s showing up on the front page. This does not constitute a trend,” the user bellowed.

Without a shred of evidence, The_Donald’s users proffered several reasons as to why they believe Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, would want to make #ImWithHer, the hashtagged version of one of Clinton’s campaign slogans, appear as a trending topic. These reasons include (hold your breath) that California is “infested with SJWs,” a derisive term used to refer to people who believe in social equality and justice (“social justice warriors”), and that Twitter is “cucked.”

Trump participated in a kid gloves AMA with these people just a few days ago, if you hadn’t heard.

At issue here is what does and does not constitute a “trend” as far as Twitter’s algorithms are concerned. The company very clearly defines trends as “topics that are popular now, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis.” I like to think of this as velocity versus acceleration: Topics that people are frequently talking about at a steady rate (#music or #summer, say) aren’t likely to appear as a trending topic, while a subject that’s talked about by a large number of people but only for a relatively short amount of time (#DemsinPhilly or, in this case, #ImWithHer) are likely to appear as a trending topic.

Danny Sullivan, the founding editor of Search Engine Land, a publication that closely monitors the online search business, told Motherboard that he’s seen “plenty of anti-Clinton hashtags” trending in the past, “so it's hardly a case that Twitter is going out of its way to help her.”

The user who made the claims against Twitter did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment. Twitter has not yet responded to Motherboard’s request for comment, but has frequently rejected charges of playing favorites with trending topics, going so far as to write a detailed blog post in December 2010 explaining why a series of WikiLeaks-related hashtags didn’t trend following the release of several US diplomatic cables (“cablegate”).

It should also be noted that, by default, Twitter trends are tailored to users’ interests and location: On Monday nights my trending topics typically include a bunch of hashtags from WWE Monday Night Raw, while a football fan is likely to see trending topics related to Monday Night Football.

The accusation that Twitter is unabashedly favoring Clinton over Trump is just the latest in a long list of grievances held by members of The_Donald against large technology companies (including Reddit itself) and the mainstream media.

In early June, members of The_Donald claimed that Google was purposefully preventing the phrase “crooked hillary,” an epithet frequently leveled against Clinton by Trump and his acolytes, from appearing in the search engine’s autocomplete feature—a charge that was swiftly denied by the Mountain View-based company. Members of The_Donald have also recently claimed that Google was purposefully omitting Trump from search results for the phrase “presidential candidates.” (Google said this was a technical error, and Trump now appears first in those search results.) Facebook has also been accused by The_Donald of censoring pro-Trump speech after Gizmodo reported that Facebook was preventing conservative-leaning news topics from appearing in the site’s Trending Topics section. The Gizmodo report prompted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to personally meet with prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck and S.E. Cupp, to assure them that Facebook was a neutral platform.

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The_Donald Claims Twitter Is Artificially Promoting the ‘ImWithHer’ Hashtag

How Cellphone Camera Images Can Fool Machine Vision

Finding some grainy imperfections in your smartphone photo is an unavoidable reality of digital photography (especially in low light conditions), but it’s not going to stop you from recognizing who or what you’ve photographed. However, that might not be true of machines that use Google’s computer vision software to “see.”

According to a new report, Google researchers found that the accuracy of the company’s image recognition algorithms often failed when they were challenged with grainy, less-than-perfect pictures.

We’re already using machine vision for all sorts of purposes, including facial recognition, image identification, and self-driving vehicles. This study looked at Google’s software specifically, which is one of the best machine vision systems out there. It suggests that there could be real limitations to a growing number of such systems, which is important to deal with as we decide how much to trust the devices that technology makers claim can “see” for us.

Clean images are classified correctly and adversarial images are misclassified. (Above, a knee pad. Below, a garbage truck.) All images from Google

Adversarial images aren’t a new problem in the field of machine learning. These pictures, which have a specifically engineered type of grainy noise, have been used to throw a wrench into image classification software: Changes to an image that would be just about imperceptible to a human eye, like blurry pixelation, can totally mess up a computer’s ability to correctly identify what it is.

“It was found out, a few years ago, that it is possible to modify the input image and it will confuse the image recognition system,” said Alexey Kurakin, one of the authors of the report and researcher at Google Brain, who spoke to me over the phone from California.

“Let’s say an image of an elephant,” he continued. “You modify the image slightly with this noise that is hard for the human eye to see very well. [If] you give it to your image recognition system, now the image recognition system thinks it’s no longer an elephant, but an airplane or a car,” even though a human eye likely wouldn’t be confused by the same trick.

Before now, this vulnerability had only been tested by uploading an image to the classification system directly. Kurakin and his team tried something different. They took cellphone pictures of printed images that were increasingly modified with that special kind of noise—random data that, again, would not stop us from seeing an elephant, but would throw the computer vision system for a loop.

He and his team found that the software still misclassified items, in the most noisy cases as often as 97 percent of the time.

According to the paper, the cellphone images, which were input into the Inception 3 neural network (which is Google’s really, really smart image identification algorithm), were captured “without careful control of lighting, camera angle, distance to the page.”

In other words, these images looked a whole lot like what would be produced not in the lab, for research purposes, but out in the real world.

“Prior to my paper, they directly fed the image to neural network,” said Kurakin. “This is important because, if you have a file with the image, you have fine-grain control over each pixel.” In other words, previous research had generated the noise in the individual pixels and then let the machine analyze the picture.

Kurakin and his team have now shown that a snapshot from a regular camera with no modifications has the same worrisome effect.

To get over this hurdle, scientists will need to tinker with both the image recognition software itself, and the data that’s used to train it. Maybe machines can be become familiar with flawed images that way.

Until then, it’s a reminder that while we begin to realize the incredible promise of new machine learning technology, it still has fundamental weaknesses that could be exploited.

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How Cellphone Camera Images Can Fool Machine Vision

Why the Internet Won’t Let Harambe the Gorilla Die

Image: ViralHog/Wikimedia

Harambe died for our sins, but he never truly went away.

It’s almost exactly two months since Harambe the gorilla was shot at Cincinnati Zoo, passing into the gorilla afterlife and fame as social media’s “Harambae.”

In the background of TV coverage at the RNC, a protestor holds a sign reading “BUSH DID HARAMBE.” Meanwhile, on The Donald’s subreddit, users suggest it was Hillary Clinton. In the town of Willoughby, Ohio, citizens pass through a street renamed “Harambe Drive” on Google Maps, thanks to the efforts of dedicated “Harambe activists.” “Dicks out for Harambe,” an unusual rallying call, has even reached the ears of celebrities.

Harambe is everywhere, sealed into memehood for eternity, glaring out from screens with his world-weary eyes. It’s an unheard-of level of mourning, not least for a gorilla we hardly knew.

How did we get here? On May 28, a four-year-old boy named Isaiah Dickerson climbed into Harambe’s enclosure, watched by a crowd including his terrified mother, who can be heard on recordings of the incident shouting “Mommy’s right here” from the fence. The 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla, a critically endangered species, dragged the child through water and grabbed at his hand until a zoo worker intervened by shooting Harambe dead.

Harambe. Image: Cincinnati Zoo

Outrage ensued. Harambe’s death made newspaper headlines, prompting outrage and sentimentality, and even calls for the parents of Isaiah to face criminal charges, with over 490,000 signing a petition calling for “Justice for Harambe.”

Tweets by mildly unlikeable celebrities including Piers Morgan and Ricky Gervais, alternately snide and sanctimonious, pushed the incident further towards parody. Almost instantly, Harambe became the stuff of 4chan memes and "Harambro" humour, which simultaneously mocks and celebrates the fallen primate as a symbol of online outrage. The histrionic, one-in-a-million circumstances of his death, along with the overwrought public, made Harambe the internet’s absurdist pin-up.

I only check Twitter for Harambe memes
— Tyler (@teddy_tie) July 26, 2016

But time has passed, and the internet’s affections move on quickly. Why does Harambe keep coming back from the dead? This week, a mural in Melbourne by artist Lushsux, previously “in loving memory of” Taylor Swift" (after her career was “ended” by Kim Kardashian’s snapchats), was transformed into a memorial for Harambe, putting the late gorilla back in news headlines. The jokes on Twitter began again. What makes Harambe so endlessly meme-able?

Perhaps it's because, as an animal dead by human misadventure, the ape is the eternal underdog. One meme which attracted hundreds of thousands of retweets this week offered a glimpse into Bernie Sanders’s living room, where a framed picture of Harambe had apparently been placed on a shelf. Had the embattled Vermont senator found a totem in the martyred gorilla? Was he trying to send out a message?

Of course, it was fake. Irish Twitter user and meme purveyor @PrayforPatrick created it with Photoshop, somehow managing to dupe people into believing that Bernie would actually memorialise a fallen gorilla next to pictures of his family. The tweet was subsequently cribbed by 1.6 million-follower account @Dory and showed up in stories on Buzzfeed and Irish site The Journal.

“Most people saw it for what it was,” Patrick told me in a Twitter DM, “though there were a good few people who, for some reason, believed it was genuine. Most of those people were American.”

- friEND
- bestfriEND
- girlfriEND
- boyfriEND
- Harambe

Only Harambe has no end...
— memearchive (@memearchive) July 24, 2016

Another reason for Harambe’s enduring appeal could be that his death perfectly encapsulates a certain brand of vegan clickbait, one I’ll provisionally call animal misery porn. Headlines like “Terrified Cow Cries Thinking She’s Headed For the Slaughter” or “Adorable Puppy was Hooked on Meth and Heroin” come to mind; stories which sometimes come from a good place, sincerely written out of love and concern for animal welfare, but which more often are designed to harvest clicks out of shock and outrage. Often they originate on viral news sites, which seek out the most grotesque and graphic stories for clicks.

Unless you are friends with particularly abrasive PETA members, animal misery porn tends to stay confined to its own part of the internet. But as an animal interest story, Harambe managed to transcend his origins, instigating an international controversy. Part of the appeal, as a headline, is that it pits animal life directly against that of a human child: Given the choice, what kind of person would choose the gorilla?

This might be why Harambe lives on most of all in satire on Change.org, social media’s favourite echo chamber for outrage. There are now 119 Change.org petitions in Harambe’s name. Some are serious; one says, “All zoos should adopt ‘Bokito Law,’ where a creature is tranquillised rather than killed,” while another calls for “Harambe’s Law” to bring in tougher legal consequences for the killing of animals and is signed by over 200,000 people.

But the majority of these petitions are less credible, or downright ludicrous. Users want Harambe to be put on the dollar bill and added to Pokémon Go, or to “Change Gorilla Glue to Harambe Glue.” Others take a more ghoulish approach—“Cincinnati Zoo, Sacrifice the child to resurrect Harambe”—and feature trolling in the comments, occasionally venturing into racism and off-colour jokes, but equally heavy on benign absurdist humour.

Thinkpiece idea: Harambe is Princess Diana to millennials
— Carl Kinsella (@TVsCarlKinsella) July 25, 2016

A large part of Harambe’s longevity as a meme might also be simply because he’s unexpectedly versatile. There is something blue steel about that gorilla’s face: in some pictures it looks almost as though he’s pouting. Harambe can show up anywhere: in Pokémon Go you can play as Team Instinct, Team Mystic, Team Valor and now Team Harambe (not actually, but in spirit…). The game Overwatch has been especially fruitful for Harambe memes thanks to the character of Winston, a weaponised genetically engineered gorilla.

One final explanation for Harambe’s popularity is simply that he latched on to the internet’s sense of the absurd. 2016 is a year of bitter chaos, one in which conspiracy theories became real and indiscriminate cruelty has reigned. No one, it seems, can escape unscathed. That a toddler could climb a three-foot fence, crawl through bushes and fall a further 15 feet into the moat of the gorilla’s enclosure seems freakish. Harambe had to die, but not for any good reason. When we laugh at his death, perhaps we are laughing at our own futility, in the face of random destruction.

Sometimes Harambe humour confronts this head on: One particularly entertaining thread on Reddit’s /r/teenagers titled “Harambe and his life” argues that they should be talking about him more “Due to his cultural significance and how his death has sparked the so-called 'Brexit' and the refugee crisis.” People are aware of what’s going on in the wider world; they’d just rather be making jokes about a gorilla.

Forum Cop investigates the ugliest of internet beef, getting to the heart of online squabbles and extricating facts from gossip in digital enclaves.

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Why the Internet Won’t Let Harambe the Gorilla Die

Programmers Made a Selfie Filter To Make You Like More Like You, Sorry

Contrary to what internet culture says about selfies, they’re hardly more than just photos of your face. Ideally, you’ll look good in them. Possibly better than you look in real life.

But if there’s one thing any selfie connoisseur understands, it’s that, for many, using the front-facing camera on your phone can distort the heck out of your features. Your eyes are suddenly bulbous and alien. And from certain angles, you’d swear your chin could cut glass.

Knowing this, a team of computer scientists at Princeton University created a new method for making your selfies look more realistic—and, ultimately, more attractive. The editing software, which is the first of its kind, can modify your face as if it were professionally photographed, or even alter the height and angle of your portrait. The end result, according to its makers, is a lifelike 3D rendering, and not a flat, 2D image.

“Although it is the age of the selfie, many people are unaware of how much these self-portraits do not really look like the person being photographed because the camera is way too close,” said Ohad Fried, the experiment’s lead developer and a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, in a statement.

“Now that people can edit so many aspects of a photo right on their phones, we wanted to provide a quick way to edit faces that maintains realism.”

The project began when engineers attempted to build a model for generating 3D heads. Using data from FaceWarehouse, the team was able to create six dozen reference points across the human face. When fed a selfie, the software will stretch and compress its subject matter, based on these anatomically correct coordinates. Then, voilà, a photograph that shows how people really see you.

“As humans, we have evolved to be very sensitive to subtle cues in other people's faces, so any artifacts or glitches in synthesized imagery tend to really jump out,” said Adam Finkelstein, the paper’s lead author and a professor of computer science at Princeton University.

As for when the tool will be made into a commercial product, researchers are still ironing out some technical kinks. For example, when repositioning your selfie, the synthesizer can’t account for missing features, such as ears, if you’re a fan of the egregious Myspace pose. And, occasionally, it has trouble interpreting hair.

I tested several photos of myself and Motherboard colleagues on the public beta version, but was told each time that “no face was found in the image.” I suppose until it’s fixed, we’ll remain weird-looking and selfie-conscious.

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Programmers Made a Selfie Filter To Make You Like More Like You, Sorry

What Are the Risks of Hacking Infrastructure? Nobody Really Knows

Robert M. Lee is the CEO and Founder of Dragos and a SANS Certified Instructor and course author. He gained his start in security as an Air Force Cyber Warfare Operations Officer identifying nation-state cyber attacks on critical infrastructure while serving in the Intelligence Community. He may be found on Twitter @RobertMLee.

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The systems we rely on most for some of the nation’s most sensitive infrastructure, such as the power grid, manufacturing, oil and gas facilities, and water utilities, face cybersecurity threats we do not fully understand. This leads to a gap in reporting that can be filled by “experts” with questionable experience and hyped-up metrics.

All this raises the question: How do we not have at least an understanding of the threats we face—such as the groups and their capabilities that wish us harm—even if we cannot fully counter them? This question can be answered through two key points: We have a lack of visibility into industrial networks, and there is a significant desire for organizations to report on cyber threats, which leads to hype.

An Issue of Visibility

The government and private sector communities have traditionally gained deep insight into the IT threat landscape. With endpoint sensors, antivirus, intrusion detection systems, and other data sources internal to IT environments recording activity and reporting it, there has been a lot of information to go through. For decades now, governments as well as organizations with access to large data sets, such as vendors like Kaspersky, Symantec, Trend Micro, Microsoft, Verizon, and others, have compiled great insight into the malicious actors in our environments.

As the community has pushed to analyze adversary activity in networks, the field of threat intelligence has emerged as a hot topic. At its core, threat intelligence seeks to analyze malicious actions and extract knowledge on how to detect these threats and counter them more efficiently. A great benefit of this threat intelligence has been an understanding of the threat landscape, or knowledge of what threats have the potential to impact different organizations and how they might accomplish their malicious goals.

There are unseen hacks in the ICS community. We are going to begin seeing more of them come to light.

Industrial control system (ICS) environments such as the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) networks that run our electric grid, water distribution systems, and gas pipelines have not traditionally had these security sensors. Visibility into the ICS networks has been difficult to obtain, and sometimes with good reasons. As an example, running antivirus software on systems in an ICS can potentially do more damage than good by flagging good files as malicious and deleting them. Other reasons have not been as good, such as culture challenges that exist from the lack of understanding the value of security to the reliability and safety of industrial operations.

Regardless, adversary activity has not been as easy to observe due to a lack of information we can acquire from these environments. Take for example the US government’s ICS Computer Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT). The ICS-CERT publishes one of the recognized authorities on information about incidents across different industries in the ICS community. In the 2015 edition of the team's annual report on security incidents, 110 of 295 incidents were identified as having an “unknown” attack vector. In other words, there was no understanding of how the incident happened.

The second most common attack vector found was phishing emails, at 109 cases. The problem with this metric is that most ICS networks do not have email systems or access internal to the ICS network. This means that for the majority of the security incidents reported, the cause was either unknown or was only seen outside of the control systems themselves.

A little reported fact is that a significant majority of the ICS-CERT incidents are not reported by infrastructure owners but by other government entities. There is little visibility into the most critical networks of our nation’s most critical infrastructure such as nuclear power stations. This opens the door for organizations and individuals to make wild claims such as Dell’s claim that 2014 saw a 100 percent increase in cyber attacks on SCADA environments. The company claimed over 600,000 cyber attacks took place, which can only be accurate using a very loose definition of the word attack. Without real data, these claims are without appropriate counters. It gives way to hype.

Gaps in Knowledge Will be Filled with Hype

News organizations grab attention from their audience when headlines speak of cyber attacks against critical infrastructure. Security companies gain access to media to promote their members and latest cyber security products when they report on these attacks. Individuals gain notoriety at security conferences when they can speak on matters that few can challenge them on despite having no experience in the field of ICS security. And some misguided security practitioners believe that the hype can serve as a wake up to the ICS community to take security seriously.

But hype can dissuade the many organizations who are working hard to take security seriously from further investments. More importantly, the hype gets resources allocated eventually, but they are resources for the hyped-up threats and not the real threats the industry faces.

How do we not have at least an understanding of the threats we face [...] even if we cannot fully counter them?

Take for example the Norse and AEI report on Iranian cyber attacks against ICS/SCADA networks. The report made bold claims of attribution of Iranian cyber attacks against SCADA systems. I critiqued the report, and its predecessor which claimed 500,000 cyber attacks, because almost all of the claims fell short of reality. The individuals did not have subject matter expertise, or any experience for that matter, with ICS environments and the attribution to Iran was based on determining the source IP address of scans, which they called attacks, against honeypots, not actual infrastructure. Yet it gained national media attention and was briefed to senior government officials.

This is far from the only example. Other notable examples include: claims of cyber attacks against an oil pipeline despite strong evidence against the claims, beliefs that Russia hacked a water utility when it was just an employee logging into the network while on vacation, and fear over Israel’s power grid being hacked based on government member statements when it was just ransomware on an unrelated network.

So What?

What this ultimately means is that we need more practitioners in the field of ICS cyber security. We need to focus on training personnel instead of being overly focused on products. The right people will choose the right tools, but untrained people will use tools incorrectly even when they are the right ones. Those people need to look into their environments with knowledge of the ICS instead of over-relying on knowledge on the threats, which we do not have as much of right now.

We need the ICS industry to feel comfortable sharing information related to breaches, espionage, and attacks when they find something. Security vendors in this space need to prioritize quality of information instead of the quantity. The government needs to incentivize the good work of ICS companies leading the way in the community instead of relying solely on punitive measures that lead to a culture of just complying with regulations.

And to top it all off, the entire security community needs to take a critical look at reports of ICS cyber attacks, incidents, and malware so that the ICS community can stay focused on discovering the real threats. This will help them avoid falling prey to agendas by some government agencies and security companies despite their best intentions.

There are unseen hacks in the ICS community. We are going to begin seeing more of them come to light. These case-studies need leveraged properly to advocate for more visibility community wide while avoiding the hype that can take us all down the wrong path.

The Hacks We Can’t See is Motherboard’s theme week dedicated to the future of security and the hacks no one’s talking about. Follow along here.

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What Are the Risks of Hacking Infrastructure? Nobody Really Knows