Month: May 2018

First Cyberattack in 1834

The Blanc brothers traded government bonds at the exchange in the city of Bordeaux, where information about market movements took several days to arrive from Paris by mail coach. Traders who could get the information more quickly could make money by anticipating these movements. Some tried using messengers and carrier pigeons, but the Blanc brothers found a way to use the telegraph line instead. They bribed the telegraph operator in the city of Tours to introduce deliberate errors into routine government messages being sent over the network. The telegraph’s encoding system included a “backspace” symbol that instructed the transcriber to ignore the previous character. The addition of a spurious character indicating the direction of the previous day’s market movement, followed by a backspace, meant the text of the message being sent was unaffected when it was written out for delivery at the end of the line. But this extra character could be seen by another accomplice: a former telegraph operator who observed the telegraph tower outside Bordeaux with a telescope, and then passed on the news to the Blancs. The scam was only uncovered in 1836, when the crooked operator in Tours fell ill and revealed all to a friend, who he hoped would take his place. The Blanc brothers were put on trial, though they could not be convicted because there was no law against misuse of data networks. But the Blancs’ pioneering misuse of the French network qualifies as the world’s first cyber-attack.

War on Fake Reviews

An Amazon spokeswoman explained that when a product is hit with many reviews in a short period of time, the company’s systems will automatically suppress all but “verified” purchases. But this preventative measure, too, can be easily gamed. “People would buy our game, not play it, leave the terrible review, and instantly request a refund,. It’s a well-worn tactic.” In his estimation, user-review systems such as those used by Valve, Steam’s developer, are so vulnerable to exploitation that they require as much moderation as social-media platforms. “The ethics and utility of these systems boil down to this: if a platform is going to have it, they have to be able to manage it to protect people from abuse and harassment, or they become responsible for that abuse”

Art from Overfitting?

We argue that hand marks initially supplied the idea to archaic humans that a graphic mark could act as a representation, however basic it was. This was a beginning of sorts, but how could hand marks give rise to the more complex animal depictions? Hunters entering the caves with an overactive visual system will have regularly “mistaken” the natural cave features for animals. The cave walls also simulated the outdoor environment, where hunters regularly had to be able to spot their prey in camouflage. All the hunters needed to do to “complete” a depiction was to add 1 or 2 graphic marks to the suggestive natural features based on the visual imagery in their “mind’s eye.” When later humans entered the same caves and saw these, the Neanderthals may literally have “handed on” to our own species the notion that a graphic mark could act as a figurative representation. Thanks to the primed visual system of the later hunter-gatherers—and the suggestive environment of the caves—it was Homo sapiens who took the final step creating the first complex figurative representations, with all the ramifications that followed for art and culture.

UBI vs Basic Jobs

In my ideal system, we would propose some sort of inherently progressive tax at some fixed %, and say that the basic income was “however much that produces, divided by everybody”. That means that as the economy grows, the basic income increases. At the beginning, the basic income might not really be enough to live off of (especially if I got my calculations wrong). As we get more things like robot labor and productivity increases, so does the income. By the time robots are good enough to put lots of people out of work, they’re also good enough that X% of what the rich robot-owning capitalists make is quite a lot, and everybody can be comfortable.

Then various Congresspeople can debate at what point the UBI is large enough that we can eliminate various welfare programs. On the one hand, welfare programs can be sticky, so we might worry they would be overly cautious. On the other hand, many Congresspeople are Republicans, so they probably wouldn’t be.

Carbon Nanotube Production

Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered a technique to cost-effectively convert carbon dioxide from the air into a type of carbon nanotubes that is “more valuable than any other material ever made.” Carbon nanotubes are super-materials that can be stronger than steel and more conductive than copper. So despite much research, why aren’t they used in applications ranging from batteries to tires? Answer: The high manufacturing costs and extremely expensive price.
The price ranges from $100–200 per kilogram for the “economy class” carbon nanotubes with larger diameters and poorer properties, up to $100K per kilogram and above for the “first class” carbon nanotubes — ones with a single wall, the smallest diameters, and the most amazing properties.

Nanocomp Technologies is producing sheets of carbon nanotubes that measure 1m by 2m and promising slabs 10m2 in area. The first applications will probably be as electrical conductors in planes and satellites to replace copper wire and save weight. Saving weight would save fuel. Nanocomp’s materials possess a unique combination of high strength-to-weight ratio, electrical and thermal conductivity, as well as flame resistance that exceeds those of many other advanced materials by orders of magnitude.

2022-10-28: Behold Carbon Nano Onions

By microwaving fish waste, you can quickly and efficiently create carbon nano-onions (CNOs)—a unique nanoform of carbon that has applications in energy storage and medicine. CNOs are nanostructures with spherical carbon shells in a concentric layered structure similar to an onion. They have “drawn extensive attention worldwide in terms of energy storage and conversion” because of their “exceptionally high electrical and thermal conductivity, as well as large external surface area”
Though CNOs were first reported in the 1980s, conventional methods of manufacturing them have required high temperatures, a vacuum and a lot of time and energy. Other techniques are expensive and call for complex catalysts or dangerous acidic or basic conditions. The newly discovered method requires only 1 step—microwave pyrolysis of fish scales extracted from fish waste—and can be done within 10 seconds.

How exactly the fish scales are converted into CNOs is unclear, though the team thinks it has to do with how collagen in the fish scales can absorb enough microwave radiation to quickly increase in temperature. This leads to pyrolysis, or thermal decomposition, which causes the collagen to break down into gasses. These gasses then support the creation of CNOs.

Brooklyn Bridge Champagne Vaults

The cavernous vaults, which are located closer to the foot of the bridge, were rented out as storage space holding wine, champagne and liqueurs, as well as newspapers from the Evening World and produce from the Fulton Fish Market. Year round, the alcohol was kept in the stable temperatures afforded by the Brooklyn Bridge vaults and the rent collected helped offset the cost of constructing the bridge.

It is known that the vaults were constructed first in 1876, likely to appease distributors like Luyties and Racky’s whose storage facilities were demolished to build the bridge. A faded logo for Pol Rogers, the French champagne house favored by Winston Churchill, is still visible. The vaults were closed during World War I and repurposed for non-alcohol storage uses during Prohibition. In 1934, 6 months after the repeal of Prohibition, the city ceremoniously turned over the keys to a new tenant, Anthony Oechs & Co., an alcohol distributor, at a party inside the vaults attended by 100s of revelers.

Another curious find was uncovered in 2006 inside the Manhattan-side tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. A veritable time capsule was discovered by city workers which contained a stockpile of supplies in the event of nuclear attack. Put into reserve at the height of the Cold War in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this space, intended as both fallout shelter and storeroom, was forgotten for nearly 50 years.

As reported by The New York Times at the time of the discovery, the vault contained “water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers — an estimated 352K of them, sealed in 10s of watertight metal canisters and, it seems, still edible.” Boxes with blankets were labeled “For Use Only After Enemy Attack.”

Vertebrate-microbe symbiosis

Yet amazingly, there is an animal-that-screams-animal in which an alga also dwells. That would be the spotted salamander Ambystoma maculatum. When it is an embryo, cells of the alga Oophila amblystomatis somehow end up inside it. Technically, the salamander’s now a photosynthetic animal. This salamander is the sole known example of a vertebrate playing host to a symbiotic microorganism of any kind, photosynthetic or no. And needless to say, something very interesting — no one is yet sure exactly what — is going on between the 2. Past experiments have clearly shown that the salamander benefits from its unconventional living arrangements. How the algae feel about the situation has been rather less clear. Intracellular algae showed clear signs of stress and oxygen and sulfur deprivation, producing lots more heat shock and autophagy-related proteins in response to finding themselves inexplicably inside a salamander. So why does the Oophila, the salamander alga, put up with its apparently dreary living conditions inside its host? It’s an intriguing question that lacks a clear answer, but there are clues. The alga is found nowhere else in nature besides salamander egg capsules. Algal cells remain visible inside young salamanders for a long time. Even when they are no longer obvious, algal DNA remains detectable in adult salamanders in the oviducts and the male reproductive tract. Freshly laid eggs contain encysted algal cells. And those algal cells in the capsule don’t seem nearly as put-upon as those inside embryos. Where might they come from? Is it possible that the alga is passed from generation to generation of salamander, a perpetual part of the animal? If so, the salamander has given the algae the ultimate gifts: a free ride, a home, and immortality, at least for the life of the host species. If that is the case, it was probably a bargain worth making.

Fentanyl at scale

What happens when chinese scale is applied to drugs. Narcos was child’s play:

Fentanyl is a smuggler’s dream. It’s compact. It’s valuable. It’s fantastic for the smugglers and it’s terrible for law enforcement. There’s no need to grow vast fields of opium poppies, which must be defended against weather, competitors and government eyes. Raw materials and equipment are cheap. Synthesis takes ~1 week and requires neither heat nor skills more sophisticated than following a recipe. And in recent years, rogue chemists have unearthed instructions for analogues that researchers discovered decades ago but never put into legitimate use. Sellers offer these variations before governments can outlaw them. Potency and purity vary: 1 dose may produce a euphoric high, while another kills immediately. Fentanyl’s astronomical profit margins have driven its rapid spread. 1 kilogram from China sells for $3800, which, when turned into tablet form, could fetch on the street up to $30m.

2021-11-06: Easily scalable synthetic drugs created a new type of drug lord:

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that Sam Gor’s annual revenue could be as high as $21b, the same as Citibank’s. Practically every newspaper in the West has described Tse Chi Lop as Asia’s El Chapo. The comparison could hardly be less accurate. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, has claimed personal responsibility for 3000 murders in a drug war that took 300k lives. That is not Tse’s way. He achieved the size of Sam Gor not by murder and torture, but by industrializing his business, reducing the cost per unit, providing an excellent product at a fair price, and establishing well-maintained networks of key partnerships. There’s also the question of scale. El Chapo’s cartel was worth $3b—a fraction of Sam Gor’s value.

2023-06-19: China doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to crack down on fentanyl, arguably for geopolitical reasons.

From 2018 onwards, drug war cooperation with the United States declined in concert with the more general deterioration of US-China relations. In August 2022, cooperation ceased altogether. There have been no high-profile Chinese prosecutions since a trial in Hebei in 2019. While state media continues to boast of “an intensified fight against narcotics” and “the strictest drug control in the world,” this rigour does not apply to fentanyl. The opioid’s traffickers have come to enjoy a great sense of impunity. America’s crisis has intensified as a result, and the Party will certainly be enjoying the historical parallel.

2023-06-23: Deaths are through the roof and all this article manages to do is to paw ineffectually at prevention.

The shift to synthetics has put law enforcement at a distinct disadvantage by dramatically reducing drug prices — recent estimates suggest that fentanyl prices have fallen rapidly, by roughly 50% from 2016 to 2021. It has also made it much harder to detect and therefore interdict drugs. A great deal more law enforcement is therefore needed simply to return to the pre-synthetic level of efficacy.

Low-light image enhancement

Imaging in low light is challenging due to low photon count and low SNR. Short-exposure images suffer from noise, while long exposure can induce blur and is often impractical. A variety of denoising, deblurring, and enhancement techniques have been proposed, but their effectiveness is limited in extreme conditions, such as video-rate imaging at night. To support the development of learning-based pipelines for low-light image processing, we introduce a dataset of raw short-exposure low-light images, with corresponding long-exposure reference images. Using the presented dataset, we develop a pipeline for processing low-light images, based on end-to-end training of a fully-convolutional network. The network operates directly on raw sensor data and replaces much of the traditional image processing pipeline, which tends to perform poorly on such data. We report promising results on the new dataset, analyze factors that affect performance, and highlight opportunities for future work.