Category: reader

Cree Introduces 200 Lumen/Watt Production Power LEDs

ndverdo writes “Cree just announced production power LEDs reaching 200 lumen/watt. Approximately doubling the previous peak LED light efficiency, the new LEDs will require less cooling. This should enable the MK-R series to finally provide direct no-hassle replacements to popular form-factors such as MR-16 spots and incandescent lighting in general. The LEDs are sampling and it is stated that ‘production quantities are available with standard lead times.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cree Introduces 200 Lumen/Watt Production Power LEDs

Your Cisco phone is listening to you: 29C3 talk on breaking Cisco phones

Here’s a video of Ang Cui and Michael Costello’s Hacking Cisco Phones talk at the 29th Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin. Cui gave a show-stealing talk last year on hacking HP printers, showing that he could turn your printer into a inside-the-firewall spy that systematically breaks vulnerable machines on your network, just by getting you to print out a document. Cui’s HP talk showed how HP had relied upon the idea that no one would ever want to hack a printer as its primary security. With Cisco, he’s looking at a device that was designed with security in mind. The means by which he broke the phone’s security is much more clever, and makes a fascinating case-study into the cat-and-mouse of system security. Even more interesting is the discussion of what happened when Cui disclosed to Cisco, and how Cisco flubbed the patch they released to keep his exploit from working, and the social issues around convincing people that phones matter. We discuss a set of 0-day kernel vulnerabilities in CNU (Cisco Native Unix), the operating system that powers all Cisco TNP IP phones. We demonstrate the reliable exploitation of all Cisco TNP phones via multiple vulnerabilities found in the CNU kernel. We demonstrate practical covert surveillance using constant, stealthy exfiltration of microphone data via a number of covert channels. We also demonstrate the worm-like propagation of our CNU malware, which can quickly compromise all vulnerable Cisco phones on the network. We discuss the feasibility of our attacks given physical access, internal network access and remote access across the internet. Lastly, we built on last year’s presentation by discussing the feasibility of exploiting Cisco phones from compromised HP printers and vice versa. We present the hardware and software reverse-engineering process which led to the discovery of the vulnerabilities described below. We also present methods of exploiting the following vulnerabilities remotely. Hacking Cisco Phones [29C3] ( Thanks, Ang! )

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Your Cisco phone is listening to you: 29C3 talk on breaking Cisco phones

13 Technologies You Won’t See in 2013

It seems like only yesterday we were planning for the Mayan apocalypse, but like so many other products, the 14th b’ak’tun (next era) has been delayed due to bugs and lack of pre-orders. Yet if you talked to some pundits back in 2011, they’d have told you that the end of days was coming out in Q4 of 2012, along with its competitor, BlackBerry 10. More »

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13 Technologies You Won’t See in 2013

This Crazy Map Has One Dot for Every Person in the United States

The amount of people in the whole world is pretty wildly unfathomable. For that matter, even a subset like just the 300,000,000 or so that live in the United States can be hard to wrap your head around. This interactive map by Brandon M-Anderson helps by showing one dot for each of them . It’s pretty wild. More »

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This Crazy Map Has One Dot for Every Person in the United States

China’s Princelings: descendants of Mao’s generals who control the country’s wealth

This long-read from Bloomberg about China’s “Princelings” — the generation of hyper-rich oligarchs’ children, descended from Mao’s generals — is endlessly fascinating. Wealth in China is even more concentrated than Russia, Brazil or the USA, and the Chinese looter-class use complex screens that take advantage of different ways of representing their names in English, Cantonese and Mandarin to obscure the ownership of former state assets, flogged at pennies on the dollar in sweetheart deals for the hyper-privileged. The Princelings are western-educated, mostly in the USA, and flaunt expensive luxury-brand accessories on their social media profiles. The accompanying interactive graphic lets you explore the intertwining relationships between the families of the “eight immortals.” Opportunities for the princelings surged in the 1990s after Deng kick-started another wave of economic changes. They jumped into booming industries including commodities and real estate as new factories and expanding cities transformed China’s landscape. Two of Deng’s children — Deng Rong, 62, and her brother, Deng Zhifang — were among the first to enter real estate, even before new rules in 1998 commercialized the mainland’s mass housing market. Two years after Deng Rong accompanied her father on his famous 1992 tour of southern China to showcase the success of emerging export center Shenzhen, she was in Hong Kong to promote a new development she headed in Shenzhen. Some apartments in the 32-story complex were priced at about $240,000 each, according to a front-page story in the South China Morning Post. Corporate records show that by the late 1990s half of the company was owned by two people with the same names as Deng Rong’s sister-in-law, Liu Xiaoyuan, and the granddaughter of Wang Zhen, Wang Jingjing. Deng Rong and Deng Zhifang didn’t respond to questions sent by fax to their respective offices in Beijing. Liu couldn’t be reached for comment through one of the companies with which she’s associated. Wang Jingjing didn’t respond to questions couriered to her office in the Chinese capital and a reporter who visited on two occasions was told she wasn’t there. Heirs of Mao’s Comrades Rise as New Capitalist Nobility [Bloomberg News]

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China’s Princelings: descendants of Mao’s generals who control the country’s wealth

Linus Chews Up Kernel Maintainer For Introducing Userspace Bug

An anonymous reader points out just how thick a skin it takes to be a kernel developer sometimes, linking to a chain of emails on the Linux Kernel Mailing List in which Linus lets loose on a kernel developer for introducing a change that breaks userspace apps (in this case, PulseAudio). “Shut up, Mauro. And I don’t _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously. I’d wait for Rafael’s patch to go through you, but I have another error report in my mailbox of all KDE media applications being broken by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it’s the same kernel bug. And you’ve shown yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I’ll apply it directly and immediately myself. WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE! Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don’t break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I’m angry, because your whole email was so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that broke things was so obviously crap. … The fact that you then try to make *excuses* for breaking user space, and blaming some external program that *used* to work, is just shameful. It’s not how we work,” writes Linus, and that’s just the part we can print. Maybe it’s a good thing, but there’s certainly no handholding when it comes to changes to the heart of Linux. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linus Chews Up Kernel Maintainer For Introducing Userspace Bug

Senate Renews Warrantless Eavesdropping Act

New submitter electron sponge writes “On Friday morning, the Senate renewed the FISA Amendments Act (PDF), which allows for warrantless electronic eavesdropping, for an additional five years. The act, which was originally passed by Congress in 2008, allows law enforcement agencies to access private communications as long as one participant in the communications could reasonably be believed to be outside the United States. This law has been the subject of a federal lawsuit, and was argued before the Supreme Court recently. ‘The legislation does not require the government to identify the target or facility to be monitored. It can begin surveillance a week before making the request, and the surveillance can continue during the appeals process if, in a rare case, the secret FISA court rejects the surveillance application. The court’s rulings are not public.'” The EFF points out that the Senate was finally forced to debate the bill, but the proposed amendments that would have improved it were rejected. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Senate Renews Warrantless Eavesdropping Act

Pirate Radio Station In Florida Jams Automotive Electronics

New submitter titanium93 writes “For months, dozens of people could not use their keyless entry systems to unlock or start their cars when parked in the vicinity of the eight-story Regents bank building in Hollywood, FL. Once the cars were towed to the dealership for repair, the problem went away. The problem resolved itself when police found equipment on the bank’s roof that was broadcasting a bootleg radio station. A detective and an FCC agent found the equipment hidden underneath an air conditioning chiller. The man who set up the station has not been found, but he faces felony charges and fines of at least $10,000 if he is caught. The radio station was broadcasting Caribbean music around the clock on 104.7 FM.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pirate Radio Station In Florida Jams Automotive Electronics

Lady Finds Chinese Worker’s Plea For Help Inside Product Bought At K-Mart

A clever Chinese worker smuggled the note above into a Halloween decoration which was later bought at a K-Mart store in Oregon, and the woman who discovered the note felt compelled to share it with the world. Whether this note is a fake or not is still being debated, but Sophie Richardson from the Human Rights Watch claims: We’re in no position to confirm the veracity or origin of this…. I think it is fair to say the conditions described in the letter certainly conform to what we know about conditions in…labor camps…. If this thing is the real deal, that’s somebody saying, “Please help me, please know about me, please react.” That’s our job. Link  –via 22Words

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Lady Finds Chinese Worker’s Plea For Help Inside Product Bought At K-Mart

The long slow death of the landline

The CDC reports that more than one third of American homes are now landline-free, with six in ten adults aged under 30 living in households with only wireless phones. In a study carried out as part of the National Health Interview Survey, 35.8 percent of all respondents reported having only cellular telephones. A further 15.9 percent reported that while they had landlines, they received all or almost all their calls on their mobiles. While 34 percent of all adults now live in households with only cellular phones, the number jumps to 40.6 percent when limited to households with children. Fifty-eight percent of renters and 76 percent of adults living with roommates reported having only cellphones. The growth is slowing, though, with the 1.8 percent six-month increase in landline-less homes being the lowest jump since 2008. Even the elderly are abandoning their landlines, albeit slowly: for the first time, more than 1 in 10 of those aged 65 or more reported living mobile-only. Early Release of Estimates From the National Health Interview Survey, January–June 2012 [PDF link]

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The long slow death of the landline