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“We have a tool that works on a narrow slice of phones,” Comey said at an encryption and surveillance conference at Kenyon University in Ohio late on Wednesday.
The FBI director stated that while the hack works on the iPhone 5C and older smartphones made by Apple, the same method wouldn’t work on newer models that have fingerprint sensors.
Older iPhone versions don’t have the ‘secure enclave,’ that handles the end user encryption protocols that protects, pins and passcodes. Comey also said that:
“Litigation between the government and Apple over the San Bernardino phone has ended, because the government has purchased, from a private party, a way to get into that phone, 5C, running iOS 9,” the director said.
It has been widely speculated that an Israeli cybersecurity firm by the name of Cellebrite has been revealed as the third party source that the FBI are using to crack the security features of the iPhone that was used by the San Bernardino terrorists.
The FBI had been demanding that Apple create a special version of their iOS operating system, that would prevent the device from wiping itself if too many incorrect attempts are made via the passcode logon screen.
A federal court in the US was due to rule last month whether the FBI could issue a court order forcing Apple to help them, but the hearing was postponed when the Department of Justice announced that it might not need the tech firm’s assistance because a third-party had demonstrated a possible extraction method to FBI agents.
At the conference, the FBI director also made the point that the FBI was in a position to assist local and state law enforcement because they now had the means to unlock the older iPhones for them. The director sounded disappointed when he admitted that evidence gained this way could not be used in court.
The post FBI Admits San Bernadino Hack Only Works On Older iPhones appeared first on FileHippo News.
Facial recognition software, in both its real-world and movie-fantasy applications, is really amazing technology. But with the constant barrage of fear mongering associated with its applications, it’s nice to see some good news come out about it.
Microsoft has partnered with ING, Delft University of Technology, The Mauritshuis and Museum Het Rembrandthu on a project called Next Rembrandt to apply the methods of facial recognition software to create a whole new face. How? (And slightly less important…why?) By having the software study up on its art history.
Next Rembrandt fed digitized images of 346 paintings by Rembrandt into the software’s database and then applied the same layer-by-layer facial characteristic breakdown used in recognition technology to have the computer analyze the portraits. But instead of picking out a specific face for identification, the computer was tasked with creating a whole new face using the styles and conventions of the Dutch master.
The end result was a painting that is so eerily similar to something Rembrandt himself would have created that it’s nearly a flawless representation of his style. The painstaking process took more than 500 hours and involved multiple layers of image rendering and inking. One project leader has stated that if he didn’t know better–and saw it hanging in a museum with the artist’s name–he would believe the computer’s finished product to be a genuine Rembrandt.
According to Next Rembrandt’s website, “To master his style, we designed a software system that could understand Rembrandt based on his use of geometry, composition, and painting materials. A facial recognition algorithm identified and classified the most typical geometric patterns used by Rembrandt to paint human features. It then used the learned principles to replicate the style and generate new facial features for our painting.”
But this still hasn’t explained the why, other than to demonstrate the growing capabilities of facial recognition software. Creating forgeries for fun is one thing, but this only highlights how advanced the capabilities have become; that’s a far less enjoyable prospect for many people, especially those who are designing counter-products to thwart the technology and protect our privacy.
The post Facial Recognition Software Gets Artistic appeared first on FileHippo News.
As any regular reader of our news section here at FileHippo can’t but have failed to have noticed over the last 6 weeks, the ongoing legal feud between Apple and the FBI has been an omnipresent story that for a long time felt like it would go and on and on and on and on.
Apple’s steadfast refusal to comply with the US government’s order to unlock the San Bernadino terrorist iPhone sparked off a massive debate in the tech world about privacy, the rights of the individual and personal encryption.
But now the people at WhatsApp have added in built default end-to-end encryption for all of its messages. If anyone was still had any doubt as to what side of the fence the company was building its house on, they just got their answer.
“Recently there has been a lot of discussion about encrypted services and the work of law enforcement,” the company said in a statement on their website. “While we recognize the important work of law enforcement in keeping people safe, efforts to weaken encryption risk exposing people’s information to abuse from cyber criminals, hackers, and rogue states.”
The move to end-to-end encryption for all WhatsApp users now means that even if the tech messaging firm wanted to hand over information to a legal authority, it can’t.
As part of the announcement, the post on the WhatsApp website says:
“The idea is simple: when you send a message, the only person who can read it is the person or group chat that you send that message to. No one can see inside that message. Not cybercriminals. Not hackers. Not oppressive regimes. Not even us. End-to-end encryption helps make communication via WhatsApp private – sort of like a face-to-face conversation.”
WhatsApp is one of the few free communication platforms that now provides full end-to-end encryption that is switch on by default for everything WhatsApp related. The company also said that they fully expect encryption to ‘ultimately represent the future of personal communication.’
The post Whatsapp Switches On Encryption For A Billion Users appeared first on FileHippo News.
When most tech consumers think of software piracy, they tend to think of a gaunt gamer in a darkened basement, drooling over an unlicensed copy of the latest title. But the reality of global software piracy is far more serious: in a ten year period ending in 2012, the US lost nearly 43,000 manufacturing jobs due to illegal software, which amounted to almost $40 billion lost in the manufacturing sector and almost $7 billion lost in federal tax revenue.
Those numbers are horrifying enough in a world economy that many perceive as stable, but what happens when that kind of cause-and-effect is happening in an unstable or emerging market? Kenya has certainly found out, to their own detriment.
For a wide variety of reasons–including ignorance of the issue, lack of enforcement of existing copyright laws, and the perception that pirated software is the only affordable way to keep up in any kind of tech sector–Kenya’s illegal software problem is reaching crisis proportions. With the help of initiatives from companies like Microsoft, though, their government is at least claiming to work to put an end to it.
Microsoft will be offering amnesty to users who’ve been working with pirated copies of their titles, an epidemic which Kecobo, the Kenyan Copyright Board, says has reached as much as 78% of software use. The tech giant will overlook the use of stolen software and give users the opportunity to purchase legitimately licensed versions without fear of prosecution. It’s not just a sound economic move on both sides; the unfortunate reality of the illegal software according to Kecobo’s estimates is that the chances of falling victim to cybercrime due to pirated software are as high as a 74% chance, a factor that pirates are all too happy to exploit.
After the month-long amnesty period ends, Kecobo at least claims that it will begin cracking down on software piracy by arresting and prosecuting offenders.
The post Microsoft Offers Amnesty To End Software Piracy appeared first on FileHippo News.
