helmet makes sense. Except perhaps for some riders where there are no helmet laws whatsoever: Illinois, Iowa and New Hampshire (whose state motto leaves out the worst of the possibilities: Live Free or Die — or spend the rest of your life with a traumatic brain injury.)
, that will drive home the point. In it, a young woman is riding a scooter when a door opens on a parked car, knocking her off the scooter and into the path of a truck. The truck runs over her helmeted head.
She apparently survived with just bruises and cuts on her scalp, and was even able to provide a quote: “Without the helmet, I think I would have been dead,” said the woman identified only as Ms. Zhu, a mother of two.
UCLA scientists and engineers have developed a new process for assembling semiconductor devices. The advance could lead to much more energy-e?cient transistors for electronics and computer chips, diodes for solar cells, light-emitting diodes, and other semiconductor-based devices.
Their method joins a semiconductor layer and a metal electrode layer without the atomic-level defects that typically occur when other processes are used to build semiconductor-based devices. Even though those defects are minuscule, they can trap electrons traveling between the semiconductor and the adjacent metal electrodes, which makes the devices less e?cient than they could be. The electrodes in semiconductor-based devices are what enable electrons to travel to and from the semiconductor; the electrons can carry computing information or energy to power a device.
This is a video of Youtuber The King Of Random demonstrating the robot arm flamethrower he built. It’s pretty sweet, although I’m not sure how I feel about having a flamethrower mounted to my arm in the event something goes horribly wrong (ie: it catches fire itself) and I need to toss it and start thinking about who I’m going to blame for the accidental arson I just committed. My brother is always a safe bet. "I live 2,000 miles away." Don’t listen to him, detective, he owns a jet.
Keep going for the video, but actual testing starts at 2:10 and there’s a worthwhile green flame test at 3:16.
Thanks to Rob, who agrees the only opinion that matters when it comes to flamethrowers is Trogdor’s.
via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome http://geekologie.com/
This is a brief demonstration video of Centauro, a centaur (not the ones from Fallout) inspired search and rescue robot developed by engineers at the Humanoids and Human Centered Mechatronics Lab at the Italian Institute of Technology. Did I mention it has axe blades for hands that can chop super flimsy boards in half? I’m surprised they didn’t go with chainsaws.
[Centauro] can lift heavy items, poke holes in fences and easily cut through wood and other objects. Lead engineer on the project Nikolaos Tsagarakis has specifically stated the goal of the Centauro to be "…capable of using unmodified human tools for solving complex bimanual manipulation tasks, such as connecting a hose or opening a valve, in order to relieve the situation" in an emergency.
The future goal isn’t to have Centauros operate autonomously, but rather "where a human operator is telepresent with its whole body in a Centaur-like robot, which is capable of robust locomotion and dexterous manipulation in the rough terrain and austere conditions characteristic of disasters." So they’ll be human-controlled, that’s a relief. Because I imagine if they were operating autonomously these search and rescue missions would end a lot differently. Centauro, report in. "There were no survivors." Dammit! Wait, why are your axe hands so bloody?
Keep going for the video.
Thanks to Jeffrey S, who’s not convinced ‘search and rescue’ isn’t Italian for ‘seek and destroy’.
via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome http://geekologie.com/
Verizon “grossly overstated” its 4G LTE coverage in government filings, potentially preventing smaller carriers from obtaining funding needed to expand coverage in underserved rural areas, a trade group says.
The Federal Communications Commission last year required Verizon and other carriers to file maps and data indicating their current 4G LTE coverage. The information will help the FCC determine where to distribute up to $4.5 billion in Mobility Fund money over the next 10 years. The funds are set aside for “primarily rural areas that lack unsubsidized 4G,” the FCC says.
If Verizon provided the FCC with inaccurate data, the company’s rural competitors might not be able to get that government funding.
“Verizon’s claimed 4G LTE coverage is grossly overstated,” the Rural Wireless Association (RWA), which represents rural carriers, told the FCC in a filing yesterday.
Accurate data needed to improve coverage
The FCC allows carriers to challenge other carriers’ data, but the rural providers say they face great expense in trying to gather the necessary evidence.
“Verizon should not be allowed to abuse the FCC challenge process by filing a sham coverage map as a means of interfering with the ability of rural carriers to continue to receive universal service support in rural areas,” the RWA wrote.
The RWA asked the FCC to investigate Verizon’s claimed coverage.
“RWA’s members are in the middle of the Challenge Process but are expending enormous time and financial resources in their efforts due to inaccurate data submitted by Verizon,” the group said. “RWA requests that the Commission investigate the 4G LTE coverage claimed by Verizon and require re-filing of Verizon’s data to correct its overstated coverage.”
Verizon denied any wrongdoing. “We are reviewing RWA’s filing, but we are confident that our Mobility Fund map is fully consistent with the FCC’s mapping specifications,” a Verizon spokesperson told Ars.
Verizon also addressed an earlier version of the RWA’s claims in a letter to the FCC last month.
The Mobility Fund is part of the FCC’s Universal Service Fund, which is paid for by Americans through fees imposed on phone bills.
RWA: Verizon falsely claimed to cover entire Oklahoma Panhandle
Verizon claims to cover almost all of the Oklahoma Panhandle, an area of 14,778.47 square kilometers, the RWA wrote. But an engineering firm hired by PTCI (Panhandle Telephone Cooperative, Inc.) “used publicly available information and the FCC-adopted 5Mbps downlink standard to produce a map that estimated that Verizon’s coverage area should be approximately 6,806.49 square kilometers in the Oklahoma Panhandle—not even half of the LTE coverage area Verizon publicly claims to serve,” the RWA wrote.
The filing continued:
Since this estimated propagation map was compiled, PTCI has driven more than 37,000 miles in order to compile data for the MF-II [Mobility Fund II] challenge process. PTCI’s speed test data collection included a total of 402,573 test points—drive tests taken using Verizon-specified devices that are on plans not subject to network prioritization or throttling. Of the total test points collected, 357,374 (88.8 percent) tested below 5Mbps download speed or did not register 4G LTE service at all on Verizon-designated handsets. The results of the speed tests taken by PTCI largely bear out [the engineering firm’s] initial Verizon propagation projections.
Carriers in other areas would presumably have to undergo similarly laborious and costly processes in order to challenge Verizon data. PTCI estimates that its research “will cost close to $1 million—more than half of which could have been avoided but for overstated Verizon coverage,” the RWA said.
The filing also states:
$1 million is a hefty price tag to test an area comprised of only three counties. Other RWA members are seeing similar Challenge Process costs. Pioneer Cellular, also based in Oklahoma, estimates that it will take 20 drivers 75 days to complete testing in the 24,010 drive-testable, challengeable square kilometers of its licensed service territory. Like PTCI, Pioneer expects to spend nearly $1 million to complete the challenge process. This includes $600,000 in labor costs, $247,000 in mileage, $48,000 for handsets, and $96,000 for data usage. Sagebrush Cellular, based in Montana, expects to spend more than $1.5 million to participate in the challenge process. This figure includes $275,000 for project management and other labor, $62,000 for mapping and $1,178,000 for drive testing expenses.
Verizon disputes methodology
Verizon’s letter to the FCC said that its map is accurate, and was based on “a sophisticated propagation model that incorporates industry best practices for propagation modeling.”
“The [PTCI’s] consultants’ coverage map underestimates Verizon’s Mobility Fund coverage because it fails to take into account all of the Verizon cell sites that provide coverage to customers in the Oklahoma Panhandle,” Verizon also wrote. “The consultants’ coverage map reflects only the Verizon cell sites that are actually located in the Oklahoma Panhandle…. Because the Oklahoma Panhandle is only 34 miles across, Verizon cell sites in adjacent areas of neighboring states are able to provide coverage to a significant portion of the Oklahoma Panhandle.”
Verizon questioned whether the drive tests suffered from “speed measurement errors,” and said that drive tests finding sub-5Mbps speeds are “not evidence that Verizon’s coverage map is inconsistent with the Commission’s mapping standards.”
The FCC acknowledged “that the ’80 percent cell edge probability’ component of the mapping specifications could result in sub-5Mbps speed measurements in areas shown as covered by the Mobility Fund maps,” Verizon said. But the FCC declined to adopt stricter measuring requirements because that would result in government funding “being used to upgrade or over-build 4G LTE networks rather than to expand 4G LTE coverage to unserved areas,” Verizon said.
The RWA remains convinced that Verizon exaggerated coverage, and said it believes an FCC investigation into Verizon’s claimed 4G LTE coverage “could save prospective challengers millions of dollars apiece” and open the challenge process to more companies “who are currently deterred from participating in the process by the enormous cost involved.”
If the RWA is correct, this could make more rural areas eligible for Mobility Fund dollars, benefiting customers who would get better coverage and more choices.
We asked the FCC if it will take up the RWA’s request for an investigation into Verizon’s coverage claims and will update this story if we get an answer.
In late 2016, security researcher Justin Shattuck was on assignment for an organization that was under a crippling denial-of-service attack by a large number of devices, some of which appeared to be hosted inside the network of a large European airport. As he scanned the airport’s network from the Internet—and later, with the airport operators’ permission, from inside the network—he was eventually able to confirm that the devices were indeed part of several previously unseen botnets that were delivering record-setting denial-of-service attacks on websites.
One of the infected devices was a wireless gateway from Sierra Wireless. Authorized IT administrators used it to connect to the airport network in the event that primary connection methods failed. Surprised that such a sensitive piece of equipment could become a foot soldier in a denial-of-service attack, Shattuck began to investigate. What he found shocked him. Not only did an Internet scan show that 40,000 such gateways were running in other networks, but a large percentage of them were exposing a staggering amount of sensitive data about the networks they were connected to.
Affecting human life
Worse still, it turned out that many of the unsecured gateways were installed in police cars, ambulances, and other emergency vehicles. Not only were the devices openly broadcasting the locations of these first responders, but they were also exposing configurations that could be used to take control of the devices and, from there, possibly control dash cameras, in-vehicle computers, and other devices that relied on the wireless gateways for Internet connections.
An informal probe at the time found that 47 municipalities and 29 police forces were using the unsecured devices. At one point early on, Shattuck, who is principal threat researcher for F5 Networks, tracked several vehicles as they drove around Houston. By tracking their locations over time and noticing the places they stopped regularly, Shattuck soon figured out they were police cruisers.
Shattuck said he has spent the past 22 months investigating the problem and helping wireless gateway providers—which, besides Sierra Wireless, also includes Moxa and Digi—to begin fixing it. Despite the efforts, he said scans regularly show large numbers of unsecured devices continue to expose not only emergency first responders but also remote pipelines, hydrogen refueling stations, traffic monitoring systems, tolls, bridges, and airports. Now, after almost two years of keeping the problem a carefully guarded secret, he plans to discuss it in detail Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.
“It’s time to talk about this,” Shattuck told Ars. “This affects human life in ways you only see in movies.”
Shattuck said one of his chief concerns is that the unsecured devices reveal a host of sensitive information about first responders in real time. When someone first starts monitoring a feed, it’s not immediately clear that it’s coming from a device located in a police car or ambulance, but with a small amount of tracking it quickly becomes clear. A vehicle, for instance, that regularly shows up at the same precinct every eight hours is almost certainly a police cruiser. Similarly, a vehicle that frequently visits hospital emergency rooms is likely an ambulance. Often, Shattuck would see police cruisers regularly stop at a residence and stay there for several hours, an indication that the location might be the home of the officer.
Divulging that information over the open Internet presents a variety of risks. The most serious is the danger to first responders when their real-time location is broadcast without their knowledge. Police officers often rely on the secrecy of their location. Criminals or organized terrorists who got a hold of a feed might use it in a physical attack or to evade law enforcement. Because unsecured devices also give up configuration details about the networks they connect to, skilled hackers might also use the information to access police or hospital networks, monitor or erase dash cam footage, or monitor drivers’ Internet or radio communications.
“If someone can tell where those police officers are, then you can start to reroute them,” Shattuck said. “You can monitor them. You can tamper with the trusted device by taking it offline or man-in-the-middle the service.”
No easy fix
Fixing the problem has proven vexing, in part because it doesn’t stem from a single cause. In some cases, it’s the result of firmware bugs that don’t properly restrict Internet-reachable devices to authorized users. In other cases, it’s because the devices shipped with default login credentials that no one changed. In still other cases, someone configured services that leak sensitive data. The devices affected include Sierra Wireless Airlink models LS300, GX400, GX/ES440, GX/ES450, and RV50; the Digitransport WR44; and the Moxa Oncell G3.
“The central issue is that devices have been deployed with the configuration UI exposed to the public Internet instead of making use of a platform such as ALMS [short for Airlink Managed Service] for secure remote management and/or using product security features such as Trusted IP to restrict access to the device to approved hosts,” Larry LeBlanc, the chief security engineer for Sierra Wireless, said of the cause of his company’s products being unsecured. In many cases, third-party services are installing the devices using static, publicly accessible IP addresses and not changing default credentials.
Over the past few years, Sierra Wireless has issued six advisories here, here, here, here, here, and here. New Sierra Wireless products now ship with all available security patches and a secure-by-default posture—for example, the configuration interface hasn’t been enabled by default.
The company has also established a free security concierge service to help users secure their devices. Anyone who operates Airlink gateways reachable from the public Internet can use the service by calling Sierra Wireless Technical support at 877-552-3860. People who use gateways from other manufacturers should contact their technical support departments.
Shattuck said that despite how overlooked the small devices are, they represent a risk to emergency first responders.
“To them it’s just a black box in the ambulance,” he said. “They have no idea that little black box you hit your head on is the thing that lets people in. The point is we can control services connected to the device.”
Redditor SuperFryX created this illustration listing every trooper variant in the Imperial Military featured in “canon” Star Wars material so far. Click on the picture below to get a larger version.
