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Manufacturer Remotely Bricks Smart Vacuum After Its Owner Blocked It From Collecting Data (tomshardware.com) 120

"An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device," writes Tom's Hardware.

"That's when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to." The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after... He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again... [H]e decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again...

[He discovered] a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware. From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that's where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data.

First of all, it's Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn't protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home. This isn't unusual, by far. After all, it's a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer's server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers.

Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader registrations_suck for sharing the article.

Comment Langendorf bread (Score 1) 165

When I was a kid, we too had stupid things. Besides elephant jokes (how many elephants can you fit in a VW Beetle? Five -- two in the front, two in the back, and one in the glove box), the dumbest joke I remember was to run up to a friend fast and breathless and demand "Guess what!" as if you'd seen a UFO or fire engine run by, then shout "Langendorf bread, that's what!" and run away cackling like Kamala Harris.

EU

New Large Coral Reef Discovered Off Naples Containing Rare Ancient Corals (independent.co.uk) 13

Off the southwest cost of Italy, a remotely operated submarine made "a significant and rare discovery," reports the Independent — a vast white coral reef that was 80 metres tall (262 feet) and 2 metres wide (6.56 feet) "containing important species and fossil traces." Often dubbed the "rainforests of the sea", coral reefs are of immense scientific interest due to their status as some of the planet's richest marine ecosystems, harbouring millions of species. They play a crucial role in sustaining marine life but are currently under considerable threat...

hese impressive formations are composed of deep-water hard corals, commonly referred to as "white corals" because of their lack of colour, specifically identified as Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata species. The reef also contains black corals, solitary corals, sponges, and other ecologically important species, as well as fossil traces of oysters and ancient corals, the Italian Research Council said. It called them "true geological testimonies of a distant past."

Mission leader Giorgio Castellan said the finding was "exceptional for Italian seas: bioconstructions of this kind, and of such magnitude, had never been observed in the Dohrn Canyon, and are rarely seen elsewhere in our Mediterranean". The discovery will help scientists understand the ecological role of deep coral habitats and their distribution, especially in the context of conservation and restoration efforts, he added.

The undersea research was funded by the EU.

Thanks to davidone (Slashdot reader #12,252) for sharing the article.

Comment Re:Physics IS full of waste and fraud (Score 1) 213

Explain where I have confused climate and weather. You didn't, and you won't, because you can't. You make arguments with nothing to back them up because you don't know what you are talking about, and because you don't want to risk anyone rebutting your claims.

That's also why you didn't rebut a single one of my claims. You don't believe your own claims. You are just another climate alarmist yelling at the clouds and wearing an onion on your belt.

Comment Re:Physics IS full of waste and fraud (Score 0, Troll) 213

You're an idiot.

Of course *climate change* is real. It's been changing for 4.5 billion years.

What's not real is the fantasy that humans are changing climate so fast that we have already passed several tipping points on the way to Venus, that polar bears and penguins have gone extinct, that New York City has been drowned, that Arctic summer ice has vanished, that Mt Kilamanjaro has lost its peak snow, that snow has vanished from the Earth ... how many more failed predictions do you need to discern a pattern of lies?

CO2 was 6000 ppm 500 million or so years ago. It was 4000 ppm during parts of the dinosaur age. If it falls below 150 ppm or so, plants go extinct, and without plants, all animal life goes extinct. 280 ppm was the so-called baseline 150 years ago; how much closer to extinction do you want to get? It's 430 ppm now.

The global climate was warmer during the Medieval Warming Period, as attested to Greenland actually being green enough to raise cattle. It was warmer during the Roman Warm Period, and earlier eras, as attested by olive trees growing above the current tree line. Glaciers retreating up mountains now from warming have uncovered forests which grew for 300 years, 1000-1500 years ago, until they were knocked down, in situ, by growing glaciers.

I saw a map of the US Atlantic coast, showing claimed recent sea level rises. Coastal cities only a couple of hundred miles apart showed remarkably different sea level rises -- for the same ocean on the same coast. Oceans can't do that, but land can, meaning these were not sea level rises but different degrees of land subsidence.

The climate alarmists have made failed predictions and lied about so much for so long, that anyone who still puts any credence in them is a blithering idiot. People who have truth on their side don't need to invent so much fraudulent data and lie so thoroughly.

The claim that 97% of scientists agree that AGW is real is based on selective cherry picking of self-selected survey results. It also flies in the face of demanding trillions more dollars in research on global warming. If it's settled, why do they need trillions more dollars to study it? As the old saying goes, "If it's settled, it ain't science. If it's science, it ain't settled."

Comment Re:Physics IS full of waste and fraud (Score 0) 213

Yes, I wish more people would pay attention to what he said about them.

I don't think anything better illustrates the corruption of free money than the climate alarmists simultaneously wanting trillions more funding for science that is settled, which is an oxymoron to start with; if it's settled, it ain't science, and if it's science, it ain't settled. So shut up and give us your money. After a while, along with a few fiascos like Fauci, the public begins to notice they're being plucked.

The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least amount of hissing. -- Jean-Baptiste Colbert

Comment Physics IS full of waste and fraud (Score 0) 213

One need not see very many current science papers to see how much nonsense is being peddled as science. Aside from the fakes, from both AI and paper mills, most of it contributes nothing to knowledge. Too much has the appearance of being "publish or perish" trivia that will never be referenced or even read beyond its title.

The problem is politicians who think the way to advance their careers is to shovel money at "science", and that scientific knowledge is measured in dollars and euros and yen and every other currency. Plenty of bureaucrats are ready, willing, and able to funnel it to their buddies, because the only way bureaucrats can measure their professional success is in bigger budgets, more underlings, and fresh regulations. After all, a bureaucracy which does not issue new regulations is declaring "mission accomplished" and its own obsolescence.

Programming

The Toughest Programming Question for High School Students on This Year's CS Exam: Arrays 65

America's nonprofit College Board lets high school students take college-level classes — including a computer programming course that culminates with a 90-minute test. But students did better on questions about If-Then statements than they did on questions about arrays, according to the head of the program. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp explains: Students exhibited "strong performance on primitive types, Boolean expressions, and If statements; 44% of students earned 7-8 of these 8 points," says program head Trevor Packard. But students were challenged by "questions on Arrays, ArrayLists, and 2D Arrays; 17% of students earned 11-12 of these 12 points."

"The most challenging AP Computer Science A free-response question was #4, the 2D array number puzzle; 19% of students earned 8-9 of the 9 points possible."

You can see that question here. ("You will write the constructor and one method of the SumOrSameGame class... Array elements are initialized with random integers between 1 and 9, inclusive, each with an equal chance of being assigned to each element of puzzle...") Although to be fair, it was the last question on the test — appearing on page 16 — so maybe some students just didn't get to it.

theodp shares a sample Java solution and one in Excel VBA solution (which includes a visual presentation).

There's tests in 38 subjects — but CS and Statistics are the subjects where the highest number of students earned the test's lowest-possible score (1 out of 5). That end of the graph also includes notoriously difficult subjects like Latin, Japanese Language, and Physics.

There's also a table showing scores for the last 23 years, with fewer than 67% of students achieving a passing grade (3+) for the first 11 years. But in 2013 and 2017, more than 67% of students achieved that passsing grade, and the percentage has stayed above that line ever since (except for 2021), vascillating between 67% and 70.4%.

2018: 67.8%
2019: 69.6%
2020: 70.4%
2021: 65.1%
2022: 67.6%
2023: 68.0%
2024: 67.2%
2025: 67.0%

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