So How Exactly Does a GIF Cause a Seizure?

Very few people will ever have to suffer the terrible effects that strobes and flashing lights have on those diagnosed with photosensitive epilepsy.

But for Newsweek journalist Kurt Eichenwald, who last year suffered from a debilitating photosensitive seizure after viewing a strobing GIF sent by a Twitter troll, the dangers of flashing lights are all too real. "You deserve a seizure for your post," the suspect, John Rayne Rivello, said to Eichenwald, just before he sent the GIF.

This isn't the first time that people diagnosed with photosensitive epilepsy have been maliciously targeted over the internet, though. In 2008 the Epilepsy Foundation had to temporarily shut down its website after hackers plastered the Foundation's forums with flashing images.

In the vast majority of cases, photosensitive epilepsy is a genetic condition that affects just three percent of all of those diagnosed with some form of epilepsy. Recent research, led by scientists at Imperial College London, suggested that an 'epileptic network' of some 320 genes, dubbed M30, is responsible for the condition. When this network malfunctions, epilepsy is triggered, concluded the paper.

But what's the science behind photosensitive seizures? While many of the triggers have been identified and can be avoided, such as the frequency of the flashing lights or the intensity of a light source (two factors that were prominent in the Eichenwald attack), doctors and scientists still poorly understand the actual mechanics of a seizure, according to the Epilepsy Society.

A number of recent medical journals do paint a clearer picture of the effects of light on the brain, however.

In a 2014 study published by the Austin Journal of Clinical Neurology, three Japanese researchers linked strobe lights to eliciting peak regional cerebral blood flow in the visual cortex, which then has a knock on effect on the central nervous system.

"High-temporal-frequency visual stimuli can yield hazardous responses in the central nervous system," explained Masaaki Tanaka, Akira Ishii, and Yasuyoshi Watanabe. The three researchers also linked the increase of oxygenated blood in the cerebral cortex to certain frequencies of flashing light, another contributing factor to seizures.

At the heart of this current research in determining exactly why the brain reacts as it does is a process called Magnetoencephalography (MEG).

Read more: Neuroscientists Uncover More Evidence Linking Epileptic Seizures and Music

MEG works in much the same way as MRI, scanning the brain for electrical currents firing off inside neurons. These electrical currents create magnetic fields that can give researchers valuable information about neural activity, especially when it comes studying the process of a seizure, and for localizing areas of the brain that can benefit from epilepsy surgery.

Using MEG techniques, the Japanese researchers behind the 2014 paper even suggested that seizures may be linked to a system in the central nervous system that is susceptible to certain frequency of vibrations ultimately caused by strobe lighting.

"The existence of a fundamental frequency suggests the presence of a periodic system in the central nervous system," said the researchers. "Every periodic system exhibits some degree of sympathetic vibration. The wind induced structural collapse of Tacoma Narrows Bridge in WA in 1940 is a famous example of the hazardous nature of this type of vibration."

The researchers concluded that strobe light stimuli may indeed affect such a periodic system in the brain, with seizures and other neuropsychological abnormalities acting as the results to such systems being compromised.

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Google’s Handling of Public Health Data Should Serve as a Cautionary Tale, Report Says

Time and time again it's proven that massive, uncontrolled retention of public data can lead to serious breaches of privacy and trust. And in no other sector can this issue cause more problems than in healthcare, where reams of personally identifiable patient information are subject to hacks and leaks.

With this in mind, Google-owned AI subsidiary DeepMind's entrance into AI-powered healthcare in 2015 has been lauded as being less a canary in a coalmine, more a bull in a china shop by a new academic report that criticizes DeepMind's approach to patient privacy in conjunction with the UK's National Health Service (NHS).

"DeepMind had not built a piece of healthcare software in its entire existence, and so, to have it just be walked over to by physicians and have an entire hospital's worth of identifiable patient data given to them on trust seems a bit much to me," the paper's co-author, Hal Hodson, told Motherboard yesterday.

"People are paying attention to this stuff."

It was July 2015 when doctors from the British public hospitals within the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust asked Google's artificial intelligence subsidiary DeepMind to develop software that uses NHS patient data. Just four months later, on November 18, the personally identifiable information on 1.6 million NHS patients was in the hands of third-party servers processing data for DeepMind's initiative—an app for doctors called Streams that should have only required data related to specific patients who were at risk of acute kidney injury.

Then, an April 2016 investigation carried out by Hodson, who then worked at New Scientist, revealed that DeepMind's access to patient data by far exceeded what the company's public relations department had let on, with DeepMind possessing patient data including information on HIV, drug overdoses, and abortions dating back five years.

It was only after New Scientist's article "that any public conversation occurred about the nature, extent and limits of the DeepMind-Royal Free data transfer," states Hodson in the report.

This flagrancy of data transparency conventions is warning to be learned from, the paper concludes.

"By doing it so badly at the start, it will be harder for them going forward, but I also think potentially it's good," Hodson told Motherboard. "There's now a lot more scrutiny, people are paying attention to this stuff."

If lessons are not learnt from DeepMind's alleged mistakes, we are looking at dire consequences, including criminal breach of privacy, computational errors that could lead to misdiagnosis, and ultimately, the risk of mistreatment. A DeepMind spokesperson told Motherboard today that the paper "completely misrepresents" the reality of how the NHS is using technology to process data.

But to establish trust, DeepMind needs to admit it made mistakes, according to Hodson. "The paper doesn't talk about now. The paper talks about the beginning, which is important because of the trust reasons," Hodson told Motherboard.

He admits there has been a marked changed between the quality of the privacy and policy documents that sets out the rules for how patient data is handled between 2015 and now.

"[DeepMind] has improved, and I think it should be trying to do this stuff. But natural monopolies only work as long as there's oversight and regulation, and currently, the existing oversight and regulation appears to not be very strong."

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The CIA Can Now Order Drone Strikes Without Pentagon Approval

Last November, Motherboard asked how President Trump would handle the legacy of his predecessor's drone program. Much was unclear, but four months later, we have our answer: America's remote killing strategy is only intensifying.

Trump has given unprecedented power to the CIA to expand its killing program and launch drone strikes against targets, drone strikes that have no legal obligation for public disclosure and do not require the the approval of the Pentagon.

In a distinct change to Obama's policies, which allowed the CIA to hunt and surveil suspected terror targets but required the permission of the military to physically launch a missile strike, The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump has given the CIA authority to pull the trigger on its own strikes. This decision came shortly after his inauguration, and has already been used in a strike against al Qaeda deputy Abu al-Khayr al-Masri in February, the newspaper reports.

The unnamed US officials speaking to the Journal said that the new authority the CIA possesses can only be used for operations in Syria, but there are fears the CIA could easily expand its remit to outside of the country.

Obama's decision to allow the military to preside over the final call on drone strikes, rather than the CIA, promoted heightened transparency and public disclosure on America's drone operations. The CIA can now kill at will, unaffected by the need for public disclosure.

The revelation comes as US officials admit the Trump administration has almost put the finishing touches on a drone strike review that lowers the threshold on acceptable civilian casualties injured or killed in a drone strike, according to The Washington Post. The review goes back on policies Obama introduced, and could give the Pentagon permission to launch its own strikes without the approval from the White House.

It was previously unclear how Trump would wage his war against terror, but it is now obvious that the drone strike complex initiated by Bush, propelled by Obama, and now inherited by Trump continues to expand along the same trajectory.

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Bellingcat Wants Your Help to Debunk Fake News

Iraqi Federal Police Are Weaponizing Off-the-Shelf Drones, ISIS-Style

The proliferation of consumer, off-the-shelf unmanned aerial vehicles weaponized by non-state actors like Islamic State has taken a new turn this week after the Iraqi Federal Police deployed the very same drones against Islamic State itself.

On March 1, reports sourced from Twitter indicated that the police force had begun surveilling and attacking Islamic State positions in Western Mosul with quadcopters. One day later, further reports showed a video feed from onboard a quadcopter that was striking Islamic State positions with the very same DIY bombs that Islamic State has been using. The drone used by the IFP appears to be a DJI Matrice 100—the same drone photographed by Agence France-Presse reporter Sara Hussein on February 23.

While consumer UAVs have been used as a force for good across the Middle East by humanitarian and security forces, this is the first known instance of a police force attacking targets with drones not originally intended for such tasks. What is not yet clear are the implications for companies like DJI, which simultaneously condemns the use of weaponized drones but likely supports the fight against Islamic State.

When Motherboard raised the issue with DJI, a company representative told us the matter is an "interesting point" but is just "the reverse side of the coin."

"Our stance still is that DJI makes consumer drones for creative and peaceful purposes," the representative explained via email. "We are dedicated to optimising our technology to enhance the benefits consumer drones provide to communities and we will continue to educate our users on safe and responsible flying."

Bellingcat analyst Nick Waters, who has been following the use of drones by Islamic State closely, told Motherboard that the drones actually have the capability to be more ethical than a normal weapon system.

"You get to see exactly what you're shooting at, they're surprisingly accurate (likely reducing civilian casualties) and when you only have one or two bombs you want to make sure you hit the target first time," he told Motherboard via Twitter direct message.

"They're better than firing a bunch of 107mm rockets into an area and hoping you hit something with 'ISIS' written on it," Waters added.

But when asked if the IFP's deployment of weaponized consumer drones could pave the way for other police forces around the world using such tactics, Waters dismissed the idea.

"The proliferation of drones, including armed drones, is definitely happening right now," he said. "I don't think armed drones will be used that much by normal police though: the Iraqi Federal Police is more like a very heavily armed gendarmerie than civil police. They've even got their own artillery!"

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There Will Always Be Internet Outages, So Buckle Up

For the marketing types at cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, the holy grail is known as "five nines"—99.999 percent availability. It's a term that means when you pay them big bucks to host your website, internet service, or to store data in their cloud, it is guaranteed, contractually, to be available 99.999 percent of the time.

This is known in the industry as "high availability." An uptime of 99.999 percent equates to downtime of just 5.26 minutes a year. Customers, such as those affected by today's Amazon S3 storage outage, sign contracts called Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which guarantee they'll be receiving the highest availability possible.

The glaring issue here is that the guaranteed level is not 100 percent, and it never will be. Even Amazon's S3 only offers four nines (99.99 percent) availability, and has to dish out free cloud computing credits to customers that don't receive this level of service.

Time and time again it is proven that cloud computing outages can and will happen, forcing businesses offline and potentially causing their customers sizable chunks of lost revenue, and perhaps even starving their pets. Even today's relatively minor outage meant that Motherboard was unable to upload images into our CMS, which allows us to publish our stories online.

Amazon's S3 storage service effectively hosts images for thousands upon thousands of websites, including chat app Slack and yes, Vice. Today the issue is with its US-EAST-1 region, which is situated in Virginia. But Amazon's cloud services have gone down before.

Indeed, even through three years of reporting industry news on cloud computing, not a single company executive would admit this to me, however. They'd harp on about redundancy regions (back up data centers, essentially), or evangelize about their bombproof servers. But it's just not true: technical problems will always be a part of a technology, and as the world shifts more of its computing power online, rather than on a disk under a desk, the more even the most trivial of outages will cause major problems.

I guess the lesson here, like so many other industries, is not to put all of your eggs in one basket. Huge cloud players, led by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, are scrabbling over each other to host as many customers as possible—perhaps it's best there will always be competition. And as we put more of our "things" in the Internet of (Hackable) Things, the costs of these outages continues to rise. It's going from "the internet is down" to "oh shit, the internet is in all of my stuff, and now they're down."

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If Cell Service Goes Down in a Disaster, This App Will Keep You Connected

Climate change will irrevocably continue to hit environments and populations in developing countries the hardest for the foreseeable future, but these locations are often the ones least well equipped to deal with its effects.

In Bangladesh, a country very vulnerable to climate change, cellular network outages are a major problem, especially after flooding or detrimental weather. This can lead to delayed evacuation, hindered search and rescue, or even just the inability to talk with friends and family.

Radio already plays a large part in negating the impact of poor cellular networks in Bangladesh and other countries. But IBM has a new system that it hopes can further bolster communications networks in times of crisis. Together with recently-acquired subsidiary the Weather Company, IBM researchers have created a way to use mobile phones as individual nodes for communication without cell signal—a method known as mesh networking.

The system will be available for people to use later this month in India, then select countries after that. It comes in the form of an update to The Weather Channel's free Android app, available on the Google Play store.

IBM's mesh network technology uses the phone's built-in radio hardware to make peer-to-peer connections with other nearby devices, and send government emergency alerts from device to device. This signal is transmitted across a series of devices, allowing people to stay informed even when the cellular or Wi-Fi signal goes down. IBM said its mesh network thrives on more devices joining in with communication, unlike cellular networks that become flooded when too many people try to use them at once. While communication with the outside world may be stunted, a daisy-chain of networked devices can stay connected and continue to pass along information.

The team behind the app is actively working with national meteorological services around the world to help broadcast government-issued severe weather alerts even if a country's existing infrastructure has been affected, IBM said in a statement this week. Usually, a government-issued message is broadcast via cell tower to all devices within its range. But if  that network goes down, so does the ability to send alerts.

An IBM spokesperson told Motherboard over the phone today that India was chosen as the first market for the mesh networking technology as The Weather Channel's weather app is already a popular choice amongst smartphone users in the country, and that its population is open to the idea of community wireless mesh network projects.

Mesh networking is not new. It's been used in a variety of  applications, such as military networks, for years. Mesh networking with smartphones has also been used to varying levels of success already, being used in protests such as the Arab Spring and Hong Kong's mass protests in 2014. Wi-Fi mesh networks are even becoming a popular option in private homes, boosting signal strength and getting rid of dead zones.

But the new app from IBM and the Weather Channel puts mesh networking right into the hands of users who already own smartphones.

The mesh networking capability will be rolled out for Indian users of the app on February 24, before arriving in Bangladesh, and 40 other countries later this year, an IBM spokesperson told Motherboard over the phone today. The company's peers, such as Google and Facebook, are already attempting to win over users in developing countries with networking boons like drones and balloons, but heading direct to user's smartphones appears a logical way to connect the unconnected.

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