journal – Page 122

The iPhone 7 Has Arbitrary Software Locks That Prevent Repair

Jason Koebler, reporting for Motherboard: Apple has taken new and extreme measures to make the iPhone unrepairable. The company is now using software locks to prevent independent repair of specific parts of the phone. Specifically, the home buttons of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are not user replaceable, raising questions about both the future repairability of Apple products and the future of the thriving independent repair industry. The iPhone 7 home button will only work with the original home button that it was shipped with; if it breaks and needs to be replaced, a new one will only work if it is “recalibrated” in an Apple Store. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The iPhone 7 Has Arbitrary Software Locks That Prevent Repair

IoT Garage Door Opener Maker Bricks Customer’s Product After Bad Review

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Denis Grisak, the man behind the Internet-connected garage opener Garadget, is having a very bad week. Grisak and his Colorado-based company SoftComplex launched Garadget, a device built using Wi-Fi-based cloud connectivity from Particle, on Indiegogo earlier this year, hitting 209 percent of his launch goal in February. But this week, his response to an unhappy customer has gotten Garadget a totally different sort of attention. On April 1, a customer who purchased Garadget on Amazon using the name R. Martin reported problems with the iPhone application that controls Garadget. He left an angry comment on the Garadget community board: “Just installed and attempting to register a door when the app started doing this. Have uninstalled and reinstalled iPhone app, powered phone off/on – wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here…” Shortly afterward, not having gotten a response, Martin left a 1-star review of Garadget on Amazon: “Junk – DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY – iPhone app is a piece of junk, crashes constantly, start-up company that obviously has not performed proper quality assurance tests on their products.” Grisak then responded by bricking Martin’s product remotely, posting on the support forum: “Martin, The abusive language here and in your negative Amazon review, submitted minutes after experiencing a technical difficulty, only demonstrates your poor impulse control. I’m happy to provide the technical support to the customers on my Saturday night but I’m not going to tolerate any tantrums. At this time your only option is return Garadget to Amazon for refund. Your unit ID 2f0036… will be denied server connection.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dutch Scientist Proposes Circular Runways For Airport Efficiency

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: While airport terminal architecture has a solid history of style and innovation, rarely is a proposal put forth to utterly redesign the runway. But that’s precisely the aim of Henk Hesselink, a Dutch scientist working with the Netherlands Aerospace Center. Dubbed the “endless runway, ” Hesselink’s brainchild is a 360-degree landing strip measuring more than two miles in diameter. Since airplanes would be able to approach and take off from any direction around the proposed circle, they wouldn’t have to fight against crosswinds. And three planes would be able to take off or land at the same time. Hesselink’s team uses flight simulators and computerized calculations to test the unconventional design, and have determined that round airports would be more efficient than existing layouts. With a central terminal, the airport would only use about a third of the land of the typical airport with the same airplane capacity. And there’s an added benefit to those living near airports: Flight paths could be more distributed, and thereby making plane noise more tolerable. BBC produced a video detailing Hesselink’s circular runway concept. The concept is fascinating but there are many questions the video does not answer. Phil Derner Jr. from NYC Aviation writes via Business Insider about some of those unanswered questions in his article titled “Why the circular runway concept wouldn’t work.” The fundamental issues discussed in his report include banked runway issues, curved runway issues, navigation issues, and airspace issues. What do you think of Hesselink’s concept? Do you think it is preposterous or shows promise? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Dutch Scientist Proposes Circular Runways For Airport Efficiency

17-Year-Old Corrects NASA Mistake In Data From The ISS

“A British teenager has contacted scientists at NASA to point out an error in a set of their own data, ” writes the BBC. An anonymous reader quotes their report. A-level student Miles Soloman found that radiation sensors on the International Space Station (ISS) were recording false data… The correction was said to be “appreciated” by NASA, which invited him to help analyse the problem… The research was part of the TimPix project from the Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS), which gives students across the UK the chance to work on data from the space station, looking for anomalies and patterns that might lead to further discoveries. What Miles had noticed was that when nothing hit the detector, a negative reading was being recorded. But you cannot get negative energy… It turned out that Miles had noticed something no-one else had — including the NASA experts. NASA said it was aware of the error, but believed it was only happening once or twice a year. Miles had found it was actually happening multiple times a day. There’s a video of the student — and his teacher — describing the discovery, a story which Miles says his friends at high school listen to with “a mixture of jealousy and boredom” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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17-Year-Old Corrects NASA Mistake In Data From The ISS

Mass-produced artificial blood is now a real possibility

Doctors dream of having artificial blood always on hand, but the reality has usually been very different. While you can produce red blood cells in a lab, the current technique (which prods stem cells into action) only nets a small number of them at best. British researchers appear to have found the solution, however: they’ve developed a technique that can reliably produce an unlimited number of red blood cells. The trick is to create “immortalized” premature red blood cells that you can culture as much as you like, making mass production a real possibility. The biggest challenge is translating the technique to commercial manufacturing. Scientists have produced a few liters of blood in the lab, but there’s a big difference between that and the massive volumes needed to serve even a single hospital. Although the UK’s National Health Service is planning to trial artificial blood this year , this new technique won’t be involved. As it is, you wouldn’t likely see a wholesale switch to artificial blood even if this new method was ready for the real world. Any mass production is most likely to focus on people with rare blood types that can’t always count on donations. Even that limited effort could make a huge difference, mind you. Hospitals could always have a consistent supply of rare blood, so you wouldn’t have to worry about them running out in a life-or-death situation. Via: BBC , Digital Journal Source: University of Bristol , Nature

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Mass-produced artificial blood is now a real possibility

Ubuntu Linux 17.04 ‘Zesty Zapus’ Final Beta Now Available For Download

BrianFagioli writes: The final beta of Ubuntu 17.04 ‘Zesty Zapus’ became available for download Thursday. While it is never a good idea to run pre-release software on production machines, Canonical is claiming that it should be largely bug free at this point. In other words, if you understand the risks, it should be a fairly safe. Home users aside, this is a good opportunity for administrators to conduct testing prior to the official release next month. “The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the final beta release of the Ubuntu 17.04 Desktop, Server, and Cloud products. Codenamed ‘Zesty Zapus’, 17.04 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution, ” says Adam Conrad, Canonical. “The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Edge, VMWare, Safari, And Ubuntu Linux Hacked at Pwn2Own 2017

The 10th annual Pwn2Own hacking competition ended Friday in Vancouver. Some of the highlights: Ars Technica reports one team “compromised Microsoft’s heavily fortified Edge browser in a way that escapes a VMware Workstation virtual machine it runs in… by exploiting a heap overflow bug in Edge, a type confusion flaw in the Windows kernel and an uninitialized buffer vulnerability in VMware.” Digital Trends reports “Samuel Grob and Niklas Baumstark used a number of logic bugs to exploit the Safari browser and eventually take root control of the MacOS on a MacBook Pro, [and] impressed onlookers even more by adding a custom message to the Touch Bar which read: “pwned by niklasb and saelo.”Ubuntu 16.10 Linux was also successfully attacked by exploiting a flaw in the Linux 4.8 kernel, “triggered by a researcher who only had basic user access but was able to elevate privileges with the vulnerability to become the root administrative account user…” reports eWeek. “Chaitin Security Research Lab didn’t stop after successfully exploiting Ubuntu. It was also able to successfully demonstrate a chain of six bugs in Apple Safari, gaining root access on macOS.”Another attacker “leveraged two separate use-after-free bugs in Microsoft Edge and then escalated to SYSTEM using a buffer overflow in the Windows kernel.” None of the attendees registered to attempt an attack on the Apache Web Server on Ubuntu 16.10 Linux, according to eWeek, but the contest’s blog reports that “We saw a record 51 bugs come through the program. We paid contestants $833, 000 USD in addition to the dozen laptops we handed out to winners. And, we awarded a total of 196 Master of Pwn points.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Proof Daylight Saving Time Is Dumb, Dangerous, and Costly

From a report on Bloomberg: The case for daylight saving time has been shaky for a while. The biannual time change was originally implemented to save energy. Yet dozens of studies around the world have found that changing the clocks has either minuscule or non-existent effects on energy use. The latest research suggests the time change can be harmful to our health and cost us money. The suffering of the spring time change begins with the loss of an hour of sleep. That might not seem like a big deal, but researchers have found it can be dangerous to mess with sleep schedules. Car accidents, strokes, and heart attacks spike in the days after the March time change. It turns out that judges, sleep deprived by daylight saving, impose harsher sentences. Some of the last defenders of daylight saving time have been a cluster of business groups who assume the change helps stimulate consumer spending. That’s not true either, according to recent analysis of 380 million bank and credit-card transactions by the JPMorgan Chase Institute. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Proof Daylight Saving Time Is Dumb, Dangerous, and Costly

IBM built an atomic hard drive

While the rush to keep pace with Moore’s Law is getting rather “chaotic” , researchers at IBM announced on Wednesday that they have drastically reduced the space required to store a bit of information down to that of a single atom. This tiny advancement in storage technology, is a big deal. Given that modern hard drives need about 100, 000 atoms to store a single bit, this development could shrink the size of future storage mediums by an order of magnitude. IBM figures that it can store the entire iTunes catalog (all 35 million tracks) onto a disk the size of a credit card by using this technique. A single atom of holmium credit: IBM Research – Almaden The system uses atoms of holmium seated atop a magnesium oxide surface, which keeps the atom’s magnetic poles stable — even in the presence of other magnets. The orientation of these poles determines whether the atom constitutes a 1 or a 0. To write to this storage system, a microscopic needle induces a current to flip the atom’s orientation. Reading the information, conversely, is simply a matter of measuring the magnetic current passing through each atom, which varies depending on which pole is facing up. But don’t expect this technology to show up in the next iPhone, mind you. It currently requires a liquid nitrogen-cooled tunnelling electron microscope operating in a vacuum to work. The study was published today in the journal Nature .

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IBM built an atomic hard drive

Hidden Backdoor Discovered In Chinese IoT Devices

“A backdoor has been found in devices made by a Chinese tech firm specializing in VoIP products, ” reports TechRadar. An anonymous reader quotes their article: Security outfit Trustwave made the discovery of a hidden backdoor in DblTek’s devices which was apparently put there to allow the manufacturer access to said hardware — but of course, it’s also open to being exploited by other malicious parties. The backdoor is in the Telnet admin interface of DblTek-branded devices, and potentially allows an attacker to remotely open a shell with root privileges on the target device. What’s perhaps even more worrying is that when Trustwave contacted DblTek regarding the backdoor last autumn — multiple times — patched firmware was eventually released at the end of December. However, rather than removing the flaw, the vendor simply made it more difficult to access and exploit. And further correspondence with the Chinese company has apparently fallen on deaf ears. The firmware with the hole “is present on almost every GSM-to-VoIP device which DblTek makes, ” and Trustwave “found hundreds of these devices on the net, and many other brands which use the same firmware, so are equally open to exploit.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hidden Backdoor Discovered In Chinese IoT Devices

Ken May

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