Grannys Goodies

Google’s account recovery procedure can make it unclear to users that they’re giving hackers full access to their account

A technique used by marketers to trick people into signing up for “free” merchandise could easily be re-deployed as an engine for harvesting untold numbers of Google account passwords. Fixing the issue won’t be trivial for Google, because the exploit is fundamental to how Google allows users to recover access to their accounts when they lose or forget their passwords.

While others have reported on the use of this exploit by individual hackers, I believe what you’re reading now is the first account of how it could be transformed into a mass phishing scam that could dragoon even relatively sophisticated users.

The Hack

Recently, my wife and I both received, within an hour of one another, a text like this:

Your entry last month has WON! Goto http://xxxxxx enter your Winning Code: “1122″ to claim your FREE $1,000 Best Buy Giftcard!

Our phone numbers are almost identical, so the fact that we both got this text in a short period of time suggests that someone is auto-SMSing it to every number in a certain range, one after another. Which would make it classic text spam, annoying but not dangerous on its own.

The URL contained in the text goes to this website, http://bestbuy.bestgiftcardsforu.com/ which asks for your email address. The site appears to be affiliated with (or at least is linking to and borrows text from) MyRewardsClub.com. I don’t think these people are hackers, just marketers.

But here’s how hackers could turn this marketing scheme into a password-harvesting scheme: After users enter their email address, if it’s a gmail address, hackers could automatically request that Google send an account verification code to the cell phone of the owner of that Gmail address. This is what Google does when you tell it that you forgot your password — one of the three options for recovering it is to have a verification code sent to the cell phone number associated with your account.

In order for the user to claim their “reward” (in this case, a fake $1000 gift card) the site could then direct them to enter the verification code that Google sent to the user’s phone. As soon as the site has both a user’s Gmail address and that verification code, it’s game over — hackers can use the code to log into that account and immediately change the password, giving them access and locking the user out of their own account.

Other Examples of The Hack

This exploit appears to be precisely the way that a hacker got access to a number of accounts in the course of obtaining images for the website Is Anyone Up, as described by Camille Dodero in a recent feature for the Village Voice:

Is it really so easy to hack a Gmail account? See for yourself: Go to the Gmail login screen and click on the frequently ignored link underneath the sign-in menu, “Can’t access your account?” Three options appear; choose “I forgot my password.” Type in a Gmail address—any active Gmail address—and if there’s a phone number associated with the account, you’re given three more options, one of which is “Get a verification code on my phone.” You don’t even need to know the phone number. Just hit “continue” and an unrelated six-digit code will appear in a text to the account owner’s phone. Type in that verification code—a number easily obtained by a masquerading e-impostor—and you’re in. The first thing you’re prompted to do is immediately change your password, thereby blocking out the original owner.

In other words, if a hacker knows only your Gmail address and can figure out how to access your phone, he’s already most of the way into your shit.

In the case of the hacker collecting images for Is Anyone Up, it appears that he or she chatted up targets via Facebook.

An Increasingly Common Phishing Scheme

This attack has been used by others, and may be widespread. Lokesh Singh, a “professional hacker,” describes on the site HackingLoops how one of his clients fell victim to this same hack, only the attacker used Gchat to convince the victim to hand over the verification code that Google had texted to him.

What Google and its users are facing, in other words, is a phishing scheme that appears to work even on relatively sophisticated users, or at least the kind who are smart enough not to click on random links in spam emails. But what I described at the beginning of this piece potentially takes this attack to a whole new level, beyond labor-intensive hacks of individual accounts and into the realm of automated, large-scale password harvesting.

It’s great that Google has a way for users to recover access to their Gmail accounts that relies on a secondary device that hackers almost never have access to — a user’s cell phone. The weak link, as always, is the human who already has access to all their supposedly secure touch points — the user himself. Perhaps this attack can be stymied simply by raising awareness of the fact that no one should ever, ever hand over their google verification code.

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Article source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=f130f8d81a4f33f4d7b9d38f292206d4

We’ve seen medical uses of the iPhone, and we’ve seen electronic noses (and tongues). Now, how about combining the two?

That’s the vision of a team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology. Led by Nate Lewis, a chemist, the team is developing an e-nose that can sense chemical vapors. And Lewis’s grad student Heather McCraig thinks the technology will someday be small and affordable enough that a doctor can carry it around on her iPhone, and use it to perform instant diagnoses on her patients. “You wouldn’t need to send samples off to a lab, you would immediately be able to start treatment,” she explains near the end of this cool video from the American Chemical Society.

Just the idea that you can smell illness–never mind the part about doing it via a smart phone–might be new to some people. But of course, smell is just another form of chemical detection, and chemical detection is at the heart of many diagnostic tests. “You can learn a lot just by smelling your patients with the unaided nose,” one prominent physician has asserted, citing no less than Hippocrates as an antecedent in the diagnosis-via-nostril trend. (More history on breath analysis for medical diagnosis can be found here.)

In August, Courtney Humphries elucidated in TR how an electronic nose could essentially smell tuberculosis in a urine sample. The findings, from a team in New Delhi, India, were remarkable:

“The researchers collected urine samples from more than 100 newly diagnosed TB patients in New Delhi. They analyzed molecules from the urine that evaporate quickly in the air, called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, which give a detailed readout of chemical components and their concentrations. Using this method to hunt for patterns, they identified several VOCs that occurred in significantly different concentrations in infected individuals. Using this signature, they were able to predict TB infection in another group of patients with nearly 99 percent accuracy.”

A 2008 article in Chemical Review (PDF) actually gave an exhaustive analysis of the electronic nose (subtitle: “Current Status and Future Trends”). The article outlined various different approaches to e-sniffing (everything from gas chromatography to infrared spectrometry) and examined various applications of the technology beyond disease diagnosis (food and beverage analysis as well as environmental monitoring also get a look). “[T]he possibilities for the application of the electronic nose in the medical field are very diverse,” conclude the study authors, citing uremia, fungal respiratory disease, asthma, and even lung cancer as diseases that might be detectable by an e-nose.

So when might we see this thing in the wild? I wouldn’t hold your breath (so to speak). Although the Daily Mail and other outlets that suggest an affordable iPhone-sized e-nose might be coming someday “soon,” the researcher Humprhies spoke to was less optimistic. He told TR that it would actually be a “hugely complex job” to shrink the device and make it affordable.

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Article source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=c11afaed3296b35822f9b4591482f4a8

In recent years, various companies and labs have developed impressive humanoid robots that walk, shuffle and even run. Some even dance in groups of up to 20, performing sophisticated choreographed routines. 

This kind of synchronisation is no easy task. One way to do it is have one robot as the leader, broadcasting details of its movement and position over a network that the other robots all follow. 

The trouble is that network dynamics are not as predictable as choreographers would like. Small delays of half a second or so are common while some messages can be delayed by several seconds. That’s clearly not good enough for a dance routine or any other type of synchronised behaviour.

So the approach preferred by roboticists is to program each robot with the dance routine, synchronise their internal clocks at the start of the performance and then leave them to it. 

The advantage is that If the performance is reasonably short, the chances of the clocks becoming desynchronised can be made small.  The disadvantage is that if the robots become desynchronised–if one falls over, for example–there is no way to regain synchronisation.

So roboticists have been searching for a better form of synchronisation that is more robust to the various trials and tribulations that befall robotic dancers. Today, Patrick Bechon and Jean-Jacques Slotine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, reveal a new approach based on the biological phenomenon of quorum sensing.

Biologists have long puzzled over the ability of bacteria and social insects to sense not only the presence of compatriots but their number and to synchronise their behaviour.

It turns out that these creatures perform this synchronisation using a process called quorum sensing. This works by constantly releasing signalling molecules into the environment while at the same time measuring the local concentration of these molecules. 

This concentration rises as more creatures join the local population and so is an effective measure of population density. When the concentration rises over some threshold level, it triggers a different behaviour such cell division, pathogen production and nest building.  

Now Bechon and Slotine say a similar approach provides a robust way to synchronise humanoid robots. The ideal approach  to synchronisation is for each robot to have access to every other robot’s position. Instead, the quorum sensing approach gives, each robot  access to a global variable such as the average position or average clock time. Each robot can also change this variable because it contributes to the average.

The idea is that if each robot attempts to synchronise with this global average, the swarm as whole should keep good time.

These guys test out their approach with a group of eight NAO robots built by the French robotics company Aldebaran. Each has an internal clock which attempts to synchronise with  a global average time maintained by a central server.

It’s important to point out that the server is not acting as a master with the robots as slaves that simply follow its signal. If the connection to the central is lost, the robots simply continue with routine but without centralised synchrony. 

Instead, the central server is more like a a kind of environment that the robots can sense and interact with.

This arrangement has the significant advantage that if one robot falls over it can simply get back up and join in again when it has resynchronised its movements with the group (see video).

This work is part of a broader development in robotics. The advent of relatively cheap humanoid robots from Aldebaran and other companies means that the large-scale sychronisation of humanoid swarms is now possible.

That’s interesting because while synchrony allows large numbers of robots to do the same thing at the same time–such as dancing or marching–it also allows large number so robots to do different but related tasks at the same time. 

In other words, synchrony is an enabling technology for large scale co-operation. And that opens the way to an entirely new set of tasks that robots could do–think manufacturing and construction. Perhaps even nest building.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1205.2952: Synchronization And Quorum Sensing In A Swarm Of Humanoid Robots 

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Article source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=8501009c85bcedf891dc2b661b874be8

Facebook is the gateway to the Internet for a growing number of people. They message rather than e-mail; discover news and music through friends, rather than through conventional news or search sites; and use their Facebook ID to access outside websites and applications.

As the keeper of so many people’s social graph, Facebook is in an incredibly powerful position—one reason its IPO this week is expected to be the largest ever for an Internet company.

But potential investors should take note that there’s a flip side to Facebook’s explosive growth and power; that flip side, as one analyst put it, is its bid to become a core piece of the Internet’s infrastructure. Facebook’s own technology infrastructure is expensive to build and operate, and it must scale rapidly.

Infrastructure is Facebook’s biggest cost, and to support growing traffic and network complexity, it will have to spend even more. What’s less clear is whether Facebook’s revenues will likewise increase—especially if additional traffic comes from less lucrative visitors, such as people accessing the site from their phones or from outside North America and Europe.

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To date, Facebook has been up to the infrastructure challenge. In less than eight years it has grown to host 526 million daily users, 300 million daily photo uploads, and nine million applications.

Two metrics highlight Facebook’s success in this respect.

First, Facebook spent $860 million, or about $1 per active monthly user, to deliver and distribute its products last year. The bulk of that money was related to data center equipment, staff, and operating costs. That is up from about 80 cents and 60 cents per user in the two previous years. For the moment, however, Facebook’s revenue, currently at $4.30 per user, is growing at an even faster clip. That’s a good sign for any potential investor.

Second, Facebook is not only the Web’s biggest social media site, it is also consistently the fastest. In 2010, Facebook’s response time averaged one second in the U.S., but had improved to 0.73 seconds by mid-2011, according to AlertSite. By comparison, LinkedIn, the next fastest, took nearly double the time to load. Twitter’s site was a full two seconds slower.

Facebook has come a long way since it was first hosted in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room and expanded as he rented additional servers for $80 a month. By late 2009, Facebook disclosed it was using about 30,000 servers, and since then, the number has more than doubled.

As it has grown, the company’s engineers have had to innovate to keep costs down and process a growing volume of data. For example, Facebook designed minimalist custom servers that are cheaper for it to build and run than off-the-shelf ones. It also built a program to optimize the performance of its code, cutting the computing demand on its Web servers by 50 percent. It has open-sourced many of its software innovations and also created the Open Compute Project to widely share its new server designs, with the hope that others could contribute useful innovations. 

Today, Facebook is building its own data centers in Oregon, North Carolina, and Sweden. Last year it spent nearly a third of its revenues, $1.1 billion, in capital expenditures on networking equipment and infrastructure. It plans to spend as much as $1.8 billion on such costs this year.

These infrastructure investments are a good sign, says KC Mares, a data-center energy expert and the founder of MegaWatt Consulting; owning and operating rather than leasing data-center space will help Facebook save money in the long term. Other growing tech companies such as Google have pursued this same strategy.

But as Facebook’s IPO filing makes clear, there is also a risk to investing in a global infrastructure to serve all users, regardless of their short-term profitability. It is a balancing act.

“If you add too much, it’s a big cost that eats into your revenues. If you don’t add fast enough, it’s an opportunity cost of customers you can’t serve,” says John Pflueger, a board member of the Green Grid, an IT industry group.

Coming to the wrong conclusions about how to invest in infrastructure can have major consequences. Just look at Friendster, a social network founded before Facebook and MySpace. Friendster had more than 100 million users, but it quickly fell behind as Facebook came to dominate the landscape.

Jim Scheinman, head of business development at Friendster until 2005, says Friendster made product decisions that required too much computing power. For example, it tried to calculate up to six-degree connections between all users. As a result, the site slowed to a crawl. Today, big Web companies often calculate exactly how much revenue they lose when a page is slow to load, even down to tenths of a second.

Facebook, of course, is long past its early days and has more than a critical mass on its platform: almost half of the world’s population of Internet users. But to stay relevant as it battles companies like Google, it’ll have to stay on the cutting edge, and it will need the computing power to support that.

The question, says Scheinman, is less about costs and capital and more about engineering challenges: “When they have a billion people, and as people use the product more, does that create scaling issues they haven’t yet seen before?”

Article source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=3f4974649ecfec5e7a78a9b791d20634

Ever since Facebook announced its $1 billion acquisition of the company behind the popular photo-sharing app Instagram last month, the question on every nerd’s lips has been: What will be the next big thing in mobile apps?

Clever Creations: Cinemagram allows you to turn a video clip into an animated GIF that is somewhere between a photo and a video.

Rachel Metz

For many, the answer is video. Apps like Viddy and Socialcam have picked up steam, gaining users—including pop stars Justin Bieber and Britney Spears—who are shooting and sharing videos with others within the apps and on social networks. Like Instagram, many of these apps also include a number of effects you can use to give your videos an edge, such as filters and background music.

And with the upcoming unveiling of Airtime, a stealth social video startup from Napster cofounders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, it’s clear that the medium is on the rise.

With this in mind, I reviewed a number of quickly growing video-sharing apps. All are free and let you share your creations with friends in several different ways. Odds are slim you’ll use one of these to create a prize-winning film, but chances are you’ll have fun developing your inner auteur.

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Socialcam

Availability: Android and iPhone

Sharing: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Posterous, Tumblr, Dropbox, e-mail, and SMS

Socialcam is like having a little video-sharing studio in your pocket. And unlike a number of other apps I’ve tried, this one doesn’t limit video length (though, if your videos are anything like mine, there may be limits to your audience’s patience).

The app includes filters which you can swipe through to choose before filming, including the flashback-inducing “Grunge” and Tron-like “Electronica.” Once you’ve shot your masterpiece, you can pick a theme for it (essentially, a title page that introduces the video) and a soundtrack from a variety of cheesy-sounding prerecorded tunes. You can post it to numerous social networks, as well as YouTube and Dropbox.

As its name suggests, Socialcam is very social. You can follow other users or tag those who appear in your videos. Like other apps I tested, you can also respond to videos, “like” them, or share them with others. If you want, Socialcam will automatically push all these actions to Facebook and tweet about the ones you like on Twitter. And the app has more ways to share your videos than any other I tried. So many choices can make the app’s interface feel too crowded, though.

Viddy

Availability: iPhone only

Sharing: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, e-mail, and SMS

Short clips are the main event on Viddy, where each video you take can be a maximum of 15 seconds.

Like Socialcam, Viddy is full of features. A handy on-screen sound meter lets you keep an eye on volume, and an optional timer will count down several seconds before the app begins filming. You can lock the white balance, exposure, and focus. When you’ve finished taking a video, you can change its look by adding a filter (the app comes with several, and you can download a number of others, most of which are free and some of which are celebrity-endorsed). Each filter has its own soundtrack that you can adjust or turn off, but I mostly found the tunes distracting.

I liked the ability to adjust the strength of a filter, which is useful if, say, you’re using Snoop Dogg’s official smoke-filled one but only want a hint of haze. It does take some time for Viddy to process adjustments, though, so while you can immediately see a thumbnail of the movie, you’ll have to wait a bit to watch it all the way through after doing any editing.

There are plenty of ways to share your videos and interact with other Viddy users and with your friends, and you can tag users, places, and things in your clips. Once you configure social networks like Facebook and Twitter, a little green circle will appear next to that network’s icon—tap to make it red if you don’t want your video shared on that particular site.

Cinemagram

Availability: iPhone only

Sharing: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and e-mail

This addictive app allows you to turn a short video clip into an animated GIF that’s part still image, part lively video. You take a short video, choose a few seconds of it, and Cinemagram will show you a still image of the first frame of the clip. You then use your finger to shade in the portion of the screen you want to animate (you can zoom in to do more precise editing).

For example, if you shoot a video of a friend dancing in the sunlight, then highlight only their shadow, you’ll create a still shot of the person with just their shadow boogieing over and over. You can also add filters to your creations, ranging from simple black-and-white or sepia to various washed-out tints, and enable automatic sharing on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

It takes a bit of practice—and creativity—to come up with compelling Cinemagrams, but the results can be impressive and haunting. I came up with a still shot of boats with a tiny bird flying by as well as a frozen skateboarder’s disembodied legs grinding on a granite slab in a local park. I was happy to share them with friends on Facebook and Twitter. And it was fun to scroll through the latest Cinemagrams created by other users, like one that showed a woman seemingly leaping in and out of a purse sitting on a desk, and another that showed two girls standing motionless with their hands out in front of them while their shadows played a game of patty-cake.

Tout

Availability: Android and iPhone

Sharing: Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, and SMS

Like Viddy, Tout lets users take 15-second videos. But the appeal here is actually the lack of frills, which makes it very simple to quickly share clips with your friends. With Tout, there are no filters to choose, and you can’t use the iPhone’s digital zoom. You simply shoot your video while a little on-screen clock counts down the seconds to zero. After recording a clip, you can add a note to describe it, choose a social network to share it on, or e-mail a link to your friends.

Within the Tout app, you can check out other users’ publicly posted videos, either by looking at what’s currently popular or searching for a specific word. And while you can’t post text comments in response to others’ videos, you can reply with a video of your own.

One thing to keep in mind, which I figured out the hard way after accidentally posting a test clip to Twitter: You can’t delete published Touts from the app—it must be done by logging into the Tout website.

Article source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=a4b0a9ee120c5a42cbac02ff165874e2

Soon, your dog will be in the cloud.

That’s not a reminder of the fact that all dogs go to heaven. Rather, it’s simply a technological inevitability. As pet owners become more and more interested in helicopter parenting their dogs and cats, expect to see more announcements like this one from Fujitsu, which is working on a smart dog collar that’ll track your dog’s movements with a cloud-connected device.

“Starting in the second half of 2012,” says Fujitsu, “the company will begin offering a new cloud service to provide pet health management support using sensor data collected from the device.” Fujitsu has been demonstrating the device at a Tokyo forum yesterday and today.

This is as much about helicopter parenting as it is about the data-driven life. It turns out that pets, like people, are increasingly living sedentary lifestyles, and are facing the same scourge of obesity and diabetes we find in their human owners. How do you make sure your dog’s getting sufficient exercise? With a cloud-connected dog collar, of course.

Fujitsu says the device is “compact, lightweight, and requires very little power,” and thus can be worn 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. On top of being a doggie pedometer analyzing your pet’s movements, the device can also record signs of shivering and external temperature–other indications of your pet’s health.

Fujitsu says the data can be transferred from the device using “FeliCa” technology, which is a common Sony-developed RFID smart card system in Japan.  Data can be viewed on a smart phone, computer, or uploaded to the cloud for storage. Online, a website can help render the data visually in graph form, to help you parse just how Fido’s doing, and whether he’s met the various weight-loss goals you may have set for him.

A commenter on The Verge says of the device, “Shut up and take my money.” But I’m a tad skeptical. Who is obsessed enough with their dog’s health to want step-by-step data on the subject, yet hands-off enough that they can’t be assured to take their dog for regular walks or runs to prevent the lifestyle diseases in question? Is the device really for greyhound racers, for whom exact metrics on movement, stamina, and the like might translate into profits? Or is it for data junkies and fitness nuts who have always lamented that their dog can’t benefit from Nike Plus like they do?

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Article source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=293a919143cdf9f64f3b3ee0dd3e9223

New Scientist’s Jim Giles calls attention to this freaky fact: that in the future–the rather near future–our interfaces with our gadgets may be our own bodies. “Left your phone at home again?” he writes. “A solution is at hand: make sure it is with you at all times by having it implanted in your arm.” That’s certainly a way of having a solution at hand, so to speak.

This is pretty much no longer the realm of science fiction, according to researchers at the Canadian software company Autodesk. The team embedded, somewhat grimly, a button, LED, and touch sensor in a cadaver’s arm. Each element worked just fine when under the skin–Bluetooth connection and wireless charging even worked through the skin.

MIT’s Sherry Turkle weighed in on this, noting that “in general, the trend has been that people are more and more willing to incorporate bits of the machine world into themselves.” After all, to a certain extent, cyborgs are already among us–think of your uncle’s pacemaker. But there’s obviously a difference between elective, versus life-saving, implantation of technology. Where, if anywhere, do we draw the line?

Turkle’s most startling comment to New Scientist is that in some ways, people already behave as though they were cyborgs, as though their smart phones were essentially semi-externalized parts of themselves, like the daemons in The Golden Compass. “People literally cannot be without this device,” Turkle said. “They don’t feel the same when they are not connected. We live with our phones as if they are part of our body.”

Turkle’s ambivalence about technology is about as well thought out as anyone’s–her book Alone Together is a good place to start, if you’re troubled by our incipient cyborgism. Last year, she told me in an interview that while the iPhone was “a precious technology,” it needed to be “used in accordance with your social, professional, and personal values.” For me, my personal values probably prevent me from implanting the thing inside my forearm.

While certain benefits come with implanting a gadget–it makes it tougher to lose, obviously–there are naturally risks involved: the possibility of infection, for instance. But personally, my mind rejects the idea of an implanted smart phone more than I suspect my body would. Setting aside all the concerns about infection, lack of privacy, and the like, I simply want–I think most people simply want–the option to not be connected, now and again. I have said before that one of the most important applications of the last few years has been the Internet-disabling Freedom. That Freedom can’t be used on smart phones is oppressive enough. The notion of a life in which we literally can’t be free of our phones, because they’re embedded in us? I think at that point, we begin to lose sight of what it means to be human–not because subcutaneous technology would make us inherently robotic, but rather because it would spell an end to all restorative, contemplative, unconnected silence.

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Article source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=bada27c3bb3b89247ba77e5c5fbeaa98

There’s certainly money in politics, and Facebook knows it. The company, now under pressure to to justify its enormous $104 billion IPO, is trying to hire someone to maximize political advertising sales during the 2012 election season in the U.S.

“The Client Partner will establish and strengthen key relationships with national political campaigns and organizations with a focus on driving revenue, platform adoption, advertiser education, and advertiser satisfaction,” the posting on Facebook’s website says.

How much money is in politics for Facebook? That’s hard to say. But with the rise of the Super PAC, campaign spending on advertising will likely reach record-breaking levels this year. A growing percentage of that is moving online, in part because fewer people are watching live TV than during previous election years, according to the global ad agency WPP. The Hill reports that the Obama campaign alone is on track to spend $35 million on total online advertising this year, up from $16 million in 2008.

Unlike other advertisers that have questioned the value of Facebook this week, both the Romney and Obama presidential campaigns are likely to appreciate Facebook’s importance. It had 40 million U.S. users in 2008 compared with 160 million today—almost the entire American voting public, according to The Guardian. 

So, yes, we’ll be seeing a lot more politics in and next to our News Feeds over the next few months, targeted based on our activity and our friends’ activity on the network. Whether the lifting of corporate spending limits on political campaigns, a result of a Supreme Court decision in 2010, will actually be a meaningful boost Facebook’s bottom line this year is unknown. The company’s total advertising revenue worldwide was about $3 billion in 2011.

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The United States Commerce Department concluded today that Chinese solar panel manufacturers are dumping solar panels in the U.S., and is penalizing them by imposing a 30 percent tariff on 62 solar manufacturers in China and a general 250 percent tariff on other solar panel manufacturers in China. That’s on top of a small tariff of 2.9 to 4.73 percent it announced earlier this year.

The decision may increase solar panel prices in the U.S. and will undoubtedly have political repercussions, as China has threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs. It could also have an impact on innovation, but exactly what that impact will be less clear. 

The new tariffs could help some solar panel companies in the U.S. that are working innovative technology get to market by raising prices here. But they could also hurt U.S. companies that supply materials and equipment to manufacturers in China, as well as installers who benefit from cheap solar panels imported from China. Many of these companies are also innovating—with new technology and financing models–to bring down the cost of solar, so hurting them could slow down progress toward solar power that’s cheap enough to compete without subsidies. One prominent solar researcher with ties to Chinese companies argues that trade barriers can only hurt innovation.

We break down the issues here, in a story we ran after the smaller tariff was announced in March.

The tariff decision is preliminary and may yet be overturned later this year.

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Article source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=c555b3ce937663551759953008a62a24

Photo: Andrew Braithwaite

In 2009, the Pew Internet Trust published a survey worth resurfacing for what it says about the significance of Facebook. The study was inspired by earlier research that “argued that since 1985 Americans have become more socially isolated, the size of their discussion networks has declined, and the diversity of those people with whom they discuss important matters has decreased.”

In particular, the study found that Americans have fewer close ties to those from their neighborhoods and from voluntary associations. Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears suggest that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phone, may play a role in advancing this trend.

If you read through all the results from Pew’s survey, you’ll discover two surprising things:

1. “Use of newer information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as the internet and mobile phones, is not the social change responsible for the restructuring of Americans’ core networks. We found that ownership of a mobile phone and participation in a variety of internet activities were associated with larger and more diverse core discussion networks.”

2. However, Americans on the whole are more isolated than they were in 1985. “The average size of Americans’ core discussion networks has declined since 1985; the mean network size has dropped by about one-third or a loss of approximately one confidant.” In addition, “The diversity of core discussion networks has markedly declined; discussion networks are less likely to contain non-kin – that is, people who are not relatives by blood or marriage.”

In other words, the technologies that have isolated Americans are anything but informational. It’s not hard to imagine what they are, as there’s been plenty of research on the subject. These technologies are the automobile, sprawl and suburbia. We know that neighborhoods that aren’t walkable decrease the number of our social connections and increase obesity. We know that commutes make us miserable, and that time spent in an automobile affects everything from our home life to our level of anxiety and depression.

Indirect evidence for this can be found in the demonstrated preferences of Millenials, who are opting for cell phones over automobiles and who would rather live in the urban cores their parents abandoned, ride mass transit and in all other respects physically re-integrate themselves with the sort of village life that is possible only in the most walkable portions of cities.

Meanwhile, it’s worth contemplating one of the primary factors that drove Facebook’s adoption by (soon) 1 billion people: Loneliness. Americans have less support than ever — one in eight in the Pew survey reported having no “discussion confidants.”

It’s clear that for all our fears about the ability of our mobile devices to isolate us in public, the primary way they’re actually used is for connection.

On average, the size of core discussion networks is 12% larger amongst cell phone users, 9% larger for those who share photos online, and 9% bigger for those who use instant messaging.

The Pew study is full of factoids like this one. Bloggers are more likely to have confidants of a different race, people who upload photos online are 61% more likely to have a confidant with different political views, etc.

Humans are a social species, and we will use any outlet we’re offered to connect with one another. Cultural shifts, the flight to the suburbs and our short-sighted investments in fossil-fuel based infrastructure put up barriers to social connections that we are only now coming to grips with. For all the hand-wringing over how we connect online, it’s clear that the one unalloyed good social networks have accomplished is a net increase in our interdependence.

The question worth asking is: How did it occur to a generation raised in the suburbs that they could have the kind of civic life that can only be achieved in people-centered neighborhoods? Isn’t it possible that in the 21st century we expect more of our physical environments because that kind of connectedness is what we’ve come to expect from our our virtual ones?

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