Tech is Great, but E-waste is a Real Problem

As electronics have become increasingly ubiquitous, the never-ending upgrade churn fills an ever-larger e-graveyard. If that’s where the story ends, we’re in real trouble. The several years of use a typical device sees effectively become a short conveyor belt between mines around the world and the local landfill. The only sensible and sustainable thing to do is to recycle the materials in our devices—ideally right into the next generation of tech.

In the last few years, some computer manufactureshas started to move beyond just collecting e-waste for recyclers and is trying to “close the loop” by using some of the recycled material in its products—namely the plastic. These companies require purchasers to pay for a disposal fee when they buy the product. Because a limited number of types of plastic get used for electronics, e-waste is a better resource to work with than your household recycling bin would be. Most of the plastic that comes in is suitable to be used in new products. But it’s not quite that simple—paints, labels, “soft-touch” coatings, and additives like flame retardants can render plastic difficult or even impossible to work with.

Credits: 

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/where-do-laptops-go-when-they-die/

NASA Pumpkin Carving Contest

Shut it down, NASA wins. They made your pumpkin carving game look like child’s play. You should just give up right now. Put the knife away, set that pumpkin aside and use your time in a more productive manner—like looking at these beautiful pumpkins. While the annual event is called a competition, no one is officially crowned the champion. The only judge is the viewing public. We’ve collected our favorites in no particular order below. If you guys want to vote in the comments I’ll tally them up tomorrow and update the post with a winner.



Credits:
http://gizmodo.com/nasa-absolutely-killed-the-halloween-pumpkin-carving-co-1788384623

Google Reinvents the Whiteboard

Google's new Jamboard is a massive touch display and accompanying cloud service that's supposed to help business users brainstorm together. Jamboard works like a digital whiteboard, letting users sketch out ideas, attach digital sticky notes, plus bring in content from the web into a single, constantly updating workspace. People can use Jamboard to collaborate both on the 55-inch mega-display of the same name, or using accompanying tablet and smartphone apps for iOS and Android.

The hardware is slickly designed, and Google's functionality feels like it could be a major enhancement over analog brainstorming. But Google is asking companies to make a big commitment to Jamboard. The company isn't revealing final pricing for the appliance yet, but expects its hardware to cost less than $6,000 at release. That means a rollout of multiple Jamboards in an organization will likely cost tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. Jamboard also supports technology that will turn handwriting drawn on the screen into text, and convert drawn shapes into digital ones. It's a way to dress up the work that people are doing on the device.



Credits:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3134878/enterprise-applications/google-is-trying-to-reinvent-the-whiteboard.html

How to Protect Yourself with the Internet of Things

Technology experts warned for years that the millions of Internet-connected "smart" devices we use every day are weak, easily hijacked and could be turned against us. The massive siege on Dyn, a New Hampshire-based company that monitors and routes Internet traffic, shows those ominous predictions are now a reality. Who orchestrated the attack is still unknown. But how they did it — by enslaving ordinary household electronic devices such as DVRs, routers and digital closed-circuit cameras —is established.

The attackers created a digital army of co-opted robot networks, a "botnet," that spewed millions of nonsense messages at Dyn's servers. Like a firehose, they could direct it at will, knocking out the servers, turning down the flow and then hitting it full blast once again. As long as companies have been gleefully making and selling Internet-connected devices (the so-called Internet of Things or IoT), computer security experts have warned the security included with them was far too weak, or sometimes even nonexistent.


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Distributed Denial of Service Attack on Friday

Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, and a huge swath of other websites were down or broken on Friday morning. This happened as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. In order to understand how one DDoS attack could take out so many websites, you have to understand how Domain Name Servers (DNS) work. Basically, they act as the Internet’s phone book and facilitate your request to go to a certain webpage and make sure you are taken to the right place. If the DNS provider that handles requests for Twitter is down, well, good luck getting to Twitter. Some websites are coming back for some users, but it doesn’t look like the problem is fully resolved.

Customers suffering from disruption included Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Netflix, Reddit, Pagerduty, Shopify, Disqus, Freshbooks, Vox Media, PayPal, Etsy, Github, Heroku, Time, PlayStation, the Intercom app and more. While Dyn said that the issue has been resolved, users of the affected services were still reporting problems with connectivity at time of writing. Amazon Web Services was also impacted by the Dyn’s temporary collapse, and said: “Between 4:31 AM and 6:10 AM PDT, we experienced errors resolving the DNS hostnames used to access some AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.





Credits:
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/21/major-websites-across-east-coast-knocked-out-in-apparent-ddos-attack.html

Bill Belichick Can't take Microsoft Tablets Anymore

Bill Belichick is throwing in the towel in his ongoing fight with the use of tablets on the sideline. Responding to a question in a conference call Tuesday about headset issues the Patriots had during last week’s win over the Bengals, Belichick said he “can’t take it anymore” with the tablets, adding there isn’t enough consistency in the performance of the devices.

The decision comes after Belichick was caught on camera slamming down a sideline tablet following a Bills touchdown during their Oct. 2 matchup. He also railed for several minutes about ongoing issues with NFL technology, including the communication system between coaches in the press box and those on the field, as well as the coach-to-quarterback play calling system, which Belichick said “fail on a regular basis.” NFL teams were supposed to have more improved Microsoft Surface 4 tablets to use for still images and strategizing in games this season. Tablet use for in-game video playback was approved by the NFL for use in preseason games with the idea that teams could experiment with them and provide feedback for improvement.

Security risks with Pokemon Go

The extraordinary success of Pokémon Go has been surprising, even in the rapidly changing paradigm of the mobile application space. The game, which allows users to hunt down and capture virtual monsters, uses Augmented Reality (AR) technology to display the creatures in real world locations such as parks, homes, and offices.

Pokémon Go has already broken five Guinness World Records, including most revenue grossed by a mobile game in its first month: $206.5 million. There’s no denying that the game has set a new benchmark that the next generation of games will aim to surpass. However, businesses looking to model their strategy after the success of Pokémon Go need to also be aware of what the game’s developer Niantic missed – especially when it comes to security.

There were privacy concerns around the game’s initial launch due to over-requesting of permissions for a user’s Google account. The application asked for access to full account privileges, although Niantic maintains that the game never used any of the extended permissions. There were also reports of users downloading and installing fake pre-release versions of the software, which were found to contain malware.

Since addressing the initial issues, the ongoing battle between the developer and groups of hackers has focused on accessing and unlocking upcoming aspects of the game code. The current attacks have been relatively benign, with groups simply wishing to discover spoilers in the information coded into the game and its resources and graphics. Helper apps and websites also emerged to assist players in tracking down creatures using server data surreptitiously– frequently overwhelming the backend in the process.



Credits:
https://appdevelopermagazine.com/4509/2016/10/13/What-the-mobile-AR-phenomenon-has-taught-us-about-security

Package your GoPro in a Nerf Football

The AER is a Kickstarter project that looks to take the same concussion-avoiding principles of the classic foam Nerf football and apply it to your GoPro instead. AERVIDEO claims that the AER, which consists of a Nerf-inspired foam casing and fins, makes it possible to safely throw your GoPro up in the air to take drone-esque aerial shots at a fraction of the price of a decent drone. It’s an idea that brings to mind Jonas Pfeil’s Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera, which similarly took a bunch of cameras and fit them into a foam ball for interesting aerial shots.

The problem is that while drones are powered flying devices that allow you to control where your camera is going and what you're shooting, the AER is quite literally flinging a GoPro in the sky on a wing and a prayer and hoping you get something good out of the same arcing throw. However, the price is certainly cheaper than most drones, selling for $55 on Kickstarter (on the other hand, a Nerf Vortex football costs $12.99). The company hopes to start shipping the AER in January, with the usual reminder that this is a crowdfunding campaign for a company that hasn’t shipped anything before, so use your best judgement when backing.



Credits:
http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/10/11/13241470/aer-kickstarter-gopro-nerf-vortex-football

Yahoo Searches Users Email for FBI

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter. The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events. Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified. According to two of the former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc .



Credits:
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/yahoo-reportedly-scanned-emails-for-nsa-fbi/

Quadriplegic Now A Licenced Driver in Semi Autonomous Car

Sam Schmidt is no ordinary race car driver after suffering a devastating accident in training that rendered him a quadriplegic back in 2000. Now he's also the first American to have been handed a driving license that permits him to use an autonomous vehicle on public highways. The state of Nevada has announced that Schmidt is able to drive a modified Corvette Stingray Z06 that is controlled just with the motion of his head, breath and voice commands. There's a little stretching of the definition of autonomous, here, since Schmidt is directly in control of the car himself. The vehicle, however, does much of the heavy lifting for him, and so qualifies under Nevada state law as self-driving. For instance, Schmidt controls the gear shift through voice commands, that the car then handles automatically, while a sip-and-puff device enables him to control acceleration and braking. The vehicle's customization was handled by Arrow Electronics as part of its semi-autonomous motorcar project

The granting of the license is a huge step forward in enabling disabled people to regain their independence, since Schmidt can now travel ostensibly where he wants. Nevada will also use it to burnish its credentials as a tech-friendly city, since it now houses plenty of bleeding-edge tech startups including Hyperloop One and Faraday Future -- not to mention that it's also the home of Tesla's Gigafactory. It's also a big deal for the world of semi-autonomous vehicles, since legislators may look more favorably upon cars with humans behind the wheel. After all, most of the alarmism that currently surrounds autopilot systems is that a computer can't make the sort of snap judgments a person can.

Link to the video.

Credits:
http://www.forbes.com/video/5141787625001/

Hackers are Attacking Voting Systems

Concerns are growing over the possibility of a rigged presidential election. Experts believe a cyberattack this year could be a reality, especially following last month's hack of Democratic National Committee emails. Roughly 70 percent of states in the U.S. use some form of electronic voting. Hackers told CBS News that problems with electronic voting machines have been around for years. The machines and the software are old and antiquated. But now with millions heading to the polls in three months, security experts are sounding the alarm.

CBS News learned that only 60 percent of states routinely conduct audits post-election by checking paper trails. But not all states even have paper records, like in some parts of swing states Virginia and Pennsylvania, which experts say could be devastating. The Election Assistance Commission told CBS News that it ensures all voting systems are vigorously tested against security standards and that systems certified by the EAC are not connected to the Internet.



Credits:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/rigged-presidential-elections-hackers-demonstrate-voting-threat-old-machines/