‘Pulsed Electromagnetic Energy’ Could Cause Havana Syndrome

An intelligence panel investigating the cause of a spate of mysterious incidents that have struck dozens of US officials across the globe has said that some of the episodes could “plausibly” have been caused by “pulsed electromagnetic energy” emitted by an external source, according to an executive summary of the panel’s findings released Wednesday. CNN reports: But the panel stopped short of making a definitive determination, saying only that both electromagnetic energy and, in limited circumstances, ultrasound could explain the key symptoms — highlighting the degree to which the murky illness known colloquially as “Havana Syndrome” has remained one of the intelligence community’s most stubborn mysteries. “We’ve learned a lot,” an intelligence official familiar with the panel’s work told reporters, speaking on anonymity under terms set by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “While we don’t have the specific mechanism for each case, what we do know is if you report quickly and promptly get medical care, most people are getting well.”

The scientific panel emphasized that the cases it studied were “genuine and compelling,” noting that some incidents have affected multiple people in the same space and clinical samples from a few victims have shown signs of “cellular injury to the nervous system.” An executive summary of the panel’s work provided new details about how the government is categorizing cases as possible Havana Syndrome, a clinically vague illness that has long frustrated firm diagnosis because victims have suffered from such a diverse array of symptoms. Although officials declined to say how many cases the panel examined as part of its inquiry, they said they studied cases that met four “core characteristics”: the acute onset of sounds or pressure, sometimes in only one ear or on one side of the head; simultaneous symptoms of vertigo, loss of balance and ear pain; “a strong sense of locality or directionality”; and the absence of any known environmental or medical conditions that could have caused the other symptoms.

Both pulsed electromagnetic energy, “particularly in the radiofrequency range,” and ultrasonic arrays could feasibly cause the four core symptoms, the panel found. Both could originate from “a concealable source.” But ultrasound can’t travel through walls, the panel found, “restricting its applicability to scenarios in which the source is near the target.”
Sources of radiofrequency energy, on the other hand, are known to exist, “could generate the required stimulus, are concealable, and have moderate power requirements,” the panel said. “Using nonstandard antennas and techniques, the signals could be propagated with low loss through air for tens to hundreds of meters, and with some loss, through most building materials.” But intelligence officials familiar with the panel’s work emphasized that important information gaps remained, forestalling them from reaching firmer conclusions. The experts panel also ruled out so-called psycho-social factors. They also ruled out “ionizing radiation, chemical and biological agents, infrasound, audible sound, ultrasound propagated over large distances, and bulk heating from electromagnetic energy.”

“The panel made seven recommendations, including developing better biomarkers that are ‘more specific and more sensitive for diagnosis and triage’ of cases,” reports CNN. “It also recommended utilizing ‘detectors’ and obtaining ‘devices to aid research.’ Finally, officials urged swift action by medical officials whenever a case is reported, emphasizing that individuals who have been treated immediately after an event have improved.”

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Cruise To Offer Free Robo-Taxi Rides In San Francisco For the Public — Without Back-Up Drivers

Cruise, the driverless spin-off from General Motors, said on Tuesday that it’s about to offer public robot-taxi rides in its San Francisco hometown soon — “within weeks, not months.” In a first for San Francisco, Cruise’s public rides will be fully driverless, with no back-up driver behind the wheel. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: It has been giving rides to its own employees sans backup driver since November, and has been test-driving truly driverless cars here since December 2020. Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, has been providing rides to some San Franciscans since August. […] Cruise is now accepting applications from members of the public who want to hop into Poppy, Tostada or another of its self-driving Chevy Bolts. The company said it will pick names from the wait list in “weeks not months.” Meanwhile it is already giving rides to some locals who were nominated by Cruise employees.

Cruise’s rides for the public will run from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. and will be in the city’s northwest quadrant — including Nob Hill, the Fillmore, the Panhandle, the Sunset and the Richmond. For now, the rides from both services are free. Neither Cruise nor any other robot car company has permission from the California Public Utilities Commission to charge for rides, although Cruise applied for it in November.

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YouTube Ad Revenue Tops $8.6 Billion, Beating Netflix In the Quarter

YouTube topped Netflix in terms of quarterly revenue, with the Google-owned video platform delivering $8.6 billion in advertising revenue in Q4, the company said Tuesday. The Hollywood Reporter reports: For fiscal 2021, YouTube delivered $28.8 billion in advertising revenue. In the same quarter a year earlier, YouTube delivered $6.9 billion in advertising revenue, underscoring the continued explosive growth of the platform. For comparison, Netflix delivered $7.7 billion in revenue in Q4 in 2021, compared to $6.6 billion a year earlier. Overall, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported $75.3 billion in revenue for the quarter, and $257.6 billion for the year, with Google search advertising still making up the lions share of revenue.

With regard to YouTube, the executives cited commerce as a potential growth area for YouTube, with CEO Sundar Pichai calling it “a whole other layer of opportunity.” “Podcasts, gaming, learning, sports, across all of these areas we will take a vertical specific look and find out how we can support creators better,” he said. “While pretty early, there is a lot of pilots under way,” he added, noting that they were “super early” into testing how shopping could be baked into YouTube Shorts, its TikTok-esque shorts platform, which Pichai said now has more than 5 trillion views. The executives also called out YouTube’s connected TV opportunity.

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Hiding Windows 11’s Teams Icon Doesn’t Just Save Taskbar Space — It Also Saves RAM

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Plenty of apps that you install on your computer have a setting that tells them to launch when you initially log in to save you the trouble of launching your most commonly used apps yourself. Leaving this setting on can also allow apps to check for updates or launch more quickly when you start them for the first time. The difference for some of the preinstalled Microsoft apps in Windows 10 and 11 is that they use some of these resources by default, whether you actually use the apps or not. Developer and IT admin Michael Niehaus drew attention to some of these apps in recent blog posts examining the resource usage of Windows 11’s widgets, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Edge in a fresh install of Windows 11 (the Edge observations apply to Windows 10, too).

Both Widgets and Teams spawn a number of Microsoft Edge WebView2 processes in order to work—WebView2 is a way to use Edge and its rendering engine without launching Edge or using its user interface. Collectively, these processes use a few hundred megabytes of memory to work. The widget-related processes don’t start unless you actually click the widgets button, though they remain in the background afterward, even if you’re not actively viewing your widgets. But the Teams processes all launch automatically, whether you actually use Teams or not. Uninstalling Teams will prevent this from happening, but Niehaus points out that simply removing the Teams icon from Windows 11’s Taskbar in the Taskbar settings is enough to keep these WebView2 processes from launching when you log in. Ars Technica’s Andrew Cunningham also recommends disabling System Boost in the Edge settings if you don’t use it as your default browser. Otherwise, it too will use a couple hundred megabytes of memory.

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Website Fined By German Court For Leaking Visitor’s IP Address Via Google Fonts

Earlier this month, a German court fined an unidentified website $110 for violating EU privacy law by importing a Google-hosted web font. The Register reports: The decision, by Landgericht Munchen’s third civil chamber in Munich, found that the website, by including Google-Fonts-hosted font on its pages, passed the unidentified plaintiff’s IP address to Google without authorization and without a legitimate reason for doing so. And that violates Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). That is to say, when the plaintiff visited the website, the page made the user’s browser fetch a font from Google Fonts to use for some text, and this disclosed the netizen’s IP address to the US internet giant. This kind of hot-linking is normal with Google Fonts; the issue here is that the visitor apparently didn’t give permission for their IP address to be shared. The website could have avoided this drama by self-hosting the font, if possible.

The decision says IP addresses represent personal data because it’s theoretically possible to identify the person associated with an IP address, and that it’s irrelevant whether the website or Google has actually done so. The ruling directs the website to stop providing IP addresses to Google and threatens the site operator with a fine of 250,000 euros for each violation, or up to six months in prison, for continued improper use of Google Fonts. Google Fonts is widely deployed — the Google Fonts API is used by about 50m websites. The API allows websites to style text with Google Fonts stored on remote servers — Google’s or a CDN’s — that get fetched as the page loads. Google Fonts can be self-hosted to avoid running afoul of EU rules and the ruling explicitly cites this possibility to assert that relying on Google-hosted Google Fonts is not defensible under the law.

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World’s Fastest Gaming Monitor Hits 500 Hz Refresh Rate

According to Chinese news outlet Sina, BOE has made breakthroughs in monitor technology and has built the world’s first 500 Hz gaming monitor. Tom’s Hardware reports: The monitor features a 27-inch, Full HD panel equipped with a high-mobility oxide backplane which is how BOE achieved the blisteringly high refresh rate, with a response time of just 1ms. BOE has ample experience with oxide semiconductor display technology. For example, the company’s 500 Hz monitor is significantly faster than the fastest gaming monitors on the market today, from the likes of Asus, Alienware, and Acer, which “only” top out at 360 Hz. Other attributes include accurate 8-bit output and support for an 8-lane eDP signal. Remember that BOE’s monitor is a prototype designed for demonstration purposes only. BOE has not stated if it will be making a 500 Hz gaming panel for the mass market anytime soon, so we could be waiting a long until an official monitor arrives in the hands of gamers.

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Amazon Warehouse Manager Pleads Guilty To Stealing $273K of Computer Parts

Can AI Help Us Reimagine Chess?

Three research scientists at DeepMind Technologies teamed up with former world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik to “explore what variations of chess would look like at superhuman level,” according to their new article in Communications of the ACM. Their paper argues that using neural networks and advanced reinforcement learning algorithms can not only surpass all human knowledge of chess, but also “allow us to reimagine the game as we know it….”

“For example, the ‘castling’ move was only introduced in its current form in the 17th century. What would chess have been like had castling not been incorporated into the rules?”

AfterAlphaZero was trained to play 9 different “variants” of chess, it then played 11,000 games against itself, while the researchers assessed things like the number of stalemates and how often the special new moves were actually used. The variations tested:

– Castling is no longer allowed
– Castling is only allowed after the 10th move
– Pawns can only move one square
– Stalemates are a win for the attacking side (rather than a draw)
– Pawns have the option of moving two squares on any turn (and can also be captured en passant if they do)
– Pawns have the option of moving two squares — but only when they’re in the second or third row of squares. (After which they can be captured en passant )
– Pawns can move backwards (except from their starting square).
– Pawns can also move sideways by one square.
– It’s possible to capture your own pieces.
“The findings of our quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate the rich possibilities that lie beyond the rules of modern chess.”

AlphaZero’s ability to continually improve its understanding of the game, and reach superhuman playing strength in classical chess and Go, lends itself to the question of assessing chess variants and potential variants of other board games in the future. Provided only with the implementation of the rules, it is possible to effectively simulate decades of human experience in a day, opening a window into top-level play of each variant. In doing so, computer chess completes the circle, from the early days of pitting man vs. machine to a collaborative present of man with machine, where AI can empower players to explore what chess is and what it could become….

The combination of human curiosity and a powerful reinforcement learning system allowed us to reimagine what chess would have looked like if history had taken a slightly different course. When the statistical properties of top-level AlphaZero games are compared to classical chess, a number of more decisive variants appear, without impacting the diversity of plausible options available to a player….
Taken together, the statistical properties and aesthetics provide evidence that some variants would lead to games that are at least as engaging as classical chess.

“Chess’s role in artificial intelligence research is far from over…” their article concludes, arguing that AI “can provide the evidence to take reimagining to reality.”

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Not Just the IRS – 20 US Agencies Are Already Set Up For Selfie IDs

America’s Internal Revenue Service created an uproar with early plans to require live-video-feed selfies to verify identities for online tax services (via an outside company called ID.me).

But Wired points out that more than 20 U.S. federal agencies are already using a digital identification system (named Login.gov and built on services from LexisNexis) that “can use selfies for account verification.”

It’s run by America’s General Services Administration, or GSA….
The GSA’s director of technology transformation services Dave Zvenyach says facial recognition is being tested for fairness and accessibility and not yet used when people access government services through Login.gov. The GSA’s administrator said last year that 30 million citizens have Login.gov accounts and that it expects the number to grow significantly as more agencies adopt the system.

“ID.me is supplying something many governments ask for and require companies to do,” says Elizabeth Goodman, who previously worked on Login.gov and is now senior director of design at federal contractor A1M Solutions. Countries including the UK, New Zealand, and Denmark use similar processes to ID.me’s to establish digital identities used to access government services. Many international security standards are broadly in line with those of the U.S., written by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Goodman says that such programs need to provide offline options such as visiting a post office for people unable or unwilling to use phone apps or internet services….

In fact, Wired argues that in many cases, a selfie or biometric data is virtually required by U.S. federal security guidelines from 2017:

NIST’s 2017 standard says that access to systems that can leak sensitive data or harm public programs should require verifying a person’s identity by comparing them to a photo — either remotely or in person — or using biometrics such as a fingerprint scanner. It says that a remote check can be done either by video with a trained agent, or using software that checks for an ID’s authenticity and the “liveness” of a person’s photo or video…. California’s Employment Development Department said that ID.me blocked more than 350,000 fraudulent claims in the last three months of 2020. But the state auditor said an estimated 20 percent of legitimate claimants were unable to verify their identities with ID.me.

Caitlin Seeley George, director of campaigns and operations with nonprofit Fight for the Future, says ID.me uses the specter of fraud to sell technology that locks out vulnerable people and creates a stockpile of highly sensitive data that itself will be targeted by criminals. …

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Secrets of ‘Space Invaders’ — and One Very Tiny Homegrown Cabinet

IEEE Spectrum has republished an article from nearly 40 years ago remembering one of the long-forgotten secrets of the classic video game Space Invaders.

It’s about that iconic descending musical notes accompanying the onslaught of the aliens…

The more aliens a player shot, the faster they approached; their drumbeat quickened, the tension mounted. Ironically, says Bill Adams, director of game development for Midway Manufacturing Co., of Chicago, Ill., which licensed Space Invaders for sale in the United States, these features of the game were accidental. “The speeding up of the space invaders was just a function of the way the machine worked,” he explained. “The hardware had a limitation — it could only move 24 objects efficiently. Once some of the invaders got shot, the hardware did not have as many objects to move, and the remaining invaders sped up. And the designer happened to put out a sound whenever the invaders moved, so when they sped up, so did the tone.”

Accident or not, the game worked. As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of the book Video Invaders, more than 4 billion quarters had been dropped into Space Invaders games around the world — “which roughly adds up to one game per earthling.”

But Space Invaders also enjoyed at least one special home-grown revival earlier this month. Hobbyist Nu Iotachi used an Arduino Pro Micro board to build their own Space Invaders arcade cabinet that’s just 3.15 inches tall (80 millimeters).

Made from thin hand cut plywood with pinhead joysticks, “Its Microchip ATmega328 microcontroller contains a processor running at 16MHz,” reports the project’s site Hackster.io, “which is far faster than the processor in the original Space Invaders arcade cabinet.”

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