New Metric Prefixes Get Bigger And Smaller

November 22, 2022 by Al Williams 72 Comments

It always fascinates us that every single thing that is made had to be designed by someone. Even something as simple as a bag and box that holds cereal. Someone had to work out the dimensions, the materials, the printing on it, and assign it a UPC code. Those people aren’t always engineers, but someone has to think it out no matter how mundane it is before it can be made. But what about the terms we use to express things? Someone has to work those out, too. In the case of metric prefixes like kilo, mega, and pico, it is apparently the General Conference on Weights and Measures that recently had its 27th session. As a result of that, we have four more metric prefixes to learn: ronna, quetta, ronto, and quecto.

Apparently, the new prefixes are to accommodate “big data” which is rapidly producing more data than there are atoms in the Universe. There were actually proposed earlier in a slightly different form but accepted at the conference. Apparently quecca is too close to a Portuguese swear word. So what do these actually mean? A QB (quettabyte) would be 10³⁰ bytes while an RB (ronnabyte) is only 10²⁷. So 1 QB would be 1,000,000 yottabytes (YB) the previous top of the scale.

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Start Your Engines: The FPV Contest Begins Now!

November 22, 2022 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

There are places that you can go in person, but for everything else, there’s FPV. Whether you’re flying race quads, diving the depths in a yellow submarine, or simply roving the surface of the land, we want to see your builds. If it’s remote controlled, and you feel like you’re in the pilot’s seat, it’s FPV.

When you say “first person view” many of you will instinctively follow up with “flight” or “drone”. But given the ease of adding a camera and remote control to almost any vehicle, there’s no reason to only fly the FPV skies. (Of course, we want to see your crazy quadcopter builds too.)

We went looking for a few less-traditional examples to whet your appetite, and we found a lot. There are super-cute FPV bots for indoors and more robust tanks for cruising around the neighborhood. In the summer, you’ll probably need an FPV lawnmower, and for the winter, naturally, an FPV snowblower or a budget-friendly FPV snow-boat. Or skip the outdoors entirely and terrorize the pool with an FPV sub.

This contest isn’t exclusively about the vehicles either. If you’re working on the tech that makes FPV possible, we want you to enter. For instance, this simple quad/drone tracker will help keep your video feed running and your mind on flying. This cockpit will make the immersion more complete. And nobody likes the jello-cam effect that excess vibration can cause, so we’d like to see camera hacks as well.

And of course, your quads. Is your FPV quad too fast, too light, or does it fly too far? Show us. The contest starts now and runs until Jan 3, 2023, and there are three $150 shopping sprees courtesy of Digi-Key on the line. Get hacking!

FDA’s Approval Of Cell Culture Chicken: The Rise Of Fresh Meat Without The Animal?

November 21, 2022 by Maya Posch 105 Comments

On November 14th of this year, the FDA cleared the path for Upside Foods to sell its cell-culture-based chicken products within the US. This is the first product of its kind to be cleared for commercial sale within the Americas, with only Singapore having previously cleared a similar product for sale, back in December of 2020. This latter product comes courtesy of another California start-up called Eat Just.

Since that initial approval in Singapore, Eat Just has begun to set up a 2,800 square meter (~30,000 square feet) production facility in Singapore that is scheduled to begin producing thousands of kilograms of slaughter-free meat starting in the first quarter of 2023. This would make it the top-runner in the cultured meat industry, which to this point has seen dozens of start-ups, but precious few actual products for sale.

With CEO Josh Tetrick of Eat Just projecting price equality between their cultured meat and meat from animals by 2030, could the FDA’s approval herald the dawn of slaughter-free meat? There are obviously still hurdles, but as we’ll see, the idea is not nearly as far-fetched as one might think.

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This Week In Security: Mastodon, Fake Software Company, And ShuffleCake

November 18, 2022 by Jonathan Bennett 15 Comments

Due to Twitter’s new policy of testing new features on production, the interest in Mastodon as a potential replacement has skyrocketed. And what’s not to love? You can host it yourself, it’s part of the Fediverse, and you can even run one of the experimental forks for more features. But there’s also the danger of putting a service on the internet, as [Gareth Heyes] illustrates by stealing passwords from, ironically, the infosec.exchange instance.
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The Blood Factory: New Research May Open The Door To Artificial Blood

November 15, 2022 by Dan Maloney 37 Comments

There were news stories afoot this week with somewhat breathless headlines that suggested a medical breakthrough was at hand: “In a 1st, two people receive transfusions of lab-grown blood cells.” A headline like that certainly catches the eye, especially as the holidays approach and the inevitable calls for increased blood donations that always seem to happen this time of year as the supply gets pinched. Does a headline like that mean that someone is working on completely artificial blood?

As always with this sort of thing, the answer is a mixed bag. Yes, a team in the UK has transfused two patients with a small amount of lab-grown red blood cells, and it’s the first time that particular procedure has been performed. But while the headline is technically correct, the amount transfused was very small, so the day when lab-grown whole blood transfusions replace donated blood isn’t exactly here yet. But the details of what was done and why it was attempted are the really interesting part here, and it’s worth a deep dive because it does potentially point the way to a future where totally synthetic blood may be a real thing.

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This Week In Security: Microsoft Patches, Typosquatting Continues, And Code Signing For All

November 11, 2022 by Jonathan Bennett 3 Comments

The pair of Outlook vulnerabilities we’ve been tracking have finally been patched, along with another handful of fixes this Patch Tuesday, a total of six being 0-day exploits. The third vulnerability was also a 0-day, discovered by the Google Threat Analysis Group. This one resulted in arbitrary code execution when a Windows client connected to a malicious server.

A pair of escalation of privilege flaws were fixed, one being yet another print spooler issue, and the other part of a key handling service. The final zero-day fixed was a mark-of-the-web bypass, that being the tag that gets added to file metadata to indicate it’s a download from the internet. If you deliver malware inside an ISO or marked read-only in a zip file, it doesn’t show the warning when executing.

Will Typosquat For Bitcoin

A trend that doesn’t show signs of slowing down is Typosquatting, the simple malware distribution strategy of uploading tainted packages using misspelled variations of legitimate package names. The latest such scheme, discovered by researchers at Phylum, delivered a crypto-stealer in Python packages. These packages were hosted on PyPi, under names like baeutifulsoup4 and cryptograpyh. The packages install a JavaScript file that runs in the background of the browser, and monitors for a cryptocurrency address on the clipboard. When detected, the intended address is swapped for an attacker-controlled address. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Microsoft Patches, Typosquatting Continues, And Code Signing For All” →

Chinese Chips Are Being Artificially Slowed To Dodge US Export Regulations

November 9, 2022 by Lewin Day 68 Comments

Once upon a time, countries protected their domestic industries with tariffs on imports. This gave the home side a price advantage over companies operating overseas, but the practice has somewhat fallen out of fashion in the past few decades.

These days, governments are altogether more creative, using fancy export controls to protect their interests. To that end, the United States enacted an export restriction on high-powered computing devices. In response, Chinese designers are attempting to artificially slow their hardware to dodge these rules.

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