The Linkielist

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The Linkielist

Copyright Making Sure That MTV Remains An Irrelevant Relic, Rather Than A Cultural Icon

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For those of us of a certain age, MTV defined culture. It was where we learned about not just music, but wider pop culture. Of course, MTV lost its cultural place atop the mountaintop with the rise of the internet, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a key source of culture in the 1980s. Historically, the way that society preserves and remembers culture is to share it and spread it around. This is actually how culture is created. Yet copyright is the opposite of that. Copyright is about locking up content and denying the ability to create shared culture around it. And the best evidence of this is the fact that someone (it is not entirely clear who…) with the power to do so, demanded that the Internet Archive take down a bunch of old MTV videos that were uploaded.

From a purely legal standpoint, it seems quite likely that whoever issued the takedown did have a legal leg to stand on. The real question, however, should be whether or not they have a moral or cultural leg to stand on. After all, if the entire point of copyright — as per the Constitution — is to encourage “the progress” then how does taking these old clips down do anything to support that goal?

There are a number of other points worth mentioning to demonstrate how crazy this whole thing is, starting with the fact that MTV itself knew how important it was to build on cultural touchstones in that its whole logo/image was built off a public domain image from just a few years earlier. The moon landing was in 1969, and MTV launched in 1981. Imagine if this image had been locked up under copyright?

This also demonstrates a separate point we’ve been making for years, which is that the actual commercial value of a piece of work locked up behind copyright, tends not to be that long, and yet we locked it up for basically a century for no good reason at all. In the earliest copyright times in the US, copyright initially was for 14 years, which could be renewed for another 14 if the copyright holder felt it was worth it. A maximum of 28 years would mean that most of the uploaded clips would now be in the public domain if we had kept those terms. And, as we’ve pointed out repeatedly, back when copyright was 28 years, renewable for another 28 years, very few works were renewed, suggesting that the vast majority of copyright holders did not see any reason to retain their copyright beyond 28 years (indeed, the numbers suggest many would have been fine with significantly shorter copyright terms):

Yet, today copyright automatically lasts beyond most of our lifetimes. And, for what purpose? Right now, MTV is not particularly culturally relevant. You’d think that someone might jump at the chance to get renewed interest in MTV’s past cultural relevance, but the belief that copyright means we must lock up culture seems to prevail over common sense.

Taking down these cultural touchstones may have been perfectly legal, but all it’s really done is help demonstrate the many, many problems of today’s copyright law and how it destroys, rather than enhances, culture.

Source: Copyright Making Sure That MTV Remains An Irrelevant Relic, Rather Than A Cultural Icon | Techdirt

China’s next-generation crew spacecraft nails its test mission landing

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After it launched on Tuesday and nailed a series of maneuvers, China’s future crewed spacecraft has made a successful desert touchdown. Built by China’s main space contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), the uncrewed prototype will ferry astronauts to China’s future space station and, eventually, the moon.

The crewed capsule (which doesn’t have a name yet), was lofted into an 5,000-mile-high orbit by China’s Long March 5B carrier rocket. During the mission, it underwent deep space trials similar to Orion’s 2014 mission, completing seven orbital adjustment maneuvers. Early this morning, the craft completed a deorbit burn, followed by separation of the crew and service modules. The three chutes deployed shortly after re-entry and it touched down in the Dongfeng desert area at 1:49 AM ET.

Designed to carry crews of up to six astronauts, the craft tested weighed 14 tons and is designed to be the primary transport to China’s future space station. CASC and the CNSA, China’s space agency, are also working on a 21.6-ton variant for deep space, designed to be used in future manned lunar missions. However, the CNSA has yet to nail down details for the larger craft and its moon missions are at least a decade away.

On top of doing orbital maneuvers, the prototype craft (with no life-support systems) conducted experiments on 3D printing of composite materials, high-definition image transmission and more. The mission was largely a success, apart from the malfunction of a cargo return capsule equipped with an inflatable heat shield.

Source: China’s next-generation crew spacecraft nails its test mission landing | Engadget

Scientists break the link between a quantum material’s spin and orbital states

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In designing electronic devices, scientists look for ways to manipulate and control three basic properties of electrons: their charge; their spin states, which give rise to magnetism; and the shapes of the fuzzy clouds they form around the nuclei of atoms, which are known as orbitals.

Until now, electron spins and orbitals were thought to go hand in hand in a class of materials that’s the cornerstone of modern information technology; you couldn’t quickly change one without changing the other. But a study at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory shows that a pulse of laser light can dramatically change the spin state of one important class of materials while leaving its orbital state intact.

The results suggest a new path for making a future generation of logic and based on “orbitronics,” said Lingjia Shen, a SLAC research associate and one of the lead researchers for the study.

“What we’re seeing in this system is the complete opposite of what people have seen in the past,” Shen said. “It raises the possibility that we could control a material’s spin and orbital states separately, and use variations in the shapes of orbitals as the 0s and 1s needed to make computations and store information in computer memories.”

The international research team, led by Joshua Turner, a SLAC staff scientist and investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES), reported their results this week in Physical Review B Rapid Communications.

[…]

Much as electron spin states are switched in spintronics, electron orbital states could be switched to provide a similar function. These orbitronic devices could, in theory, operate 10,000 faster than spintronic devices, Shen said.

Switching between two orbital states could be made possible by using short bursts of terahertz radiation, rather than the magnetic fields used today, he said: “Combining the two could achieve much better device performance for future applications.” The team is working on ways to do that.

More information: L. Shen et al, Decoupling spin-orbital correlations in a layered manganite amidst ultrafast hybridized charge-transfer band excitation, Physical Review B (2020). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.101.201103

Journal information: Physical Review B
Provided by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Source: Scientists break the link between a quantum material’s spin and orbital states

The Internet Furry Drama Raising Big Questions About Artificial Intelligence and Copyright

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Much of the fun of internet drama comes from its frivolousness, but sometimes an online shitfest points to something bigger. Last week, the AI-powered furry art site thisfursonadoesnotexist did just that, igniting a fandom firestorm while also highlighting an important debate about digital art. Trained on more than 55,000 images pulled (without permission) from a furry art forum, the algorithm was a simple case of art theft to some. For others, it was a chance to break out the popcorn. But legal scholars who spoke with Gizmodo said the conflict raises thorny questions about ownership in the age of AI—questions that may ultimately have to be answered in court.

Arfa, the programmer behind thisfursonadoesnotexist, says he used the same GAN (generative adversarial network) architecture behind the site thispersondoesnotexist to generate around 186,000 furry portraits. When he posted the project on Twitter last Wednesday, dozens of commenters rushed to weigh in. While many were fascinated by the project, some in the furry community objected to Arfa’s unauthorized use of art from the furry forum e621.net as training data. At least one person tried (and failed) to find proof that the algorithm was copying images from e621.net outright. And within days, the entire site was slapped with a DMCA copyright infringement complaint. (The company whose name the DMCA was issued in, according to Arfa, denied filing the notice and requested it be withdrawn.)

[…]

The creator of thisfursonadoesnotexist thinks it would’ve been impossible to contact all the artists involved. Arfa told Gizmodo that he scraped 200,000 images that were then narrowed down to a 55,000-image training set representing approximately 10,000 different artists—creators who may go by different names now or have left the fandom entirely. According to Arfa, he’s more than willing to take an image down from thisfursonadoesnotexist if it clearly copies an original character, but he says he has yet to see credible evidence of that.

In defense of the AI’s originality, the site has produced a collection of mushier fursonas whose delirious weirdness inspired a flurry of memes. “Some of these have designs that are so… specific? Holistic?” a commenter on Hacker News wrote, linking to a fursona with a tail sticking out of her head and an adorably half-formed feline mouse. Do these Cronenberg-esque misfit furries, with their wild-eyed gazes, scream “LOVE ME”or “SAVE ME”? The art world adores liminality—that’s value added right there.

Illustration for article titled The Internet Furry Drama Raising Big Questions About Artificial Intelligence
Image: Thisfursonadoesnotexist

Furry artists aren’t alone in facing the dilemma of digital manipulation. Just last month, Jay Z filed DMCA takedown notices against a YouTuber who used speech synthesis software to make his voice read the Book of Genesis and cover Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” While experts explained to Gizmodo that Jay Z’s issue isn’t copyright, since copyright doesn’t cover speech patterns, both incidents suggest a future where machine learning art is widespread, even commonplace. In such a future, can an artist’s original work be used as training material? If so, to what end? (In Jay Z’s case, YouTube ultimately allowed the videos to stand.)

Source: The Internet Furry Drama Raising Big Questions About Artificial Intelligence

Samsung Surprise As World’s First Smartphone With Quantum Hardware Technology Launches May 22

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an announcement from Samsung and Korean provider SK Telecom that the world’s first 5G smartphone complete with a quantum random number generator (QRNG) is due to launch next week.

The current Samsung Galaxy flagship S20 series all come with a new secure element security solution including a dedicated security chip that can prevent hackers from stealing data even if they have their hands on your hardware.

The Galaxy A Quantum, however, turns the security dial up to 11.

Although it’s a Galaxy A71 5G at heart, the rebranded and updated smartphone comes complete with one important security extra: a QRNG chip developed by ID Quantique.

When random just is not random enough

Random number generators are a vital part of many security solutions, but they often aren’t as random as you might expect. Indeed, “pseudo-random” number generators are not uncommon, but these are a weak spot cryptographically and, as such, are something of a honeypot for hackers. What the ID Quantique QRNG brings to the security party is not only a genuinely random number generator but one able to generate perfectly unpredictable randomness.

The QRNG chip found in the Samsung Galaxy A Quantum is provably random, has full entropy from the first bit, and has been both designed and manufactured specifically for mobile handsets.

The quantum randomness is achieved by way of “shot noise” from a light source captured by a CMOS image sensor. A light-emitting diode (LED) and an image sensor are contained within the chip, and that LED emits a random number of photons thanks to something called quantum noise, ID Quantique explains. Those photons are then captured and counted by the image sensor pixels and provide a series of random numbers fed into a random bit generator algorithm.

The algorithm further distills the “entropy of quantum origin” to create the perfectly unpredictable random bits. If any failure is detected during the physical process, the stream is disabled and an automatic recovery procedure starts another.

With uses such as two-factor authentication, biometric authentication for mobile payments, and blockchain-based document storage wallets, the QRNG will be put to good use.

A new chapter in quantum security history

Grégoire Ribordy, co-founder and CEO of ID Quantique, said, “With its compact size and low power consumption, our latest Quantis QRNG chip can be embedded in any smartphone, to ensure trusted authentication and encryption of sensitive information. It will bring a new level of security to the mobile phone industry. This is truly the first mass-market application of quantum technologies.” Ryu Young-sang, vice-president at SK Telecom, said the Galaxy A Quantum is a “new chapter in the history of the quantum security industry.”

Source: Samsung Surprise As World’s First Smartphone With Quantum Technology Launches May 22

Papa don’t breach: Contracts, personal info on Madonna, Lady Gaga, Elton John, others swiped in celeb law firm ‘hack’

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Hackers are threatening to release 756GB of A-list celebs’ contracts, recording deals, and other personal info allegedly stolen from a New York law firm.

The miscreants have seemingly got their hands on confidential agreements, private correspondence, contact details, and other information belonging to superstars, including Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Sir Elton John, Run DMC, Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, and Lady Gaga, and their representatives.

The data was swiped by the REvil, aka Sodinokibi, malware-slinging gang best known for taking down Travelex, infosec biz Emsisoft’s Brett Callow told The Register.

A Tor-hidden website belonging to REvil, which lists dozens of organizations compromised by the crew, includes screenshots of folders, a non-disclosure agreement, Madonna’s 2019-2020 tour arrangements, and Aguilera’s music rights as proof of its cyber-heist.

The gang claims to have hacked entertainment law firm Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks, based in the Big Apple, and siphoned its documents.

The law firm could not be reached for comment. We assume they were otherwise occupied. Their website right now just shows its logo whereas as recently as May 8, it listed its clients and staff.

“The documents purportedly include information about multiple music and entertainment figures, including: Lady Gaga, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Bruce Springsteen, Mary J. Blige, Ella Mai, Christina Aguilera, Mariah Carey, Cam Newton, Bette Midler, Jessica Simpson, Priyanka Chopra, Idina Menzel, HBO’s ‘Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,’ and Run DMC. Facebook also is on the hackers’ hit list,” reported showbiz industry mag Variety, which was also tipped off by Emsisoft.

The law firm also represents big name personalities in TV, film, and sport, and media and online giants, from Kate Upton and Robert De Niro to Sony, Spotify, Vice, and EMI. It is assumed the swiped data was partially leaked to encourage the lawyers to cough up a ransom demand – or the rest of the information would spill onto the dark web. ®

Updated to add

Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks have said they were hacked, and in a statement said: “We can confirm that we’ve been victimised by a cyber-attack. We have notified our clients and our staff. We have hired the world’s experts who specialise in this area, and we are working around the clock to address these matters.”

Source: Papa don’t breach: Contracts, personal info on Madonna, Lady Gaga, Elton John, others swiped in celeb law firm ‘hack’ • The Register

Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket’s tanks just disintegrated in Earth’s orbit

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Russian rocket tanks used to launch a radio telescope have broken up into 65 chunks, littering Earth’s orbit with debris.

The tanks, dumped from the Fregat-SB upper stage of the Zenit-3SLBF rocket that took the Spektr-R radio telescope into orbit in 2011, disintegrated on Friday, Roscosmos said on Sunday. “According to reports, the destruction occurred on May 8, 2020 in the time interval 08:00 – 09:00 Moscow time over the Indian Ocean,” a statement reads.

It’s not clear what caused the break-up. The 18th Space Control Squadron (18 SPCS) of the US Air Force went public with details of the disintegration on Saturday, and noted there was no evidence it was caused by a collision

[…]

Roscosmos said it is counting up the exact number of fragments from the, well, rapid self-disassembly of the tank block. There are said to be at least 65 pieces whizzing round at thousands of miles per hour in an orbit with an apogee height of 3,606 kilometres, perigee height of 422 kilometres, and orbital inclination of 51.45 degrees.

As for the Spektr-R: it was declared defunct in early 2019 after going silent. At the time, it was Russia’s only space telescope publicly known to be operational.

Source: Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket’s tanks just disintegrated in Earth’s orbit

Amazon builds UV-light robot to kill coronavirus on surfaces

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Amazon built robot that is designed to kill the novel coronavirus with ultraviolet light.

The robot looks a little like a hotel luggage cart, with a tall metal frame attached to a rectangular wheeled bottom. One side of the frame is outfitted with at least 10 ultraviolet tube lights.

In a video shared with CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” the robot rolls down the freezer aisle of a Whole Foods store, aiming UV light at the freezer doors.

The robot could be used in warehouses and at Whole Foods stores to kill the virus on surfaces such as food, packaging, and door handles.

Source: Amazon builds UV-light robot to kill coronavirus on surfaces – Business Insider

Brit defense contractor Interserve hacked, up to 100,000 past and present employees’ details siphoned off

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Britain’s Ministry of Defence contractor Interserve has been hacked, reportedly leaking the details of up to 100,000 of past and current employees, including payment information and details of their next of kin.

The Daily Telegraph reports that up to 100,000 employee details were stolen, dating back across a number of years. Interserve currently employs around 53,000 people.

A source told the paper that names, addresses, bank details, payroll information, next of kin details, personnel and disciplinary records had been swiped.

The intrusion took place “earlier this month,” the tight-lipped firm said in a statement.

[…]

Interserve holds a number of public sector contracts comprising, among others, some of the Ministry of Defence’s more important bases. The company website says it has a presence on 35 MoD sites, including: the Falkland Islands; the vital mid-Atlantic RAF staging post on Ascension Island; Gibraltar; and Cyprus. The contract for the overseas bases is reportedly worth around £500m.

Closer to home, Interserve also maintains the vital and secretive MoD bunkers at Corsham, coyly referred to as “the cutting edge global communications hub for the Ministry of Defence”. Corsham is in fact the home of the MoD’s Global Operations Security Control Centre, as well as the Joint Security Co-ordination Centre, plus a Cyber Security Operations Centre.

Informed sources whispered to El Reg that quite a few people at Corsham would be unhappy with news that a contractor with full access to the sensitive site has been hacked.

Source: Brit defense contractor hacked, up to 100,000 past and present employees’ details siphoned off – report • The Register

Researchers spot thousands of Android apps leaking user data through misconfigured Firebase databases

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Security researchers at Comparitech have reported that an estimated 24,000 Android apps are leaking user data because of misconfigured Firebase databases.

Firebase is a popular backend service with SDKs for multiple platforms, including Android, iOS, web, C++ and Unity (for games). Features include two NoSQL database managers, Cloud Firestore and the older Realtime Database. Data is secured using rules which “work by matching a pattern against database paths, and then applying custom conditions to allow access to data at those paths”, according to the docs. This is combined with authentication to lock up confidential data while also allowing access to shared data.

“A common Firebase misconfiguration allows attackers to easily find and steal data from storage. By simply appending ‘.json’ to the end of a Firebase URL, the attacker can view and download the contents of vulnerable databases,” the report explained.

How common a problem is it? The Comparitech security team reviewed just over half a million apps, comprising, they say, about 18 per cent of apps in the Play store. “In that sample, we found more than 4,282 apps leaking sensitive information,” the report claimed.

Source: Researchers spot thousands of Android apps leaking user data through misconfigured Firebase databases • The Register

PrintDemon vulnerability impacts all Windows versions | ZDNet

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Two security researchers have published today details about a vulnerability in the Windows printing service that they say impacts all Windows versions going back to Windows NT 4, released in 1996.

The vulnerability, which they codenamed PrintDemon, is located in Windows Print Spooler, the primary Windows component responsible for managing print operations.

The service can send data to be printed to a USB/parallel port for physically connected printers; to a TCP port for printers residing on a local network or the internet; or to a local file, in the rare event the user wants to save a print job for later.

Trivially exploitable local privilege elevation

In a report published today, security researchers Alex Ionescu & Yarden Shafir said they found a bug in this old component that can be abused to hijack the Printer Spooler internal mechanism.

[…]

PrintDemon is what researchers call a “local privilege escalation” (LPE) vulnerability. This means that once an attacker has even the tiniest foothold inside an app or a Windows machine, even with user-mode privileges, the attacker can run something as simple as one unprivileged PowerShell command to gain administrator-level privileges over the entire OS.

This is possible because of how the Print Spooler service was designed to work, Ionescu and Shafir said.

Because this is a service meant to be available to any app that wants to print a file, it is available to all apps running on a system, without restrictions. The attacker can create a print job that prints to a file — for example a local DLL file used by the OS or another app.

The attacker can initiate the print operation, crash the Print Spooler service intentionally, and then let the job resume, but this time the printing operation runs with SYSTEM privileges, allowing it to overwrite any files anywhere on the OS.

In a tweet today, Ionescu said exploitation on current OS versions requires one single line of PowerShell. On older Windows versions, this might need some tweaking.

“On an unpatched system, this will install a persistent backdoor, that won’t go away *even after you patch*,” Ionescu said.

Patches available

The good news is that this has now been patched, hence Ionescu and Shafir’s public disclosure. Fixes for PrintDemon have been released yesterday, with the Microsoft May 2020 Patch Tuesday.

PrintDemon is tracked under the CVE-2020-1048 identifier. Two security researchers from SafeBreach Labs, Peleg Hadar and Tomer Bar, were the first to discover the issue and report it to Microsoft. The two will be presenting their own report on the issue at the Black Hat security conference in August.

Ionescu has also published proof-of-concept code on GitHub with the purpose of aiding security researchers and system administrators investigate the vulnerability and prepare mitigations and detection capabilities.

Last month, Ionescu and Shafir have also published details and proof-of-concept code for a similar vulnerability that they named FaxHell.

FaxHell works similarly to PrintDemon, but the researchers exploited the Windows Fax service to overwrite and hijack local (DLL) files to install shells and backdoors on Windows systems.

Source: PrintDemon vulnerability impacts all Windows versions | ZDNet

Senate Votes to Allow FBI to Look at US citizen Web Browsing History Without a Warrant

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The US Senate has voted to give law enforcement agencies access to web browsing data without a warrant, dramatically expanding the government’s surveillance powers in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The power grab was led by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell as part of a reauthorization of the Patriot Act, which gives federal agencies broad domestic surveillance powers. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Steve Daines (R-MT) attempted to remove the expanded powers from the bill with a bipartisan amendment.

But in a shock upset, the privacy-preserving amendment fell short by a single vote after several senators who would have voted “Yes” failed to show up to the session, including Bernie Sanders. 9 Democratic senators also voted “No,” causing the amendment to fall short of the 60-vote threshold it needed to pass.

“The Patriot Act should be repealed in its entirety, set on fire and buried in the ground,” Evan Greer, the deputy director of Fight For The Future, told Motherboard. “It’s one of the worst laws passed in the last century, and there is zero evidence that the mass surveillance programs it enables have ever saved a single human life.”

Source: Senate Votes to Allow FBI to Look at Your Web Browsing History Without a Warrant – VICE

Saturn has a hexagon vortex 18 layers thick the larger than the earth over its pole packed with hydrocarbon ice crystals.

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The giant hexagon-shaped storm raging atop Saturn’s North Pole is made out of frozen hydrocarbon ice suspended in seven hazy layers stacked on top of one another, according to a study published in Nature Communications on Friday.

The swirling six-sided wonder, which El Reg once dubbed the hexacane, has perplexed scientists since its discovery in the 1980s by NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. The strange vortex has sides measuring about 14,500 kilometres long – more than the diameter of Earth – and remains intact despite winds that reach 400 kilometres per hour rippling through the ringed giant.

Now, a group of astronomers have analysed images taken from NASA’s Cassini probe to reveal the hexacane’s tower-like structure in more detail.

“The Cassini images have enabled us to discover that, just as if a sandwich had been formed, the hexagon has a multi-layered system of at least seven mists that extend from the summit of its clouds to an altitude of more than 300 km above them,” said Agustín Sánchez-Lavega, a physics professor at the University of Basque Country, Spain, who led the study. “Other cold worlds, such as Saturn’s satellite Titan or the dwarf planet Pluto, also have layers of hazes, but not in such numbers nor as regularly spaced out”.

hexacane

A picture of the different layers in Saturn’s hexagonal storm
Click to enlarge … Image Credit: GCP/UPV/EHU/NASA/ESA

Each layer is estimated to be seven to 18 kilometres thick, and is made up of tiny micrometre-sized frozen hydrocarbon crystals, including propyne, propane, and diacetylene, and possibly acetylene and benzene at the top. Each particle is estimated to have a diameter of 0.07 to 1.4 micrometres. The layers appear hazy as the concentration of particles suspended in each one varies.

Source: There’s a world out there with a hexagon vortex over its pole packed with hydrocarbon ice crystals. That planet is Saturn • The Register

5 minutes with a Thunderbolt machine leaves it completely open using Thunderspy – evil maids don’t need much knowledge

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Thunderspy targets devices with a Thunderbolt port. If your computer has such a port, an attacker who gets brief physical access to it can read and copy all your data, even if your drive is encrypted and your computer is locked or set to sleep.

Thunderspy is stealth, meaning that you cannot find any traces of the attack. It does not require your involvement, i.e., there is no phishing link or malicious piece of hardware that the attacker tricks you into using. Thunderspy works even if you follow best security practices by locking or suspending your computer when leaving briefly, and if your system administrator has set up the device with Secure Boot, strong BIOS and operating system account passwords, and enabled full disk encryption. All the attacker needs is 5 minutes alone with the computer, a screwdriver, and some easily portable hardware.

We have found 7 vulnerabilities in Intel’s design and developed 9 realistic scenarios how these could be exploited by a malicious entity to get access to your system, past the defenses that Intel had set up for your protection.

We have developed a free and open-source tool, Spycheck, to determine if your system is vulnerable. If it is found to be vulnerable, Spycheck will guide you to recommendations on how to help protect your system.

[…]

These vulnerabilities lead to nine practical exploitation scenarios. In an evil maid threat model and varying Security Levels, we demonstrate the ability to create arbitrary Thunderbolt device identities, clone user-authorized Thunderbolt devices, and finally obtain PCIe connectivity to perform DMA attacks. In addition, we show unauthenticated overriding of Security Level configurations, including the ability to disable Thunderbolt security entirely, and restoring Thunderbolt connectivity if the system is restricted to exclusively passing through USB and/or DisplayPort. We conclude with demonstrating the ability to permanently disable Thunderbolt security and block all future firmware updates.

All Thunderbolt-equipped systems shipped between 2011-2020 are vulnerable. Some systems providing Kernel DMA Protection, shipping since 2019, are partially vulnerable. The Thunderspy vulnerabilities cannot be fixed in software, impact future standards such as USB 4 and Thunderbolt 4, and will require a silicon redesign. Users are therefore strongly encouraged to determine whether they are affected using Spycheck, a free and open-source tool we have developed that verifies whether their systems are vulnerable to Thunderspy. If it is found to be vulnerable, Spycheck will guide users to recommendations on how to help protect their system.

[…]

The Thunderspy vulnerabilities have been discovered and reported by Björn Ruytenberg. Please cite this work as:

Björn Ruytenberg. Breaking Thunderbolt Protocol Security: Vulnerability Report. 2020. https://thunderspy.io/assets/reports/breaking-thunderbolt-security-bjorn-ruytenberg-20200417.pdf

Source: Thunderspy – When Lightning Strikes Thrice: Breaking Thunderbolt 3 Security

Gigantic new 3D map traces every neuron in a tiny mouse brain | Live Science

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Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a Seattle nonprofit dedicated to neuroscience, have been painstakingly recording every brain cell and every connection between those neurons in mice for the past several years. The result represents major progress since an earlier, simpler map they released in 2016. The now-complete map encompasses about 100 million cells, the institute reported in a paper published today (May 7) in the journal Cell.

[…]

Typically, researchers trace connections between brain cells using thin slices of tissue that can be imaged and explored layer by layer. To build a comprehensive, three-dimensional map, the Allen Institute team instead broke the mouse brain into “voxels” — 3D pixels — and then mapped the cells and connections within each voxel.

The result comprises an “average” of the brains of 1,675 laboratory mice, to make sure the map was as standard as possible.

Mice are common “model organisms” in neuroscience. Their brains have fairly similar structures to humans’, they can be trained, they breed easily, and researchers have already developed robust understandings of how their brains work.

The hope is that the map will bring that understanding to a new level, the Allen Institute said. In doing so, neuroscientists will have a tool with which to develop new research programs and accelerate research already underway. The institute compared its achievement to 1990s-era efforts to sequence different organisms’ DNA for the first time, projects that transformed the way biologists work

Source: Gigantic new 3D map traces every neuron in a tiny mouse brain | Live Science

Oil Crash Busted Broker’s Computers and Inflicted Big Losses

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Syed Shah usually buys and sells stocks and currencies through his Interactive Brokers account, but he couldn’t resist trying his hand at some oil trading on April 20, the day prices plunged below zero for the first time ever. The day trader, working from his house in a Toronto suburb, figured he couldn’t lose as he spent $2,400 snapping up crude at $3.30 a barrel, and then 50 cents. Then came what looked like the deal of a lifetime: buying 212 futures contracts on West Texas Intermediate for an astonishing penny each.

What he didn’t know was oil’s first trip into negative pricing had broken Interactive Brokers Group Inc. Its software couldn’t cope with that pesky minus sign, even though it was always technically possible — though this was an outlandish idea before the pandemic — for the crude market to go upside down. Crude was actually around negative $3.70 a barrel when Shah’s screen had it at 1 cent. Interactive Brokers never displayed a subzero price to him as oil kept diving to end the day at minus $37.63 a barrel.

At midnight, Shah got the devastating news: he owed Interactive Brokers $9 million. He’d started the day with $77,000 in his account.

“I was in shock,” the 30-year-old said in a phone interview. “I felt like everything was going to be taken from me, all my assets.”

Breach of zero burned some Interactive Brokers customers

To be clear, investors who were long those oil contracts had a brutal day, regardless of what brokerage they had their account in. What set Interactive Brokers apart, though, is that its customers were flying blind, unable to see that prices had turned negative, or in other cases locked into their investments and blocked from trading. Compounding the problem, and a big reason why Shah lost an unbelievable amount in a few hours, is that the negative numbers also blew up the model Interactive Brokers used to calculate the amount of margin — aka collateral — that customers needed to secure their accounts.

Thomas Peterffy, the chairman and founder of Interactive Brokers, says the journey into negative territory exposed bugs in the company’s software. “It’s a $113 million mistake on our part,” the 75-year-old billionaire said in an interview Wednesday. Since then, his firm revised its maximum loss estimate to $109.3 million. It’s been a moving target from the start; on April 21, Interactive Brokers figured it was down $88 million from the incident.

Customers will be made whole, Peterffy said. “We will rebate from our own funds to our customers who were locked in with a long position during the time the price was negative any losses they suffered below zero.”

[…]

Besides locking up because of negative prices, a second issue concerned the amount of money Interactive Brokers required its customers to have on hand in order to trade. Known as margin, it’s a vital risk measure to ensure traders don’t lose more than they can afford. For the 212 oil contracts Shah bought for 1 cent each, the broker only required his account to have $30 of margin per contract. It was as if Interactive Brokers thought the potential loss of buying at one cent was one cent, rather than the almost unlimited downside that negative prices imply, he said.

“It seems like they didn’t know it could happen,” Shah said.

But it was known industrywide that CME Group Inc.’s benchmark oil contracts could go negative. Five days before the mayhem, the owner of the New York Mercantile Exchange, where the trading took place, sent a notice to all its clearing-member firms advising them that they could test their systems using negative prices. “Effective immediately, firms wishing to test such negative futures and/or strike prices in their systems may utilize CME’s ‘New Release’ testing environments” for crude oil, the exchange said.

Interactive Brokers got that notice, Peterffy said. But he says the firm needed more time to upgrade its trading platform.

Source: How to Trade Oil With Negative Prices: Interactive Brokers – Bloomberg

Cognizant expects to lose between $50m and $70m following ransomware attack

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IT services provider Cognizant said in an earnings call this week that a ransomware incident that took place last month in April 2020 will negatively impact its Q2 revenue.

“While we anticipate that the revenue impact related to this issue will be largely resolved by the middle of the quarter, we do anticipate the revenue and corresponding margin impact to be in the range of $50 million to $70 million for the quarter,” said Karen McLoughlin, Cognizant Chief Financial Officer in an earnings call yesterday.

McLoughlin also expects the incident to incur additional and unforeseen legal, consulting, and other costs associated with the investigation, service restoration, and remediation of the breach.

The Cognizant CFO says the company has now fully recovered from the ransomware infection and restored the majority of its services.

Incident only impacted internal network

Speaking on the ransomware attack, Cognizant CEO Brian Humphries said the incident only impacted its internal network, but not customer systems.

More precisely, Humphries said the ransomware incident impacted (1) Cognizant’s select system supporting employees’ work from home setups and (2) the provisioning of laptops that Cognizant was using to support its work from home capabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

[…]

Cognizant held meetings with customers, however, the meetings did not go smoothly as Cognizant avoided sharing any actual details of what had happened.

ZDNet learned of the incident as it was going on, at the time, on April 17, when several disgruntled customers had reached out to this reporter about the company attempting to hide a major security breach under the guise of “technical issues” and cutting off access to a series of services.

Initially, customers feared that a hacker had either stole user data from servers, or a ransomware incident had taken place, and the ransomware spread to customer servers, encrypting their data and the servers becoming inaccessible.

Customers were thrown in full paranoia mode after Cognizant sent an internal alert to all customers, urging clients to block traffic for a list of IP addresses.

[…]

Cognizant losses from the incident are in the same range reported last year by aluminum producer Norsk Hydro, which reported that a March 2019 ransomware incident would cause total revenue losses of more than $40 million, a number it later adjusted to nearly $70 million during the year.

Humphries said that Cognizant is now working to address the concerns of customers who opted to suspend Cognizant services in the wake of the ransomware attack, which also impacted Cognizant’s current bottom line.

Cognizant reported a Q1 2020 revenue of $4.2 billion, up 2.8% over Q1 2019.

The number of SEC filings listing ransomware as a major forward-looking risk factor to companies’ profits has skyrocketed in recent years from 3 filings in 2014 to 1,139 in 2019, and already 743 in 2020. Companies are seeing today ransomware attacks as a real risk for their bottom lines as ransomware incidents tend to cause reputational damage to stock prices and financial losses due to lost revenue as most victims take weeks and months to fully recover.

Source: Cognizant expects to lose between $50m and $70m following ransomware attack | ZDNet

One malicious MMS is all it takes to pwn a Samsung smartphone: Bug squashed amid Android patch batch

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Samsung has patched a serious security hole in its smartphones that can be exploited by maliciously crafted text messages to hijack devices.

It appears no user interaction is required: if Samsung’s messaging app bundled with phones since 2015 receives a booby-trapped MMS, it will parse it automatically before the user even opens it. This will trigger a vulnerability in the Skia graphics library, used by the app to decode the message’s embedded Qmage image. The end result is code execution on the device, allowing the miscreant who sent it to potentially snoop on their victim and come up with other mischief.

The remote-code execution flaw, labeled SVE-2020-16747, was discovered and reported by Google Project Zero’s Mateusz Jurczyk. You can find an in-depth explanation of the bug here.

Samsung has pushed out updates to supported phones to squash the bug, which should be installed ASAP before someone weaponizes an exploit for this programming blunder. If you are still waiting for a patch, switching your default message app to another messaging application, and not Samsung’s, and disabling automatic MMS parsing, may help.

The patch coincides with Android’s monthly release of security fixes: all owners of devices running supported versions of Android will want to check for and install relevant updates in May’s patch batch.

This latest wedge includes fixes for a remote code execution flaw in the Android AAC decoder (CVE-2020-0103) and a critical Android framework elevation-of-privilege bug (CVE-2020-0096) that together can be exploited to gain total control of the device.

The other vulnerabilities at the 01 patch level are as follows. For the Android framework, two additional elevation-of-privilege bugs (CVE-2020-0097, CVE-2020-0098) that grant malware already on the device not-quite-total control over a device, and for the media framework, one EoP flaw (CVE-2020-0094) and three information disclosure bugs (CVE-2020-0093, CVE-2020-0100, CVE-2020-0101).

The Android system patches cover the aforementioned AAC remote code bug as well as four EoP (CVE-2020-0102, CVE-2020-0109, CVE-2020-0105, CVE-2020-0024) and three information disclosure bugs (CVE-2020-0092, CVE-2020-0106, CVE-2020-0104) holes.

At the 05 level, patches for components outside of the core Android package, fixes were posted for two kernel flaws allowing EoP (CVE-2020-0110) and information disclosure (CVE-2019-19536). Four fixes were posted for information disclosure bugs in MediaTek components (CVE-2020-0064, CVE-2020-0065, CVE-2020-0090, CVE-2020-0091).

A total of 18 patches were posted for flaws in Qualcomm components, though the details on those bugs were not given.

Those with supported Google-branded devices should get the May fixes directly from the Chocolate Factory, while other Android devices should see the fixes come from their respective vendors and carriers. This can happen anywhere from immediately to several weeks from now, to never, depending on the supplier.

Source: One malicious MMS is all it takes to pwn a Samsung smartphone: Bug squashed amid Android patch batch • The Register

Privacy Enhancements for Android

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Privacy Enhancements for Android (PE for Android) is a platform for exploring concepts in regulating access to private information on mobile devices. The goal is to create an extensible privacy system that abstracts away the details of various privacy-preserving technologies. PE for Android allows app developers to safely leverage state-of-the-art privacy techniques without knowledge of esoteric underlying technologies. Further, PE for Android helps users to take ownership of their private information by presenting them with more intuitive controls and permission enforcement. The platform was developed as a fork of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) release for Android 9 “Pie” and can be installed as a Generic System Image (GSI) on a Project Treble-compliant device.

Source: Privacy Enhancements for Android

Under DARPA’s Brandeis program, a team of researchers led by Two Six Labs and Raytheon BBN Technologies have developed a platform called Privacy Enhancements for Android (PE for Android) to explore more expressive concepts in regulating access to private information on mobile devices. PE for Android seeks to create an extensible privacy system that abstracts away the details of various privacy-preserving technologies, allowing application developers to utilize state-of-the-art privacy techniques, such as secure multi-party computation and differential privacy, without knowledge of their underlying esoteric technologies. Importantly, PE for Android allows mobile device users to take ownership of their private information by presenting them with more intuitive controls and permission enforcement options.

Source: Researchers on DARPA’s Brandeis Program Enhance Privacy Protections for Android Applications

GitHub blasts code-scanning tool into all open-source projects

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GitHub has made its automated code-scanning tools available to all open-source projects free of charge.

The aim, said the code repo house, is to help developers suss out potential security vulnerabilities ahead of time, and to do so at a scale that will work for both small and large projects.

The feature, based on the code-checking tools GitHub bought last year when it gobbled up UK-based Semmle, automatically graphs and scans code when a new push request is made and checks it for a number of common errors that can cause security vulnerabilities.

GitHub senior product manager Justin Hutchings told The Register that a key component of the Semmle (and now GitHub) scanning was CodeQL, the query language that graphs and then checks code for mistakes.

“It turns out that capability is extremely useful in security,” said Hutchings. “Most security problems are bad data flow or bad data usage in one way or another.”

While the feature itself will be new to GitHub, the underlying Semmle tools have been in use for years, which is why GitHub believes they’ll hit the ground running when they launch for free with open-source projects and as an add-on for the paid (enterprise), closed-source part of GitHub.

Although the code-scanning feature could be seen as most beneficial to smaller projects without enough work hours needed to thoroughly check for bugs, Hutchings noted that by making the feature cloud-based, bigger developers are also getting something on their wishlist.

“A lot of our commercial customers are excited about being able to run this at scale on our cloud,” he told us.

“Security analysis is compute intensive, you are dealing with millions of lines of code. You want to do this rapidly and we are finally bringing this capability into a hosted cloud environment, so they can scale up more quickly than they could previously.”

In addition to scanning for security bugs, GitHub is also adding the option for commercial developers to scan offline repositories and for exposed secrets (keys, credentials, etc) that could lead to network breaches and data leaks if let out onto the public internet. Previously limited to public repositories (such as AWS or Google Cloud), the secret-scanning feature will now be able to run on private GitHub repositories.

This addition, Hutchings said, is not just a security feature but also a stability feature, as it helps developers keep up with security policies that require changing keys at regular intervals by tracking and logging the changes. In this way, developers can avert outages and downtime that might otherwise occur when keys changes don’t get properly reported and handled.

Source: GitHub blasts code-scanning tool into all open-source projects • The Register

Very cloudy indeed!

Nervous, Adobe? It took 16 years, but open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape v1.0 now works properly on macOS

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Open-source, cross-platform vector drawing package Inkscape has reached its version 1.0 milestone after many years of development.

Inkscape can be seen as an alternative to commercial products such as Adobe Illustrator or Serif Affinity Designer – though unlike Inkscape, neither of those run on Linux. The native format of Inkscape is SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), the web standard.

[…]

Inkscape 1.0 is most significant for Mac users. Previous releases for macOS required a compatibility component called XQuartz, which enables applications designed for the X windowing system to run on macOS Quartz, part of Apple’s Core Graphics framework. This is no longer required and Inkscape 1.0 is now a native macOS application – though it is not all good news. The announcement noted: “This latest version is labelled as ‘preview’, which means that additional improvements are scheduled for the next versions.”

[…]

Inkscape 1.0 seems polished and professional. Adobe, which sells Illustrator on a subscription basis starting at £19 (if you inhale the rest of the Creative Cloud), will likely not be worried, but apart from the cost saving there are advantages in simpler applications that are relatively lightweight and easy to learn, as well as running well on Linux.

Source: Nervous, Adobe? It took 16 years, but open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape now works properly on macOS • The Register

Hackers hide web skimmer behind a website’s favicon

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a hacker group created a fake icons hosting website in order to disguise malicious code meant to steal payment card data from hacked websites.

The operation is what security researchers refer to these days as a web skimming, e-skimming, or a Magecart attack.

Hackers breach websites and then hide malicious code on its pages, code that records and steals payment card details as they’re entered in checkout forms.

[…]

Hackers created a fake icons hosting portal

In a report published today, US-based cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes said it detected one such group taking its operations to a whole new level of sophistication with a new trick.

The security firm says it discovered this group while investigating a series of strange hacks, where the only thing modified on the hacked sites was the favicon — the logo image shown in browser tabs.

The new favicon was a legitimate image file hosted on MyIcons.net, with no malicious code hidden inside it. However, while the change looked innocent, Malwarebytes said that web skimming code was still loaded on hacked sites, and there was clearly something strange with the new favicon.

[…]

The trick, according to Malwarebytes, was that the MyIcons.net website served a legitimate favicon file for all a website’s pages, except on pages that contained checkout forms.

On these pages, the MyIcons.net website would secretly switch the favicon with a malicious JavaScript file that created a fake checkout form and stole user card details.

Malwarebytes said that site owners investigating the incident and accessing the MyIcons.net website would find a fully-working icon hosting portal, and would be misled to believe it’s a legitimate site.

However, the security firm says MyIcons.net was actually a clone of the legitimate IconArchive.com portal, and that its primary role was to be a decoy.

Furthermore, the site was also hosted on servers used previously in other web skimming operations, as reported by fellow cybersecurity firm Sucuri a few weeks before.

Source: Hackers hide web skimmer behind a website’s favicon | ZDNet

Details of 44m Pakistani mobile users leaked online, part of bigger 115m cache

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The details of 44 million Pakistani mobile subscribers have leaked online this week, ZDNet has learned.

The leak comes after a hacker tried to sell a package containing 115 million Pakistani mobile user records last month for a price of $2.1 million in bitcoin.

ZDNet has obtained copies of both data sets. We received the entire 44 million records released online today, but we also received a sample of 55 million user records that were part of the 115 million data dump. Based on the data sets, we can conclude that the two are the same.

According to our analysis of the leaked files, the data contained both personally-identifiable and telephony-related information. This includes the likes of:

  • Customer full names
  • Home addresses (city, region, street name)
  • National identification (CNIC) numbers
  • Mobile phone numbers
  • Landline numbers
  • Dates of subscription

The data included details for both Pakistani home users and local companies alike.

Details for companies matched public records and public phone numbers listed on companies’ websites. In addition, ZDNet also verified the validity of the leaked data with multiple Pakistani users.

Source: Details of 44m Pakistani mobile users leaked online, part of bigger 115m cache | ZDNet

Jet propulsion by microwave air plasma in the atmosphere: AIP Advances: Vol 10, No 5

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We propose a prototype design of a propulsion thruster that utilizes air plasma induced by microwave ionization. Such a jet engine simply uses only air and electricity to produce high temperature and pressurized plasma for jet propulsion. We used a home-made device to measure the lifting force and jet pressure at various settings of microwave power and the air flow rate. We demonstrated that, given the same power consumption, its propulsion pressure is comparable to that of conventional airplane jet engines using fossil fuels. Therefore, such a carbon-emission free thruster could potentially be used as a jet thruster in the atmosphere.

[…]

n this report, we consider a microwave air plasma jet thruster using high-temperature and high-pressure plasma generated by a 2.45 GHz microwave ionization chamber for injected pressurized air. We propose a simple prototype plasma jet thruster that can generate approximately 10 N of thrust at 400 W using 0.5 l/s for the airflow, corresponding to the lifting force of 28 N/kW and a jet pressure of 2.4 × 104 N/m2. At a higher microwave power or greater airflow, propulsion forces and jet pressures comparable to those of commercial airplane jet engines can be achieved.

[…]

When high-power microwave is generated using microwave sources arranged in parallel, higher heat is also generated. At this time, the method of measuring the propulsive force with a steel ball is no longer applicable. How to deal with the impact of high temperature on equipment and how to evaluate the driving force are challenges that require further research

Source: Jet propulsion by microwave air plasma in the atmosphere: AIP Advances: Vol 10, No 5