Congress might finally take some action. Lots of
them are old enough to need drug pumps, pacemakers, etc. The FDA
hasn't looked at this new technology seriously. I wonder how the
manufacturers justify the liability risk?
A researcher says a line of IV drug pumps can be
remotely hacked to deliver an incorrect, and possibly fatal, dosage
of drugs to patients.
Security researcher Billy Rios told
Wired that a range of pumps from manufacturer Hospira, including
one line that the company stopped selling in 2013, include a flaw
that allows someone to alter the device’s software to change the
dosage.
Hospira is able to update the pumps’ firmware,
but Rios says the devices aren’t able to recognize the difference
between an update from the manufacturer or from another party. He
also said a hacker could make it look as though the pump was still
delivering the correct dosage of the drug.
… He also says he told Hospira about the flaw
in one of the lines of pumps allowing hackers to deliver an incorrect
dosage a year ago, but the
company said it was not a problem. He then tested other
pumps produced by the company. The Food and Drug Administration
released an alert last month about vulnerabilities in the line of
pumps that Rios says he warned the company about last year.
But is it still spreading?
Stuxnet
Still Present in Some Organizations: Researchers
The
notorious Stuxnet malware is still actively running on some computers
and while the threat cannot be controlled by the original attackers,
its presence demonstrates the weak security posture of these
organizations.
Stuxnet,
reportedly developed by the United States and Israel, is a worm
designed to target industrial systems. The malware became known as
the world’s first cyber weapons after it caused serious damage at
Iranian nuclear facilities.
Now,
five years after it was first discovered, Stuxnet infections still
exist, according to Czech Republic-based security firm Kleissner &
Associates, which operates the botnet monitoring system Virus
Tracker.
In
a paper published last week, titled “Internet Attacks Against
Nuclear Power Plants,” the company provided some Stuxnet-related
statistics from Virus Tracker. Kleissner & Associates has the
ability to monitor Stuxnet infections because it has acquired two of
the command and control (C&C) domains used by the worm and
pointed them to Virus Tracker sinkhole servers.
According
to Kleissner, there were at least 153 unique machines infected with
Stuxnet in 2013 and 2014. Nearly half of these infections were
traced back to Iran, but some infected devices had also been spotted
in India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and China.
[The
report:
http://kleissner.org/download/Internet%20Attacks%20Against%20Nuclear%20Power%20Plants.pdf
This is what happens when you let computers vote!
(You have no constitutional right to drive.)
Poll: 1 in
4 Americans Supports Laws Restricting Human-Driven Cars
Never mind those occasional
fender-benders, humans. Face it. Robots are better drivers than
you because they don’t drive drunk, they don’t do drugs, they
don’t doze off and they don’t get distracted.
… Removing humans from the driving equation
might sound scary, but it seems more Americans could be warming up to
the Jetson-esque idea. Some are even in favor of laws that would
limit people driving cars, if the results of a poll recently
conducted by the Ferenstein
Wire, via Google Survey, are any indication.
Per the notably unscientific
Internet-based poll,
27 percent of those surveyed -- more than one in four -- support laws
restricting human-driven vehicles. In other words, they would be
okay with giving up their right to drive in order to pave the way for
possibly safer computer-driven cars.
(Related)
There are
about 1.7 million rear-end collisions on U.S. roads each year. Here’s
how to stop them.
There are about 1.7 million rear-end collisions on
U.S. roadways each year. About 1,7000 people die in those collisions
and another 500,000 are hurt.
Many of those most-common-of-all car accidents
could be avoided if auto makers begin making collision avoidance
systems standard equipment in their vehicles, the National
Transportation Safety Board said in a recommendation issued Monday.
Enough of these and you have a zone of barrage
balloons. Makes it hard for me to fly my drones safely.
The Colorado Department of Transportation is launching a
helium-filled "half-blimp, half-kite" above Interstate 25
on Tuesday for a three-day trial to see how well it monitors traffic,
officials said.
The 1,600-cubic-foot device, called a SkySentry,
will be tethered above I-25 and 70th Avenue and will use cameras to
assess traffic conditions, CDOT spokeswoman Amy Ford said Monday.
Law enforcement agencies and other groups have
used the device for monitoring, Ford said, but CDOT is the first
department to use it for traffic-monitoring purposes.
Speaking of drones... Many NFL stadiums have
overhead cameras that run on wires, but college and high school
football programs will no doubt want this technology. (Perhaps I
could write an App to turn players into little X's and O's to match
the playbook?)
The National Football League’s Dallas Cowboys
are using a drone to record footage of their practice sessions, ESPN
reports.
The team uses the drone to capture footage
directly overhead players in an attempt to supplement existing aerial
cameras in other areas of its practice field, according to the
report.
For my Risk Management students. Notice that TSA
can not protect US infrastructure from “rouge bull squirrels.”
Fortunately, they are not well organized.
Squirrel
knocks out power to thousands in San Francisco bay area
…
PG&E spokesman J.D. Guidi told the Contra Costa Times that
power was down in cities east of San Francisco, including Berkeley
and Oakland, on Monday night after a
squirrel "impacted equipment"
at the El Cerrito substation. He gave no details
For my students, all of whom seem to need it.
Skype
Translator coming as app, Microsoft wants you to speak in 4 languages
Microsoft has announced that its Skype Translator,
which can allow people to speak and understand 4 languages in real
time, will be coming to computers as an app by the end of July.
… Skype Translator is a tool that integrates
with Skype, a popular VoIP app that allows people to make voice and
video calls using internet. With the Translator, according to
Microsoft, people can talk to others in four languages -- Italian,
Spanish, Mandarin and English. So for example if they you are an
Indian and wants to talk to a Spanish person who doesn't know
English, you can use the Translator feature. You can speak in
English and it will be translated into Spanish in real time.
Skype Translator was first announced in December
2014. It was available to users through a web page. But now with
Microsoft coming out with an app, more people will be comfortable
using it.
I sense a challenge for my students!
These 5 SMS
Services Offer You the Internet Without a Data Plan
… Today Cool Websites and Apps outlines
services that take advantage of SMS to give you access to web
services without actually connecting to the Internet. Call it the
offline web.
Whether you’re hoping to make
your dumb phone smart or just save
money on your phone bill by ditching mobile data entirely, these
apps give you access to information without the need for Internet
access – thanks to SMS.
Send in the geeks! Some of my students will love
this, others will see it as just another language to learn.
Swift Goes
Open Source
Among all the talk about watch faces, music
streaming and iOS 9 many failed to grab a hold of perhaps the biggest
story of the day. Last year Apple introduced Swift, a revolutionary
new programming language that makes it easy to get started
programming, removing the reliance on Objective-C and simplifying
much of the process involved in turning raw code into finished apps.
Despite a massive surge of interest, many were
concerned that developing with Swift would see them hemmed-in to
Apple’s ecosystem. Apple just burst that bubble by announcing that
the language is to be made
open source (“later this year”), providing all
developers full access to Swift’s inner workings regardless
of platform. It’s worth pointing out you’ll still
need to pay the $99 developer fee to get your app listed on the App
Store, but that doesn’t mean you can’t build Swift apps for
another platform completely free of charge.
“We
think Swift is the next big programming language, the one
that we’ll all be doing application and system programming on for
20 years to come,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software
engineering. It’s also been updated to version 2.0, with an
assortment of improvements and tools for porting your old Swift 1.2
code.
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