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MirrorLink Car Smartphone Network Has Vulnerabilities, Claim Researchers

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

MirrorLink Car Smartphone Network Has Vulnerabilities, Claim Researchers

A system of rules that allow vehicles to communicate with smartphones may be vulnerable to hacking, a new study suggests. Many of today’s automobiles leave the factory with secret passengers: prototype software features that are disabled but that can be unlocked by clever drivers, researchers said.

In what is believed to be the first comprehensive security analysis of its kind, researchers at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and George Mason University in the US found vulnerabilities in MirrorLink, a system of rules that allow vehicles to communicate with smartphones.

MirrorLink when unlocked can allow hackers to use a linked smartphone as a stepping stone to control safety-critical components such as the vehicle’s anti-lock braking system.

Damon McCoy, from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, explained that “tuners” – people or companies which customise automobiles – might unwittingly enable hackers by unlocking insecure features.

“Tuners will root around for these kinds of prototypes, and if these systems are easy to unlock they will do it,” he said. “And there are publically available instructions describing how to unlock MirrorLink. Just one of several instructional videos on YouTube has gotten over 60,000 views,” McCoy added.

“The researchers used such publically available instructions to unlock MirrorLink on the in-vehicle infotainment system in a 2015 vehicle they purchased from eBay for their experiments,” said McCoy.

The automaker and supplier declined to release a security patch – reflecting the fact that they never enabled MirrorLink. McCoy pointed out that this could leave drivers who enable MirrorLink out on a limb.

MirrorLink is the connection protocol and allows the driver or passenger to control phone apps via the car’s dash and steering wheel controls. Created by the Connected Car Consortium, MirrorLink represents 80 per cent of the world’s automakers, is the first and leading industry standard for connecting smartphones to in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems.

However, some automakers disable it because they chose a different smartphone-to-IVI standard, or because the version of MirrorLink in their vehicles is a prototype that can be activated later.

[Source:- gadgets.ndtv]

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Education

Grammar schools help poor claim is ‘tosh’ , says Ofsted chief Wilshaw

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

Sir Michael Wilshaw

The idea that poor children will benefit from a return of grammar schools is “tosh” and “nonsense”, says the outgoing chief inspector of Ofsted.

Sir Michael Wilshaw said a return to selection at 11 years old would be a “profoundly retrograde step” that would lead to sliding standards.

He spoke out after reports that Prime Minister Theresa May favours changing the law so new grammars can open.

England’s Education Secretary Justine Greening is looking into the issue.

Supporters of grammar schools say that children from poor backgrounds are helped to make the most of their potential because entry to such schools is on the basis of raw ability.

But many argue that, in fact, the vast majority of those doing well in entrance tests are children whose parents have paid for them to be privately tutored outside school.

In a speech to London Councils’ education conference, Sir Michael praised the success of schools in the capital saying they had undergone an “amazing transformation” and lead the way in “narrowing the attainment gap between rich and poor”.

“It has maintained its status as the top performing region across all key stages when it comes to the performance of children eligible for free school meals,” he said.

The soaring success of London schools made “a mockery of the claim that opening up many grammar schools is the key to unlocking the potential of disadvantaged children and to boosting social mobility,” he said.

‘Pretty woeful’

“If grammar schools are the great answer, why aren’t there more in London?

“If they are such a good thing for poor children, then why are poor children here in the capital doing so much better than their counterparts in those parts of the country that operate selection?”

He said he appreciated that many grammar schools did a “fine job”, but added that their record of admitting children from non-middle class backgrounds was “pretty woeful”.

“The notion that the poor stand to benefit from the return of grammar schools strikes me as quite palpable tosh and nonsense – and is very clearly refuted by the London experience.”

He cited figures showing the under-representation of poor pupils in grammar schools.

In Bexley, he said grammar schools had 9% of pupils on free school meals, compared to 28% in non-selective schools.

In Sutton, where five out of 14 schools are grammars, the proportion is about 7% in grammar schools and 25% in non-selective schools.

In a BBC interview this weekend, Mrs May did not answer directly a question about whether she planned to bring back grammar schools.

But she said Ms Greening was looking at the issue of new grammar schools as well as other areas of education policy.

Labour banned new grammars in 1998 amid concerns they were dominated by middle-class pupils whose parents gave them a head-start with private tutoring.

England’s first “new” grammar for 50 years in Sevenoaks, Kent, was only approved last year as an “annexe” to an existing school using a loophole in the law.

Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner described Sir Michael’s comments as “an embarrassing rebuke” for the Conservatives.

“The Tories should be concentrating instead on raising standards in all schools and improving education for all our children, regardless of their backgrounds.

“They are failing to do so. But they want to return to a system in which children were branded as failures at the age of 11 and which only increased division in our society.

[Source:- BBC]

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Internet

MirrorLink Car Smartphone Network Has Vulnerabilities, Claim Researchers

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

MirrorLink Car Smartphone Network Has Vulnerabilities, Claim Researchers

A system of rules that allow vehicles to communicate with smartphones may be vulnerable to hacking, a new study suggests. Many of today’s automobiles leave the factory with secret passengers: prototype software features that are disabled but that can be unlocked by clever drivers, researchers said.

In what is believed to be the first comprehensive security analysis of its kind, researchers at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and George Mason University in the US found vulnerabilities in MirrorLink, a system of rules that allow vehicles to communicate with smartphones.

MirrorLink when unlocked can allow hackers to use a linked smartphone as a stepping stone to control safety-critical components such as the vehicle’s anti-lock braking system.

Damon McCoy, from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, explained that “tuners” – people or companies which customise automobiles – might unwittingly enable hackers by unlocking insecure features.

“Tuners will root around for these kinds of prototypes, and if these systems are easy to unlock they will do it,” he said. “And there are publically available instructions describing how to unlock MirrorLink. Just one of several instructional videos on YouTube has gotten over 60,000 views,” McCoy added.

“The researchers used such publically available instructions to unlock MirrorLink on the in-vehicle infotainment system in a 2015 vehicle they purchased from eBay for their experiments,” said McCoy.

The automaker and supplier declined to release a security patch – reflecting the fact that they never enabled MirrorLink. McCoy pointed out that this could leave drivers who enable MirrorLink out on a limb.

MirrorLink is the connection protocol and allows the driver or passenger to control phone apps via the car’s dash and steering wheel controls. Created by the Connected Car Consortium, MirrorLink represents 80 per cent of the world’s automakers, is the first and leading industry standard for connecting smartphones to in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems.

However, some automakers disable it because they chose a different smartphone-to-IVI standard, or because the version of MirrorLink in their vehicles is a prototype that can be activated later.

[Source:- gadgets.ndtv]

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Internet

With New High-Speed Wireless Ventures, Facebook Stakes Claim On Another Corner Of The Internet

by Rajdeep
written by Rajdeep

While the average consumer might just think of Facebook as just a place to post photos, ignore high school friends’ (and distant uncles’) politically charged rants, and catch up on the news, the reality is that Facebook has been quietly building a behind-the-scenes empire that covers everything from advertising to virtual reality to artificial intelligence. And the company’s latest venture makes it clear that Facebook is intent on being a lot more than a social media platform.

It’s been a big week of announcements from Facebook, unveiling new features, like simplified sign-in, in-app ticket-buying and file-sharing through Messenger.

These are all big updates to the social side of Facebook, but it was another, less-heralded announcement — one involving satellites, giant antennas, and functionally city-sized signal-repeaters — that highlights the vast scope of the company’s operations.

These projects are called Terragraph and Project ARIES, and each is designed to solve an internet access problem.

Terragraph is designed for dense urban areas and uses a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is still unlicensed in many countries (including the U.S.), but supports very high data-transmission speeds — at a very short range.

So Terragraph is basically designed as a series of street-level nodes, fairly close together, that function more-or-less like signal-repeaters that can strengthen and carry wireless communications without being hampered by pesky features of the urban landscape, like “buildings” or “people.”

Where Terragraph is designed for the world’s billions of urban would-be internet users, Project ARIES is for their country cousins.

The idea behind the ARIES antenna array is to significantly boost the capacity of wireless networks serving rural, underserved areas without needing to build out more extensive (expensive) network infrastructure or crowd more spectrum. In short, it basically is able to blast out a lot more signal at once than existing, traditional antennas can do.

Terragraph and ARIES are just the latest in a growing number of internet and tech ventures that Facebook has started or acquired in recent years. Some of these projects have a more direct connection to the Facebook social media platform than others.

Here’s a brief overview of some of the many industries Facebook has a hand in right now:

  • Advertising: Facebook generates more than $5 billion per quarter in revenue, and this is where more than 96% of it comes from. Facebook not only sells advertising space on their own service(s) to more than 2.5 million businesses, but also through their Atlas service, help businesses use Facebook data to place more effective ads — and track their performance — on other platforms.
  • Artificial intelligence: Facebook’s banking big on AI. For now they’re trying to harness AI for tasks as comparatively simple as basic chatbots or automated audio captions of photos, for blind and visually impaired Facebook users. However, AI and machine learning are a major cornerstone of the company’s ten-year plan (see top image) at this point.
  • Commerce and payments: Not only can businesses put a “buy” button on their Facebook posts, but you can send money through Messenger, and now you can buy goods and services directly through the platform, too. There’s money to be made in being the middleman, and in rendering everyone else’s independent apps and website obsolete in the name of simplicity.
  • Content aggregation: Facebook just announced a “save to Facebook” plugin that works basically just like any other social bookmark or “save for later” tool, like Instapaper or Pocket. Only, y’know, saved to Facebook.
  • Content hosting: Facebook’s Instant Articles, designed to optimize news links for mobile connections, effectively keeps media organizations’ content hosted inside Facebook for all mobile readers — which is a huge percentage of the audience, these days. Facebook also revamped its ‘Notes’ feature last year to basically make it a modern blogging platform (think more like Medium) so any individual who wants to create, host, and share web content in that way can also do it without having their readers step foot off of Facebook.
  • Direct communication: WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, Facebook’s two direct communication tools, have roughly one billion users each. One app at a time, Facebook is stepping into basically every kind of personal communication function — text, voice, and video — your phone can do, and integrating them under its own umbrella.
  • Internet access: Through the non-profit Internet.org and its Free Basicsservice, Facebook provides zero-cost, zero-rated, low-bandwidth data plans to about 25 million users in 37 developing nations. The service, of course, provides all of those users with Facebook access, as well as some other sites and programs that vary locally.
  • Internet infrastructure: Free Basics works through partnerships with local telecom companies, but Terragraph and Project Aries are all Facebook’s.
  • Photo and video hosting: The last time Facebook published stats on it, users were uploading more than 350 million new photos daily — but that was two years ago. Meanwhile Instagram users post more than 80 million new photos daily, and Facebook users stream over 100 million hours of video. Again: that’sper day. With live streaming video now available to all users, not just celebrities and media accounts, those numbers are only going to keep skyrocketing.
  • Social networking: Obviously, this one is the elephant in the room. There are 1.6 billion people, give or take — about 22% of the entire world’s population — on Facebook, sharing photos and status updates and articles and videos and whatever else they want.
  • Virtual reality: Facebook spent $2 billion to buy Oculus back in 2014, and the product just finally launched at the end of March. Facebook is all in on VR, as their ten-year plan and recent developer conference highlight, although we can’t say yet how quickly consumers will follow along.

       [Source:- Consumeris]

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Education

Protest leaflets claim relationship education teaches infants masturbation

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Rohit Dasgupta

Leaflets claiming that new relationship education lessons will encourage primary school children to masturbate have been handed out in east London, the BBC has learned.

It comes after protests in Birmingham against LGBT teaching made headlines.

Other leaflets said parents “will be questioned on the day of judgement” if they do not challenge the lessons.

Labour councillor Rohit Dasgupta said local officials had a “duty” to counter the “misinformation”.

The School Gate Campaign – which distributed the leaflets – has now removed the specific accusation that infants would be “encouraged to masturbate” in its literature, but Mr Dasgupta argued the damage had already been done.

The new flyers (example, below) say some teaching resources will introduce words like masturbation to juniors. This is written in draft teaching guidance for at least one local authority in England.

The campaign said it stood by the leaflets’ other claims – including that relationships education lessons would promote “transgenderism and homosexual lifestyles”.

Leaflet aimed at parents

From September next year it will be compulsory to teach relationships education in primary schools in England, and relationships and sex education (RSE) in secondary schools.

The government wants primary schools to include teaching about things like single parents, adoption and same-sex relationships – but said it will be for individual schools to decide what is “age appropriate”.

The proposal has led to leafleting campaigns and hundreds of mainly Muslim campaigners protesting at the gates of some primary schools, most notably in Birmingham.

There were fears the row was “being exploited” by Islamist and far-right activists.

Some parents there objected to a set of teaching resources called No Outsiders, which includes stories about a boy who wants to dress as a mermaid, and a penguin who has two fathers.

With the new school term approaching, Mr Dasgupta described the leaflets being handed out in his area in Newham, east London, as a form of “intimidation” and containing “untruths”.

Protesters gathered outside Anderton Park, 24 May
Image captionProtests have taken place outside school gates in Birmingham

He showed the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme an example that claimed RSE would promote “transgenderism and homosexual lifestyles” and “pervert the course of natural child development”.

It added that “children in infant school will be encouraged to masturbate. First sexual experiences will be encouraged by the age of 12.”

Mr Dasgupta said parents had also been targeted through messaging apps, with many being told there would be “consequences” if they did not attend an upcoming parents’ meeting about RSE.

Asked why it was not legitimate for parents to want a say in their child’s education, he said while they should be “told exactly what their children are taught”, head teachers should ultimately decide, as the experts. He added the government should have the “backbone” to support them.

“This is about making sure we teach our children about equality,” he said.

The School Gate Campaign said “the majority of parents do not agree with the current approach to sex education, which demands ever more explicit sex education at ever younger ages”.

Javid Iqbal
Image captionJavid Iqbal said the issue needed to be resolved by sitting together round a table, rather than via protests

Javid Iqbal, whose children and grandchildren have both attended Parkfield School – the centre of the Birmingham protests – is now calling for the protests to stop.

He used to speak on behalf of the Parkfield Parents Group, but said the demonstrations were “not helpful at all”.

“We’re adults – we’re educated enough to sit round a table to resolve these issues instead of standing outside a school shouting and screaming.”

Mr Iqbal also criticised those from outside the local community who had become involved in the local dispute, saying they were “just here for publicity”.

Earlier this month the BBC reported that a “homophobic” video and far-right material linked to protests against LGBT relationship lessons were being investigated by police.

Mr Iqbal said “a lot of parents” had removed their children from the school to look for alternatives in the area, unhappy at how it had managed the situation.

Yehudis Fletcher
Image captionYehudis Fletcher says some orthodox Jewish schools do not want to teach the new RSE lessons

Yehudis Fletcher, from Manchester, has spoken out publicly in favour of the lessons, and said others had contacted her to say they supported her viewpoint but did not wish to voice it openly.

She said this was because there was “such a loud opposition… and fear of putting your head above the parapet”.

Ms Fletcher, an orthodox Jew who has three young children, said some of those running orthodox schools in the area did not want to teach RSE.

“There are people who want children to remain largely ignorant about sex and relationships because they want them to carry on with the traditional way, in which they’re married at a very early age without much knowledge of what they’re getting into,” she said.

The Department for Education has said RSE is a “vital” subject and schools would be supported to deliver lessons “to a high standard”.

It said it was working closely with schools which had volunteered to introduce the subject next month, and was setting up a working group including parents, young people and representatives of faith and minority groups to consider the delivery of the lessons.

Parents with concerns were urged to “talk to their child’s school in a calm and constructive way”.

[“source=bbc”]

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Gadgets News

Google-Oracle Java Infringement Case Gets New Life as Appeals Court Revives Claim

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Google-Oracle Java Infringement Case Gets New Life as Appeals Court Revives Claim

A US appeals court on Tuesday resurrected a multi-billion dollar copyright case brought by Oracle Corp against Alphabet’s Google.

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said Google’s use of Oracle’s Java development platform to create the Android operating system was not protected under the fair-use provision of copyright law, reversing a 2016 jury verdict.

The court sent the case back to a US judge in San Francisco for a trial to determine how much compensation Google owes Oracle.

Oracle had previously sought $9 billion (roughly Rs. 58,000 crores) in damages.

“We are disappointed the court reversed the jury finding that Java is open and free for everyone,” Google spokesman Patrick Lenihan said in a statement. “This type of ruling will make apps and online services more expensive for users.”

“The Federal Circuit’s opinion upholds fundamental principles of copyright law and makes clear that Google violated the law,” said Oracle general counsel Dorian Daley in a statement. “This decision protects creators and consumers from the unlawful abuse of their rights.”

The closely watched case, which dates to 2010, involves how much copyright protection should extend to the Java programming language, which Google used to design the Android operating system that runs most of the world’s smartphones.

Oracle is seeking royalties for Google’s use of some of the Java language, while Google argues it should be able to use Java without paying a fee.

Annemarie Bridy, a professor of intellectual property at the University of Idaho College of Law, said in an interview the ruling could stifle software innovation by opening up developers to potential liability for copyright infringement.

“This is a ruling that could have a significant chilling effect on software developers,” she said, noting that they rely on computer code like Oracle’s to make apps communicate with each other.

Matthew Sarboraria, a vice president and associate general counsel at Oracle, said in an interview that such concerns were overblown.

Sarboraria said the ruling bolsters copyright protection in the software industry, ensuring that programmers have incentives to innovate.

“The sky is not falling,” he said. “The sky is firmly in place.”

[“source=gadgets.ndtv”]

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