An Elegant App That Makes It Simple to Schedule Meetings and Events

Image: Doodle

Living with roommates on and off since high school, I’m all too familiar with how difficult it can be to schedule a meeting with multiple busy adults–particularly via email or text.

“Is everyone free Thursday at 6pm?”

“I can’t do 6, but I can do after 8.”

“Wednesday works better for me, I’ve got yoga on Thursdays.”

“Can we do Friday instead? But only before 5:30.”

End the back-and-forth confusion by starting the scheduling conversation with Doodle. Doodle is an iOS, Android, and web app that simplifies the entire process. One person takes charge and selects a handful of dates and times for a possible event. He or she then shares the Doodle link with others who reply with their name and the times they’re available. This results in a neat grid showing red boxes and green check-marked boxes for all the dates and times people are available, allowing you to select the option most of your invitees can make. Voila, meeting time decided.

When you create an event, you can give it a name, location, and enter other relevant details. You’ll need to supply an email address to manage it, but you don’t need a Doodle account to do this (and neither does anyone else you share the poll with). If you do sign up though, you can link up Doodle with your calendar of choice and have the event automatically uploaded. Creating an account also lets you manage multiple event polls simultaneously.

Doodle is a beautiful service because it is so simple. It’s incredibly straightforward to create an event, to share it, and to fill in your responses. I’ve been using it for about five years now, and unlike so many apps and sites that evolve into something huge and complicated over the years, it’s remained the same, easy-to-use, consistent site since day one. If you only have two or three people to coordinate with, sure, Google Calendar invites will suffice. But more than that, and Doodle will really save you time and headaches.

Apple May Have a Problem With That HealthKit Name

Photo: Apple

HealthKit already exists, and it doesn’t belong to Apple.

The HealthKit website and Twitter handle both belong to an Australian startup of the same name. It’s a global health platform connecting doctors and patients that’s ostensibly very similar to Apple’s planned iOS 8 platform. And while based in Australia, it has users in a variety of English-speaking countries, including the U.S.

The company isn’t too pleased with Apple’s name choice for its own health-focused services. “Feeling annoyed #Apple is using our #HealthKit name for their new health product! @tim_cook r u aware of this?,” @HealthKit tweeted just after midnight Pacific on Monday. The company followed that by tweeting “Apple likes our #HealthKit name and so do we!” and a retweet from another account saying that this HealthKit has been around far longer than iOS 8.

“It is very flattering that they like our name, but I’m a little let down because how hard would it have been to spend five seconds to put HealthKit.com into their browser and find us?” Alison Hardacre, co-founder and managing director of HealthKit told WIRED. “Everybody worries that Google or Apple will come into their space and their business will die, but no one thinks that company will come into that space and use the same name!”

HealthKit bought its corresponding domain name, which Hardacre says is “too important to let go,” in early 2012. Apple hasn’t been in touch with the the company yet.

Prior to its Monday debut, HealthKit was referred to as HealthBook. Prolific breaker of Apple news Mark Gurman believes Apple switched the name from HealthBook to HealthKit at the last minute, in response to his early leaks. This sort of evidence does suggest he could be right. The fact that the domain, Twitter handle, and IP for the name don’t belong to Apple is unusual for the company, which often trademarks a slew of possible names to cover its bases (for the California names of OS X, Apple trademarked everything from Big Sur and Redwood to Yosemite. Apple has also trademarked “iWatch” in a number of countries).

The ownership of the HomeKit name is less clear. While the current website is basically a collection of “fresh gift ideas,” the site is owned by a California-based company called “Arch Holdings, Inc.” Apple will often buy websites and IP under the guise of another business name to avoid drawing attention to itself. The Twitter account of the same name is taken, but unused. HealthKit.com, by contrast, is owned by Lachlan Wheeler, the other cofounder of the Melbourne health company.

Hardacre says their website is seeing a huge surge of traffic since Apple’s announcement Monday, which, under other circumstances, would be a good thing. “It’s been so intensely hard to build this business,” Hardacre says. “We dont want to be trampled on by a big company like Apple.”

We reached out to Apple for comment but did not receive a reply in time for publication.

Google Renews Battle With the NSA by Open Sourcing Email Encryption Tool

Illustration: WIRED

Google is taking another step towards an internet that can stand up to snooping from the NSA.

Today, the company released the source code for a new web browser plugin that encrypts your email messages before they’re sent across the net. Dubbed End-to-End, the plugin aims prevent interlopers from reading messages even if they gain access to the computer servers that drive your web email service of choice. So, if you’re using Googles’s Gmail, it could thwart the NSA and other snoopers even if they have access to Google’s network.

The plugin isn’t yet available to the general public. The idea is for security researchers to heavily test the code before Google releases a completed version of the plugin that’s available to everyone. “The End-To-End team takes its responsibility to provide solid crypto very seriously, and we don’t want at-risk groups that may not be technically sophisticated–journalists, human-rights workers, et al–to rely on End-To-End until we feel it’s ready,” the company said in releasing the code. “Prematurely making End-To-End available could have very serious real world ramifications.”

Several other companies and independent open source projects are working on similar encryption tools, but this one has added heft because Google is behind it. Once it’s finished, End-to-End could be a big step forward for email privacy, but there are some big limitations, and critics say the tool could end up doing more harm than good.

A Google First

As Venture Beat first reported in April, the plugin will be based on the venerable encryption standard PGP, short for Pretty Good Privacy. Specifically, it will be based on OpenPGP, the same standard used by other open source implementations of PGP, such as GPG.

Using PGP, all messages are scrambled in such a way that, in theory, only the sender and intended recipient can open them. That means that even if the NSA intercepts your PGP encrypted messages from Google’s servers, they won’t be able to read it without the use your private key.

It’s already possible to use PGP with Gmail and other webmail services through a third-party plugin called Mailvelope, and Samsung’s Android phones have long included PGP encryption as an option with its stock email program. But this the first time Google has officially supported encrypting email.

The Limitations

This makes for good security, but it can also be inconvenient. For example, the End-to-End plugin will store your private keys on your local machine. That means if you want to use someone’s else’s computer, or a public machine, you’ll either need to import your keys or simply not use the service. Also, the keys will not be backed up or store on Google servers, according to the company’s online FAQ. That means that if you lose your key, or forget your passphrase, it’s gone forever.

What’s more, if you use End-to-End, any emails you encrypt won’t be instantly searchable. That’s a big problem with encryption in general. Though a new technique called homomorphic encryption could eventually solve this problem, it’s not something that’s built into OpenPGP today.

Plus, Google won’t be able to scan encrypted email messages in order to target advertising. Security expert Eleanor Saitta believes this may lead to Google to discourage most users from actively using encryption. She worries that the End-to-End may simply be a publicity stunt designed to keep Google’s engineers happy while scoring points with privacy advocates.

She also points out Google has history of abandoning projects that don’t make the company money, such as iGoogle and Google Reader. If activists come to rely on Google’s encryption tools, but those tools are discontinued, they will be left without crucial protections. “People live and die by the long-term success and failure of communication platforms — I mean that in a very literal sense,” she says. “You cannot put people in a position where they are depending on a software platform for life safety issues and then simply terminate it.”

The Competition

Her other worry is that the existence of Google’s own plugin may discourage people from building other alternatives, or make it harder for open source encryption projects to raise funds. For example, Mailpile raised over $100,000 last year to build a new open source email client that works with any email provider, including Gmail, and has PGP encryption baked in from the beginning. But it will need more funding eventually, and Saitta worries that potential backers may not be as motivated to contribute.

What’s more, she says, we need more than just this kind of message encryption. Although it’s possible to encrypt the contents of an email, it’s not possible to conceal who you’ve been sending email to or who you’ve received email from. That has led to the creation of many alternative messaging schemes, such as the chat encryption system Off The Record. Saitta has been working on another email alternative called Briar which does away with intermediary servers altogether, passing encrypted messages directly from device to device. Meanwhile, PGP creator Phil Zimmermann has teamed up with Ladar Levison of Lavabit–the email service Edward Snowden used–and other security researchers to create a new email protocol called Darkmail, but haven’t yet released any code publicly.

In short, there’s nothing that can replace email quite yet, and using email privately, for now, means using encryption. Google is a unique position to make it easier for people to use PGP, but we need more than just encrypted email if we want to keep our communications private. We also need clients like Mailpile and Thunderbird, as well as new ideas like Briar and Darkmail. And we still need people fighting for political change to stop the NSA and other government agencies to stop spying on civilians. Ultimately, we need as many people as possible working to protect our privacy. The new Google encryption is a welcome addition to the tool kit, and let’s hope there are more to come.

U.S. Marshals Seize Surveillance Records to Keep Them From ACLU

A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn Tuesday when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them.

The surprise move by the U.S. Marshals Service stunned the ACLU, which earlier this year filed a routine public records request with the Sarasota, Florida, police department for information detailing its use of the controversial surveillance tool.

The ACLU had an appointment Tuesday morning to review documents pertaining to a case investigated by a Sarasota police detective. But marshals swooped in at the last minute to grab the records, claiming they belong to the U.S. Marshals Service and barring the police from releasing them.

ACLU staff attorney Nathan Freed Wessler called the move “truly extraordinary and beyond the worst transparency violations” the group has seen regarding documents detailing police use of the technology.

“This is consistent with what we’ve seen around the country with federal agencies trying to meddle with public requests for stingray information,” Wessler said, noting that federal authorities have in other cases invoked the Homeland Security Act to prevent the release of such records. “The feds are working very hard to block any release of this information to the public.”

Stingrays, also known as IMSI catchers, simulate a cellphone tower and trick nearby mobile devices into connecting with them, thereby revealing their location. A stingray can see and record a device’s unique ID number and traffic data, as well as information that points to its location. By moving a stingray around, authorities can triangulate a device’s location with greater precision than is possible using data obtained from a carrier’s fixed tower location.

The records sought by the ACLU are important because the organization has learned that a Florida police detective obtained permission to use a stingray simply by filing an application with the court under Florida’s “trap and trace” statute instead of obtaining a probable-cause warrant. Trap and trace orders generally are used to collect information from phone companies about telephone numbers received and called by a specific account. A stingray, however, can track the location of cell phones, including inside private spaces.

The government has long asserted it doesn’t need a probable-cause warrant to use stingrays because the device doesn’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages, but instead operates like pen-registers and trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information. The ACLU and others argue that the devices are more invasive than a trap-and-trace.

Recently, the Sarasota police department revealed it had used stingrays at least 200 times since 2010 without telling a judge because the device’s manufacturer made it sign a non-disclosure agreement that police claim prevented them from telling the courts.

The U.S. Marshals Service claimed it owned the records Sarasota police offered to the ACLU because it had deputized the detective in the case, making all documentation in the case federal property. The agency dispatched a marshal from its office in Tampa to seize the records and move them to an undisclosed location.

The U.S. Marshals Service declined to comment, saying it “does not discuss pending litigation.”

Florida public records law requires that even if a dispute over records occurs, the Sarasota Police Department were legally obligated to hold onto the records for at least 30 days once they had received the ACLU’s request. That period would have given the ACLU a chance to argue their case in court to obtain the records.

“We’ve seen our fair share of federal government attempts to keep records about stingrays secret, but we’ve never seen an actual physical raid on state records in order to conceal them from public view,” the ACLU wrote in a blog post Tuesday morning.

The ACLU filed an emergency motion seeking a temporary injunction preventing the police department from releasing additional files to the marshals. The motion also asks the court to find the department in violation of state law for allowing the U.S. Marshals Service to seize the documents. The ACLU wants the court to order the police department to retrieve the documents. Because the ACLU filed the motion in a state court, the judge cannot directly order the U.S. Marshal Service to return the documents.

Preservation of wine without sulphite addition

A good glass of wine is a byword for quality of life -- and not just for connoisseurs. In order to avoid wine spoilage, wineries mostly add sulphur dioxide during the winemaking process. However, the sulphites that dissolve in wine can cause allergic reactions -- including asthma. Within the EU they must therefore be declared as an ingredient on the label and the limits for sulphites in wine have been reduced. Sulphites unfold their preservative action in two ways. On the one hand they inactivate microorganisms, such as unwanted yeasts, acetic acid bacteria and lactic acid bacteria, thus protecting wine from spoilage. Secondly, they act as antioxidants and protect delicate flavours against oxidation. Both effects ensure that wine is preserved and can be stored for ageing. Conventional alternative physical preservation methods such as filtration are suited for wine only to a limited extent, because they also remove colour and valuable flavours. Other methods operating at high temperatures, such as pasteurization, are unsuited as they destroy heat-sensitive ingredients.

A new method for preservation of liquid foods, working at moderate temperatures and therefore referred to as "cold pasteurization," is the so-called pressure change technology, which has been developed and patented by the Dresden company Edecto for fruit juice within the framework of a nationally funded project[1]. "The physical process has effects similar to those of sulphurization of the wine: growth of microorganisms is prevented because the cells are mechanically disrupted. In addition, the protective atmosphere of an inert gas decreases oxidation reactions, so drinks are stabilized," explains Edith Klingner, a physicist at Edecto, who coordinates the EU-funded project "PreserveWine-DEMO."

In the initial PreserveWine project, international partners including Edecto investigated whether the new method can also be applied to wine. At the Fraunhofer IGB a batch plant was modified and on the basis of initial results a continuous plant was developed and built. The TÜV-approved pilot plant can treat up to 120 litres of wine per hour at a pressure of 250 to 500 bar and at temperatures below 40°C. The results are promising for the treatment of white wine as well as red wine. "Unwanted oxidizing enzymes are inactivated, while neither temperature-sensitive ingredients nor colour and taste are altered by the treatment," confirms Dr. Ana Lucía Vásquez-Caicedo, food technologist and group manager at the Fraunhofer IGB.

In the pressure change technology a chemically inert gas, such as nitrogen or argon, is dissolved at high pressure in the liquid to be preserved. When the liquid is exposed to a high pressure of up to 500 bar, the solubility of the gas increases in the liquid. As a result, the dissolved gas also diffuses into the microbial cells. When the pressure is finally abruptly decreased, the gas expands -- even within the cells -- and causes these to burst. The previously dissolved gas then goes back into the gas phase and is recovered for reuse.

"In studies at the Fraunhofer IGB and our partner institute ADERA we have shown that the colour of the wine is maintained over time during storage in barrels or bottles. In wine tastings, we found that the taste is not affected," says Vásquez-Caicedo. The new preservation method can be used in different stages of wine production: after vinification (wine pressing) of white wine, after the alcoholic fermentation, after the malolactic fermentation employed mainly in red wine for acid degradation as well as when racking and filling.

In the follow-up project "PreserveWine-DEMO" the process will be transferred as a winery process to industrial scale. To this end, the researchers want to build a mobile plant that can be tested on site in various wineries. In parallel, the consortium aims to ensure product quality and process feasibility and wants to examine consumer acceptance of the new technology.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Bacterium causing U.S. catfish deaths has Asian roots

A bacterium causing an epidemic among catfish farms in the southeastern United States is closely related to organisms found in diseased grass carp in China, according to researchers at Auburn University in Alabama and three other institutions. The study, published this week in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, suggests that the virulent U.S. fish epidemic emerged from an Asian source.

Since 2009, catfish farming in Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas has been seriously impacted by an emerging strain of Aeromonas hydrophila, which causes Aeromonas septicemia in catfish. A serious infection that can cause death in as little as 12 hours, Aeromonas septicemia's clinical signs include skin lesions and blood loss.

Normally A. hydrophila, which can be found in both fresh and brackish water, only affects fish that are stressed or injured. But the newer strain has affected even apparently healthy fish with no obvious signs of duress, says senior study author Mark Liles, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Auburn. When initial tests of the diseased fish showed A. hydrophila was responsible, says Liles, scientists "didn't believe it at first, because the signs didn't match the more typical opportunistic infections in stressed fish that we associate with A. hydrophila." To date, disease outbreaks have been responsible for an estimated loss of more than $12 million in catfish aquaculture operations in the southeastern United States, he says.

Liles and colleagues studied the molecular epidemiology of the epidemic-causing A. hydrophila to try to trace its evolution. They compared samples of the bacteria to 264 known Aeromonas strains in an international database. Only one virulent strain came close to matching the one sampled from Alabama: ZC1, isolated from a diseased grass carp in China's Guangdong Province. ZC1 was isolated from fish that had experienced an epidemic outbreak atypical of Aeromonas infections.

Researchers also identified a less aggressive related A. hydrophila strain called S04-690, taken in 2004 from a diseased catfish in a commercial aquaculture pond in Mississippi. That strain caused a serious Aeromonas septicemia outbreak that killed thousands of catfish but did not result in an epidemic on neighboring farms.

Next, the scientists evaluated the evolutionary relationships of additional Chinese carp bacteria samples from epidemics in the Hubei Province in China. This revealed that all of the Chinese carp bacteria samples, including ZC1, group together with the recent U.S. epidemic samples of bacteria in catfish, suggesting that a common ancestor is responsible for the virulent A. hydrophila strains causing fish disease in both China and the United States. S04-690, from the Mississippi fish, also was found to be in the same group, related to both the U.S. catfish and Asian carp bacteria. However, it was genetically distinct from the other two strains. By contrast, A. hydrophila strains that do not cause epidemics are more heterogeneous.

Additional experiments found that isolated bacteria from diseased catfish in America and diseased carp in China shared alternate forms of 10 key 'housekeeping' genes required for basic cellular function.

It's not clear how the bacterium was introduced in America, Liles says. It could be from importing Asian carp to America for aquatic weed control, or from transporting ornamental fish or contaminated processed seafood products from Asia. The spread of disease among farms also is not fully understood but could result from birds that move from pond to pond eating catfish, or from harvesting equipment that may be insufficiently sanitized between uses.

Liles and other researchers are investigating means to control the spread of illness, including developing vaccines against the bacteria, and using medicated feed and/or probiotics. Meanwhile, he says, U.S. farmed catfish are safe to eat and pose no disease threat to humans due to strict standards regarding harvesting and processing of sick animals.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by American Society for Microbiology . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Facebook Embarks on Cross-Country Tour to Woo Small Businesses

Photo: Jon Snyder/WIRED

One of the world’s biggest businesses is counting on small businesses for growth.

On Tuesday, Facebook kicked off a series of events for small business owners in the hopes of convincing more of them to start advertising and marketing on its popular social networking service. At the first so-called Facebook Fit event in New York City, Facebook’s small business director Dan Levy announced that there are now 30 million small businesses with active Facebook pages–that’s 5 million more than there were in the fourth quarter of 2013–but even as the number of pages has grown, only about 1 million of those small businesses are actually advertising on Facebook. That gap poses a big business opportunity for the tech giant.

At the same time, however, many businesses have been outraged by the fact that Facebook has been limiting their organic reach, meaning fewer people who “Like” a brand on Facebook actually see its posts. Valleywag recently reported that the tech giant could be cutting that reach to just 1 or 2 percent in an attempt to force more people to pay for ads in order to get exposure.

By hosting a road show like this, Facebook can simultaneously placate entrepreneurs by educating them on how to improve their reach without ads, while simultaneously leading those audiences of entrepreneurs to their paid products. “With organic reach we understand people’s frustration, and we understand people built businesses this way,” Levy told WIRED after the presentation. “We’re trying to explain what we did, so Facebook becomes a predictable place people can use to grow their business.”

The most predictable way, of course, is with advertising. Levy told the audience full of entrepreneurs story after story of how people have used Facebook’s advertising tools to grow their businesses. He told them about new products, like the custom audience feature, which allows businesses to import their lists of existing customers and send targeted Facebook ads to those people. The lookalike audience feature, another relatively new one, takes that one step further, allowing business owners to target ads to their existing customers as well as other customers who Facebook says are just like them.

Levy also touted Facebook’s Page Manager App, which gives businesses a way to track metrics on their pages for free. If a post is performing especially well, the app will suggest that the business owner pay to turn it into a promoted post, which gets more exposure. According to Levy, that’s the gateway to advertising for 70 percent of Facebook’s new advertisers.

Self-serving as this boot camp may seem for Facebook, though, it does has obvious benefits for small business owners, too. For starters, it’s a networking event, which includes panel discussions with business owners and marketing professionals who have built successful brands Facebook. Facebook–which is taking the event to Miami, Chicago, Austin, and the Bay Area next–is also hosting training sessions on how business owners can use the platform to increase sales online and in-stores. That, Levy says, was inspired by the ad hoc training sessions already being taught by business owners in meet-up groups around the country. “We realized we need to be out helping them more, because it’s what small businesses need to succeed,” he says, admitting, “It’s probably something we should have reaized a lot earlier.”