Month: September 2016

A BMW i3 drawing. (credit: BMW)

Late last week, Reuters reported that several top executives from BMW would be skipping the Paris Motor Show to figure out how the company will proceed in its electric car strategy.

Anonymous sources said the company is weighing whether it will change course on its electric i3 program, which only saw 25,000 deliveries last year. Some executives want the company to produce an electric Mini that would hit markets as soon as 2019—but that's likely an expensive endeavor since the company would have to alter the Mini platform to house a giant battery and upgrade its factories to accommodate that production. One anonymous source told Reuters it would be more expensive to retool the i3 platform for a Mini body than to re-engineer the Mini platform to support the kind of battery it would need to be all-electric.

Still, government regulation in the US and Europe is increasingly favoring low- and zero-emissions vehicles, and the popularity of Tesla’s Model 3—which received hundreds of thousands of reservations in the week after it was announced—are encouraging companies to invest in electric vehicles.

My new neighbor was using AirDrop to move some files from his phone to his iMac. I hadn't introduced myself yet, but I already knew his name. Meanwhile, someone with a Pebble watch was walking past, and someone named "Johnny B" was idling at the stoplight at the corner in their Volkswagen Beetle, following directions from their Garmin Nuvi. Another person was using an Apple Pencil with their iPad at a nearby shop. And someone just turned on their Samsung smart television.

I knew all this because each person advertised their presence wirelessly, either over "classic" Bluetooth or the newer Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) protocol—and I was running an open source tool called Blue Hydra, a project from the team at Pwnie Express. Blue Hydra is intended to give security professionals a way of tracking the presence of traditional Bluetooth, BTLE devices, and BTLE "iBeacon" proximity sensors. But it can also be connected to other tools to provide alerts on the presence of particular devices.

Despite their "Low Energy" moniker, BTLE devices are constantly polling the world even while in "sleep" mode. And while they use randomized media access control (MAC) addresses, they advertise other data that is unique to each device, including a universally unique identifier (UUID). As a result, if you can tie a specific UUID to a device by other means, you can track the device and its owner. By using the Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI), you can get a sense of how far away they are.

Enlarge (credit: Pander)

Attackers are draining the CPU and power resources of more than 5,000 file transfer protocol servers by infecting them with malware that surreptitiously mints the relatively new crypto currency called Monero, researchers said.

A notable percentage of the 5,137 infected servers are powered by Seagate Central, a network-attached storage device that allows users to remotely retrieve files using FTP connections, according to a report published Friday by researchers from antivirus provider Sophos. The Seagate device contains a weakness that allows attackers to upload malicious files to any device that has been configured to allow remote file access, the report said. Once users inadvertently click on the malicious files, their systems are infected with Mal/Miner-C, the malware that mines the Monero coins.

Sophos Senior Threat Researcher Attila Marosi estimated that Mal/Miner-C has already mined Monero coins valued at 76,599 Euros (about $88,347) and has the ability to earn about $481 each day. While new crypto coins sold on the open market don't always fetch their entire estimated value, the earnings are nonetheless significant, since virtually all the hardware and electricity costs are borne by the people hosting the infected servers. The researcher went on to calculate that the infected servers comprised about 2.5 percent of the entire Monero mining infrastructure. The estimate was based on the infected servers having the capacity to generate 431,000 hashes per second when mining Monero coins, while the overall pool of miners as measured by monoepool.com was 861,000 hashes per second.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

That Apple and Google would have an interest in cars is not surprising; the automobile of 2016 is as much a tech product as it is a vehicle. That trend is only accelerating as self-driving technology continues to mature. But over the past few days, we've seen a flurry of speculation over the automotive projects at two of the world's biggest tech companies.

Let's start with Google. The Mountain View-based search giant has been working on its autonomous transport project since 2009—which may as well be forever in tech years. It started with modified Toyotas and Lexuses, then more recently with electric vehicles of its own design. The high-profile nature of Google (and therefore its car project) has arguably helped get people to take the prospect of autonomous driving more seriously than they otherwise might have. In 2012 when Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law legislation in California to allow testing of autonomous vehicles on the road, he did so at Google's HQ.

But it has not been smooth sailing for Google's car project; at various times it has been linked to partnerships with Uber, Ford, General Motors, and Fiat-Chrysler. However, only the last of those collaborators has panned out; Ford is going at it alone to build an autonomous ride-sharing vehicle in 2021, and Uber is working with Volvo on a similar vehicle (and with a similar time frame). Despite having seven years of experience—and 1.5 million miles—under its belt, it's possible that Tesla's approach of using fleet learning that leverages tens of thousands of vehicles has given the young upstart a big advantage.

Enlarge (credit: Hiram Huang)

HP announced Monday that it will acquire Samsung’s printer segment for $1.05 billion. The acquisition is part of a move to “disrupt and reinvent the $55 billion copier industry, a segment that hasn’t innovated in decades,” the company said in a press release.

The Palo Alto-based HP will also acquire over 6,500 patents pertaining to printing and Samsung printing's team of 1,300 researchers and engineers.

In 2014, HP said it would split into two separate companies: Hewlett Packard Enterprise, selling servers and enterprise services, and HP Inc, selling PCs and printers. That process completed in late 2015.

Enlarge / Ken Kutaragi, president and group chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. unveils the PlayStation 3 during a news conference on May 16, 2005 in Culver City, California. (credit: Getty Images)

Open up your wallets—Sony might have as much as $55 for you. PlayStation 3 owners who lost the ability to run Linux on their consoles following a 2010 firmware update should soon be getting a notice from the console maker that it is settling a class-action lawsuit over the debacle.

A California federal judge signed off (PDF) on the accord (PDF) Thursday, and notices of the deal will be sent via e-mail to those on the PlayStation network. Those notices should reach as much as 77 percent of the affected class members, according to the court. Other advertisements about the deal will be advertised online.

Those eligible for a cash payment of either $9 or $55 are "all persons in the United States who purchased a Fat PS3 model in the United States between November 1, 2006, and April 1, 2010."