Daily Archives: October 21, 2024

Hacked Robot Vacuums Shout Slurs at Their Owners, Chase down their dogs

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a robot vacuum behind a running dog. The dog is terrified[…] hackers gained control of the devices and used the onboard speakers to blast racial slurs at anyone within earshot. One such person was a lawyer from Minnesota named Daniel Swenson. He was watching TV when he heard some odd noises coming from the direction of his vacuum. He changed the password and restarted it. But then the odd sounds started up again. And then it started shouting racial slurs at him like a surly disgruntled maid.

There were multiple reports of similar incidents across the United States and around the same time. One of them happened in Los Angeles, where a vacuum chased a dog while spewing hate. Another happened in El Paso, where the vac spewed slurs until it’s owner turned it off.

The attacks are apparently quite easy to pull off thanks to several known security vulnerabilities in Ecovacs, like a bad Bluetooth connector and a defective PIN system that is intended to safeguard video feeds and remote access but actually doesn’t do any of that at all.

A pair of cybersecurity researchers released a report on Ecovacs detailing the brand’s multiple security flaws earlier this year. The company, it appears, has not yet addressed all of its critical issues—nor do they seem to believe that their vacuums are even capable of being hacked, at least according to that owner Daniel Swenson, who says that the company’s customer support didn’t believe him when he said his vacuum was shouting the N-word at him.

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Source: Robot Vacuums Hacked to Shout Slurs at Their Owners

Big data, real world, multi-state study finds RSV vaccine highly effective in protecting older adults against severe disease, hospitalization and death

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[…] RSV vaccination provided approximately 80 percent protection against severe disease and hospitalization, Intensive Care Unit admission and death due to a respiratory infection as well as similar protection against less severe disease in adults who visited an emergency department but did not require hospitalization, ages 60 and older. Of this population, those ages 75 and older — were at highest risk of severe disease and were the most likely to be hospitalized.

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In the U.S., respiratory disease season typically commences in late September or early October and continues through March or early April.

RSV affects the nose, throat and lungs, causing substantial illness and death among older adults during these seasonal epidemics. In years prior to the availability of an RSV vaccine, an estimated 60,000 to 160,000 RSV-associated hospitalizations and 6,000 to 10,000 RSV-associated deaths occurred annually among U.S. adults aged 65 years and older, according to the CDC.

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Dr. Dixon added “Studies like this one are critical to understanding the effects of prevention techniques like vaccination. The annual cost of RSV hospitalization for adults in the U.S. is estimated to be between $1.2 and $5 billion. Preventing up to 80 percent of hospitalizations could result in major savings for consumers and the health system.”

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Source: Big data, real world, multi-state study finds RSV vaccine highly effective in protecting older adults against severe disease, hospitalization and death | ScienceDaily

Both uBlock Origin and Lite face browser problems

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Both uBlock Origin and its smaller sibling, uBlock Origin Lite, are experiencing problems thanks to browser vendors that really ought to know better.

Developer Raymond Hill, or gorhill on GitHub, is one of the biggest unsung heroes of the modern web. He’s the man behind two of the leading browser extensions to block unwanted advertising, the classic uBlock Origin and its smaller, simpler relation, uBlock Origin Lite. They both do the same job in significantly different ways, so depending on your preferred browser, you now must make a choice.

Gorhill reports on GitHub that an automated code review by Mozilla flagged problems with uBlock Origin Lite. As a result, he has pulled the add-on from Mozilla’s extensions site. The extension’s former page now just says “Oops! We can’t find that page”. You can still install it direct from GitHub, though.

The good news is that the full-fat version, uBlock Origin, is still there, so you can choose that. Hill has a detailed explanation of why and how uBlock Origin works best on Firefox. It’s a snag, though, if like The Reg FOSS desk you habitually run both Firefox and Chrome and wanted to keep both on the same ad blocker.

That’s because, as The Register warned back in August, Google’s new Manifest V3 extensions system means the removal of Manifest V2 – upon which uBlock Origin depends. For now, it still works – this vulture is running Chrome version 130 and uBO is still functioning. It’s still available on Google’s web extensions store, with a slightly misleading warning:

This extension may soon no longer be supported because it doesn’t follow best practices for Chrome extensions.

So, if you use Chrome, or a Chrome-based browser – which is most of them – then you will soon be compelled to remove uBO and switch to uBlock Origin Lite instead.

It would surely be overly cynical of us to suggest that issues with ad blockers were a foreseeable difficulty now that Mozilla is an advertising company.

To sum up, if you have a Mozilla-family browser, uBlock Origin is the easier option. If you have a Chrome-family browser, such as Microsoft Edge, then, very soon, uBlock Origin Lite will be the only version available to you.

There are other in-browser ad-blocking options out there, of course.

Linux users may well want to consider having Privoxy running in the background as well. For example, on Ubuntu and Debian-family distros, just type sudo apt install -y privoxy and reboot. If you run your own home network, maybe look into configuring an old Raspberry Pi with Pi-hole.

uBlock Origin started out as a fork of uBlock, which is now owned by the developers of AdBlock – which means that, as The Register said in 2021, it is “made by an advertising company that brokers ‘acceptable ads.'”

If acceptable ads don’t sound so bad – and to be fair, they’re better than the full Times-Square-neon-infested experience of much of the modern web – then you can still install the free AdBlock Plus, which is in both the Mozilla’s store and in the Chrome store.

Source: Both uBlock Origin and Lite face browser problems • The Register