Nicole Perlroth’s roundup on the Spectre and Meltdown security holes
Excellent roundup — this really is amazingly bad news for CPU performance and fixability
(tags: meltdown spectre nicole-perlroth security cpu performance speculative-execution intel amd arm)
These stickers make AI hallucinate things that aren’t there – The Verge
The sticker “allows attackers to create a physical-world attack without prior knowledge of the lighting conditions, camera angle, type of classifier being attacked, or even the other items within the scene.” So, after such an image is generated, it could be “distributed across the Internet for other attackers to print out and use.” This is why many AI researchers are worried about how these methods might be used to attack systems like self-driving cars. Imagine a little patch you can stick onto the side of the motorway that makes your sedan think it sees a stop sign, or a sticker that stops you from being identified up by AI surveillance systems. “Even if humans are able to notice these patches, they may not understand the intent [and] instead view it as a form of art,” the researchers write.
(tags: self-driving cars ai adversarial-classification security stickers hacks vision surveillance classification)
Notes from the Intelpocalypse [LWN.net]
What emerges is a picture of unintended processor functionality that can be exploited to leak arbitrary information from the kernel, and perhaps from other guests in a virtualized setting. If these vulnerabilities are already known to some attackers, they could have been using them to attack cloud providers for some time now. It seems fair to say that this is one of the most severe vulnerabilities to surface in some time. The fact that it is based in hardware makes things significantly worse. We will all be paying the performance penalties associated with working around these problems for the indefinite future. For the owners of vast numbers of systems that cannot be updated, the consequences will be worse: they will remain vulnerable to a set of vulnerabilities with known exploits. This is not a happy time for the computing industry.
Aadhaar’s Dirty Secret Is Out, Anyone Can Be Added as a Data Admin
If you think your Aadhaar data is only in the hands of those authorised to access the official [Indian national] Aadhaar database, think again. Following up on an investigation by The Tribune, The Quint found that completely random people like you and me, with no official credentials, can access and become admins of the official Aadhaar database (with names, mobile numbers, addresses of every Indian linked to the UIDAI scheme). But that’s not even the worst part. Once you are an admin, you can make ANYONE YOU CHOOSE an admin of the portal. You could be an Indian, you could be a foreign national, none of it matters – the Aadhaar database won’t ask. A person of your choosing would then have access to the data of all 119,22,59,062 Aadhaar cardholders.
(tags: aadhaar security fail vulnerabilities privacy)
My bedroom lights turn on when my blood sugar goes low! (Dexcom, Nightscout and IFTTT) : diabetes
Now this is a great idea — IOT to the rescue
(tags: iot via:fp via:eatpaste blood health diabetes monitoring home)