Shooter’s iPhone Could Harbor ‘Dormant Cyber Pathogen’, Claims San Bernardino DA

The iPhone at the center of the ongoing encryption dispute between Apple and the FBI may contain a “dormant cyber pathogen”, according to the San Bernardino county District Attorney.

The curious claim appears in an amicus brief filed by Michael Ramos with a California court on Thursday. In the document, Ramos speculates that the iPhone used by terror suspect Syed Rizwan Farook “may contain evidence that can only be found on the seized phone that it was used as a weapon to introduce a lying dormant cyber pathogen that endangers San Bernardino’s infrastructure.”

The apparent threat is cited as a violation of California Penal Code Section §502, covering protections against tampering, interference, damage and unauthorized access to computer systems. The reference suggests Ramos believes that some sort of malware may be contained on the iPhone, but offers no justification for the claim, nor the odd nature of its wording.

“It sounds like he’s making up these terms as he goes,” said iPhone forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski, speaking to ArsTechnica about the filing. “We’ve never used these terms in computer science.” Zdziarski believes that the amicus is simply designed to mislead the courts and manipulate a decision in the FBI’s favor. “It offers no evidence whatsoever that the device has, or even might have, malware on it. It offers no evidence that their network was ever compromised.”

The claim in the court filing is the first time that a law enforcement agency has alluded to what may be contained on the iPhone at the center of the federal investigation. It also runs counter to the FBI’s main dispute with Apple that it requires assistance from the company precisely in order to ascertain its content.

Separately, a number amicus briefs were filed on Thursday in support of Apple’s stance in the dispute. The full list of submitted documents have been catalogued on Apple’s website. Additionally, five families of San Bernardino victims have filed in support of the FBI.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tag: Apple-FBI
Discuss this article in our forums

Sony’s Future Lab will ask users for input on early prototypes

Sony has a new research initiative called Future Lab Program that’s more transparent than what you might be used to. Instead of treating the concepts that come out of the lab as closely guarded secrets, Sony plans to share the program’s prototypes with you. In fact, it aims to use your feedback to refine those prototypes and make sure the company’s heading in the right direction. Sony will show off Future Lab’s first prototype at the SXSW conference, which is scheduled to begin on March 12th in Texas.

This first concept is codenamed “N,” and all we know about it at the moment is that it’s a wearable device with a hands-free interface. It promises a new way of experiencing music and sound without having to insert anything in your ear. You can watch its teaser trailer below, but it doesn’t really shed light on what the device looks like — not that you’d have to wait too long to find out. Since Future Lab intends to solicit feedback, we’ll likely see and know more about “N” on the program’s website, Facebook and Twitter accounts after its SXSW debut.

Sony has other product development programs in place, launched in an effort to conjure up new hits for the company. One of those is the Business Creation department it introduced in 2014, which offers employees the chance to get their most innovative ideas realized. The company also opened up a crowdfunding and e-commerce platform last year that internal teams use to raise funds for their experimental devices.

Source: Sony, Future Lab Program, (Facebook), (Twitter)

Kendrick Lamar releases a new album in response to tweets

Twitter can apparently be used for more than just mischief making, activism and unexpected beefs, as it appears LeBron James managed to coax a new album out of rapper Kendrick Lamar. SBNation notes that the NBA star tweeted at TDE label head Anthony Tiffith after seeing the performance at this year’ s Grammy awards (pictured above), asking for the release of Lamar’s unreleased tracks . Fast forward a couple of weeks, and the eight-track album untitled unmastered. has just appeared on iTunes, Google Play, Tidal and Spotify.

Yo @dangerookipawaa after that @kendricklamar Grammy performance , you have to release those untitled tracks asap!!! What’s up? Talk to me

— LeBron James (@KingJames) February 23, 2016

Yea muthafuckas KING KENDRICK returns 2nite.. Thank @kingjames for this…. #TDE

A video posted by gwadpot (@dangerookipawaa) on Mar 3, 2016 at 7:30pm PST

untitled unmastered. https://t.co/YlAszcK4e4

— Kendrick Lamar (@kendricklamar) March 4, 2016

Just to make things clear, Tiffith told Instagram followers to thank LeBron for the album’s release. That’s great, but it could be bad for his mentions, since now people will ask him to use the power of 140 characters once more and coax a new season of Firefly out of Netflix or Amazon.

Source: SBNation, iTunes, Spotify, Tidal

How to add family members to your Windows 10 PC – CNET

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

Sharing a PC doesn’t have to be a pain if you give each family member their own personal login. Personal logins allow for separate files, desktops, and browser favorites, and adult family members can monitor and restrict kids’ activity by blocking websites, limiting screen time, and keeping tabs on what sites kids are visiting and what they’re searching for.

To add a family member to your Windows 10 PC, you’ll need to sign them up for a Microsoft account — only the primary user can have a local login.

Here’s how to get started:

Add an adult

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

1. To add an adult, open the Settings menu and go to Accounts > Family & other users. Under Your family, click Add a family member.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

2. Select Add an adult and type in the email address they use to sign into Microsoft accounts (Hotmail, OneDrive, Skype, or Xbox). Click Next to send an invitation to the person’s email account. They will be able to address to log into your Windows 10 PC immediately, but they will need to accept the invitation before they can start managing family settings.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

3. If the person you are adding does not use any Microsoft services and therefore doesn’t have a Microsoft account, click The person I want to add doesn’t have an email address. You will need to create a Microsoft account for them, either with a new Outlook.com email address or with their own non-Microsoft email address.

Add a child

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

1. Open the Settings menu and go to Accounts > Family & other users. Under Your family, click Add a family member.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

2. Select Add a child and type in the email address your child uses to sign into Microsoft accounts. Click Next to send an invitation to your child’s email address.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

3. If the child you are adding does not have a Microsoft account, click The person I want to add doesn’t have an email address. You will need to create a Microsoft account for them, either with a new Outlook.com email address or with their own non-Microsoft email address.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

4. Children must have parental permission to create an online Microsoft account. You will need to verify that you are an adult by re-entering your password and consenting to the creation of the account. You will see a screen asking if you want to let your child use their Microsoft account online — you can say Yes or No to this.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

If you say No, your child will still have an account, but they won’t be able to use it without your permission (your password).

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

If you say Yes, you will need to verify that you are an adult by allowing Microsoft to make a small $0.50 charge to your credit card.

Managing accounts

You can change a user’s account from Standard to Administrator by going to Settings > Accounts > Family & other users and selecting their account. Click Change account type to switch them from Standard to Administrator (and back again).

From this menu, you can also Block an account from signing in. Blocking a user from signing in is temporary and can be reversed from an Administrator account at any time.

To manage parental controls on children’s accounts, go to Settings > Accounts > Family & other users > Manage family settings online.

Here’s what’s new in Google Photos v1.5 – CNET

Google recently updated the Photos service on the Web with adjustments to the editing tools. Now the Android app for the service is getting improvements as well. Among these are big changes for the Assistant and Collections areas, as well as tweaks to in-app navigation.

Version 1.15 of Google Photos is still rolling out. If you want to skip the wait, grab a copy of the app from APKMirror. Make sure to download the version that matches the DPI (find the value with this app) of your device. The downloaded file will replace your current version. Once you’re on version 1.15, here’s what you need to know:

The Assistant tab is no longer the lonely white space that only offers automagic creations, photo reminders of yesteryear, or app news. After the update, buttons to create new albums, collages, animations and movies will be moving in to keep those features company.

Enlarge Image

Nicole Cozma/CNET

Over in the Collections area…wait, Albums? Yep, Google has finally renamed Collections to Albums, which should be less confusing for new and current users. There’s also a new carousel row at the top of the Albums tab, which lets you access shared albums, people, places, videos, movies, etc.

Enlarge Image

Nicole Cozma/CNET

You may also notice that these two options — Assistant and Albums — along with the primary shortcut to view all of your photos, have moved out of the slide-out menu on the left. Instead, they have a new home in the navigation bar the bottom of the screen. The latest version of the Google+ app uses the same bar, but it disappears once you start scrolling. This one doesn’t do that…yet.

In addition to the menu change, the ability to swipe between sections of the app has been removed. This might be good or bad news, depending on what navigation methods you’re most comfortable with.

What do you think of the changes? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

(Via Google Photos)

How to remove personal information from photos in Windows 10 – CNET

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

There’s more to your digital photos than meets the eye. Embedded in each file is EXIF data, or metadata, that contains information on your camera’s make and model, the time and date the photo was taken, and even GPS coordinates if you happened to take the photo from a camera (or, more likely, a phone) that has geotagging enabled.

Luckily, Microsoft lets you remove this sensitive information in Windows 10 in just a few easy steps. Of course, if you’d rather not bother running all your photos through your desktop before posting them online, you can also turn off geotagging at the source.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

1. Open the folder that contains the photo you want to remove metadata from. Right-click on the photo and click Properties. (You can also select several photos, right-click them, then click Properties.)

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

2. In the Properties window, click the Details tab to see the photo’s metadata. At the bottom of the window, click Remove Properties and Personal Information.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

3. If you would like to remove metadata directly from this file, select Remove the following properties from this file and select all of the property values you want to remove. Click OK to remove the data.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

4. If you want to retain a copy of the file with metadata, select Create a copy with all possible properties removed — this will create a copy of the file with metadata removed, but you will still have original metadata-filled file.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

5. Windows 10’s metadata-removal tool isn’t perfect, unfortunately, and it may not be able to remove all the personal information from your photos. If you run into issues removing metadata with Windows, you’ll need to try a third-party tool such as BatchPurifier Lite.

Stop the whining! Make Apple EarPods play nice with Xbox One – CNET

Other headphones play nice with the Xbox One, but if you have tried to use Apple EarPods with Remote and Mic with an Xbox One controller, it probably wasn’t for long. Because if you plugged in a pair of Apple EarPods to a newer Xbox One controller that has a headphone jack, you were greeted by a high-pitched whining buzzing sound.

The easy solution is to simply use another set of headphones. But if you must use Apple’s EarPods, then I would direct your attention to clever YouTuber Nick Robinson, who figured out a fix. And it is this:

1. Plug your Apple EarPods into your Xbox One controller.

2. Double-tap the big Xbox button on your controller to open Xbox One’s left panel on your screen and scroll down to the gear icon to open the Settings menu.

3. Move the slider for Mic monitoring all the way to the left to mute it.

4. Enjoy the silence.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

Robinson suggests that in addition to adjusting the slider for Mic monitoring, you also toggle the switch to Off for Headset mic. I found, however, that just moving the slider for Mic monitoring did the trick.

Robinson also posits an interesting theory about why Apple’s EarPods create this annoying buzzing sound in the first place. He explains that Apple reversed the ground and mic rings on the plug.

(Via OS X Daily.)

Instagram blocks users from linking to Telegram and Snapchat

You know that website section in your Instagram bio? It’s the only place on the social network where you can deeplink to other parts of the internet, and IG celebs often use it to let fans know where else they can be found. It still works as intended, but it has suddenly stopped supporting Telegram and Snapchat links, as TechCrunch reported. An IG spokesperson confirmed to TC that it has “removed the ability to include ‘add me’ links” to profiles.” He said that it was “not the way [their] platform was intended to be used,” but that “other types of links are still allowed.”

The spokesperson didn’t name specific websites, but upon checking, we can confirm that Instagram continues to support Twitter, LinkedIn and, of course, Facebook links. If you try to add a Telegram or a Snapchat profile, though, you get this message:

Telegram founder Pavel Durov took to Twitter to air his grievances against Facebook, IG’s parent company. This isn’t the first time a Facebook-owned service put up walls keeping out Telegram links, after all: in late 2015, Whatsapp also removed the ability to deeplink to its rival messaging app. Durov believes Facebook has been targeting his service either because it’s been growing steadily (he says it now has 100 million monthly active users) or because of the launch of its public chatrooms called Channels, which could make Telegram a legit social network. We’ve reached out to the Snapchat team for their insights on why IG also blocked their ephemeral messaging app, and we’ll update this post if we hear back.

Another @Facebook tentacle closes on users’ ability to share a link to their Telegram profile. #hypocrisy pic.twitter.com/xC6ydp3M0p

— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) March 2, 2016

Source: Techcrunch

The Hubble has seen farther back in time than ever before

NASA announced on Thursday that an international team of astronomers have used the Hubble space telescope to spot the most distant galaxy discovered to date — not to mention one of the oldest in the visible Universe. The galaxy, dubbed GN-z11, has a measured redshift of 11.1, meaning it formed just 400 million years after the Big Bang.

GN-z11 is 25 percent smaller than the Milky Way and contains barely one percent of its star mass. That makes sense, given that we’re looking at an infant galaxy. However, the number of new stars being formed there outpaces the Milky Way’s by 20 times. It’s these bright new stars that illuminate the galaxy enough to be seen by the Hubble.

“It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon,” Garth Illingworth of UC Santa Cruz said in a statement. If these measurements are correct, and NASA is confident they are, that would mean GN-z11 formed near the start of the epoch of reionization, the period of time in which the first galaxies coalesced.

The team’s finding will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. “We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We managed to look back in time to measure the distance to a galaxy when the Universe was only three percent of its current age,” the paper’s lead author, Yale’s Pascal Oesch, said.

Source: Hubble Space Telescope

DARPA unveils its next VTOL aircraft concept

DARPA announced on Thursday that it had awarded the Phase 2 design contract for its unmanned VTOL X-Plane concept to Aurora Flight Sciences (AFS). VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) planes, like the current generation of V-22 Osprey or F-35B Lightning II, have to trade off between a number of mission requirements including flight speed versus range or fuel efficiency versus power. With the X-Plane, DARPA hopes to have it all and make this VTOL platform more functional on the battlefield.

For the upcoming demonstrator aircraft, DARPA hopes to achieve a top sustained flight speed between 300 and 400 knots, a hover efficiency of at least 75 percent, boost its cruise lift-to-drag ratio to 10 (up from the V-22’s ratio of 5 to 6), and have the ability to carry at least 40 percent of the plane’s expected 10,000-pound gross weight.

AFS’s concept would employ the same 4,000 HP engine used by the V-22 to generate 3 MW of electrical power that will drive the 24 ductless fans spread across its rear wings and front canards. These fans will rotate, as you can see in the image above, enabling the X-Plane to seamlessly transition from a hover to forward flight.

“This VTOL X-plane won’t be in volume production in the next few years but is important for the future capabilities it could enable,” DARPA program manager, Ashish Bagai, said. “Imagine electric aircraft that are more quiet, fuel-efficient and adaptable and are capable of runway-independent operations. We want to open up whole new design and mission spaces freed from prior constraints, and enable new VTOL aircraft systems and subsystems.” AFS expects to have its demonstrator in the air sometime in 2018.

Source: DARPA