Lifeboat Foundation

Android camera security threat, disclosed and since addressed, had spy vulnerabilities. These were fixed by Google and Samsung with a patch rolled out for Pixel and Samsung devices The recent headlines surrounding the flaw on Android devices teased a discomforting thought in the latest of numerous discomforting thoughts about security risks in the Android ecosystem.

Imagine your app is recording video and taking photos without your permission.

In short, attackers could hijack your phone camera. Dan Goodin in Ars Technica: This was all about “an app needed no permissions at all to cause the camera to shoot pictures and record video and audio.”

Over the last few years, rapid progress in AI has enabled our smartphones, social networks, and search engines to understand our voice, recognize our faces, and identify objects in our photos with very good accuracy. These dramatic improvements are due in large part to the emergence of a new class of machine learning methods known as Deep Learning.

Animals and humans can learn to see, perceive, act, and communicate with an efficiency that no Machine Learning method can approach. The brains of humans and animals are “deep”, in the sense that each action is the result of a long chain of synaptic communications (many layers of processing). We are currently researching efficient learning algorithms for such “deep architectures”. We are currently concentrating on unsupervised learning algorithms that can be used to produce deep hierarchies of features for visual recognition. We surmise that understanding deep learning will not only enable us to build more intelligent machines but will also help us understand human intelligence and the mechanisms of human learning. http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yann/research/deep/

Hacking the Pixel’s Titan M chip and finding exploits in the developer preview versions of Android will earn you the big bucks.

Google has increased the maximum prize for its Android bug bounty program to $1 million for anyone who can compromise the Titan M security chip found in its Pixel phones. The top prize is for a “full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence” of the dedicated security chip. On top of that, there’s an additional 50 percent bonus if a security researcher is able to find an exploit on specific developer preview versions of Android, resulting in a potential prize of $1.5 million. The new rewards take effect starting today.

Introduced with 2018’s Pixel 3, Google’s Titan M security chip cordons off your smartphone’s most sensitive data from its main processor to protect against certain attacks. Google says the chip offers “on-device protection for login credentials, disk encryption, app data, and the integrity of the operating system.” Since its introduction, the chip has also been integrated with Android’s security key functionality where it’s used to store a person’s FIDO credentials. Suffice it to say, the integrity of the Titan M is an important element for the security of recent Pixel devices.

Vulnerabilities in the Google Camera app left hackers able to take photos, and silently record audio and video, even when the phone was locked.

A Chinese contest has pitched the country’s greatest hackers against the world’s leading technologies—and sent a message to the West.

At Google’s hardware event this morning, the company introduced a new voice recorder app for Android devices, which will tap into advances in real-time speech processing, speech recognition and AI to automatically transcribe recordings in real time as the person is speaking. The improvements will allow users to take better advantage of the phone’s voice recording functionality, as it will be able to turn the recordings into text even when there’s no internet connectivity.

This presents a new competitor to others in voice transcriptions that are leveraging similar AI advances, like Otter.ai, Reason8, Trint and others, for example.

As Google explained, all the recorder functionality happens directly on the device — meaning you can use the phone while in airplane mode and still have accurate recordings.

A new study describes a novel approach for purifying rare earth metals, crucial components of technology that require environmentally-damaging mining procedures. By relying on the metal’s magnetic fields during the crystallization process, researchers were able to efficiently and selectively separate mixtures of rare earth metals.

Seventy-five of the periodic table’s 118 elements are carried in the pockets and purses of more than 100 million U.S. iPhone users every day. Some of these elements are abundant, like silicon in computer chips or aluminum for cases, but certain metals that are required for crisp displays and clear sounds are difficult to obtain. Seventeen elements known as rare earth metals are crucial components of many technologies but are not found in concentrated deposits, and, because they are more dispersed, require toxic and environmentally-damaging procedures to extract.

With the goal of developing better ways to recycle these metals, new research from the lab of Eric Schelter describes a new approach for separating mixtures of rare earth metals with the help of a magnetic field. The approach, published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, saw a doubling in separation performance and is a starting point towards a cleaner and more circular rare earth metals economy.

Circa 2017

Today, lithium is the active ingredient in batteries that power smart phones, laptops, and cars. But because of the price of lithium, researchers have been looking for another, more abundant element that could replace it. Several start-ups and established companies have tackled the idea of developing rechargeable batteries in which the active ingredient is sodium, lithium’s neighbor on the periodic table.

Besides its availability, sodium has several other important properties—not the least of which is its resistance to catching on fire. What’s more, “It was a good candidate because it could store a similar amount of energy as compared to lithium,” remembers Minah Lee, who does research on sodium batteries at Stanford University.

Continue reading “How Long Before Sodium Batteries Are Worth Their Salt?” »