If they are in a position that they can attack the sound-card firmware, they have the access and skill to own the machine hands down. There are far easier ways to get your identity at that point. The whole point of this exploit is that it can be run via the browser using embedded ads when other methods fail. It's an exploit that can be used without needing to actually exploit the PC itself.
So for myself one of the uses is this: "Alexa turn on the Theater"
- Sets the lights. Turning some off, others to 10%, color temp to 2200K
- Turns on the TV
- Turns on the Receiver
- Turns on the BD player
- Sets the input on the TV to HDMI2
- Sets the input on the Receiver
The automatic processing machines have all hit the scrapyards, and manual processing of Kodachrome was never done AFAIK, due to the extremely tight temperature and timing requirements.
One crazy aussie managed to do it. But he was a pro working in a professional photo lab and did it to see if he could. It was apparently a pain in the ass.
on laptops it is not. You can activate both speakers and headphones in the mixer. Maybe not (that easy) on windows, but on linux there is no problem. It's a feature, not a bug.
Yes but a web ad using an ultrasonic beacon won't have access to do that. If it did, you're owned anyway so what's the point.
Unless that is done by the firmware of the sound-chip. Then it may be possible to hack it. Have you verified this?
If it's possible for a bad actor to override it, they already own your laptop and don't need to use this kind of trick to find you anyway. A web ad with embedded ultrasonic beacon won't have the level of system access to do it, which is what we are talking about here.
This attack model assumes there is an app on the phone able to listen all time for ultrasounds. Obviously granting microphone access to an app is dangerious and should not be taken lightly.
They already exist! Leave it to ad agencies to beat the government to the punch on tracking out lives. Best part is we stupidly agree to it (or just don't read the fine print when installing some crap app on our phones)
One thing iOS does that I wish Android did is they way they handle applications using the microphone. Not only do you need to grant mic permissions, when an app uses the mic, the status bar changes color, continuously flashes if the app is in the background, and it adds a banner under the status bar that tells you that the mic is in use and what application is using it. There is no hiding that an application is trying to listen to the mic.
This! As somewhat of an audio engineer I know various speaker drivers very well, and laptop speakers essentially never have advertised frequency responses above 20KHz. And you're right, realistically, it's more like 18Khz with a steep drop off after 16KHz. Many people can hear 20KHz -- I've done tone tests and found I can hear up to 22KHz. So what speakers is this person using and what manner of computer has this kind of built in tweeters?
Well to the first point, it could also be used by an agency taking over a tor site covertly, no need to embed it in an ad. To the second, it doesn't require the phone to be compromised at all, just the user to download an app from an official app store and not pay attention to the terms and permissions it's asking for. This technology is used in advertising beacons today. The app developer adds a library and it reports back to the agency that provides the beacons. There have been several stories in the past year about marketing companies getting into this business. They listen for advertising beacons from online ads, TV, radio, and in stores and other public places. It wouldn't be that hard for a government agency to hijack that and get them to feed them all the info they can gather on anyone reporting back with their snare beacon IDs. Considering that's pretty much what they do now for their regular customers.
I wouldn't expect a tech savvy person to do it (though some will) but there are enough non-tech savvy people who use things like Tor thanks to friends, online tutorials, or pre-packaged browsers that it would probably net a few fish from a big enough site.
Using apps: Articles are published on apps targeting the Chinese-language market that have often been ignored by Chinese censors for weeks or months at a time, before being blocked. Often these apps are openly branded with the “New York Times” name.
I'm not saying censoring them is right, but this crap they are peddling about not knowing why their apps were pulled from China is pure bullshit. They know exactly why: They were banned in 2012 by the Chinese government! China just never got around to asking for the apps to be pulled until now.
The vast majority of articles, videos, and other "content" we all consume on a daily basis is paid for -- directly or indirectly -- by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period.
Ev noted, continuing
Apparently we suck at this, and those corporate overloards aren't paying us enough to keep the lights on so we will have to find another way.
For example: 6mb/s? I'll just buy that 30gb Xbox game on disk (and still suffer through a multi-gig day-1 patch). 100mb/s? Digital it is! Yay! no more swapping discs!
You would download Xbox games on your mobile device? I must admit, I didn't consider that use case.
Want to stream 4K UHD content? Not with that 6mb/s you aren't. 30mb/s? Go for it!
I salute you for possessing the visual acuity to fully enjoy UHD video on your phone's screen.
I can just do the things I do now faster
And there we are. This is the main reason everybody and their mother moved from dial-up to ISDN to ADSL and on and on to the latest broadband technology. Also the reason most people cite for upgrading to faster computers and to solid state drives.
Speaking of SSDs, I've never heard of anyone saying, "My new drive is 10X faster than the old one; it needs to be 10X larger so I won't fill it up too fast (not to be confused with the common "cost per gigabyte compared to platters" complaint).
What, your phone doesn't support a hotspot? Mine does. Your cellphone provider doesn't sell dedicated hotspots? You should really find a new one. And since my cellular data at home is faster than my wired internet (thanks AT&T uverse!) if it wasn't capped I'd sure as hell use it and dump uverse in a heartbeat. Also these questions of speed vs cap are not just a cellular issue. Broadband carriers are rolling out caps at the same time they are also starting to offer higher speeds, particularly cable companies who don't want to have customers using their lines to bypass their TV packages.
Here is the complete quote of what I said, the important parts are in bold so you don't miss them this time:
There are plenty of other examples. The problem as the connections get faster, if the cap's don't increase (or, you know, just go the fruck away) in proportion then it's making all that new speed somewhat pointless since I can't really utilize if for new things, I can just do the things I do now faster. And if I already have sufficient bandwidth for doing what I do now, then there is no point to increasing it.
As internet speeds have increased we've come up with new ways to use that speed. Data caps are restricting those new uses. What's the point of 5G if I can do what I do now on 4G or LTE with no issues? The answer is, for the consumer there isn't one. We do not just want to do what we do now, but faster. We want to do other things that we can't do today. Just like we have with computers. We didn't make faster computers to run our old programs faster and faster. At a certain point the extra speed is irrelevant. If that were the case we would have stopped creating new processors decades ago. We've used those faster computers to develop new software that can take advantage of their increase in performance.
Comparing bandwidth to caps is a good way to demonstrate how restricting those caps are. What the hell would be the point of a 14 gigabit connection if you have a 5 gigabyte data cap? Hell even with a 1tb cap like AT&T has on their uverse service it's massively more bandwidth than would be useful. Web pages won't load any faster that they would on even a 100mb/s connection. The browser and originating server would become the limiting factors well before even that speed. You can stream all the way up to UHD on every mainstream service that currently offers it, buffer free, at 18mb/s (I've tested this personally on Amazon, Netflix, and VuDu, they all work flawlessly on a 18mbs pipe). Nothing we do today on mobile devices would benefit from such a massive jump in speed. Now take that cap out, or make it more reasonable in proportion to the speed and it opens up all kinds of possibilities.
As for your last point with the SSD, it's shit and you know it.
No IPTV can can be fed over copper / fiber / cell out the att router box.
Yes it can but what does that have to do with the article here, specifically talking about their new 5G offering to DirecTV Now customers and your original post about how a 16 tuner set top box would eat up the data allowance if the tech installing the dish miss-aimed it? There is no dish in this case, nor is there a set top DVR. The service isn't being offered to DirecTV customers, and there is no reason to do that anyway. They already have satellite equipment to receiver their channels on. Right now AT&T is very happy with that arrangement, so much so they have essentially stopped the roll-out of their IPTV uVerse service. Maybe one day they will move them from satellite to wireless but you are talking decades from now.
DTV and DTV Now won't be combined anytime soon either. This is due to content licensing issues (otherwise DTV Now would already have things like non owner-operated locals which DTV already has carriage agreements for, or CBS locals period). DTV Now doesn't use DVRs so has no need for a "16 tuner" box and AT&T has no interest in making hardware for it since they can just make apps for existing devices like Apple TV, Roku (coming soon), Fire TV, Android, iOS, Android TV (coming soon) and probably smart TVs in the future. The DVR functionality, when it is rolled out, will be cloud based so no local recordings and no need for local DVR hardware.
Doubtful. Sprint isn't exactly setting the world on fire these days. Hell if being in the carrier business is the reason, Apple would probably be more influenced by Softbank's Japanese carrier operations. Heck Softbank in Japan has almost as many subscribers as Sprint does in the US (~40 vs ~58 million), in a country with less than half of the US's population.
That's funny since most printed text is printed at like 72dpi and nobody complains that printed text is pixelated or "unclear." The human eye isn't that good. What you are loving isn't resolution related -- it's the better backlight giving you better blacks than what you had on old 1080 monitors.
That's funny since most printed text is printed at like 72dpi and nobody complains that printed text is pixelated or "unclear." The human eye isn't that good. What you are loving isn't resolution related -- it's the better backlight giving you better blacks than what you had on old 1080 monitors.
Found the guy who's never worked on a 4K monitor. Try it for a while. Going back to 1080p it looks like text was rendered with a circular saw. I have a very new, high end 27" 144hz gaming monitor. I love it for games but I also have two 27" 4K monitors on the PC I use for work and the difference is extremely noticeable. Text and lines are razor sharp.
they will join them all together or at least iptv and sat.
They are not putting cellular modems in their DTV boxes. That would be beyond useless and since the data is zero rated on their network, it would make no sense to do it from their perspective anyway.
Well it's a great way to show how caps are not growing in any sort of realistic proportion to bandwidth speeds. And that's important. Faster internet opens up more use cases for the user. For example: 6mb/s? I'll just buy that 30gb Xbox game on disk (and still suffer through a multi-gig day-1 patch). 100mb/s? Digital it is! Yay! no more swapping discs! Want to stream 4K UHD content? Not with that 6mb/s you aren't. 30mb/s? Go for it! Oh look, true BD level HD streams? You're gonna need a bigger pipe!
There are plenty of other examples. The problem as the connections get faster, if the cap's don't increase (or, you know, just go the fruck away) in proportion then it's making all that new speed somewhat pointless since I can't really utilize if for new things, I can just do the things I do now faster. And if I already have sufficient bandwidth for doing what I do now, then there is no point to increasing it.
There is a point from the carrier's perspective however. When speeds increase but the usage per user doesn't they can get more users per tower, since the actual time each user is utilizing the available spectrum for the tower goes down. That 20mb email pull goes from 5 seconds to 1 second. Same amount of data from the user perspective, but it frees up 4 seconds of utilization from the tower's perspective. The exception, of course, is streaming audio/video. In this case since AT&T owns DirecTV Now in this case, they can use the free data to lock you in to both their video service and data service, so it's still a win. For them.
If they use muilt-cast like the IPTV U-verse tv system then not so much.
But if they want to get very evil have the installer miss aim the dish so it's easy to get rain fade and when that 16 tuner box switches to cell it's overeager city and even if with an auto cut off that takes 1 hour you can rack up a lot at $10 a gig.
This is for DirecTV Now, not regular DirecTV. DirecTV Now is an Over The Top (OTT) streaming TV service from DirecTV. It competes with SlingTV and Playstation Vue. There is no dish involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is.
If they are in a position that they can attack the sound-card firmware, they have the access and skill to own the machine hands down. There are far easier ways to get your identity at that point. The whole point of this exploit is that it can be run via the browser using embedded ads when other methods fail. It's an exploit that can be used without needing to actually exploit the PC itself.
You can do it with one button on a programmable remote. So - meh ?
Not from a different room.
So for myself one of the uses is this: "Alexa turn on the Theater"
- Sets the lights. Turning some off, others to 10%, color temp to 2200K
- Turns on the TV
- Turns on the Receiver
- Turns on the BD player
- Sets the input on the TV to HDMI2
- Sets the input on the Receiver
Can't do that with a clapper.
The automatic processing machines have all hit the scrapyards, and manual processing of Kodachrome was never done AFAIK, due to the extremely tight temperature and timing requirements.
One crazy aussie managed to do it. But he was a pro working in a professional photo lab and did it to see if he could. It was apparently a pain in the ass.
They pay devs to put it in their apps, just like other advertising.
on laptops it is not. You can activate both speakers and headphones in the mixer. Maybe not (that easy) on windows, but on linux there is no problem. It's a feature, not a bug.
Yes but a web ad using an ultrasonic beacon won't have access to do that. If it did, you're owned anyway so what's the point.
Unless that is done by the firmware of the sound-chip. Then it may be possible to hack it. Have you verified this?
If it's possible for a bad actor to override it, they already own your laptop and don't need to use this kind of trick to find you anyway. A web ad with embedded ultrasonic beacon won't have the level of system access to do it, which is what we are talking about here.
Can't do that because you are on a laptop? Too bad, you are screwed.
Stick a 3.5mm plug into the headphone jack. solved.
This attack model assumes there is an app on the phone able to listen all time for ultrasounds. Obviously granting microphone access to an app is dangerious and should not be taken lightly.
They already exist! Leave it to ad agencies to beat the government to the punch on tracking out lives. Best part is we stupidly agree to it (or just don't read the fine print when installing some crap app on our phones)
One thing iOS does that I wish Android did is they way they handle applications using the microphone. Not only do you need to grant mic permissions, when an app uses the mic, the status bar changes color, continuously flashes if the app is in the background, and it adds a banner under the status bar that tells you that the mic is in use and what application is using it. There is no hiding that an application is trying to listen to the mic.
This! As somewhat of an audio engineer I know various speaker drivers very well, and laptop speakers essentially never have advertised frequency responses above 20KHz. And you're right, realistically, it's more like 18Khz with a steep drop off after 16KHz. Many people can hear 20KHz -- I've done tone tests and found I can hear up to 22KHz. So what speakers is this person using and what manner of computer has this kind of built in tweeters?
You guys realize this is not some theoretical flight of fancy, right? It's being used today for ad tracking: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-that-use-inaudible-sound-to-link-your-phone-tv-tablet-and-pc/
Apps using SilverPush
Well to the first point, it could also be used by an agency taking over a tor site covertly, no need to embed it in an ad. To the second, it doesn't require the phone to be compromised at all, just the user to download an app from an official app store and not pay attention to the terms and permissions it's asking for. This technology is used in advertising beacons today. The app developer adds a library and it reports back to the agency that provides the beacons. There have been several stories in the past year about marketing companies getting into this business. They listen for advertising beacons from online ads, TV, radio, and in stores and other public places. It wouldn't be that hard for a government agency to hijack that and get them to feed them all the info they can gather on anyone reporting back with their snare beacon IDs. Considering that's pretty much what they do now for their regular customers.
I wouldn't expect a tech savvy person to do it (though some will) but there are enough non-tech savvy people who use things like Tor thanks to friends, online tutorials, or pre-packaged browsers that it would probably net a few fish from a big enough site.
Apple removed the English and Chinese-language versions of the New York Times app on 23 December, although it was not immediately clear why.
Maybe because the NYT was banned in China in 2012?? http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/26/world/asia/china-times-website-blocked/
and
From How the New York Times is eluding censors in China
Using apps: Articles are published on apps targeting the Chinese-language market that have often been ignored by Chinese censors for weeks or months at a time, before being blocked. Often these apps are openly branded with the “New York Times” name.
I'm not saying censoring them is right, but this crap they are peddling about not knowing why their apps were pulled from China is pure bullshit. They know exactly why: They were banned in 2012 by the Chinese government! China just never got around to asking for the apps to be pulled until now.
The vast majority of articles, videos, and other "content" we all consume on a daily basis is paid for -- directly or indirectly -- by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period.
Ev noted, continuing
Apparently we suck at this, and those corporate overloards aren't paying us enough to keep the lights on so we will have to find another way.
For example: 6mb/s? I'll just buy that 30gb Xbox game on disk (and still suffer through a multi-gig day-1 patch). 100mb/s? Digital it is! Yay! no more swapping discs!
You would download Xbox games on your mobile device? I must admit, I didn't consider that use case.
Want to stream 4K UHD content? Not with that 6mb/s you aren't. 30mb/s? Go for it!
I salute you for possessing the visual acuity to fully enjoy UHD video on your phone's screen.
I can just do the things I do now faster
And there we are. This is the main reason everybody and their mother moved from dial-up to ISDN to ADSL and on and on to the latest broadband technology. Also the reason most people cite for upgrading to faster computers and to solid state drives.
Speaking of SSDs, I've never heard of anyone saying, "My new drive is 10X faster than the old one; it needs to be 10X larger so I won't fill it up too fast (not to be confused with the common "cost per gigabyte compared to platters" complaint).
What, your phone doesn't support a hotspot? Mine does. Your cellphone provider doesn't sell dedicated hotspots? You should really find a new one. And since my cellular data at home is faster than my wired internet (thanks AT&T uverse!) if it wasn't capped I'd sure as hell use it and dump uverse in a heartbeat. Also these questions of speed vs cap are not just a cellular issue. Broadband carriers are rolling out caps at the same time they are also starting to offer higher speeds, particularly cable companies who don't want to have customers using their lines to bypass their TV packages.
Here is the complete quote of what I said, the important parts are in bold so you don't miss them this time:
There are plenty of other examples. The problem as the connections get faster, if the cap's don't increase (or, you know, just go the fruck away) in proportion then it's making all that new speed somewhat pointless since I can't really utilize if for new things, I can just do the things I do now faster. And if I already have sufficient bandwidth for doing what I do now, then there is no point to increasing it.
As internet speeds have increased we've come up with new ways to use that speed. Data caps are restricting those new uses. What's the point of 5G if I can do what I do now on 4G or LTE with no issues? The answer is, for the consumer there isn't one. We do not just want to do what we do now, but faster. We want to do other things that we can't do today. Just like we have with computers. We didn't make faster computers to run our old programs faster and faster. At a certain point the extra speed is irrelevant. If that were the case we would have stopped creating new processors decades ago. We've used those faster computers to develop new software that can take advantage of their increase in performance.
Comparing bandwidth to caps is a good way to demonstrate how restricting those caps are. What the hell would be the point of a 14 gigabit connection if you have a 5 gigabyte data cap? Hell even with a 1tb cap like AT&T has on their uverse service it's massively more bandwidth than would be useful. Web pages won't load any faster that they would on even a 100mb/s connection. The browser and originating server would become the limiting factors well before even that speed. You can stream all the way up to UHD on every mainstream service that currently offers it, buffer free, at 18mb/s (I've tested this personally on Amazon, Netflix, and VuDu, they all work flawlessly on a 18mbs pipe). Nothing we do today on mobile devices would benefit from such a massive jump in speed. Now take that cap out, or make it more reasonable in proportion to the speed and it opens up all kinds of possibilities.
As for your last point with the SSD, it's shit and you know it.
No IPTV can can be fed over copper / fiber / cell out the att router box.
Yes it can but what does that have to do with the article here, specifically talking about their new 5G offering to DirecTV Now customers and your original post about how a 16 tuner set top box would eat up the data allowance if the tech installing the dish miss-aimed it? There is no dish in this case, nor is there a set top DVR. The service isn't being offered to DirecTV customers, and there is no reason to do that anyway. They already have satellite equipment to receiver their channels on. Right now AT&T is very happy with that arrangement, so much so they have essentially stopped the roll-out of their IPTV uVerse service. Maybe one day they will move them from satellite to wireless but you are talking decades from now.
DTV and DTV Now won't be combined anytime soon either. This is due to content licensing issues (otherwise DTV Now would already have things like non owner-operated locals which DTV already has carriage agreements for, or CBS locals period). DTV Now doesn't use DVRs so has no need for a "16 tuner" box and AT&T has no interest in making hardware for it since they can just make apps for existing devices like Apple TV, Roku (coming soon), Fire TV, Android, iOS, Android TV (coming soon) and probably smart TVs in the future. The DVR functionality, when it is rolled out, will be cloud based so no local recordings and no need for local DVR hardware.
Doubtful. Sprint isn't exactly setting the world on fire these days. Hell if being in the carrier business is the reason, Apple would probably be more influenced by Softbank's Japanese carrier operations. Heck Softbank in Japan has almost as many subscribers as Sprint does in the US (~40 vs ~58 million), in a country with less than half of the US's population.
That's funny since most printed text is printed at like 72dpi and nobody complains that printed text is pixelated or "unclear." The human eye isn't that good. What you are loving isn't resolution related -- it's the better backlight giving you better blacks than what you had on old 1080 monitors.
That's funny since most printed text is printed at like 72dpi and nobody complains that printed text is pixelated or "unclear." The human eye isn't that good. What you are loving isn't resolution related -- it's the better backlight giving you better blacks than what you had on old 1080 monitors.
Found the guy who's never worked on a 4K monitor. Try it for a while. Going back to 1080p it looks like text was rendered with a circular saw. I have a very new, high end 27" 144hz gaming monitor. I love it for games but I also have two 27" 4K monitors on the PC I use for work and the difference is extremely noticeable. Text and lines are razor sharp.
Not to mention all that extra screen real estate!
they will join them all together or at least iptv and sat.
They are not putting cellular modems in their DTV boxes. That would be beyond useless and since the data is zero rated on their network, it would make no sense to do it from their perspective anyway.
I'm sure there's a reason why someone might want 8K, but I've not even been convinced of the benefit of 4K yet.
Video walls. Like Barney Stinson had!
Or projectors. Amazing how people forget those exist.
Get your HDMI 2.1 Monster cable to day only $89.99 ...>
It's on sale for 90% off!?
Well it's a great way to show how caps are not growing in any sort of realistic proportion to bandwidth speeds. And that's important. Faster internet opens up more use cases for the user. For example: 6mb/s? I'll just buy that 30gb Xbox game on disk (and still suffer through a multi-gig day-1 patch). 100mb/s? Digital it is! Yay! no more swapping discs! Want to stream 4K UHD content? Not with that 6mb/s you aren't. 30mb/s? Go for it! Oh look, true BD level HD streams? You're gonna need a bigger pipe!
There are plenty of other examples. The problem as the connections get faster, if the cap's don't increase (or, you know, just go the fruck away) in proportion then it's making all that new speed somewhat pointless since I can't really utilize if for new things, I can just do the things I do now faster. And if I already have sufficient bandwidth for doing what I do now, then there is no point to increasing it.
There is a point from the carrier's perspective however. When speeds increase but the usage per user doesn't they can get more users per tower, since the actual time each user is utilizing the available spectrum for the tower goes down. That 20mb email pull goes from 5 seconds to 1 second. Same amount of data from the user perspective, but it frees up 4 seconds of utilization from the tower's perspective. The exception, of course, is streaming audio/video. In this case since AT&T owns DirecTV Now in this case, they can use the free data to lock you in to both their video service and data service, so it's still a win. For them.
Huh. I stand corrected.
Yea well do your research next time. Cellular technology branding is serious business!
If they use muilt-cast like the IPTV U-verse tv system then not so much.
But if they want to get very evil have the installer miss aim the dish so it's easy to get rain fade and when that 16 tuner box switches to cell it's overeager city and even if with an auto cut off that takes 1 hour you can rack up a lot at $10 a gig.
This is for DirecTV Now, not regular DirecTV. DirecTV Now is an Over The Top (OTT) streaming TV service from DirecTV. It competes with SlingTV and Playstation Vue. There is no dish involved.
Don't worry! DirecTV Now is Zero Rated on AT&T's mobile networks so it won't use any of your data! And all it costs is the death of net neutrality!