Author: peterjang73

When you buy a TV streaming box, there are certain things you wouldn’t expect it to do. It shouldn’t secretly be laced with malware or start communicating with servers in China when it’s powered up. It definitely should not be acting as a node in an organized crime scheme making millions of dollars through fraud. However, that’s been the reality for thousands of unknowing people who own cheap Android TV devices.

In January, security researcher Daniel Milisic discovered that a cheap Android TV streaming box called the T95 was infected with malware right out of the box, with multiple other researchers confirming the findings. But it was just the tip of the iceberg. Today, cybersecurity firm Human Security is revealing new details about the scope of the infected devices and the hidden, interconnected web of fraud schemes linked to the streaming boxes.

Human Security researchers found seven Android TV boxes and one tablet with the backdoors installed, and they’ve seen signs of 200 different models of Android devices that may be impacted, according to a report shared exclusively with WIRED. The devices are in homes, businesses, and schools across the US. Meanwhile, Human Security says it has also taken down advertising fraud linked to the scheme, which likely helped pay for the operation.

“They’re like a Swiss Army knife of doing bad things on the internet,” says Gavin Reid, the CISO at Human Security who leads the company’s Satori Threat Intelligence and Research team. “This is a truly distributed way of doing fraud.” Reid says the company has shared details of facilities where the devices may have been manufactured with law enforcement agencies.

Human Security’s research is divided into two areas: Badbox, which involves the compromised Android devices and the ways they are involved in fraud and cybercrime. And the second, dubbed Peachpit, is a related ad fraud operation involving at least 39 Android and iOS apps. Google says it has removed the apps following Human Security’s research, while Apple says it has found issues in several of the apps reported to it.

First, Badbox. Cheap Android streaming boxes, usually costing less than $50, are sold online and in brick-and-mortar shops. These set-top boxes often are unbranded or sold under different names, partly obscuring their source. In the second half of 2022, Human Security says in its report, its researchers spotted an Android app that appeared to be linked to inauthentic traffic and connected to the domain flyermobi.com. When Milisic posted his initial findings about the T95 Android box in January, the research also pointed to the flyermobi domain. The team at Human purchased the box and multiple others, and started diving in.

In total the researchers confirmed eight devices with backdoors installed—seven TV boxes, the T95, T95Z, T95MAX, X88, Q9, X12PLUS, and MXQ Pro 5G, and a tablet J5-W. (Some of these have also been identified by other security researchers looking into the issue in recent months). The company’s report, which has data scientist Marion Habiby as its lead author, says Human Security spotted at least 74,000 Android devices showing signs of a Badbox infection around the world—including some in schools across the US.

Humanity’s biggest and most ambitious plan to search for extraterrestrial life is about to go back to the drawing board.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have been working on a strategy to fly a set of Mars rocks, carefully collected by the Perseverance rover, back to Earth for study. But a new independent assessment of the plan says it can’t be done on current budgets and schedules. The entire project will probably cost between US$8 billion and $11 billion — far more than the roughly $4 billion estimated in a previous independent review report, issued three years ago. And there’s a “near zero probability” of the missions launching in 2027 and 2028, as the space agencies had hoped. Even pushing the launch dates out to 2030 would still cost between US$8 billion and $9.6 billion, the report estimates — comparable with the cost of building the James Webb Space Telescope, the single most expensive astronomy project in history.

The report, released on 21 September, stresses that Mars sample return is strategically important to the space agencies, in that it would demonstrate US and European ‘soft power’ at a time when China has also announced plans to bring back rocks from Mars. The mission is also scientifically important: it is the culmination of a decades-long quest to search for life beyond Earth. But the current plan is unworkable, according to the report, which was commissioned by NASA and led by a former NASA manager, Orlando Figueroa.

NASA says it will put current plans on hold and come up with an alternative strategy by early next year. “It’s going to take a little time for us to assess the path forward,” says Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary-science division in Washington DC. The recommendations from the report are “big”, she says. “They’re not things that can be answered overnight.”

In a statement, ESA said it is evaluating how it can adjust its plan while still achieving the overall mission objectives. “We are conducting preliminary studies to assess all options given the various scenarios and will inform member states and coordinate with NASA on the outcome as soon as possible.”

A valuable collection

As currently envisioned, a Mars sample-return mission would involve NASA building a lander that would fly to the Red Planet to grab up to 30 rock samples, as well as a rocket that would blast off from the Martian surface to carry them into orbit around Mars. ESA would build the spacecraft to retrieve the precious cargo from orbit and fly it back to Earth.

Scientists can analyse the rocks in much greater detail in laboratories on Earth than with the compact instruments available on robotic rovers. The analysis would include hunting for ‘biosignatures’, molecules or other signals of past life in the samples. “These measurements are difficult to do remotely,” says Daniel Glavin, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “You really want the samples back and in the lab.”

NASA’s Perseverance rover has already collected a bevy of samples from Mars’s Jezero Crater and has even placed ten sealed tubes, containing rock cores, on the ground for possible retrieval. The rover continues to travel around Jezero, gathering more samples that make its collection increasingly valuable as time goes on, the report says. The rocks gathered so far formed in an ancient river delta and lake that were probably once similar to life-friendly environments on Earth.

Competing priorities

Mars sample return was one of the highest-ranked priorities recommended for NASA in the last two planetary ‘decadal’ surveys — reports, put together with input from the research community, that aim to guide the direction of US planetary science for the following ten years. But the project has struggled to remain affordable as engineers have refined the designs for the various spacecraft that would be part of the mission. The earlier independent review, which NASA commissioned from experts outside the agency specifically to head off problems with unexpected cost increases, recommended spending $3.8 billion to $4.4 billion on the sample-return project.

But that was before engineers had a full sense of what would be involved and hence how much it would cost, Glaze says. And NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which would lead much of the Mars sample-return project, has struggled with an overstretched work force. This led NASA to delay last year’s planned launch of a separate mission, a spacecraft destined for the asteroid Psyche.

There are also questions about how to balance the cost of Mars sample return against other missions in the $3.2-billion budget for NASA’s planetary-science division. The most recent decadal survey, released in 2022, recommended limiting the cost of Mars sample return to no more than 35% of the division’s overall budget. That’s a big challenge as the agency also tries to keep funding going for other priority projects, such as the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, slated for later this decade, and a mission to Uranus next decade.

That means all eyes remain on how to pay for Mars sample return. “The community knew that prioritization of a multi-mission effort and the single most ambitious effort in the history of planetary sciences would have challenges,” says Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who helped to lead the most recent decadal survey. “That’s why the [survey] highlights the importance of NASA working with Congress to augment the budget and figure out the appropriate funding profile to get Mars sample return done.”

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 27, 2023.

After evidence surfaced in 2018 that leading face-analysis algorithms were less accurate for people with darker skin, companies including Google and Meta adopted measures of skin tone to test the effectiveness of their AI software. New research from Sony suggests that those tests are blind to a crucial aspect of the diversity of human skin color.

By expressing skin tone using only a sliding scale from lightest to darkest or white to black, today’s common measures ignore the contribution of yellow and red hues to the range of human skin, according to Sony researchers. They found that generative AI systems, image-cropping algorithms, and photo analysis tools all struggle with yellower skin in particular. The same weakness could apply to a variety of technologies whose accuracy is proven to be affected by skin color, such as AI software for face recognition, body tracking, and deepfake detection, or gadgets like heart rate monitors and motion detectors.

“If products are just being evaluated in this very one-dimensional way, there’s plenty of biases that will go undetected and unmitigated,” says Alice Xiang, lead research scientist and global head of AI Ethics at Sony. “Our hope is that the work that we’re doing here can help replace some of the existing skin tone scales that really just focus on light versus dark.”

But not everyone is so sure that existing options are insufficient for grading AI systems. Ellis Monk, a Harvard University sociologist, says a palette of 10 skin tones offering light to dark options that he introduced alongside Google last year isn’t unidimensional. “I must admit being a bit puzzled by the claim that prior research in this area ignored undertones and hue,” says Monk, whose Monk Skin Tone scale Google makes available for others to use. “Research was dedicated to deciding which undertones to prioritize along the scale and at which points.” He chose the 10 skin tones on his scale based on his own studies of colorism and after consulting with other experts and people from underrepresented communities.

X. Eyeé, CEO of AI ethics consultancy Malo Santo and who previously founded Google’s skin tone research team, says the Monk scale was never intended as a final solution and calls Sony’s work important progress. But Eyeé also cautions that camera positioning affects the CIELAB color values in an image, one of several issues that make the standard a potentially unreliable reference point. “Before we turn on skin hue measurement in real-world AI algorithms—like camera filters and video conferencing—more work to ensure consistent measurement is needed,” Eyeé says.

The sparring over scales is more than academic. Finding appropriate measures of “fairness,” as AI researchers call it, is a major priority for the tech industry as lawmakers, including in the European Union and US, debate requiring companies to audit their AI systems and call out risks and flaws. Unsound evaluation methods could erode some of the practical benefits of regulations, the Sony researchers say.

Stoke Space shared stunning new photos from a recent flight test of the company’s Hopper reusable rocket prototype.

The flight test, called Hopper2, included a vertical takeoff and vertical landing demonstration, during which the reusable second-stage rocket successfully lifted about 30 feet (9 meters) off the ground and then safely touched down in its targeted landing zone after 15 seconds of flight. 

The recent photos that Stoke Space shared on X (formerly Twitter) show the spacecraft on the launch pad at the company’s test site in Moses Lake, Washington, along with the bright blaze ignited by the rocket’s hydrogen/oxygen engine during liftoff. 

Related: Stoke Space gets closer to 100% reusable rocket with successful ‘Hopper’ test flight (video)

The test, performed on Sept. 17,  was meant to demonstrate several of Hopper’s systems and design elements, including its novel hydrogen/oxygen engine, coolant-based heat shield and a propulsion system that maneuvers the rocket by throttling its different engines. 

While the spacecraft didn’t directly experience the heat from hypersonic reentry to Earth’s atmosphere during its test flight, it has successfully operated at 100% of the expected heat load in a simulated environment, bringing the company one step closer towards developing fully reusable rockets. 

“This test was the last test in our Hopper technology demonstration program. We successfully completed all of the planned objectives,” the company said in a statement announcing the successful test launch. “We’ve also proven that our novel approach to robust and rapidly reusable space vehicles is technically sound, and we’ve obtained an incredible amount of data that will enable us to confidently evolve the vehicle design from a technology demonstrator to a reliable reusable space vehicle.”

Following the successful test of the second stage rocket, Stoke Space will now shift its focus to developing a reusable first stage in order to reach the company’s goal of building a 100% reusable rocket with a turnaround time of just 24 hours. 

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The asteroid sample collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft just experienced its second touchdown in only two days.

The sample — a stash of dirt and gravel that the probe snagged from the asteroid Bennu in October 2020 — touched down in the Utah desert on Sunday (Sept. 24), thrilling mission team members and scientists around the world. 

But the asteroid sample stayed in the Beehive State for just a day before boarding a plane to its final destination, which it reached today (Sept. 25).

“Welcome to Houston, OSIRIS-REx! The asteroid sample arrived today in Texas where it will be curated and preserved by our team here at Johnson. The information collected could help scientists around the world investigate planetary formation, the origins of life and how asteroids might impact Earth,” NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC), which is based in Houston, said today in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

Related: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx lands samples of asteroid Bennu to Earth after historic 4-billion-mile journey

OSIRIS-REx launched in September 2016 and arrived at Bennu, a 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) near-Earth asteroid, in December 2018. The probe studied Bennu up close for 22 months, then swooped in to grab a sample — marking the very first time a NASA probe had managed to collect pieces of an asteroid in space.

That dive revealed Bennu’s surface to be surprisingly spongy; OSIRIS-REx sank far into the asteroid before backing away to safety. 

OSIRIS-REx left Bennu in May 2021, beginning a long journey back to Earth. At 6:42 a.m. EDT (1042 GMT) on Sunday, the probe released its sample capsule, which came down to Earth on the U.S. Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range about four hours later — just as planned.

The Bennu sample will now make its way to a newly built curation facility at JSC managed by the agency’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division.

The OSIRIS-REx science team — which includes more than 200 people based at 35 institutions around the world — will then study the sample for about two years in an effort to meet the mission’s main science goals. As the above JSC post noted, those goals include better understanding how the solar system formed and evolved and the role carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu may have played in delivering life’s building blocks to Earth.

The science team will have access to about 25% of the Bennu material, which is thought to weigh about 8.8 ounces (250 grams). Four percent of the sample will go to the Canadian Space Agency, which provided OSIRIS-REx’s laser altimeter instrument. 

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will get 0.5% of the material, as part of a deal with NASA that includes collaboration between OSIRIS-REx and JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission, which returned a small sample of the asteroid Ryugu to Earth in December 2020.

The remaining 70% of the Bennu sample will remain at JSC “for study by scientists not yet born, using technologies not yet invented, to answer fundamental questions about the solar system,” according to NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample-return press kit.   

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