Daily Archives: January 4, 2018

When a North Korean Missile Accidentally Hit a North Korean City

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What happens when a North Korean ballistic missile test fails in flight and explodes in a populated area? On April 28, 2017, North Korea launched a single Hwasong-12/KN17 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) from Pukchang Airfield in South Pyongan Province (the Korean People’s Army’s Air and Anti-Air Force Unit 447 in Ryongak-dong, Sunchon City, to be more precise). That missile failed shortly after launch and crashed in the Chongsin-dong, in North Korean city of Tokchon, causing considerable damage to a complex of industrial or agricultural buildings.
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As seen in image 1, had the launch succeeded, Rodong Sinmun would likely have printed an image of Kim Jong-un standing in front of the transporter-erector-mounted IRBM in a hardened tunnel.

That would have (and now does) send a dire message to U.S. and allied military planners: North Korea’s missiles won’t be sitting ducks at known “launch pads,” contrary to much mainstream analysis. What’s more, the proliferation of newly constructed hangers, tunnels, and storage sites cannot be assumed to stop at the Pukchang Airfield. Similar facilities likely exist across the country. In 2017, not only has North Korea tested a massive variety of strategic weaponry, but it has done so from a more diverse list of launch sites — what the U.S. intelligence community calls “ballistic missile operating areas” — than ever before. Gone are the days of Kim Jong-un supervising and observing launches at a limited list of sites that’d include Sinpo, Sohae, Wonsan, and Kittaeryong.
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As North Korea’s production of now-proven IRBMs and ICBMs continues, it will have a large and diversified nuclear force spread across multiple hardened sites, leaving the preventive warfighter’s task close to impossible if the objective is a comprehensive, disarming first strike leaving Pyongyang without retaliatory options. The time is long gone to turn the clock back on North Korea’s ballistic missile program and its pre-launch basing options.

Source: When a North Korean Missile Accidentally Hit a North Korean City | The Diplomat

Rare Malware Targeting Uber’s Android App Uncovered

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Malware discovered by Symantec researchers sneakily spoofs Uber’s Android app and harvests users’ passwords, allowing attackers to take over the effected users’ accounts. The malware isn’t widespread, though, and most Uber users are not effected.
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In order to steal a user’s login information, the malware pops up on-screen regularly and prompts the user to enter their Uber username and password. Once a user falls for the attack and enters their information, it gets swept up by the attacker.

To cover up the credential theft, this malware uses deep links to Uber’s legitimate app to display the user’s current location—making it appear as though the user is accessing the Uber app instead of a malicious fake.

Source: Rare Malware Targeting Uber’s Android App Uncovered

Asus is turning its old routers into mesh Wi-Fi networks

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Mesh routers like Eero, Netgear’s Orbi, and Google Wifi are getting all the hype these days, but replacing your whole network with a bunch of new devices can be kind of expensive. Asus has a good solution with its new AiMesh system, which lets you repurpose your existing Asus routers as part of a mesh network.For now, the mesh support is coming to a few routers today in beta, including the ASUS RT-AC68U, RT-AC1900P, RT-AC86U, RT-AC5300, and the ROG Rapture GT-AC5300. with additional support planned for the RT-AC88U and RT-AC3100 later this year.

Source: Asus is turning its old routers into mesh Wi-Fi networks – The Verge

Google’s voice-generating AI is now indistinguishable from humans

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A research paper published by Google this month—which has not been peer reviewed—details a text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2, which claims near-human accuracy at imitating audio of a person speaking from text.

The system is Google’s second official generation of the technology, which consists of two deep neural networks. The first network translates the text into a spectrogram (pdf), a visual way to represent audio frequencies over time. That spectrogram is then fed into WaveNet, a system from Alphabet’s AI research lab DeepMind, which reads the chart and generates the corresponding audio elements accordingly.

Source: Google’s voice-generating AI is now indistinguishable from humans — Quartz

Project Maven brings AI to the fight against ISIS

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For years, the Defense Department’s most senior leadership has lamented the fact that US military and spy agencies, where artificial intelligence (AI) technology is concerned, lag far behind state-of-the-art commercial technology. Though US companies and universities lead the world in advanced AI research and commercialization, the US military still performs many activities in a style that would be familiar to the military of World War II.

As of this month, however, that has begun to change. Project Maven is a crash Defense Department program that was designed to deliver AI technologies—specifically, technologies that involve deep learning neural networks—to an active combat theater within six months from when the project received funding. Most defense acquisition programs take years or even decades to reach the battlefield, but technologies developed through Project Maven have already been successfully deployed in the fight against ISIS. Despite their rapid development and deployment, these technologies are getting strong praise from their military intelligence users. For the US national security community, Project Maven’s frankly incredible success foreshadows enormous opportunities ahead—as well as enormous organizational, ethical, and strategic challenges.
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As its AI beachhead, the department chose Project Maven, which focuses on analysis of full-motion video data from tactical aerial drone platforms such as the ScanEagle and medium-altitude platforms such as the MQ-1C Gray Eagle and the MQ-9 Reaper. These drone platforms and their full-motion video sensors play a major role in the conflict against ISIS across the globe. The tactical and medium-altitude video sensors of the Scan Eagle, MQ-1C, and MQ-9 produce imagery that more or less resembles what you see on Google Earth. A single drone with these sensors produces many terabytes of data every day. Before AI was incorporated into analysis of this data, it took a team of analysts working 24 hours a day to exploit only a fraction of one drone’s sensor data.
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Now that Project Maven has met the sky-high expectations of the department’s former second-ranking official, its success will likely spawn a hundred copycats throughout the military and intelligence community. The department must ensure that these copycats actually replicate Project Maven’s secret sauce—which is not merely its focus on AI technology. The project’s success was enabled by its organizational structure: a small, operationally focused, cross-functional team that was empowered to develop external partnerships, leverage existing infrastructure and platforms, and engage with user communities iteratively during development. AI needs to be woven throughout the fabric of the Defense Department, and many existing department institutions will have to adopt project management structures similar to Maven’s if they are to run effective AI acquisition programs.
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To its credit, the department selected drone video footage as an AI beachhead because it wanted to avoid some of the more thorny ethical and strategic challenges associated with automation in warfare. As US military and intelligence agencies implement modern AI technology across a much more diverse set of missions, they will face wrenching strategic, ethical, and legal challenges—which Project Maven’s narrow focus helped it avoid.

Source: Project Maven brings AI to the fight against ISIS | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Gamers Want DMCA Exemption for ‘Abandoned’ Online Games

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Several organizations and gaming fans are asking the Copyright Office to make a DMCA circumvention exemption for abandoned online games, to preserve them for future generations. The exemption would allow museums and libraries to offer copies of abandoned online servers, so these games won’t turn to dust.

The U.S. Copyright Office is considering whether or not to update the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, which prevent the public from tinkering with DRM-protected content and devices.

These provisions are renewed every three years. To allow individuals and organizations to chime in, the Office traditionally launches a public consultation, before it makes any decisions.

This week a series of new responses were received and many of these focused on abandoned games. As is true for most software, games have a limited lifespan, so after a few years they are no longer supported by manufacturers.

To preserve these games for future generations and nostalgic gamers, the Copyright Office previously included game preservation exemptions. This means that libraries, archives and museums can use emulators and other circumvention tools to make old classics playable.

However, these exemptions are limited and do not apply to games that require a connection to an online server, which includes most recent games. When the online servers are taken down, the game simply disappears forever.

Source: Gamers Want DMCA Exemption for ‘Abandoned’ Online Games – TorrentFreak

Edward Snowden’s New App Uses Your Smartphone to Physically Guard Your Laptop

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My disk is encrypted, but all it takes to bypass this protection is for an attacker — a malicious hotel housekeeper, or “evil maid,” for example — to spend a few minutes physically tampering with it without my knowledge. If I come back and continue to use my compromised computer, the attacker could gain access to everything.Edward Snowden and his friends have a solution. The NSA whistleblower and a team of collaborators have been working on a new open source Android app called Haven that you install on a spare smartphone, turning the device into a sort of sentry to watch over your laptop. Haven uses the smartphone’s many sensors — microphone, motion detector, light detector, and cameras — to monitor the room for changes, and it logs everything it notices. The first public beta version of Haven has officially been released; it’s available in the Play Store and on F-Droid, an open source app store for Android.

Source: Edward Snowden’s New App Uses Your Smartphone to Physically Guard Your Laptop