November 2016 – Page 3 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Android Malware Used To Hack and Steal Tesla Car

An anonymous reader writes: By leveraging security flaws in the Tesla Android app, an attacker can steal Tesla cars. The only hard part is tricking Tesla owners into installing an Android app on their phones, which isn’t that difficult according to a demo video from Norwegian firm Promon. This malicious app can use many of the freely available Android rooting exploits to take over the user’s phone, steal the OAuth token from the Tesla app and the user’s login credentials. This is possible because the Tesla Android app stores the OAuth token in cleartext, and contains no reverse-engineering protection, allowing attackers to alter the app’s source code and log user credentials. The OAuth token and Tesla owner’s password allow an attacker to perform a variety of actions, such as opening the car’s doors and starting the motor. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Android Malware Used To Hack and Steal Tesla Car

Google’s DeepMind Made an AI Watch Close To 5000 Videos So That It Surpasses Humans in Lip-Reading

A new AI tool created by Google and Oxford University researchers could significantly improve the success of lip-reading and understanding for the hearing impaired. In a recently released paper on the work, the pair explained how the Google DeepMind-powered system was able to correctly interpret more words than a trained human expert. From a report: To accomplish the task, a cohort of scientists fed thousands of hours of TV footage — 5000 to be precise — from the BBC to a neural network. It was made to watch six different TV shows, which aired between the period of January 2010 and December 2015. This included 118, 000 difference sentences and some 17, 500 unique words. To understand the progress, it successfully deciphered words with a 46.8 percent accuracy. The neural network had to recognize the same based on mouth movement analysis. The under 50 percent accuracy might seem laughable to you but let me put things in perspective for you. When the same set of TV shows were shown to a professional lip-reader, they were able to decipher only 12.4 percent of words without error. Thus, one can understand the great difference in the capability of the AI as compared to a human expert in that particular field. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google’s DeepMind Made an AI Watch Close To 5000 Videos So That It Surpasses Humans in Lip-Reading

Commuters Get Free Rides After Hackers Target San Francisco Public Transit

A cyber attack oddly gave San Franciscans something to be thankful for this weekend when officials responded to a hack of the city’s transit system by giving away free rides . Read more…

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Commuters Get Free Rides After Hackers Target San Francisco Public Transit

On Fiji, ants have learned to grow plants to house their massive colonies

A tree full of Squamellaria plants in Fiji. Each one has been carefully grown by ants, who live inside the plants’ fleshy interior. It’s like James and the Giant Peach, except not giant. High in the trees on the island of Fiji, ants in the species Philidris nagasau are doing something extraordinary. They’ve brought in seeds from several species of a large, lumpy fruit from a plant known as Squamellaria and carefully planted them in the nooks and crannies of the tree bark. Once the plant takes root in the tree and begins to grow, the ants climb inside its young stalks and fertilize it. But then the real action starts. As the fruit swells, the ants move inside, carving tunnels and rooms into the fleshy interior. When the colony expands, it may include dozens of these fruits, which look like strange tumors sprouting from tree branches. Though researchers have known for a while that ant colonies can live inside fruits, a new study in Nature Plants reveals that this housing arrangement is far more complex and ancient than we knew. University of Munich biologists Guillaume Chomicki and Susanne S. Renner went to Fiji to observe the ants and found that they inhabited six different species of Squamellaria . Each of these species evolved to grow in tree bark using a specialized root system called a foot. When the plants are still young, the ants enter a small cavity in the stalk called a domatium to fertilize it. Though the researchers never directly observed how the ants did the fertilizing, they speculate that basically the ants are pooping in there. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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On Fiji, ants have learned to grow plants to house their massive colonies

FBI Hacked Over 8,000 Computers In 120 Countries Based on One Warrant

Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard: In January, Motherboard reported on the FBI’s “unprecedented” hacking operation, in which the agency, using a single warrant, deployed malware to over one thousand alleged visitors of a dark web child pornography site. Now, it has emerged that the campaign was actually several orders of magnitude larger. In all, the FBI obtained over 8, 000 IP addresses, and hacked computers in 120 different countries, according to a transcript from a recent evidentiary hearing in a related case. The figures illustrate the largest ever known law enforcement hacking campaign to date, and starkly demonstrate what the future of policing crime on the dark web may look like. This news comes as the US is preparing to usher in changes that would allow magistrate judges to authorize the mass hacking of computers, wherever in the world they may be located. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An iPhone 4 Survived a Year at the Bottom of a Lake

If you’ve ever submerged your phone in liquid, you know the utter devastation that follows immediately afterward, during which you alternately shake your fist at yourself and the offending liquid. One guy, however, got lucky. Read more…

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An iPhone 4 Survived a Year at the Bottom of a Lake

Navy leaks personal data for over 130,000 sailors

Another day, another data breach. While everyone is focused on pre-holiday activities, the Navy reveals that it was notified by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in October about a compromised laptop. Now, an investigation has determined that names and social security numbers of 134, 386 current and former sailors had been accessed by unknown individuals. Other than dumping the news out while few are paying attention, the Navy says it will notify those affected “in the coming weeks, ” by phone, letter and email. At this point, the Navy says it has not found evidence the information is being misused, but similar to the OPM data breach last year, this could have far-reaching consequences. The Navy Times cites an unnamed official saying the leaked info came from the Career Waypoints (C-WAY) database that handles re-enlistment and Navy Occupational Specialty requests. Source: US Navy

Scientists put mouse embryos in suspended animation for a month

A team of scientists from the University of California, San Francisco only wanted to slow down mice embryos’ cell growth in the lab. Instead, they managed to completely pause their development, putting the blastocysts (very early embryos) in suspended animation for a month. What’s more, they found that the process can put stem cells derived from the blastocysts in suspended animation, as well. Okay, let’s face it: that doesn’t sound nearly as cool as putting humans in suspended animation. But their finding still has huge implications for various fields of medicine. Doctors could develop a way to suspend embryos for IVF and scientists could find a method to slow down aging, among other possibilities. Helps that the researchers were able to prove that the embryos can develop normally even after a pause in their growth. Team member Ramalho-Santos from the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research said: “It was completely surprising. We were standing around in the tissue culture room, scratching our heads, and saying wow, what do we make of this? To put it in perspective, mouse pregnancies only last about 20 days, so the 30-day-old ‘paused’ embryos we were seeing would have been pups approaching weaning already if they’d been allowed to develop normally.” So, what exactly did the team do that led to their finding? They used a drug that inhibited the activities of a protein called mTOR, which regulates different cellular processes. By inhibiting the protein, they also inhibit the cells’ activities. In the future, the researchers want to explore mTOR inhibitors’ capability to pause stem cells’ activities in the late stages of their development, which could be used to repair or replace organs. And since other studies already showed that mTOR inhibitors can extend the lives of mice, the researchers want to explore their possible uses in aging research. Source: University of California, San Francisco

Credit card readers were hacked at MSG for nearly a year

Knicks fans have it rough . To watch last year’s third-worst team, fans got to pay the league’s highest ticket prices and drink the priciest beer. To add further insult, Madison Square Garden (MSG) Co. has revealed that their credit card information may have been stolen, too. Thieves tapped the magnetic card readers at merchandise and concession stands at Knicks and Rangers Games, Radio City Music Hall and other MSG locations between November 9th, 2015 and October 24th of this year, the company wrote in a special notice . That makes almost a year of theft before MSG got wise to it, with hackers spiriting away all the data needed to create a replica card. The company said it was notified of a possible breach and started looking into it along with “leading security firms.” After spotting unauthorized access, “MSG worked with the security firms to stop it and to implement enhanced security measures, ” it said. The point-of-sale systems are now safe, but MSG advises customers who visited venues during that period to check their credit card statements for unauthorized purchases. The company didn’t say how many customers were affected, but the number who went to events at those venues is in the millions. It also didn’t indicate why it took so long to spot the breach, fix it and report it to the public. The theft reportedly didn’t impact online or box office ticket sales, so if you went to the game and didn’t buy anything with a credit card, you probably weren’t ripped off (at least not by the thieves). Via: Recode Source: MSG

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Credit card readers were hacked at MSG for nearly a year

Singularity Watch: This AI Taught Itself to Read Lips Better Than Humans

A team of researchers at Oxford University have coaxed an artificial intelligence program into an impressive leap forward and towards our own obsolescence. The program, known as LipNet, is showing particularly promising ability to read lips in video clips, thanks to machine learning and a novel way of approaching the data. The key difference is that rather than try to teach the AI the mouth shapes of single words and phonemes, the LipNet is asked to interpret whole sentences. Using GRID, a huge bank of 3 second videos featuring brightly lit forward facing speakers, LipNet has learned to translate speech to text with a 93.4% accuracy rate. Compare that to humans’ 52.3%. It doesn’t look good. To accomplish this, the team ran over 28, 000 videos of actors speaking syntactically similar sentences through a neural network. Each contained a command, color, letter, number, preposition, and adverb, in the same order. When tested using 300 of the same sentence types, human lip reading translators had an error rate of 47.7%, whereas LipNet netted just 6.6%. With this kind of accuracy, we might see better automation of closed captioning on news and entertainment videos, and some speculate it may be a feature in more personal communication as well. Imagine realtime translation of a Skype or FaceTime conversation with poor audio quality. I want that already. Detractors are quick to point out the structural limitations of the data set used, since apparently most movies, news and YouTube videos don’t only feature well lit actors speaking directly into a camera in short sentences. However, given incrementally useful data sets, the LipNet framework appears capable of learning enough to do good, even if it won’t be stealing jobs any time soon. Check out the testing data and paper here .

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Singularity Watch: This AI Taught Itself to Read Lips Better Than Humans