We're Apparently Scanning Our TVs For Viruses Now

from the internet-of-broken-things dept

We've noted for many years that (like so many "internet of things" devices) modern smart televisions have the security protection equivalent of damp cardboard. Not only are they often easily hacked (something intelligence agencies are super excited about since it gives them audio access to targets), but the companies that make them have been busted repeatedly for hoovering up user usage data (and even audio from your living room), and then failing to adequately secure it.

This week, Samsung took a bit of heat for urging the company's TV customers to, for the first time, occasionally run an antivirus scan on their television sets. The Tweet was online online briefly before Samsung deleted it, apparently realizing it only advertised the fact that you shouldn't be getting viruses on your TV set in the first place:

That's amusing for several reasons. One, because customers wouldn't be getting viruses on their television sets if these products had even the most basic security protections, something TV vendors have failed at for years. Two, because it highlights how many modern televisions have become insanely complicated. Not because consumers necessarily want them to be insanely complicated, but because most TV vendors want you using their embedded streaming platforms and as opposed to a third-party streaming device (like Roku, Chromecast, or a game console).

And of course they want you using their streaming platforms because they want to monetize your viewing and other profitable data. As a Vizio executive recently acknowledged, this can help subsidize the cost of cheaper TV sets. That creates a dilemma whereby the consumer is forced to pay a premium if they want a TV set that simply displays a god-damned image and doesn't hoover up their personal data:

The problem is if you've shopped for a TV lately, it's effectively impossible to find a "dumb" television that simply passes on signal from other devices. As in: they're simply not available at any meaningful scale, even if you were willing to pay a significant premium for them. Many people certainly are; most embedded TV OS platforms are kind of terrible, and users would rather buy a new streaming box (Roku, Chromecast, Apple TV) every few years than be forced to buy an entirely new TV set because the embedded streaming hardware becomes outdated (something TV vendors clearly would benefit from).

While some set vendors might argue that dumb televisions don't exist because there's no market demand for them, the fact is they haven't even bothered to try. And they haven't bothered to try because they're fixated on accelerating the TV upgrade cycle and collecting and selling your personal usage data to a universe of partners. Which again, might not be quite as bad if these companies had done a good job actually securing and encrypting this data, or designing television OS' that didn't feel like they were barfed up from the bowels of 1992 GUI design hell.

It's all kind of a silly circle dysfunction but pretty standard operating procedure in the internet of broken things era, where an endless list of companies now sell over-hyped internet-connected appliances, gleefully collect and monetize your data, but can't be bothered to adequately secure that data or provide consumers with clear options to avoid data collection entirely.

Filed Under: computer security, iot, security, smart tvs, viruses
Companies: samsung

DailyDirt: There's So Much We Don't Know About Life...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Biology defies simple categorization -- even though some think of the field of biology as glorified taxidermy. We even have a difficult time defining what life is. (Are viruses alive?) Fundamental questions about how life began and how life even continues are still elusive. We've just started to scratch the surface of collecting data that might help us understand more about ourselves and the ecosystem we live in. Here are just a few links on genomes and biodiversity that lead to more questions than answers.

• What is the 'hypothetical minimal genome' required for a living organism to exist? Researchers thought that maybe a living cell could get away with 256 genes, but it didn't produce a viable living organism. So after a some trial & error iterations of editing simple bacterial genomes, it looks like 473 genes might be the smallest genome that life needs... to be called life. (And we still don't know what a significant fraction of these genes do.) [url]
• Genome analysis is becoming more practical to do on a large scale, and for just $25,000, you could have your own personal genome -- plus a battery of other medical tests that may or may not provide any meaningful results. Collecting all this health data, though, could start to provide some interesting correlations, and the company offering the service is named Human Longevity -- so there might be something in aggregating this information that might help people live longer lives. [url]
• How many mammalian viruses exist? At least 320,000? And there's probably no limit to the number. It's important to note that not all viruses cause disease -- bacteriophages keep us healthy by killing off bacteria that do cause diseases. So we don't want to eradicate viruses, but it would be nice to know more about them. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: bacteria, bacteriophages, biology, dna, genes, genome, hypothetical minimal genome, longevity, viruses

DailyDirt: What's In Your... DNA?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Biotechnology doesn't have quite the same milestones of progress as Moore's Law, but as we unravel how biology works, we're going to have incredibly powerful tools to change the world. Sure, we're going to need to figure out the ethical ramifications of a GATTACA-esque future where designer babies are possible and replicants/clones can be grown for replacement parts. But it might take a while still before we're engineering lifespans and curing the disease of aging.

• Remnants of an ancient virus have been found in human stem cells' DNA, and this kind of viral material was once considered "Junk DNA" -- but may actually play a critical role in human development. Apparently, human embryonic stem cells require certain bits of DNA to act like stem cells (ie. be pluripotent, able to turn into over 200 different kinds of cells in the human body) -- and those critical bits of DNA are from a retrovirus that infected our ancestors' DNA millions of years ago. [url]
• Chromosomal proteins are intertwined with DNA, and these proteins play a critical role in determining when DNA is triggered to do its job. It's still not completely known how these chromosomal proteins evolved, but changes in these proteins can cause harmful mutations and cancer -- as well as improved cell performance. Learning more about these proteins and how they interact with DNA could lead to a much better understanding of certain diseases -- and even more fundamental clues to how life has evolved. [url]
• CRISPR is an incredibly important biological tool, allowing scientists to edit DNA much more easily than ever before... and it's a tool that can be used to delete HIV from human DNA. HIV is a retrovirus (so it puts its own genetic information into a host's DNA), and being able to remove it from a living cell could someday provide a cure -- and lead to other effective treatments for various intractable viral infections. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: biotech, cancer, chromosomal proteins, crispr, dna, genetics, junk dna, stem cells, viruses

DailyDirt: Zombies!

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are plenty of zombie movies where viruses decimate the human population with diseases that turn infected hosts into crazy, blood-thirsty undead bodies. Biotech research reports (and maybe even the CDC!) make some of the premises for these zombie movies sound plausible, but mother nature itself has created a few zombie phenomena as well. Here are just some examples.

• Toxoplasma gondii infects rodents, cats.. and people -- possibly causing weird behaviors and strange culture quirks. The Happening has already happened, sort of. [url]
• Fungus-controlled ants are compelled by their mold-masters to die in nice neighborhoods for spores to thrive. These ants are programmed to die on north-facing plant leaves, roughly 25 centimeters off the ground, in an area with 94-95% humidity and a temperature between 20-30 Celsius. [url]
• A wasp's venom can turn a cockroach into a "dog on a leash." The wasp ends up laying eggs in the belly of its cockroach-pet -- and the wasp young eat their way out. [url]
• Another kind of wasp lays its eggs in an orb spider, and the larvae control the spider to build a special web for them. Is there a Spiderman villan based on this wasp? [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: ants, fungi, spiders, viruses, wasps, zombies

One Of The Earliest Computer Viruses Was Really DRM Gone Wrong

from the no-surprise-there dept

Author William Gibson has a nice little opinion piece claiming that we've now hit the 25th anniversary of "digital vandalism" in the form of computer viruses. I'm pretty sure he's wrong about that, as just a few years back there were all those news reports about how Rich Skrenta (who later went on to found the Open Directory Project, Topix and Blekko) created the first widespread computer virus in Elk Cloner back in 1982. That said, Elk Cloner was more of a prank. The virus Gibson is talking about was more malicious, in that it locked up files. So, if Gibson's point is that this was the first malicious virus, perhaps that's more accurate (though, I would imagine there are some other claims to the throne).

Still, what may be most interesting is that the virus that Gibson discusses was really based on an early attempt at DRM:

IN January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest version of their heart-monitoring software from piracy. They called it Brain, and it was basically a wheel-clamp for PCs. Computers that ran their program, plus this new bit of code, would stop working after a year, though they cheerfully provided three telephone numbers, against the day. If you were a legitimate user, and could prove it, they'd unlock you.

But in the way of all emergent technologies, something entirely unintended happened. The Alvis' wheel-clamp was soon copied by a certain stripe of computer hobbyist, who began to distribute it, concealed within various digital documents that people might be expected to want to open.

Gibson talks about his own surprise that it was hobbyists who really drove digital vandalism (and to some extent, still do). What I find even more interesting is how early on DRM was already over-aggressive and getting in the way of legitimate uses.

Filed Under: drm, viruses, william gibson

Computer Techs Turn Normal Virus Removal Into Multi-Million Dollar Scam

from the opus-dei-has-infected-your-computer dept

Lots of people suspect that the various companies out there who promise to clean viruses off your computer are a bit of a scam -- and, apparently, in at least one case, it turned out to be a huge scam. Apparently a guy working for one of those companies, Vickram Bedi, realized that Roger Davidson, who brought in his laptop to have it cleaned of a virus, was a wealthy composer (and heir to a fortune). So, rather than clean up the virus, Bedi and his girlfriend, Helga Invarsdottir, worked out a scam that bilked Davidson of somewhere between $6 and $20 million.

When asked to remove the virus from the laptop, Mr. Bedi allegedly told Mr. Davidson that his computer had in fact been attacked with a virus so virulent that it also damaged Datalink's computers, according to prosecutors.

Mr. Bedi told Mr. Davidson that he had tracked the source of the virus to a remote village in Honduras and that Mr. Bedi's uncle, purportedly an officer in the Indian military, had traveled there in a military aircraft and retrieved the suspicious hard drive, prosecutors said.

In addition, Mr. Bedi told the victim that his uncle had uncovered an assassination plot against Mr. Davidson by Polish priests tied to Opus Dei, according to prosecutors....

In addition to the thousands of dollars charged to secure Mr. Davidson's computer, Mr. Bedi and Ms. Invarsdottir allegedly charged thousands more to provide 24-hour covert protection for Mr. Davidson and his family.

Harrison Police Chief Anthony Marraccini said the couple charged Mr. Davidson about $160,000 every month for bogus security and other services. At the time of their arrest, Ms. Invarsdottir had $1.6 million in a bank account and Mr. Bedi had $6 million in a separate account, Mr. Marraccini said. Those accounts have been frozen and computers and business documents were seized by police, Mr. Marraccini said.

According to the article, this scam only came to light after law enforcement was investigating Bedi and Invarsdottir for another scam, suggesting that this may have been an even bigger scam, with more targets.

Filed Under: roger davidson, scams, viruses

Captain Cyborg Has A Virus-Infected Sidekick... But Nothing Can Stop A PR Campaign

from the virus-infected? dept

About a decade ago, if you followed the technology space, you might recall a series of articles about a professor at the University of Reading, named Kevin Warwick, who made himself famous by implanting a computer chip in his arm, declaring himself an expert in "cybernetics" and figuring out ways to get way too much press for nothing special. The Register, amusingly, dubbed him "Captain Cyborg" and regularly mocked his various exploits. We haven't heard much about Warwick in a while, but when I saw a bunch of folks chatting about a BBC article concerning the "first human infected with computer virus," I was immediately reminded of Warwick. Reading through the article, it was no surprise to find out that this "experiment" is actually being conducted by a colleague of Warwick's, Mark Gasson -- who according to Warwick's own bio lead the research group that Warwick works in.

The story is -- as with all captain cyborg stories -- a lot less than the headline suggests. Gasson wasn't "infected with a computer virus." He took a chip that had a computer virus and stuck it in his arm, just like Warwick has done n the past. The parallels to an actual virus are minimal, and the usefulness for anything is even less than that. Gasson presents this as useful for considering the implications for implanted technology such as pacemakers, but that's nothing new. People have talked about potential technology issues from the wireless interface to pacemakers for years. Doing some sort of publicity stunt with an implanted computer chip doesn't further that discussion along.

Filed Under: cyborgs, hype, implants, kevin warwick, mark gasson, pr stunts, viruses

Unpatched, Virus-Infected Windows To Blame For Grounded French Fighter Pilots And Halt To Traffic Arrests In Houston

from the gov't-security dept

Reader Calvin sends in two separate stories of government institutions who apparently failed to patch their Windows machines to protect against the Conficker virus -- despite the patch being available for many months. First, Houston police have stopped arresting people with outstanding traffic warrants and shut down the municipal court system for a few days to try to deal with their computer systems being overrun by the virus. Then, across the Atlantic, the French Navy is dealing with a similar problem, forcing them to ground many of their fighter planes. Some naval staff were told not to turn on their computers at all, as apparently the Navy's internal computer network has been hit by the virus as well. Apparently, now might be a good time to run some traffic lights in Houston or invade France (kidding, kidding...).

Filed Under: cornficker, france, houston, security, viruses
Companies: microsoft

More Scammers Using Bogus Copyright Infringement Accusations To Get Their Way

from the it's-just-too-easy dept

Last Friday, we noted that scammers were picking up the success the entertainment industry was having with "pre-settlement" letters to accused file sharers, and using a similar tactic with phone calls, demanding money to avoid getting sued. We noted that it was only a matter of time until those scammers moved to email as well -- and, of course, it's already happened. TorrentFreak is reporting on how scammers are sending threatening letters pretending to be from MediaDefender, one of the firms who provides questionable evidence to the recording industry for its lawsuits. These emails include an attachment, which the email says is more data on what the recipient is accused of sharing on various sites -- but which is actually a virus. So it's not quite to the level of extorting money directly yet -- but that's likely only a matter of time, if it's not happening already.

Filed Under: copyright, infringement, pre-settlement letters, scammers, viruses

Viruses... In... Spaaaaaaaaace

from the for-you-muppet-fans dept

NASA is admitting that laptop brought to the international space station in July apparently contained a virus designed to swipe user passwords, though they're not sure how it happened. The computers don't control anything mission critical, but are used by astronauts to send email and to track their nutritional programs. The computers were never connected to the internet, so NASA is guessing that an astronaut had an infected USB key or something that resulted in the virus getting onto the computer.

Filed Under: nasa, space, viruses