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Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for March 14, 2020

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Steve Palmer
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An electric motorcycle that's constructed from wood is on pre-sale for 2021 deliver; Coinbase announces BTC transaction batching in order to reduce fees and overhead; A cryptography pioneer discusses election security; Firefox add-on puts Facebook in its own container to limit snooping; and a Steem essay discusses the science behind snoring

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First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak*, StemGeeks.

pixabay license by webandi: source.

  1. This $67,000 electric motorcycle made from real wood can be fully charged in 40 minutes - An electric motorcycle that is built from wood and charges in 40 minutes can be preordered for $67,000 from the French motorcycle company, Newron Motors. The prototype was built last year, and this first production model, the EV-1 will go from 0 to 62 in 3 seconds and has a top speed of 136 mph. So far, the company has commited to building 12 units. A fully charged battery can support up to 186 miles on the highway or 136 in the city. Material choices include ebony, oak, red cedar, and white ash. The bikes will be available starting in 2021. Click through for photos and more details.

  2. Coinbase rolls out Bitcoin transaction batching - Until now, the coinbase exchange has broadcast every customer's send requests in their own dedicated transactions, but today they are changing that practice in a way that will reduce the company's demands on the bitcoin network and reduce fees for customers. Starting today, coinbase will bundle send requests from multiple customers into a single transaction and take advantage of the ten minute lag between bitcoin blocks to eliminate the overhead that has been associated with dedicated transactions. By doing this, the firm expects to reduce their demands on the bitcoin network by more than 50%, and they also expect to see an equivalent reduction in customer fees. To take advantage of the new feature, no action is necessary from coinbase customers.

  3. Cryptography Pioneer Seeks Secure Elections the Low-Tech Way - The "R" in RSA encryption comes from the last name of MIT professor, Ronald Rivest. This article interviews the professor for his thoughts about election security, which is a particularly thorny problem, because it must be anonymous, accurate, secret, and auditable. About 15 years ago, Rivest created the ThreeBallot system in order to study the problem. In short, the system uses three ballots where a voter chooses their preferred candidate on two ballots and chooses non-preferred candidates on one, which may or may not overlap with the preferred candidate. At the end, the total number of voters is subtracted from each candidate's totals to account for the non-preferred votes. This system leads to a system where the voter keeps one ballot as a receipt, but their vote is still secret. After the election, all ballots are posted online, and the voter can use their receipt to verify that their own vote was cast correctly. The results are also auditable to the extent that they can detect one in three miscounts, which is more than enough accuracy to deter major voting fraud. This interview catches some of Rivest's insights from a decade and a half of research. In the near term, he says that US elections should strive for paper ballots with statistical auditability with a longer term goal of full end to end verification. He notes that a large number of ballots don't need to be audited in order to detect fraud, and compares it to using a single spoonful to determine if a bowl of soup has enough salt. For end to end verification, Rivest acknowledges that ThreeBallot is too complicated for practical use, but suggests Scantegrity II, a system by David Chaum, and describes it as follows:
    You fill out your oval with a special pen. You vote as usual by filling in ovals. However, when you darken an oval, a number appears. The embedded numbers are not sequential and are different for every candidate and on every ballot. You can write down your ballot number and the numbers that appear as your receipt, which doesn’t reveal how you voted. Then you look online later and verify, for example, that on ballot 3454605, the bubbles corresponding to numbers 327, 567 and so on were recorded properly. There’s no table anywhere that says 327 is a vote for so-and-so. It looks and feels a lot like ordinary voting.
    In summary, Rivest suggests that computers are good in low adversarial situations where there is no alternative, but that they are very hard to secure and we're still learning how to do it. In contrast, he says that paper ballots are an alternative that are available and work well.

    Here is a video that was embedded in the article:

  4. Firefox 74 slams Facebook in solitary confinement: Browser add-on stops social network stalking users across the web - The new version of the Firefox browser automatically prompts users to install the Facebook Container Add-on. Once installed, this add-on deletes existing facebook cookies and redirects new login sessions to a tab that's controlled by the container. This redirection shields the browser's other tabs from snooping by Facebook. Unfortunately, it may also break other sites where the user uses Facebook's login authentication. To get them working, those tabs can also be moved inside of the container, although this means once-again surrendering the user's privacy. The add-on has an average of 4.5 star ratings from its 1.1 million users. In all, Facebook is believed to have about 2 1/ 2 billion users.

  5. Steem @tomlee: Do you know why people Snore? The Science Behind Snoring - In this post, the author describes the phenomenon of snoring and discusses some of its causes and treatments. In short, it says snoring is a phenomenon that arises from obstruction of the airway and results in a vibrating sound during sleep. It notes that almost everyone snores at some time or another, but that in severe cases it can disturb the sleep of others in the household and also lead to a serious medical condition that's known as obstructive sleep apnea. It goes on to list possible causes of snoring, which include sleep deprivation, excessive use of drugs or alcohol, obesity, and stress. Treatments include lifestyle changes, surgical operations, and continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @tomlee.)

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