This Week In Security: Breaking Apple ID, Political Hacktivism, And Airtag Tracking

August 20, 2021 by Jonathan Bennett 10 Comments

Have you ever thought about all the complexities of a Single Sign On (SSO) implementation? A lot of engineering effort has gone into hardened against cross-site attacks — you wouldn’t want every site you visit to be able to hijack your Google or Facebook account. At the same time, SSO is the useful ability to use your authentication on one service to authenticate with an unrelated site. Does SSO ever compromise that hardening? If mistakes are made, absolutely, as [Zemnmez] discovered while looking at the Apple ID SSO system.

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Neuromorphic Computing: What Is It And Where Are We At?

August 19, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 31 Comments

For the last hundred or so years, collectively as humanity, we’ve been dreaming, thinking, writing, singing, and producing movies about a machine that could think, reason, and be intelligent in a similar way to us. The stories beginning with “Erewhon” published in 1872 by Sam Butler, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” and the 1927 film “Metropolis” showed the idea that a machine could think and reason like a person. Not in magic or fantastical way. They drew from the automata of ancient Greece and Egypt and combined notions of philosophers such as Aristotle, Ramon Llull, Hobbes, and thousands of others.

Their notions of the human mind led them to believe that all rational thought could be expressed as algebra or logic. Later the arrival of circuits, computers, and Moore’s law led to continual speculation that human-level intelligence was just around the corner. Some have heralded it as the savior of humanity, where others portray a calamity as a second intelligent entity rises to crush the first (humans).

The flame of computerized artificial intelligence has brightly burned a few times before, such as in the 1950s, 1980s, and 2010s. Unfortunately, both prior AI booms have been followed by an “AI winter” that falls out of fashion for failing to deliver on expectations. This winter is often blamed on a lack of computer power, inadequate understanding of the brain, or hype and over-speculation. In the midst of our current AI summer, most AI researchers focus on using the steadily increasing computer power available to increase the depth of their neural nets. Despite their name, neural nets are inspired by the neurons in the brain and share only surface-level similarities.

Some researchers believe that human-level general intelligence can be achieved by simply adding more and more layers to these simplified convolutional systems fed by an ever-increasing trove of data. This point is backed up by the incredible things these networks can produce, and it gets a little better every year. However, despite what wonders deep neural nets produce, they still specialize and excel at just one thing. A superhuman Atari playing AI cannot make music or think about weather patterns without a human adding those capabilities. Furthermore, the quality of the input data dramatically impacts the quality of the net, and the ability to make an inference is limited, producing disappointing results in some domains. Some think that recurrent neural nets will never gain the sort of general intelligence and flexibility that our brains offer.

However, some researchers are trying to creating something more brainlike by, you guessed it, more closely emulates a brain. Given that we are in a golden age of computer architecture, now seems the time to create new hardware. This type of hardware is known as Neuromorphic hardware.

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Where’s That Radio? A Brief History Of Direction Finding

August 19, 2021 by Al Williams 35 Comments

We think of radio navigation and direction finding as something fairly modern. However, it might surprise you that direction finding is nearly as old as radio itself. In 1888, Heinrich Hertz noted that signals were strongest when in one orientation of a loop antenna and weakest 90 degrees rotated. By 1900, experimenters noted dipoles exhibit similar behavior and it wasn’t long before antennas were made to rotate to either maximize signal or locate the transmitter.

British radio direction finding truck from 1927; public domain

Of course, there is one problem. You can’t actually tell which side of the antenna is pointing to the signal with a loop or a dipole. So if the antenna is pointing north, the signal might be to the north but it could also be to the south. Still, in some cases that’s enough information.

John Stone patented a system like this in 1901. Well-known radio experimenter Lee De Forest also had a novel system in 1904. These systems all suffered from a variety of issues. At shortwave frequencies, multipath propagation can confuse the receiver and while longwave signals need very large antennas. Most of the antennas moved, but some — like one by Marconi — used multiple elements and a switch.

However, there are special cases where these limitations are acceptable. For example, when Pan Am needed to navigate airplanes over the ocean in the 1930s, Hugo Leuteritz who had worked at RCA before Pan Am, used a loop antenna at the airport to locate a transmitter on the plane. Since you knew which side of the antenna the airplane must be on, the bidirectional detection wasn’t a problem.

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Golden Rice’s Appearance On Philippine Store Shelves And The Rise Of Biofortification

August 18, 2021 by Maya Posch 45 Comments

After decades in development, the Philippines became the first country on July 21st of this year to formally approve the commercial propagation of so-called golden rice. This is a rice strain that has been genetically engineered to produce beta-carotene in its grains. This is the same compound that has made carrots so famous, and is a significant source of vitamin A.

Getting enough vitamin A is essential for not only children and newborns, but also for pregnant and lactating women. Currently, vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is the primary cause of preventable childhood blindness and an important cause of infant mortality. While VAD is hardly the only major form of world-wide malnutrition, biofortification efforts like golden rice stand to dramatically improve the lives of millions of people around the globe by reducing the impact of VAD.

This raises questions of how effective initiatives like golden rice are likely to be, and whether biofortification of staple foods may become more common in the future, including in the US where fortification of foods has already become commonplace. Continue reading “Golden Rice’s Appearance On Philippine Store Shelves And The Rise Of Biofortification” →

Airdropping Live Fish Is A Thing And It Looks Magnificent

August 18, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 52 Comments

Utah is a place that features a wonderful and varied wilderness. Its mountainous terrain is home to many valleys, ponds, and streams. They’re a particular favorite of recreational anglers who visit the region for the great fishing. Oftentimes, however, these areas are fished out by visitors and need to be restocked. Other environmental factors also come into play in reducing populations, too.

A plane delivering live fish to the lakes of Utah via air drop. Source: Utah DWR

When this happens in some areas, it’s as simple as driving up a truck full of water and fish and dumping them into the lake. The problem is that many of these lakes and streams are difficult to access by foot or by road. Believe it or not, the most practical method found to deal with the problem thus far is dropping in live fish by air. Here’s how it all goes down.

Live Cargo

Typically, the fish dropped into these remote watercourses are quite young, and on the order of 1-3″ long. The fish are specifically raised to later be fished, and are also usually sterile, making it easier for Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources to manage numbers. When it comes time to restock remote lakes, waterbombing planes are pumped full of water and loaded up with fish.

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Teardown: 3D Printed Space Shuttle Lamp

August 17, 2021 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

Since the very beginning, the prevailing wisdom regarding consumer desktop 3D printers was that they were excellent tools for producing prototypes or one-off creations, but anything more than that was simply asking too much. After all, they were too slow, expensive, and finicky to be useful in a production setting. Once you needed more than a few copies of a plastic part, you were better off biting the bullet and moving over to injection molding.

But of course, things have changed a lot since then. Who could have imagined that one day you’d be able to buy five 3D printers for the cost of the crappiest Harbor Freight mini lathe? Modern 3D printers aren’t just cheaper either, they’re also more reliable and produce higher quality parts. Plus with software like OctoPrint, managing them is a breeze. Today, setting up a small print farm and affordably producing parts in mass quantities is well within the means of the average hobbyist.

Space shuttle lamp — Flickering LEDs provide a sense of motion

So perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I started seeing listings for these 3D printed rocket lamps popping up on eBay. Available from various sellers at a wide array of price points depending on how long you’re willing to wait for shipping, the lamps come in several shapes and sizes, and usually feature either the Space Shuttle or mighty Saturn V perched atop a “exhaust plume” of white PLA plastic. With a few orange LEDs blinking away on the inside, the lamp promises to produce an impressive flame effect that will delight space enthusiasts both young and old.

As a space enthusiast that fits somewhere in between those extremes, I decided it was worth risking $30 USD to see what one of these things looked like in real life. After waiting a month, a crushed up box arrived at my door which I was positive would contain a tiny mangled version of the majestic lamp I was promised — like the sad excuse for a hamburger that McBurgerLand actually gives you compared to what they advertise on TV.

But in person, it really does look fantastic. Using internally lit 3D printed structures to simulate smoke and flame is something we’ve seen done in the DIY scene, but pulling it off in a comparatively cheap production piece is impressive enough that I thought it deserved a closer look.

Now it’s always been my opinion that the best way to see how something was built is to take it apart, so I’ll admit that the following deviates a bit from the rest of the teardowns in this series. There’s no great mystery around flickering a couple LEDs among Hackaday readers, so we already know the electronics will be simplistic in the extreme. This time around the interesting part isn’t what’s on the inside, but how the object itself was produced in the first place.

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Thor does battle with a man shooting lasers from his hands

Of Lasers And Lightning: Thwarting Thor With Technology

August 17, 2021 by Adam Zeloof 45 Comments

Most of us don’t spend that much time thinking about lightning. Every now and then we hear some miraculous news story about the man who just survived his fourth lightning strike, but aside from that lightning probably doesn’t play that large a role in your day-to-day life. Unless, that is, you work in aerospace, radio, or a surprisingly long list of other industries that have to deal with its devastating effects.

Humans have been trying to protect things from lightning since the mid-1700s, when Ben Franklin conducted his fabled kite experiment. He created the first lightning rod, an iron pole with a brass tip. He had speculated that the conductor would draw the charge out of thunderclouds, and he was correct. Since then, there haven’t exactly been leaps and bounds in the field of lightning rod design. They are still, essentially, a metal rods that attract lightning strikes and shunt the energy safely into the earth. Just as Ben Franklin first did in the 1700s, they are still installed on buildings today to protect from lightning and do a fine job of it. While this works great for most structures, like your house for example, there are certain situations where a tall metal pole just won’t cut it.

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