Science
Israeli Contact Tracing App Raises Privacy Concerns in US – The Media Line
As contact tracing apps roll out in the US, apps like Tel Aviv-based GlobeKeeper’s SAFE spark concerns around privacy and civil liberties
As civil liberties organizations and experts raise their concerns about the risks posed by contact tracing apps, Tel Aviv-based app developer GlobeKeeper is already in talks with various US states and private companies to deploy their COVID-19 tracking app SAFE.
Earlier in the pandemic, GloberKeeper collaborated with Israel’s Health Ministry in developing HaMagen, a voluntary contact tracing app currently in use by over 2 million Israelis.
Their new app, SAFE, works with a device’s Bluetooth technology to broadcast and communicate with other Bluetooth devices in range. The app generates unique anonymous identifiers every 15 minutes and uploads the information to a public database. Data is stored on the individual’s device, with deletion after 21 days.
“The data is basically public. So not even the government owns it. It’s sitting on the cloud, publicly. It’s random unique identifiers that don’t include any personal information,” GlobeKeeper CEO Dan Peleg explained.
Peleg said the SAFE app meets the standards of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and does not violate the rules of the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
While there is no comprehensive federal privacy law in place in the US, developers who use the CCPA model as a guideline are viewed positively by Professor Jon Garon, director of the Intellectual Property, Cybersecurity and Technology Law Program at Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad College of Law. According to Garon, CCPA is the most aggressive pro-consumer law in the US.
“If these apps are adopted by state health agencies, it is incumbent on the agencies to make sure contractually that the consumer agreement is very narrow in scope, allowing the app to do the contact tracing necessary for health care but not to divulge that data to any third party. If it’s done that way, then its health benefits will outweigh the privacy risks,” Garon said.
Despite transparency assurances by contact tracing developers like Peleg, and those like Garon who see the potential benefits of digital contact tracing, there remain widespread concerns over privacy among civil liberties watchdogs like the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.).
“I think digital contact tracing is unproven, unreliable, and in all likelihood, a dangerous distraction from manual contact tracing and other evidence-based public health tools,” said Albert Cahn, the executive director of S.T.O.P.
Cahn is concerned that contact tracing technology in the US could be used as a new spying tool by local police departments and national security authorities.
I think digital contact tracing is unproven, unreliable, and in all likelihood, a dangerous distraction from manual contact tracing and other evidence-based public health tools.
There is also the concern that, should this type of software be purchased by private entities, the voluntary nature of the app could be nullified, forcing people to make choices like keeping either their jobs or their right to privacy.
“As an employee protection matter, it’s completely inappropriate to give companies this sort of power over their employees’ health data,” Cahn said.
S.T.O.P. is currently working on enacting a state law in New York that would ban employers from forcing employees to hand over their health data.
Peleg believes that how private companies choose to enforce use of the SAFE app is a matter of their internal policies. He also thinks that, while governments should regulate apps like SAFE, his company is not responsible for government actions that might result in the accessing of an individual’s data stored on their personal device.
Both Garon and Cahn advocate the need for federal privacy laws in the US and better protection against geolocation data mining, of which both Google and Apple have been found guilty in the past.
In May, S.T.O.P. released a report about the civil liberties and privacy risks of COVID-19 Bluetooth tracking apps.
The future of contact tracing apps beyond the pandemic is unclear but Peleg is enthusiastic that his app’s positive contribution and benefits will outweigh the risks posed by privacy gatekeepers.
“The point is to help the community minimize the economic damage and life taken from the pandemic. Getting back to normal is the most important thing,” he said.
The point is to help the community minimize the economic damage and life taken from the pandemic. Getting back to normal is the most important thing.
For Cahn, there are still important questions to be answered by American society and lawmakers.
“In the case of COVID-19, do we go down the path of experimental, unproven, equally dangerous technology as a solution? Or do we listen to the public health experts, use evidence-based methods and make the investment in manual contact tracing needed to save lives?”
Rohama Bruk is a student in The Media Line’s Press and Policy Student Program. Ms. Bruk attends the University of Miami.
Science
"Hi, It's Me": NASA's Voyager 1 Phones Home From 15 Billion Miles Away – NDTV
<!–
Washington, United States:
NASA’s Voyager 1 probe — the most distant man-made object in the universe — is returning usable information to ground control following months of spouting gibberish, the US space agency announced Monday.
The spaceship stopped sending readable data back to Earth on November 14, 2023, even though controllers could tell it was still receiving their commands.
In March, teams working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that a single malfunctioning chip was to blame, and devised a clever coding fix that worked within the tight memory constraints of its 46-year-old computer system.
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“Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems,” the agency said.
Hi, it’s me. – V1 https://t.co/jgGFBfxIOe
— NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) April 22, 2024
“The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again.”
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was mankind’s first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium, in 2012, and is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth. Messages sent from Earth take about 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft.
Its twin, Voyager 2, also left the solar system in 2018.
Both Voyager spacecraft carry “Golden Records” — 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials.
These include a map of our solar system, a piece of uranium that serves as a radioactive clock allowing recipients to date the spaceship’s launch, and symbolic instructions that convey how to play the record.
The contents of the record, selected for NASA by a committee chaired by legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, include encoded images of life on Earth, as well as music and sounds that can be played using an included stylus.
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Their power banks are expected to be depleted sometime after 2025. They will then continue to wander the Milky Way, potentially for eternity, in silence.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Science
West Antarctica's ice sheet was smaller thousands of years ago – here's why this matters today – The Conversation
As the climate warms and Antarctica’s glaciers and ice sheets melt, the resulting rise in sea level has the potential to displace hundreds of millions of people around the world by the end of this century.
A key uncertainty in how much and how fast the seas will rise lies in whether currently “stable” parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet can become “unstable”.
One such region is West Antarctica’s Siple Coast, where rivers of ice flow off the continent and drain into the ocean.
This ice flow is slowed down by the Ross Ice Shelf, a floating mass of ice nearly the size of Spain, which holds back the land-based ice. Compared to other ice shelves in West Antarctica, the Ross Ice Shelf has little melting at its base because the ocean below it is very cold.
Although this region has been stable during the past few decades, recent research suggest this was not always the case. Radiocarbon dating of sediments from beneath the ice sheet tells us that it retreated hundreds of kilometres some 7,000 years ago, and then advanced again to its present position within the last 2,000 years.
Figuring out why this happened can help us better predict how the ice sheet will change in the future. In our new research, we test two main hypotheses.
Read more:
What an ocean hidden under Antarctic ice reveals about our planet’s future climate
Testing scenarios
Scientists have considered two possible explanations for this past ice sheet retreat and advance. The first is related to Earth’s crust below the ice sheet.
As an ice sheet shrinks, the change in ice mass causes the Earth’s crust to slowly uplift in response. At the same time, and counterintuitively, the sea level drops near the ice because of a weakening of the gravitational attraction between the ice sheet and the ocean water.
As the ice sheet thinned and retreated since the last ice age, crustal uplift and the fall in sea level in the region may have re-grounded floating ice, causing ice sheet advance.
The other hypothesis is that the ice sheet behaviour may be due to changes in the ocean. When the surface of the ocean freezes, forming sea ice, it expels salt into the water layers below. This cold briny water is heavier and mixes deep into the ocean, including under the Ross Ice Shelf. This blocks warm ocean currents from melting the ice.
Seafloor sediments and ice cores tell us that this deep mixing was weaker in the past when the ice sheet was retreating. This means that warm ocean currents may have flowed underneath the ice shelf and melted the ice. Mixing increased when the ice sheet was advancing.
We test these two ideas with computer model simulations of ice sheet flow and Earth’s crustal and sea surface responses to changes in the ice sheet with varying ocean temperature.
Because the rate of crustal uplift depends on the viscosity (stickiness) of the underlying mantle, we ran simulations within ranges estimated for West Antarctica. A stickier mantle means slower crustal uplift as the ice sheet thins.
The simulations that best matched geological records had a stickier mantle and a warmer ocean as the ice sheet retreated. In these simulations, the ice sheet retreats more quickly as the ocean warms.
When the ocean cools, the simulated ice sheet readvances to its present-day position. This means that changes in ocean temperature best explain the past ice sheet behaviour, but the rate of crustal uplift also affects how sensitive the ice sheet is to the ocean.
What this means for climate policy today
Much attention has been paid to recent studies that show glacial melting may be irreversible in some parts of West Antarctica, such as the Amundsen Sea embayment.
In the context of such studies, policy debates hinge on whether we should focus on adapting to rising seas rather than cutting greenhouse gas emissions. If the ice sheet is already melting, are we too late for mitigation?
Our study suggests it is premature to give up on mitigation.
Global climate models run under high-emissions scenarios show less sea ice formation and deep ocean mixing. This could lead to the same cold-to-warm ocean switch that caused extensive ice sheet retreat thousands of years ago.
For West Antarctica’s Siple Coast, it is better if we prevent this ocean warming from occurring in the first place, which is still possible if we choose a low-emissions future.
Science
NASA's Voyager 1 resumes sending engineering updates to Earth – Phys.org
For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).
Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth.
The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory—including some of the FDS computer’s software code—isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide affected the code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.
The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22.5 hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification had worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.
During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.
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