Month: September 2016

This is the setup Ogborn allegedly received. (credit: US Attorney's Office Southern District of Texas)

While Silk Road has long been shuttered, the Dark Web still thrives. Sites like Alpha Bay have picked up where others have left off, offering a slew of illegal goods ranging from drugs to forged documents.

On Monday, federal prosecutors in Houston announced the arrest of a 50-year-old man, Cary Lee Ogborn, who was accused of attempting to purchase explosives “for the purposes of injury or destruction of property.” He could face up to a decade in prison.

According to the criminal indictment, the suspect picked up a package last Friday that he believed was a grenade and a stick of dynamite with a wireless detonator. (In fact, it was all inert.) The government claims that Ogborn believed that he had bought the explosives on Alpha Bay for $600 in bitcoins as of earlier this month. In fact, the criminal complaint states that Ogborn was actually communicating with an undercover federal agent.

Enlarge (credit: Sergei Skorobogatov/YouTube)

Passcodes on iPhones can be hacked using store-bought electronic components worth less than $100 (£77), according to one Cambridge computer scientist.

Sergei Skorobogatov has demonstrated that NAND mirroring—the technique dismissed by James Comey, the director of the FBI, as unworkable—is actually a viable means of bypassing passcode entry limits on an Apple iPhone 5C. What's more, the technique, which involves soldering off the phone's flash memory chip, can be used on any model of iPhone up to the iPhone 6 Plus, which use the same type of LGA60 NAND chip. Later models, however, will require "more sophisticated equipment and FPGA test boards."

In a paper he wrote on the subject, Skorobogatov, a Russian senior research associate at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory's security group, confirmed that "any attacker with sufficient technical skills could repeat the experiment," and while the technique he used is quite fiddly, it should not present too much of an obstacle for a well-resourced branch of law enforcement.

Enlarge (credit: Canary)

Canary's only device since the company's inception in 2013 has been its home security camera, which features an alarm that will shatter the eardrums of even the toughest burglar. Now, Canary is expanding its lineup of smart home devices with Canary Flex, which shaves off more than half the size and weight of the original camera. The Flex is meant to be used any place in or around your home, inside or out.

Canary Flex looks like a small Beats pill but without the bass-dropping abilities. Measuring about 4.5 inches long and weighing just a half a pound, it's an oval device with a camera lens at one end. The Flex magnetically snaps into a curved base that allows it to be propped upright on any surface. Canary is also coming out with other mounting accessories, including a twist mount that can snake around structures to secure the Flex at awkward angles; a stake mount for sticking the camera into a potted plant or your front yard; and a secure mount that sticks to any surface, indoor or outdoor.

That's the big push behind the Canary Flex: its weatherproof design makes it an outdoor-ready security camera, and its integration with the existing Canary app means you can control it seamlessly along with an existing Canary camera you may have already. In this case, "weatherproof" means that the Flex is IP65-level water-resistant: it can withstand jets of water (real-world translation: it's rain-proof) but shouldn't be fully submerged for a long time. The Flex can operate in temperatures between 14 and 113 degrees Fahrenheit.

G'day mate; are you ready for an open-world Outback adventure? If so, welcome to Forza Horizon 3, cobber. (Okay, okay, I'll stop with the mildly unfunny Australian slang.) Another year brings us another Forza racing game, and since this is an even-numbered year, that means it's coming in the form of an open-world entry in the Horizon half of the franchise.

This one, like the last two, was hand-coded in the UK by Playground Games, and it continues the series' geographical love for equal chunks of slick city driving, carved muddy paths, and amber waves of driveable grain. The location has changed, but the hipster-friendly setup remains the same: you're asked to set up and promote a giant car-and-concert festival. What better way to do so than to race fast-'n-crazy across a giant, real-world locale?

Microsoft says that the map is twice the size of the previous, Mediterranean-obsessed game—which might explain the game's hefty 47GB install size—and you get a number of different environments, from suburban beach towns and the built-up city of Surfer's Paradise to wilder expanses of rainforest and the dried-out, scorched-earth Outback. You'll traverse that substantial map while jumping from one car to the next, and the game ships with 350 vehicles to choose from. Many of these return from their appearance in Forza Motorsport 6, although quite a few new ones join the pack because of their apparent off-road prowess, like the extremely fun Ariel Nomad.

The game stresses individuality from the get-go, with new superficial perks like selectable avatars (finally, Forza has female and ethnically diverse drivers who aren't masked by giant helmets), hundreds of spoken names to choose from ("Jonathan" is in there, but not Aussie gems like "Bruce" or "Sheila," sadly), and up to eight characters in your custom license plate. (My coworker Sam Machkovech opted for "BUTTSTUF," so, apparently, the game's profanity filter is relatively loose, as is its stupidity meter. Geez, Sam.)

Enlarge (credit: The Dark Knight, Warner Bros.)

Finance messaging giant SWIFT plans new measures to help banks combat fraud, after a gang broke into Bangladesh's central bank in February and stole £57 million pounds—and were only caught because one of them made a typo in a £15 million transfer.

The banking communications network, which allows financial institutions across the world to send each other secure messages about their transactions, is introducing "Daily Validation Reports," which it bills as a mechanism to help customers detect unusual patterns in their message flows, and give them more of a chance "to identify possible fraud attempts and improving the likelihood they can cancel any fraudulent transfers."

The heist, which could have cost almost £700 million but for the typo—which spelled the name of a Sri Lankan NGO called the "Shalika Foundation" as the "Shalika Fandation"—which raised red flags at Deutsche Bank, who warned the Bangladeshis, allowing them to cancel most of the rest of the transactions. Worse still, the Shalika Foundation appears not even to exist, Reuters reported.