October 23, 2017 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

FBI tried and failed to unlock 7,000 encrypted devices

In an 11-month period, the FBI failed to gain access to around 7, 000 encrypted mobile devices, BBC News reports , which is about half of those targeted by the agency according to FBI Director Christopher Wray. In a speech given at the Association of Chiefs of Police conference yesterday, he said that device encryption was “a huge, huge problem, ” for the agency. The FBI publicly went after Apple following the 2015 San Bernardino terror attack as it sought access to the shooter’s locked iPhone 5c — a request that Apple staunchly refused . It eventually got around the issue by paying an undisclosed vendor reportedly $900, 000 for software that gave the agency access to the phone. While that incident garnered a lot of attention, it certainly wasn’t the first time the FBI made it clear that encrypted smartphones were a headache for the agency. In 2014, then Director James Comey said that secure communications could lead to “a very dark place” and called on Congress to change the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act accordingly. Further, while the FBI presented the San Bernardino attacker’s phone as a special case of national security, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Justice was pursuing nine similar requests around the same time. Wray said at the conference, “I get it, there’s a balance that needs to be struck between encryption and the importance of giving us the tools we need to keep the public safe.” But as cybersecurity expert Alan Woodward told BBC News , encryption is here to stay. “Encryption that frustrates forensic investigations will be a fact of life from now on for law enforcement agencies, ” he said. “Even if the equipment manufacturers didn’t build in such encryption it would be possible to obtain software that encrypted data in the same way.” Source: BBC News

View the original here:
FBI tried and failed to unlock 7,000 encrypted devices

Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis now online

If you’re craving some light reading, might I suggest Stephen Hawking’s 1965 doctoral thesis ” Properties of Expanding Universes .” In celebration of “Open Access Week 2017,” Cambridge University Library has made Hawking’s 117-page thesis freely available online. “By making my PhD thesis Open Access, I hope to inspire people around the world to look up at the stars and not down at their feet; to wonder about our place in the universe and to try and make sense of the cosmos,” Hawking says . “Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding. “Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before them, just as I did as a young PhD student in Cambridge, inspired by the work of Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. It’s wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis – hopefully they won’t be disappointed now that they finally have access to it!” From the thesis abstract: Some implications and consequences of the expansion of the universe are examined. In Chapter 1 it is shown that this expansion creates grave difficulties for the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravitation. Chapter 2 deals with perturbations of an expanding homogeneous and isotropic universe. The conclusion is reached that galaxies cannot be formed as a result of the growth of perturbations that were initially small. The propogation and absorption of gravitational radiation is also investigated in this approximation. In Chapter 3 gravitational radiation in an expanding universe is examined by a method of asymptotic expansions. The ‘peeling off’ behaviour and the asymptotic group are derived. Chapter 4 deals with the occurrence of singularities in cosmological models. It is shown that a singularity is inevitable provided that certain very general conditions are satisfied.

See the original article here:
Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis now online

Returning to Second Life

Seriously, this once happened. A decade ago, dozens of media outlets and technologists discovered “The Next Internet.” An original cyberspace science fiction fantasy had finally come to fruition as the world gained a second digitized reality. In a short period of time, countries established embassies , media companies opened bureaus , one of Earth’s biggest rock bands played a concert , political campaigns took to its streets, and people became real-world millionaires plying their skills in this new arena. That much hyped “Next Internet?” You may remember it better by its official name—Second Life. For many modern Internet users, the platform has likely faded far, far from memory. But there’s no denying the cultural impact Second Life had during the brief height of its popularity. Explaining Second Life today as a MMORG or a social media platform undersells things for the unfamiliar; Second Life became an entirely alternative online world for its users. And it wasn’t just the likes of Reuters and U2 and Sweden embracing this platform. Second Life boasted 1.1 million active users at its peak roughly a decade ago. Even cultural behemoth Facebook only boasted 20 million at the time. Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See original article:
Returning to Second Life

2 Million IoT Devices Enslaved By Fast-Growing BotNet

An anonymous reader writes: Since mid-September, a new IoT botnet has grown to massive proportions. Codenamed IoT_reaper, researchers estimate its current size at nearly two million infected devices. According to researchers, the botnet is mainly made up of IP-based security cameras, routers, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, network video recorders (NVRs), and digital video recorders (DVRs), primarily from vendors such as Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, GoAhead, JAWS, Vacron, AVTECH, MicroTik, TP-Link, and Synology. The botnet reuses some Mirai source code, but it’s unique in its own right. Unlike Mirai, which relied on scanning for devices with weak or default passwords, this botnet was put together using exploits for unpatched vulnerabilities. The botnet’s author is still struggling to control his botnet, as researchers spotted over two million infected devices sitting in the botnet’s C&C servers’ queue, waiting to be processed. As of now, the botnet has not been used in live DDoS attacks, but the capability is in there. Today is the one-year anniversary of the Dyn DDoS attack, the article points out, adding that “This week both the FBI and Europol warned about the dangers of leaving Internet of Things devices exposed online.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Five-minute allergy test passes the FDA’s scrutiny

A few years ago, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( EPFL ) started developing what they eventually dubbed the “world’s most rapid” allergy test. Now, that test has received the FDA’s approval and will start telling you what you’re allergic to in as fast as five minutes next year. Abionic, the EPFL spinoff that took over the test’s development in 2010, created the abioSCOPE platform and its accompanying single-use test capsules to be able to detect your allergies with just a single drop of blood. After combining the blood with a reagent, the tester will place the mixture on the platform’s DVD-like mounting plate (see above) and allow it to form complex molecular complexes with the test capsules. Initial results will pop up on abioSCOPE’s screen in five minutes — the full results are due three minutes later. The system uses the integrated fluorescent microscope’s laser to check for the presences of those complexes, so you can quickly find out if you’re allergic to dogs, cats, common grass and tree pollens. Sure, the system can only test for four kinds of allergens, but at least you don’t have to undergo anything uncomfortable or invasive just to find out you’re allergic to your lawn. Source: EPFL , Abionic (1) , (2)

Visit site:
Five-minute allergy test passes the FDA’s scrutiny