Month: March 2016

The San Bernardino District Attorney told a federal judge late Thursday that Apple must assist the authorities in unlocking the iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the two San Bernardino shooters that killed 14 people in a killing rampage in December. The phone, which was a county work phone issued to Farook as part of his Health Department duties, may have been the trigger to unleash a "cyber pathogen," county prosecutors said in a brief court filing.

"The iPhone is a county owned telephone that may have connected to the San Bernardino County computer network. The seized iPhone may contain evidence that can only be found on the seized phone that it was used as a weapon to introduce a lying dormant cyber pathogen that endangers San Bernardino's infrastructure," according to a court filing (PDF) by Michael Ramos, the San Bernardino County District Attorney.

The county declined to directly comment. A spokesman, David Wert, told Ars in an e-mail that "The county didn't have anything to do with this brief. It was filed by the district attorney." The DA's office, which did not immediately respond for comment, followed up with a statement to Ars, saying that there is a "compelling governmental interest in acquiring any evidence of criminal conduct, additional perpetrators, potential damage to the infrastructure of San Bernardino County, and in protecting the California Constitutionally guaranteed due process rights of the victims, deceased and living, arising from state crimes committed on December 2, 2015."

Everybody loves a cute picture of a baby bird, which is why the Internet is packed with shots of these tiny balls of fluff, watched over by their adoring parents. Nature's reality, however, is a lot less adorable. Many wading birds—including egrets, herons, and storks—actually feed their babies to local alligators in exchange for protection from other predators.

A new study published in PLoS One explores the complicated relationship between colonies of wading birds and alligators in the Florida Everglades. Environmental scientists have known for a lot time that birds and alligators thrive in part thanks to a mutually beneficial arrangement that's called "facilitation." The birds choose to nest in trees right in the middle of alligator territories, and the reason seems obvious. Their nests are high enough to keep the birds out of chomping range, so the alligators focus on killing the raccoons and possums that would normally eat birds' eggs. Alligators keep tropical flooded islands and swamps safe from predators.

Rarely did anyone wonder what alligators got out of this deal. They can get raccoons anywhere, so why stick around bird colonies? Answering that question is the focus of this new study.

A Florida congressman has introduced a new bill that would forbid federal agencies from purchasing Apple products until the company cooperates with the federal court order to assist the unlocking of a seized iPhone 5C associated with the San Bernardino terrorist attack.

In a statement released on Thursday, Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) blasted Apple.

"Taxpayers should not be subsidizing a company that refuses to cooperate in a terror investigation that left 14 Americans dead on American soil," he said. "Who did the terrorist talk to? Who did he message with? Did he go to a safe house? Is there information on the phone that might prevent a future attack on US soil? Following the horrific events of September 11, 2001, every citizen and every company was willing to do whatever it took to side with law enforcement and defeat terror. It’s time Apple shows that same conviction to further protect our nation today."

For many of us, the term "robot" still evokes an image of R2D2 or a terminator-style collection of metal parts. But there's no reason to limit our construction materials to hard parts. A number of labs are working on soft-bodied robots and have shown they can do some rather interesting things, like squeeze through narrow spaces.

A team of researchers from Cornell and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia has taken a soft-bodied robot and made it glow. Their method of producing the light, however, has some interesting side effects: it allows the robot to determine how much it has flexed, and it makes the robot responsive to touch.

These days, "glow" is usually synonymous with "LED." But the authors used a very different technique, relying on what's called an electroluminescent phosphor—basically, something that glows when it's place in an alternating electric field. The phosphors (zinc sulfide, in this case) can be embedded in a silicone gel, making them stretchable and bendable. Different dopants in the phosphor will cause it to glow in different colors.

In the wake of Apple's high-profile fight with the FBI, more users and journalists have been paying attention to encryption of local storage in phones and tablets. Apple began encrypting all devices by default in iOS 8. Google made encryption a requirement for all Google-approved Android phones that ship with Marshmallow (after a false start in Lollipop), and it has been available as an optional Android security feature for years.

Amazon's Fire OS is a fork of Android, based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code but without Google's apps and services or guaranteed compatibility with apps developed for Google-approved Android. Amazon has heavily customized the UI and provides its own app store, but it typically leans on AOSP code for under-the-hood, foundational features—in older Fire OS versions, the optional device encryption was handled the same way it was on any Android device. However, according to user David Scovetta and others on Amazon's support forums, that encryption support has been deprecated and removed in recent releases of Fire OS 5, both for new Fire tablets and for older devices that have been upgraded.

We contacted Amazon for comment, and the company told us that local device encryption support was removed in FireOS 5 because the feature wasn't being used:

After studying images and data that characterize a range of mountains that run for 420km across Pluto's Cthulhu feature, planetary scientists now think they are seeing peaks capped with methane snow.

Pluto's Cthulhu region, about the size of Alaska, is characterized by reddish hues in contrast to the more pale, heart-shaped feature known as Sputnik Planum. Cthuhlu likely gets this darker color from tholins, complex organic molecules that form when ultraviolet light strikes simple organic molecules like methane. Tholins have been found on several worlds in the outer solar system, including Titan.

However, higher resolution images of mountains within the Cthulhu region have shown that the upper slopes on the highest peaks are much brighter. The most obvious explanation for this is a methane snow that has condensed out of Pluto's thin atmosphere, scientists say.

A vaccine would be a priceless weapon in the fight against Zika, a virus currently tearing through the Western Hemisphere and linked to devastating birth defects and paralyzing neurological conditions. But a vaccine wouldn’t be everything, of course. If the frustrating wars against measles and polio have proven anything, it’s that eradicating an infectious disease requires relentless public health outreach, surveillance, and containment, as well as medical advances. Indeed, the one and only eradication of an infectious disease of humans—smallpox—was accomplished not just with a vaccine, but tight networks for disease monitoring and strategic vaccination campaigns around disease hotspots—in other words, spatial data and responses.

While Zika is very different from smallpox and scientists are likely to be years away from having a vaccine, the importance of spatial data in stamping out a scourge are the same. And, when it comes to mapping Zika, Google thinks it’s uniquely suited for the task.

Thursday, the tech giant announced that it has assembled a team of volunteer engineers, designers, and data scientists that will use weather, travel, and disease data to map and forecast the spread of the virus. Google hopes that the resulting open source modeling will help governments and public health organizations monitor and anticipate outbreaks in real time so that they can direct resources and responses accordingly.

Researchers have devised an attack on Android and iOS devices that successfully steals cryptographic keys used to protect Bitcoin wallets, Apple Pay accounts, and other high-value assets.

The exploit is what cryptographers call a non-invasive side-channel attack. It works against the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm, a crypto system that's widely used because it's faster than many other crypto systems. By placing a probe near a mobile device while it performs cryptographic operations, an attacker can measure enough electromagnetic emanations to fully extract the secret key that authenticates the end user's data or financial transactions. The same can be done using an adapter connected to the USB charging cable.

"An attacker can non-invasively measure these physical effects using a $2 magnetic probe held in proximity to the device, or an improvised USB adapter connected to the phone's USB cable, and a USB sound card," the researchers wrote in a blog post published Wednesday. "Using such measurements, we were able to fully extract secret signing keys from OpenSSL and CoreBitcoin running on iOS devices. We also showed partial key leakage from OpenSSL running on Android and from iOS's CommonCrypto."

In a public statement on Wednesday evening, Volkswagen AG said that its top executives had been briefed on issues relating to the diesel emissions scandal prior to the time that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the company a Notice of Violation last fall. Still, the company maintains that its CEO may not have understood the gravity of the situation.

VW Group has previously been cagey about whether top executives knew that engineers had been installing illegal defeat devices in diesel vehicles. (The term “defeat device” here refers to lines of code in the engine management software.) So-called defeat devices suppress the car’s emissions control system when it’s being driven normally, allowing the system to work when the car is being tested in a lab. This setup resulted in diesel Volkswagens, Audis, and Porsches releasing many times the allowed limit of NO_x emissions every time the car got on the road.

If top executives knew about the defeat devices, they could face additional lawsuits from shareholders on top of the billions in fines that the EPA and the Department of Justice have sued VW Group for. The company also must account for the cost to fix or buy back the affected cars.