Lifeboat Foundation

From navigation to remote banking, mobile device users rely on a variety of applications to streamline daily tasks, communicate, and dramatically increase productivity. While exceedingly useful, the ecosystem of third-party applications utilizes a number of sensors – microphones, GPS, pedometers, cameras – and user interactions to collect data used to enable functionality. Troves of sensitive personal data about users are accessible to these applications and as defense and commercial mobile device users become increasingly reliant on the technology, there are growing concerns around the challenge this creates for preserving user privacy.

Under DARPA’s Brandeis program, a team of researchers led by Two Six Labs and Raytheon BBN Technologies have developed a platform called Privacy Enhancements for Android (PE for Android) to explore more expressive concepts in regulating access to private information on mobile devices. PE for Android seeks to create an extensible privacy system that abstracts away the details of various privacy-preserving technologies, allowing application developers to utilize state-of-the-art privacy techniques, such as secure multi-party computation and differential privacy, without knowledge of their underlying esoteric technologies. Importantly, PE for Android allows mobile device users to take ownership of their private information by presenting them with more intuitive controls and permission enforcement options.

The researchers behind PE for Android today released a white paper detailing the platform’s capabilities and functionality, and published an open source release of its code to GitHub. In open sourcing PE for Android, the researchers aim to make it easier for the open-source Android community and researchers to employ enhanced privacy-preserving technologies within Android apps while also encouraging them to help address the platform’s current limitations and build upon its initial efforts.

may 2020

Thousands of Swedes have been pioneering the use of futuristic microchips that are implanted under the skin of the hand.

The technology is used for everyday tasks like accessing your smartphone, opening the front door or setting an alarm.

Continue reading “Will microchip implants be the next big thing in Europe?” »

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted emergency clearance for a coronavirus testing kit that allows people to take a nasal sample in their own homes and send it to a laboratory for diagnostic testing.

The FDA granted the clearance to the company Everlywell, Inc.

Christina Song, an Everlywell spokeswoman told The New York Times, “From the moment that you hit the order button, to the moment that you get the test results on your phone or device, that process is designed to take three to five days.”

Continue reading “FDA approves at-home nasal swab test kit for COVID-19” »

Samsung and South Korean carrier SK Telecom today announced a new 5G smartphone dubbed Galaxy A Quantum.

The Samsung Galaxy A Quantum is the world’s first 5G smartphone equipped with a quantum random number generator (QRNG) chipset, which is developed by SK Telecom’s Switzerland-based subsidiary ID Quantique.

The QRNG chipset is the SKT IDQ S2Q000 and it enhances the security of the phone’s data by using quantum encryption technology to generate random numbers and create unpredictable secure keys.

A Samsung Galaxy smartphone incorporating quantum technology is due to launch in Korea next week.

Carbon nanotubes embedded in leaves detect chemical signals that are produced when a plant is damaged.

MIT engineers have developed a way to closely track how plants respond to stresses such as injury, infection, and light damage, using sensors made of carbon nanotubes. These sensors can be embedded in plant leaves, where they report on hydrogen peroxide signaling waves.

Plants use hydrogen peroxide to communicate within their leaves, sending out a distress signal that stimulates leaf cells to produce compounds that will help them repair damage or fend off predators such as insects. The new sensors can use these hydrogen peroxide signals to distinguish between different types of stress, as well as between different species of plants.

A trio of researchers, two with the University of Leeds, the other the Technical University of Denmark, has developed a theory to explain why Earth’s north magnetic pole has been drifting from Canada to Russia. In their paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Philip Livermore, Christopher Finlay and Matthew Bayliff describe their theory and what their models based on it showed.

The Earth’s north magnetic pole was first discovered by an explorer named James Clark Ross back in the 1830s. At that time, it was centered over the Nunavut territory in Canada. Since that time, scientists have kept track of its movement, which, until recently, was very slow. But then in the 1990s, it began to pick up speed, moving from Canada toward Siberia in Russia. The movement of the pole has garnered interest in the media because it forces changes to navigational systems and smartphones that use its location as a focal point. In this new effort, the researchers have come up with what they believe is an explanation for the movement of the pole and why it began moving faster.

The researchers suggest that there are two large lobes of negative magnetic flux at the boundary of the core and the mantle. They further suggest that changes in molten metal flow in the core result in changes in the magnetic flux in the lobes. The position of the pole is determined by the strength of the two lobes—when one gains strength, the other loses strength resulting in the pole moving in the stronger direction. The result is a constant tug-of-war between the two lobes. The current movement is therefore due to one of the lobes gaining the upper hand.

In the week of April 12–18, the top 10 search terms on Amazon.com were: toilet paper, face mask, hand sanitizer, paper towels, Lysol spray, Clorox wipes, mask, Lysol, masks for germ protection, and N95 mask. People weren’t just searching, they were buying too —and in bulk. The majority of people looking for masks ended up buying the new Amazon #1 Best Seller, “Face Mask, Pack of 50”.

When covid-19 hit, we started buying things we’d never bought before. The shift was sudden: the mainstays of Amazon’s top ten—phone cases, phone chargers, Lego—were knocked off the charts in just a few days. Nozzle, a London-based consultancy specializing in algorithmic advertising for Amazon sellers, captured the rapid change in this simple graph.

It took less than a week at the end of February for the top 10 Amazon search terms in multiple countries to fill up with products related to covid-19. You can track the spread of the pandemic by what we shopped for: the items peaked first in Italy, followed by Spain, France, Canada, and the US. The UK and Germany lag slightly behind. “It’s an incredible transition in the space of five days,” says Rael Cline, Nozzle’s CEO. The ripple effects have been seen across retail supply chains.

Continue reading “Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models” »

Wireless charging is already a thing (in smartphones, for example), but scientists are working on the next level of this technology that could deliver power over greater distances and to moving objects, such as cars.

Imagine cruising down the road while your electric vehicle gets charged, or having a robot that doesn’t lose battery life while it moves around a factory floor. That’s the sort of potential behind the newly developed technology from a team at Stanford University.

If you’re a long-time ScienceAlert reader, you may remember the same researchers first debuted the technology back in 2017. Now it’s been made more efficient, more powerful, and more practical – so it can hopefully soon be moved out of the lab.

Continue reading “Engineers Unveil a System That Delivers Electricity Wirelessly” »