Tech Today w/ Ken May

Samsung Made a Bitcoin Mining Rig Out of 40 Old Galaxy S5s

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Samsung is starting a new “Upcycling” initiative that is designed to turn old smartphones and turn them into something brand new. Behold, for example, this bitcoin mining rig, made out of 40 old Galaxy S5 devices, which runs on a new operating system Samsung has developed for its upcycling initiative. Samsung premiered this rig, and a bunch of other cool uses for old phones, at its recent developer’s conference in San Francisco. Upcycling involves repurposing old devices instead of breaking them down for parts of reselling them. The people at Samsung’s C-Lab — an engineering team dedicated to creative projects — showed off old Galaxy phones and assorted tablets stripped of Android software and repurposed into a variety of different objects. The team hooked 40 old Galaxy S5’s together to make a bitcoin mining rig, repurposed an old Galaxy tablet into a ubuntu-powered laptop, used a Galaxy S3 to monitor a fishtank, and programed an old phone with facial recognition software to guard the entrance of a house in the form of an owl. Samsung declined to answer specific questions about the bitcoin mining rig, but an information sheet at the developer’s conference noted that eight galaxy S5 devices can mine at a greater power efficiency than a standard desktop computer (not that too many people are mining bitcoin on their desktops these days). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Critical Flaws In Maritime Communications System Could Endanger Entire Ships

Orome1 shares a report from Help Net Security: IOActive security consultant Mario Ballano has discovered two critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities affecting Stratos Global’s AmosConnect communication shipboard platform. The platform works in conjunction with the ships’ satellite equipment, and integrates vessel and shore-based office applications, as well as provides services like Internet access for the crew, email, IM, position reporting, etc. The first vulnerability is a blind SQL injection in a login form. Attackers that successfully exploit it can retrieve credentials to log into the service and access sensitive information stored in it. The second one is a built-in backdoor account with full system privileges. “Among other things, this vulnerability allows attackers to execute commands with SYSTEM privileges on the remote system by abusing AmosConnect Task Manager, ” Bellano shared. The found flaws can be exploited only by an attacker that has access to the ship’s IT systems network, he noted, but on some ships the various networks might not be segmented, or AmosConnect might be exposed to one or more of them. The vulnerabilities were found in AmosConnect 8.4.0, and Stratos Global was notified a year ago. But Inmarsat won’t fix them, and has discontinued the 8.0 version of the platform in June 2017. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Critical Flaws In Maritime Communications System Could Endanger Entire Ships

US libraries will continue to preserve old games

Libraries and museums will most likely have more time to preserve old games before they disappear completely. The US Copyright Office has announced that it plans to recommend the renewal of a DMCA exemption giving museums and libraries the right to preserve old games, so long as they require sever support that’s no longer working. They can even hack consoles to keep those games running if needed. This exemption has been in place since 2015, but it needs to be renewed every three years. The Office says that after reviewing the public’s comments, it didn’t “find any meaningful opposition to renewal.” It has even received petitions from people running archival efforts to renew the exemption. In addition, as Gamasutra notes, the agency is now seeking comments about an expansion being pushed by the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment. MADE wants the exemption to cover multiplayer and massively multiplayer games, which were left out in the original rule. The Electronic Software Association blocked their addition the first time due to concerns about privacy, but their inclusion gets approved, then your kids might get to play your old favorite games someday. Via: Gamasutra Source: US Copyright Office

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US libraries will continue to preserve old games

Two sailors and two dogs rescued at sea, months after distress call

Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiaba planned to sail from Hawaii to Tahiti last spring. They ran into engine trouble in late May, and were eventually rescued by the Nav y on October 25, 900 miles southeast of Japan. (more…)

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Two sailors and two dogs rescued at sea, months after distress call

What happened to Las Vegas shooter’s hard drive? It’s a mystery

Enlarge / Vehicles drive past a Las Vegas billboard featuring a Federal Bureau of Investigation tip line number on Interstate 515. On October 1, Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and injured more than 450 after he opened fire on a large crowd at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Local and federal investigators still have not come up with a motive that sparked a Nevada man to commit one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history. More than three weeks after Stephen Paddock opened fire and killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others attending a country music festival below his Las Vegas hotel room, authorities appear stumped about uncovering a critical piece of information—Paddock’s hard drive—that could potentially lead them to other suspects. Stephen Paddock. (credit: Facebook ) Some madmen leave behind manifestos of sorts, like the one from Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. His 35,000-word manifesto railing against technology paved the way for his 1996 arrest after his brother, David, realized it was written by his sibling. Paddock, who killed himself in his Mandalay Bay hotel room after the October 1 shooting rampage, hasn’t left any hint of a motive to explain his murders. The FBI is currently examining computers and cellphones in the FBI’s lab in Quantico tied to the Paddock case. However, a hard drive in a laptop found in the shooter’s hotel room is now missing, according to The Associated Press . Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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What happened to Las Vegas shooter’s hard drive? It’s a mystery

Inspired by brain’s visual cortex, new AI utterly wrecks CAPTCHA security

Enlarge / A representation of how physically close feature recognition units are built hierarchically to create an object hypothesis. (credit: Vicarious AI) Computer algorithms have gotten much better at recognizing patterns, like specific animals or people’s faces, allowing software to automatically categorize large image collections. But we’ve come to rely on some things that computers can’t do well. Algorithms can’t match their image recognition to semantic meaning, so today you can ensure a human’s present by asking them to pick out images of street signs. And algorithms don’t do especially well at recognizing when familiar images are distorted or buried in noise, either, which has kept us relying on text-based CAPTCHAs, the distorted text used to verify a human is interacting with Web services. Or we had relied on them ’til now, at least. In today’s issue of Science , a Bay Area startup called Vicarious AI describes an algorithm they created that is able to take minimal training and easily handle CAPTCHAs. It also managed general text recognition. Vicarious’ secret? They modeled the structure of their AI on information we’ve gained from studying how the mammalian visual cortex processes images. Thinking visually In the visual cortex, different groups of neurons recognize features like edges and surfaces (and others identify motions, which aren’t really relevant here). But rather than viewing a scene or object as a collection of these parts, the neurons start communicating among each other, figuring out by proximity which features are part of a single object. As objects are built up and recognized, the scene is built hierarchically based on objects instead of individual features. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Inspired by brain’s visual cortex, new AI utterly wrecks CAPTCHA security

NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1070 Ti battles AMD’s latest video cards

NVIDIA has largely been sitting pretty since the GeForce 10-series arrived and gave it a comfortable performance lead in the graphics realm, but things have changed: AMD’s Vega cards are at least fast enough that you might consider them instead. Needless to say, NVIDIA isn’t about to let that situation stand. It’s launching the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, a $449 upper mid-range card that could outperform the $399 Vega 56 and undercut the $499 Vega 64 on price. For all intents and purposes, it’s very nearly as powerful as a GTX 1080: you have the same core clock speed as the pricier board, and only slight hits to the CUDA core count (2, 432 vs. 2, 560), texture units (152 vs. 160) and boost clock (1, 683MHz vs. 1, 733MHz). About the only major difference is that you’re still limited to ‘just’ GDDR5 memory instead of the speedier GDDR5X on the 1080. Pre-orders are starting today ahead of the November 2nd release, and it’s notable that both the Founders Edition card and the official suggested retail price are the same. You’re not necessarily paying extra to go with the first-party design this time around. The real dilemma is whether or not it’s worth springing for the 1070 Ti, at least those models that cling to the stock specifications. It’s entirely possible to score an overclocked GTX 1070 for less than $400 if you play your cards right, and the Vega 56 (if you can find it; it’s not as common) still packs quite a punch. The 1070 Ti is mostly alluring if you prefer NVIDIA hardware and want near-1080 speed without paying the well over $500 it typically costs to get a full-fledged 1080. With that said, keep an eye out for overclocked third-party boards that don’t carry a significant premium — those may hit the sweet spot and give you a reason to jump to the 1070 Ti instead of sticking to the regular 1070 or AMD’s offerings. Via: Ars Technica Source: NVIDIA (1) , (2)

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NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1070 Ti battles AMD’s latest video cards

Watch a real rocket scientist figure out (and beat) carnival scams

As a parent you often are forced by your tyrannical children to try carnival games. This, according to ex-NASA and JPL engineer Mark Rober, is a bad idea. Rober and his friends – including a professional baseball player – dismantle every carnival game they can find, assessing the probabilities of winning and point out that the only ones you could feasibly win are the throwing games… Read More

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Watch a real rocket scientist figure out (and beat) carnival scams

Giant worms roam Australia

Stilgar: Usul, we have wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen. Paul: Streuth! Say hi to Digaster longmani , an enormous earthworm reported on by 7 News Queensland in Australia . Adds Fox News : Robert Raven, Head of Terrestrial Biodiversity at the Queensland Museum, told the news site the earthworm in Mace’s photo could measure up to three feet long once it relaxes and stretches out. “In the 1970s, I was walking through Lamington National Park and could hear them beneath me as they gurgled through some water,” Raven recalled. “Seeing them is a sign we are getting good rain.”

Big hard disks may be breaking the bathtub curve

(credit: Alpha six ) Low-cost cloud backup and storage company Backblaze has published its latest set of hard disk reliability numbers for the second quarter of 2017. While the company has tended to stick with consumer-oriented hard disks, a good pricing deal has meant that it also now has several thousand enterprise-class disks , allowing for some large-scale comparisons to be drawn between the two kinds of storage. The company has also started to acquire larger disks with capacities of 10TB and 12TB. The company is using two models of 8TB Seagate disk: one consumer, with a two-year warranty, and the other enterprise, with a five-year warranty. Last quarter, Backblaze noted some performance and power management advantages to the enterprise disks, but for the company’s main use case, these were of somewhat marginal value. The performance does help with initial data migrations and ingest, but the performance benefit overall is limited due to the way Backblaze distributes data over so many spindles. (credit: Backblaze ) In aggregate, the company has now accumulated 3.7 million drive days for the consumer disks and 1.4 million for the enterprise ones. Over this usage, the annualized failure rates are 1.1 percent for the consumer disks and 1.2 percent for the enterprise ones. At least for now, then, the enterprise disks aren’t doing anything to justify their longer warranty; their reliability is virtually identical. The focus now is on what happens to the consumer disks as they pass their two-year warranty period. Will they show the same reliability, or will deterioration become more apparent? Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments