Author: Marc Bacvanski

Earlier this week, Lebanon announced its plan to introduce a new digital currency in 2021. This feels natural to anyone following the rise of cryptocurrencies in recent years, starting with Bitcoin’s explosion in popularity in 2017. But Lebanon isn’t simply developing a new incarnation of Bitcoin as their currency. Like China, Sweden, the UK, and several other countries, Lebanon is working to create a central bank digital currency, or CBDC.

Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies, CBDCs are a form of digital currency fully backed by the country’s government and considered legal tender. Also unlike Bitcoin, the value of CBDCs are relatively stable. While the value of Bitcoin may fluctuate drastically over the period of an hour, day, or year, the value of a government-issued CBDC is fairly constant, much like how dollar bills have an almost constant value over time. This stability is key to any currency’s widespread use – if merchants, bankers, and investors cannot depend on the currency they receive to maintain its value, then they will use another more stable currency instead.

Building a CBDC is more complex than simply removing cash from circulation and switching to electronic banking as we know it today. Traditional banking systems ultimately rely on actual money being transferred, meaning that the number that appears in your bank account is a representation of the actual money you own. Under a completely digital currency, the number in your bank account is the actual money you own, and losing access to your bank account means losing that money forever.

CBDCs have distinct advantages over traditional currencies, particularly that precise analysis of the money flow can be utilized to combat money laundering and crime. More importantly for countries like Lebanon, a CBDC would boost trust in the governmental banking system. Lebanon has very little gold reserves, and instead of backing a traditional currency with gold, using a CBDC would enable the Lebanese government to sell the gold in foreign markets in the event of a monetary crisis.

You probably know browser cookies as the reason why you’ll Google something and then suddenly start seeing advertisements for it on your Instagram feed. More specifically, this spooky action is the work of third-party cookies – little bits of data stored in your browser by advertising companies, in order to collect data on your browsing habits.

Since the start of the web, online advertising companies have figured out that the most efficient way to do online advertising is to show you advertisements that line up with your interests. Third party cookies allow these advertising companies to track your movements across the web, and glean valuable data about your life.

If this feels like a massive invasion of privacy to you, you’re not alone. At the beginning of this year, Google announced that it would end support for third-party tracking cookies before 2022 – essentially a death sentence for this longtime staple of online advertising and tracking, considering close to 70% of all internet users worldwide use Google Chrome. The Safari and Firefox browsers have already begun blocking tracking cookies automatically.

But it’s going to take a lot more for advertising companies to throw in their towels and give up on tracking your browsing. Blocking third party cookies is a good first step, but advertising companies are much more clever than we think – after all, their whole livelihood depends on collecting your data.

Enter browser fingerprinting: a seemingly innocuous scheme that has big implications for online privacy in a post-cookie era. Browser fingerprinting collects a number of small, seemingly useless pieces of data about your browser, including your default fonts, page zoom levels, the size of your screen, time zone, and over 20 other unique identifiers of the hardware and software on your computer. The sum of these properties is called your browser fingerprint. These are fairly common properties – after all, there are surely a lot of people in your time zone. It’s quite likely that you and someone you know share the same one crease on your thumb – but the likelihood of your entire fingerprints matching is incredibly small. Altogether, the likelihood of an exact browser fingerprint match for two people is incredibly small. 

When someone with the same fingerprint visits two different web pages, those two websites can be fairly confident that this is the same person. When you then log in to Facebook, Facebook (or any other site that verifies your identity) now knows that this fingerprint belongs to you – and it knows all the sites your fingerprint has appeared on. It’s game over for your privacy, once again. But this time, you can’t just disable cookies or install an adblocker to keep you safe.

You can check if your browser fingerprint is unique at Panopticlick, a project by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It found my Safari browser to have a unique fingerprint among at least 228,159 other browsers. This is pretty bad.

Browser fingerprinting is a very powerful tactic and one that is extremely difficult to counter. One way is to try to make your fingerprint as common as possible – perhaps by running a standard version of a popular browser (Chrome, Firefox) on a popular operating system (Windows). This way advertisers will have a hard time telling you apart from the thousands of other people with the exact same fingerprint – but for most, changing computers is unfeasible.

One could also use the Tor browser or disable JavaScript, which is needed for most fingerprinting attempts  – at the expense of having a pretty terrible browsing experience, since JavaScript is required for most websites to function.

The most reliable method to thwart fingerprinting is to constantly change your fingerprint, making it unique for every single site you visit. If advertising companies think that you are a new person on every site you go to, they can’t track you. I use the Brave browser, which generates random data instead of sending actual fingerprintable information about the device. This guarantees my fingerprint will be different on every site I visit, so advertisers can’t track the same fingerprint across multiple pages. 

In many ways, browser fingerprinting is scarier than third-party cookie tracking. It gives advertising companies great power over our online experiences, and without an easy way to regain control of our online identities. Being constantly vigilant of privacy threats like fingerprinting is the only way to make the internet more safe and secure.

Image credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

In early September, the American Academy of Pediatrics hosted a webinar on wildfire and smoke exposure in children, where leading pediatricians Dr. Stephanie Holm and Dr. Petra Steinbuchel discussed the physical and mental health risks of wildfire smoke to children. 

Dr. Holm presented studies showing that for young children, exposure to wildfire smoke is directly correlated with pneumonia, bronchitis, and other lower respiratory infections. For pregnant mothers, wildfire smoke increases the risk of decreased birth weight, preterm births, and respiratory mortality. Dr. Holm recommends air filtration inside the home as the only significant way to significantly reduce particulate matter from smoke, citing studies showing most masks to be less than 40% effective for wildfire smoke. Dr. Holm reminds us, “particulate matter is an IARC classified carcinogen, so the more we can reduce it the better.”

Dr. Steinbuchel discussed the mental health impacts of wildfires on children. PTSD is the greatest mental health risk for wildfire survivors, with 10-30% of survivors experiencing PTSD compared to 4-8% of the general population. Young children are most at risk. According to Dr. Steinbuchel, “kids have a way of sensing the truth,” so communicating honestly and compassionately with children can reduce the trauma that comes with wildfires.

Four out of the top five largest wildfires ever recorded in California are currently blanketing the state with a suffocating layer of smoke. While many flock to purchase expensive air filters and masks, Black, LatinX, and Native American groups are often left without the resources to protect their children’s physical and mental health. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which hosts this webinar, hopes that by bringing awareness to these risk factors, health officials can work towards making these resources more accessible to all.

View the recording of the webinar, or visit the event web page from the American Academy of Pediatrics website.

For most quantum computing researchers, simply building large scale, functioning quantum computers is already a distant goal – let alone programming them to do useful tasks. But for a small team of researchers in Switzerland, high level programming of a quantum computer is already reality – in fact, they’ve designed a new programming language just for it. Silq, a novel programming language created by the SRI lab at ETH Zürich, is designed to make it easy for anyone with a basic knowledge of programming to harness the untapped power of quantum computing.

Most state of the art quantum computing research focuses on designing the physical hardware to run quantum programs. They face incredible technological challenges, including cooling quantum chips down to -459 degrees Fahrenheit in order to tap into the strange, complex, and beautiful quantum phenomena that they hope will power the next generation of computers. Rather than use bits, which represent 0 and 1s, quantum computers use qubits, which can exist in superposition – they can simultaneously be in 0 and 1 at the same time. This completely new model of computation, though challenging to understand, holds immense power. Because so much of the success of quantum computers depends on hardware, most quantum computer researchers have a Ph.D. background in quantum physics. What makes Silq unique is its core purpose: to make it easy for regular computer scientists to take advantage of all that quantum computing has to offer.

The SRI lab team, led by Dr. Martin Vechev, initially set out to analyze existing quantum algorithms. Quickly, however, Dr. Vechev and his group found that quantum algorithms were incredibly painful to express in all existing quantum languages. Coming from a computer science background rather than one in quantum physics, he and his group felt that existing quantum programming languages were too low-level – meaning they focused too much on the details of the physics of the computer. When you and I sit in front of our computers, we rarely ever think about the laws of physics governing the electrons buzzing away within them – and rarely do computer scientists either. But this was exactly what people programming quantum computers had to do, and it was distracting. 

Dr. Vechev and his team saw that anyone who wanted to program a quantum computer would have to understand years of study in quantum physics. But they also realized that the fundamental principles of computation and algorithms were universally applicable – regardless of the type of computer or its underlying physics. Why couldn’t a regular software engineer quickly and easily learn to program a quantum computer, without needing a Ph.D. in quantum physics?

Much like silk, Silq prides itself on how smooth its experience is. Even if you don’t have a deep background in physics, computer scientists will feel right at home working with the fundamental algorithmic concepts they already know. For the first time, quantum algorithms are expressed as actual algorithms, not as convoluted quantum physics problems. By making it easy for computer scientists to program quantum computers, Dr. Vechev and his team hope that many of the advancements in classical computer science will make their way over to quantum computing, helping to solve some of the world’s most challenging computational problems.

Silq’s home page can be found at https://silq.ethz.ch/. Download the code and try it out yourself, from https://github.com/eth-sri/silq.

Image credit: IBM Research