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Apple Hacker Charlie Miller To Demo Dangers of Near-Field Communications
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's hacker nemesis Charlie Miller, who the company banned from its app store developer program, apparently hasn't been waiting around for his suspension to be lifted. His latest pet project is hacking near-field communications (NFC), and at Black Hat USA in Vegas this month, he will demonstrate the dangers of using your smartphone to pay your cab fare. (But when his Apple 'sentence' is up, look out)."
iOS is a walled garden. Apple is under no obligation to let anyone develop for it. If you're going to embarrass and criticize Apple, they are under no obligation to let you do it on their iPhones and iPads (or Macs either, for that matter).
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
As if he couldn't get someone else to proxy for him already. If apple keeps him away and he finds something worth while, he'll find someone else that is willing to front for him and just submit another app to prove his point. Keeping people out is useless, they should be thankful for someone to hilight their security flaws, even if it's bad publicity for them at that moment. Not exposing it and letting someone commit a serious crime on a large scale will hurt Apple more than having someone expose it.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The guy is providing you with research and development, for free.
Hire him, you blind idiots.
You'd prefer this hack had been quietly discovered in the wild by somebody who isn't so upfront with the techniques? And then deal with the cost and PR fiasco of violated iPhone users?
Wake up, Apple HQ morons.
Your wallet product is being hardened against exploit, for FREE, and you punish the guy for it.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
He's one of the guys that proved Apple isn't so unhackable and "immune to viruses" after all. He does have a point that NFC technology is too new to know whether it's safe, and honestly, I'm glad someone like him is on the case to determine just how exploitable it is. I've already had my bank account cleaned out once because of a hack into a store's debit card system.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Essentially with NFC you have this card/phone in your pocket which all day long is saying to every other device it meets, "Hey, are you an EPoS terminal? I'd really like to pay for something, now!". It is not clear to me why the dangers of this need to be demonstrated, least of all to delegates at BlackHat.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
1) Apple phones don't have NFC chips in them so Charlie Miller cannot be "exposing them"
2) Charlie Millier will be exposing security problems of NFC with Android phones.
3) Charlie Miller is also Google's nemesis and has exposed how silly Android security testing is:
http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerability-management/167901026/security/client-security/240003490/apple-ban-gives-miller-time-to-hack-other-things.html
4) timothy seems to have an axe to grind against Apple so he's submitting these idiotic articles lately. It's he, however, that looks stupid as a result.
Oh Apple is fully within its rights, aside from the breach of fiduciary responsibility. Smart companies pay people like this for their services. Smarter ones give them a free tshirt and work for free. Stupid ones attempt to censor and really stupid ones prosecute.
Does anybody have a good set of instructions on how to make a Faraday Cage wallet?? (note not how to buy said wallet or something on a split between 64 pages so we can get ad income for 64 page views thing like instructables)
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How are they censoring him? He uploaded an exploit into the App Store. If he wanted to bring attention to it, all he had to do was to contact Apple or put something on the net. Instead he violated the terms of use and his developer agreement and uploaded said exploit instead.
I doubt it's specific to iOS, as there are exactly zero iOS devices with NFC, and there is zero exposed support for NFC in either the production iOS 5.x, or the beta of 6.x.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
So there I am standing at the gas station yesterday, and I catch a quick glimpse of one of those ad's on the TV screen offering to give you 5 cents off per gallon if you pay at the pump with NFC through your phone. I'm a bit amused by this as right next to it is a sign saying not to use your cell phone at the pump with a funny symbol of fire next to it. Curious as to the contrary suggestions, I look at the fine print of the NFC ad where it basically says "for your safety, you can only use this as a single pump" or basically trying to manage the risk by only using it briefly. This is somewhat funny as they can't seem to make up their mind as to whether is it safe, or isn't it?
Block, yes, spoof, no. Try spoofing a keyfile-secured SSH connection between a laptop and a wireless router.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you think that summary *isn't* a blatant swing at Apple, written to make Charlie's completely non-Apple-related NFC hacking look like something to do with Apple and the app store, then I have a bridge to sell you.
If we're jumping to conclusions about what this means for Apple when two of the three sentences specifically mention Apple and his link to them and the "ban" from the App Store for violating his dev agreement. If Apple, the App Store and iOS have nothing to with this then why is 66% of the summary dedicated to it?
The salient point appears to be that he will show something related to NFC hacking at a conference using a "smartphone". Interesting how the particular model of smartphone or the OS it runs is not mentioned, yet the other 66% of the summary heavily mentions Apple. Mmm. Seems legit.
Either way, we know it's not an iPhone or iOS since the iPhone doesn't have any NFC hardware in it, unless he managed to get his hands on the rumoured iPhone 5 prototype that might have it included but no one knows yet.
I ended up getting an HP laptop with all or better specs than a comparable Ibook and at less than half the cost.
Really? You found an HP that runs OS X? Also where is this "Ibook" you are referring to? Apple does not sell any laptop branded Ibook or IAnything for that matter. And very much doubt you found anything that is truly similar for "less than half the cost" once you include ALL the hardware including the case and the rest of it. I've compared ultrabooks running Windows from various vendors to Apple's offerings myself. While Apple certainly wasn't the cheapest they weren't a whole lot more expensive once you compared their stuff to the most similar stuff from HP and the rest.
The only difference is my laptop is not ultra-thin, which is unimportant to me.
So the hardware is not the same. If you don't like Apple's products that's fine. Nothing wrong with that. My own laptop is an Acer and it is excellent. But unless you compared extremely similar hardware you weren't doing a serious comparison.
having a gun on you doesn't keep your money safe.
No shit. Being properly trained and highly skilled in their use, however, is mighty effective.
Mostly correct - equally important to training is maintaining proper situational awareness. You can spend all the time you like practicing at the range, but unless you remain aware of your surroundings and the potential threats they may contain, all that training will be for naught.
The Wikipedia entry for John Cooper is quite informative to this end, as well as providing excellent information regarding proper handling and safety measures in regards to firearms.
When your choice of marks is A) a mean looking guy with a large pistol strapped to his side, or B) a scrawny dork with a cell-phone where his pistol should be, the path to take is obvious.
This is where concealed carry / strong castle laws come in handy - though the "scrawny dork" isn't openly carrying, that doesn't mean he's not carrying. The choice of marks is less obvious, and the smart criminal (i.e., the one who lives to crime another day) would cut his potential losses and walk away.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese