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Researchers Find 'Mind-Control' Gaming Headsets Can Leak Users' Secrets
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Usenix security conference in Seattle last week, a group of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, Oxford University and the University of Geneva presented a study that hints at the darker side of a future where we control computers with our minds rather than a mouse. In a study of 28 subjects wearing brain-machine interface headsets built by companies like Neurosky and Emotiv and marketed to consumers for gaming and attention exercises, the researchers found they were able to extract hints directly from the electrical signals of the test subjects' brains that partially revealed private information like the location of their homes, faces they recognized and even sequences of numbers they recognized. For the moment, the experimental theft of users' private information from brain signals is more science fiction than a real security vulnerability, since it requires tricking the victim into thinking about the target information at a certain time, and still doesn't work reliably. (Though much better than random chance.) But as BMI gets more sophisticated and mainstream, the researchers say their study should serve as a warning about privacy issues around the technology of such interfaces."
...then you have nothing to hide!
I guess in the future, lucid dreaming will be mandatory learning a young age so we are forced to control our dreams to prevent deviancy.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
take off the headset before going to the ATM :)
But now ve hav vays only of collectink unemployment...
...don't tell Miniluv.
Silence is a state of mime.
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article09-121
...people voluntarily reveal private information like the location of their homes, what they had for breakfast, favorite sexual positions, etc.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I am a wererabbit!
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Thanks to this research it seems pretty clear that interfacing to the brain reveals much more than where you want to move a cursor.
Anybody working with classified info won't be allowed anywhere near these things.
Now it seems to me that could make quite a useful interrogation tool, and I'd be therefore very surprised if such things are not already in use by constabulary forces.
I'll really worry when Google starts investing heavily in the technology.
I predict a sharp growth of tinfoil hat making companies' share price.
Anyway, this technology is amazing. How long until we (as a species) can do the same from a distance? How long until such devices are then minituarized and cost so little that it is feasible to make them ubiquitous?
Keep thinking about tits, if you are a man. The male brain can only think about one thing at a time:
http://askville.amazon.com/men-multi-task-women/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=36377417
Sweet I bought one of those NeuroSky ones. Sounds like I'm making a new word puzzle game that goes something like this:
Have some random wordsearch puzzle show up, and at the beginning have a little animation that walks over and expands every letter one at a time. Then record their thoughts and hopefully you'll get a weak signal for something they find 'similar.' Let them finish the puzzle and then generate a new one using a genetic algorithm that manipulates some of the letters around the 'similar' letters. Your fitness function is whether a sequence of letters became more familiar or not. Maybe you can eventually figure out some password that way. Of course you'd still have to figure out the site/service, and username... but that's for another game!
Ohh maybe I could throw in some IAP as well. $1 and I won't scan your brain for info!
Mouse??? My primary interface to the computer is still the keyboard...
Come on ppl, this shit has been in deployment for the best part of 30 years...all these so-called techies and security researchers and none of them can piece this together.
Bloody genius.
Where did you got you tinfoils hats guys?
Thoughtcrime will soon be a legal offense. Make no mistake, this IS coming, naturally in the name of The Children or Terrorists.
the only taboo is secrecy!
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
ya know where he'd post mutilated cats and tortured animals , yea we need all be like that
...Google announces it is buying Neurosky and Emotiv for an undisclosed sum of money
If you RTFA, you discover that they can use it to confirm that you recognize particular things, so the system doesn't "leak" secrets. They can only "steal" things they already know.
This is the first step towards the world described in Ghost int he Shell. At some point a need for security appliances on brain-machine interfaces will be needed and created. Then the brain-machine interface and the security appliance will move to an embedded solution within bodies. At that point, hacking will be a lot more dangerious as one of the impacts of attacking, defending, and counter-attacking will be loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availablility of people's own brains.
I do security
I've read that in 20 years or less, we will be able to download all of a person's brain onto a computer hard drive. All of their memories, accumulated knowledge and yes, any crimes they may have comitted. Trying to find citation. Click this link, and scroll down to see a pic of "the headset of the future!" http://m.io9.com/5495712/six-ways-science-can-see-into-your-brain This article on the ethics of brain imaging http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/7324 and http://m.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/feb/09/neuroscience.ethicsofscience?cat=science&type=article
Woo imagine stuff, telepathy, speaking with the dead, chasing the bad spirit away, science and engineering instead find solutions : mobile phone, mass storage memory, medicine.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Researchers find 'Mind-Control' gaming headsets can be used like a glorified POLYGRAPH, and may some day be about as usefull. ...There. Fixed it for ya.
jz (Je-Tze)
In 1984 they couldn't read brains and yet they had thought crimes. We already have lesser forms of thought crime today.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
If so it could now be possible for anyone to experiment with it using these cheap headsets...great...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you thought nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide!
Its about marketing not crime. Your browser shows you A and then B, or your video game shows you A and then B, etc. The parts of your brain correlated with "wants" shows more activity during B. Targeted marketing starts delivering ads related to B.
This technology may not be accurate enough for a court of law but marketing does not need that level of accuracy.
You mean to tell me that devices created to read your thoughts are, in fact, capable of reading your thoughts. What a wacky, unforeseen outcome!
And if you can't do it with medical-grade EEG or room-sized MRI results, you can't do it with a gaming headset for the next 30 years.
That is why the "it" is likely to be targeted advertising not the extraction of evidence for use in court. Marketing doesn't need the level of accuracy that a court would.
How to properly use acronyms:
1. Right the full term out.
2. After the full term, put the acronym in parentheses.
3. After that, use the term freely.
1, 2. "...brain-machine interface (BMI)..."
3. "But as BMI gets more..."
This is especially necessary in the case of something like BMI which has a well-known meaning: body mass index. It absolutely is clear from the context that BMI is not meant as body mass index, but an acronym -especially one that is well known to mean something else- appearing out of a vacuum screws up the flow of reading and without the parenthetical acronym earlier, it's a lot harder to find and figure out what was meant if there is some question.
Used in a different way, this can be fun. See Necomimi ears. These are cosplay ears which are controlled by a CPU that's reading basic brain activity. They swing up to the "pricked" position when brain activity indicates the wearer has their active attention on something, and slowly droop if the wearer isn't doing much.
These were sold at Fanme 2012. If you call out the wearer's name, or their phone rings, the ears prick up. There are reports that people playing video games have their Necomimi ears prick up when they're doing a level, and the ears relax when they finish.
Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.
Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.
Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.
Works in theory, but good luck trying to get the 12 year olds on X-Box live from cursing insults first.
Yes, I am glad to see you.
And, no, I'm not thinking about work right now.
Why do you ask?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
a train that will take you far away...
20 years from now some user tries out the new free game on facebook. It's got some number puzzles, some geography aspects, inserts pictures of his friends here and there as he walks around a virtual city.
On the other side, the malicious company gathers information about what people on your friends list are closest to you by how you react when you see their pictures, they probably know what city you live in from facebook so unknown to you the city you've been walking through has been a simplified version of your own hometown, showing what parts of it you are more familiar with and have positive feelings towards. The number games are located around where the atms in town are, which means subconsciously you'll be thinking of your pin code and probably favour those numbers.
That's just off the top of my head, the first ideas I got. Expand it to credit card numbers, put a card in the game that you "pay" with, and any number game you play in connection to it you might give away your credit card numbers. Of course odds are they already have that from selling you in game bonuses.
No wait, I'm just thinking of how zynga operates.
But yeah, I'm sure this technology could make for even worse versions. The most sophisticated phishing attack in history, a trawling operation, catching near everyone. And all completely above board, seemingly... A hit game, the familiarity people feel making it so popular... And then after a few weeks, a few hundred million gets stolen. Bank accounts en masse turning up empty.
Any nerd or geek well worth their stripes should've known this Google Glasses and related tech is BULLSHIT.
Because, you've seen and understand the implications outlined in the episode of ST:TNG, "The Game".
It's a low-pass filter that ensures you only transmit relevant UI patterns. =)