Intel vPro processors suffer serious security flaw even if the machines are switched off

Why it matters to you

If you’re running a machine with an Intel vPro processor, then you need to keep your eyes open this week for an important security fix.

Another security vulnerability has been revealed that poses a significant risk for a number of PCs running Intel processors. This one’s a bit different — and potentially more dangerous — than many other vulnerabilities in that it targets business-class systems in particular. It can also affect machines that aren’t even running.

The flaw, which exists in Intel vPro processors, affects the Active Management Technology, or AMT, feature. AMT lets administrators manage machines via remote connections, and the vulnerability allows attackers to bypass authentication and utilize the same capabilities, as Ars Technica reports.

AMT is a part of the remote access features of some vPro processors that allow remote access to a machine even when it’s shut down. As long as such a machine has power, it can by design be accessed with all the intended remote capabilities enabled.

Intel designed AMT to demand a password before allowing remote access via web browser. Unfortunately, the flaw allows attackers to use any text string to bypass the authentication requirement. Tenable Network Security, which has created what it characterizes as the first Intel AMT vulnerability detection capability, describes the flaw as follows:

” … we reduced the response hash to one hex digit and authentication still worked. Continuing to dig, we used a NULL/empty response hash (response=”” in the HTTP Authorization header). Authentication still worked. We had discovered a complete bypass of the authentication scheme.”

In other words, even an empty text field was able to authenticate and gain access to the affected PCs. As Ars Technica points out, the issue is made even worse by the AMT feature’s design, in which network traffic is passed through the Intel Management Engine and to the AMT, bypassing the operating system. That means that there’s no record of unauthorized access.

Intel indicated in a blog post that PC manufacturers should be releasing patches for affected systems within the week. It also posts a tool to locate and diagnose vulnerable systems. Fujitsu, HP, and Lenovo have provided information on their own affected systems. So far, the Shodan security search engine has located more than 8,500 machines that are vulnerable to attack.

Telus rolling out Galaxy S8 and S8+ ‘red tint’ fix

The Great White North gets less red.

Telus, Canada’s second-largest network provider, has announced that it is rolling out the so-called “red tint” fix for the Galaxy S8 and S8+, which began hitting European and U.S. devices over the past week or so.

Shortly after the Galaxy S8 series was launched, some users found their Super AMOLED screens were redder than they should be, which Samsung said was a calibration misalignment that could be solved using software. An update adds new settings to the phone’s white balance options, along with manual controls for those who want to more specifically control the way colors appear on the phone’s screen.

No word on whether other Canadian carriers will launch the same update this week. Has your Galaxy S8 seen this issue?

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Comcast’s xFi app makes setting up your parents’ WiFi less painful

There are plenty of great routers on the market, but most of them have simply horrible interfaces for setting up and configuring your WiFI network. Companies like Google and Apple have built smartphone apps that make managing WiFi much easier, but it’s still not a commonplace experience. Comcast, of all companies, is looking to change that. Today, it’s launching a new app for Xfinity internet customers called xFi, and judging from the demo we saw, it’ll make it much easier for the average user to control their WiFI network.

The xFi app for iOS and Android works with the internet “gateway” boxes that Xfinity customers can rent. They work as both a cable modem and wireless router; while we’d probably recommend buying your own gear rather than leasing from your service provider, the truth is that millions of people just go with what Xfinity offers. Comcast’s chief product officer Chris Satchell said that about 10 million customers have the company’s standard gateway, and more will be getting the xFi Advanced Gateway the company announced at CES — it supports the Gigabit speeds that Xfinity is rolling out.

Similar to the Google WiFi app, xFi uses simple visuals to walk you through setting up your router — it gives you suggestions for where to place it and which cables to hook up. Once that’s set, the app makes you give the new WiFi network a name and password, perhaps one of the best features. If you’ve ever spent any time at your parent’s house trying to update their router’s name or password, this should hopefully help.

Once set up, the xFi app lets you set up “profiles” for each member of your household and assign the different devices you connect to the network to each profile. That comes in handy if you’re managing a network with kids on it and want to set up parental controls. Once you assign devices to profiles, you can pause internet to an entire profile all at once — so if you don’t want your kids online after 10PM, for example, you can shut down all associated devices at once.

The app is smart enough to classify devices as they’re added — so it can differentiate between a set-top streaming box and a laptop. It also shows you how much bandwidth each profile uses and exactly how much data is being used at various hours of the day. The xFi control panel is also available through the web as well as any TV using Xfinity’s X1 cable box.

Comcast is also announcing a partnership with Plume, a company making dead-simple mesh WiFi adapters. The tiny Plume devices plug into a wall socket and extend your WiFi network into rooms that have bad coverage; Comcast says it is working with Plume to make its products work seamlessly with Xfinity hardware and the new xFi setup app, but the fruits of that collaboration won’t be available until later this year.

If you’re a Comcast customer and want to use the xFi app to manage your network, that’s all available today. Millions of customers will be able to use the app with the gateway they rent — but if your hardware isn’t compatible with the new app, Comcast says that it’ll upgrade your hardware for free. Like we said earlier, you’re probably better off with your own cable modem and router. But, if your parents happen to be using Comcast’s own hardware, this might make it easier for you to manage their network.

Why have 1 room when you can have 2? Our favorite transforming homes

More than half of the world population lives in metropolitan areas. By 2050, this number is expected to increase by 66 percent, with an additional 2.5 billion humans inhabiting worldwide cites, according to a report by the United Nations. This is a daunting prospect, considering cities are already rather densely populated with little wiggle room for further expansion.

Fortunately, many architecture and design firms are working to intelligently maximize existing living space to get the most functionality out of even the most modest studios. From sliding walls to murphy beds, there are a slew of creative ways to efficiently utilize our current living spaces and these six transforming homes are as ingenious as they are breathtaking.

Transformer Apartment

We’ve covered the Transformer Apartment extensively in the past and for good reason. Even years after the initial unveiling, this unit is still one of our favorite designs. Artist Vlad Mishin created the modular wall central to the overall functionality of the Transformer Apartment. This pliable partition separates the 645-square-foot apartment in half. The individual panels can slide and also rotate for an array of settings and styles, allowing the room to be compartmentalized into a series of rooms or one open space.

BedUp Room

Sleep is certainly crucial to our overall wellbeing, but our bedrooms are under utilized the other hours of the day. To address this, the BedUp Vision mockup lets you transform your bedroom into a practical workspace during waking hours. A pair of steel cables attach to a tray beneath the mattress, allowing the bed to be easily raised to the ceiling, and freeing up valuable floor space beneath. You can look at a few of BedUp’s other models here.

Yo! Home

Like the BedUp model, the Yo! Home also incorporates a rising bed frame to maximize living space when you’re not sleeping. However, this transforming home has a wealth of other creative space-saving touches. Hollow nooks have been built into the floor to minimize clutter and offer additional storage. Similarly, other floor panels transform into a dining table, and a breakfast counter slides out of one of the walls for supplemental culinary space.

Adjustable partitions allow the rooms to be reconfigured for additional space and/or personal aesthetic preference. The Yo! Home is still in the prototype phase, but the team plans to incorporate these floor plans into 24 apartments in Manchester, England.

Flat 27A

Situated in Hong Kong, Flat 27A is the brainchild of design studio Design Eight Five Two (DEFT). The main objective for the project was to maximize the 550-square-foot living space for a client and his pet cat. The flat was originally built as a two-bedroom arrangement, but after the design overhaul the space can be separated into individual rooms or a single space with plenty of natural lighting.

In the dining area, the table can be extended to accompany up to 10 guests, and the bench opens for additional storage space. In case you were wondering, the cat now has its own private quarters built into one of the wooden storage units, and the kitty box is concealed in a nook underneath the sink.

LifeEdited apartment

Graham Hill, founder of sustainability website TreeHugger, opened a competition for architects around the world to turn his 420-square-foot Manhattan apartment into a modular living space. Hill eventually chose Romanian architects Catalin Sandu and Adrian Iancu’s design, with a renovation cost of nearly $400,000.

The final product, the LifeEdited apartment, includes murphy beds, transformable furniture, and adjustable walls. After the redesign, the SoHo apartment was listed for just under one million dollars. You can read more about the LifeEdited apartment here.

Ori

MIT Media Lab collaborated with designer Yves Béharto create the Ori transforming home system. The name “Ori” comes from the Japanese word “origami,” meaning “to fold,” and this living space does just that and much more. The system is designed around a modular partition, dividing the room into a bedroom and a functional office/entertainment area. The central unit includes a closet, shelving, and a slide-out bed, all of which one can easily reposition, allowing for more or less space on either side.

The unit is controlled via a simple control panel, and the Ori system is also compatible with an app enabling you to adjust the arrangement — as well as the lighting — via your smartphone. The Ori system will be used in projects underway in Boston, Massachusetts, Washington DC, and Seattle, Washington.

Tesla updates its data-sharing policy to help with its self-driving technology

Why it matters to you

If you’ve got a Tesla, you’ve got a car that’s decked out with sensors. Now, some of that sensor data is going to be collected to make self-driving technology a reality.

Tesla wants you to help render yourself obsolete — at least, insofar as driving is concerned. Over the weekend, the car company updated its Autopilot feature along with its data sharing policy to allow for video collections, all in the name of making self-driving a reality. That means that if you have a Tesla equipped with sensors, you’ll be sharing your driving data with the company.

In a message to customers, Tesla wrote, “We are working hard to improve autonomous safety features and make self-driving a reality for you as soon as possible. In order to do so, we need to collect short video clips using the car’s external cameras to learn how to recognize things like lane lines, street signs, and traffic light positions.”

Noting that there is strength in numbers, Tesla added that the more access to information the company has, “the better your Tesla’s self-driving ability will become.”

The electric carmaker also noted that the video clips will not be linked to your car’s identification number, promising, “We have ensured that there is no way to search our system for clips that are associated with a specific car.”

That said, even though your data may not be traced back to you, it’ll likely be shared at large. Tesla pointed out that information collected may be shared “with partners that contribute similar data to help us provide the service. At no point is any personally identifiable information collected or shared during the process.”

Aside from the new data-sharing policy, Tesla’s Autopilot update is quite exciting in and of itself. If you have a Model S or Model X from October of 2016 or later, you’ll now have access to more features, like active avoidance for side collisions if you’re going between 30 and 83 MPH, an automatic high beam mode that will turn off your brights if other drivers are approaching, and Autosteer,  which now works up to 90 mph on the highway and 45 mph on smaller roads.

The Nintendo PlayStation can finally play CD games

It was no small feat when Terry and Dan Diebold got their hands on a prototype of the fabled Nintendo PlayStation, but there has always been a catch to it: its signature feature, the CD drive, couldn’t actually play games. Even a load of repair work barely got the drive to turn on. Well, the end is finally in sight. Professional tinkerer Ben Heckendorn (aka Ben Heck) has managed to get the CD drive working, including games. The solution, as he explains, involved replacing some “questionable” capacitors and “jiggling some things around” — he was caught off-guard when things started working. The biggest challenge now is finding games to use with the near-mythological system.

As you might have gathered given the hardware’s sudden cancellation, no one wrote official games for this Nintendo/Sony hybrid (at least, that we know of). To date, enthusiasts have had to write games based on emulators that can only take vague stabs at what the full console can do. That’s borne out in Ben’s early testing. One homebrew game had legions of glitches until the developer modified it, while another title just boots to a black screen. You’re not going to see some long-lost Super Mario Bros. game, in short. This will, however, encourage coders to write games that could take advantage of Super Nintendo-level processing power and CD storage.

And even with the dearth of software, this latest work might be worth it for the insights into what Nintendo and Sony were planning. For instance, it’s clear that the CD drive wasn’t casually tacked on — there’s an SNES program sending instructions directly to a relevant controller chip, instead of through an add-on bus. Ben is sending the console back to the Diebolds, but he can be satisfied at having answered some of the video game world’s longstanding mysteries.

Source: Ben Heck Show (YouTube), Element14

Self-repairing roads could also charge your electric car

Potholes are bad enough for the jarring rides, car damage and safety hazards they create, but it’s also problematic to fix them. You’re looking at lane and road closures that can last for days, assuming the city can even spare the resources. However, Dutch researchers might have a solution that not only helps the road fix itself, but promises to solve range anxiety for electric car drivers. Delft University’s Erik Schlangen tells The Verge that there are plans to test self-repairing asphalt whose conductive steel fibers and bacteria would both fix small cracks in the pavement and send electricity to EVs above. The trial will charge your vehicles when you’re stopped at intersections, giving you a little bit of extra range in those moments you’re waiting for the light to turn green.

There are numerous challenges involved in making it all work. The healing requires an induction machine that generates enough heat in both the asphalt and the fibers to trigger the repair process. And of course, you’d need to both send electricity through the steel and outfit cars with wireless charging systems. Schlangen estimates that this road would cost about 25 percent more than usual even if you discount the additional equipment.

However, the payoff for both city infrastructure and drivers could be well worth the steep initial cost. The constant decay of asphalt makes it expensive and time-consuming to maintain, in some cases discouraging cities from starting work in the first place. If you’ve driven often enough, you’ve no doubt seen roads that never seem to get proper care — Schlangen believes the new approach would double the lifespan of a road and dramatically reduce maintenance costs, which could improve road quality even on neglected side streets. And if there were enough EV chargers at traffic lights, they could reduce the need for dedicated charging stations.

It’s not certain when tests would start, although there have been Dutch experiments with self-fixing asphalt dating back to 2010. The greatest challenge may simply be convincing everyone to participate. Municipal governments might balk at having to redo their roads, and car companies may be loathe to including expensive new charging hardware. This is more a vision of what driving could be like years from now, once all the pieces have fallen into place.

Via: Inhabitat

Source: The Verge

Cricket now offers HD Voice to a select number of its Android phones

Why it matters to you

You never want to be that person yelling into your phone in public.

It’s not just Verizon that wants you to stop asking, “Can you hear me now?” Late last week, Cricket Wireless added HD Voice to its service offerings — that is, for owners of a few select Android phones. That means that customers who make and receive calls on the Alcatel Idol 4, LG Escape 3, Samsung Galaxy Sol 2, or ZTE Grand X 4 will enjoy improved voice call quality thanks to HD Voice’s Voice over LTE (VoLTE) technology. In addition, these customers will also be able to surf the web while talking using an LTE connection.

We ought to point out that not only will you have to have a VoLTE-compatible phone, but the recipient of your phone call must have a qualifying device that is connected to Cricket’s LTE network as well. That said, if you have both those thing going for you, Cricket promises “significantly improved voice clarity.”

“High Definition Voice (HD Voice) is just one of the ways we’re working to build a better network for our customers,” the carrier said. “HD Voice uses VoLTE (voice over LTE) technology. At Cricket, you’ll get voice calling over our nationwide 4G LTE network. Enjoy crisp and clear conversations while using your phone to surf the web or stream music or video at up to 4G LTE speeds.”

Even in the loudest of environments, Cricket promises that HD Voice will cut through the noise.

“Conversations will sound more natural, almost as if the person at the other end of the line is right there next to you. And with HD Voice, you can talk while surfing at 4G LTE speeds,” the carrier stated in its FAQ. How is this done? Cricket notes that it uses wide-band audio technology and noise cancellation for more natural sounding voices and less background distractions.

Best of all, there’s no additional cost for Cricket’s HD Voice service, and all you have to do to access the technology is update your phone’s software.

The San Francisco BART has committed to 100 percent renewable energy, but it’ll take awhile

Why it matters to you

If you’re opting for public transportation in San Francisco to save the planet, here’s some great news — the BART is going even greener.

You’re already reducing your carbon footprint by taking public transportation, and now the system itself is reducing its own carbon footprint. That is, if that public transportation is located in San Francisco. The California city’s BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) system has adopted “aggressive guidelines” enabling it to buy more power directly from renewable sources. Thanks to the newly approved Wholesale Electricity Portfolio Policy, the BART is going greener than ever.

“Every day, BART takes cars off the road and helps drive down our greenhouse gas emissions,” said BART Director Nick Josefowitz. “But especially now, BART and the Bay Area must shoulder even more responsibility to combat climate change. Even though BART is not required to comply with the state’s renewable energy standards, we have committed to purchasing 100% renewable electricity and taking a leadership role in decarbonizing our transportation sector.”

While BART already boasts a relatively clean portfolio in terms of its power sources, its newfound ability to buy its own power from various renewable energy sources including solar, wind, and small hydroelectric facilities, will make the transport system more environmentally friendly still. The hope is that the BART will derive its power from at least 50 percent eligible renewable sources and from at least 90 percent low and zero carbon sources by 2025. And a few more decades down the road, BART hopes to hit 100 percent in both these categories.

“Given that renewable energy supply costs have fallen significantly in recent years and have approached cost parity with other supply sources, BART has an opportunity to set clean energy goals that are both ambitious and realistic,” said BART’s Sustainability Manager Holly Gordon.

Thus far, BART seems like it’s the very first electrified public transit system to make the 100 percent renewable power pledge. And hopefully, it’ll set a precedent that transport agencies across the country (and the world) can emulate.

NASA is reviewing candidates for its next Solar System mission

NASA might be focusing on Mars recently, but it hasn’t forgotten the rest of the Solar System. The agency has begun reviewing the 12 proposals it received for the New Frontiers program, the same one that gave rise to New Horizons, Juno and other notable unmanned missions. All the proposals will go through scientific and technical probing with the next seven months, with one or a few moving on to the next phase of the selection process. NASA will choose the best mission to develop in 2019 and will spend up to $1 billion to make it a reality.

While the agency typically keeps New Frontiers submissions a secret, the themes it listed when it was looking for submissions can give you an idea of what they’re about:

• Comet Surface Sample Return
• Lunar South Pole-Aitken Basin Sample Return
• Ocean Worlds (Titan and/or Enceladus)
• Saturn Probe
• Trojan Tour and Rendezvous
• Venus In Situ Explorer

During a talk about Cassini’s Grand Finale, Linda Spilker, one of the project’s scientists, revealed that three of the proposals want to continue the probe’s work. One of them wants to bring back gas from Saturn’s atmosphere, while another wants to explore Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes. The last one intends to get samples from Enceladus’ geysers and to analyze them for amino acids, which are a possible indicator of life.

NASA aims to launch the mission it chooses by 2024, and based on previous New Frontiers projects, we might be in for a lot of fascinating discoveries and high-res images. New Horizons took the closest photos of Pluto we’ve ever seen, Juno (pictured above) is exploring Jupiter and has been capturing detailed images, as well, while Osiris-Rex is on its way to rendezvous with near-Earth asteroid Bennu.

Via: Popular Mechanics

Source: NASA