Month: October 2018

Hyundai

LOS ANGELES—If you believe we'd be better off with more people driving electric vehicles, any increase in the variety of those EVs is a welcome event. The latest option for the would-be EV owner certainly hits most of the right notes to be a hit. The Hyundai Kona EV is a crossover, the body style so on-trend that it made Ford kill all its old-fashioned cars. The 64kWh battery gives it a range of 258 miles, and on the latest fast-chargers it will go from flat to 80 percent state-of-charge in 54 minutes. And it comes with all the latest advanced driver assists and a rather funky interior. The only thing we still don't know is the exact price. But since Hyundai told us it's meant to be competitive against the Chevrolet Bolt, Nissan Leaf, and that elusive standard-range Tesla Model 3, expect a pre-incentive price to start somewhere around $37,000.

Our first experience of the little Kona crossover was back in April when we tested a pair of its gasoline-powered variants. The Kona EV is built on the same bones, but Hyundai's design team has given it a unique styling treatment inside and out to distinguish this all-electric one from its internal combustion engined siblings. Most noticeable is the new nose. Hyundai is eschewing the idea of making all its models look identical, and battery EVs don't need to suck in lots of fresh air to feed an engine. So the Kona EV ditches the big grille for a much more aerodynamic front end.

Enlarge (credit: Department of Homeland Security)

Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act filing by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) show that Amazon's government sales unit was actively seeking to provide the Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations with Rekognition,  the controversial facial recognition system. The pitch was part of a larger discussion of Amazon Web Services offerings to ICE HSI, an  offerring including artificial intelligence algorithms and predictive analytics.

Amazon has provided cloud services to DHS in the past, including US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).  USCIS uses Amazon cloud storage to store data, including information associated with Alien Registration Numbers (A-Numbers)—numbers also used by ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, and other DHS agencies to identify and track immigrants. And DHS has been pushing to do more in AWS. In a 2017 Request for Information (RFI), DHS requested "information regarding forward-thinking, modern Development, Security and Operations (DEVSECOPs), specifically in association with Big Data, Analytics, PersonCentric, Entity Resolution and Machine Learning...to build, enhance, and support systems in large cloud environments, specifically Amazon Web Services (AWS)."

In a June 15 email to a DHS recipient, Amazon Web Service's federal sales principal for Homeland Security followed up on a conversation about Amazon's artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies that occurred at the Redwood City, California offices of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. The firm had an "integrated consulting management services" contract with ICE, part of which focused on "developing ICE [Enforcement and Removal Operations'] modernized vision and strategy."

Enlarge / Microplastics come from tiny plastic pieces in products like microbeads, as well as broken-down pieces of larger plastics. (credit: Florida Sea Grant)

There’s plastic in your poop. Or at least, there’s microplastic in some people’s poop. A presentation at a gastroenterology conference in Vienna this week reported the preliminary results of a pilot study looking at fecal samples, finding nine different kinds of microplastics in the samples they analyzed. The news has attracted a lot of media attention, but the study is so small that it’s worth viewing it cautiously instead of drawing solid conclusions from it.

Concern about plastic in the human food supply has been a hot topic for some time, with tiny particles from broken-down plastics being found in food, drinks, and even the air. If we’re taking plastic in on one end, and we can't digest it, it’s expected and logical that we’d see it on the other end, too. But expectation isn’t the same thing as actual evidence, and this study is the first to present evidence of those microplastics in the human gut.

Gastroenterologist Philipp Schwabl and his colleagues asked their participants to keep a food diary for a week before packaging up their poop in a plastic-free sample kit and shipping it to Vienna. Then, those samples were cleared of all the stuff that’s expected to be there, like proteins and undigested plant matter, leaving the remainder to be tested for 10 different kinds of microplastic.

Enlarge / AAAAAH IT'S COMING RIGHT TOWARD ME! (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

Today we’re presenting the second installment of my wide-ranging interview with Chris Anderson. He was Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief for 12 years and then started one of the most influential companies in the brief history of consumer drones. Part one ran yesterday. If you missed it, click right here. Otherwise, you can press play on the embedded audio player, or pull up the transcript, both of which are below.

We start off today discussing how the consumer drone market graduated from DIY kits to fully manufactured projects. Anderson provided hobbyists with some kits early on, and boy, did they sell. They then began eternal afterlives as customer service nightmares (half his customers didn’t seem to know how to solder—and it went downhill from there).

Anderson met a brilliant fellow maker named Jordi Muñoz through the online community of drone tinkerers. They became well-acquainted over the discussion forums, and he eventually invited Jordi to start a company with him. The startup was (and remains) 3D Robotics. Anderson had no idea that his cofounder was a Tijuana-based teenager—and it wouldn’t have bothered him in the slightest if he’d known.

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners (ICDPPC) in Brussels. (credit: European Data Protection Supervisor)

Apple CEO Tim Cook today called on the US government to pass "a comprehensive federal privacy law," saying that tech companies that collect wide swaths of user data are engaging in surveillance.

Speaking at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners (ICDPPC) in Brussels, Cook said that businesses are creating "an enduring digital profile" of each user and that the trade of such data "has exploded into a data-industrial complex."

"This is surveillance," Cook said. "And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them. This should make us very uncomfortable."

https://t.co/1Of8EsOW8z Here's a low quality bug that is a pain to exploit.. still unpatched. I'm done with all this anyway. Probably going to get into problems because of being broke now.. but whatever.

— SandboxEscaper (@SandboxEscaper) October 23, 2018

SandboxEscaper, a researcher who back in August tweeted out a Windows privilege escalation bug, has published another unpatched Windows flaw on Twitter.

The new bug has some similarities to the previous bug. Windows services usually run with elevated privileges. Sometimes they perform actions on behalf of a user, and to do this they use a feature called impersonation. These services act as if they were using a particular user's set of privileges. After they've finished that action, they revert to their normal, privileged identity.

Both this bug and SandboxEscaper's previous bug depend on improper use of impersonation—specifically, the services in question (last time it was Task Scheduler, this time it's the "Data Sharing Service") revert their impersonation too quickly and end up performing some actions with elevated privileges when they should in fact have been impersonated. The last bug allowed one file to be written over another. In this case, it's a call to delete a file that is improperly impersonated, ultimately giving regular unprivileged user the ability to delete any file on the system, even those that they should have no access to.