Tech News: Reading Unopened Letters Using AI

became the target of hackers. But one thing I did not mention this was a failing on my part is that while I don't agree at all philosophically with the average Gab users, I also condemn hacking in an effort to gain access to systems and steal, you know, people's data. I think intrusion experts are important. They can help companies discover and patch security vulnerabilities, and sometimes folks will do

that all on their own. They'll product systems to see if they're really secure, and typically they'll reach out and tell a company if they found a vulnerability, unless, of course, they're going all black hat with the hacker route. But this was a case of someone scraping data off of gabs systems and then sharing that data externally. And while I might vehemently disagree with the general political viewpoint over at GAB, I also don't condone stealing data anyway. No

one told me to say any of that. In fact, no one's even brought it up. Maybe I'm just being you know, overreactive or whatever, but it occurred to me after that show went live that I really should say something about it, as I think it's really the ethical thing to do. Okay, let's get onto the news. Our

first story falls into the category of irony. The US of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has found in favor, at least partly of a German company called bit Management, regarding the company's claim that the U. S. Navy copied software from bit Management without permission. So this is a copyright case. But another way to say it is that the US Navy has been found guilty of piracy, which, as I understand it, is the opposite of what navies

are supposed to do. All goofs aside, this is just the latest development and a problem that started a decade ago. The U. S. Navy purchased software called BS Contact, which is a virtual reality suite from Bit Management Actually they went through a third party company and then the Navy copied that software onto its internal network. But according to Bit Management, the purchase of the software did not include

a license for the Navy to do that. The Navy ended up installing the software more than half a million computers. The company filed suit against the Navy in twenty sixteen on the matter, demanding that the Navy pay for all those copies, which amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars. So why did it take so long for the case

to reach its current status? While a big part of the problem is that the Navy was working with a third party retailer that acted kind of like a go between, and it meant that Navy officials actually believed that they did have the permission to copy the software, while Bit Management maintains the Navy did not in fact have that permission. Now, the initial court case found in favor of the U. S. Navy against Bit Management, but then Bit Management appealed the matter.

The Court of Appeals partly upheld the earlier ruling in favor of the Navy, but it did say that while there was an implied license between bit Management and the Navy. The Navy failed to track usage of the software across its network, which would have been part of the terms of this implied license. As such, the Navy is liable

for copyright infringement. Now the case will go back to Federal Claims Court to decide what damages should be paid to bit Management, and first part bit Management says those damages should be somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars yikes. At Microsoft's virtual event Ignite, the company unveiled a cloud based platform for software developers interested in

making applications that incorporate mixed reality. And just in case that phrase doesn't mean anything to you, mixed reality is sort of a spectrum of experiences that includes stuff like virtual reality, where the majority of what a user experiences through their senses comes courtesy of a computer, so the stuff you see and hear are all computer generated, to augmented reality, which involves enhancing our perception of the world around us by incorporating digital experience adians is on top of,

or integrated with that world around us. So while MESH sounds promising and it could lead to some really interesting implementations of mixed reality, software, engineer and technical fellow. That's, by the way, a title, not a description. Alex Kitman said that the hollow lens that's the mixed reality headset from Microsoft, won't be hitting consumer shelves any time in the immediate future. Kitman said that the hollow lens has a way to go before it is in a form

factor that consumers will really appreciate and enjoy. I think that's actually a really refreshing thing to hear. I've never used a hollow lens myself, I understand the experience is really compelling. It's really interesting. However, the headsets right now are a little bulky. They can become uncomfortable after you wear them for a bit. And Kipman's point is that a consumer product really needs to be quote comfortable enough and immersive enough and socially acceptable enough end quote, and

that the hollow lens just isn't there yet. For that reason, the hollow lens market is still aimed at businesses rather than you know, the general consumer. The company Brave, which makes a web browser that focuses on user privacy, has

announced that it has acquired a search engine. That search engine is called tail Cat, which in itself is the product of a similarly privacy focused company called Clicks, but Clicks actually called it quits in April of last year in the wake of the pandemic, citing fundraising problems as being one of the big reasons the company had to shut down. Tail Cat will transform into Brave Search, and

it will be the default search engine for the Brave browser. Now, I have to admit I had not heard of Brave before reading up on the news this week, but there are around twenty five million active Brave users according to the Register. Brave blocks website trackers and ads, but it also has its own an ad network, which has prompted some critics to question the ethics behind the company's revenue model.

I'm gonna have to look into this in a more thorough manner and do maybe a full episode about Brave, because I find it interesting and their approach does seem to be a bit complicated. Now, it wouldn't be a news episode in one if we didn't spend a little time talking about social networking platforms and their contribution to misinformation and radicalization. So first up is YouTube, which has once again suspended lawyer and former politician Rudy Giuliani's account.

This makes it suspension number two and as many months. The band will last for two weeks, during which time Giuliani will not be allowed to upload new videos to his channel. And you might ask what was the reasoning behind this band, Well, it was technically twofold. According to a YouTube spokesperson, quote, we removed content from Rudy W. Giuliani che and All for violating our Sale of Regulated Goods policy, which prohibits content facilitating the use of nicotine,

and our presidential election integrity policy. End quote. Now, if Giuliani gets a third strike within ninety days of this band being lifted, his channel will get a permanent ban. Giuliani has spent a lot of time undermining the results of the twenty u S election, saying repeatedly that there was widespread fraud without you know, providing any actual evidence that such fraud happened. In fact, he's been reprimanded for

that very thing multiple times in multiple courts. And in semi related news, Wired ran a story titled TikTok played a key role in MAGA radicalization, MAGA being make America great Again, and they pointed out that while a lot of the public's focus on the subject of radicalization and extremism has been on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Parlor or la if you prefer, TikTok has mostly been overlooked, and Cameron Hickey, the author of the piece, makes the

point that TikTok has way more active users than Parlor ever did, and that radicalizing content on TikTok often falls into a categorization that makes it tricky for TikTok to actually moderate the content simply because TikTok hasn't really formulated policies that really cover that type of messaging, and the meme generating culture at TikTok also means that these types of messages get augmented as more and more people interact

with them and add to them and share them. It's also a reminder that in a world where people are more isolated than they usually are, technological radicalization is playing a much larger role than it previously did. And since I mentioned Parlor last month, the company filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon after Amazon Web Services or a WS, gave Parlor the boot kicked him off the servers. This made the website homeless for a short time until it

found new hosting services. The court ruled that Parlor needed to file an amended complaint by February sixteenth, which Parlor failed to do. It got a deadline extension, which ended on Tuesday, March second, and they still didn't have an amended complaint. Instead, they withdrew the lawsuit, though they did file a different lawsuit against Amazon in the state of Washington, claiming defamation and breach of contract. Whether this suit will

fare better remains to be seen. In the meantime, Parlor is still banned from both the iOS and Android app stores, so there's no Parlor app for those platforms, though users can still visit the web based version of the site.

The iOS app version of Netflix now has a feature called Fast Laughs, and as the name suggests, this feature delivers short videos of comedic content to the viewer, with some lasting as little as fifteen seconds, so you get in, you get your joke, and you get out, as they say, clips come from movies, television series, and comedy specials, and it includes a way for users to share their favorites with their friends, assuming their friends are also Netflix subscribers,

and the company plans to deliver around one hundred clips each day for people to kind of sift through. The feature also offers a way for users to navigate straight to the source of where the clip came from if they want to watch the whole thing, which is really the whole reason for this feature to exist in the first place. I don't have an iPhone, so I have not had a chance to test this out myself, which is really too bad, as I could use a good laugh.

And our final story, and one that I'm really excited about because I'm a nerd, is that researchers, including some at M I. T. Libraries, have created a pretty nifty way to read unopened letters from hundreds of years ago. All right, first, let's present what the problem actually is. So back before there were envelopes, before you could get an envelope, put a letter in it, and seal it, there were just a couple of different ways that you could send a written message to someone that included some

sort of protection against tampering. So one of those ways was that you could seal the message with a wax seal. You've probably seen TV shows or movies where this happens, where you put a blob of wax down to seal a letter. Shut and then you use like a signet ring or something to stamp it so that you know that the message you get is legitimate and that no

one has opened it. If the seal is broken when the message arrives, you know that somebody somewhere has opened the darn thing, and that could mean not just that the message had been compromised and potentially read, but it also opens up the possibility that someone altered the message. But another way to send a letter and try to keep it being snooped on was a practice called letter locking,

and it's actually a pretty simple idea. So you write your letter on paper, you know, one side of each piece of paper, put your stacks of paper together, and then you would fold your paper in such a way that to unfold it you would have to tear the paper a little bit in the process. There'd be no way to unfold the letter without tearing the paper a little bit. Not tear it enough to rip the letter in half or anything, but there would be a tear

in the paper. So if you got a letter and you saw that there was already a tear in the paper before you could even unfold it, you would know someone else had opened it. Before you got it and then intrigue. Now flash forward a few hundred years. There are a lot of unopened letters from ages ago. And while we could open these letters in the intended way, it would actually cause damage to the documents. And arguably the actual folding method itself is part of the information

we to preserve. So how else are we supposed to get our beady little eyes on the contents of these letters. Well, these researchers used some really cool technology to read the letters without opening them. First, they used an X ray scanner to thoroughly scan an unopened letter, and the scanner, which was designed to be used in dentistry, would create a three dimensional X ray scan of the letter, which included where ink was on the surface of the paper

and where the folds were. Then, using a custom built algorithm, the team had a computer virtually unfold this three dimensional model into a two dimensional reconstruction of the original letter. They were virtually unfolding the scan of the letter, at which point they could actually read it. And that whole process is so amazingly cool to me. It's a really

nifty way to engineer around a tricky problem. Now beyond that, I could see this general sort of appro being used to develop strategies for other types of machine learning and

automated systems. Creating sets of rules so that machines like computers and robots can achieve a task is a big part of artificial intelligence, and while this application might have limited uses in its current form, you could see how a similar approach might be used to create a rule set for a robot when, say, it encounters a door.

We humans typically know how to open doors, though I have to admit I'm pretty good at pushing on poll doors and vice versa, but robots find it all much more tricky, particularly because we have a lot of different kinds of doors with different ways to open them. Anyway, I thought the story was particularly interesting, and besides, I'm a medievalist at heart, so it had to go in. And that wraps up the news for Thursday, March fourth,

two thousand twenty one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, please let me know. Reach out on Twitter to handle It's text stuff hsw and I'll talk to you again release soon. Y Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.