Google Tracks Your Movements, Like It or Not
August 13th, 2018Mmm hmm.
Via: AP:
Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to.
An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used privacy settings that say they will prevent it from doing so.
Computer-science researchers at Princeton confirmed these findings at the AP’s request.
British UFO Researcher, Who Died After Vomiting Black Liquid, Had His Laptop Wiped by Authorities
August 13th, 2018“Natural causes.”
Via: Daily Mail:
A conspiracy theorist’s laptop and mobile will be analysed at an inquest into his death after the UFO expert vomited two litres of black fluid and died aged 39.
Max Spiers’s laptop was wiped when authorities returned it after his death more than two years ago during a trip to Poland to attend a conference.
Today a pre-inquest review at Guildhall in Sandwich, Kent, heard how the contents of his SIM card were also of particular interest.
Before he died Mr Spiers messaged his mother, Vanessa Bates, saying: ‘You’re boy’s in trouble, if anything happens to me, investigate.’
An initial inquest opened in December 2016 when the court heard he vomited two litres of black blood, but the inquest was adjourned last year.
The father of two allegedly made many ‘enemies’ in his investigations. His inquest will now be held over four days from January 7, 2019.
Authorities in Poland, where Mr Spiers was attending a conference, initially concluded the sudden death was due to natural causes.
Inside Google’s Effort to Develop a Censored Search Engine in China
August 12th, 2018Via: The Intercept:
Google analyzed search terms entered into a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for a censored search engine it has been planning to launch in China, according to confidential documents seen by The Intercept.
Engineers working on the censorship sampled search queries from 265.com, a Chinese-language web directory service owned by Google.
…
It appears that Google has used 265.com as a de facto honeypot for market research, storing information about Chinese users’ searches before sending them along to Baidu. Google’s use of 265.com offers an insight into the mechanics behind its planned Chinese censored search platform, code-named Dragonfly, which the company has been preparing since spring 2017.
After gathering sample queries from 265.com, Google engineers used them to review lists of websites that people would see in response to their searches. The Dragonfly developers used a tool they called “BeaconTower” to check whether the websites were blocked by the Great Firewall. They compiled a list of thousands of websites that were banned, and then integrated this information into a censored version of Google’s search engine so that it would automatically manipulate Google results, purging links to websites prohibited in China from the first page shown to users.
Airbus’ Solar-Powered Zephyr Smashes Flight Duration Record on Maiden Outing
August 12th, 2018Via: New Atlas:
Airbus’ Zephyr program has claimed another record, with a production model unmanned solar-powered aircraft touching down after more than 25 days in the air. That voyage is the longest unmanned flight ever made, and was achieved on this particular vehicle’s maiden voyage, no less.
Originally built by British defence company Qinetiq and now owned by Airbus, the Zephyr aircraft is designed to soar through the stratosphere for months at a time by drawing on the power of the sun. It is similar to Facebook’s now defunct Aquila aircraft in this sense, and is hoped to one day provide satellite-like services with the flexibility of an unmanned drone.
Hacker Finds Hidden ‘God Mode’ on Old x86 CPUs; ‘These Backdoors Probably Exist Elsewhere’
August 12th, 2018One more for your herniating Compromised Down to the Silicon file folder.
Via: Tom’s Hardware:
Some x86 CPUs have hidden backdoors that let you seize root by sending a command to an undocumented RISC core that manages the main CPU, security researcher Christopher Domas told the Black Hat conference here Thursday (Aug. 9).
The command — “.byte 0x0f, 0x3f” in Linux — “isn’t supposed to exist, doesn’t have a name, and gives you root right away,” Domas said, adding that he calls it “God Mode.”
The backdoor completely breaks the protection-ring model of operating-system security, in which the OS kernel runs in ring 0, device drivers run in rings 1 and 2, and user applications and interfaces (“userland”) run in ring 3, furthest from the kernel and with the least privileges. To put it simply, Domas’ God Mode takes you from the outermost to the innermost ring in four bytes.
“We have direct ring 3 to ring 0 hardware privilege escalation,” Domas said. “This has never been done.”
That’s because of the hidden RISC chip, which lives so far down on the bare metal that Domas half-joked that it ought to be thought of as a new, deeper ring of privilege, following the theory that hypervisors and chip-management systems can be considered ring -1 or ring -2.
“This is really ring -4,” he said. “It’s a secret, co-located core buried alongside the x86 chip. It has unrestricted access to the x86.”
The good news is that, as far as Domas knows, this backdoor exists only on VIA C3 Nehemiah chips made in 2003 and used in embedded systems and thin clients. The bad news is that it’s entirely possible that such hidden backdoors exist on many other chipsets.
“These black boxes that we’re trusting are things that we have no way to look into,” he said. “These backdoors probably exist elsewhere.”
Cost to Dismantle First Nuclear Powered Aircraft Carrier: “Up to $1.5 Billion”
August 12th, 2018
Via: Popular Mechanics:
Six years after decommissioning USS Enterprise, the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the U.S. Navy is still figuring out how to safely dismantle the ship. The General Accounting Office estimates the cost of taking apart the vessel and sending the reactors to a nuclear waste storage facility at up to $1.5 billion, or about one-eighth the cost of a brand-new aircraft carrier.
Ford Workers Using Exoskeleton Vests at 15 Auto Plants in Seven Countries
August 12th, 2018Via: CBS:
Ford Motor Company will unveil its plan Tuesday to use wearable technology to lighten the load on some of its human workers. Exoskeleton vests are being introduced in 15 auto plants in seven countries, and the business of providing technology to augment the human workforce is expected to boom in the coming years.
As CBS News transportation correspondent Kris Van Cleave reports, the vest Ford is giving to employees cost around $6,000. But the goal is to reduce injuries, which is both good for workers and the company, which could save money.
Resisting the Ideology of Screen-Based Learning
August 12th, 2018Via: Aeon:
As a parent, it is obvious that children learn more when they engage their entire body in a meaningful experience than when they sit at a computer. If you doubt this, just observe children watching an activity on a screen and then doing the same activity for themselves. They are much more engaged riding a horse than watching a video about it, playing a sport with their whole bodies rather than a simulated version of it in an online game.
Berry Growers Use Lasers To Stave Off Thieving Birds
August 12th, 2018Via: NPR:
During every berry-picking season in the Pacific Northwest, blueberry and raspberry growers fight to prevent birds from gobbling up the crop before harvest. This year, some farmers are trying something new to scare away the thieving birds: lasers.
Justin Meduri manages a large blueberry farm and cherry orchard outside Jefferson, Ore. Birds like both fruits.
“Flocks can move in of up to 2,000 to 3,000 starling birds,” Meduri says. The starlings gorge themselves and knock down berries right as the crop is ready to pick. When he didn’t take countermeasures, Meduri says the damage was “Inconceivable, huge. We had almost a 20 to 25 percent, maybe even 30 percent damage loss.”
Meduri says he previously hired a falconer to protect his fields. But the falcons were expensive, temperamental and sometimes flew away. Then last year, he became one of the first farmers in the U.S. to install automated lasers.
MONSANTO ORDERED TO PAY $289 MILLION IN WORLD’S FIRST ROUNDUP CANCER TRIAL
August 10th, 2018Via: Reuters:
A California jury on Friday found Monsanto liable in a lawsuit filed by a man who alleged the company’s glyphosate-based weed-killers, including Roundup, caused his cancer and ordered the company to pay $289 million in damages.
The case of school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson was the first lawsuit to go to trial alleging glyphosate causes cancer. Monsanto, a unit of Bayer AG following a $62.5 billion acquisition by the German conglomerate, faces more than 5,000 similar lawsuits across the United States.
…
Brent Wisner, a lawyer for Johnson, in a statement said jurors for the first time had seen internal company documents “proving that Monsanto has known for decades that glyphosate and specifically Roundup could cause cancer.”
