ndrosen

My final trip to Phoenix to finish up my brother's affairs.
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Six years ago, the Pokemon Go app was updated to let users do 'field research' and scan statues and things. Niantic used photos and such to build 3D models of environments and mapped those into navigable fields for delivery robots.

Niantic thanks Pokemon Go players for their free contributions to Niantic's corporate bottom line. But no money will be forthcoming unless you're a stockholder.

From the article:
"This week, Niantic Spatial, part of the team behind Pokémon Go, announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, a company that makes short-distance delivery robots for food and groceries. Soon, those robot couriers will scoot around sidewalks using Niantic’s Visual Positioning System (VPS)—a navigation tool that can reportedly pinpoint location down to a few centimeters just by looking at nearby buildings and landmarks. Niantic trained that VPS model on more than 30 billion images captured by Pokémon Go users, and claims it will help robots operate in areas where GPS falls short."

Once again, if you're not paying for the product, then YOU are the thing being sold. The problem is, if you're a paying customer, you're still getting your data harvested and re-sold. You can't win, and you can't quit the game.

https://www.popsci.com/technology/pokemon-go-delivery-robots-crowdsourcing/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/16/2136229/pokemon-go-players-unknowingly-trained-delivery-robots-with-30-billion-images

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels have been held in Boston, as a parody of the Nobel Prizes, doling out mock prizes for curious and weird research. One of the things they do is the winners do a 24/7 lecture: explain their work in 24 seconds, and again in 7 words. They used to give a cash prize of like 10,000,000 (some strange foreign currency that when converted is like $50US), but I don't see mention of it.

Well, the 2026 ceremony will be held in Switzerland, details to be announced.

Last year, four of the ten winners did not attend because of the customs and immigration policies of the U.S. government. Because of the fear that the situation will only get worse, it was decided to take the ceremony overseas and eliminate that friction.

The web site for the Ig Nobels, at the Journal for Improbable Research. ignobel.org also redirects here:
https://improbable.com/ig/

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/ig-nobels-ceremony-moves-to-europe-over-security-concerns/

https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/03/10/1540242/ig-nobels-ceremony-moves-to-europe-indefinitely-citing-us-safety-concerns

The Swiss canton of Basel-Stadt had an election. And the election included some evoting, a system being piloted to help people to vote who are living abroad or who are disabled.

Guess what!

THREE USB sticks supplied with decrypt keys failed to work, and 2,048 ballots could not be counted. The ballots are too small a number to affect any results as they represent less than 4% of the votes cast.

Basel-Stadt election officials have delayed announcing election results, and an investigation has been begun.

Gee, if only they'd also written the keys down on CDs or DVDs. Oh, wait! Computers don't have optical media drives anymore. And it's not really best practices to send decrypt keys via email or cloud services.

NEVER EVER EVER treat USB sticks as permanent media! If you copy a file onto one to move it to another computer, copy it off ASAP! They will fail, and at the worst possible moment. I carry a 512 gig USB stick on my key ring, it's very cool with both USB-C and USB-A ends on it: very useful. But if it fails some day - AND I EXPECT IT TO - not a big deal.


Now, let's talk about the number of ballots that can't be decrypted: 2,048. This is a very curious number to report, because it's a very important number in computers: it's a power of two. Computers only know two numbers: zero and one. Everything is based on binary powers of two: 1, 2, 4, 8, etc. 2048 is 2 to the 11th power. It suggests that this may not be a problem with the USB keys, but rather with the encryption software itself. The implication that I got from the Register article was that the USB keys could be read, but the decrypt key didn't work. Keys usually have built-in checksum, which is a mathematical computation that ensures that the info that you're storing hasn't been tampered with. It's just like your credit card numbers: you can instantly verify that it's a valid credit card number (and it's actually a pretty cool formula, you can look it up). You recompute the checksum, preferably comparing it to a second copy, and it tells you if the key has been tampered with. The article didn't go into this detail.

So let's talk about integer overflow! Every piece of information is represented, ultimately, in binary. Am 8-bit binary number - a byte - can hold a maximum value of 255. That's all eight bits turned on: 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + 64 + 128. What happens when you add one to that number? The obvious answer is that it becomes 256, but that can't happen. It's one byte, eight bits. To represent 256, you need nine bits, we only have eight. You now have an overflow situation. Sometimes the byte flips to -255, sometimes the program just flat-out crashes. You can't say with certainty without more information: what language was used, what compiler, etc.

A problem with some computers was that an overflow could cause the program to write into memory that was not supposed to be accessible to it, which could potentially cause a computer crash. The fun stuff was when hackers figured out how to make programs READ memory where they weren't supposed to: this allowed them into areas that the operating system programmers didn't anticipate and allowed the lifting of system passwords and all sorts of fun stuff! But that was in the past, operating systems are somewhat better designed now.

One VERY famous example of integer overflow was the Sid Meier's game Civilization and Nuclear Gandhi. In the game, as in life, Gandhi as a country's leader, was a peaceful guy and not militarily aggressive. In the game's code, there was a hostility counter, which was a small integer, I don't remember how big it was, let's say it was four bits, for a maximum value of 15 (1+2+4+8). 15 was maximum peaceful civilization. -15 was maximum war state, 'gonna nuke your ass' mentality. The programmers forgot to do a bounds check on that variable, and if India was at 15, and something increased it by 1, rather than ignoring the increase since they were already at Nirvana, it overflowed to -15 and they went total rage-monster and started throwing nukes at all their neighbors. Nuclear Gandhi.

Encryption programs are REALLY complicated! With 2048 being a binary power of two, it's quite possible that there is some sort of subtle bug lurking in the encryption code that didn't show in testing that's preventing the decrypt keys from working, and that it's not actually failed USB keys.

But still, my advice holds: do not trust USB keys for permanent - or critical! - storage.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/11/swiss_evote_usb_snafu/

https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/03/11/1953224/swiss-e-voting-pilot-cant-count-2048-ballots-after-usb-keys-fail-to-decrypt-them

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time-when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudo-science and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."

Carl Sagan, A Demon-Haunted World, 1995

(A Demon-Haunted World was Sagan's penultimate book, he died in 1996 of pneumonia from a form of leukemia at the age of 62.)