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This is the first video footage of a ram’s horn squid (Spirula spirula) .
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Accuracy isn’t great, but that it can be done at all is impressive.
Murtuza Jadiwala, a computer science professor heading the research project, said his team was able to identify the contents of texts by examining body movement of the participants. Specifically, they focused on the movement of their shoulders and arms to extrapolate the actions of their fingers as they typed.
Given the widespread use of high-resolution web cams during conference calls, Jadiwala was able to record and analyze slight pixel shifts around users’ shoulders to determine if they were moving left or right, forward or backward. He then created a software program that linked the movements to a list of commonly used words. He says the “text inference framework that uses the keystrokes detected from the video … predict[s] words that were most likely typed by the target user. We then comprehensively evaluate[d] both the keystroke/typing detection and text inference frameworks using data collected from a large number of participants.”
In a controlled setting, with specific chairs, keyboards and webcam, Jadiwala said he achieved an accuracy rate of 75 percent. However, in uncontrolled environments, accuracy dropped to only one out of every five words being correctly identified.
Other factors contribute to lower accuracy levels, he said, including whether long sleeve or short sleeve shirts were worn, and the length of a user’s hair. With long hair obstructing a clear view of the shoulders, accuracy plummeted.
Seny Kamara gave an excellent keynote talk this year at the (online) CRYPTO Conference. He talked about solving real-world crypto problems for marginalized communities around the world, instead of crypto problems for governments and corporations. Well worth watching and listening to.
iOS apps are repeatedly reading clipboard data, which can include all sorts of sensitive information.
While Haj Bakry and Mysk published their research in March, the invasive apps made headlines again this week with the developer beta release of iOS 14. A novel feature Apple added provides a banner warning every time an app reads clipboard contents. As large numbers of people began testing the beta release, they quickly came to appreciate just how many apps engage in the practice and just how often they do it.
This YouTube video, which has racked up more than 87,000 views since it was posted on Tuesday, shows a small sample of the apps triggering the new warning.
EDITED TO ADD (7/6): LinkedIn and Reddit are doing this.
I previously wrote about hacking voice assistants with lasers. Turns you can do much the same thing with ultrasonic waves:
Voice assistants—the demo targeted Siri, Google Assistant, and Bixby—are designed to respond when they detect the owner’s voice after noticing a trigger phrase such as ‘Ok, Google’.
Ultimately, commands are just sound waves, which other researchers have already shown can be emulated using ultrasonic waves which humans can’t hear, providing an attacker has a line of sight on the device and the distance is short.
What SurfingAttack adds to this is the ability to send the ultrasonic commands through a solid glass or wood table on which the smartphone was sitting using a circular piezoelectric disc connected to its underside.
Although the distance was only 43cm (17 inches), hiding the disc under a surface represents a more plausible, easier-to-conceal attack method than previous techniques.
Fantastic video:
Scientists had used a specialized camera system developed by Widder called the Medusa, which uses red light undetectable to deep sea creatures and has allowed scientists to discover species and observe elusive ones.
The probe was outfitted with a fake jellyfish that mimicked the invertebrates’ bioluminescent defense mechanism, which can signal to larger predators that a meal may be nearby, to lure the squid and other animals to the camera.
With days to go until the end of the two-week expedition, 100 miles (160 kilometers) southeast of New Orleans, a giant squid took the bait.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Neat video, and an impressive-looking squid. I can’t figure out how long it is.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
It’s likely the diamondback squid. There’s a video.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Last month, I gave a 15-minute talk in London titled: “Why technologists need to get involved in public policy.”
In it, I try to make the case for public-interest technologists. (I also maintain a public-interest tech resources page, which has pretty much everything I can find in this space. If I’m missing something, please let me know.)
Boing Boing post.
EDITED TO ADD (10/29): Twitter summary.
Another piglet squid video.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.