Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Hacking the self-driving world. (Clear military application!)
Researchers Stealthily Manipulate Road Navigation Systems
A team of researchers from Virginia Tech, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and Microsoft Research has discovered a new and stealthy GPS spoofing method that has been proven to be highly effective against road navigation systems.
GPS spoofing has been around for many years. This attack method can in theory be used to trick drivers into going to an arbitrary location, but in practice the instructions provided by the targeted navigation system often contradict the physical road (e.g. make a left turn on a highway), making it less likely to work in a real-world scenario.
Researchers now claim to have discovered a more efficient method that is less likely to raise suspicion. Using this technique an attacker could trick the victim into following an incorrect route (e.g. cause ambulances and police cars to enter a loop route), deviate a targeted vehicle to a specific location, or cause the target to enter a dangerous situation (e.g. enter a highway the wrong way).
For the attack to work, the attacker needs to know the target’s approximate destination and the most likely victim of this technique would be an individual who is not familiar with the area.




Timely course. Not free, but there is a free trial.
New Pluralsight Course: The State of GDPR - Common Questions and Misperceptions
… We wanted to produce this course now – after GDPR was in action – so that we could have a narrative on what we're learning since it's come into effect. There's a million resources telling everyone all the things they should and should not do (and a good whack of those disagreeing with each other too), this course is a fresh take on things and is far more focused on what's actually happening than it is speculating how the regs will be enforced.




The future for all those transportation services?
How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First
Harri Nieminen decided it was time to replace his car with an app.
He had owned a car in Helsinki for the past nine years but recently found he’d lost the patience for parking on crowded city-center streets, especially in snowy months. His almost-new Opel Astra had been sitting mostly idle, so he decided to get rid of it. This lifestyle shift came about with the help of an app offering unlimited rides on public transit, access to city bikes, cheap short-distance taxis and rental cars—all for one monthly fee.
… The concept that reshaped Nieminen’s transportation life has an unwieldy name in the industry: mobility as a service, or MaaS. It may become the biggest revolution in personal travel since Ford Motor Co.’s Model T popularized private ownership of motor vehicles a century ago.
The elements of mobility-as-a-service products are already familiar digital services—trip planning, ride hailing, car sharing—alongside the seamless booking, ticketing and payment common to every kind of mobile app. Instead of using one app for rides and local government apps for public transport, Whim offers a single app with a single fee. Users get to pick the most efficient way to get between any two places.
The aim is to eventually make personal cars obsolete by offering people a superior experience. “Your mobile operator can get you all your calls and all the mobile data you need,” said Sampo Hietanen, chief executive officer of MaaS Global Oy, the company behind Whim. “We’re trying to solve the big question in transportation: What do we need to offer to compete with car ownership?”
The cost of cars accounts for as much as 85 percent of personal transportation spending, according to Hietanen, even though the average car is used only 4 percent of the time. That implies a great potential for more efficient allocation: fewer cars shared by a larger group of part-time users.




The roots of privacy are rather tangled. An interesting read.
What Roe v. Wade Means for Internet Privacy
Roe v. Wade left Americans with the idea that privacy is something we can expect as citizens. But does the SCOTUS consider privacy a constitutional right?




Trying to legitimize Bitcoins or at least make it understandable?
IBM Is Helping Launch a Price-Stable Cryptocurrency Insured By the FDIC
The latest attempt to create a cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar, or "stablecoin," combines 21st-century technology with an invention from the Great Depression.
Announced Tuesday, a startup called Stronghold is launching USD Anchor, which will run on the rails of the Stellar blockchain and use its consensus mechanism to verify transactions. The token will be backed one-for-one with U.S. dollars held at a Nevada-charted trust company called Prime Trust, which in turn will deposit the cash at banks insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
IBM is partnering on the initiative with Stronghold, and said it will explore various use cases for the token with its financial institution clients.




Perspective.
Why Bank of America branches are disappearing
Bank of America (BAC) announced on Monday that deposits made on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are outpacing those made at branches for the first time.
Customers logged into Bank of America's mobile app 1.4 billion times last quarter.
… Bank of America's vast network of branches fell to 4,411 at the end of June, compared with 4,542 a year ago. The company has 1,720 fewer branches than it did in June 2008. That's a 28% drop.




Something for my students to play with? Can we do it right?
FBI Wish List: An App That Can Recognize the Meaning of Your Tattoos
EFF: “We’ve long known that the FBI is heavily invested in developing face recognition technology as a key component in its criminal investigations. But new records, obtained by EFF through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, show that’s not the only biometric marker the agency has its eyes on. The FBI’s wish list also includes image recognition technology and mobile devices to attempt to use tattoos to map out people’s relationships and identify their beliefs. EFF began looking at tattoo recognition technology in 2015, after discovering that the National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST), in collaboration with the FBI, was promoting experiments using tattoo images gathered involuntarily from prison inmates and arrestees. The agencies had provided a dataset of thousands of prisoner tattoos to some 19 outside groups, including companies and academic institutions, that are developing image recognition and biometric technology. Government officials instructed the groups to demonstrate how the technology could be used to identify people by their tattoos and match tattoos with similar imagery. Our investigation found that NIST was targeting people who shared common beliefs, with a heavy emphasis on religious imagery. NIST researchers, we discovered, had also bypassed basic oversight measures. Despite rigid requirements designed to protect prisoners who might be used as subjects in government research, the researchers failed to seek sign-off from the in-house watchdog before embarking on the project…”




I might use this when my handouts reach critical mass. Hardcover, paperback or ebook…


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