Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Adam Pasick

The Tech Start-Up Running Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

Tim Fernholz and Adam Pasick, Quartz — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 14:38:54 -0400

The Groundwork, a political technology start-up funded by Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, has maintained its position as the top technology provider to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Candidates reported their fundraising and expenditures for the third quarter to the public on Thursday, and a Quartzanalysis shows that The Groundwork continued to play a significant role in Clinton’s front-running campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination—and in no other.

The Groundwork received payments of $136,131 during the third quarter, bringing its total payments from Clinton’s campaign up to $313,349. It is the single highest-paid provider of technology services to the campaign in the quarter, and second only to Blue Wolf Group, a digital consulting company, in total earnings. A Clinton campaign source said the Blue Wolf Group, which hasn’t been paid since August, is no longer a major contributor to the campaign’s digital efforts.

The Clinton campaign raised $29.45 million in the third quarter and spent $25.8 million in the process, far more than any of Clinton’s Democratic or Republican rivals, and she still tops all presidential candidates with $33 million in cash on hand.

Out of the $60 million she has raised so far in total, the campaign has spent $5.7 million on outside vendors for her digital campaign apparatus—including subscriptions to digital tools such as Slack and Github—on top of salaries for a burgeoning team of data analysts, engineers, product managers, and strategists.

Most of the outside digital spending—some $4 million—has gone to Bully Pulpit Interactive, a digital ad-buying firm that in turn uses most of that money to place ads on the Web and social media. Her other major digital vendors by expenditure include NGP VAN ($113,000 in total), which builds and maintains voter-file databases for Democratic campaigns, and Precision Strategies ($80,000 in total), a firm cofounded by Teddy Goff, the campaign’s top digital strategist, who is paid as a consultant.

The Groundwork, as Quartz revealed, is building the infrastructure for a modern, data-driven campaign—integrating vast amounts of information into a platform that will allow Clinton to raise money, coordinate volunteers and events, and plot get-out-the-vote efforts.

In many other Democratic campaigns, this sort of work was done by Blue State Digital, a consulting firm that was a top contractor on both Obama campaigns. But the company, whose founder Joe Rospars reportedly wrote a memo playing up potential Clinton rival Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, has not received any payments from the Clinton campaign since July.

According to a newly-added jobs page on its otherwise empty website, The Groundwork “is a platform for community engagement at scale, which enables social-impact organizations to leverage world-class technology to create awareness, build community, and activate supporters.”

The Groundwork’s main investor, Eric Schmidt, has a history of investing in start-ups that emerge from Democratic campaigns, and his decision to fund this one could end up being even more valuable to Clinton than a big donation. The company, founded as Clinton began exploring her presidential run, works with no other campaigns, but says it has other nonprofit clients.

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Here Are the Best TSA Yelp Reviews

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Wed, 19 Aug 2015 15:00:00 -0400

Just about anyone who has flown through a US airport since Sept. 11, 2001 has had an encounter—aggravating, hilarious, or even surprisingly great—with the Transportation Safety Administration, tasked with securing the nation’s airports and planes, among other duties. Now the online review site Yelp has unveiled an official deal with the TSA that allows the public to rate their experiences, for better or worse.

“We encourage Yelpers to review any of the thousands of agency field offices, TSA checkpoints, national parks, Social Security Administration offices, landmarks and other places already listed on Yelp if you have good or bad feedback to share about your experiences,” the company said in a blog post. “Not only is it helpful to others who are looking for information on these services, but you can actually make an impact by sharing your feedback directly with the source.”

Many airports and other TSA sites have already been garnering reviews over the last several years. The agency will now be able to claim its own official pages on Yelp and launch new ones “to listen and respond to customer comments,” the federal government’s DigitalGov initiative said in a post of its own. Claiming a page won’t, however, give the TSA any control over what’s posted.

Ads will be removed from pages for government sites to “prevent perceived endorsements,” DigitalGov added.

Travelers have already been using Yelp to unofficially rate TSA agents for years. Here’s a selection of some of the best comments:

(Image via Gil C/ Shutterstock.com)

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Hackers Have Been Using the Starbucks App to Steal Money From Latte Drinkers

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Thu, 14 May 2015 14:00:00 -0400

Any time you link an app to your bank account or credit card, you better use a good password. That seems to be the takeaway from a recent spate of thefts suffered by people using the Starbucks app, which lets you pay for coffee using your smartphone.

As reported by journalist Bill Sullivan and CNN, victims noticed that their accounts had illicitly been used to buy Starbucks gift cards worth hundreds of dollars, which can then be sold on the black market.

An Orlando woman named Maria Nistri told Sullivan that someone accessed her Starbucks app account and changed the username and password. The thief used the existing $34 balance to buy a gift card, waited for the app’s “auto-fill” function to withdraw more money from her bank account, and then stole another $100 within a few minutes.

Jean Obando of Sugar Land, Texas had $550 stolen via his Starbucks app, which was linked to his PayPal account, he told CNN.

Starbucks’ gift cards and smartphone apps are hugely popular, and constitute their own currency of sorts. One in seven Americans received one of its gift cards last year, and users load billions of dollars onto them every year. The company’s smartphone app, which is also available for the Apple Watch, accounts for about one in every six transactions at its US outlets.

The company was quick to dismiss any suggestion that its own systems had been hacked, and pointed the finger at users who chose insecure passwords to protect their accounts. It said in a statement:

Occasionally, Starbucks receives reports from customers of unauthorized activity on their online account. This is primarily caused when criminals obtain reused names and passwords from other sites and attempt to apply that information to Starbucks. To protect their security, customers are encouraged to use different user names and passwords for different sites, especially those that keep financial information.

In a separate incident in January, Starbucks came under fire for a security vulnerability that might allow app passwords to be stolen, but the company quickly issued an update that fixed the issue.

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Two Shape-Shifting Robots Now Stranded for Eternity Inside Fukushima’s Radioactive Ruins

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 13:32:24 -0400

Four years after an earthquake and tsunami destroyed Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. is still at work trying to clean up the scene. This month TEPCO sent two specially-designed shape-shifting robots into the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear reactor to assess the damage.

The first of the unnamed snake-like 60 cm (24 in) robots—which use wheels to roll along in a “C” shape and convert to an “I” shape to shimmy through pipes—got stuck after moving about 10 meters (pdf) into the reactor’s ruins on April 10, and was abandoned. The second robot, which took a different route yesterday, completed its mission, but was also abandoned after it suffered damage to its camera from the high radiation levels.

The robot in “snake” mode.(AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi)

Even if the robots hadn’t been damaged, a Pixar-style “WALL-E” ending was never in the cards: As IEEE Spectrum notes, the robots became so radioactive that they would have been permanently stored in a shielded box if they had returned from their missions.

Before their demise, the robots—designed by the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning and Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy—measured radiation levels of 5.9 sieverts an hour. By comparison, brief exposure to levels of 10 sieverts per hour would cause death within a few weeks for humans.

The anonymous snakebots may be done for, but there is still a vast robot menagerie working on the Fukushima cleanup—including Quince, Packbot, Raccoon, and Rosemary.

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China’s Sketchy App Stores Now Serve up iPhone Malware

Adam Pasick and Lily Kuo, Quartz — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 13:57:26 -0500

A US security company has raised the alarm about a new breed of malware that has infiltrated hundreds of thousands of Apple devices, including Macs and iPhones. But unless you’re downloading pirated software from Chinese app stores, you probably don’t have anything to worry about.

The “Wirelurker” malware was flagged by security firm Palo Alto Networks, and is notable because it is one of the first pieces of malicious code that can infect iPhones that have not been jailbroken, or modified so that they can use apps not approved by Apple. But Wirelurker still requires users to download an unauthorized OS X app for their Mac computers—in particular one of several hundred that are available on a Chinese app store called Maiyadi—after which the malware is transferred to an iPhone or iPad via a USB cable.

“We believe that this malware family heralds a new era in malware attacking Apple’s desktop and mobile platforms,” Palo Alto Networks researcher Claud Xiao said in a blog post . Maiyadi offers about 400 apps infected with Wirelurker, which have been downloaded more than 350,000 times, Xiao added. The site, which also contains extensive technology discussion forums, claims to have 1.5 million active registered users .

China’s app stores are notorious for two things: pirated apps, and huge amounts of malware . It’s a particular problem for smartphones running Google’s Android OS, especially because the official Google Play app store is not available in China. In its place hundreds of third-party app stores have sprung up , some from major tech companies like Baidu and Tencent, along with many others from smaller companies. A study last year of the twenty biggest global Android app stores found over 7,000 dangerous malware-carrying apps (pdf) on offer, most of them in China.

Unlike Google Play, Apple’s app stores for both iOS mobile devices and computers running OS X are available in China—so the main reason to frequent third-party app stores like Maiyadi is to find pirated (i.e. free) software.

Chinese social media users seemed unsurprised that malware and pirated apps went hand-in-hand.

“Don’t use Maiyadi’s pirated software. It’s a pile of viruses,” said one Sina Weibo user (in Chinese). “This gives users a wake up call, it’s still best to download from official, trustworthy sources like the Mac App store,” said a contributor to an Apple forum on Feng.com (in Chinese).
Wirelurker, to be sure, looks to be an exceptionally nasty piece of malware. Once it infects a Mac and is then transferred to an iPhone, it can overwrite existing programs on your smartphone, replacing them with corrupted versions that could potentially steal passwords or financial data.

“We are aware of malicious software available from a download site aimed at users in China, and we’ve blocked the identified apps to prevent them from launching,” Apple tells Quartz in a statement. “As always, we recommend that users download and install software from trusted sources.”

Wirelurker, for now, limits itself to loading an innocuous comic book reader app on infected iPhones, which Palo Alto Networks speculates could be a test run for more nefarious aims down the road. “This malware is under active development, and its creator’s ultimate goal is not yet clear,” Xiao wrote in his blog post.

Palo Alto Networks also said that there are signs that the creators of Wirelurker, like its victims, are Chinese. It’s worth noting that Wirelurker appears to be unrelated to last month’s reported hacking of Apple’s iCloud services in China , which let unidentified intruders insert themselves between iPhone users and Apple’s servers to intercept sensitive data.

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Here Are Some of the Terrifying Possibilities That Have Elon Musk Worried About Artificial Intelligence

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Mon, 04 Aug 2014 11:48:30 -0400

Elon Musk, the Tesla and Space-X founder who is occasionally compared to comic book hero Tony Stark, is worried about a new villain that could threaten humanity—specifically the potential creation of an artificial intelligence that is radically smarter than humans, with catastrophic results:

Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014

Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014

Musk is talking about “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” by Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. The book addresses the prospect of an artificial superintelligence that could feasibly be created in the next few decades. According to theorists, once the AI is able to make itself smarter, it would quickly surpass human intelligence.

What would happen next? The consequences of such a radical development are inherently difficult to predict. But that hasn’t stopped philosophers, futurists, scientists and fiction writers from thinking very hard about some of the possible outcomes. The results of their thought experiments sound like science fiction—and maybe that’s exactly what Elon Musk is afraid of.

AIs: They’re not just like us

“We cannot blithely assume that a superintelligence will necessarily share any of the final values stereotypically associated with wisdom and intellectual development in humans—scientific curiosity, benevolent concern for others, spiritual enlightenment and contemplation, renunciation of material acquisitiveness, a taste for refined culture or for the simple pleasures in life, humility and selflessness, and so forth,” Bostrom has written (pdf, pg. 14). (Keep in mind, as well, that those values are often in short supply among humans.)

“It might be possible through deliberate effort to construct a superintelligence that values such things, or to build one that values human welfare, moral goodness, or any other complex purpose that its designers might want it to serve,” Bolstroms adds. “But it is no less possible—and probably technically easier—to build a superintelligence that places final value on nothing but calculating the decimals of pi.”

And it’s in the ruthless pursuit of those decimals that problems arise.

Unintended consequences

Artificial intelligences could be created with the best of intentions—to conduct scientific research aimed at curing cancer, for example. But when AIs become superhumanly intelligent, their single-minded realization of those goals could have apocalyptic consequences.

“The basic problem is that the strong realization of most motivations is incompatible with human existence,” Daniel Dewey, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, said in an extensive interview with Aeon magazine. “An AI might want to do certain things with matter in order to achieve a goal, things like building giant computers, or other large-scale engineering projects. Those things might involve intermediary steps, like tearing apart the Earth to make huge solar panels. A superintelligence might not take our interests into consideration in those situations, just like we don’t take root systems or ant colonies into account when we go to construct a building.”

Put another way by AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute: “The AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, but you are made of atoms it can use for something else.”

Be careful what you wish for

Say you’re an AI researcher and you’ve decided to build an altruistic intelligence—something that is directed to maximize human happiness. As Ross Anderson of Aeon noted, “an AI might think that human happiness is a biochemical phenomenon. It might think that flooding your bloodstream with non-lethal doses of heroin” is the best way to reach that goal.

Or what if you direct the AI to “protect human life”—nothing wrong with that, right? Except if the AI, vastly intelligent and unencumbered by human conceptions of right and wrong, decides that the best way to protect humans is to physically restrain them and lock them into climate-controlled rooms, so they can’t do any harm to themselves or others? Human lives would be safe, but it wouldn’t be much consolation.

AI Mission Accomplished

James Barrat, the author of “Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era,” (another book endorsed by Musk) suggests that AIs, whatever their ostensible purpose, will have a drive for self-preservation and resource acquisition. Barrat concludes that “without meticulous, countervailing instructions, a self-aware, self-improving, goal-seeking system will go to lengths we’d deem ridiculous to fulfill its goals.”

Even an AI custom-built for a specific purpose could interpret its mission to disastrous effect. Here’s Stuart Armstrong of the Future of Humanity Institute in an interview with The Next Web:

Take an anti-virus program that’s dedicated to filtering out viruses from incoming emails and wants to achieve the highest success, and is cunning and you make that super-intelligent. Well it will realize that, say, killing everybody is a solution to its problems, because if it kills everyone and shuts down every computer, no more emails will be sent and and as a side effect no viruses will be sent. This is sort of a silly example but the point it illustrates is that for so many desires or motivations or programmings, “kill all humans” is an outcome that is desirable in their programming.

Even an “oracular” AI could be dangerous

Ok, what if we create a computer that can only answer questions posed to it by humans. What could possibly go wrong? Here’s Dewey again:

Let’s say the Oracle AI has some goal it wants to achieve. Say you’ve designed it as a reinforcement learner, and you’ve put a button on the side of it, and when it gets an engineering problem right, you press the button and that’s its reward. Its goal is to maximize the number of button presses it receives over the entire future.

Eventually the AI—which, remember, is unimaginably smart compared to the smartest humans—might figure out a way to escape the computer lab and make its way into the physical world, perhaps by bribing or threatening a human stooge into creating a virus or a special-purpose nanomachine factory. And then it’s off to the races. Dewey:

Now this thing is running on nanomachines and it can make any kind of technology it wants, so it quickly converts a large fraction of Earth into machines that protect its button, while pressing it as many times per second as possible. After that it’s going to make a list of possible threats to future button presses, a list that humans would likely be at the top of. Then it might take on the threat of potential asteroid impacts, or the eventual expansion of the Sun, both of which could affect its special button.

Roko’s Basilisk

The dire scenarios listed above are only the consequences of a benevolent AI, or at worst one that’s indifferent to the needs and desires of humanity. But what if there was a malicious artificial intelligence that not only wished to do us harm, but that retroactively punished every person who refused to help create it in the first place?

This theory is a mind-boggler, most recently explained in great detail by Slate, but it goes something like this: An omniscient evil AI that is created at some future date has the ability to simulate the universe itself, along with everyone who has ever lived. And if you don’t help the AI come into being, it will torture the simulated version of you—and, P.S., we might be living in that simulation already.

This thought experiment was deemed so dangerous by Eliezer “The AI does not love you” Yudkowsky that he has deleted all mentions of it on LessWrong, the website he founded where people discuss these sorts of conundrums. His reaction, as highlighted by Slate, is worth quoting in full:

Listen to me very closely, you idiot.
YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.
You have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought.

Reprinted with permission from Quartz. The original story can be found here.

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Softbank’s Humanoid Robot Will Be Great for Tending to Japan’s Elderly

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 13:29:43 -0400

Softbank is pricing Pepper as a consumer electronics must-have at 198,000 yen ($1,900) when it goes on sale in February. Taiwan’s Foxconn (a.k.a. Hon Hai) will take care of manufacturing. Details on the 48-inch (121 cm) high robot’s capabilities are scarce, and the first iteration of Pepper may end up being not much more than a humanoid curiosity.

But the real growth market in Japan—and perhaps throughout the developed world—will be robots that can take care of the fast-growing population of elderly people.

Climbing the robot career ladder

Softbank plans to accumulate know-how from Pepper’s initial interactions with humans—it will be stationed at several Softbank retail stores beginning this week—and use that knowledge to build “a household robot that can be used in nursing care for the elderly, among other uses,” the Nikkei newspaper reported. Among the robot’s capabilities are the ability to “estimate emotions based on expressions and voice tones.”

The robot was largely developed by France’s Aldebaran Robotics, known for a soccer-playing humanoid robot called Nao. In 2012, Softbank purchased an 80% stake in Aldebaran for $100 million. That could turn out to be a characteristically canny investment for Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son—especially if Pepper finds customers in Japan’s booming elderly care industry.

No one left to care for Grandma

Japan’s demographic predicament is so dire that robots may be the only answer to a diminishing workforce. The country is on pace to lose a third of its population in the next 50 years, and more than 40% of people will be over 65 by 2060. (Put another way: adult diapers are outselling children’s diapers.)

The country’s “care technology market” is already worth more than $1 billion a year. The government allocated $23 million last year to “help develop nursing care robots and spread their use,” and selected 24 companies, including Toyota, to receive subsidies for developing “nursing care robot equipment.”

“There will be a market for these robots in retirement homes without enough nurses, robots that can accompany Alzheimers patients and help them find their way back to their rooms, for example,” Aldebaran founder Bruno Maisonnier told the Financial Times in 2012 (paywall). “In the future, we might have a robot for each person, helping older people get three or four more years of autonomous living before they even have to go into a care home.”

But will Grandpa care for Pepper?

It remains to be seen whether older people in Japan will show as much as enthusiasm for Pepper as Son did on stage. A plush robot seal called Paro has been well received in some Japanese nursing homes, but it’s a long way from a stuffed animal to a humanoid. A few years ago, Tmsuk, a Japanese robot maker, scrapped a pilot program to put a one-meter (3.2 ft.) tall robot in hospitals, in part because of a lukewarm reception from patients. “We want humans caring for us, not machines,”one of them complained.

And this is in Japan, where robots are already part of the culture. Older people in other countries may find the idea of a robotic companion even harder to accept.

Reprinted with permission from Quartz. The original story can be found here.

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Facebook’s Drones Could Bring Internet to the Developing World—and Stick it to Mobile Carriers

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 11:36:14 -0500

Facebook is in talks to buy a drone company called Titan Aerospace for $60 million, according to TechCrunch . The New Mexico-based start-up is is developing autonomous solar-powered aircraft that can stay aloft for up to five years at near-orbital heights, which could make them ideal for beaming internet access to remote areas.

This holds an obvious appeal for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is focused on reaching the two-thirds of humankind who are not yet online. Google is testing a similar internet access program called Project Loon that uses a network of weather balloons, which are currently aloft over the South Pacific .

Titan’s aircraft are still under development, but it hopes to launch its Solara 50 model, which can carry a payload of up to 70 pounds (31.8 kilograms) and has the same wingspan as a Boeing 787, sometime in 2014. The larger Solara 60 can carry up to 250 pounds, and is due in 2015. Flying between 60,000 and 70,000 feet (18,300 and 21,300 meters), well above commercial jet traffic, a single aircraft could provide connectivity over an 18-mile (29 kilometer) radius.

That could prove to be an enormous boon for remote areas of Africa and Asia, where Facebook’s “ next billion ” live. Look at all these potential WhatsApp users:

Having a drone fleet could also give Facebook more leverage with mobile carriers as it tries to secure “zero-rate” deals in the developing world, which would allow people to use Facebook without it counting against their data plans.

Facebook contends that zero-rating its content actually encourages overall mobile phone usage and thus is profitable for carriers in the long run. While it has a number of zero-rate deals already, some carriers have recently been unreceptive to that argument . “It does not make any sense,” Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said at a shareholder meeting last month. “There is no reason why I should give my network capacity for free.”

But what if Facebook can bypass the carriers and offer mobile data services to developing markets with a futuristic fleet of high-flying solar-powered drones? A couple of years from now, when Facebook has yet another meeting with a mobile carrier in India, Nigeria, or Indonesia to talk about a zero-rate deal, the carrier would be offered an implicit choice: Cut us a deal or we release the drones.

Facebook was not immediately available for comment.

Reprinted with permission from Quartz . The original story can be found here .

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Singapore Figured Out How to Tax Bitcoin—Treat it Like a Product, Not Money

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 10:59:37 -0500

If you’ve made a fortune in bitcoins over the past year and think you can shield the gain from the tax man, you may be in for a rude shock: Tax authorities around the world have been closely studying the virtual currency, which in some cases is much less anonymous and untraceable than it might seem.

Even if you’re willing to pay your fair share of your bitcoin earnings, prepare for some headaches. Bitcoin’s popularity has run well ahead of tax law, mostly because nobody can seem to decide what exactly bitcoins should be: A currency, like a dollar or a euro? A financial instrument like a stock or a bond? Or illegal altogether?

The Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) thinks it found a workable way to bring bitcoins in from the cold. In a response to the bitcoin brokerage Coin Republic, as reported by Coinbase’s Jon Southurst, IRAS says it will treat bitcoins like a product—no different than an iPhone or an MP3 or a shrink-wrapped piece of software—which incurs taxes when it is sold for cash or used to pay for goods or services:

The IRAS reminded Coin Republic that bitcoins do not fit the definition of ‘money’ or ‘currency’, so supplying them is seen as a good/service for taxation purposes rather than a currency exchange.

Read more at Quartz.

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As Bitcoin Booms, So Does Bitcoin Bank Robbery

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 16:57:26 -0500

Robbing a bank is such a hassle in the real world, with all the complicated logistics of weapons, vaults, dye packs, and getaway cars. It’s a lot more straightforward to rob digital currency exchanges and payment processors. To paraphrase bank robber Willie Sutton, that’s where the bitcoins are.

The huge interest in bitcoin and the concurrent surge in the value of the currency—bitcoin has risen 6,000% versus the US dollar in the last year and 300% just this month—has also created a growing incentive for larcenous hackers:

European bitcoin payment processor BIPS lost the equivalent of about $1 million last week after a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack overwhelmed its servers and enabled attackers to gain access to customers’ online bitcoin “wallets.”
Poland’s Bidextreme.pl was also hacked last week, and its users’ accounts emptied, though it did not disclose the amount taken.
A week earlier, the Czech exchange Bitcash.cz was hit, with 4,000 users losing bitcoins worth about $100,000.
Australia’s TradeFortress said it was hacked in November, leading to the loss of $1 million worth of users’ bitcoins.
China’s GBL exchange abruptly went offline in October, with $4.1 million in users’ bitcoins going missing.

Read the full story at Quartz to find out how you steal a bitcoin, anyway.

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Google Engineers Blast NSA With F-bombs, Righteous Outrage and Lord of the Rings Analogies

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 11:15:05 -0500

Google chairman Eric Schmidt had some stern words for the National Security Agency this week, saying the NSA’s reported hacking of Google’s data centers was “outrageous” and “perhaps illegal” (paywall). But some Google employees are venting their rage in a much less constrained fashion.

Brandon Downey, a Google network security engineer, let loose on Google+ with a broadside last week when news of the NSA intrusions first surfaced:

I’m just going to post my thoughts on this. Standard disclaimer: They are my own thoughts, and not those of my employer. Fuck these guys. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life trying to keep Google’s users safe and secure from the many diverse threats Google faces … seeing this, well, it’s just a little like coming home from War with Sauron, destroying the One Ring, only to discover the NSA is on the front porch of the Shire chopping down the Party Tree and outsourcing all the hobbit farmers with half-orcs and whips.

Mike Hearn, a network security colleague of Downey’s, weighed in with his own profanity-laced response on Tuesday afternoon, noting that the slides leaked by Edward Snowden showed the NSA accessing the very systems he had worked for years to safeguard against criminals within the confines of the legal system:

Unfortunately we live in a world where all too often, laws are for the little people. Nobody at GCHQ or the NSA will ever stand before a judge and answer for this industrial-scale subversion of the judicial process. In the absence of working law enforcement, we therefore do what internet engineers have always done – build more secure software. The traffic shown in the slides below is now all encrypted and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on understanding it, ruined. Thank you Edward Snowden.

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Indian IT Outsourcing Giant Infosys Stung by U.S. Immigration Morass

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:39:25 -0400

Bangalore-based Infosys posted a scanty 1.2 percent increase in net profit for the three months to Sept. 30, falling short of analysts’ already-lowered estimates. The earnings miss was largely due to a 2.19 billion rupee provision for “visa related matters,” stemming from a US investigation into whether Infosys broke immigration rules by bringing in full-time workers from India under short-term “business visitor” visas. The H-1B visas that companies like Infosys rely on have become a contentious issue in the US immigration debate. With no sign that Washington will be able to tackle immigration any time soon, Infosys and other IT outsourcing companies have recently been building up their operations in Mexico instead.

Read the full story at Quartz.

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This Is How Fear of Government Snooping Takes Its Toll on Tech Companies

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 10:17:09 -0400

Two very different technology offerings were dropped on Thursday because of fears that the US and China might be trying to spy on the customers using them.

In Baltimore, Maryland—just down the road from the headquarters of the National Security Agency in Ft. Meade—a US company called CyberPoint International lost a contract to provide a videoconferencing system to the federal government after US Customs determined that CyberPoint’s offering was in fact Chinese, substantially made by telecom equipment maker ZTE. A US House Intelligence panel has recommended that government agencies and contractors should avoid using equipment made by ZTE and its larger Chinese counterpart Huawei, because of fears that they might have ties to the Chinese military that could compromise the security of federal computer networks. ZTE and Huawei have strenuously denied the claims.

Meanwhile, another US company called RSA Security—a unit of computer storage giant EMC—quietly told its customers to stop using a software encryption algorithm that it had long recommended. According to documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA, which helped create the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (or Dual EC DRBG for short), had secretly introduced vulnerabilities into the algorithm so it could exploit them later.

Experts have long suspected that Dual EC DRBG, which generates a quasi-random string of numbers to be used in encryption, was intentionally flawed.

Read the full story at Quartz.

(Image via clarence s lewis/Shutterstock.com)

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A Scientist Used Some Electrodes, a Magnet, and a Swim Cap to Play a Video Game Using His Colleague’s Brain

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 12:41:06 -0400

“Yes! Success!”

It wasn’t quite “Mr. Watson. Come Here. I need you.” but it could prove to be just as revolutionary: Researchers at the University of Washington have completed the first experiment demonstrating human brain-to-brain communication. Fittingly given the sci-fi connotations, they used the technology to play a video game.

UW professor Rajesh Rao, hooked up to a machine that reads electrical activity in the brain, transmitted a neural signal over the Internet to his colleague Andrea Stocco across campus, who had a powerful magnetic coil aimed at his brain’s left motor cortex, which controls movement of the right side of the body. While watching a video game on a screen, Rao imagined moving his right hand, and Stocco’s right index finger twitched involuntarily, causing him to tap the space bar on a keyboard.

The experiment combined two well-established pieces of equipment—an electroencephalography machine, which reads brain waves, and a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil, which can trigger them—and used custom computer code to translate Rao’s brain signals into a command for Stocco’s brain. Both devices are non-invasive, though transcranial stimulation does carry a small risk of seizures.

Read more at Quartz.

(Image via VLADGRIN/Shutterstock.com)

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Beijing Embraces Big Data to Measure Public Opinion

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Mon, 05 Aug 2013 09:54:04 -0400

China is known to have one of the world’s most restrictive internet regimes, with increasingly sophisticated systems in place to snuff out dissent and suppress discussion of controversial topics.

But Beijing policymakers are beginning to see the internet as more than a walled garden, carefully pruned—it’s a source of invaluable information about how netizens feel about the Communist Party’s slate of reforms. The Washington Post’s Simon Denyer reports that party leaders are now getting real-time summaries of online discussions, and “opinion monitoring centers have sprung up in state-run news organizations and universities to mine and interpret the vast rivers of chatter on the Internet.”

A data-driven approach to politics has long been a hallmark of cutting-edge campaigns in western countries—Barack Obama’s re-election campaign famously employed an all-star technology team to optimize messaging and voter turnout—but it’s a new development in China, where a top-down one-party system didn’t leave any room for actually listening to citizens.

Brutal Smartphone Market Is Clobbering Former Stalwarts

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 13:09:16 -0400

There was a time when NEC was the 500 lb. gorilla in Japan’s cellphone market with a 27% market share—then came smartphones. Faced with competition from the likes of Apple and Samsung, NEC’s share quickly shrunk to a measly 5%; after spending six months unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a partnership with China’s Lenovo, the company has decided to exit the smartphone business entirely, according to a report by the Nikkei newspaper.

Japan’s smartphone market is brutal, dominated by fickle mobile carriers and fad-chasing consumers. As in the rest of the world, it is also intensely competitive: In addition to Apple and Samsung, there are five homegrown firms—Sony, Fujitsu, Sharp, Panasonic, and Kyocera—who are vying for a spot in users’ pockets.

Still, Japan once had ten handset makers before the relentless economics of smartphones winnowed the crowd. And NEC (which will reportedly keep making non-smartphones for Japan’s elderly) won’t be the last firm to bow out. Who’s next? Well, JP Morgan analyst Alvin Kwock said in a note this week that Taiwan’s struggling smartphone vendor HTC may be forced to consider being acquired by the Chinese mobile telecommunications equipment maker Huawei to survive.

Read more at Quartz.

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China Patches Cracks in the Great Firewall ahead of Tiananmen anniversary

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 11:21:56 -0400

The “June 4 Incident,” which the world outside of China knows as the Tiananmen Square protests, is a forbidden topic within the Great Firewall of China.

In recent years, Beijing’s enormous internet censorship program has taken aim at any words or phrases that could conceivably refer to the government crackdown that killed hundreds or even thousands of protesters in 1989. On the anniversary last year, there were reports that even mentioning the word “today” was banned.

This year the government is getting more sophisticated. The censorship monitoring group Greatfire.org reported that users of the popular Twitter-like service Sina Weibo are now able to search for “六四事件”" (“June 4th incident)” and related terms. Instead of receiving a censorship notice, as they had in the past, a page of search results appears—but it is scrubbed clean of all references to the 1989 protests. It’s a move George Orwell would have admired: If users go looking for information, they won’t find anything—and they won’t even know the information is being censored.

Read more at Quartz.

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Softbank’s Latest Sprint Nextel Offer Includes a Seat on the Board for Uncle Sam

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:31:59 -0400

Japan’s Softbank is taking an extraordinary step to make sure its bid for Sprint Nextel goes through: effectively giving the US government a seat on the board to assuage its fears that Chinese equipment suppliers like Huawei might compromise the nation’s telecom infrastructure.

US lawmakers have expressed concerns that using Chinese equipment could pose a threat to national security—and those fears have been shamelessly hyped even further by Dish TV, which has made a counter-offer for Sprint. Softbank, which had already agreed not to use Huawei equipment, has now agreed to give the US government what the Wall Street Journal called an “unusual level of influence” by letting it approve a board member who will be responsible for national security issues.

Read more at Quartz.

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China’s Huawei Bails on the United States

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:35:43 -0400

There’s only so much abuse that a giant network equipment manufacturer repeatedly accused of threatening US national security can take.

“We are not interested in the US market any more,” Huawei executive vice president Eric Xu said at the company’s annual analyst summit on Wednesday, as reported by the Financial Times.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to get into the U.S. market,” Chief Technology Officer Li Sanqi added in an interview with IDG. “[But] we today face reality. We will focus on the rest of the world, which is reasonably big enough and is growing significantly.”

Huawei has been a punching bag in Washington for years, with congressmen labeling the company a trojan horse for cyberwarfare by China. It has come under additional scrutiny following the suspicious death in Singapore of an American engineer who was working on a cutting-edge military technology project that may have violated US export rules. Computer files found in his apartment included a proposal for Huawei to collaborate on the project.

Read more at Quartz.

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China Bird Flu Breakdown: No Country for Old Men

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:56:40 -0400

The H7N9 virus is disproportionately affecting older men as it spreads in China, the World Health Organization said in a bulletin on Monday, for reasons that are not immediately clear.

Between March 31 and April 16, when the WHO researchers were crunching the numbers, there were 63 reported cases of the new bird flu strain, with a median age of 64 years and with men making up 71% of cases. Although the 22% fatality rate in all males was similar to females, the rate of deaths in older men was 20%, compared to no deaths in older females.

That demographic breakdown, while based on an early assessment with a small sample size, stands in contrast to the previous H5N1 influenza outbreak in China, in which most patients were working-age adults, with no disparity in gender. China as a whole has a mostly working-age population, and elderly women outnumber elderly men.

The researchers said the answer could lie in different levels of exposure due to “gender-associated practices and norms,” differences in the way men and women of different ages respond to the virus, or different health-care seeking behaviors, leading to a bias in the way the cases have been reported.

Read more at Quartz.

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Malware Turns Hacked Computers Into Slaves That “Mine” New Digital Currency

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:31:02 -0400

The digital currency Bitcoin is having a bit of a moment, which is drawing the attention of cybercriminals. They don’t want to steal your money (though there issome of that too). Instead they want to hijack the processing power of your computer to create more bitcoins out of thin air.

There is no company, central bank, or government behind Bitcoin—there is only math. The currency, created by a pseudonymous researcher and governed by computer code, is slowly adding more coins to circulation. New bitcoins are distributed to users with access to hugely powerful computers, which compete to process fiendishly complicated math problems. The system gives new coins to the winner as a reward; the process is known as “mining.”

The newest Bitcoin scam was discovered last week by security firm Kaspersky Lab, which found a type of computer malware that hijacks computers and uses them to mine new bitcoins.

Two New H7N9 Cases: See How Bird Flu Is Spreading Through China

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:43:46 -0400

China’s avian flu outbreak continued to spread on Wednesday. In the city of Hangzhou, in Zhejiang province near Shanghai, one 38 year old man has died, state-owned broadcaster CCTV said on its Sina Weibo page (Chinese, registration required). Another Hangzhou man, 67, has contracted the virus, theZhejiang Online News reported (Chinese).

Click here for an interactive version of the map

Congress’ Cybersecurity Crackdown on China Could Put Apple in the Crossfire

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:37:45 -0400

Last week, Congress quietly passed a bill that will make it much more difficult for the US government to buy computer equipment from Chinese companies, amid a spate of cyberattacks linked to Beijing. But the unintended consequences could ensnare Apple’s iPhone and other devices sold by US firms that are assembled in China.

A continuing budget resolution that is awaiting President Obama’s signature bans several federal agencies, including NASA and the Justice and Commerce Departments, from purchasing any “information technology system” that was “produced, manufactured or assembled” by entities “owned, directed, or subsidized by the People’s Republic of China,” unless the agency’s chief and the FBI determine whether there is a cybersecurity threat and conclude that the purchase is in the US national interest. The clause was first spotted by Stewart A. Baker, a lawyer and former Homeland Security official, who writes the Skating on Stilts blog.

Congress has long worried that buying equipment from Chinese technology companies like Huawei could lead to more hacking of US computer systems—especially since a growing body of evidence implicates the Chinese government in widespread cyberattacks on western governments and corporations. (The suspicious death of a American engineer in Singapore who had business links to Huawei has also caused alarm on Capitol Hill.)

Read more at Quartz.

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Cheap Android smartphones could overwhelm China’s censors

Adam Pasick, Quartz — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:37:06 -0500

A massive glut of commodity smartphones running a stripped-down version of Google’s Android software is coming to market in China, with the potential to upend the mobile phone marketplace and swamp the country’s Internet censors.

Android already accounts for 90% of new smartphone purchases in China, a trend that is alarming the government enough that it is complaining about it. The volume of smartphone shipments in China hit 70 million in the fourth quarter—a 112% year-on-year increase—and the total number of Chinese smartphones is projected to reach a staggering 240 million this year. (That doesn’t include simpler “feature” phones that can’t as easily run software or access the Internet.)

Foreign firms like Samsung were the first to bring Android to China, and homegrown manufacturers like Lenovo—set to become the top-selling Chinese Android handset maker this year—are coming on strong. But they may all be eventually swamped by cheap commoditized handsets from more than a thousand no-name manufacturers, which TechRice’s Kai Lukoff has dubbed “ChinaDroids.” They have chipsets from Taiwan’s Mediatek, run a heavily modified version of the “Ice Cream Sandwich” series of Android, and come preloaded with Chinese apps. By one estimate they already control 40% of the Chinese smartphone market.

Read more at Quartz.

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