firehose

Where’s your head at?

rigohc:

Spanish militia-women during the Spanish civil war    1936                                                                    FMLN guerrilas in El Salvador !980’s                                                                                  female IRA fighting British troops in northern Ireland 1970’s                               Mexican rebel Guerrillera in the Mexican Revolution 1910’s                                                                        

An anonymous reader writes: The military and private contractors have been toying with exoskeletal combat suits for a while, but Harvard's Wyss Institute has a new take on the concept. Rather than using a hard metal frame and the massively overpowered mechanical servos necessary to move it, the Soft Exosuit is a lightweight mesh of webbing combined with a series of strain sensors and basic microprocessors. "The suit mimics the action of leg muscles and tendons when a person walks, and provides small but carefully timed assistance at the leg joints without restricting the wearer's movement." The suit continually monitors its wearer's body position, movement, and muscular strain, providing small amounts of targeted support. The team has now received $2.9 million in funding from DARPA to refine the suit's design. They say they'll be working on medical applications for the suit as well as military ones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gateway of the Temple of Dendera, Egypt, ca. 1862

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All pictures by Dik Daniels

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djempirical

no surprise, of course.

It should come as no surprise that most mobile apps run some sort of analytics on user behaviour. But in the case of Facebook, the social network’s Messenger app for iOS apparently tracks quite a bit more than most users likely realize.

iOS forensics and security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski spent Tuesday morning disassembling Facebook Messenger’s iOS binary, at one point declaring via Twitter that “Messenger appears to have more spyware type code in it than I've seen in products intended specifically for enterprise surveillance.”

In an email, Zdziarski said that Messenger is logging practically everything a user might do within the app, from what and where they tap, to how often a device is held in portrait versus landscape orientation; even time spent in the Messenger app, versus the time it spends running in the background.

Related: The Canadian Government Is Creeping On Your Facebook

Some of this is expected behaviour for an app developer, of course, but of greater concern are the other things Zdziarski found, whose intended purpose is less clear. 

“[Facebook is] using some private APIs I didn’t even know were available inside the sandbox to be able to pull out your WiFi SSID (which could be used to snoop on which WiFi networks you’re connected to) and are even tapping the process list for various information on the device,” he wrote in an email.

On Twitter, Zdziarski said he’s worked for companies that write enterprise surveillance software that didn’t know this level of access was possible.

Messenger appears to have more spyware type code in it than I've seen in products intended specifically for enterprise surveillance

I asked independent security researcher Ashkan Soltani via email whether Facebook’s relationship with Apple—having a user’s Facebook account baked directly into iOS—might give Facebook access to private APIs and capabilities that other developers don't have. Soltani wrote that he believed my hunch was correct.

Multiple strings discovered by Zdziarski within the binary also have an ominous phrase, [“DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED”],  tacked onto the end. iPhone hacker Chpwn (also known as Grant Paul), who now works at Facebook chimed in via Twitter to say he was responsible for naming the strings, writing “the whole thing’s an inside joke.” 

However, it’s not clear what some of these functions, which have names such as “globalProviderMapData” and “isHeadPublisher” actually do, and why they would warrant the threat of termination, joking or not, if used.

Zdziarski cautioned via email that “a couple hours of tinkering around isn’t going to provide any meaningful conclusions… but there is a lot of code that suggests Facebook is running analytics on nearly everything it possibly can monitor on your device.”

Facebook declined to provide any official comment, but a spokesperson pointed me to the responses of Facebook Messenger developer Lucy Zhang, who told Zdziarski via Twitter that it’s “probably no surprise that we use analytics to understand usage and make the app faster [and] more efficient.”

She offered one such example where analytics told the team that users were using Like stickers often, “so we moved that feature so people can send in fewer taps.”

While it’s not out of the ordinary for app developers to run all sorts of analytics on their users to measure how an app is being used, it’s often unclear to users just how much data an app is capable of collecting—assuming they’re told such data is being collected in the first place. 

Even in cases where apps are upfront about permissions—as is the case with Facebook’s Android Messenger app—there is still a lack of nuance when explaining what, exactly, granting certain permissions might mean. Facebook faced backlash over its Messenger app for Android in August, when users questioned why the app was requesting access to their device’s camera, microphone, text messages and more, naturally assuming the worst.

The reasons turned out to be relatively benign, but the concern should serve as a reminder that it’s no longer enough for an app to simply request access to sensitive phone functions and sensors without explanation. Maybe it's part of the hangover since the revelations on the NSA courtesy of Edward Snowden, but app developers such as Facebook, as well as app store owners Apple and Google, have to do a better job at explaining why such access is needed, and how it will be used.

“Ultimately it comes down to whether or not you trust Facebook not to take advantage of their position on your device to snoop on you,” wrote Zdziarski. “The technical capabilities to do so are certainly there.”

Original Source

"I'm probably going to lose my fantasy football matchup this week cause all day can't play Sunday for disciplining his child Jesus help us"

submitted by youhatemeandihateyou [link] [150 comments]

Real Programmers via xkcd

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Each Saturday Morning here at Adafruit is Saturday Morning Cartoons! Be sure to check our cartoon and animated posts both nostalgic and new that inspire makers of all ages! You’ll find how-tos for young makers, approaches to learning about science and engineering, and all sorts of comic strip and animated Saturday Morning fun! Be sure to check out our Adafruit products featuring comic book art while you’re at it!

submitted by gagagagagagago [link] [44 comments]

my-foot-is-a-quesadilla:

How you think your D&D session is going to go:

How it usually ends up:

How I think my Pathfinder session is going to go:

How it usually ends up:

BruceS — *Raspberry Pi smart watch.

submitted by MrMangogogo [link] [8 comments]

alphadogg writes: Harvard College's CS50, the school's Introduction to Computer Science course for undergrads, has attracted about 1 in 8 students this fall — a new record for the school and yet another sign of just how hot this field is becoming for the job-hungry. Overall, 818 undergrads (or 12% of the student body) signed up for the challenging course this semester (PDF), and nearly 900 students are registered when factoring in graduate and cross-registered students. Topics on the syllabus include Linux, cryptography, HTML and JavaScript. David Malan, a Harvard CompSci grad, teaches the course.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes On Thursday, Google launched "App Runtime for Chrome (Beta)" which allows Android apps to run on Chrome OS without the need for porting. At the moment, only Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words, and Vine are available on the platform with the rest of the Play Store's offerings to come later. Google "built an entire Android stack into Chrome OS using Native Client" in order to achieve this.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jfruh writes If you send an email to support-de@google.com, Google's German support address, you'll receive an automatic reply informing you that Google will not respond to or even read your message, due to the large number of emails received at that address. Now a German court has ruled (PDF) that this is an unacceptable response, based on a German law saying that companies must provide a means for customers to communicate with them. Update: 09/12 15:47 GMT by S : Updated to fix the links.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shout:

Shout is a web IRC client that you host on your own server.

What features does it have?

• Multiple user support
• Stays connected even when you close the browser
• Connect from multiple devices at once
• Responsive layout — works well on your smartphone

Demo version.