Month: February 2016

(credit: aqua.mech)

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But a sweaty human by any other college-affiliation than your own might smell far more sour.

In two experiments, researchers found that college students asked to sniff sweaty t-shirts were significantly more disgusted if they thought the funk originated from someone at a rival school rather than their own. The findings, reported Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlight the importance of social groupings in our perceptions. Namely, social groups help make individuals more tolerant of personal pew—improving team work—as well as create perceived barriers to collaboration with non-group members.

“More fundamentally, the studies remind us that groups involve not only a gathering of minds but also of sweaty, smelly, tactile bodies,” the authors conclude. “It is impossible to work with people if you cannot stand their physical presence. Accordingly, understanding of how group life is possible will necessarily remain incomplete without attention to the sensual dimension.”

(credit: Soraya Okuda/EFF)

If you are in favor of Apple’s staunch resistance to the government, you may be interested to join a rally on Tuesday, February 23 at 5:30pm local time at an Apple Store near you.

Last Tuesday, Fight for the Future, an advocacy group, quickly organized a pro-Apple rally at the Apple Store on Stockton Street in downtown San Francisco. Representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a few dozen people showed up on short notice, so the groups are expanding their efforts.

The new rallies promise events in Hong Kong, Munich, London, and many cities around the United States, including Anchorage, San Diego, New York, and Minneapolis.

(credit: Shawn Morgan/Intel Corporation)

On Monday, AT&T and Intel announced that they’d be partnering to test consumer drones on AT&T’s LTE network, specifically accounting for a drone’s relatively high altitude (AT&T is testing connectivity up to 500 ft high, in accordance with federal rules). The companies will also try to minimize any potential signal interference.

The two companies said they’d be showing off Intel drones at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Intel noted that the two companies would “test and define” how drones connected to an LTE network. AT&T said that such testing would allow better real-time camera footage to be streamed from the drone.

(credit: Valve)

With HTC beginning to take pre-orders for the SteamVR-powered Vive headset in just one week, you may well be wondering if your PC tower is up for running high-end VR without any distracting lag. Worry not: Valve has just released a SteamVR Performance Test Tool to determine whether you are technologically ready to shell out $799 for an HTC Vive.

Unlike Oculus' own Rift Compatibility Tool, which just seems to check your PC parts against a list without actually running a diagnostic, Valve's tool takes a few minutes to run through a small, non-interactive animation of a GLaDOS robot repair facility. The goal is to "determine whether your system is capable of running VR content at 90fps and whether VR content can tune the visual fidelity up to the recommended level," according to a Valve blog post.

Afterwards, the tool gives an average fidelity rating (on a numerical and Low/Medium/High/Very High scale). It also tells you what percentage of tested frames dipped below the recommended 90 fps for a smooth VR experience and whether any of those frames were bound by the CPU, rather than the GPU. The tool does warn that "the varying CPU cost of positional tracking and processing-intensive applications" could mean actual software runs worse than the test would suggest and warns that it doesn't test for available USB slots either.

(credit: Amy)

A key justification for last week's court order compelling Apple to provide software the FBI can use to crack an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters is that there's no other way for government investigators to extract potentially crucial evidence from the device. Technically speaking, there are ways for people to physically pry the data out of the seized iPhone, but the cost and expertise required and the failure rate are so great that the techniques aren't practical.

In an article published Sunday, ABC News lays out two of the best known techniques. The first one is known as decapping. It involves removing the phone’s memory chip and dissecting some of its innards so investigators can read data stored in its circuitry. With the help of Andrew Zonenberg, a researcher with security firm IOActive, here's how ABC News described the process:

In the simplest terms, Zonenberg said the idea is to take the chip from the iPhone, use a strong acid to remove the chip’s encapsulation, and then physically, very carefully drill down into the chip itself using a focused ion beam. Assuming that the hacker has already poured months and tens of thousands of dollars into research and development to know ahead of time exactly where to look on the chip for the target data -- in this case the iPhone's unique ID (UID) -- the hacker would, micron by micron, attempt to expose the portion of the chip containing exactly that data.

The hacker would then place infinitesimally small "probes" at the target spot on the chip and read out, literally bit by bit, the UID data. The same process would then be used to extract data for the algorithm that the phone normally uses to "tangle" the UID and the user's passkey to create the key that actually unlocks the phone.

From there the hacker would load the UID, the algorithm and some of the iPhone's encrypted data onto a supercomputer and let it "brute force" attack the missing user passkey by simply trying all possible combinations until one decrypts the iPhone data. Since the guessing is being done outside the iPhone's operating system, there's no 10-try limit or self-destruct mechanism that would otherwise wipe the phone.

But that’s if everything goes exactly right. If at any point there's even a slight accident in the de-capping or attack process, the chip could be destroyed and all access to the phone's memory lost forever.

A separate researcher told ABC News it was unlikely the decapping technique would succeed against an iPhone. Instead, it would likely cause the data to be lost forever. A slightly less risky alternative is to use infrared laser glitching. That technique involves using a microscopic drill bit to pierce the chip and then use an infrared laser to access UID-related data stored on it. While the process may sound like it was borrowed from a science fiction thriller, variations of it have been used in real world. In 2010, for instance, hardware hacker Chris Tarnovsky developed an attack that completely cracked the microcontroller used to lock down the Xbox 360 game console. His technique used an electron microscope called a focused ion beam workstation (then priced at $250,000 for a used model) that allowed him to view the chip in the nanometer scale. He could then manipulate its individual wires using microscopic needles.