Now, Even Your Headphones Can Spy You

Malware can turn your computers into perpetual eavesdropping devices by covertly turning speakers or headphones/earphones into microphones, scientists have warned. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Israel have shown how most PCs today are susceptible to such attacks using a malware called SPEAKE(a)R. The fact that headphones, earphones and speakers are physically built like microphones, and that an audio port’s role in the PC can be reprogrammed from output to input, creates a vulnerability that can be abused by hackers. This is the reason people like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tape up their mic and webcam. You might tape the mic, but would be unlikely to tape the headphones or speakers. Malware can stealthily reconfigure the headphone jack from a lineout jack to a microphone jack, making the connected headphones function as a pair of recording microphones. This works even when the PC does not have a connected mic.

Large Frozen Water Deposit Found On Mars

Using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists have found a huge reservoir of water frozen beneath a region of cracked and pitted plains on the red planet. This may prove to be a vital resource for astronauts in the future. Researchers examined part of the Utopia Planitia region on Mars, in the mid-northern latitudes, with the orbiter’s ground penetrating Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument. Analyses of data from more than 600 overhead passes unveil a deposit more extensive in area than the US state of New Mexico, and that could hold about as much water as in Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes of North America. The deposit ranges in thickness from about 80 to about 170 metres, with a composition that is 50 to 85% water ice, mixed with dust or larger rocky particles.

Species Can't Cope With Pace Of Warming

Most plants and animals cannot adapt at the rate the climate is changing, scientists have said. A study of more than 250 species found their ability to change their “climate niche”, the conditions under which they can survive, will be vastly outpaced by future changes in rainfall and temperature. Amphibians, reptiles and plants are particularly vulnerable, according to US researchers, and tropical species are at higher risk than those from temperate zones. Ecologists analyzed how quickly species had changed their niches over time, and how these rates compared with that of global warming. Rates of change in climatic niches were much slower than rates of projected climate change, by more than 200,000 fold for temperature on average, they said.

New Technique Can Stop Illegal Copying Of Your Photos, Videos

Scientists have developed an innovative light-based technique to create secure, invisible watermarks that can be used to prevent photos, videos and books from being illegally copied and distributed. In research, researchers use a complex pattern of light, or diffraction pattern, as a unique watermark. The invisible watermark is embedded into the content we are trying to protect. Imperceptibility is one of the most significant advantages of optical watermarking. The new approach encodes the optical watermark in a single step. It is faster, and uses a less complex optical setup than the optical watermarking approaches previously pursued, the researchers said. The technique can also be used to optically encrypt data or to hide information within images. The method is based on a technique called single-shot ptychography encoding (SPE) that uses multiple partially overlapping beams of light to generate a diffraction pattern from a complex object. Unlike other methods, SPE is also less prone to error than other methods. In addition to conducting numerical simulations to test their method, the researchers carried out an optical experiment showing the usefulness of SPE. Most methods for optical watermarking have only been demonstrated with simulations. This experiment shows that our method is suitable for practical optical watermarking. For the optical experiment, the researchers used SPE to create a watermark consisting of a diffraction pattern of multiple tiny spots. Prior to embedding the watermark into a host image, they used computer processing to remove any repeated data and to scramble the diffraction pattern, making it easier to embed the watermark and further improving its security. The spot size can be reduced to smaller than 10 microns, which helps prevent degradation of the host image. Once a watermark is embedded into digital media, there are multiple ways to detect it to check for authenticity. If someone knows an optical watermark is present, it can be detected by subtracting the host image and then using a special security key and extraction algorithm.