Monthly Archives: January 2018

With the “Forever Battery,” Ossia’s Cota AA system Promises True Wireless Charging

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The Forever Battery comes in a AA form factor, and houses electronics (including an antenna) within its shell. Ossia’s Cota system uses a transmitter that beams electricity along direct paths through the air to the antenna in the battery, charging it from distances of up to 30 feet, with nary a wire to be seen between them.

“Think of Wi-Fi,” Obeidat said. “Just like you have a Wi-Fi router in the home, you have a Cota transmitter. You have many low-power devices, one of them could be the AA battery … inside of it has electronics that communicate and receive power from that transmitter.” The Cota system beams the power only through unoccupied space; if a person were to move in the way, Cota would angle the beam to avoid them.

Obeidat went on to explain that users could have the battery in a variety of devices, such as smoke detectors or remote controls, receiving power without hassle. He also emphasized that the AA form factor of the Forever Battery is just the start. Ossia believes it can scale the technology down to work in smartphone batteries. To this end, the company hopes to partner with large smartphone manufacturers to integrate Cota into their smartphone batteries.

Source: With the “Forever Battery,” Ossia Promises True Wireless Charging | Digital Trends

The Vuzix Blade Is What Google Glass Always Wanted to Be

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The thing that always rubbed me the wrong way about Google Glass though, was how after an underwhelming debut, the company seemingly forgot about its moonshot tech. The only thing that remains of the project are enterprise-only models focused more on assisting business complete specialized tasks than expanding the tech as a whole.

It’s a shame because if Google had continued to develop the Glass, we might not have had to wait as long for something like the Vuzix Blade. Sporting a tiny DLP projector that spits images onto its full color see-through display, the Blade’s uses waveguide optics to project a tiny display onto the right lens of some surprisingly normal-looking glasses.

In addition to the Blade’s innovative display, it also has everything it needs to function as a standalone wearable, complete with a built-in CPU running a customized version of Android, 8-MP camera, 4GB of storage and a microSD card slot, wi-fi, and a mic and touchpad for controlling the device.
[…]
Controlling it is a cinch too. A two-finger swipe on the touchpad built into the right side of the glasses takes you to the home screen, while a one finger swipe advances you through UI, with a single-tap used for making selections.

From there, you can pair the Blade with your phone, which makes it easy to check your messages, view directions or even take first-person photos or videos, using either the touchpad or voice commands. But that’s not all, because in addition to Vuzix’s homemade smartphone companion app, the Blade also sports built-in Alexa integration. So if you want to ask about the weather without pulling out your phone? No problem. How about controlling smart home devices like lights or your thermostat? That’s easy too.

Source: The Vuzix Blade Is What Google Glass Always Wanted to Be

US House reps green-light Fourth Amendment busting spy program

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The US House of Representatives has passed a six-year extension to the controversial Section 702 spying program, rejecting an amendment that would have required the authorities to get a warrant before searching for information on US citizens.

The 256-164 vote effectively retains the status quo and undermines a multi-year effort to bring accountability to a program that critics argue breaks the Constitution. A bipartisan substitute amendment put forward by House reps Justin Amash (R-MI) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and supported by both ends of the political spectrum was defeated 233-183.< [...] The already tense atmosphere in Washington DC over the issue was heightened when President Trump tweeted his apparent support of critics of the program just moments after the Amash-Lofgren amendment was discussed on Fox News./blockquote>

Source: US House reps green-light Fourth Amendment busting spy program • The Register

OnePlus Android mobes’ clipboard app caught phoning home to China

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OnePlus has admitted that the clipboard app in a beta build of its Android OS was beaming back mystery data to a cloud service in China.

Someone running the latest test version of OnePlus’s Oreo-based operating system revealed in its support forums that unusual activity from the builtin clipboard manager had been detected by a firewall tool.

Upon closer inspection, the punter found that the app had been transmitting information to a block of IP addresses registered to Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce and cloud hosting giant.
[…]
This should not come as much of a shock to those who follow the China-based OnePlus. In October last year, researchers discovered that OnePlus handsets were collecting unusually detailed reports on user activities, although the manufacturer said at the time it was only hoarding the data for its internal analytics. One month later, it was discovered that some phones had apparently been shipped with a developer kit left active, resulting in the phones sporting a hidden backdoor.

And lest we forget, today’s desktop and mobile operating systems are pretty gung-ho in phoning home information about their users, with Microsoft catching flak for Windows 10 telemetry in particular. ®

Source: OnePlus Android mobes’ clipboard app caught phoning home to China

WhatsApp Security Design Could Let an Infiltrator Add Members to Group Chats

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Only admins can add new members to private groups. But the researchers found that anyone in control of the server can spoof the authentication process, essentially granting themselves the privileges necessary to add new members who can snoop on private conversations. The obvious examples that come to mind are hackers who manage to gain access to WhatsApp servers or a government successfully pressuring WhatsApp to give it access to targeted group chats.

Perhaps even more troubling, a compromised admin with control of the server could manipulate the messages that would alert group members that someone new had been added, according to the researchers. However, WhatsApp denies this is an issue.

Wired confirmed the researchers’ findings with a WhatsApp spokesperson. While the company, which is owned by Facebook, acknowledges the issue of server security, the spokesperson pushed back on the idea that attackers could block, cache, or otherwise prevent the alert that new members have been added.

Source: WhatsApp Security Design Could Let an Infiltrator Add Members to Group Chats [Updated]

What’s Slack Doing With Your Data?

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More than six million people use Slack daily, spending on average more than two hours each day inside the chat app. For many employees, work life is contingent on Slack, and surely plenty of us use it for more than just, say, work talk. You probably have a #CATS and a women-only channel, and you’ve probably said something privately that you wouldn’t want shared with your boss. But that’s not really up to you.

When you want to have an intimate or contentious chat, you might send a direct message. Or perhaps you and a few others have started a private channel, ensuring that whatever you say is only seen by a handful of people. This may feel like a closed circuit between you and another person—or small group of people—but that space and the little lock symbol aren’t actually emblematic of complete privacy.

Do Slack employees have access to your chats? The short answer is: sort of. The long answer is… below. Can your company peek at your private DMs? It’s entirely possible. Slack’s FAQ pages help elucidate some of these concerns, but at times the answers are frustratingly vague and difficult to navigate. So we dug into it for you. Read more to find out what Slack—and your company—is actually doing with your data.

Source: What’s Slack Doing With Your Data?

The short is:
Yes, there are slack employees that can view your data. Channel owners can see everything in a channel, also direct messages. Slack gives your data to law enforcement upon request and won’t inform you. They don’t (and say won’t) sell it to third parties. Deletion is deletion. Slack, like any other company, can be hacked. Caveat emptor.

Wall Street Analysts Are Embarrassingly Bad At Predicting The Future, Study Finds

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The researchers looked at a database of long-term growth forecasts made for all domestic companies listed on a major stock exchange. The forecasts are made in December each year, and predict how well a company’s stocks will do over the next three to five years. From 1981 to 2016, they found that the top 10 percent of stocks analysts were most hopeful about generally had poorer growth than the 10 percent of stocks they were most pessimistic about.

The paper found that investing in the stocks that analysts were most pessimistic in a given year about would have yielded an average 15 percent in extra returns (in stock terms, a profit) the following year, compared to a 3 percent return that would have been made from investing in the predicted champs.

The study, though it hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, is in fact merely an update of a classic study published in 1996; it too found a similarly stark contrast. Nor is this the only kind of study to find a clear gap between the professed stock expectations of analysts and actual reality. So the results aren’t exactly surprising.

Source: Wall Street Analysts Are Embarrassingly Bad At Predicting The Future, Study Finds

Stop us if you’ve heard this one: Apple’s password protection in macOS can be thwarted

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An Apple developer has uncovered another embarrassing vulnerability in macOS High Sierra, aka version 10.13, that lets someone bypass part of the operating system’s password protections.This time, a vulnerable dialog box was found in the System Preferences panel for the App Store settings. The bug, reported by developer Eric Holtam to the Open Radar bug tracker, has since been verified by Mac-toting netizens.The bug allows a user logged in with admin rights (this is important to note) to get around the password requirement when making changes in the App Store settings panel. Open the App Store settings panel, click on the padlock to make changes, a password prompt pops up, type in any string of text, and the “password” is accepted, unlocking the preferences panel.Aaron Lint, veep of research at infosec biz Arxan, claimed the trick can also be used to bypass the login requirements for some other settings panels as well, but not the important “Users and Groups” and “Security and Privacy” controls.

Source: Stop us if you’ve heard this one: Apple’s password protection in macOS can be thwarted • The Register

Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime, Federal Court Rules

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the federal court of appeals heeded EFF’s advice and rejected an attempt by Oracle to hold a company criminally liable for accessing Oracle’s website in a manner it didn’t like. The court ruled back in 2012 that merely violating a website’s terms of use is not a crime under the federal computer crime statute, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But some companies, like Oracle, turned to state computer crime statutes — in this case, California and Nevada — to enforce their computer use preferences. This decision shores up the good precedent from 2012 and makes clear — if it wasn’t clear already — that violating a corporate computer use policy is not a crime.

Source: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime, Federal Court Rules – Slashdot

Boffins tweak audio by 0.1% to fool speech recognition engines

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a paper by Nicholas Carlini and David Wagner of the University of California Berkeley has explained off a technique to trick speech recognition by changing the source waveform by 0.1 per cent.

The pair wrote at arXiv that their attack achieved a first: not merely an attack that made a speech recognition SR engine fail, but one that returned a result chosen by the attacker.In other words, because the attack waveform is 99.9 per cent identical to the original, a human wouldn’t notice what’s wrong with a recording of “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, but an AI could be tricked into transcribing it as something else entirely: the authors say it could produce “it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single” from a slightly-altered sample.

It works every single time: the pair claimed a 100 per cent success rate for their attack, and frighteningly, an attacker can even hide a target waveform in what (to the observer) appears to be silence.

Source: Boffins tweak audio by 0.1% to fool speech recognition engines • The Register

Nissan’s Car of the Future Will Read Your Brain Waves

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The Japanese company will unveil and test its “brain-to-vehicle” technology at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The “B2V” system requires a driver to wear a skullcap that measures brain-wave activity and transmits its readings to steering, acceleration and braking systems that can start responding before the driver initiates the action.The driver still turns the wheel or hits the gas pedal, but the car anticipates those movements and begins the actions 0.2 seconds to 0.5 seconds sooner, said Lucian Gheorghe, a senior innovation researcher at Nissan overseeing the project. The earlier response should be imperceptible to drivers, he said.“We imagine a future where manual driving is still a value of society,” said Gheorghe, 40, who earned a doctorate in applied neural technology. “Driving pleasure is something as humans we should not lose.”

Source: Nissan’s Car of the Future Will Read Your Brain Waves – Bloomberg

Unitek USB 3.0 to SATA Adapter Cable for 2.5″ SSD or HDD – Hard Drive Adapter: turns your hard disk into portable storage

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Supports 2.5″ SATA I/II/III hard drive/solid state drive. USB 3.0 supports data transfer speeds up to 5Gbps. Backwards compatible with USB2.0/USB1.0
Efficient UASP Transfer Protocol. An Equipped Cover provides better dust protecting SATA connector from dust.
Portable and lightweight design make it is easy to carry. LED light shows Power and Activity status.
Support hot swapping, easy and tool-free installation. No drivers or software needed
What We Offer – Unitek USB 3.0 to SATA 6G Adapter x1, 2-year warranty quality guarantee, 24h friendly customer service and email support

Man’s YouTube Video of White Noise Hit With Five Copyright Claims

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On Thursday, Tomczak tweeted a screenshot of the complaints that have been lodged against his video, “10 Hours of Low Level White Noise.” The clip is exactly what its title advertises, and the absurdity of someone claiming ownership of a bunch of frequencies with equal intensity playing simultaneously—that’s all white noise is—clearly illustrates just how beyond broken YouTube’s automated copyright system really is.
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What’s most egregious about the situation is that the claimants aren’t just disputing Tomczak’s right to upload the video—they’ve elected to monetize it and leave it up. Tomczak isn’t missing out on any big profits (the video only has 1,485 views), but running around YouTube monetizing white noise has plenty of opportunities to be a moneymaker. A simple search pulls up millions of white noise videos and many of them have millions of views. A lot of the offerings are relaxing sounds like rain or a fan, but there’s plenty of good, old-fashioned TV static that’s quite popular.

Source: Man’s YouTube Video of White Noise Hit With Five Copyright Claims

Yahooooo! says! its! email! is! scrahoooo-ed!

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Yahoo! Mail – yes, amazingly it is still a thing – is today taking a break from business as usual norms with the service down for almost the past seven hours.Since circa 9am, the email service has received hundreds of complaints an hour on downdetector.co.uk, with users moaning about persistant “error 15” messages, and others telling of short periods of functionality before being kicked out of their accounts.Yahoo’s customer care Twitter account belatedly acknowledged the outage after 2pm, saying it had “received reports that users are seeing temporary access errors when accessing #YahooMail”, and that it was “working to fix this as quickly as possible.”More than a full hour later, the social media ninjas at Yahoo updated the customer base to say it still didn’t know when it would be able to make things better.

Source: Yahooooo! says! its! email! is! scrahoooo-ed! • The Register

The joys of the cloud…

How a Reddit Email Vulnerability Led to Thousands in Stolen Bitcoin Cash

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The exploit allowed hackers to request a password reset for a target account and then click the generated link without opening the email it had been sent in. How was this possible? Theories circulated, buoyed by posts on Hacker Noon and The Next Web. It was the r/bitcoin users out to cause trouble; Or was it a Reddit admin gone rogue?But this attack had incentive beyond ideology. What made the users of r/btc such a rich target was the deployment of a bot account called Tippr, which was used, among other things, to reward a particularly funny or insightful comment. By tagging someone and designating an amount, Tippr withdrew some BCH from your hotwallet and allocated it to the recipient. Given that Tippr is active on both Reddit and Twitter (where it provides its donation service for such heavyweights as the Tor Project), there was easy money to be had.

Source: How a Reddit Email Vulnerability Led to Thousands in Stolen Bitcoin Cash

This Ex-NSA Hacker Is Building an AI to Find Hate Symbols on Twitter

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NEMESIS, according to Crose, can help spot symbols that have been co-opted by hate groups to signal to each other in plain sight. At a glance, the way NEMESIS works is relatively simple. There’s an “inference graph,” which is a mathematical representation of trained images, classified as Nazi or white supremacist symbols. This inference graph trains the system with machine learning to identify the symbols in the wild, whether they are in pictures or videos.

Source: This Ex-NSA Hacker Is Building an AI to Find Hate Symbols on Twitter – Motherboard

Auto like Instagram pics Bot

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Bot to automatically like your friends’ Instagram posts, and notify you on your Slack channel.

This script runs Instagram API every 15mins (cronjob) and checks for any new Instagram post for a paticular user_id. If a new a post is found it likes the post and sends a notification to your configured Slack channel using Slack Webhooks.

Github

Western Digital ‘My Cloud’ devices have a hardcoded backdoor — stop using these NAS drives NOW!

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Today, yet another security blunder becomes publicized, and it is really bad. You see, many Western Digital My Cloud NAS drives have a hardcoded backdoor, meaning anyone can access them — your files could be at risk. It isn’t even hard to take advantage of it — the username is “mydlinkBRionyg” and the password is “abc12345cba” (without quotes). To make matters worse, it was disclosed to Western Digital six months ago and the company apparently did nothing until November 2017. Let’s be realistic — not everyone stays on top of updates, and a backdoor never should have existed in the first place.

Source: Western Digital ‘My Cloud’ devices have a hardcoded backdoor — stop using these NAS drives NOW!

Rs 500, 10 minutes, and you have access to billion Aadhaar (Indian social security) details

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It took just Rs 500, paid through Paytm, and 10 minutes in which an “agent” of the group running the racket created a “gateway” for this correspondent and gave a login ID and password. Lo and behold, you could enter any Aadhaar number in the portal, and instantly get all particulars that an individual may have submitted to the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India), including name, address, postal code (PIN), photo, phone number and email.

What is more, The Tribune team paid another Rs 300, for which the agent provided “software” that could facilitate the printing of the Aadhaar card after entering the Aadhaar number of any individual.

Source: Rs 500, 10 minutes, and you have access to billion Aadhaar details

Ridiculously, the reporters of this news are now facing governmental investigation, instead of getting the recognition they deserve.
Snowden on Twitter

Major Cryptocurrency Index Excludes Korean Prices Without Warning, creates apparent drop in prices

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CoinMarketCap, arguably the most prominent global index of cryptocurrency prices, triggered a wave of anxiety and anger this morning when it removed a group of Korean cryptocurency exchanges from its price calculations.Though the change was apparently made at midnight Sunday U.S. EST, CoinMarketCap did not publicize it until midday on Monday, saying that the Korean exchanges showed “extreme divergence in prices from the rest of the world and limited arbitrage opportunity.” This morning we excluded some Korean exchanges in price calculations due to the extreme divergence in prices from the rest of the world and limited arbitrage opportunity. We are working on better tools to provide users with the averages that are most relevant to them. — CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) January 8, 2018The move resulted in a sharp drop in CoinMarketCap’s measurement of nearly all cryptocurrencies. That gave the impression that a broad market decline, already in progress, had become even more dramatic overnight. As news of the cause for the sharp drop spread Monday, most cryptocurrency prices began recovering losses.

Source: Major Cryptocurrency Index Excludes Korean Prices Without Warning | Fortune

Our Solar System is an exception: most planets have more regular spacing and sizing

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They found that planets in the same planetary system have correlated sizes. “Each planet is more likely to be the size of its neighbor than a size drawn at random from the distribution of observed planet sizes,” the paper said. If the system contains three or more planets, the planets are also more likely to be spaced regularly. Smaller planets seem to sit closer together than larger planets, leading scientists to believe that the patterns developed early during their formation.
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This is at odds with our Solar System, Weiss explained to The Register. “Unlike these exoplanetary systems, the solar system has incredible size diversity. Earth is more than twice the radius of Mercury, Neptune is four times the radius of Earth, and Jupiter is ten times the radius of Earth. Also, the terrestrial planets are very widely spaced.”

The authors suggested the complex gravitational interactions between Jupiter and Saturn are to blame. When the terrestrial planets were still forming, Jupiter and Saturn scattered the protoplanets and increased the number of collisions among them.

Source: Astroboffins say our Solar System is a dark, violent, cosmic weirdo • The Register

SteelSeries’ Dual-Sensor Mouse Could Be the King of Precision

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The Rival 600 even has its own CPU and storage tucked inside, so that once you get everything configured just the way you like, you can save those settings directly in the mouse, so you won’t need to re-download the SteelSeries app if you play with it on a different machine.

Source: SteelSeries’ Dual-Sensor Mouse Could Be the King of Precision

What I really really dislike about Razer’s offering is that their control panel requires an online account and connection. The settings and who knows what else is stored in their ‘cloud’. For a mouse or keyboard driver, this seems to me to be totally unnecessary and an invasion of privacy. This looks like a good alternative.

AI System Sorts News Articles By Whether or Not They Contain Actual Information

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In a recent paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, computer scientists Ani Nenkova and Yinfei Yang, of Google and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, describe a new machine learning approach to classifying written journalism according to a formalized idea of “content density.” With an average accuracy of around 80 percent, their system was able to accurately classify news stories across a wide range of domains, spanning from international relations and business to sports and science journalism, when evaluated against a ground truth dataset of already correctly classified news articles.

Source: AI System Sorts News Articles By Whether or Not They Contain Actual Information – Motherboard