Google Restricting Huawei’s Use Of Android: The E-Commerce Side of the Trade War?

Even though security concerns on Huawei products has been around since 2006, does Google’s latest move now makes Trump’s trade war with China now has a e-commerce front?

By: Ringo Bones

Back around 2006 to 2007, tech-savvy Gen-X’ers’ primary reason for “boycotting” Huawei and ZTE gear was primarily due to the Tibetan Freedom Movement and how Beijing kept incrementally ratcheting their crackdown on Uyghurs since the 1990s. Sadly such concerns were largely forgotten or dipped below the radar of activist social media since a relatively unknown senator from Illinois got elected to The White House. Then and now, no major news correspondent manage to ask Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei about what he thinks about consumers who chose to boycott Huawei products because of Tibetan Freedom Movement and Uyghur crackdown concerns. But recently in February 2019, the Huawei issue surfaced yet again – and in a way bigger manner – after the company faced growing backlash from Western countries, primarily lead by the Trump Administration, over possible risks posed by using Huawei products in next-generation 5G mobile networks.

On May 20, 2019, Google decided to start restricting new designs of Huawei smartphones access to some Google apps. This move comes after the Trump Administration added Huawei to a list of companies that American firms cannot trade with unless they have a “special license”. In a statement, Google said it was “complying with the order and reviewing the implications”. At the moment, Huawei declined to comment.

At the moment, existing Huawei smartphone users will still be able to update apps and push through security fixes, as well as update Google Play services, but when Google launches the next version of Android later this year, it may not be available on Huawei devices. Future Huawei devices may no longer have apps such as YouTube and Google Maps. Even though Huawei has already a so-called Plan B to prepare them from such scenarios brought about by the Trump Administration’s “Trade War”, the company probably must now abandon its plan to overtake Samsung to become the world’s best-selling smartphone brand by 2020.

The Mankosi Village Do It Yourself Internet: A Good Model to Follow For Those Still Trying To Connect to The Internet?

With only a preliminary help to start up the village’s own mesh network, would Mankosi village, South Africa’s do it yourself internet serves as a good example for those still can’t connect to the internet due to their remote location?

By: Ringo Bones

Even though the project got its start back in 2017, Mankosi village, South Africa’s Do It Yourself – also called Zenseleni – in the local language recently got press notice not only for its ongoing success, but primarily for its lower user fees in comparison to other major telecommunication company owned internet networks in other parts of the African continent. In Mankosi, you can get one full month of internet for less than 2 US dollars – about 1.70 US dollars in fact.

When the villagers of Mankosi first heard about this thing called the internet and how it could help them in touch cheaply while helping them with all manner of information research, the village, with the help of the University of Western Cape built a mesh network that later became known as Zenzeleni – which means do-it-yourself in their local language. The village runs its own mesh networks that are then linked to the internet. Due to the relatively remote location of Mankosi village, a mesh network based internet system is much cheaper to operate than a conventional single mast based network more often used by major telecommunication companies / internet service providers to locate relatively remote areas to the internet. Mankosi’s messed network system was initially ran on off the grid solar photovoltaic power generating systems, although the village got recently connected to the country’s main electrical grid back in 2018 which further reduced their operating costs.

Due to the economies of scale, the network still manages to earn a profit since it was started back in 2017 even at the price that they charge. The Mankosi village network also make money by selling voice-over-internet-protocol vouchers that people can use to talk to each other. This cost about 17-percent of what people normally pay to make calls in South Africa. Zenzeleni instead charge 50-percent of network charges and thus makes a profit. The profit is used to maintain the network and to fund other development projects within the villages. Mankosi’s Zenzeleni network still runs till this day because the University of Western Cape trained several villagers – and they still do – to install and maintain the towers as in-house technicians.

DNA: Music Recording And Playback Format Of The Future?

With traditional independent record stores now closing and malls no longer selling Red Book Compact Discs, will DNA prove to be the “future-proof” music format of the future?

By: Ringo Bones

With traditional independent music stores – ones that sell vinyl LPs and Redbook 16-bit 44.1 KHz sampled compact discs closing and big malls no longer selling Redbook CDs, it seems that it would only be a matter of time that every Generation-Xers music collection could be consigned to the dustbin of history much sooner than expected. Thankfully, to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the release of their most successful album, UK based electronic music group Massive Attack released their Mezzanine album on DNA back in October 2018.

Massive Attack worked with Andrew Melchior at the technology consultancy 3^rd Space Agency – the man who helped Bjӧrk convert her performance of “Stonemilker” into virtual reality for her 2015 MOMA show. According to Melchior: “The advantage with DNA is that our civilization could crash into dust and rebuild itself using entirely different technology, meaning they couldn’t access our computers or disks, since every human carries DNA, we can expect any future civilization to work out how to play back DNA-stored information. Which means the first thing a future civilization would learn about us might be Mezzanine.”

Using the DNA molecule to store vast amounts of digitally encoded information is more than just a science fiction pipe dream that was first popularly presented in the Superman movie franchise Man of Steel. The idea has first been published back in 1964 to 1965 when a Soviet era physicist named Mikhail Neiman published his work on the subject in the journal Radiotekhnika. But the first successful execution of encoding digital data onto a DNA molecule was back in 2012 when Harvard biologist George Church encoded one of his books onto a DNA molecule.

The electronic musicians Massive Attack worked with scientists at TurboBeads, a commercial spin-off from the Swiss science, engineering and mathematics university ETH Zurich, to adopt a technology pioneered by maverick US biotechnologists Craig Venter when he created a synthetic chromosome of a bacteria species in the laboratory with four “watermarks” written in the DNA. Robert Grass, professor at ETH Zurich’s Functional Materials Laboratory and his colleague Reinhard Heckel used similar chemical techniques to translate Mezzanine’s digital audio stream into genetic code. “We store digital information in a sequence of zeroes and ones, but biology stores genetic information using the four building blocks of DNA,” Grass explains. “We compressed Mezzanine’s digital audio then coded it as DNA molecules by converting the binary 0s and 1s into a quaternary code – with adenine representing 00, cytosine representing 01, guanine representing 10 and thymine representing 11. The resulting DNA resembles natural DNA in every way, although it contains no useful genetic information.”

According to Massive Attack band member Robert del Naja: “The storage potential of DNA is huge.” Indeed, one milligram of the DNA molecule could store the complete text of every book in the US Library of Congress and have room to spare. Del Naja also states: “If you think about DNA versus the ridiculous amounts of server farms that have got to be cooled 24/7 all around the world, this looks like a much better solution going forward. It allows us to archive music for hundreds of thousands of years.” Unfortunately as of late no word yet on the newfangled format’s sound quality.

Beyond Verbal: Also A Novel Medical Diagnostic App?

Originally an Israeli start-up company that claims to do emotion recognition using vocal intonations, could Beyond Verbal’s vocal analyzing system also serve as an early medical diagnostic tool?

By: Ringo Bones

When Dr. Yoram Levanon founded Beyond Verbal back in 2012, their patented computer algorithm was originally intended to provide emotion recognition by analyzing subtle and not-so-subtle vocal intonations. Beyond Verbal commercializes a patented technology from 18 years of research by physicists and neuropsychologists into the mechanisms of human intonations. The company says that its technology enables machines to understand human emotions by analyzing raw voice intonations as people speak. 

This technology is based on research of over 70,000 subjects in more than 30 different languages, which led to the development of the app that extracts people’s moods, attitudes and personality from the intonations of their voice. Together with neuro-psychologist Dr. Lan Lossos, the original idea for Beyond Verbal came when Dr. Levanon began showing interest in how babies – who do not understand a single word – are able to figure out exactly what their caretakers feel toward them. Levanon and Lossos then studied over 60,000 test subjects in at least 26 languages and their success in extracting, decoding and measuring human moods, attitudes and personalities gave birth to what they call Emotional Analytics.   

Years later, it was found out that their app can also manage to detect illness through the sound of one’s voice. As of 2019, during various interviews with the press, CEO, founder and Beyond Verbal’s chief scientist Dr. Yoram Levanon states that the latest version of their Beyond Verbal app has the ability to be able to analyze diseases via the human voice with up to 75-percent accuracy in tests via a newly added classifier using vocal biomarkers. The latest version of the Beyond Verbal app has now the ability to detect early signs of Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer and even early signs of autism in children. Does this now make Beyond Verbal a quite effective medical app?

Has Beijing Doing Cyber Espionage on the African Union?

Even though they had donated the building and the computer equipment, has Beijing been conducting cyber espionage work on the African Union headquarters during the last five years?

By Ringo Bones 

The 200-million US dollar headquarters in Addis Ababa – including the computer system - was fully funded and built by China and opened to great fanfare back in 2012. Many in the West see it as a symbol of Beijing’s thrust for influence in Africa and access to the continent’s natural resources. Then an article published back in Friday, January 2, 2018 in the French publication Le Monde quoting anonymous African Union sources – which included IT technicians – reported that data from computers in the Chinese-built building had been transferred nightly to Mainland Chinese servers during the past five years. After the massive hack was discovered a year ago, the building’s IT system including the servers was changes, according to Le Monde. During the sweep for bugs after the discovery, microphones hidden in desks and the walls were also detected and removed, the newspaper reported. 

Sadly, despite of the report’s credibility, Chinese and African Union officials that gathered in Addis Ababa for the bloc’s annual summit both denied Le Monde’s report. China’s ambassador to the African Union, Kuang Weilin, recently called the article “ridiculous and preposterous” and said its publication was intended to put pressure on relations between Beijing and the African continent. 

When asked about the report, Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who assumed the African Union chairmanship this year, said that he did not know anything about it. “But in any case, I don’t think there is anything done here that we would not like people to know,” he told reporters after a meeting of African heads-of-state. “I don’t think spying is the specialty of the Chinese, We have spies all over the place in this world,” Kagame said. “But I will not have worried about being spied on in this building.” Kagame’s only concern, he said, was that the African Union should have built its own headquarters, instead of China. “I would only have wished that in Africa we got our act together earlier on. We should have been able to build our own building.”

Are Filipino Facebook Content Moderators Compromised?

Rumors are abound online, but are Filipino Facebook content moderators actually bribed to remove content critical to Vladimir Putin, the Beijing Communist Party and Pres. Rodrigo Duterte from Facebook? 

By: Ringo Bones 

I first heard it back in Friday, February 2, 2018 that a whistleblower had acquired proof that Filipino Facebook content moderators had been receiving bribes from various entities to advance their respective political ends by removing Facebook posts critical of them. Even though someone from the BBC had taken the story seriously but is still awaiting verification on the authenticity of the material – which means it could be a big story two weeks from now. But is there any truth to the story that Filipino Facebook content moderators are taking bribes? 

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook started to hire additional personnel in the form of “content moderators” back in 2014 to control the tide of “propaganda posts” by the so-called Islamic State that showcased beheadings of western NGOs, charity workers and journalists caught up in their violent and bloody empire building in the wake of the Syrian civil war. It is not just “gruesome beheadings” that these so-called moderators block from being posted on Facebook. These also include inappropriate posts of pornographic nature – i.e. the so-called “dick pics” and their ilk. But since the so-called Islamic State is now in the wan, many of this so-called “Facebook Content Moderators” have branched out to do other tasks - sadly, they have the power to declare whichever of your posts is “spam” at their own discretion if they are not caught by their superiors.

Filipino Facebook Content Moderators are typically paid around 24,000 pesos a month – around 376 UK pounds (quid) or a little over 500 US dollars – which is twice that the typical salary of a public school teacher here in the Philippines. Rumors started to circulate around the middle of last year after one of the moderators who is actually working for Amnesty International infiltrated the center after it was found out that there are Filipino Facebook content moderators who are paid by the Kremlin with up to 10,000 US dollars if they block video posts on Facebook that are taken by Amnesty International operatives in Syria that show Russian troops and planes loyal to Bashar Al Assad committing war crimes. 

American and European non-government organizations and charity groups critical of the current Philippine president who recently compared himself to Adolf Hitler – i.e. Rodrigo Duterte – on his handling of the Philippines’ so-called drug problem got their Facebook pages either blocked or made “unvisitable” in the Philippines. Should there be an ethics committee serving as an oversight on Filipino Facebook Content Moderators?

Could The Ransomware Cyber Attacks Trigger A Malware Apocalypse?

Given that it was originally revealed as an NSA creation by Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing, could the recent WannaCry Ransomware cyber attacks someday trigger a malware apocalypse? 

By: Ringo Bones

The so-called “Zombie Apocalypse” might have been only a product of Hollywood, but the recent Ransomware malware attacks is not only real but painfully tangible for us who have grown dependent to the global internet infrastructure. The WannaCry Ransomware cyber attacks started back in May 12, 2017 and traced to be triggered in the Hong Kong – Singapore time zone in the South-East Asian region and then spread to over 150 countries. The worst-hit countries were reported to be Russia, Ukraine, India and Taiwan. It eventually infected more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries but got press notice only after the malware affected Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) and scores of children’s hospitals in the UK. 

The WannaCry Ransomware was found to specifically infect systems that have not been updated with the most recent security updates – especially the one issued by Microsoft back in March 14, 2017. The Ransomware malware also managed to scare the pants off of conspiracy theorists after I.T. experts found out that it uses the EternalBlue Exploit developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as revealed by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden. 

It got the moniker “Ransomware” after the NSA-developed malware got into the hands of criminal hackers who extorted money to computer system owners affected by their malware attack. They usually ask for 500 to 600 U.S. dollars worth in bitcoins to restore their computer systems into full working order. Sadly, there are variants of the Ransomware malware that doesn’t have the kill-switch that can be turned off by the criminal hackers after you pay then the required bitcoin funds.