Redditor Jasonp55 has a neat demonstration of the perils of confusing correlation with causation, and his well-chosen example makes this a potentially useful chart for discussing this issue with friends who won’t vaccinate themselves and their kids. /r/skeptic, I was practicing GraphPad and I think I may have discovered the ‘real’ cause of autism… (imgur.com) ( Thanks, Fipi Lele! )
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Correlation between autism diagnosis and organic food sales
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
Instructables user Aandaghassaei has posted a HOWTO for making a 3D printed record that plays on a regular turntable. Her method converts any digital audio file to grooves ready to print. It’s a bit fuzzy, but still rather exciting! I’m waiting for the way when taking a snapshot of a vinyl disc can be the first step toward deriving its audio content, converting that back to a shapefile, and printing out a high-fidelity duplicate. In this Instructable, I’ll demonstrate how I developed a workflow that can convert any audio file, of virtually any format, into a 3D model of a record. This is far too complex a task to perform with traditional drafting-style CAD techniques, so I wrote an program to do this conversion automatically. It works by importing raw audio data, performing some calculations to generate the geometry of a record, and eventually exporting this geometry straight to the STL file format (used by all 3D printers). Most of the heavy lifting is done by Processing, an open source environment that’s often used for coding interactive graphics applications. To get Processing to export to STL, I used the ModelBuilder Library written by Marius Watz (if you are into Arduino/Processing and 3D printing I highly recommend checking this out, it works great). I’ve uploaded some of my complete record models to the 123D gallery as well as the Pirate Bay. Check Step 6 for a complete listing of what’s there and what I plan on posting. Alternatively, you can go to Step 7 to download my code and learn how to make your own printable records from any audio file you like. 3D Printed Record
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HOWTO convert an MP3 to a playable, 3D printed record
The North Paw is a kit for an anklet that subtly vibrates your on the side of your ankle that faces north, so that you attain a kind of subliminal “Compass Sense” like those possessed by certain birds. What makes it way more awesome than a regular compass? Persistence. With a regular compass the owner only knows the direction when he or she checks it. With this compass, the information enters the wearer’s brain at a subconscious level, giving the wearer a true feeling of absolute direction, rather than an intellectual knowledge as with a regular compass. Because of the plasticity of the brain, it has been shown that most wearers gain a new sense of absolute direction, giving them a superhuman ability to navigate their surroundings. The original idea for North Paw comes from research done at University of Osnabrück in Germany. In this study, rather than an anklet, the researchers used a belt. They wore the belt non-stop for six weeks, and reported successive stages of integration. North Paw ( Thanks, Lucas )
Link:
Acquire a transhuman Compass Sense with a kit-built anklet
Virtuoso hardware hacker Bunnie Huang is building an open hardware laptop. Want. We started the design in June, and last week I got my first prototype motherboards, hot off the SMT line. It’s booting linux, and I’m currently grinding through the validation of all the sub-components. I thought I’d share the design progress with my readers. Of course, a feature of a build-it-yourself laptop is that all the design documentation is open, so others of sufficient skill and resources can also build it. The hardware and its sub-components are picked so as to make this the most practically open hardware laptop I could create using state of the art technology. You can download, without NDA, the datasheets for all the components, and key peripheral options are available so it’s possible to build a complete firmware from source with no opaque blobs. Building my Own Laptop
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Bunnie Huang is building a laptop
At the latest San Francisco Drone Olympics (now called DroneGames, thanks, no doubt, to awful bullying from the organized crime syndicate known as the International Olympic Committee), there were many fascinating entries, but the champion was James “substack” Halliday’s Virus-Copter (github), which made wireless contact with its competitors, infected them with viruses that put them under its control, sent them off to infect the rest of the cohort, and then caused them to “run amok.” Many people have written to point out that Virus-Copter shares some DNA with one of the plot elements in my novel Pirate Cinema , but I assure you the resemblance is entirely coincidental. Drones, after all, are stranger than technothrillers. Here’s the $300 drone the competitors were flying. The payload virus.tar includes: node cross-compiled for the ARM chips running on the drones * felixge’s ar-drone module * some iwconfig/iwlist wrappers in lib/iw.js * open wireless networks in nodes.json (gathered by the deployment computer) Report from the DroneGames (formerly Drone Olympics ;-))
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Flying malware: the Virus Copter
Greg sez, “This project is using a number of computational photography techniques to document Charles Babbage’s ‘Difference Engine No 2’ for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. There are interactive gigapixel images for the four cardinal views of the device available to view.” Babbage Difference Engine in Gigapixel ( Thanks, Greg ! )
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Gigapixel images of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine #2
A Slashdot post from Samzenpus rounds up links to a series of projects to make self-filling water-bottles inspired by the hydrophilic nodules on the Namib Desert Beetle. After a successful prototype, MIT has launched a competition to improve on the design. Water Bottle Fills Itself From the Air
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Competition to design a hydrophilic, self-filling water-bottle
Prena Law, a notorious porno copyright troll sent out a blackmail letter to victims that included the URL of a TorrentFreak article describing one of the rare cases in which someone stood up to a troll and lost. TorrentFreak felt that this was misleading, and resented being used as part of a sleazy scheme, so they replaced the article with a page explaining how copyright trolls work, and how to defend yourself against them. Porno copyright trolls are companies that sends out legal threats to people, claiming they were downloading porn with embarrassing titles and demanding money not to permanently associate their names with porn by naming them in lawsuits. Thousands and thousands of people have been victimized by them. We redirected the URL referenced by Prenda to a page with information about these mass-BitTorrent lawsuits. So, instead of being scared by an article about a $1.5 million judgment, Internet bill payers can inform themselves about the steps they can take to respond to the settlement letter. The page in question explains that increasingly judges are condemning the practices of copyright trolls, and that many mass lawsuits have been thrown out. Just recently a judge designated Prenda’s ways as a “bad faith effort,” and dismissed one of their mass-BitTorrent lawsuits. In addition to some much-needed balance we also included links to attorneys who are familiar with these lawsuits, plus links to other useful resources. Hopefully, this will enable a few of the victims to respond properly and resolve the matter without having to pay up. TorrentFreak Trolls a Copyright Troll
Douglas sez, 18 months ago Boing Boing posted about EFF’s effort to get Ubuntu to make full disk encryption (FDE) easy upon install. EFF has delivered. I’m sure many of us have had and continue to have the experience of trying to nudge someone (or ourselves) over from OS X or Windows to GNU/Linux and LUKS full disk encryption, but the process got roadblocked at some point because using the alternate installer to config the partitions and all for FDE was just too much of a hassle for parties involved. Now in Ubuntu 12.10, FDE is just a tickbox in the default installer. How cool is that? This means it’s a good time to donate to EFF . And if you’re using Ubuntu 12.10, don’t forget to fix the privacy problems for which EFF provides a tutorial (thanks again!). ( Thanks, Doug ! )
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EFF delivers easy full-disk encryption for Ubuntu