There’s little concern independent or third-party candidates will win the presidency but they could siphon support from the ultimate Democratic and GOP nominees.
It’s undeniable that in HBO Max’s pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death, Edward Teach (Taika Waititi) and Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) are in love with each other. But in season two, David Jenkins is giving jilted first mate Izzy Hands (Con O’Neill) a chance to compete for the hearts of the two captains. Or at least, mess…
Cops use all sorts of tech to track individuals — facial recognition comes to mind, as does mimicking cell phone towers to get pings or mobile data tracking. But some people are finding ways to use technology to listen back. Bluetooth signals might reveal where police are and when they are and when devices like body cams or Tasers are activated.
“It’s be really weird if you had your volume turned all the way up and all of your devices are just screaming, right?,” Alan “Nullagent” Meekins, cofounder of Bluetooth tracking platform RFParty, said. “But that’s really what you’re doing in these wireless spectrums, they’re just constantly shouting.”
All Bluetooth devices have a unique 64 bit identifier called a MAC address. Often a chunk of that address is composed of an Organizational Unique Identifier (OUI), essentially a way for a device to say who it’s made by. A look at the IoT devices that are used by many police forces led Meekins and his cofounder Roger “RekcahDam” Hicks to Axon, a company best known for Tasers. Modern police kits are overflowing with Bluetooth-enabled tech (often also made by Axon), from the aforementioned Tasers and body cams, to in-vehicle laptops. Even the gun holsters supplied to some cops send a Bluetooth ping when a sidearm is unholstered. By just reading company documentation, they were able to find the OUI.
A Bluetooth identifier seems trivial, but it could reveal a lot of information about where cops are and what they’re up to, like when their body cams are recording or they turn on the sirens to respond to a call. “There’s the signal that is sent when a police officer basically thinks something’s recording worthy, if that’s the case, people can document that, detect that and there won’t be any question whether or not hey, there’s a body cam or there wasn’t body cam,” Meekins told Engadget. It’s a way to potentially determine whether certain evidence exists so that it can be produced more quickly in a records request — something police often “slow walk” Meekins said. As people run RFParty, the app will collect historical data. In the case of body cams, if the device begins recording, it typically sends a Bluetooth signal out to other devices. If a cop turns on a camera (or Taser or other IoT device), someone running the app could collect this data to record details about the incident.
It’s similar to radio waves: if you have the equipment to get past the music and news stations into the bands used by emergency response personnel (and once you know the language and codes to make sense of whats being broadcast there) you can listen in on cop radios to hear about arrests and where police might be patrolling.
An Axon spokesperson confirmed that the company uses Bluetooth capabilities for pairing in-car systems with mobile apps, and for its camera recording devices. Using Bluetooth connectivity helps with “ensuring that incidents are captured and that devices are connected to maximize visibility,” the spokesperson said. “Axon is working on additional measures and improvements to address concerns of tracking our devices over time. Specifically, rotation of unique BLE device addresses (known as MAC addresses) that can specifically identify our devices, and removing the need for including serial numbers in Bluetooth broadcasts to reduce the ability to track a specific device over time.”
No features in RFParty are designed specifically to track police, it’s a general Bluetooth scanning service, similar to existing services like Wigle.net or nRF Connect. But some of what’s displayed on its maps includes common Internet of Things devices used by police, including body cams. Anecdotally, users are already using RFParty for police tracking purposes.
“We have all this technology that there’s certain people who understand it, and can exploit it. But you know, most people can’t and I think there needs to be more knowledge given out,” Hicks told Engadget. In a talk at DefCon 31 this past August, Meekins showed what the Axon OUI is and privately provided a live demo to me of how a knowledgeable RFParty user could leverage that information.
Of course, having that historical data handy for accountability purposes requires people to be running RFParty in the vicinity of potential abuses of police power, and it’s unlikely the app will become popular on a scale where that data will be available for almost any such incident. Still, when cops have the power to use technology against nearly anyone, it’s interesting to see the tables turned.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-hackers-are-using-bluetooth-to-track-police-activity-140012717.html?src=rss
AfD was founded in 2013 with a focus against eurozone rescue packages but gained strength following the arrival of a large number of refugees and migrants in 2015.
Ahsoka is over (for now, at least it seems), and many questions remain. What are Thrawn’s plans? What will our heroes do to stop him? Just what great mysteries are out there for our other foes left to uncover? But an even sillier question lingers, too: what is up with the eyeballs on this show?
Despite what Jules Verne may have you believe, it’s not exactly possible to journey to the center of the Earth. As such, it’s pretty difficult to gain a full understanding of what the core of our planet looks like. NASA is trying the next best thing.
It’s set to launch a mission to an asteroid that’s understood to be largely made up of iron and nickel. In fact, this metal-rich asteroid, which is called 16 Psyche, is believed to once have been part of a planetary core. This is the first NASA mission to study an asteroid that has more metal than rock or ice.
Launch for the Psyche mission is targeted for 10:16AM ET on Thursday. The spacecraft will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida (this will be the first of several NASA science missions in which the primary payload will launch on one of those rockets). You can watch a live stream of the launch below.
The Psyche spacecraft is around the size of a small van. As soon as it reaches the asteroid, it will start sending images of 16 Psyche back to Earth. It’s equipped with a magnetometer, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer and a multispectral imager to study the asteroid. It will spend around two years snapping photos, mapping the asteroid’s surface and collecting data to gain a better understanding of 16 Psyche’s composition.
The spacecraft, which is powered by solar electric propulsion, is expected to reach 16 Psyche (which is in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter) in July 2029. If NASA had been ready to launch the mission last year, as was previously the plan, it might have been able to reach 16 Psyche as early as 2026.
NASA understands that the 173-mile wide 16 Psyche asteroid may, in fact, not be an exposed core of a planetesimal, an early planetary building block. The agency says that it might instead be the “leftover piece of a completely different kind of iron-rich body that formed from metal-rich material somewhere in the solar system.”
The spacecraft will have a second job to do. It will also test new laser communications tech from NASA JPL called Deep Space Optical Communications. This is said to be able to transfer data and images at least 10 times faster than conventional systems. The experiment will test how capable the system is of transmitting data at faster rates beyond the Moon. However, it won’t be used to send back any Psyche mission data.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/watch-nasa-launch-a-mission-to-study-a-metal-rich-asteroid-this-thursday-133048930.html?src=rss
“What miraculous alignment of the planets could bring two opposites together… and make them stick together for six decades?”
Gerwig said an iconic 1950s film served as inspiration for the “Barbie” scene due to its “dream ballet inside of a dream ballet.”
According to Reuters, OpenAI is exploring making its own artificial intelligence chips, even looking into an acquisition. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously blamed GPU shortages for users’ concerns regarding the company API’s speed and reliability, leading to these moves. OpenAI using its own chips could reduce its costs too. Based on analysis by Bernstein Research, each ChatGPT query costs the company around four cents.
At the moment, NVIDIA controls the market for chips that power AI applications. The Microsoft supercomputer OpenAI used to develop its technology, for instance, uses 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest backer, has been working on its own AI chip since 2019.
— Mat Smith
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NASA will give the public a look at the asteroid sample brought back to Earth by its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. A livestream of the reveal is set for 11 AM ET on Wednesday, October 11. OSIRIS-REx grabbed its sample from Bennu back in 2020, then spent a year-and-a-half observing the asteroid before returning to Earth in May 2021. “The very best ‘problem’ to have is that there is so much material, it’s taking longer than we expected to collect it,” said Christopher Snead, NASA’s deputy OSIRIS-REx curation lead.
Atari just announced pre-orders for a physical cartridge of the company’s once-ubiquitous 2600 console. The game, Save Mary, was developed during the console’s golden years, before being shelved when the 2600 went the way of the dodo. If you want to play it, you don’t need to dust down your old 2600. Conveniently, Atari sells an upgraded version of the console, called the 2600+. What a relief.
Bloomberg reports that X is testing a trio of subscription tiers to help solve its financial woes. Details are scant, but these paid subscription options are likely to impact the number of ads you might see when using the platform. It looks like it’ll break down into Basic, Standard and Plus. Basic users will continue to see the regular number of ads, while standard users will see half, equivalent to what folks who pay $8 each month get at the moment. Plus users will see no ads whatsoever, for however much that might cost.
This week, Cherlynn and Devindra chat with Engadget’s Sam Rutherford about everything from the Made by Google event. That includes the Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel Watch 2. We give Google credit for leaning on AI long before it was trendy, but we wonder if the Pixel 8 Pro’s temperature sensor will actually be useful.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-chatgpt-creator-openai-might-start-making-its-own-ai-chips-111521672.html?src=rss
The former president oh-so-modestly assessed the possibility of such an incident on his watch.
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