It is great to have siblings because they make sure that you are grounded and don’t get too full of yourselves. My sister Surabhi sent me this image to ensure I know what they think of my specialization.
Well, in all fairness when Gaurang became a ships captain we told him he was a driver of a ship (instead of a bus). So, I can’t really complain…
– Suramya
Earthquakes are extremely devastating and because we don’t have a way to predict them in advance they end up taking a huge toll on lives. The existing systems for earthquake prediction are fraught with false positives to the point of being useless. However, that hasn’t stopped people from trying to predict them, and in a new paper researchers Quentin Bletery and Jean-Mathieu Nocquet claim to have found a unique way to predict them up to 2 hours in advance using GPS data.
They analyzed high-rate GPS time series before 90 different earthquakes that were magnitude 7 and above to find a precursor signal and they observed a subtle signal that rose from the noise about 2 hours before these major earthquakes occurred. This looks extremely promising and if validated can change how we approach disaster management of earthquakes. However, the study still needs to be validated and we don’t yet know if the precursor signal could ever be measured for individual events with the accuracy needed to provide a useful warning.
The existence of an observable precursory phase of slip on the fault before large earthquakes has been debated for decades. Although observations preceding several large earthquakes have been proposed as possible indicators of precursory slip, these observations do not directly precede earthquakes, are not seen before most events, and are also commonly observed without being followed by earthquakes. We conducted a global search for short-term precursory slip in GPS data. We summed the displacements measured by 3026 high-rate GPS time series—projected onto the directions expected from precursory slip at the hypocenter—during 48 hours before 90 (moment magnitude ≥7) earthquakes. Our approach reveals a ≈2-hour-long exponential acceleration of slip before the ruptures, suggesting that large earthquakes start with a precursory phase of slip, which improvements in measurement precision and density could more effectively detect and possibly monitor.
This is an area where Machine Learning might prove to be useful to extrapolate and predict but that being said we still need to validate and verify before implementing it or depending on it. The paper with their findings was published in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.adg2565)
Source: Hacker News: Early Warning: GPS Data Could Detect Large Earthquakes Hours Before They Happen
– Suramya
Unless I have managed to mess up something really bad, this Blog should now be a part of the Fediverse and all posts here should get published to the Fediverse automatically. If all is well, then searching for @suramya@suramya.com on a Mastodon instance should allow you to add me there and all posts (with their full text) made here should get published there automatically.
Once the ActivityPub plugin is installed, each author’s page on your WordPress blog will become its own federated instance. In other words, if you have two authors, Jane and Bob, on your website, example.com, then your authors would have their own author pages at example.com/author/jane and example.com/author/bob. Each of those author pages would now be available to Mastodon users (and all other federated platform users) as a profile that can be followed. Let’s break that down further. Let’s say you have a friend on Mastodon who tells you to follow them and they give you their profile name @janelivesheresomeofthetime. You search for her name, see her profile, and click the follow button, right? From then on, everything Jane posts on her profile shows up in your Home feed. Okay, similarly, now that Jane has installed the ActivityPub plugin on her example.com site, her friends can also follow her on Mastodon by searching for @jane@example.com and clicking the Follow button on that profile.
– Suramya
I am constantly surprised at how insecure these some of the men are. The following screenshot came up in my Mastodon feed (unfortunately I didn’t save the link to the post, just the image and I can’t find it now) and I was flabbergasted. This is a screenshot from a ‘romance’ guide that is explaining how addressing a man by their name instead of calling them hey you is an example of Micro-cheating…
What on earth is wrong with people? Calling folks by their name is basic curtsy. I admit I am bad at it because I have a hard time remembering names but that is not something I am proud of and I try to go the extra mile to ensure that I memorize names.
A quick search gave me the site, and the examples they use in this ‘article’ are beyond idiotic. Search for the text from the example above and you will find it. I am not linking to it because I don’t want to send them more traffic. For example, #25 claims that “giggling“, yes you read that right is an example of Micro-cheating… Some more gems from the site:
9. Letting a guy she interacts with ever so briefly on the bus or in an elevator believe that he’s got a shot for a few precious seconds before getting on with her day.
Just because someone smiled at you doesn’t mean they are interested in dating you.
30. Addressing a man by his full name instead of the nickname he goes by (e.g. “Hello, Douglas”), which is secretly one of the most subtle but impactful ways to flirt.
I don’t like calling folks by their nicknames unless I know them well enough to use it (not talking about examples where Christian is shortened to Chris) and that doesn’t mean I am flirting with them.
34. Sending texts to a guy that are laced with more emojis than she typically uses when communicating with her besties.
These folks need to talk to a psychiatrist because they need help. They are being trained from a young age to only think about women a certain way and to expect every lady they meet to fall at their feet to fulfill their every desire. This is obviously not what happens in the real world and then these folks grow more & more militant and misogynistic causing huge problems for everyone around them. Some of them have actually killed people because they didn’t get what they thought was their right.
– Suramya
I am getting really tired of folks shoving ChatGPT integration into everything whether it makes sense or not. The latest silliness is an electric bike with ChatGPT integration. I understand the desire to integrate GPS/Maps etc in a bike, although personally I would rather use an independent device which would get updates more frequently than the built in GPS where the maps might get updated a few times a year. Unless the maps are getting downloaded live using 3G/4G/whatever. I even understand the desire to integrate voice recognition in the setup so that the user can talk to it. But why on earth do I want/need to have ChatGPT shoved in there?
Based on ChatGPT’s well known tendency to hallucinate there is a good probability that it might decide that you should take a path that is not safe or even dump you into the ocean because it hallucinated that it was the way to go. This is the same thing we saw with Blockchain a few years ago, everything was suddenly on the Blockchain whether it needed to be or not. The sad part is that these folks are going to make a ton of money because of the hype behind ChatGPT and then bail leaving the consumers with a sub-par bike that hallucinates.
Source: Urtopia Unveils the World’s First Smart E-Bike with ChatGPT Integration at EUROBIKE 2023
– Suramya
The past few weeks have been interesting over at Mastodon where some of the community has been screaming and loosing their minds about the possibility of Meta becoming part of the Fediverse. Bloonface summarized my feelings about it perfectly in the following Toot:
People have reason not to trust Meta because of their behavior in the past, and we have extreme examples where Opensource protocols were subverted (XAMPP) and the opensource clients killed off. However, we also have the example of AOL which was a closed garden opening up their network and users to the Internet which introduced a ton of people to the Open Internet and while there were initial hiccups and adjustments required in the long run it was good for the internet to ingest the closed garden into an open network.
One of the biggest reasons for people sticking with Facebook/Whatsapp/whatever is the cost of switching and the Network effect. Basically, what that means is that people use a social network/site because their friends are already using it and it is difficult to get them to switch. I have tried getting my family and friends to switch to Signal from Whatsapp but since most folks are on Whatsapp it becomes a chicken and egg problem. We can’t move there because all the friends are here. Having Meta become a part of the Fediverse would allow me to move to a new network/server and still be able to connect with my friends / relatives on FaceBook. This interoperability lowers the switching costs allowing users the freedom to change servers without loosing the userbase/network they have build up on the old system/
Cory Doctorow has written a fantastic article about Facebook’s war on switching costs that goes into detail on how reducing the switching costs and increasing interoperability is a good idea.
Unfortunately, there are folks who think that only the chosen few should be allowed to use ‘their’ networks and are screaming their heads off about something that is not even a formal discussion yet. Meta has had a few exploratory calls with Mastodon server admins and that’s it. No one has ‘betrayed’ the users or sold out or whatever. I can’t remember how many folks have been referencing that post about ‘Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution’ that I wrote about a while ago (not linking to the original post because I don’t what to increase its visibility). It is the same standard whining for a certain part of the user group that always tries to gatekeep everything and it is annoying.
I would love to have everyone move to Mastodon so that I don’t have to log into Twitter to catch up with folks. Currently not everyone is on Mastodon which means that either I stop following their work or I log into Twitter to read what they are doing till they migrate. If Twitter federates then I wouldn’t have to do that, I could read their posts from the comfort of my own server. Same thing with Facebook, I don’t log in much there but that means that I miss a lot of updates from family who still use it actively.
However, the advantage of having an open federated network is that even if some of the admins have a hissy fit and block the Meta (or any other servers) nothing is preventing their users from deciding to move their accounts to a more sensibly managed server as they are not locked in.
– Suramya
Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun has been a challenge to explore and examine because of its closeness to the Sun. This is the second craft to orbit the planet after NASA’s MESSENGER probe, which orbited the planet from 2011 to 2015. BepiColombo is a joint venture between European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The latest flyby was 3rd of the 6 planned flybys of the planet. The team has released a short video composed of 217 images taken during the flyby.
Pic Credit: European Space Agency/ Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
The closest approach took place at 19:34 UTC (21:34 CEST) on 19 June 2023, about 236 km above the planet’s surface, on the night side of the planet.
…
Approaching on the nightside of the planet, a few features started to appear out of the shadows about 12 minutes following the closest approach, when BepiColombo was already about 1800 km from the surface. The planet’s surface became more optimally illuminated for imaging from about 20 minutes after close approach and onwards, corresponding to a distance of about 3500 km and beyond. In these closer images, a bounty of geological features are visible, including a newly named crater.
…
While not apparent in these flyby images, the nature of the dark material associated with Manley Crater and elsewhere will be explored further by BepiColombo from orbit. It will seek to measure just how much carbon it contains and what minerals are associated with it, in order to learn more about Mercury’s geological history.
The next Mercury flyby will happen in September 2024 but the next next long solar electric propulsion ‘thruster arc’ is planned to start early August until mid-September which will help BepiColombo in Braking against the gravitational pull of the Sun. During the lifetime of the project, the module will have completed 15,000 hours of solar electric propulsion operations which will allow it to perform 9 planetary flybys in total — one at Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury.
The more we explore our celestial neighbors, the more information we will have before we start working towards space colonization and building settlements. Although, I don’t think that Mercury will be a contender in the near future for a settlement, unless we find a rare mineral or something over there.
Source: Slashdot: New Video Shows a Flyby of the Planet Mercury – with AI-Assisted Music
– Suramya
With modern technology it is getting more and more easy to track someone. There are many apps, devices etc that allow a target to be tracked in near realtime by someone. This can be done using an App on your phone, find my phone functionality, family phone track etc etc. As someone who is worried about getting tracked they can disable GPS, get a new dumb phone that doesn’t support GPS etc which can mitigate the threat to a large extent. Unfortunately, now there is a new attack surface that allows an attacker to approximately locate a target with up to 96% accuracy.
Researchers have figured out how to deduce the location of an SMS recipient by analyzing timing measurements from typical receiver location. Basically they measure the time elapsed between sending a SMS and the receipt of the Delivery report and then use a ML model to predict the location area where the target could be located. The other advantage of this attack is that it doesn’t require any specialized equipment or access to restricted systems but can be executed via a simple smartphone.
Short Message Service (SMS) remains one of the most popular communication channels since its introduction in 2G cellular networks. In this paper, we demonstrate that merely receiving silent SMS messages regularly opens a stealthy side-channel that allows other regular network users to infer the whereabouts of the SMS recipient. The core idea is that receiving an SMS inevitably generates Delivery Reports whose reception bestows a timing attack vector at the sender. We conducted experiments across various countries, operators, and devices to show that an attacker can deduce the location of an SMS recipient by analyzing timing measurements from typical receiver locations. Our results show that, after training an ML model, the SMS sender can accurately determine multiple locations of the recipient. For example, our model achieves up to 96% accuracy for locations across different countries, and 86% for two locations within Belgium. Due to the way cellular networks are designed, it is difficult to prevent Delivery Reports from being returned to the originator making it challenging to thwart this covert attack without making fundamental changes to the network architecture.
The biggest problem with this method is that it doesn’t depend on any software or anything that needs to be installed on the target phone. You just need a phone that supports SMS, which is pretty much all phones in the market. There is an option to disable delivery reports which would mitigate the threat to an extent but is an opt-out setup rather than an opt-in. One way to reduce this vector would be for manufacturers to disable the delivery report by default and folks who need it can enable it from settings instead of the other way round which is the case right now.
Source: HackerNews: Freaky Leaky SMS: Extracting user locations by analyzing SMS timings
Full Paper: Freaky Leaky SMS: Extracting User Locations by Analyzing SMS Timings
– Suramya
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