Month: February 2016

Enlarge / The FBI wants Apple to shut down the retry limits on the San Bernardino shooter's work phone. Both sides have attempted to claim the moral high ground. (credit: John Karakatsanis)

There's been a lot of bluster about the ongoing encryption saga between the FBI and Apple. "So Apple recently joined ISIS," The Daily Show's Trevor Noah joked this week. CIA Director John Brennan's view was a tad more serious. "What would people say if a bank had a safe deposit box that individuals could use, access, and store things, but the government was not able to have any access to those environments?" he told NPR's Morning Edition. "Criminals, terrorists, whatever could use it. What is it about electronic communications that makes it unique in terms of it not being allowed to be accessed by the government when the law, the courts say the government should have access?"

Let's start with the facts. Apple is currently fighting a court order obtained by the FBI. The FBI wants Apple to build software to help bypass security software on a specific iPhone 5C. The FBI is trying to unlock this device—a phone provided by San Bernardino County to employee Syed Farook, the man who with his wife shot 36 people and killed 14—but it's obstructed by the phone's security feature, which might delete the contents of the phone after 10 failed attempts to guess the PIN passcode. For now, Apple is resisting this court order that asks the company to write code that would block the auto-delete feature and allow the FBI to "brute-force" the passcode.

Beyond the facts are various arguments about things like the limits of government power or the legal authority of law enforcement to gain access to evidence believed to be related to what has been labeled a terrorist act. Those questions will be resolved by the courts eventually. But both the FBI and Apple have tried to take the high ground in different ways within the court of public opinion—the FBI emphasizes the moral imperative of honoring the victims and fighting terrorism, while Apple proclaims an ethical duty it has to protect the privacy and security of millions of iPhone users worldwide.

(credit: Samsung)

The actual phones get the most attention at Mobile World Congress every year—the Samsung Galaxy S7, LG G5, and Xiaomi's Mi 5 all look promising in different ways—but component announcements can give us some insight into what to expect later this year and at next year's MWC. For example, Samsung has just announced 256GB NAND flash chips suitable for phones and tablets, many of which top out at 128GB today.

The capacity is interesting, but Samsung spends more time extolling the virtues of the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 interface used to connect the storage to the rest of the phone. By using a two-lane storage interface, these chips promise sequential read speeds of up to 850MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 260MB/s; the read speed is quite a bit higher than the mainstream SATA III SSDs available for many PCs today. The write speeds are likely capped because you can't fit as many flash chips into a phone or tablet as you can into a dedicated SSD, and SSDs need to be able to write to multiple flash chips at once to maximize performance.

UFS is just one possible solution for speeding up mobile storage. Apple, for instance, is using an NVMe interface for storage in its latest iPhones, the same interface that it's using for SSDs in newer products like the MacBook and Retina iMacs. Either way, the interface leads to better performance in phones and tablets, and (as Samsung points out) combined with USB 3.0 interfaces, it can improve transfer times when you're moving files over from a PC. Both can be considerably faster than the eMMC interface, which is still what is used most frequently in phones, tablets, and even low-cost laptops.

Michael Griffin addresses the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics 100th Anniversary Celebration in 2015. (credit: NASA)

During a congressional hearing Thursday, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin had harsh words for the space agency—and the space policy crafted by President Obama's administration. Under the Obama administration's guidance, NASA has established Mars as a goal for human spaceflight and said that astronauts will visit the red planet by the 2030s. However, a growing number of critics say the agency’s approach is neither affordable or sustainable.

On Thursday, Griffin, administrator of NASA from 2005 to 2009, joined those critics. The United States has not had a serious discussion about space policy, he testified, and as a result, the space agency is making little discernible progress. NASA simply cannot justify its claims of being on a credible path toward Mars, he added.

“To quote my friend and colleague Jim Albaugh, the now-retired CEO of Boeing Commercial Aircraft, the current administration’s view of our nation’s future in space offers ‘no dream, no vision, no plan, no budget, and no remorse,’” Griffin said during a hearing of the House Science Committee. “We must remedy this matter with all deliberate speed.”

One of the most exciting parts of Microsoft's DirectX 12 API is the ability to pair graphics cards of varying generations, performance, or even manufacturers together in a single PC, to pool their resources and thus make games and applications run better. Unfortunately, testing "Explicit Multi Adaptor" (EMA) support under real-world conditions (i.e. not synthetic benchmarks) has so far proven difficult. There's only been one game designed to take advantage of DX12's numerous low-level improvements—including asynchronous compute, which allows GPUs to execute multiple command queues simultaneously—and the early builds of that game didn't feature support for multiple GPUs.

As you might have guessed from the headline of this story, it does now. The latest beta version of Stardock's real-time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity includes full support for EMA, meaning that for the first time we can just what kind of a performance boost we can get by doing the previously unthinkable and sticking an AMD and Nvidia card into the same PC. That's not to mention seeing how EMA stacks up again SLI or Crossfire—which have to be turned off in order to use DX12's multi-GPU features—and whether AMD can repeat the ridiculous performance gains seen in the older Ashes benchmark.

Benchmarks conducted by a variety of sites, including Anandtech, Techspot, PC World, and Maximum PC all point to the same thing: EMA works, scaling can reach as high as 70 percent when adding a second GPU, and yes, AMD and Nvidia cards play nicely together.

For all the technical ways to break into an ATM, you can still just crowbar your way in in many cases. (credit: clement127)

What was the best way to steal cash from an ATM in 2015? Skimming still remains king, but a survey of 87 members of the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) says that card trapping and transaction reversal fraud are on the rise around the world.

In November 2015, ATMIA internally published a survey (PDF) describing the state of ATM hacking in the previous year, from how ATMs were attacked to how much money was lost from the attacks. The results showed that ATM operators were wising up to skimming operations, in which devices are placed in or on the ATM to capture card information so the skimmer can reuse the card numbers later. This caused "a deflection of crime from traditional electronic skimming towards more physical and less sophisticated forms of attack, especially card trapping and Transaction Reversal Fraud.”

Fourteen percent of respondents said they saw an increase in card skimming hacks, but 28 percent of respondents said they actually saw skimming operations decrease. Still, credit card skimming outpaces other techniques for committing ATM fraud overall. Of those instances of skimming, 73 percent involved skimmers placed within the ATM, and 27 percent involved skimmers placed on the verification device of the bank access door.