Month: April 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A market-leading garage door controller is so riddled with severe security and privacy vulnerabilities that the researcher who discovered them is advising anyone using one to immediately disconnect it until they are fixed.

Each $80 device used to open and close garage doors and control home security alarms and smart power plugs employs the same easy-to-find universal password to communicate with Nexx servers. The controllers also broadcast the unencrypted email address, device ID, first name, and last initial corresponding to each one, along with the message required to open or shut a door or turn on or off a smart plug or schedule such a command for a later time.

Immediately unplug all Nexx devices

The result: Anyone with a moderate technical background can search Nexx servers for a given email address, device ID, or name and then issue commands to the associated controller. (Nexx controllers for home security alarms are susceptible to a similar class of vulnerabilities.) Commands allow the opening of a door, turning off a device connected to a smart plug, or disarming an alarm. Worse still, over the past three months, personnel for Texas-based Nexx haven’t responded to multiple private messages warning of the vulnerabilities.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A market-leading garage door controller is so riddled with severe security and privacy vulnerabilities that the researcher who discovered them is advising anyone using one to immediately disconnect it until they are fixed.

Each $80 device used to open and close garage doors and control home security alarms and smart power plugs employs the same easy-to-find universal password to communicate with Nexx servers. The controllers also broadcast the unencrypted email address, device ID, first name, and last initial corresponding to each one, along with the message required to open or shut a door or turn on or off a smart plug or schedule such a command for a later time.

Immediately unplug all Nexx devices

The result: Anyone with a moderate technical background can search Nexx servers for a given email address, device ID, or name and then issue commands to the associated controller. (Nexx controllers for home security alarms are susceptible to a similar class of vulnerabilities.) Commands allow the opening of a door, turning off a device connected to a smart plug, or disarming an alarm. Worse still, over the past three months, personnel for Texas-based Nexx haven’t responded to multiple private messages warning of the vulnerabilities.

Enlarge / And then there were four: after debuting the EQS sedan and SUV and then the EQE sedan, it's now time for the EQE SUV. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

LISBON, PORTUGAL—On the whole, Americans love SUVs. And Mercedes-Benz loves selling cars to Americans. So we weren't at all surprised when it first revealed an SUV version of the EQE sedan, nor when we learned the EQE SUV would be built in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

That's now underway, with cars arriving in dealers any week now. After spending a couple of days driving different models in the EQE SUV range, it's clear that Mercedes' engineers have been listening to and incorporating feedback as their ideas meet real-world driving conditions. The result is a competent electric SUV, if not one that necessarily gets the heart racing or demands you drive the long way home.

The EQE SUV might not be the most exciting EV in Mercedes' lineup, but it's probably the most significant. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

The EQE SUV is the fourth new Mercedes EV to use the company's EVA2 platform after the EQS sedan and SUV, and the EQE sedan. That much should be obvious when you see one—all feature ultra-streamlined designs that can resemble the "speed shapes" that some car showrooms use to show off different paint colors. That wasn't the design brief, though—making it as slippery as possible was. And the designers succeeded, with a drag coefficient of 0.25. In a contest of elegance, I'm not sure the SUV would triumph over the sedan, but then I'm not sure it's supposed to.

Enlarge / And then there were four: after debuting the EQS sedan and SUV and then the EQE sedan, it's now time for the EQE SUV. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

LISBON, PORTUGAL—On the whole, Americans love SUVs. And Mercedes-Benz loves selling cars to Americans. So we weren't at all surprised when it first revealed an SUV version of the EQE sedan, nor when we learned the EQE SUV would be built in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

That's now underway, with cars arriving in dealers any week now. After spending a couple of days driving different models in the EQE SUV range, it's clear that Mercedes' engineers have been listening to and incorporating feedback as their ideas meet real-world driving conditions. The result is a competent electric SUV, if not one that necessarily gets the heart racing or demands you drive the long way home.

The EQE SUV might not be the most exciting EV in Mercedes' lineup, but it's probably the most significant. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

The EQE SUV is the fourth new Mercedes EV to use the company's EVA2 platform after the EQS sedan and SUV, and the EQE sedan. That much should be obvious when you see one—all feature ultra-streamlined designs that can resemble the "speed shapes" that some car showrooms use to show off different paint colors. That wasn't the design brief, though—making it as slippery as possible was. And the designers succeeded, with a drag coefficient of 0.25. In a contest of elegance, I'm not sure the SUV would triumph over the sedan, but then I'm not sure it's supposed to.

The key to a successful sleight-of-hand magic trick is how well a magician manipulates the audience's perception, especially of manual movements, since that is crucial to how we anticipate another's actions. To learn more about how humans experience such misdirection, researchers in the UK performed simple magic tricks for three species of monkeys to see if they could be fooled. They found that only those species with at least partially opposable thumbs were fooled, suggesting that having similar anatomy (and therefore biomechanical ability) plays a vital role in the illusion. They described their results in a new paper published in the journal Current Biology.

“Magicians use intricate techniques to mislead the observer into experiencing the impossible," said co-author Elias Garcia-Pelegrin, who practices magic and conducted this research while completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge. "It is a great way to study blind spots in attention and perception. By investigating how species of primates experience magic, we can understand more about the evolutionary roots of cognitive shortcomings that leave us exposed to the cunning of magicians. In this case, whether having the manual capability to produce an action, such as holding an item between finger and thumb, is necessary for predicting the effects of that action in others.”

The researchers focused on three species with different hand anatomies and associated biomechanical abilities: yellow-breasted capuchin monkeys, Humboldt's squirrel monkeys, and common marmosets. For instance, capuchins are known for their manual dexterity, due in part to the fact that they can individually control their fingers. So they can perform a scissor grip (holding an object between the sides of two fingers), as well as a precision grip (bringing the thumb to the index or middle finger). They can even probe, pinch, or enclose an object with both hands, much like humans, and use stone tools to crack nuts.

The key to a successful sleight-of-hand magic trick is how well a magician manipulates the audience's perception, especially of manual movements, since that is crucial to how we anticipate another's actions. To learn more about how humans experience such misdirection, researchers in the UK performed simple magic tricks for three species of monkeys to see if they could be fooled. They found that only those species with at least partially opposable thumbs were fooled, suggesting that having similar anatomy (and therefore biomechanical ability) plays a vital role in the illusion. They described their results in a new paper published in the journal Current Biology.

“Magicians use intricate techniques to mislead the observer into experiencing the impossible," said co-author Elias Garcia-Pelegrin, who practices magic and conducted this research while completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge. "It is a great way to study blind spots in attention and perception. By investigating how species of primates experience magic, we can understand more about the evolutionary roots of cognitive shortcomings that leave us exposed to the cunning of magicians. In this case, whether having the manual capability to produce an action, such as holding an item between finger and thumb, is necessary for predicting the effects of that action in others.”

The researchers focused on three species with different hand anatomies and associated biomechanical abilities: yellow-breasted capuchin monkeys, Humboldt's squirrel monkeys, and common marmosets. For instance, capuchins are known for their manual dexterity, due in part to the fact that they can individually control their fingers. So they can perform a scissor grip (holding an object between the sides of two fingers), as well as a precision grip (bringing the thumb to the index or middle finger). They can even probe, pinch, or enclose an object with both hands, much like humans, and use stone tools to crack nuts.