Lifeboat Foundation

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO. — It’s not easy to get into the GPS room. A security cocoon typical of U.S. military installations protects Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado, but the windowless home of the 2nd Space Operations Squadron (2SOPS) lies within the base’s “restricted access area.” A gatehouse, extra vehicle barriers, armed guards, monitored communication channels, and a total ban on smartphones stand between the outside world and the place where the U.S. Air Force operates the GPS satellite constellation.

Inside you’ll find a hallway lined with keypad-controlled doors. Behind each is a room with 10-person teams who fly satellites. The rooms are staffed around the clock. The 2SOP squadron not only runs the constellation that provides global navigation and precise time data to civilian and military users.

Continue reading “The Future of GPS Is Taking Shape Inside These Locked Rooms” »

How fast does your phone charge? And how fast do you want your future smartphone to charge? At the moment, one of the fastest charging technologies has been presented by Xiaomi. Its 100W charging seems to be from another planet. But the smartphone makers are working hard to overcome this technology. Actually, this has its own reasons. We mean, still, there is no technology allowing the manufacturers to bring more power to the same capacity battery. So as the use applications are getting wider, the companies have to solve the power shortage problem. Seems, new technology has been already developed. And if nothing accidental happens, it will appear on future phones quite soon.

Samsung’s leaked Android 10 roadmap has a lot of blanks which raise questions about many devices and there should be an official confirmation soon.

Android camera security threat, disclosed and since addressed, had spy vulnerabilities. These were fixed by Google and Samsung with a patch rolled out for Pixel and Samsung devices The recent headlines surrounding the flaw on Android devices teased a discomforting thought in the latest of numerous discomforting thoughts about security risks in the Android ecosystem.

Imagine your app is recording video and taking photos without your permission.

In short, attackers could hijack your phone camera. Dan Goodin in Ars Technica: This was all about “an app needed no permissions at all to cause the camera to shoot pictures and record video and audio.”

Over the last few years, rapid progress in AI has enabled our smartphones, social networks, and search engines to understand our voice, recognize our faces, and identify objects in our photos with very good accuracy. These dramatic improvements are due in large part to the emergence of a new class of machine learning methods known as Deep Learning.

Animals and humans can learn to see, perceive, act, and communicate with an efficiency that no Machine Learning method can approach. The brains of humans and animals are “deep”, in the sense that each action is the result of a long chain of synaptic communications (many layers of processing). We are currently researching efficient learning algorithms for such “deep architectures”. We are currently concentrating on unsupervised learning algorithms that can be used to produce deep hierarchies of features for visual recognition. We surmise that understanding deep learning will not only enable us to build more intelligent machines but will also help us understand human intelligence and the mechanisms of human learning. http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yann/research/deep/

Hacking the Pixel’s Titan M chip and finding exploits in the developer preview versions of Android will earn you the big bucks.

Google has increased the maximum prize for its Android bug bounty program to $1 million for anyone who can compromise the Titan M security chip found in its Pixel phones. The top prize is for a “full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence” of the dedicated security chip. On top of that, there’s an additional 50 percent bonus if a security researcher is able to find an exploit on specific developer preview versions of Android, resulting in a potential prize of $1.5 million. The new rewards take effect starting today.

Introduced with 2018’s Pixel 3, Google’s Titan M security chip cordons off your smartphone’s most sensitive data from its main processor to protect against certain attacks. Google says the chip offers “on-device protection for login credentials, disk encryption, app data, and the integrity of the operating system.” Since its introduction, the chip has also been integrated with Android’s security key functionality where it’s used to store a person’s FIDO credentials. Suffice it to say, the integrity of the Titan M is an important element for the security of recent Pixel devices.

Vulnerabilities in the Google Camera app left hackers able to take photos, and silently record audio and video, even when the phone was locked.

A Chinese contest has pitched the country’s greatest hackers against the world’s leading technologies—and sent a message to the West.