Infi-Zeal's Blog

When most of us think of electronics, we think of the sturdy stability of silicon and plastic. Flexibility is a trait that belongs to the organic world, where materials come in all shapes and stiffness. However, advances in materials science and electrical engineering have paved the way for a new type of electronic device: one that can bend and fold just like a piece of paper. From flexible displays to disposable  RFID tags , these new materials have enabled electronics to end up in places they never have before. They could even, thanks to Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science professor Ana Claudia Arias, end up in our own clothing. Professor Arias is a recent addition to the Berkeley engineering community, having begun her career in materials science at the company  Plastic Logic , developing materials called organic printed electronics. Just as one might print ink onto paper using a desktop printer, these electronics can be printed onto various flexible...

  Four years and $54 million later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is finally ready to launch a surveillance unit capable of spying on Skype conversations and other Internet communications. The Domestic Communications Assistance Center (DCAC) is a collaborative effort between the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, and the Drug Enforcement Agency. All three agencies will build customized hardware to enable wiretapping on wireless and Internet conversations per court order requests. “It’s also designed to serve as a kind of surveillance help desk for state, local, and other federal police,”  CNET reported . “The center represents the technological component of the bureau’s ‘ Going Dark ’ Internet wiretapping push, which was allocated $54 million by a Senate committee last month.” The DCAC has been tight-lipped about its purpose. The FBI said in a  statement  that the organization will “not be responsible for the actual execution of any electronic surveillance...

Reliance Internet Hacked By Anonymous India This news might come as a shock to many reliance users. Anonymous India Compromised intranet of Reliance Broadband. It seems that they hacked into the admin panel for the filtering server. when anyone try to open a website, say i opened twitter.com, i will be redirected to the defaced page of Anonymous India. Below is the message on their defacement page. Anonymous REVENGE / WE OWN YOU Told you not to mess with free speech and lesser with Anonymous Government of India, you know what you did wrong. you caused out twitter account to be blocked now we will show you what anonymous is capable of doing. ———————————————- We give you 24Hours at maximum to give our twitter account back and apologize Give @OpIndia_Revenge BACK ———————————————– IF NOT We will unleash hell and shiver on you Greeting government of India, you were bad really bad. One of the worst governments the world has. Yet we tried our best not to go too tough on you, and the...

New intelligent algorithms could help robots to quickly recognize and respond to human gestures. Researchers at A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore have created a computer program which recognizes human gestures quickly and accurately, and requires very little training. Many works of science fiction have imagined robots that could interact directly with people to provide entertainment, services or even health care. Robotics is now at a stage where some of these ideas can be realized, but it remains difficult to make robots easy to operate. One option is to train robots to recognize and respond to human gestures. In practice, however, this is difficult because a simple gesture such as waving a hand may appear very different between different people. Designers must develop intelligent computer algorithms that can be 'trained' to identify general patterns of motion and relate them correctly to individual commands. Now, Rui Yan and co-workers at the A*STAR ...

Break Google Chrome in six steps Browsers are a really nice target for attackers of all stripes and skill levels. But, unless you're a savant or have just landed here from the future, you may want to take a pass on going after Google Chrome, judging by the insane level of effort and skill that an anonymous security researcher had to deploy in order to compromise Chrome during the company's Pwnium contest in March. The researcher who received one of two $60,000 rewards handed out by Google for full sandbox escapes and compromises of Chrome during the contest used the alias Pinkie Pie. At the time that his accomplishment was announced during the CanSecWest conference in March, Google officials did not specify exactly how the researcher had been able to break Chrome's many layers of security, but just said that he had used multiple bugs to do it. Now, Google security researchers have revealed the method and techniques that Pinkie Pie used , and if anything, the whole...

  In what was billed as "Monday Mail Mayhem," the hacktivist group Anonymous released a 1.7-GB archive that it's characterizing as "data that used to belong to the United States Bureau of Justice, until now." "Within the booty you may find lots of shiny things such as internal emails, and the entire database dump," according to a statement released by the group. "We Lulzed as they took the website down after being owned, clearly showing they were scared of what inevitably happened." That statement was included with a BitTorrent file (named 1.7GB_leaked_from_the_Bureau_of_Justice) uploaded Monday to the Pirate Bay by "AnonymousLeaks," although multiple downloaders Tuesday complained that the Torrent download was stuck at the 94%-completion point. Why "dox"--release purloined data from--the  Bureau of Justice Statistics ? "We are releasing data to spread information, to allow the people to be heard, and to know t...

Iranian Hackers Claim They Compromised NASA SSL Digital Certificate There's still no official response from NASA officials after a group of Iranian student programmers calling themselves Cyber Warriors Team claimed to have swiped records for thousands of NASA researchers by compromising an agency site's SSL certificate. In a May 16  statement posted on Pastebin , the group claimed (in poorly constructed English) to have exploited a vulnerability in a login system to gain administrative rights. "Our main work and we target Is in use. Our target was not Internet sabotage. Our Target was Do ‘MAN IN THE MIDDLE’ attack (with using Confirmation obtained) and also Clear the track after each connection in the network For Hide and Disclosing my presence in Two-way communication between. But the problem still exists And its use isn't Hard For We (CW.T)." NASA has come under federal scrutiny since admitting earlier this year that it's suffered more than 5,400 cy...

Anonymous attack on Indian Government Continues Hacktivist grop Anonymous continued its attacks on the Indian government and creative industries at the weekend by taking out the web sites of the national CERT and the country’s President in retaliation for widespread blocks on video and file sharing sites. The group’s  @opindia_revenge  Twitter account documented the latest attacks, which also appeared to take offline the web site of film company and broadcaster Reliance Big Entertainment, and government portal india.gov.in. All are now back online, having apparently been struck by a DDoS attack on Saturday or Sunday. In a more unusual attack, the group also defaced the web site of an apparently innocent company –  ABC Krishi Equipments  – which makes agricultural machinery, in an apparent warning to the government. “Government wouldn't want this to happen on their website ryt? They shud know we are still watching,” the group  tweeted . The at...

HULK - Http Unbearable Load King HULK is a web server denial of service tool written for research purposes. It is designed to generate volumes of unique and obfuscated traffic at a webserver, bypassing caching engines and therefore hitting the server's direct resource pool. For the aspiring attacker or pen tester, there is no shortage of attack tools, scripts, crimeware kits and exploits available online. But, the Internet being what it is, there's always room for one more. Enter HULK, a new DDoS tool that arrives just in time to coincide with the release of some movie involving the actual Hulk and other CGI-ified mediocre-heroes. The HULK ( HTTP Unbearable Load King ) DDoS tool is somewhat different from others of its ilk in that it doesn't simply hammer a server with a massive load of TCP SYN requests or other predictable packets. Instead, HULK generates numerous unique requests designed to prevent server defenses from recognizing a pattern and filtering the a...

Wikipedia: If you see ads, You are infected Wikipedia is warning its users that seeing ads on its website usually means your computer is infected with some type of malware. Most of the time, this means a rogue browser add-on or extension. Wikipedia  has issued a warning to its millions of visitors. The headline says it all: “If you’re seeing ads on Wikipedia, your computer is probably infected with malware.” The free encyclopaedia gives three examples of how ads can get onto the site, but only one involves malware. First thing’s first: get yourself a solid antivirus solution like  Microsoft Security Essentials  or  Malwarebytes  and start scanning. If your antivirus solution doesn’t find anything, the second way ads get onto Wikipedia is via browser add-ons and extensions. One example is a Google Chrome extension called “I want this.” To remove it, or any other such extension, open the options menu via the wrench icon on the top right, click on Setti...

Apple’s iCloud Under Attack By Hackers Some iCloud registrants are beginning to notice spam email in their Sent folders, despite having nothing to do with the unsolicited messages ending up in their friends’ inboxes. They believe they’ve been hacked, and they have taken to Apple Support Communities to seek answers. AppleInsider points out to a  couple of small threads on Apple’s forums where several iCloud subscribers are signaling a potential attack on the company’s servers. "I never use my @me email for anything, and I guarantee someone didn't break into the account by guessing my password (or brute force methods) — it's a pseudoly randomly generated string of 15 numbers, letters (upper and lower case) and symbols (I worked in IT for many years and am perhaps overly zealous about password security, which makes memorization a real pain)," one person wrote. “I’m worried that Apple's iCloud servers themselves got hacked, as I see there are a few o...

A new study in Nature  reports that two people with tetraplegia were able to reach for and grasp objects in three-dimensional space using robotic arms that they controlled directly with brain activity. They used the BrainGate neural interface system, an investigational device currently being studied under an Investigational Device Exemption. One participant used the system to serve herself coffee for the first time since becoming paralyzed nearly 15 years ago. On April 12, 2011, nearly 15 years after she became paralyzed and unable to speak, a woman controlled a robotic arm by thinking about moving her arm and hand to lift a bottle of coffee to her mouth and take a drink. That achievement is one of the advances in brain-computer interfaces, restorative neurotechnology, and assistive robot technology described in the May 17 edition of the journal  Nature  by the BrainGate2 collaboration of researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Brown University, Mas...

Wikileaks has been under DDoS attack for the last three days The Pirate Bay is down. Wikileaks is down. Visa was down. Are all these Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks a coincidence? Right now it’s not clear, but something is definitely happening. After covering The Pirate Bay Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack and Anonymous’ denial of responsibility for it, I’ve been checking the torrent site’s Facebook Page every so often. The Pirate Bay said it thought it might know who was behind the attack, so I was curious if they would post it today. They haven’t yet, but they did just post this: Wikileaks.org is also under attack. This sure is the year of the storm… As predicted here: https://thepiratebay.se/blog/204 I checked, and indeed  Wikileaks  is down for me. The site’s  Twitter  account sent this message out five hours ago: “WikiLeaks has been under sustained DDOS attacks over the last 72 hours. http://www.wikileaks.org is good, http:...

Russian BitTorrent-Killer project sponsored by Microsoft A team of Russian developers is touting a technology it says can kill off BitTorrent-based P2P file sharing – and says it has attracted investment from Microsoft. According to a story in Russia Beyond the Headlines, the technology developed by Andrei Klimenko, his brother Alexei, and Dmitry Shuvaev has attracted $US100,000 from Microsoft’s seed investment fund, and another $US34,000 from the Bortnik Fund. The company they have founded, called Pirate Pay, also claims to have conducted successful proof-of-concept tests, blocking “50,000” downloads of the movie  Vysotsky: Thanks go God I’m Alive  in the month after its release. What’s not clear, either from the original story or the  TorrentFreak   follow-up , is exactly how the technology works. From the hints dropped by Andrei Klimenko, Pirate Pay operates what is essentially a BitTorrent-specific, cloud-based denial of service. “We used a numb...