Technology

So this is bad. Black Hat, the king of enterprise security conventions, kicked off today, and most noticeable amid the fusillade of security research was some impressive work from Ruben Santamarta of IOActive, whose team has unearthed worrying vulnerabilities in satellite communication systems, aka SATCOM, used by airplanes, ships and military units worldwide.

Now, itnot catastrophically bad: In particular, while attackers could mess with or disable your in-flight Wi-Fi, conceivably try to hack into devices connected to them and/or disable all in-flight satellite comms, they couldn&t actually affect any systems that control the airplane. The bigger worries are in the military or maritime spheres, because these are remote vulnerabilities — anyone on the internet can hack into a connected vulnerable SATCOM device. Which is to say, presumably most of them, since communication is their whole reason for being.

In the former case, in addition to the risk of attackers modifying or disabling satellite communications, devices with onboard GPS could leak the location of military units. And in both cases, this opens up the prospect of &cyber-physical attacks,& a brilliantly dystopic phrase if ever there was one; basically, if you crank enough power through a satellite antenna, it can radiate energy powerful enough that it affects biological tissue and electrical systems. Same general principle as a microwave oven.

But wait, it gets worse! These are embedded systems. In general thereno easy way to beam a remote upgrade to them; in some cases the only upgrade is a wholesale replacement. And while there are mitigations (not fixes per se, but approaches that will reduce the severity and likelihood of attacks) for aviation and military SATCOM, maritime systems are … more problematic.

So. Don&t worry too much if you&re not a sailor or a soldier, your airplane won&t plunge or divert because of this … but someone sitting at a computer far away on the ground might be able to take over your in-flight Wi-Fi. Santamarta (who has a history of this kind of thing) and IOActive are working with vendors and unspecified &government agencies& to address these vulnerabilities, but it sounds like, at least on the high seas, this problem is going to be with us for a while.

(The full technical talk regarding these vulnerabilities is tomorrow; todaypress conference was merely a teaser. I&ll update this post with any important details that arise.)

In the very near future, robots are going to be picking the vegetables that appear on grocery store shelves across America.

The automation revolution thatarrived on the factory floor will make its way to the ag industry in the U.S. and its first stop will likely be the indoor farms that are now dotting the U.S.

Leading the charge in this robot revolution will be companies likeRoot AI, a young startup which has just raised $2.3 million to bring its first line of robotic harvesting and farm optimization technologies to market.

Root AI is focused on the 2.3 million square feet of indoor farms that currently exist in the world and is hoping to expand as the number of farms cultivating crops indoors increases. Some estimates from analysis firms like Agrilystput the planned expansions in indoor farming at around 22 million square feet (much of that in the U.S.).

While that only amounts to roughly 505 acres of land — a fraction of the 900 million acres of farmland thatcurrently cultivated in the U.S. — those indoor farms offer huge yield advantages over traditional farms with a much lower footprint in terms of resources used. The average yield per acre in indoor farms for vine crops like tomatoes, and leafy greens, is over ten times higher than outdoor farms.

Root AIexecutive team thinks their company can bring those yields even higher.

Founded by two rising stars of the robotics industry, the 36 year old Josh Lessing and 28 year old Ryan Knopf, Root is an extension of work the two men had done as early employees at Soft Robotics, the company pioneering new technologies for robotic handling.

Spun out of research conducted by Harvard professor George Whiteside, the team at Soft Robotics was primarily comprised of technologists who had spent years developing robots after having no formal training in robot development. Knopf, a lifetime roboticist who studied at the University of Pennsylvania was one of the sole employees with a traditional robotics background.

&We were the very first two people at Soft developing the core technology there,& says Lessing. &The technology is being used for heavily in the food industry. What you would buy a soft gripper for is… making a delicate food gripper very easy to deploy that would help you maintain food quality with a mechanical design that was extremely easy to manage. Like inflatable fingers that could grab things.&

Root AI co-founders Josh Lessing and Ryan Knopf

It was radically different from the ways in which other robotics companies were approaching the very tricky problem of replicating the dexterity of the human hand. &From the perspective of conventional robotics, we were doing everything wrong and we would never be able to do what a conventional robot was capable of. We ended up creating adaptive gripping with these new constructs,& Lessing said.

While Soft Robotics continues to do revolutionary work, both Knopf and Lessing saw an opportunity to apply their knowledge to an area where it was sorely needed — farming. &Ag is facing a lot of complicated challenges and at the same time we have a need for much much more food,& Lessing said. &And a lot of the big challenges in ag these days are out in the field, not in the packaging and processing facilities. So Ryan and I started building this new thesis around how we could make artificial intelligence helpful to growers.&

The first product from Root AI is a mobile robot that operates in indoor farming facilities. It picks tomatoes and is able to look at crops and assess their health, and conduct simple operations like pruning vines and observing and controlling ripening profiles so that the robot can cultivate crops (initially tomatoes) continuously and more effectively than people.

Root AIrobots have multiple cameras (one on the arm of the robot itself, the &tool&s& view, and one sitting to the side of the robot with a fixed reference frame) to collect both color images and 3D depth information. The company has also developed a customized convolutional neural network to detect objects of interest and label them with bounding boxes. Beyond the location of the fruit, Root AI uses other, proprietary, vision processing techniques to measure properties of fruit (like ripeness, size, and quality grading). All of this is done on the robot, without relying on remote access to a data-center. And itall done in real time.

Tools like these robots are increasingly helpful, as the founders of Root note, because therean increasing labor shortage for both indoor and outdoor farming in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the mounting pressures on the farm industry increasingly make robotically assisted indoor farming a more viable option for production. Continuing population growth and the reduction of arable land resulting from climate change mean that indoor farms, which can produce as much as twenty times as much fruit and vegetables per square foot while using up to 90% less water become extremely attractive.

Suppliers like Howling Farms, Mucci Farms, Del Fresco Produce and Naturefresh are already producing a number of fruits and vegetables for consumers, said Lessing. &They&ve really fine tuned agriculture production in ways that are meaningful to broader society. They are much more sustainable and they allow you to collocate farms with urban areas [and] they have a much more simplified logistics network.&

That ability to pare down complexity and cost in a logistics supply chain is a boon to retailers like Walmart and Whole Foods that are competing to provide fresher, longer lasting produce to consumers, Lessing said. Investors, apparently agreed. Root AI was able to enlist firms likeFirst Round Capital.Accomplice,Schematic Ventures,Liquid2 VenturesandHalf Court Venturesto back its $2.3 million round.

&There are many many roles at the farm and we&re looking to supplement in all areas,& said Lessing. &Right now we&re doing a lot of technology experiments with a couple of different growers. assessment of ripeness and grippers ability to grab the tomatoes. next year we&re going to be doing the pilots.&

And as global warming intensifies pressures on food production, Lessing sees demand for his technologies growing.

&On a personal level I have concerns about how much food we&re going to have and where we can make it,& Lessing said. &Indoor farming is focused on making food anywhere. if you control your environment you have the ability to make food…. Satisfying peoplebasic needs is one of the most impactful things i can do with my life.&

Snapchat has largely escaped scrutiny about fake news and election interference because its content quickly disappears and its publisher hub, Discover, is a closed platform. But now the Infowars mess thatplagued Facebook and YouTube has landed at Snap feet, as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has begun tweeting to promote an augmented reality Snapchat Lens built by someone in his community that puts a piece of masking tape with the word &censorship& written over it across the mouth of the user with a &Free Infowars& logo in the screencorner.Healso encouraging his followers to follow Infowars& official Snapchat page.

The situation highlights the whack-a-mole game of trying to police the fragmented social media space. There always seems to be another platform for those kicked off others for inciting violence, harassing people or otherwise breaking the rules. A cross-industry committee that helps coordinate enforcement might be necessary to ensure that as someone is booted from one platform, their presence elsewhere is swiftly reviewed and monitored for similar offenses.

&If they can shut me down, they can shut you down,& Jones says at the start of his 42-second video. He cites Facebook, Twitter and Google among those that are getting mobilized by &the Democrats& in aid of defeating opposing candidates in future elections.

(In actual fact, Twitter and related sites like Periscope have, to the consternation of many, not removed Jones& or Infowars& accounts from its platform, and for that matter neither has LinkedIn,Google+, or Instagram. Others like Pinterestand Facebook itself have now gotten behind a wider move to start to take action against accounts like these to reduce the amount of sensationalized information being spread around in the name of &free speech.& You can see the full list of Infowars& and Alex Jones& active and now inactive social accounts here.)

Jones himself doesn&t seem to have a Snapchat account, but Infowars& website cites the &Infowarslive& handle as its official Snapchat profile, and itwhat Jones is now pointing fans toward. However, from what we understand from sources, the account has been inactive since early this year.Snap, according to these sources, is currently monitoring it to see what it does and whether that content violates community guidelines, which prohibit hate speech and harassment.

In the meantime, say the sources, Snap is also looking into the Lens that Jones is promoting to determine whether it violates Snapcommunity guidelines. These guidelines include prohibiting contentthat may incite or glorify violence or the use of weapons; may be considered offensive by a particular group of individuals or that could foster negative stereotypes, such as slurs or other derogatory language; promotes dangerous, harmful, or illegal activity, or that encourages Snapping while driving; contains hashtags or usernames; or threatens to harm a person, group of people or property.

The interesting thing with a Lens, however, is that while the Lens itself may be innocuous, how it gets appropriated might be less so, and thatnot something that might get caught as quickly by Snap. Users can unlock the Lens for 24 hours with a link or screenshot of its QR Snapcode. From there they can do whatever they want with it, including reactivating it each day for further use. Lenses are one of the least ephemeral parts of Snapchat, making them a potent vector for persistently spreading a controversial viewpoint, and indeed viewpoints that might well violate those community standards, even if the Lens itself does not.

The insight thatemerging from the whole Infowars debacle is that problems exist not only with how public figures use social platforms, but with how their audiences interpret or mutate their messages as they get shared, again and again.

Snap itself — as its earnings showed us yesterday — is still a smaller platform compared to some social networks. Thatanother reason it may have avoided becoming a tool for information operations by malicious actors like the Russian agents that attacked the 2016 presidential election via Facebook.

But Snapchat is in a vulnerable place right now. YesterdayQ2 earnings report revealed that its daily active user count actually shrank from 191 million to 188 million. It took a hard stance against fake or controversial accounts, either blocking on driving away users, that could further weigh on its growth. Snap is meanwhile starting to see momentum in its ad business, beating expectations with $262.3 million in revenue last quarter. Thata trend it doesn&t want to mess with.

Now that Jones can&t spread his false news on Facebook and YouTube, he may look increasingly to platforms like Snapchat or his mobile app that Apple hasn&t removed. And if these platforms allow him to stay, that may light a beacon attracting more questionable content creators.