

Crayfis: Cosmic rays found in smartphones - jordanpg
http://crayfis.ps.uci.edu/

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dTal
It would be nice to have a bit more info about what the app is actually doing.
All could glean from the (irritating) slideshow was that it turns on the
camera whenever the phone is plugged in and idle and uploads the "data" to UCI
servers. It's not clear if any client-side processing is done - if so, there's
bound to be user impact (idle apps being killed for memory), and if not
they've got a hell of a privacy problem on their hands.

EDIT: I looked at the paper, which does address these concerns:

"Frames which contain any above-threshold pixels are stored and passed to the
second stage which examines the stored frames, saving only the pixels above a
second, lower threshold. All qualifying pixels, typically a few per frame, are
stored as a sparse array in a buffer on the phone, along with their arrival
time and the geolocation of the phone. When a wi-fi connection is available,
the collected pixels are up- loaded to a central server for offline shower
reconstruc- tion; most events are between 50-200 bytes of data."

And:

"To address user security concerns, no frames will be stored or uploaded if
the average pixel response value over the frame exceeds a threshold, such that
full images cannot be re- constructed offline."

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dang
Url changed from [http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/10/cosmic-ray-
particle-s...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/10/cosmic-ray-particle-
shower-theres-an-app-for-that/), which points to this.

