We at WIRED are winding down for the year and getting ready for what is sure to be a busy one. There is a fight going on.
We dove into why the public needs real-time flight tracking even if Musk claims it is the equivalent of doxing. The world's rich and powerful would be better off if the data were not publicly available. Musk is threatening legal action against the developer of the Elonjet tracker.
According to a new assessment from the US Department of State, internet disruptions in Iran are hurting the economy. It is difficult to calculate the economic impact of Tehran's internet black outs. It is not good according to experts.
You might have seen the Flipper Zero in a recent TikTok video, but don't think everything you see is true. WIRED's Dhruv Mehrotra got his hands on the palm-size device which packs an array of antennas that allow you to copy and broadcast signals from all types of devices While the Flipper Zero can't make an ATM spill out money, it does allow you to do a lot of other things that could get you into trouble. It allows you to see a world filled with radio waves.
That is not the only thing. We round up the security stories we didn't cover. To read the full story, click on the headline. Stay safe out there.
The life of a New York City cab driver is not easy. Russian hackers and a couple of their partners in Queens tried to get their own cut of the drivers' fares.
Two Queens men, Daniel Abayev and Peter Leyman, worked with Russians to gain access to the taxi dispatch system at New York's JFK airport. They created a group chat where drivers could secretly pay $10 to skip the sometimes hours-long line to be assigned a pickup, which would cost about a fifth of the flat fee passengers pay. The indictment doesn't say who the Russians are or how they got into JFK's dispatch system. Abayev and Leyman are said to have schemed to get access to the system by a number of methods, including bribing someone to insert a USB drive with malicious software into a dispatch operator's computer, and stealing one of their computers. Abayev wrote to his Russian contacts that he knew the Pentagon was being hacked. Can we hack the taxis?
As many as a thousand fraudulent line-skips a day were enabled by the scheme before it was shut down.
Paul Nakasone, the director of Cyber Command, has said that the organization is often engaged in "hunting forward." It means hacking foreign hackers before an event like a US election. As reported by The Washington Post, Cybercom targeted Russian and Iranian hackers in the upcoming election. One official told the Post that the operations usually go after the basic tools the hackers use to operate, including their computers, internet connections, and the like. In some cases, foreign software is discovered by Cybercom and shared with potential targets in the US to make it easier to detect.
Since the peak of foreign hacking of US elections, it has waned, but it hasn't stopped. According to a report by Mandiant, the Russian military intelligence agency appears to have targeted election websites with distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Two men, one from Wisconsin and the other from North Carolina, were charged with participating in a swatting scheme that targeted the owners of more than a dozen compromised Ring home security door cameras. The defendants phoned in false reports to law enforcement that a violent incident was happening at the victim's house, and then they streamed the police response to the hoax. The two men used the microphone of the Ring device to make fun of the police officers and victims.
Nelson is currently imprisoned in Kentucky in a different case. The federal charges were filed in the District of Arizona. Nelson and McCarty are accused of accessing computers without permission. Nelson has been charged with two counts of intentionally accessing a computer without authorization. Nelson will face an additional seven years for the additional charges if they are found guilty.
There was a simple message in March of last year. It has been five years since that sentiment was first expressed. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the streaming service will no longer allow password sharing in early23. According to a report, there are ways to stop people in Latin America from sharing passwords with each other. According to the company, more than 100 million people watch its shows and movies using other people's passwords, and it wants to make money from them. "I don't think consumers are going to love it right out of the gate," Ted Sarandos told investors. The Intellectual Property Office of the UK believes that sharing passwords for online streaming services could be in violation of the law. No one would ever be prosecuted.
The Roomba J7 uses a technology called "PrecisionVision navigation" to avoid objects in your home, such as piles of clothes on the floor. A built-in camera and computer vision allow the robot to do some things. One image of a woman on the toilet was posted online by gig economy workers in Venezuela. The photos and videos were captured by a development version of the J7 robot in 2020 and shared with a startup that helps train computer vision systems. The people using the machines agreed to share their data. The startup that leaked the images is being investigated by iRobot, the company that is being purchased by Amazon. The incident shows some of the privacy risks associated with the huge data sets used to train artificial intelligence applications.
Kelly wanted to see the Rockettes with her daughter. Conlon was kicked out of Radio City Music Hall due to the face recognition system run by Madison Square Garden Entertainment. Conlon is an attorney at a law firm that is currently litigating against the company. Conrad is not involved in that litigation. Before I told them, they knew who I was. They were aware of the firm I was associated with before I mentioned it to them. Conlon said that he was not allowed to be there. The attorney's expulsion was needed to avoid an adverse environment. Concerns over the use of face-recognition tech, which is so under regulated that a corporation can use it to punish its enemies, have been added to by the episode. I wish you a happy holidays.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
