1 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

Welcome to the TechWatch, which is a collaborative effort between SOF AT&L, J5 Donovan Group, and

SOFWERX. The TechWatch is UNCLASSIFIED and compiled using only unclassified Open Source Information.

The purpose of the TechWatch is to capture the most up to date technology information and advancements

that may be of interest to the SOF Enterprise and to prevent technical surprise.

Source: http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/ai-s-ethical-dilemma-an-unexpectedly-urgent-problem

Tech Quote

TechWatch

Legend Tech Quote Additive Manufacturing Artificial Intelligence

Big Data Bioprinting Blockchain

Cryptocurrency Cyber Attacks Drones

Genetic Engineering Hacking Human Machine Co-Evolution

Human Machine Interface Machine Learning Malware

Nanotechnology Quantum Computing Robotics

Sonic Attack About This Publication TechWatch Sign Up

Volume XIII, 11 October 2017

2 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Additive Manufacturing

29 September 2017, Cazza Construction’s X1 3D Printing Robot Can Potentially Rebuild Homes in Disaster Zones

Cazza Construction is a Silicon Valley based 3D printing company promising to revolutionize the construction industry. They plan to do do this through the X1 3D printing robot, a machine they tout as ideal for disaster zone reconstruction. They have also stated that it could be a game-changer in efforts to rebuild after hurricane Harvey.

The machine itself has tank-like tracks that rotate to move it forward and a robot arm mechanism for construction. The company has not yet shown the machine in operation to anyone so we have only details to go by. They have described the robot as having 90 kg with a maximum frontal reach of 3.9 meters. It can extend its frontal reach further to 4.7 meters with the help of a telescopic range extender. While the robot is about 1.1 meters high, it can use a hydraulic height extender to reach up to 5.5 meters.

Cazza have stated that the X1 could afford companies a 40 per cent construction cost decrease. They have also stated that their concrete dries in about a week. This speed and cost reduction could save companies millions every year.

While the company has provided some details, they have kept a veil of secrecy around the project. As mentioned earlier, no one has seen the machine in operation. Even the video above is just a digital rendering of the potential functions of the robot. The company has left everyone in the dark about how the X1 operates.

Many companies keep projects under wraps, especially start-ups. However, they rarely go this far into pricing and promotion and even construction projects in Dubai, without any on the field demonstration or thorough explanation of their technology’s operational capabilities. Many are view-ing their secrecy with an eye of skepticism as to their claims. However, if their information is accurate and the machine is capable, it could very well be a revolutionary new technology.

Cazza are looking to sell the X1 on pre-order for about $480,000.

The Cazza X1 Core, a more advanced machine, costs $620,000+.

Source: https://3dprinting.com/construction/cazza-constructions-x1-3d-printing-robot-can-potentially-rebuild-homes-in-disaster-zones/

3 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

Artificial Intelligence

8 September 2017, For Superpowers, Artificial Intelligence Fuels New Global Arms Race FOR MANY RUSSIAN students, the academic year started last Friday with tips on planetary domination from President Vladimir Putin. “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind,” he said, via live video beamed to 16,000 selected schools. “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.” Putin’s advice is the latest sign of an intensifying race among Russia, China, and the US to accumulate military power based on artificial intelligence. All three countries have proclaimed intelligent machines as vital to the future of their national secu-rity. Technologies such as software that can sift intelligence ma-terial or autonomous drones and ground vehicles are seen as ways to magnify the power of human soldiers. “The US, Russia, and China are all in agreement that artificial intelligence will be the key technology underpinning national power in the future,” says Gregory C. Allen, a fellow at nonparti-san think tank the Center for a New American Security. He coau-thored a recent report commissioned by the Office of the Direc-tor of National Intelligence that concluded artificial intelligence could shake up armed conflict as significantly as nuclear weapons did. In July, China’s State Council released a detailed strategy de-signed to make the country “the front-runner and global innova-tion center in AI” by 2030. It includes pledges to invest in R&D that will “through AI elevate national defense strength and as-sure and protect national security.” The US, widely recognized as home to the most advanced and vibrant AI development, doesn’t have a prescriptive roadmap like China’s. But for several years the Pentagon has been devel-oping a strategy known as the “Third Offset,” intended to give the US, through weapons powered by smart software, the same sort of advantage over potential adversaries that it once held in nuclear bombs and precision-guided weapons. In April, the De-partment of Defense established the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team to improve use of AI technologies such as ma-chine vision across the Pentagon. Russia lags behind China and the US in sophistication and use of automation and AI, but is expanding its own investments through a military modernization program begun in 2008. The government’s Military Industrial Committee has set a target of making 30 percent of military equipment robotic by 2025. “Russia is behind the curve—they are playing catchup,” says Samuel Bendett, a research analyst who studies the country’s

military at the Center for Naval Analyses. The AI race among the world’s three largest military powers differs from earlier competitions like those to deploy nuclear weapons or stealth technology because much artificial intelli-gence technology can be used for both commercial and military applications. Algorithms good at searching holiday photos can be repurposed to scour spy satellite imagery, for example, while the control software needed for an autonomous minivan is much like that required for a driverless tank. Many recent advances in develop-ing and deploying artificial intelligence emerged from research from companies such as Google. China’s AI strategy attempts to directly link commercial and de-fense developments in AI. For example, a national lab dedicated to making China more competitive in machine learning that opened in February is operated by Baidu, the country’s leading search engine. Another partner in the project is Beihang Univer-sity, a leading center in military drones blocked from exporting certain items by the US Department of Commerce due to nation-al security concerns. The US government is less able to simply order cooperation from the tech sector. Defense Secretary James Mattis admitted on a recent West Coast trip that took in the offices of Amazon and Google that his department needs to do a better job of tap-ping into commercial AI advances. The Pentagon plans to boost spending on its DIUx project, created by the Obama administra-tion to help smaller tech companies partner with the military. Russia’s smaller tech industry, compared with the US and China, puts it at a disadvantage in the AI arms race. But it retains a strong academic tradition in science and technology. And ad-vanced technology isn’t everything—it also matters what you do with what you’ve got. Bendett of the Center for Naval Analyses says Russia has demon-strated in recent conflicts in Syria and Ukraine that it can do much even without the best technology. Russian drones are much cheaper, and have smaller ranges, than those of the US, but have been extremely effective, he says. Allen suggests that Russia may be willing to use machine learn-ing and AI more aggressively than its rivals in intelligence and propaganda campaigns. Automation could enhance the power of hacking and social-media campaigns like those deployed in the 2016 US election, he says. Speaking last Friday, Putin suggested that Russian gains in AI could make the world safer—apparently a nod to the arguably stabilizing effect of mutual nuclear deterrence. “It would be strongly undesirable if someone wins a monopolist position,” he said. The AI arms race may bring new technologies to the world’s largest militaries, but many dynamics of international power could be the same. Source: https://www.wired.com/

TechWatch 11 October 2017

4 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

25 September 2017, Analysts Predict That Artificial Intelligence Will Be a $14 Billion Industry by 2023

IN BRIEF. A recent report on artificial intelligence pre-dicts the industry will be worth $14 billion by 2023, a huge increase from the $525 million it was worth in 2015. AI tech is already being implemented across a wide range of industries and services and is one of the fastest growing technologies in the world.

EXPONENTIAL GROWTH

A recent report asserts that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry will reach a compound annual growth rate of 17.2 percent by 2023. The market is set to swell to a whopping $14.2 billion over the next six years, up from just $525 million in 2015.

Natural language processing technology is set to be a huge contributor to this growth. This tech is being adopted rapidly, particularly by financial institutions, because it can carry out customer service transac-tions and answer common questions in the place of human employees.

As for geography, North America is expected hold the majority of the AI industry’s market share by 2023, but Europe and the Asia-Pacific region will see signifi-cant growth thanks to the rapid pace of urbanization in some areas, increasing use of smartphones, and robust automotive sectors.

THE TIME IS NOW

Inevitably, any transition away from human labor could result in fewer jobs. The big question is whether AI and automation can produce enough new jobs to ensure that the people being replaced aren’t left unemployed.

According to the World Economic Forum, automated systems are on track to replace more then five million workers by 2020. In the U.S., some have predicted that 7 percent of jobs will be lost to automation by 2025, and a recent study found that as many as 10 million jobs in Great Britain could be swallowed up by automation over the next 10 years.

While we still have reasons to be optimistic that AI and automation could create jobsrather than just take them away, that’s not likely to happen organically — we need to make some big societal changes to ensure the benefits of AI outweigh the negatives.

These changes might mean some sort of adjustment to academic curriculum that takes into account the types of jobs that students are likely to hold 10 years from now. Universal basic income (UBI) could also be the answer, giving citizens a way to ensure their basic needs are met even after they are no longer needed at their job.

AI and automation are no longer the wave of the fu-ture — the technology is already here, and these sys-tems are being implemented more broadly than even before. The world of work is changing, and the way society functions needs to change along with it.

Source: https://futurism.com/analysts-predict-that-artificial-intelligence-will-be-a-14-billion-industry-by-2023/

5 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Big Data

27 September 2017, Data Is The Oxygen For A Digital Economy: Mukesh Ambani NEW DELHI: Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani said India is poised to grow from a $2.5 trillion economy to a $7 trillion one over the next decade to become one of the world’s Top 3 economies, but to make that happen the country’s telecoms and IT industry would need to play a foundational role and create the necessary digital infrastructure. Calling data the "oxygen" of the digital economy, Ambani said the telecom industry had the urgent task of empowering 1.3 billion Indians with the tools needed to flourish in the digital marketplace. "We cannot deprive Indians of this vital life-sustaining resource," Ambani said, speaking at India Mobile Congress Wednesday. According to the RIL chairman, data is the new oil, which India doesn’t need to import. "We have it in super abundance. It will be a source of value and will create opportunities and prosperity for India and Indians," he said. Greeting Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal, who was present, as "his good friend," Ambani said 4G coverage in India would become larger than 2G coverage within the next 12 months, which is why, there was an urgent need to apply the revolutionary powers of digital technologies to India’s pressing needs and challenges.

The positive signals, according to him, were already there as India had leapfrogged from a "lowly 155th in mobile broadband penetration to being the world’s largest mobile data consuming nation in just one year". Ambani, however, said India had missed out on the first three global industrial revolutions – mechanization, mass production and automation. But, he said, it had the opportunity to lead the ongoing fourth industrial revolution that would be fueled by connectivity, data and artificial intelligence. "India now has the opportunity to lead the fourth Industrial revolution, which is set to usher in more dramatic transformations globally than the three previous revolutions," said the RIL chairman. Mobile Internet and cloud computing, he said, would be the foundational technologies in the fourth industrial revolution. Ambani also reiterated that the telecom industry would have to provide ubiquitous access to high-speed data at affordable prices, and also ensure that every Indian also had access to an affordable smartphone that connects him to limitless knowledge and the power of the Internet. The RIL chairman also urged the government and industry to consider a three-point action plan, urging them to implement innovative ideas to generate employment, self-employment and income-generation opportunities for millions of Indian youth. "Young Indians who account for 63% of nation’s population have the competence to build new digital businesses," he said. He said it is critical to foster confidence in the society that new technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud computing, Big Data analytics, 3D printing, Blockchain, Nanotechnology among others are enablers of a new wave of wealth and employment for all. Ambani said that Indian mobile market is overflowing with data, and the entire industry had worked to create robust a digital circulatory system to carry data to each one of 1.3 billion Indians, including those living in the remotest villages. Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/data-is-the-oxygen-for-a-digital-economy-mukesh-ambani/articleshow/60853591.cms

6 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Bioprinting

3 October 2017, Modern Meadows Develops Ground-breaking 3D Bio-Printed Leather

“At the beginning, the idea of Modern Meadow was animal products without the animal,” says Andras Forgacs. Forgacs is the co-founder and chief executive of Modern Meadow, a company behind a brand new bio-printing marvel. The company has just engineered bio-printed leather out of fermented collagen. They refer to this new bio-printed leather as Zoa.

Modern Meadows tried multiple methods to achieve leather printing. At first, they grew skin cells in the lab. later on, they refined their approach by fermenting collagen. The resulting material from the fermentation process was eerily similar to leather.

The company was originally aiming to produce bio-printed foods but has also moved into the pro-duction of textiles and leather. Their method also allows them to tinker with the properties of leather to produce it in the exact way they would want. This allows them to alter the weights, strength, elasticity and breathability of the material. Modern Meadows has raised $53.5 million in revenue so far. This money is the result of grants and tax credits as well as $40 million from Horizons Ventures and Iconiq Capital in 2016.

Bio-Printed Animal Products

YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/rpdxZo7rtGI

Leather is one of the most common materials in, not just fashion, but also furniture and accessories. It is so big, in fact, that it can be a 100 billion dollar a year industry. This new method of producing leather could disrupt the conventional supply chain due to certain advantages it possesses. One of the reasons that it poses as a viable alternative is that it less wasteful.

“As a designer, the most exciting part is the creativity that this technology enables,” says Suzzanne Lee, CCO. “It enables you to create things in completely new ways. Textures, weights, strength, elasticity, breathability — all of these are now tunable knobs of creativity that we didn’t have to this extent before. Whether linked to performance or aesthetic, they are incredibly exciting because they open up more band-width for design.”

Extract from www.modernmeadow.com

The Museum of Modern Art’s upcoming “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” exhibition will display the compa-ny’s works on October 1st. The company hopes to drive awareness of its materials through these sorts of exhibitions. Source: https://3dprinting.com/news/modern-meadows-develops-ground-breaking-3d-bio-printed-leather/

7 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Blockchain

1 October 2017, Disney Built a Blockchain, and Now Its Creators are Trying to Turn It into a Commercial Platform to Compete with Ethereum

(Dragonchain was first developed at Disney's tech-focused Seattle office. Disney made the protocol open-source in 2016.Thomson Reuters) -Dragonchain is a blockchain protocol originally built by Disney. -It's designed to be more private than other popular blockchains like the bitcoin and ethereum protocols. -Now some of the developers behind the technology want to build a commercial business to make it easy for less technologically savvy businesses to get involved.

From animatronics to digital animation, the Walt Disney Company has long been a pioneer in emerging technology. And blockchain technology is no exception.

In 2014, Disney's tech-focused Seattle office started building what's now known as Dragonchain, a blockchain protocol designed to allow for more data privacy than is possible on other enterprise-oriented blockchains like Ethereum. The idea was to develop a secure asset management system to be used internally.

However, Disney dropped the project in 2016 and de-cided to make it open source. Soon after, a group of for-mer Disney employees founded the Dragonchain Foundation, a non-profit which manages upkeep of the protocol.

Now, they're looking to build a commercial business — called Dragonchain Inc. — on top of the platform to help other companies quickly and easily start using blockchain.

But first they need to raise money to do so.

Gap in the market

It's commonly believed in blockchain circles that the technology could some day make up an entirely new infrastructural layer of the internet, replacing traditional contracts and payment systems used in industries like law and real estate, because the design of the

technology makes it difficult to commit fraud.

This promise has drawn in research and development funds from industry powerhouses including IBM and Cisco, which have joined various unifying organizations such as Hyperledger and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance to better understand how this new technology can be leveraged commercially.

But many large corporations, such as Disney, have been hesitant to put their own data on public blockchains because the design would leave much of their proprietary and sensitive data open to prying eyes. The hope for Dragonchain is that other companies feel the same way.

Joe Roets, now CEO of Dragonchain Inc., was one of the engineers behind the original project at Disney.

"Disney was very forward thinking and wanted to know how people use different tech," Roets said. "We started building things. It took two years to build out the platform, give or take."

Roets described Dragonchain Inc's platform as a "turn key" product, which makes it easier for companies to build what they want on top of the Dragonchain blockchain protocol, without investing in expensive and hard-to-find technological expertise.

Roets said that while it is possible to build security and encryption on top of a public blockchain, it's a costly and time-consuming project. With Dragonchain, the encryption and obfuscation is built in.

"We realized some of the real world problems are that companies have access to traditional engineers, but they don't necessarily have a crypto background," Roets said . "If you go even further into blockchain, you need an economist or a game theory expert."

More private than Ethereum

Like the technology behind the cryptocurrencies bitcoin and ethereum, Dragonchain is a digital ledger that uses complex algorithms to document transactions in a way that cannot be easily modified. Every blockchain contains a complete history of everything that has happened on it, which makes it harder for fraud to occur in financial transactions. Unlike the public bitcoin and Ethereum protocols, however, Dragonchain is a hybrid. This means some information is private, and some is public. Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/disney-built-blockchain-now-creators-123000617.html

8 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Cryptocurrency

28 September 2017, Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson Says The Company Is Mining Cryptocurrencies Fidelity Investments, one of the world’s largest investment firms with $2.3 trillion in managed assets, is taking a long look at cryptocurrencies. The firm has been experimenting internally with bitcoin, but is now bringing some of those features out to its broad customer base. According to reports in Quartz and The Financial Times, Fidelity’s chief executive, Abigail Johnson, spoke at length about the company’s commitment to cryptocurrency at Consensus, a bitcoin-themed conference in New York. Johnson said that the company had made several venture investments in bitcoin-related businesses and that the company was looking at applications of blockchain technologies alongside several leading universities. According to Quartz, Fidelity has also set up a small mining operation inside the asset manager — one that’s making money for the company. From Quartz: One of Fidelity’s projects is mining Bitcoin and Ethereum, which Johnson said was started for educational purposes, but now turns a tidy profit. “We set up a small bitcoin and ethereum mining operation…that miraculously now is actually making a lot of money,” she said. The FT reported that the company had bought its mining hardware from the now-pivoted 21 Inc. (whose chief executive appeared onstage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt con-ference in San Francisco last week). Johnson, herself is a huge proponent of the digital currency and has mined roughly 200,000 satoshis, according to the FT report. Beyond the firm’s internal work, it’s also now making cryptocurrency balances visible on the Fidelity website for customers that hold an account with Coinbase — one of the world’s biggest trading and storage service providers for the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin is now trading at around $4,200 coming off of a few recent price shocks related to a regulatory crackdown in China on cryptocurrencies. Fidelity becomes one of the largest financial services firm to speak publicly about its cryptocurrency operations, even as most of the large banks have begun experimenting with bitcoin, ethereum and other blockchain-based protocols internally.

Indeed, even as J.P. Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon was publicly decrying Bitcoin on CNBC, his company’s traders were buying shares of an exchange traded fund that tracks cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, James Gorman, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, said that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were certainly “more than just a fad.” Applications for blockchain technologies extend far beyond financial services, but the hope of return from investing bitcoin as a speculative store of value has been at the heart of the boom in cryptocurrencies for at least the past two years. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/28/fidelity-ceo-abigail-johnson-says-the-company-is-mining-cryptocurrencies/

29 September 2017, South Korea Bans All New Cryptocurrency Sales

South Korea's financial regulator on Friday said it will ban raising money through virtual currencies

The move follows similar restrictions in China on initial coin offerings

South Korea's financial regulator on Friday said it will ban raising money through all forms of virtual currencies, a move that follows similar restrictions in China on initial coin offerings. The Financial Services Commission said all kinds of initial coin offerings (ICO) will be banned as trading of virtual currencies needs to be tightly controlled and monitored.

"Raising funds through ICOs seem to be on the rise globally, and our assessment is that ICOs are increasing in South Korea as well," the regulator said in a statement after a meeting with the finance ministry, the Bank of Korea and the National Tax Service.

"Stern penalties" will be issued on financial institutions and any parties involved in issuing of ICOs, the statement added, without elaborating further on the details of those penalties.

The decision to ban ICOs as a fundraising tool was made as the government sees such issues as increasing the risk of financial scams. The decision tracks similar announcements in the U.S. and China where increasing trading volumes of cryptocurrencies are sparking concerns.

It added Friday's announcement doesn't mean the government has implicitly accepted trading of virtual currencies as part of its financial system, and will continue to monitor markets to see additional regulations are needed. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/28/south-korea-bans-all-new-cryptocurrency-sales.html

9 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Cyber Attacks

28 September 2017, Intelligence Experts Say Cyber-Thieves, Nation-State Hackers Teaming Up

NEWS ANALYSIS: Imagine a world where state-sponsored hackers team up with financial criminals to use ever more sophisticated tools to break in to your network and steal your data.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Three members of the intelligence community, speaking on the keynote panel at the NetEvents Global Press and Analyst Summit here, agree that the security landscape today is rapidly becoming a scarier than ever. That’s because today's hackers have become more skilled and technologically reactive than what security professionals were used to dealing with in years past.

The most prevalent group of cyber-attackers are those motivated by financial gain, explained MK Palmore, supervisory Special Agent, and the Information Security Risk Management Executive for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's San Francisco field office.

“They’re mostly males, 14 to 32 years old, have access to the dark web, and are able to operate in nearly complete anonymity,” Palmore said. He said that a group that’s nearly as big are hackers working on behalf of a nation state. What’s most concerning is that they’re teaming up. “We’re seeing a combination of financial and nation state actors forming super teams.”

This is a change from days when hackers operated in isolation, explained Dr. Ronald Layton, Deputy Assistant Director, U.S. Secret Service. “Now, these guys all know each other, they all are collaborative, and they communicate in Russian. “

Layton said that by working together, the groups are able to combine the virtually unlimited assets of a nation state with the sophistication of the best financial hackers.

The problem then becomes what to do about these new hackers? The first step, according to retired Deputy Director of the Department of Homeland Security and the founder of the Center for Information Security Awareness Michael Levin, is to train and educate the potential victim’s workforce. “So many of the hacks we see are the result of simple human error,” Levin explained.

Levin said that the source of those errors is primarily due to organizations that don’t want to take the time to tell their employees what they should or should not do. “How do we get them to not be lazy?” he wondered. “It’s time that we educate people to stop doing bad practices.”

Layton agreed. “We pay a lot of attention to what the bad guys will do to further their illicit game,” he said. But there’s more to it than that. “The new caffeine is curiosity. That’s what makes you click on that post, or text and drive. That’s why spearphishing is so popular. “ Layton said that a major percentage of the malware he sees comes from clicking on links and attachments.

Layton acknowledged that most businesses know that their employees need to be trained not to engage in such risky behavior, but he said that getting them to implement change is very difficult.

Palmore agreed, pointing out that motivating business remains a problem, “This message while simplistic is not being followed by business,” he said. “When you go through information security training, there are basics you are taught about protecting systems. We always find that there’s some gap in coverage in security. Those gaps may be patch management, audit and log management or buy-in from leadership and management.”

10 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

In addition, “you need to empower folks to get the

job done,” Palmore said and noted that awareness

does not equal behavioral change.

Palmore also said that if there was one security

change that organizations could implement that

would significantly reduce the exposure to hacking,

it’s two-factor authentication. “Two-factor

authentication is an obstacle to threat actors,” he

said. It won’t necessarily prevent them from

accomplishing their mission, but it could discourage

them enough that “they will move to a target that is

easier to breach,” he said.

He also said that simply following good security

practices will have a similar effect, which is to

convince the hackers to try elsewhere.

Levin said that the hackers are going to attack the low

-hanging fruit first. “They’re going to look for the

open door first.” He said that the first thing to do is

get organizations to lock their doors against

cyber-threats. He said that this includes getting rid of

easy to guess passwords, such as “Password1234,”

which he said must be the most common password in

use.

Unfortunately, threats are continuing to evolve. “The

ability for threat actors to go into the dark web allows

for a level of activity that we have not seen

historically,” Palmore explained. “Now what we look

at in terms of organized crime, anonymity,

completely changes the landscape.”

Fortunately, there are things organizations can do to

help protect themselves against today's more

sophisticated hackers and first on the list is

encryption, said Levin. It’s critical for organizations to

encrypt their customers’ data, along with the data

they use in their everyday communications, he said.

The encryption of emails is also very important, since

without encryption, you might as well put sensitive

information on a post card when you mail it.

Fortunately, he said that it’s possible to find email

systems that will automatically encrypt your email.

But Layton cautioned against using encryption that’s

too complex. “As complexity goes up, security goes

down,” he said. The reason is that when security gets

too hard to use, people will tend to stop using it.

So how to make sure your organization is taking all of

the steps required to maintain security, including

searching out security holes? “This is what the CISO is

there for,” Layton said. “This is his job.”

Unfortunately, as evidenced by recent breaches,

including the one that resulted in 143 million records

being stolen at Equifax, the CISO doesn’t always to

the job they’re hired to do.

Source: http://www.eweek.com/security/intelligence

-experts-say-cyber-thieves-nation-state-hackers-

teaming-up

11 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Drones

29 September 2017, Brain-Controlled Drones are Here. What’s Coming in the Next Five Years?

Panagiotis Artemiadis, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Arizona State University, with two drones in his Human-Oriented Robotics and Control (HORC) Lab at the ASU Tempe campus.

Newswise — Single unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) directed by joysticks, radio controllers, and mobile phones are already accomplishing a variety of useful tasks, such as aerial photography and security patrols. But using multiple drones requires multiple human operators, and this presents a coordination problem.

Now a single operator using emerging human-brain interfaces can control a swarm of drones, making possible new classes of applications, according to Panos Artemiadis, director of the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control (HORC) Lab at Arizona State University. Artemiadis is available to discuss how drone swarms using human-brain interface mechanisms will, in the next three to five years, make inroads where individually controlled UAVs cannot. Here are a few of the drone applications that are now within reach:

Search and Rescue Missions

Humans will collaborate with swarms of robots in search and rescue scenarios. The brain-robot interface enables control of many robots at the same time, and it scales the ability of a robotic team to cover larger areas in less time. If the controller detects something in the video stream that warrants closer surveillance, the swarm can be directed to

close in on that area.

Fire Fighting

Armed with infrared imaging equipment, a drone swarm can be used to track the spread of a forest fire over large areas in real time, allowing firefighters to adjust their plans accordingly. The human controller can follow a reported change in weather conditions, such as a shift in wind direction, with a swarm of drones to determine if the fire has jumped to a new area.

Agriculture Analysis

Teams of drones will oversee and analyze large agricultural fields – creating topographic maps for soil analysis and irrigation planning. In addition to being outfitted with cameras, aerial drones will use sensors to identify necessary irrigation adjustments and scanners that can identify crop infections or infestations. Some drone systems are already being used for crop spraying – swarms will be able to accomplish the task more quickly and efficiently.

Entertainment

As drones enter the entertainment arena, we will begin to see mind-controlled drone swarms for events. For example, a single person could operate a fleet of drones shooting photos and videos at an out-door concert or sports venue, narrowing in on spectator activities for display on the Jumbotron. And while Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl drones were controlled by a central computer (and filmed in advance of the show), smaller swarms can be managed by a single human for smaller light displays or to drop gifts (t-shirts or CDs, for example) into a crowd.

Cyber-physical surveillance systems

Understanding brain-drone interfaces allows building cyber-physical surveillance systems that combine human intuition and experience with the sensing capabilities of multiple drones. This would allow more efficient and accurate surveillance systems than what is now available – especially for large, security sensitive events like bowl games, marathons and political rallies.

Source: http://news.opera-api.com/news/detail/2b1bb3f2861bb2468c3915274bc74693_us

12 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

27 September 2017, This Chinese Drone Can Take

Off and Land on Water

A Chinese company is pushing the boundaries of what

drones can do out over the sea.

Shanghai UVS Intelligence System is set to become the first company in the world to bring to market a commercial drone that's able to take off and land on water. It says the roughly 20-foot long unmanned seaplane, known as the U650, could be used by businesses and the military. The U650 drones should be rolling off factory production lines in Shanghai by the end of the year, a company spokeswoman told CNNMoney. That would put UVS ahead of other firms that have developed amphibious drones but haven't yet moved beyond prototypes into production, according to analysts. The U650 can stay in the air for up to 15 hours, flying as far as 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles), according to the company. But heavy cargoes will reduce those numbers. UVS sees delivery firms as one set of potential customers. Like Amazon (AMZN, Tech30) in the U.S., Chinese e-

commerce companies like JD.com (JD) are

aggressively pursuing the use of drones in their sup-

ply chains.

UVS Intelligence System said it has contracts with

several clients, but would not disclose further details.

The U650 can carry up to 550 pounds of cargo, but it

will face limits on where exactly it can go.

Because of its size, the new drone won't be able to fly

in the same airspace as manned aircraft, which will

"restrict a lot of potential use," said Kelvin Wong, an

analyst with research firm IHS Markit.

The U650 may also appeal to the Chinese

government, which has been building up man-made

islands in disputed areas of the South China Sea.

The drones would be able to carry out surveillance

and deliver supplies, which "comes in handy because

you don't have a lot of runway in those

environments," Wong said.

YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/nyh1altmzPY

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/

technology/china-amphibious-drone/index.html

13 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Genetic Engineering

The wings of a painted lady butterfly (left) compared to mutants generated with Crispr-CAS, a gene editing technique (right)

18 September 2017, Genes Color a Butterfly’s Wings. Now Scientists Want to Do It Themselves.

Only nature can paint the gorgeous colors and patterns on a butterfly’s wings. But scientists said on Monday that they have mastered the first steps and hope in time to control the entire coloring system, making it possible to design living butterfly wings.

The patterning and colors on butterflies’ wings are governed by suites of genes. The new Crispr-Cas gene-editing technique now makes it much easier to figure out what a gene does by deleting it and seeing what happens.

Two teams of biologists report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have used the technique to explore the roles of two master genes that control the appearance of a butterfly’s wings.

A group led by Linlin Zhang and Robert D. Reed of Cornell University has found that a gene called optix has a remarkable role: It controls all the color in a butterfly’s wing. When optix is deleted from the Gulf fritillary’s eggs, the resulting adult butterflies, which are mostly deep brown, wear a ghostly black and silver livery.

A closer view of painted lady butterfly wings. A normal specimen (top) compared with a mutant with a deactivated WntA gene (bottom)

That’s because in the absence of the optix gene, the butterfly’s scales produce melanin, a black pigment, instead of the usual chestnut coloring.

The biologists had already suspected that optix played a role in activating the butterfly’s brown pigment. But they were surprised that the black pigment was turned on in the absence of optix.

A further surprise came when they turned off the optix gene in a second species, the buckeye. The butterfly’s usual browns and yellows disappeared, replaced by scales of a blazing iridescent blue. “That knocked our socks off,” Dr. Reed said.

A second group, led by Anyi Mazo-Vargas of Cornell University and Arnaud Martin of George Washington University, has explored the role of a gene called WntA, which plays a powerful role in the patterning of butterflies’ wings.

The standard pattern of nymphalid butterflies, a 90-million-year-old family of some 6,000 different species, consists of four bands, parallel to the body, that run between it and the edge of the wings. The second band, called the central symmetry system, contains the pattern in the middle of the wings, and the third band holds the eye spots.

A sara longwing butterfly with normal wing patterns

(left) compared with a genetically altered specimen

(right)

Dr. Martin’s team found that when they delete the WntA gene with the Crispr technique, the central symmetry system band disappears entirely from the wings of the speckled wood and buckeye butterflies.

14 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

But in other species, the loss of WntA has very

different effects, suggesting that the gene has been

adapted many times to play different patterning roles

as new butterfly species evolved.

In the monarch butterfly, for instance, loss of WntA

affects an almost invisible white line that edges the

distinctive black lines that delineate the wing’s veins.

In the absence of WntA, the white lines expand into

the areas between the veins, replacing the distinctive

orange pigment.

The WntA gene becomes active in the caterpillar

stage, impressing its patterning information on the

embryonic wing structures. Dr. Martin sees the WntA

gene as a sketching tool that defines the outline of

the wing design, and the optix gene studied by Dr.

Reed’s group as a “paintbrush” gene that fills in the

color.

Dr. Reed hopes in time to understand the patterning

mechanism so well that he will be able to recreate

the pattern of one butterfly’s wings on those of a

second species. But understanding butterfly wing

patterning is just a step toward addressing larger

questions in evolutionary biology.

A speckled wood butterfly (left) compared with a

mutant lacking the WntA gene

One is the knotty question of how the string of

information in a DNA molecule specifies the 3-D

structures of the body. The butterfly wing presents

this problem more tractably, in just two dimensions.

Another is that of how species evolve different forms.

The work of these two groups shows that genes like

WntA and optix — master genes that control the

activity of other genes — can evolve very different

roles in different species.

The nymphalid butterflies use WntA one way, the

monarch for a quite another. The optix gene controls

specialized wing scales in moths, but when butterflies

evolved it somehow recruited a quite different set of

servant genes, ones involved in generating pigment,

not scale type.

“A big question in evolutionary biology is how do

you rewire these gene networks,” Dr. Reed said.

Both Dr. Reed and Dr. Martin are enthralled by the

ease and power of the Crispr gene-editing tool,

invented in 2012. Before, they could infer what a

gene might do but couldn’t prove it.

With Crispr, they can manipulate any gene of choice

inside an egg and see exactly what it does.

“These are experiments we could only have dreamed

of years ago,” Dr. Reed said. “The most challenging

task in my career has become an undergraduate

project overnight.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/

science/butterfly-wing-color-patterns-gene-

editing.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%

2FGenetic%

20Engineer-

ing&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=

stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&conte

ntPlacement=1&pgtype=collection

15 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Hacking

30 September 2017, Hackers Find Exploit Through SS7 SMS 2FA to Empty Bitcoin Wallets

Hackers exploit an age-old vulnerability in the legacy communication system to compromise Gmail's 2FA and access the associated Coinbase account.

Imagine using a highly touted security feature, only to see it backfire in the most spectacular way, causing you to lose more than just time but also money. Now imagine it happening to a Bitcoin wallet that you’ve carefully guarded for the past few months or years. It surely isn’t a pleasant thought.

More than just a scary thought experiment, the above is actually a very real threat for many owners of Bitcoin wallets. Basically, anyone who has enabled two-factor authentication through SMS can be robbed of their bitcoins. and all it takes is some basic personal info.

The flaw lies in the public switched telephone network, or PSTN, where a certain part of the established protocol called Signaling System No. 7 can be exploited to intercept any incoming SMS anytime and anywhere.

Though it has been a known phone network exploit for quite some time now, it still hasn’t been remedied. And so, security researchers and hackers alike have access to it as a go-to method of violating people’s privacy and exposing them to all kinds of trouble.

Recently, researchers from Positive Technologies, a Russian security firm, were able to use the SS7 exploit to snag control of a bitcoin wallet on Coinbase (by compromising 2FA of associated Gmail account) and remove its contents. They put together a video with explanations, which you can watch here:

YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/mLh1Nmqa6OM

What they did here was just show the possibilities with such an exploit. And from the looks of it, as long as a hacker has access to a user’s first name, last name, and mobile phone number, then they’re good to go.

And the extent of the damage isn’t just limited to bitcoin wallets. In fact, hackers with knowledge of the exploit and access to a user’s personal information can also compromise money lying in active bank accounts. As the SS7 exploit has been known for quite a while, there have been many instances of it being applied in the real world over time, and an attack on bitcoin wallets is simply one of the latest ways to use the exploit.

So how can it be stopped? The truth is, you are only really vulnerable to it if you use a specific form of two-factor authentication. Since it works by intercepting SMS that is meant for a victim’s phone number, simply taking it out of the equation eliminates any threat of the SS7 exploit.

Alternatives to the use of two-factor SMS authentication include the use of apps like Google Authenticator, using two-factor email authentication, or just turning it off completely in favor of using other methods for security like better passwords and possibly even code numbers.

In any case, the responsibility of making sure that a bitcoin wallet remains safe from targeted attacks such as this one ultimately lies in the hands of the bitcoin wallet’s owner. If the SS7 exploit has stood for all the time that it has up to now, it’s unlikely to be fixed anytime soon. Source: http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/09/30/hackers-find-exploit-sms-two-factor-authentication-empty-bitcoin-wallets/

16 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Human Machine Co-Evolution

30 September 2017, The Observer View on The Future of Work – Observer Editorial

We must focus our energies on helping those whose jobs will be removed by automation

In his speech at Labour’s conference in Brighton last week, Jeremy Corbyn made an astute observation: “2017 may be the year when politics finally caught up with the crash of 2008.” The financial crisis not only sent shockwaves rippling through the global economy: it sounded a warning bell that all was not well with a weakly regulated economic model pow-ered by consumer debt bubbles and rapid house price growth. Yet the political response has been utterly inadequate. Despite promises to the contrary, we have returned to the same old growth model of debt-fuelled spending and the stark intergenerational divide has got worse, not better.

Almost a decade on, there are signs of a growing public appetite for change, from the rejection of the status quo in the Brexit referendum to the surge in support for Labour that denied Theresa May a majority in June’s general election. Both parties have acknowledged there are fundamental problems in Britain’s economic model and have committed to reform it. But Britain now stands on the cusp of an ideological choice: compare and contrast Corbyn’s challenge with May’s robust defence of free markets last week.

There is a range of social and economic challenges that will test that commitment to reform: how to cope with an ageing population; how to move to growth based more on investment than debt; how to come to a more equitable settlement between the

generations. One particularly important question is how we adapt to the challenges technology and automation pose for the future of work.

Much of the contemporary debate is underpinned by a misplaced assumption that the erosion of human work is nigh. This scenario has captured the human imagination for centuries, from the utopians who dream of a world filled with leisure to the dystopians who agonise about the rise of a “useless class”.

But the steady march of human progress has not yet eliminated the need for us to work. Instead, technological developments over the last two centuries have improved economic productivity and served to make us all richer. As some jobs have disappeared, others have replaced them; there are fewer manufacturing jobs in Britain today than there were 50 years ago, but there are many more service sector jobs. In 50 years’ time, there will undoubtedly be many more jobs created that use the human skills that will remain difficult to automate, such as empathy, care and creativity.

This is why labour market economists such as Alan Manning argue that the human race is unlikely to be on the cusp of a new technological revolution that will reduce human economic activity. Indeed, today’s labour market is showing none of the signs we would expect if automation was starting to erode the net amount of work. Productivity has fallen to pre-crisis levels, while overall employment is at record levels. If anything, British businesses are not investing in productivity-boosting technology fast enough. Future-gazing into a world with less work risks distracting us from the profound and unequal effects technology will continue to have on the way society is structured. At one end of the job market, it has created a new cadre of rewarding, high-skilled jobs in developing and maintaining this new technology. But technology has eroded the highly automatable semi-skilled jobs in the middle of the labour market, replacing them with low-skill jobs lacking autonomy. Skilled and bespoke workmanship has increasingly disappeared, replaced by Fordist assembly lines. Today, algorithms dictate to delivery couriers and warehousing workers exactly what route they should take round the city or the warehouse, eating away

17 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

at the autonomy of their job. Technology also

increases the potential for employers to constantly

monitor workers’ productivity levels, encouraging a

conception of workers as commodities to be swapped

in and out, rather than people to be trained and

developed.

Rather than debating the end of work, we should be

focusing on the real challenges technology is creating

today. First, the role of technology in deskilling low-

paid work raises serious questions about the “any job

is better than no job” mantra that has driven welfare-

to-work policy over the last two decades, particularly

in light of new research that suggests having a poor

quality job is worse for someone’s health than being

unemployed. While it’s right to expect people to work

if they can, they, in turn, should be entitled not to

have to work in conditions that cause them long-term

harm.

Second, there needs to be significant energy directed

at reskilling those whose jobs will be replaced by

robots. Here, there are critical lessons from the past.

The deindustrialization of the 1980s saw thousands of

people lose their manufacturing jobs, effectively

shunting them on to a human scrapheap, never to

work again, with devastating consequences for

themselves, their families and their communities.

For all the grandiose talk of reforming capitalism from

both parties, the contemporary political debate is

falling short. Neither party is thinking enough about

how we might improve the quality of work in the

low-paid labour market. Indeed, the Conservative

government’s flagship welfare-to-work programme

places very little emphasis on skills development. Its

cuts to social care funding are further worsening

working conditions in a growth industry of the future.

Far from making plans to retrain the losers of the

technology revolution, Conservative ministers have

almost destroyed the ecosystem for adult learning;

further education budgets have been slashed and the

numbers of part-time and mature university students

have fallen dramatically.

In contrast, Labor has placed a welcome emphasis on

adult skills, although there is as yet little detail on the

tough questions of exactly how a Labor government

would improve vocational learning and re-establish a

lifelong learning system. But there is a risk the party

falls into the seductive trap of imagining the end of

work. Shadow ministers have reportedly been flirting

with ideas such as a universal basic income, in which

all citizens get paid a basic income by the state, and a

tax on robots. Both are flawed responses to automa-

tion. Even if robots were to erode human work, a

universal basic income would be no solution: why

would their owners continue to pay the rest of us an

income when we lack the economic power that

comes from having a job? Ceding the ground of an

economic model based on the dignity of work and

humans producing stuff consumed by other humans

risks paving the way to extreme inequality. A tax on

automation would simply discourage investment in

the technological progress that improves living

standards.

Like those of the past, the next wave of technological

breakthrough is unlikely to eliminate the need for

work. Rather than putting a brake on the steady

march of human progress, our political leaders must

focus on ensuring there are as few losers as possible

in the coming decades. Otherwise, growing inequality

and social injustice will be its sorry byproducts.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/

commentisfree/2017/oct/01/observer-view-future-

work-automation#img-1

18 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Human Machine Interface

26 September 2017, Nerve-Stimulating Implants May Be the Next Level in Virtual Reality

In Brief: Palmer Luckey, a co-founder of Oculus, has recently expressed his desire to develop nerve-stimulating implants to make virtual reality experiences more immersive. He is just one of several innovators looking for ways to use technology to augment the human body.

Experimental Hardware

Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of virtual reality (VR) company Oculus, is exploring the use of nerve-stimulating implants to facilitate more immersive VR experiences. Speaking on adult VR content at a recent event, Luckey stated, “This is one of the things I’m experimenting with…virtual reality implants that are able to do stimulation into the nervous system to provide a sense of touch and to allow you to move around in virtual reality without actually moving.” Earlier this year, Luckey alluded to his work in this area on Twitter, venting his frustrations with finding medical professionals willing to implant experimental devices, noting that doing so was “really, really hard.”

Virtual Augmentation

Luckey isn’t the only innovator looking for ways to make VR experiences more immersive. We’ve seen elaborate setups to enhance mobility, along with peripherals to mimic environmental conditions such as wind and temperature. Some have even attempted to bring taste into the virtual world.

YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/KtT7OeDZxyA

Luckey’s implants would completely change how VR systems interact with our bodies, delivering an entirely new level of immersion, but plans to bring brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to fruition are even more ambitious. Elon Musk’s Neuralink and Bryan Johnson’s Kernel are two high-profile examples of brain computer interfaces that would give humans a type of superintelligence previously only seen in the realm of science fiction.

The research on these devices is in its infancy, so their full potential is still unknown. However, several immediate applications have already emerged, including the ability to help disabled persons gain greater mobility or augment the strength of laborers, allowing individuals to do more work in less time.

From healthcare to space exploration, implants could radically transform how humans navigate nearly every industry — a better experience in virtual reality is just the tip of the iceberg.

Source: https://futurism.com/nerve-stimulating-implants-may-be-the-next-level-in-virtual-reality/

19 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Machine Learning

26 September 2017, Machine Learning in the Digital Supply Chain Isn’t New Machine learning has become hot this year and suppliers are investing research and development into using machine learning in the supply chain. But in a conversation with Michael Farlekas and John Lash – the CEO and VP of Product Marketing at E2open - I was reminded of the fact that machine learning in the supply chain is not a new technology. Last year E2open acquired Terra Technology. Terra has been using machine learning to power their demand management and demand sensing applications since 2004. Their customers include Procter & Gamble, Unilever, General Mills and several other global, multinational consumer goods companies. For machine learning to work well, it needs to be a big data application. In this case in addition to doing forecasting based on historical sales, consumer goods companies leverage other data sets such as their retail customer’s point of sale, recent shipments of products from their warehouses to their stores, the retailer’s orders, syndicated data, and store inventory. Many of these data sets are accessed daily, or even several times a day, so the dynamic nature of demand is captured to a much higher degree than traditional forecasting techniques. E2open also acquired Orchestro last year. This is a demand signal repository solution which harmonizes retail Point of Sale (POS), syndicated, internal ERP, and 3rd party data into a common view of demand. In other words, the Orchestro solution makes it much easier to access demand sensing retail data sets. Machine learning for demand management works this way. The engine is making many forecasts simultaneously in different planning horizons. So, there can be a forecast for demand for liquid detergent in a 100-ounce container to the Walmart store in Tuscaloosa tomorrow, one week out, and one month out. There can also be a forecast for how much of that detergent will be needed at the distribution center in Cullman, Alabama tomorrow, one week, and one month from now. Other forecasts are being done for other big retail customers and channels. For the forecast of what is needed in the Tuscaloosa store tomorrow, it may be that the data source with the best predictive intelligence is point of sale and that a particular equation works best. For a forecast of how much of that detergent will be needed in the Cullman warehouse in a month, a different algorithm is used that weights the data sets such that the statistical forecast is most important, recent shipments the second most important; customer orders third, and so forth. Then every day, all of these forecasts at all locations and all time horizons are done again. When this was first explained to me a few years ago, my

reaction was “even if you can make all these forecasts, why would you? How could you operationalize this?” The answer is that different forecasts are used in different time horizons by different groups in the company. So, if a factory has a frozen two-week production schedule, and the new schedule starts on October 16th, the factory planner will use October 16ths aggregated forecast of all the products they need to produce for the next two weeks. All other forecasts are ignored until the next production run needs to begin, when they once again use the most recent forecast pertinent to their needs. But other departments use different forecasts in different time buckets. So, the transportation department might find it very helpful to know projected shipments to all the distribution centers next week to tune their private fleet plan. A sales director might look to use this week’s forecast on a product in short supply to all stores in New England to intelligently allocate the inventory between clients. It should also be pointed out, that the machine learning engine does not rest on its laurels. It continues to monitor the accuracy of all forecasts, continues to reweight which data sets are used, and which algorithms work best, at all locations in all time horizons. Mr. Farlekas says that E2open has strong evidence that the more humans are allowed to change forecasts, the worse those forecasts become. In short, this is a black box solution. This is, perhaps, why I had a hard time remembering that the E2opensolution was based on machine learning. Machine learning has only become sexy in the last year or two, before that the folks I talked to at the old Terra Technology seemed a bit reluctant to explain exactly how they did what they did, because “black box” solutions were definitely not sexy. The same dynamic is playing out in the supply planning area for the process manufacturing industry. A leading supplier recently explained to me how they use machine learning to solve a particular planning problem, but then asked me to keep that information confidential because solutions not based on “first principles” in that industry are considered inferior. They have been using this machine learning solution since 2002, but you would never know that from reading their website. One final point, the E2open solution is a productized solution. Mr. Farlekas said that their solution is “commercial grade, our customers don’t need data scientists and the solution does not require training.” However, as we begin to look at adding unstructured data sets to our demand models – like social media sentiment – it is a tough problem to analyze that data and transform it into ‘scored’ data that can be analyzed by the demand planning engine. I talked to Jeff Bodenstab, the VP of Marketing at the ToolsGroup, on this topic. They have just released a product called Social Sensing to solve this problem, but he admits it is early stage. They are just going through their first implementations right now. This data set will be most useful for new product introductions and promotions forecasting. In conclusion, machine learning is a hot new topic in the industry. But it’s not new. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2017/09/26/machine-learning-in-the-digital-supply-chain-isnt-new/2/#288430a2544e

20 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Malware

2 October 2017, Malware Mines Monero on

Vulnerable Servers

Security firm ESET has sounded the alarm about a

malware threat that has been very profitable for

threat actors since around May 2017: mining

cryptocurrency.

Exploiting Vulnerable Servers

According to We Live Security, a legitimate open

source Monero central processing unit (CPU) miner

called xmrig was released in May. Threat actors then

copied the code and made very few changes to

develop the malware. They added some hardcoded

command-line arguments representing the attacker’s

wallet address as well as the mining pool URL. The

fraudsters also shut down any other xmrig that may

have been running to eliminate competition for CPU

resources.

The threat actors then scanned the web for

unpatched servers vulnerable to CVE-2017-7269. This

vulnerability enables attackers to cause a buffer

overflow in the WebDAV service that is part of

Microsoft IIS version 6.0, the web server in Windows

Server 2003 R2.

Microsoft ceased supporting ISS in 2015, but an up-

date designed to stop WannaCry outbreaks was made

available in June 2017 for older systems. However, it

is impossible to ensure that all users will patch the

vulnerable servers because the automatic update

mechanism may not always work smoothly.

The payload in the malware is an alphanumeric string

that simply replaces the one that came with xmrig.

This string executes the miner rather than the calcula-

tor that is launched in the legitimate version.

Attacks Coming in Waves

As noted by SecurityWeek, attacks on these servers

seem to come in waves, possibly indicating that the

threat actors are regularly scanning for vulnerable

servers. These scans have been linked to two IP ad-

dresses located in an Amazon cloud.

At the end of August, the attack was still active, but

things slowed down greatly in the beginning of Sep-

tember. No new infections have been observed since

the beginning of the month. There is no persistence

method in the code and the cryptocurrency miner

botnet has been gradually losing worker machines.

Patching the vulnerable servers is the obvious mitiga-

tion here, but due to the age of the systems, users

may not be able to or know how.

Source: https://securityintelligence.com/news/

malware-mines-monero-on-vulnerable-servers/

21 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Nanotechnology

Schematic of a new catalyst made of copper nanoparticles that converts carbon dioxide to multicarbon products (ethylene, etha-nol, and propanol). At top left are transmission electron micro-scope images of the copper nanoparticles. The transformation of the nanoparticles from spheres to cube-like structures is key to keeping the energy input low for the reactions. Source: Dohyung Kim/Berkeley Lab

18 September 2017, Copper Catalyst Yields High Efficiency CO2-To-Fuels Conversion Critical role of nanoparticle transformation discovered Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a new electrocatalyst that can directly convert carbon dioxide into multicarbon fuels and alcohols using record-low inputs of energy. The work is the latest in a round of studies coming out of Berkeley Lab tackling the challenge of creating a clean chemical manufacturing system that can put carbon dioxide to good use. In the new study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by Berkeley Lab scientist Peidong Yang discovered that an electrocatalyst made up of copper nanoparticles provided the conditions necessary to break down carbon dioxide to form ethylene, ethanol, and propanol. All those products contain two to three carbon atoms, and all are considered high-value products in modern life. Ethylene is the basic ingredient used to make plastic films and bottles as well as polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipes. Ethanol, commonly made from biomass, has already established its place as a biofuel additive for gasoline. While propanol is a very effective fuel, it is currently too costly to manufacture to be used for that purpose. To gauge the energy efficiency of the catalyst, scientists consider the thermodynamic potential of products -- the amount of energy that can be gained in an electrochemical reaction -- and the amount of extra voltage needed above that thermodynamic potential to drive the reaction at sufficient reaction rates. That extra voltage is called the overpotential; the lower the overpotential, the more efficient the catalyst. "It is now quite common in this field to make catalysts that can

produce multicarbon products from CO2, but those processes typically operate at high overpotentials of 1 volt to attain appreciable amounts," said Yang, a senior faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division. "What we are reporting here is much more challenging. We discovered a catalyst for carbon dioxide reduction operating at high current density with a record low overpotential that is about 300 millivolts less than typical electrocatalysts." Cube-like copper catalyst The researchers characterized the electrocatalyst at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry using a combination of X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and scanning electron microscopy. The catalyst consisted of tightly packed copper spheres, each about 7 nanometers in diameter, layered on top of carbon paper in a densely packed manner. The researchers found that during the very early period of electrolysis, clusters of nanoparticles fused and transformed into cube-like nanostructures. The cube-like shapes ranged in size from 10 to 40 nanometers. "It is after this transition that the reactions to form multicarbon products are occurring," said study lead author Dohyung Kim, a graduate student in Berkeley Lab's Chemical Sciences Division and at UC Berkeley's Department of Materials Science and Engineering. "We tried to start off with pre-formed nanoscale copper cubes, but that did not yield significant amounts of multicarbon products. It is this real-time structural change from copper nanospheres to the cube-like structures that is facilitating the formation of multicarbon hydrocarbons and oxygenates." Exactly how that is happening is still unclear, said Yang, who is also a professor at UC Berkeley's Department of Materials Science and Engineering. "What we know is that this unique structure provides a beneficial chemical environment for CO2 conversion to multi-carbon products," he said. "The cube-like shapes and associated interface may be providing an ideal meeting place where the carbon dioxide, water, and electrons can come together." Many paths in the CO2-to-fuel journey This latest study exemplifies how carbon dioxide reduction has become an increasingly active area in energy research over the past several years. Instead of harnessing the sun's energy to convert carbon dioxide into plant food, artificial photosynthesis seeks to use the same starting ingredients to produce chemical precursors commonly used in synthetic products as well as fuels like ethanol. Researchers at Berkeley Lab have taken on various aspects of this challenge, such as controlling the product that comes out of the catalytic reactions. For instance, in 2016, a hybrid semi-conductor-bacteria system was developed for the production of acetate from CO2 and sunlight. Earlier this year, another research team used a photocatalyst to convert carbon dioxide almost exclusively to carbon monoxide. More recently, a new catalyst was reported for the effective production of synthesis gas mixtures, or syngas. Researchers have also worked on increasing the energy efficiency of carbon dioxide reduction so that systems can be scaled up for industrial use.

22 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

A recent paper led by Berkeley Lab researchers at the Joint

Center for Artificial Photosynthesis leverages fundamental

science to show how optimizing each component of an entire

system can accomplish the goal of solar-powered fuel

production with impressive rates of energy efficiency.

This new PNAS study focuses on the efficiency of the catalyst

rather than an entire system, but the researchers point out that

the catalyst can be hooked up to a variety of renewable energy

sources, including solar cells.

"By utilizing values already established for other components,

such as commercial solar cells and electrolyzers, we project

electricity-to-product and solar-to-product energy efficiencies up

to 24.1 and 4.3 percent for two-to-three carbon products,

respectively," said Kim.

Kim estimates that if this catalyst were incorporated into an

electrolyzer as part of a solar fuel system, a material only 10

square centimeters could produce about 1.3 grams of ethylene,

0.8 grams of ethanol, and 0.2 grams of propanol a day.

"With continued improvements in individual components of a

solar fuel system, those numbers should keep improving over

time," he said.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/

releases/2017/09/170918151710.htm

28 September 2017, Small Scale Energy Harvesters Show Large Scale Impact

The production of nano-scale devices has drastically increased with the rise in technological applications, yet a major drawback to the functionality of nano-sized systems is the need for an equally small energy resource.

To address this need, Hamid Foruzande, Ali Hajnayeb and Amin Yaghootian from the Shahid Charmran University of Ahvaz in Iran have been modeling new piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) technology at the nano-scale level. In their recent article, published this week in AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing, the

team determined how small-scale dimensions impact nonlinear vibrations and PEH voltage harvesting.

Piezoelectric materials generate electricity from the application of mechanical stress, and are utilized in everything from cell phones to ultrasonic transducers. This electricity can also be generated by vibration-induced stresses, allowing scientists to create PEHs. These PEHs can be miniaturized down to a micro- or nanosize and used in conjunction with nano-scale devices.

"Nowadays, the need for new miniaturized wireless sensors is growing. These MEMS [Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems] or NEMS [Nano-Electro Mechanical Systems] sensors usually require a power source of their size," Hajnayeb said.

Piezoelectric energy harvesting is a well-known process for converting energy available in an environment into energy that can power small electric devices. Traditionally, this has been used for generating a self-sufficient energy supply. Self-sufficiency is highly desirable for nano-scale devices due to the complicated nature of replacing small energy systems.

PEHs are gaining popularity for nano-scale applications due to their relatively simple structures, higher energy densities and ability to easily be scaled down. Macro-scale models have been extensively studied and provided a strong base point to produce nano-scale models. Foruzande, Hajnayeb and Yaghootian are taking advantage of these adaptable qualities and have generated nano-scale PEH models based on non-local elasticity theory.

"It's necessary to use this theory for other systems at nano-scale and also the sensors in nano-scale, which use piezoelectric materials," Hajnayeb said. "They have the same governing theory that we use in our article."

The research team studied nonlinear vibrations and voltage based on nonlocal elasticity theory, which states that a point stress is dependent on the strain in a region around that point. Using this theory, they could derive nonlinear equations of motion with straightforward solutions. Their results showed that adding a nanobeam tip mass and increasing the scale factor would increase the generated voltage and vibration amplitude, hence increasing energy output.

Modeling micro- and nano-scaled PEHs was also able to reveal just what impact size effects had on the output they could expect. The researchers found that the error of neglecting size is significant when comparing macro and micro PEHs. Neglecting various size effects resulted in lower estimations of PEH vibrations.

Nano-scale sensor technology is becoming a hot commodity in the scientific industry due to its expansive applications. With applications in medicine, engineering, physics and more, nano-technology has a lot to gain from the use of a stable energy source, such as these newly modeled PEHs. Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170928101245.htm

23 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Quantum Computing

26 September 2017, Microsoft’s New Coding Language Is Made For Quantum Computers

By the time the complex machines are ready, you might grasp the tech.

When one of the first personal computers, the Altair 8800 came along in 1976, Microsoft was ready with a programming language, Altair BASIC. It wants to be equally prepared when quantum computers go mainstream, so it has unveiled a new programming language and other tools for the futuristic tech at its Ignite conference. You'll still need to understand Qubits and other weird concepts, but by integrating traditional languages like C# and Python, Microsoft will make it easier to do mainstream computing on the complex machines. Quantum computing is famously difficult to grasp -- even IBM's "Beginner's Guide" is laughingly opaque. In discuss-ing Microsoft's new initiatives, Bill Gates called the physics "hieroglyphics," and when asked if he could describe it in one sentence, Satya Nadella said "I don't think so. I wish I could."

So, let's just talk about what it can do, then. By taking advantage of the principles of superposition and entanglement, quantum computers can solve certain types of problems exponentially faster than the best supercomputers. "It would allow scientists to do computations in minutes or hours that would take the lifetime of the universe on even the most advanced classical computers," Microsoft explains. "That, in turn, would mean that people could find answers to scientific questions previously thought unanswerable."

YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/cOUrzxyng04

Microsoft is effectively building a language for computers that don't really exist yet. The most advanced experi-mental machine, a 16/17 qubit model, was built by IBM and has run over 300,000 experiments. It's far from being ready for commercial applications, though. Big Blue re-cently unveiled an initiative to build commercial quantum computers called IBM Q, and has already released its own programming tools via an API called the IBM Quantum Experience.

Microsoft's programming language doesn't have a name yet, but the company already has plans for quantum com-puting in AI. In particular, it thinks that the machines could be used to train its Cortana digital assistant in days instead of months. "Even if everything else was the same, Cortana would improve 30 times faster," Microsoft's research chief Craig Mundie says.

To get quantum computing working more quickly, Mi-crosoft's star theoretical researcher, Michael Freedman (below), is trying to build both the hardware and software for a "topological quantum computer" (I'm not even going to try to explain that). To that aim, he has recruited "some of the world's preeminent condensed-matter and theoreti-cal physicists, materials scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists," Microsoft says.

Microsoft is also working on the computer itself, but to get programmers up to speed, it's releasing the programming tools for developers and computer scientists. "The same code that you're running today in simulation you can run tomorrow on our quantum computer," says quantum computing software lead Krysta Svore.

Individual users can simulate problems that require up to 30 logical qubits, while enterprise customers get 40 qubits of power (the more qubits, the faster the machine). "Developers without quantum expertise can actually call quantum subroutines, or write sequences of programming instructions, working up to writing a complete quantum program," Microsoft says.

It might be awhile before commercials computers are ready, as they currently require near-absolute zero tem-peratures to remain in a stable state. Considering how tough it is to wrap your head around the concepts, howev-er, you may need the time. If you're interested in trying the new quantum computing language, you can sign up here.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/26/microsoft-new-coding-language-is-made-for-quantum-computers/

24 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Robotics

19 September 2017, Technology in the Classroom: Robots Could Replace Teachers in 10 Years Classroom teaching will primarily be handled by adaptable robots rather than humans within 10 years and will alter human life as we know it in the process.

That is the prediction of historian Sir Anthony Seldon, vice chancellor of the University of Buckingham in the U.K., which he made at the recent British Science Festival and is contained in an upcoming book called The Fourth Science Revolution.

While each child will wind up with the best teachers and receive a first-class education according to his forecast, Seldon seemed to be at least partially conflicted about the revolutionary role of artificial intelligence in day-to-day learning, the Daily Mail explained. [Seldon] explained that in the new AI classrooms, each child will progress at his or her own pace. There will be no more set courses applicable to all students as teaching, carried out by emotionally sensitive machines, will become highly personalized. Asked if he was suggesting machines would replace the inspirational role of teachers, he said: ‘I’m desper-ately sad about this but I’m afraid I am.’

Traditional human teachers will function as low-level wingmen or women to robots, he suggested, serving as little more than classroom assistants who set up

equipment, help kids with certain low-level tasks, or maintaining discipline, he added. AI technology poses broad implications for society, he cautioned, because individuals derive a great deal of fulfillment from their jobs and that humans are hard-wired to work. With that in mind, a study by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers claims that robots and artificial intelligence could take over two of every five jobs in America within about the next 15 years. The results also suggest that technology will displace both white-collar and blue-collar workers, which could push wages downward and add to the unem-ployment rolls. There has already been a lot of discussion about how automation, such as the rollout of self-service kiosks, might reduce headcount in the fast-food industry. (Related: Read more about artificial intelligence at Robotics.news.) As an aside, the disciplinary function alluded to above could be a full-time job/career depending upon the school district concerned. All is not sanguine of the AI front, however, in the U.K. For example, two British professors have ominously warned that robots are similar to an invasive species because of their increasing ability to make conscious decisions and to eventually out-compete humans in many ways. Separately, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has also sounded the alarm about the risks to the human race posed by rapidly advancing progress in AI. Back in 2015, Health Ranger Mike Adams, the founder of Natural News, warned that once AI technology develops into highly evolved, self-aware, self-replicating systems, the human race has a big Terminator problem on is hands.

Source: http://www.robotics.news/2017-09-19-technology-in-the-classroom-robots-could-replace-teachers-in-10-years.html

25 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

14 September 2017, Blame the Victim Strategy Reaches Corporate Level: Deutsche Bank Plans to Replace Much of Workforce with Robots, Because They Act Like Robots Anyway One of the world’s biggest banks, Deutsche Bank, has announced that it will be replacing a significant portion of its workforce with robots. The financial institution, which is based in Frankfurt, Germany, employs more than 100,000 people. It is not known exactly how many people will be laid off or when, but CEO John Cryan said that the layoffs would involve a “big number” of people. Cryan won’t be winning any favor with those who will lose their jobs, and those that are keeping their jobs will probably look at him a little differently, too, after some of his comments seemed to indicate a blasé attitude toward so many people losing their liveli-hoods. In addition to boasting that the move toward automation was part of the firm’s “revolutionary spir-it,” he also said that accountants there “spend a lot of the time basically being an abacus.”

“In our banks, we have people behaving like robots doing mechanical things. Tomorrow we’re going to have robots behaving like people,” said Cryan, who became the company’s CEO in June 2015. He is in the midst of carrying out a five-year restructuring plan that has been impacting workers’ structures and bonuses.

In some cases, however, robots will be given tasks that can easily be automated and the human workers will be given more interesting work, such as analyzing numbers rather than merely producing them. Cryan gave the example of an accountant spending three to four weeks producing a single account before moving onto the next one. He suggested that using machines to produce these numbers in just a few hours would free up accountants to form opinions about what the numbers mean and take on more complex and stimu-

lating tasks. Of course, this won’t apply to all or even most positions because he clearly stated his intent to give a “big number” of workers their walking papers.

Banks in trouble

These days, cutting costs is one of the few remaining ways that banks can increase their profits as credit demand and interest rates have been staying low. Cryan is hoping to bring Deutsche Bank’s cost-to-revenue ratio down to 65 percent by 2020; last quar-ter it reached 86 percent. Cutting 15,000 jobs is a cru-cial part of his plan to turn things around at the bank.

Deutsche Bank could be looking to imitate the suc-cess of Swedish banks, which have efficiency ratios of 50 percent on average and are some of the most profitable lenders in Europe. Their technological pro-ficiency is a huge part of their success, and they’ve been using customer service virtual assistant robots that have female voices that can help people solve many common issues and answer questions.

Robots taking over broad range of jobs

Deutsche Bank workers are not alone; a study by Citi Research and Oxford Martin School revealed that two thirds of American retail jobs have a high risk of disappearing by the year 2030. Autonomous vehicles are set to take over package delivery and inventory tasks in warehouses, while self-checkout lanes are replacing cashiers. After Amazon’s recent takeover of Whole Foods, many workers at the grocery chain are worried their jobs will be lost to robots in keeping with Amazon’s enthusiasm for this approach.

Meanwhile, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, has warned Brits that robots could threaten as many as 15 million British jobs, not only low-skilled roles but also skilled jobs like clerical, pro-duction and administrative tasks.

One can only hope that this won’t go too far. After all, if robots leave droves of people unemployed, no one will have the money to spend on the goods and services they are helping to produce.

Source: http://www.robotics.news/2017-09-14-blame-the-victim-strategy-reaches-corporate-level-deutsche-bank-plans-to-replace-much-of-workforce-with-robots-because-they-act-like-robots-anyway.html

26 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

Sonic Weapon

16 September 2017, Weaponizing Sound: Could Sonic Devices Have Injured Diplomats In Cuba? Scientists still have a big mystery to solve

A mysterious illness has been striking people associated with the US Embassy in Cuba — and a secret sonic weapon is rumored to be the source. Over the past year, diplomats in Cuba have experienced an unusual collection of symptoms that range from hearing loss, vertigo, and nausea to concussions, CBS News reported.

Yesterday, the mystery grew even more complex when the Associated Press reported that the number of US victims has climbed to 21 people. Canadian diplomatic households were affected as well, the AP says. The Cuban government has denied involvement, and no “piece of equipment” that might be causing the symptoms has been discovered yet, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert told reporters.

That could be because a weapon that covertly uses sound ener-gy to injure people doesn’t actually exist, experts say. “It sounds very appealing and interesting, but I find it hard to believe that there actually is such a device,” says hearing expert John Oghalai, Chair of the Caruso Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Southern California.

The weapons known to use sound — like Flash Bang grenades or the sound cannons used against protesters, for example — are loud, obvious, and have immediate effects. No one could de-scribe these noisy devices as covert. “Obviously, we don’t know what any of the investigators have in terms of narrowing it down to say that it’s an acoustic weapon,” says James Jauchem, a retired scientist who previously investigated the biological effects of acoustic energy for the Air Force Research Laboratory. “I’d be highly skeptical of the reports.”

WHAT’S A SONIC WEAPON?

Early reports blamed a sound weapon for the attacks — but based on what we know, it seems unlikely that a sound weapon was used. Nauert told reporters that people including US government employees began experiencing “some kind of symptoms” starting in December 2016. The most recent report-ed incident, she said, was in late August. Nauert has not confirmed what the specific symptoms are, or said more about

the “incidents” that caused them, beyond calling the situation “dangerous.”

News reports are a little more detailed: some of these incidents might have been attacks with a covert sound weapon that “operated outside the range of audible sound and had been deployed either inside or outside their residences,” the Associated Press claimed, based on the statements of unnamed US officials. Other attacks may have produced a loud buzzing or scraping noise, anonymous government sources told CNN. On Thursday, the APadded that these incidents may have happened at night, when victims felt vibrations or heard ringing noises near their beds at home, and, reportedly, at a hotel. However, others who experienced symptoms don’t remember hearing or feeling anything out of the ordinary, the AP says.

Silence would be unusual for a weapon that uses sound energy to disorient, incapacitate, or deter people. In theory, a sonic weapon could do this by causing ear pain, by making a person dizzy, or by vibrating a person’s insides at a frequency that could “stun them, nauseate them, ‘or even liquefy their bowels and reduce them to quivering diarrheic messes,’” as one journalist wrote in the 1990s.

In reality, sonic weapons are much less sophisticated than the hype, and they involve significantly less diarrhea. They work by being noisy and obnoxious — which means that the crudest sonic weapon is loud music. In 1989, for instance, US forces unleashed a barrage of Black Sabbath and Guns N’ Roses to drive Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriegaout of hiding. In 1993, the FBI tried the same trick — blasting recordings of dying rabbits and Tibetan prayer chants in an effort to end a standoff with the Texas-based religious group, the Branch Davidians. (The attempt didn’t work.) Loud music has also been used to torture detainees at Guantanamo.

The Department of Defense’s list of non-lethal weapons includes ones specifically designed to use sound — but these work by loudly startling their targets, not by subtly causing major health complications. The flash bang grenade, for example, uses a bright flash of light and a loud bang to stun its victims.

The list also includes so-called acoustic hailing devices that can project both verbal commands and earsplitting beams of noise through the air (or underwater). One such device is called the Long Range Acoustic Device or LRAD, a sound cannon that can “send messages, warnings, and harmful, pain-inducing tones over longer distances than normal loudspeakers.” If fired too close to its targets, the LRAD can cause ear pain and long term hearing loss, according to the 2009 book ‘Non-Lethal’ Weapons. The New York Police Department faced a lawsuit for unleashing the LRAD on protesters and journalists in 2014.

Of course, the potential to cause deafness is a major design flaw for a sound weapon. Why? “[I]t can be expected that the weapon will cease to work if the victim quickly becomes permanently deaf from exposure to high intensity sound,” according to a report prepared for the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center.

27 UNCLASSIFIED

UNCLASSIFIED

TechWatch 11 October 2017

SILENT AND NON-DEADLY?

There are certain sounds that humans just can’t hear. Dog whistles, which are too high pitched for the human ear, are in the ultrasonic range. The rumbles of earthquakes, which are too low pitched for us to hear, fall in the infrasonic range. But for a sound weapon to cause hearing loss, “You have to actually hear it,” Oghalai says.

Hearing loss is only one of the symptoms that the diplomats are reportedly experiencing — could ultrasound or infrasound cause dizziness, nausea, or brain damage? “There’s not that much evidence there at those frequency ranges about how it impacts human health,” says Nandini Iyer, a research audiologist with the Air Force Research Laboratory. “We’re just as intrigued as you are,” she adds.

To be clear, ultrasound can affect the human body — but only if the device generating those ultrasonic waves is pressed right up against it. Doctors use ultrasound for medical imaging, for example. And ultrasonic sound waves can heat up tissue, according to that Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center report. However, the report adds, “In air and water, the power of ultrasound rapidly falls off with distance.”

“It would be difficult to come up with any way to produce a weapon of that kind,” Jauchem says. Not even rodents are bothered by pest control devices that promise to scare animals away with irritating ultrasonic noise — and unlike us, mice can actually hear those high pitched sounds. So an ultrasonic weapon that works against people is even less likely.

Jauchem’s research focused on the other end of the spectrum: infrasound. His own experiments showed that two minipigs weren’t put off their cracked corn during stints in a chamber resonating with infrasonic waves. Monkeys weren’t bothered by it either. After digging through decades of literature in the field, Jauchem concluded that infrasonic weapons are impractical.

While there’s speculation that infrasound might be able to vibrate the body’s organs or inner ear to cause pain, vertigo, and nausea, “These are things that haven’t been proven,” Jauchem says. “There’s a lot of overhype in terms of the possible effects.”

OCCAM’S RAZOR

A much more likely explanation for the symptoms is some kind of chemical exposure, Oghalai says. “That’s a lot more simple.”

Chemicals known to damage hearing include heavy metals like mercury and lead, as well as some industrial solvents used to make rubbers and plastics, according to the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine’s task force on occupational hearing loss.

Illnesses can also cause sudden hearing loss. Respiratory and ear infections, for example, can sometimes lead to inner ear inflammation called labyrinthitis. The symptoms of labyrinthitis should sound familiar: vertigo, hearing loss, bad balance, nausea, and ringing in the ears — all symptoms the diplomats are said to have experienced. The measles, mumps, West Nile, and Zika viruses have been linked to some degree of

deafness — as have medications, like certain antibiotics, aspirin in excessive amounts, and some diuretics.

It certainly would be wild for the existence of an extraordinary new sonic weapon to be discovered, but so far it seems improb-able. It’s hard to jump to the strangest and most fantastical con-clusion when there may be other plausible explanations out there. But for now, scientists still have a big mystery to solve.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/16/16316048/sonic-weapon-cuba-us-canadian-diplomats-ultrasound-infrasound-science

About This Publication

The appearance of external hyperlinks in this

publication does not constitute endorsement by the

United States Special Operations Command

(USSOCOM) or the Department of Defense (DoD) of

the linked websites, nor the information, products

or services contained therein. In addition, the

content featured does not reflect USSOCOM’s or

DoD’s views or priorities.

TechWatch Sign Up

Anyone interested in receiving the TechWatch, sign

up on the below website to agree that their names

will appear on an open distribution. We have to do

this in writing to ensure you have given your

permission to be included in this email distribution.

https://websults.wufoo.com/forms/donovan-group

-and-sofwerx-open-collaboration-list/