BRICS countries to create smartphone payment system to cut dependence on West

RT 

The five major emerging economies - Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa - are developing a joint new payment system called BRICS Pay, the Russian media has reported.

BRICS countries want to create a special online wallet to integrate the payment systems of its five member states, Izvestia said on Friday citing the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF). Russia's wealth fund is reportedly working on the project alongside its partners from China and India, who have the necessary technologies to launch the system.

The service will be similar to existing Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, allowing users to pay with a smartphone app no matter what currency the customer's account is linked to. A special cloud platform is to be created to link BRICS countries' national payment systems. 

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The Pentagon wants smartphones to recognize people by their gait

futurism

Foot Recognition Software

 

The U.S. military is developing technology that would use a smartphone’s built-in sensors to recognize how you walk or other subtle biofeedback.

In about two months, the Department of Defense will finish testing a system that will sign people into their smartphones if the phone recognizes them based on their gait, typing patterns, grip, or other physical characteristics that the phone’s hardware can pick up, according to The Washington Post.

Global Posturing System

 

If all goes well, the technology could roll out to most U.S. phones within the next two years.
“Our focus from the start was something usable at the commercial level,” Steven Wallace, a scientist at the Pentagon’s Defense Information Systems Agency told Post.

Wallace cited past developments, like the GPS and the internet, that started as military research projects and then spread out to the rest of society.

“I’m not going to say that we’re going to create something that’s as broad and as grand as GPS or the Internet, but there’s a history of the department working on things and those things ending up in consumer devices,” Wallace told the Post.

Personal Security

 

The tech under development at the Pentagon is different from China’s gait-based surveillance system. Instead of monitoring people, it’s supposed to add an extra, low-cost layer of security to government officials’ phones.

If a phone detects that too many different things — how a user walks, how they grab their phone out of their pocket or bag, how they hold it while they type — are different from normal, then it will lock. That way, people can still use their phone like normal, but someone else won’t be able to pick it up and see personal information if the phone ever gets left behind. 

READ MORE: The Cybersecurity 202: Your phone could soon recognize you based on how you move or walk [The Washington Post]

More on cybersecurity: Secret UAE Spy Team Used “Cyber Super-Weapon” to Hack any iPhone

Radiation From Smartphones May Impair Memory In Teens - Study Finds

studyfinds.org

BASEL, Switzerland — Don’t want your child to have a cellphone? One recent study gives you good reason to make kids wait as long as possible for their first mobile device: it appears that radiation from phones can hurt a teenager’s memory.

A research team at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute says that radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) may negatively affect an adolescent’s brain from cellphone exposure, causing potentially harmful effects on his or her memory performance. The authors say having the device close to one’s head lead to the greatest amount of radiation exposure.

The researchers studied nearly 700 public school students in Switzerland between ages 12 and 17. They examined how RF-EMF exposure from mobile phones over a year’s time affected memory in the adolescents, and found that memory processed and stored in the right brain hemisphere was particularly worsened. It’s believed that participants primarily held the phone up to the right side of their heads when talking, which likely led to the right hemisphere impairment.

“This may suggest that indeed RF-EMF absorbed by the brain is responsible for the observed associations.” says Martin Röösli, Head of Environmental Exposures and Health at Swiss TPH, in a statement. “A unique feature of this study is the use of objectively collected mobile phone user data from mobile phone operators.”

But Röösli couldn’t rule out that puberty and other external factors may also have played a role in memory development among the children. Further research is needed to rule out such factors, as well as to determine what, if any, long-term risks come with radiation exposure from phones.
The authors note that handheld smartphone usage, such as browsing the web, texting, or playing games led to notably less exposure to the radiation and was not believed to impair the participants’ memory.

““Potential risks to the brain can be minimized by using headphones or the loud speaker while calling, in particular when network quality is low and the mobile phone is functioning at maximum power,” says Röösli.

The study is a follow-up to a report published in 2015 with twice the sample size and more recent information about how the adolescent body absorbs RF-EMF while using different types of mobile devices. The 2015 study showed negative affects of RF-EMF exposure to the parts of the brain exposed while using a mobile cellular device. The new study confirmed these findings. Both of these studies are the first epidemiological studies to estimate the cumulative RF-EMF brain dose in teenagers.

The study was published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

The Dangers of 5G to Children’s Health

Children's Health Defense

Mobile and wireless technologies are a ubiquitous feature of modern life. Most U.S. adults own smartphones, a growing proportion are “smartphone-only” Internet users and over a fourth report being online “almost constantly.” As for children, a 2014 survey of high-income nations reported that almost seven in ten children used a mobile phone, and two-thirds of those had a smartphone, usually by age 10. As described by Nielsen, it is now as common to see “a kid with a smartphone in their hand” as it was to see “a kid playing with a yo-yo in the years before the digital age.”

The enthusiasm with which the public has embraced each new mobile and wireless technology—most of which have never undergone any appropriate safety testing or standards development—suggests that consumers rarely stop to consider the health implications of the infrastructure shoring up their ability to browse, stream and download anytime and “on the go.” Consumers are not entirely to blame for their lack of awareness—it is not easy to disentangle the technologies’ health risks in the face of the telecommunications industry’s steady and calculated disinformation efforts and a captured Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that “follows the script of fabulously wealthy, bullying, billion-dollar beneficiaries of wireless.”

"… powerful 5G (fifth-generation) networks and technology are about to subject everyone, on a continuous basis, to unprecedented forms and amounts of mandatory irradiation—without prior study of the potential health impact or any assurance of safety."

Now, however, a global 5G “frenzy” is upon us and is coming into full force. The rollout of “blazing fast” 5G technology will “dramatically increase the number of transmitters sending signals to cellphones and a host of new Internet-enabled devices.” The time is ripe for greater grassroots awareness of the undisclosed tradeoffs between convenience and 5G’s potentially catastrophic health effects. Far from a simple “next-gen” upgrade, powerful 5G (fifth-generation) networks and technology are about to subject everyone, on a continuous basis, to unprecedented forms and amounts of what retired U.S. government physicist Dr. Ronald Powell calls “mandatory irradiation”—without “prior study of the potential health impact” or any assurance of safety. Considering that young people (with their smaller body mass and developing brains) are particularly vulnerable to radiation, the Environmental Health Trust has termed 5G “the next great unknown experiment on our children”—and the entire human population.

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Brain hacking: Heavy use of wireless devices changes brain structure in children

Dr. Joseph Mercola
Mercola.com

Most people today live in a sea of radio frequencies emitted from wireless technologies of all kinds, from routers to smartphones, tablets, baby monitors, TVs, appliances, smart meters and many more.

According to many experts, chronic, heavy exposure could have severe repercussions for our health, especially that of children, who are now exposed even before birth. Research also suggests interaction with social media, games and apps online produces a number of effects, both physical and psychological.

In the largest long-term study^1,2,3 of brain development and youth health in the U.S., the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study,⁴ reveals the brains of the most prolific users of electronic devices look different compared to those who use smartphones, tablets and video games less frequently.

In all, more than 11,000 children will be followed for a decade to assess how various childhood experiences and environments affect brain development and psychological health. As noted by the researchers,⁵ "The data will provide a resource of unprecedented scale and depth for studying typical and atypical development." These preliminary findings, based on the brain scans of 4,500 9- to 10-year-olds, reveal children who use electronic devices for seven hours or more each day have premature thinning of the brain cortex, the outer brain layer that processes information from the five physical senses (taste, touch, sight, smell and sound).

The exact ramifications of this anomaly are still unknown. According to Dr. Gaya Dowling, a researcher with the National Institutes of Health, which is sponsoring the $300 million study, thinning of the cortex is thought to be part of the brain maturation process, so what these scans are showing is that this process is being sped up in children who get a lot of screen time6 (7-plus hours a day).  

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The Wifi Alliance, Coming Soon to Your Neighborhood: 5G Wireless

 "Surely with an estimated $21 trillion missing from the Pentagon, there must be one black budget item to lessen the harmful EMF emissions?"

Renee Parsons
Global Research

Just as any new technology claims to offer the most advanced development; that their definition of progress will cure society’s ills or make life easier by eliminating the drudgery of antiquated appliances, the Wifi Alliance  was organized as a worldwide wireless network to connect ‘everyone and everything, everywhere” as it promised “improvements to nearly every aspect of daily life.”  

The Alliance, which makes no pretense of potential health or environmental concerns, further proclaimed (and they may be correct) that there are “more wifi devices than people on earth”.   It is that inescapable exposure to ubiquitous wireless technologies wherein lies the problem.   

Soon after the 1895 discovery of xrays, the budding new technology was not without its health risks of burns and hair loss.  Yet the use of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) has evolved at a dramatic exponential rate from Marie Curie’s day into a mega-trillion dollar omnipotent industry creating a world totally dependent on its pernicious wireless applications.

The medical and scientific data is overwhelming and irrefutable as the wireless industry, the MSM and government agencies, frequently the last to acknowledge a pervasive health problem, continue to protect the industry from widespread public awareness of the insidious effects of the latest generation of digital by-products.   

Even prior to the 1997 introduction of commercially available wifi devices which has saturated every industrialized country, EMF wifi hot spots were everywhere.  Today with the addition of cell and cordless phones and towers, broadcast antennas, smart meters and the pervasive computer wifi, both adults and especially vulnerable children are surrounded 24-7 by an inescapable presence with little recognition that all radiation exposure is cumulative.   

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Sweden's 'Consent App' for Mitigating Draconian New Anti-Rape Law Under Fire

Sputnik

The app uses mobile bank ID technology to secure consent before intercourse by means of digital contract, which may reduce the risk of being sentenced to jail for having sex, which will have become imminent as all intercourse without an explicit consent agreement is about to become illegal in Sweden.

Stockholm-based female lawyer and defense attorney Baharak Vaziri has launched an app named Libra to alleviate the risks arising from the "consent law" that was passed amid the #Metoo anti-harassment campaign which will come into force on Sunday.

According to the app's website, the new legislation can lead to considerable difficulty for couples seeking to consummate their union, hence the tool to mitigate risks using a "digital contract."

"The app should make it easier and more empowering for people to enter into a sexual relationship, to make it based on free will and consent," the app's description in App Store said.

According to the Aftonbladet tabloid daily, the app was instantly criticized for allegedly making it harder for women to "regret" and have second thoughts during the intercourse.

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Conspiracy Theory Confirmed: Researcher Shows How Phone Shows Ads Based on Conversations It Hears

John Vibes
The Free Thought Project

For years, smartphone users have been growing increasingly suspicious that their devices are listening to them to feed them advertisements and to “enhance their experience” on third-party apps. Companies like Google and Facebook have consistently denied these claims, saying that targeted ads and messages are merely a coincidence, and that data for these services are taken in other ways.

However, earlier this year during the Cambridge Analytica scandal we began to see some of the first hints that our phones may actually be listening to us.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie says that they have probably been listening all along. During an appearance before the UK parliament, Wylie said, “There’s audio that could be useful just in terms of, are you in an office environment, are you outside, are you watching TV, what are you doing right now?”

Since the scandal, experts who have studied this possibility began revealing their surprising results.

In a recent interview with Vice, Dr. Peter Hannay, the senior security consultant for the cybersecurity firm Asterisk, explained how third-party apps exploit a loophole to gather the voice data from your phone.

Hannay said that while your microphone is always on, your voice data is only sent out to other parties if you say specific trigger words such as “Hey Siri” or “OK Google,” but there is a catch. Third-party apps often ask to gain access to voice data in their user agreements to “enhance the experience” of their products.

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Millennials engage with their smartphones more than they do actual humans

MarketWatch.com

It’s not your imagination: Millennials really are glued to their smartphones.

Nearly four in 10 millennials (39%) say they interact more with their smartphones than they do with their significant others, parents, friends, children or co-workers, according to a survey of more than 1,000 people released Wednesday by Bank of America. That’s compared with fewer than one in three people of all ages who say they engage with their smartphones more.

This means that, on an average day, millennials — defined here as being ages 18 to 34 — “interact with their smartphone more than anything or anyone else,” the survey concluded.

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Banks opting to scan fingers and faces for account access

Michael Corkery
AP

The banking password may be about to expire — forever.

Some of the nation's largest banks, acknowledging that traditional passwords are either too cumbersome or no longer secure, are increasingly using fingerprints, facial scans and other types of biometrics to safeguard accounts.

Millions of customers at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo routinely use fingerprints to log into their bank accounts through their mobile phones. This feature, which some of the largest banks have introduced in the last few months, is enabling a huge swath of the American banking public to verify their identity with biometrics. And millions of additional customers are expected to opt in as more phones incorporate fingerprint scans.

Other uses of biometrics are also coming online. Wells Fargo lets some customers scan their eyes with their mobile phones to log into corporate accounts and wire millions of dollars. Citigroup can help verify 800,000 of its credit card customers by their voices. USAA, which serves members of the military and their families, identifies some of its customers through their face contours.

Some of the moves reflect concern that so many hundreds of millions of email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers and other personal identifiers have fallen into the hands of criminals, rendering those identifiers increasingly ineffective at protecting accounts.

"We believe the password is dying," said Tom Shaw, vice president for enterprise financial crimes management at USAA, which is based in San Antonio. "We realized we have to get away from personal identification information because of the growing number of data breaches."

Long regarded as the stuff of science fiction, biometrics have been tested by big banks for decades, but have only recently become sufficiently accurate and cost effective to use in a big way. It has taken a great deal of trial and error: With many of the early prototypes, a facial scan could be foiled by bad lighting, and voice recognition could be scuttled by background noise or laryngitis.

Before smartphones became ubiquitous, there was an even bigger obstacle: To capture a finger image or scan an eyeball, a bank would have to pay to distribute the necessary technology to tens of millions of customers. A few tried, but their efforts were costly and short-lived.

Today, the equation has changed. Many models of the iPhone have touch pads that can scan fingerprints. The cameras and microphones on many mobile devices are so powerful that they can record the minute details needed to create a biometric ID. 

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Avoid texting so much: Science shows how it's psychologically messing with your mind

Alexa Erickson
Collective Evolution

Texting is one of the biggest forms of communication in today's world. From being able to send an important message without the lag time of a phone ringing or having to leave a voicemail, to sending passively funny statements and exchanging pictures and emojis, it's become more than just a means of communication, but a multi-purposeful platform for self-expression. But is it entirely a good thing? Should we be speaking with one another more often instead?

While many of us get excited over the customized ding that indicates a new message, what about the aching feeling of waiting for an answer that never comes?

What about when you're busy and respond quickly to a question instead of your usual vibrant, upbeat reply, and your friend asks if you're okay because it seemed rude?

And how about feeling obligated to respond to every text, every time, on time? It's a lot of pressure to always be "on." 

But it's just texting. It can't really be that detrimental to our wellbeing. Or can it?
Many of us wholeheartedly love texting as our preferred form of fast and casual communication, but just like many other forms, it's important to take a step back and see how it might be in your favor to put down your phone and pick up your head every now and again.

Here are six reasons why:  

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Philadelphia: Survey Finds Babies Routinely Given Smartphones

Reuters

Many children under age five own their own smartphones and tablets, and they often use the devices without any supervision or help from their parents, a small U.S. study suggests.

While the results – based on surveys of parents in 350 households in Philadelphia – aren’t nationally representative and the study didn’t measure the impact of heavy technology use on the children, the findings highlight “the pervasive nature of digital exposure,” among very young children, co-author Dr. Matilde Irigoyen of Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia said by email.

Nearly half of babies in the study used mobile gadgets daily before they reached their first birthday, and by age two more than three-quarters of children did so, according to the study published today in the journal Pediatrics.

Parents are generally advised to avoid screen time before age two because it’s thought to interfere with learning and language development, noted Dr. David Hill, chair of the council on communications and media for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

These recommendations predate the invention of smartphones and tablets. Even though television exposure at an early age has been linked to impaired language skills, the evidence around any benefits or harms from mobile games and apps is less clear, Hill, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.

“Parents should know that any claims they hear about kids learning from mobile devices are not backed up by solid science,” Hill said.

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New computer, smart phone app would monitor 'mental health' through social media

Leonor Sierra
Sott.net

University of Rochester

Researchers at the University of Rochester have developed an innovative approach to turn any computer or smartphone with a camera into a personal mental health monitoring device.

In a paper to be presented this week at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Austin, Texas, Professor of Computer Science Jiebo Luo and his colleagues describe a computer program that can analyze "selfie" videos recorded by a webcam as the person engages with social media.

Apps to monitor people's health are widely used, from monitoring the spread of the flu to providing guidance on nutrition and managing mental health issues. Luo explains that his team's approach is to "quietly observe your behavior" while you use the computer or phone as usual. He adds that their program is "unobtrusive; it does not require the user to explicitly state what he or she is feeling, input any extra information, or wear any special gear." For example, the team was able to measure a user's heart rate simply by monitoring very small, subtle changes in the user's forehead color. The system does not grab other data that might be available through the phone - such as the user's location.

The researchers were able to analyze the video data to extract a number of "clues," such as heart rate, blinking rate, eye pupil radius, and head movement rate. At the same time, the program also analyzed both what the users posted on Twitter, what they read, how fast they scrolled, their keystroke rate and their mouse click rate. Not every input is treated equally though: what a user tweets, for example, is given more weight than what the user reads because it is a direct expression of what that user is thinking and feeling.

To calibrate the system and generate a reaction they can measure, Luo explained, he and his colleagues enrolled 27 participants in a test group and "sent them messages, real tweets, with sentiment to induce their emotion." This allowed them to gauge how subjects reacted after seeing or reading material considered to be positive or negative.

They compared the outcome from all their combined monitoring with the users' self reports about their feelings to find out how well the program actually performs, and whether it can indeed tell how the user feels. The combination of the data gathered by the program with the users' self-reported state of mind (called the ground truth) allows the researchers to train the system. The program then begins to understand from just the data gathered whether the user is feeling positive, neutral or negative.

Their program currently only considers emotions as positive, neutral or negative. Luo says that he hopes to add extra sensitivity to the program by teaching it to further define a negative emotion as, for example, sadness or anger. Right now, this is a demo program they have created and no "app" exists, but they have plans to create an app that would let users be more aware of their emotional fluctuations and make adjustments themselves.

Luo understands that this program and others that aim to monitor an individual's mental health or well-being raise ethical concerns that need to be considered. He adds that using this system means "effectively giving this app permission to observe you constantly," but adds that the program is designed for the use of the user only and does not share data with anyone else unless otherwise designated by the user.

Comment: Yeah, right. We believe you!

• Big Brother USA: NYPD Forms New Social Media Unit to Mine Facebook and Twitter for Mayhem
• CIA monitoring Twitter, Facebook for intel and tips
• Internet snooping GCHQ to data mine Facebook and Twitter for intelligence

Luo's co-authors on the paper, "Tackling Mental Health by Integrating Unobtrusive Multimodal Sensing," are Dawei Zhou, Jiebo Luo, Vincent Silenzio, Yun Zhou, Glenn Currier, and Henry Kautz. The 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) takes place in Austin, Texas, from Jan. 25-30, 2015. The paper can be downloaded here.

Unlock your smartphone with a digital tattoo

The Independent

A temporary ‘digital tattoo’ that lets wearers unlock their smartphones without having to punch in a code has gone on sale for $10 in the US.

Created to work exclusively with Motorola’s Moto X smartphone, the small circular patch uses near field communications technology (NFC) to talk to mobile device and lasts for five days once stuck to the user’s skin.

The technology behind the tattoo was originally developed by Google’s ATAP research and development team (otherwise known as the Advanced Technology and Projects group – they're currently make 3D-capable and modular smartphones) and the patches are currently being sold at $10 for a pack of five.

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How Google Glass and smartphones can decipher your PIN code from across the room – even if your screen is facing away

The Independent

Security researchers from the US have shown that gadgets such as Google Glass can be used to covertly record PIN codes from distances of 10 feet – even if the target display is hidden from view.

Wired reports that the research team led by Professor Xinwen Fu of the University of Massachusetts Lowell used software that analysed the shadows and movements of peoples’ fingers in order to decipher PIN codes entered into tablets and smartphones.

A range of devices were tested including Google Glass (which recently went on sale in the UK), an iPhone 5, a Samsung smartwatch and a Logitech webcam. Video captured by Glass produced a correct four digit PIN from three metres away with 83 per cent accuracy (this was improved to more than 90 per cent with manual corrections) while the webcam was accurate 92 per cent of the time.

Similar software has been created in the past (including an iOS app) but this is the first instance of technology that can decipher PINS even when the display is unreadable. Fu explains that it does this by creating a reference image of the iPad’s screen and mapping the target’s finger movements onto this.

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Revealed: How governments can take control of smartphones

RT

‘Legal malware’ produced by the Italian firm Hacking Team can take total control of your mobile phone. That’s according to Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab and University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab(which also obtained a user manual).

Operating since 2001, the Milan-based Hacking Team employs over 50 people and offers clients the ability to “take control of your targets and monitor them regardless of encryption and mobility," while “keeping an eye on all your targets and manage them remotely, all from a single screen.”

It’s the first time Remote Control Systems (RCS) malware has been positively linked with mobile phones and it opens up a new privacy threat potential to mobile phone users.

“Our latest research has identified mobile modules that work on all well-known mobile platforms, including as Android and iOS,” wrote Kaspersky researcher Sergey Golovanov. 

“These modules are installed using infectors – special executables for either Windows or Macs that run on already infected computers. They translate into complete control over the environment in and near a victim’s computer. Secretly activating the microphone and taking regular camera shots provides constant surveillance of the target – which is much more powerful than traditional cloak and dagger operations.”

Read more
 

Broadcom Unveils New GPS System Chip for Wearable Tech

 

Susanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | The US Independent

February 21, 2014 

Susan Posel/Occupy Corporatism

Broadcom has unveiled their first global navigation satellite system (GNSS), system on chip (SoC), for mass-market wearable technology at the Mobile World Congress in Spain.

The sensor hub on this chip tracks the user while monitoring their health and providing precise location data.

As the user becomes more or less active, the chip watches and records location and activity history to better assist the user in modifying their workout or daily life habits.

Mohamed Awad, director of marketing, mobile and wireless for Broadcom said: “Today’s wearables like fitness trackers have surged in popularity, but often miscalculate speed and distance. As the largest supplier of discrete GNSS solutions, Broadcom brings its location expertise to deliver more precise fitness and health measurements to the accelerating wearable market.”

The GNSS “is a satellite system that is used to pinpoint the geographic location of a user’s receiver anywhere in the world.”

This technology combines the US global positioning system (GPS), the Russian Federation’s orbiting navigation satellite system (GLONASS) and the European Leo system to find a specific location of any target.

In April 2012 the GPS division of Broadcom devised the 4752 RFID chip that could locate an individual within centimeters with the implantation of the technology into a cell phone.

Scott Pomerantz, vice president of the GPS division at Broadcom, explained: “The use case [for Bluetooth beacons] might be malls. It would be a good investment for a mall to put up a deployment—perhaps put them up every 100 yards, and then unlock the ability for people walking around mall to get very precise couponing information.”

These chips imbedded into Androids and smartphones would now become accurate locators with the assistance of signals from global navigation satellites.

The precision of this technology could pinpoint when you enter a retail establishment, what products you purchase and track you as you return to your car. Bluetooth beacons would give this technology the ability to see pings as you travel through enclosed buildings.

Baidu uses data to track world’s largest human movement as Lunar New Year begins

South China Morning Post

Baidu has launched a heat map of where Chinese travelers are heading to, coming from, and which routes are most popular during the Lunar New Year, the country’s largest national holiday.

The heat map, which went online January 27, was created by data Baidu gathered from smart phones through use of the location-based Baidu Maps mobile app, which has more than 200 million registered users and receives 3.5 million position requests every day.

The heat map updates every four to eight hours, showing the most popular destinations, points of origin, and travel routes.

It also includes a search function so viewers can see statistics from specific cities and time frames.
According to the data revealed by the map, the most popular destination for the Lunar New Year is Beijing, followed by Chongqing. The hub cities in Hunan and Guangxi provinces tie for third.

Beijing is also ranked as the most popular city to leave, followed by Shanghai and Guangzhou. The trip both to and from Chengdu and Beijing take up the top two most widely-travelled routes for Lunar New Year travellers. 

The Lunar New Year is a period of massive-scale travel in China, when many workers either return home to their families or go on vacation.

During the 40-day holiday period - called Spring Festival in Chinese - 3.6 billion passenger trips will be made across all modes of transportation, making the Lunar New Year the largest annual mammalian migration on Earth.

To access and view the heat map, click here. 

NASA and Britain’s GCHQ Mapping “Political Alignments” of Millions of Smartphone Users Worldwide.

Global Research
Eric London


New information made public by Edward Snowden reveals that the governments of the United States and United Kingdom are trawling data from cellphone “apps” to accumulate dossiers on the “political alignments” of millions of smartphone users worldwide.

According to a 2012 internal UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) document, the National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ have been accumulating and storing hundreds of millions of user “cookies” —the digital footprints left on a cellphone or computer each time a user visits a web site—in order to accumulate detailed personal information about users’ private lives.

This confirms that the main purpose of the programs is not to protect the population from “terrorism,” but to facilitate the state repression of working class opposition to widening social inequality and social counterrevolution. The programs do not primarily target “terrorists,” but workers, intellectuals, and students.

The collection of data regarding the “political alignment” of cellphone users also suggests that the governments of the US and UK are keeping lists of those whose “political alignments” are of concern to the government. Previous revelations have shown how the NSA and GCHQ “flag” certain “suspects” for additional surveillance: the most recent revelation indicates that suspects are “flagged” at least in part based on their “political alignment.”

The legal rationale behind this process points to a growing movement to criminalize political thought in the US and UK.

If, as the revelations indicate, determining a user’s “political alignment” is a primary goal of this program, then it is also likely a factor in determining whether the government has a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that the user is a “terrorist suspect.” If this is the case, the web sites a user visits may raise the government’s level of suspicion that the user is engaged in criminal activity, and may thereby provide the government with the pseudo-legal pretext required to unlock the content of all his or her phone calls, emails, text messages, etc.

Such a rationale would amount to a flagrant violation of both the First and Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Not only does the Fourth Amendment protect against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” but the First Amendment also proscribes the government from monitoring individuals based on their political beliefs. The elimination of such a fundamental democratic right would be a dangerous step towards the imposition of a police state dictatorship.

The new report also details the depth of the mobile-app spying operation.

A 2009 “brute-force” analysis test performed by the NSA and GCHQ of what the New York Times describes as a “tiny sliver of their cellphone databases” revealed that in one month, the NSA collected cellphone data of 8,615,650 cellphone users. Data from the GCHQ test revealed that in three months, the British had spied on 24,760,289 users. Expanded to a full year, this data shows that in 2009, the NSA collected data from over 103,000,000 users, while GCHQ collected data from over 99,000,000 users: and this coming from only a “tiny sliver” of a month’s data!

“They are gathered in bulk, and are currently our single largest type of events,” one leaked document reads.

The program—referred to in one NSA document as “Golden Nugget!”—also allows the governments to receive a log of users’ Google Maps application use. Such information allows the intelligence apparatus to track the exact whereabouts of surveillance victims worldwide. One chart from an internal NSA slideshow asks: “Where was my target when they did this?” and “Where is my target going?”

An NSA report from 2007 bragged that so much geo-data could be gathered that the intelligence agencies would “be able to clone Google’s database” of all searches for directions made via Google Maps.

“It effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system,” a 2008 GCHQ report noted.

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There's no resting place for the human race

New Scientist
19 December 2013

This year, many fixed points in the human condition have begun to look distinctly movable
 

THE Chinese robot now roving the moon's surface – Yutu, the Jade Rabbit – is humanity's first emissary there for nearly 40 years. It is named after the companion of the moon goddess Chang'e. More such explorers will follow over the next decade, but few, if any, will bear names from the Greek and Russian traditions associated with the first space race.

Rather, they are beginning a new tradition. As one scientist puts it, the moon is "the eighth continent", a chunk torn off Earth aeons ago. That's not just a hypothesis for our satellite's origins: the latest space racers want to build a lunar staging post for exploration, and settlement, of the solar system (see "China lands on moon, kicks off next lunar space race").

This is not a new dream, but the urge to leave Earth is getting easier to envisage in a world of limited resources and ambitious billionaires. But do we have the right to spread to other worlds before putting our own in order? How will humanity define and locate itself when it lives on more than one planet?

This is just one of many developments challenging how we see our place in the universe. It is customary at this time of year to reflect on the past 12 months. In that spirit, let's consider a couple more advances and see if we can get a sense of where we might soon find ourselves.

Consider humanity itself. Sequencing the genome of the Denisovans, a mysterious group of prehistoric hominins, suggests that interbreeding between Neanderthals, Denisovans and humans seems to have been common, rather than the rarity previously assumed – which further drives home the idea that we are the sole survivors of a precarious evolutionary process, rather than the end of a neat line of descent. That deals yet another blow to the hubristic assumption that humanity's place is at the apex of the natural world.

Intriguingly, here at our end of the human timeline, we are beginning to engineer our own genome. Next year is likely to see the conception of a child with DNA from three parents (see "2014 Preview: Three-parent babies close to conception"). The modification is life-changing – it will prevent certain inherited diseases – but minor. Nonetheless, the introduction of genetic material that could be passed down the generations represents a watershed. How far should we go in compensating for shortcomings in our genetic inheritance? What conditions would merit such tinkering?

We need not journey into space, or history, to find ourselves rethinking our place in the world. 

Smartphones provide us with unprecedented context about our surroundings, allowing us to seek out everything from a cold drink to a hot date. They also let us detach ourselves from those around us, as we look at screens rather than our neighbours' faces.

So the line between physical here and online there is becoming increasingly blurred. Devices such as Glass, Google's augmented reality spectacles, and advances in robotics and remote control will only accelerate that trend (see "Mind-reading light helps you stay in the zone" and "The mystery behind Google's sudden robotics splurge"). Our experiences of the world, and our sense of our place in it, may soon be very different – not just from how we perceive it now, but also from how our neighbours do. Will sharing our thoughts and experiences bring us together? Or will we end up living in worlds of our own?

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Many fields, from climatology to neuroscience, raise questions about who we are and where we fit in. But that's nothing new.

Science and technology have always posed challenges, and we have always assimilated them – eventually. That drive has got us where we are today. Perhaps that's the only real constant here: to be human is to continually seek out a new place in the world.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Perpetual motion"

 Read more: "2014 preview: 10 ideas that will matter next year"