Dozens of horses died at Santa Anita Park last year. So engineer Mick Peterson is deploying everything from sensors to satellites to keep accidents down as the Breeders’ Cup approaches.
Source: Wired
Microsoft-owned Github has removed the APK of an app for organizing political protests in the autonomous community of Catalonia — acting on a takedown request from Spain’s military police (aka the Guardia Civil).
As we reported earlier this month supporters of independence for Catalonia have regrouped under a new banner — calling itself Tsunami Democrà tic — with the aim of rebooting the political movement and campaigning for self-determination by mobilizing street protests and peaceful civil disobedience.
The group has also been developing bespoke technology tools to coordinate protest action. It’s one of these tools, the Tsunami Democrà tic app, which was being hosted as an APK on Github and has now been taken down.
The app registers supporters of independence by asking them to communicate their availability and resources for taking part in local protest actions across Catalonia. Users are also asked to register for protest actions and check-in when they get there — at which point the app asks them to abide by a promise of non-violence (see point 3 in this sample screengrab):
Users of the app see only upcoming protests relevant to their location and availability — making it different to the one-to-many broadcasts that Tsunami Democrà tic also puts out via its channel on the Telegram messaging app.
Essentially, it’s a decentalized tool for mobilizing smaller, localized protest actions vs the largest demos which continue to be organized via Telegram broadcasts (such as a mass blockade of Barcelona airport, earlier this month).
A source with knowledge of Tsunami Democrà tic previously told us the sorts of protests intended to be coordinated via the app could include actions such as go-slows to disrupt traffic on local roads and fake shopping sprees in supermarkets, with protestors abandoning carts filled with products in the store.
In a section of Github’s site detailing government takedowns the request from the Spanish state to remove the Tsunami Democrà tic app sits alongside folders containing historical takedown requests from China and Russia.
“There is an ongoing investigation being carried out by the National High Court where the movement Tsunami Democrà tic has been confirmed as a criminal organization driving people to commit terrorist attacks. Tsunami Democrà tic’s main goal is coordinating these riots and terrorist actions by using any possible mean,” Spain’s military police write in the letter sent to Github.
We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment on Github’s decision to remove the app APK.
In a note about government takedowns on Github’s website it writes:
From time to time, GitHub receives requests from governments to remove content that has been declared unlawful in their local jurisdiction. Although we may not always agree with those laws, we may need to block content if we receive a valid request from a government official so that our users in that jurisdiction may continue to have access to GitHub to collaborate and build software.
“GitHub does not endorse or adopt any assertion contained in the following notices,” it adds in a further caveat on the page.
The trigger for the latest wave of street demonstrations in Catalonia were lengthy jail sentences handed down to a number of Catalan political and cultural leaders by Spain’s Supreme Court earlier this month.
These were people involved in organizing an illegal independence referendum two years ago. The majority of these Catalan leaders were convicted for sedition. None were found guilty of the more serious charge of rebellion — but sentences ran as long as 13 years nonetheless.
This month Spanish judges also reissued a European arrest warrant seeking to extradite the former leader of the Catalan government, Carles Puigdemont, from Brussels to Spain to face trial. Last year a court in Germany refused his extradition to Spain on charges of rebellion or sedition — only allowing it on lesser grounds of misuse of public funds. A charge which Spain did not pursue.
Puigdemont fled Catalonia in the wake of the failed 2017 independence bid and has remained living in exile in Brussels. He has also since been elected as an MEP but has been unable to take up his seat in the EU parliament after the Spanish state moved to block him from being recognized as a parliamentarian.
Shortly after the latest wave of pro-independence demonstrations took off in Catalonia the Tsunami Democrà tic movement’s website was taken offline — also as a result of a takedown request by the Spanish state.
The website remains offline at the time of writing.
While the Tsunami Democrà tic app could be accused of encouraging disruption, the charge of “terrorism” is clearly overblown. Unless your definition of terrorism extends to harnessing the power of peaceful civil resistance to generate momentum for political change.Â
And while there has been unrest on the streets of Barcelona and other Catalan towns and cities this month, with fires being lit and projectiles thrown at police, there are conflicting reports about what has triggered these clashes between police and protestors — including criticism of the police response as overly aggressive vs what has been, in the main, large but peaceful crowds of pro-democracy demonstrators.
The police response on the day of the 2017 referendum was also widely condemned as violently disproportionate, with scenes of riot gear clad police officers beating up people as they tried to cast a vote.
Local press in Catalonia has reported the European Commission response to Spain’s takedown of the Tsunami Democrà tic website — saying the pan-EU body said Spain has a responsibility to find “the right balance between guaranteeing freedom of expression and upholding public order and ensuring security, as well as protecting [citizens] from illegal content”.
Asked what impact the Github takedown of the Tsunami Democrà tic app’s APK will have on the app, a source with knowledge of the movement suggested very little — pointing out that the APK is now being hosted on Telegram.
Similarly, the content that was available on the movement’s website is being posted to its 380,000+ subscribers on Telegram — a messaging platform that’s itself been targeted for blocks by authoritarian states in various locations around the world. (Though not, so far, in Spain.)
Another protest support tool that’s been in the works in Catalonia — a live-map for crowdsourcing information about street protests which looks similar to the HKlive.maps app used by pro-democracy campaigners in Hong Kong — is still in testing but expected to launch soon, per the source.
Source: TechCrunch
Apple is giving users more control over their data.
Source: CNET
Ford’s most powerful production car is among the meanest-looking cars on the road.
Source: CNET
The bigger screens can display a map, phone, and radio simultaneously. Ford says it won’t be too distracting.Â
Source: Wired
Millions of neighborhood stores that dot large and small cities, towns, and villages in India and have proven tough to beat for e-commerce giants and super-chain retailers are at the center of a new play in the country. A score of e-commerce companies, offline retail chains, and fintech startups are now racing to work with these mom and pop stores as they look to tap a massive untapped opportunity.
A Pune-based startup with an idea to build a logistics network using these kirana stores said today it has won the backing of a major international investor. Three-and-a-half-year old ElasticRun said it has raised $40 million in a Series C financing round led by Prosus Ventures (formerly Naspers Ventures). Existing investors Avataar Ventures and Kalaari Capital also participated in the round.
The startup has raised $55.5 to date, Sandeep Deshmukh, co-founder and CEO of ElasticRun, told TechCrunch in an interview.
Most of these kirana stores each day go through hours of down time — when the footfall is low and the business is slow. ElasticRun works with hundreds of thousands of these stores across 200 Indian cities to have them deliver goods to other kirana stores and consumers.
Supplying goods to these stores are FMCGÂ (fast moving consumer goods) brands that are trying to reach the last mile in the nation. Nearly every top FMCG brand in the country today is a partner of ElasticRun, said Deshmukh.
Deshmukh, co-founder and CEO of ElasticRun, talking about the startup’s business at a recent conference
It’s a win-win scenario for every stakeholder, Deshmukh said. Stores are getting access to more goods than ever, and also getting the opportunity to increase their business in slow hours. And for brands and e-commerce companies, access to such a wide-reaching delivery pool has never been easier, he said.
Since there is a digital log of each transaction, Deshmukh said the startup has a good idea about the financial capacity of these kirana stores. This has enabled it to connect them with relevant financial partners to access working capital, he said.
Deshmukh said the startup will use the fresh capital to on-board more neighborhood stores and deepen its penetration in the country. ElasticRun is also working on new products to expand its offerings for brands and kirana stores and improving its analytics and machine learning algorithms to tackle larger scale.
“By working with the network of small stores across the country, we solve that problem while helping the store owners grow their businesses at the same time. In addition, offering a flexible logistics extension to consumer goods companies to directly reach these small retail shops is a huge advantage over traditional distribution networks,â€� he said.
In a statement, Ashutosh Sharma, Head of Investments for India, Prosus Ventures, said, “ElasticRun is one of those rare businesses that identified a massive need in the market, matched it with a local solution paired with technology, for the benefit of all parties involved. Consumers get faster deliveries and greater choice of goods, store owners realize increased revenues and touchpoints with their customers, and consumer goods companies get better access and insight into their target audiences.”
Source: TechCrunch
From controlling Philips Hue lights to getting Prime delivery updates, Alexa offers a lot.
Source: CNET
Kia’s svelte Stinger is one of the best all-around cars you can buy for under $50,000.
Source: CNET
If your budget simply can’t manage a line item for a ticket to Disrupt Berlin 2019, we have exciting news for you. Volunteer for our work exchange program, and we’ll give you a free Innovator pass good for both days of the show (11-12 December). We have a limited number of volunteer positions, and applications close Thursday, 31 October.
Don’t wait — apply to our volunteer work exchange and attend Disrupt Berlin for free.
It takes a lot of hands and a lot of work to produce a world-class tech event, and you’ll have a front row seat to how it all gets done. You’ll also be a big part of making Disrupt an outstanding experience for all attendees.
We might ask you to wrangle speakers, register attendees, scan tickets, stuff goodie bags, assist with other marketing activities, direct attendees, place signage or something else entirely. You’ll work hard, but you’ll also have plenty of time to enjoy that Innovator pass access.
Ready for the fine print? Here’s what you need to know. The Disrupt Berlin volunteer dates are 10-12 December. To be considered, all volunteers must
We’ll assign volunteer schedules 2-3 weeks before the event, and we’ll notify you — whether we accept your application or not — by Wednesday, 6 November.
We keep dangling the free Innovator pass and for good reason. With it, volunteers have access to the full Disrupt agenda, all stages — including the Startup Battlefield competition — exclusive video content access after the event ends, interactive workshops, more than 400 startups and sponsors in Startup Alley, networking events, the full attendee list via Disrupt Mobile App and CrunchMatch, the attendee networking platform.
As a volunteer at Disrupt Berlin 2019, you’ll see everything that goes into producing a large-scale tech event, meet great people and still have time to explore and network. Applications close on 31 October, so apply to volunteer today!
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Source: TechCrunch
An amateur radio rig exposed to the internet and discovered by a security researcher was collecting real-time of medical data and health information broadcast by hospitals and ambulances across U.K. towns and cities.
The rig, operated out of a house in North London, was picking up radio waves from over the air and translating them into readable text. The hobbyist’s computer display was filling up with messages about real-time medical emergencies from across the region. For some reason, the hobbyist had set up an internet-connected webcam pointed at the display. But because there was no password on the webcam, anyone who knew where to look could also see what was on the rig’s computer display.
Daley Borda, a security researcher and bug bounty hunter, was at home in Florida when he stumbled upon the exposed webcam. The live stream was grainy, and the quality of the images so poor that it was just possible to make out the text on the display.
“You can see details of calls coming in — their name, address, and injury,” he told TechCrunch.
TechCrunch verified his findings. Messages spilling across the screen appeared to direct nearby ambulances where to go following calls to the 999 emergency services.
One message said a 98-year-old man had fallen at his home address. A few moments later, another message said 49-year-old male was complaining of chest pains at a nearby residence. One after the other, messages were flooding in, describing accidents, incidents, medical emergencies, often including their home addresses.
Several screenshots of the amateur radio decoding software, revealing unencrypted pager messages from nearby NHS trusts. (Image: TechCrunch)
Borda spends much of his time scouring the internet for things that shouldn’t be online. He looks for exposed databases and devices and, like most other security researchers, privately reports them to their owners. If he’s lucky, the owner takes action. Better yet, they pay out a bug bounty for his efforts.
But he could not figure out who the rig belonged to. TechCrunch contacted the hobbyist’s internet provider to warn of the data exposure.
“Last night we contacted the customer to make them aware that there was a live webcam broadcasting on the open web from their household,” said a spokesperson from the internet provider. “The customer was unaware of the nature of the information being shown so has said that they will stop the feed on that particular camera.”
The hobbyist was picking up and decoding pager communications from a nearby regional National Health Service trust.
“With some cheap, relatively basic, software it is possible for hobbyists to access these frequencies and decode the information being sent, which appears is what has occurred here,” the spokesperson said.
Pagers — or beepers — may be a relic of the past, but remain a fixture in U.K. hospitals.
These traditionally one-way communication devices allow anyone to send messages to one or many pagers at once by calling a dedicated phone number, often manned by an operator, which are then broadcast as radio waves over the pager network. But pagers still offer benefits where newer technologies, like cell phones, fall down. Because they work a low frequency, pager radio waves are able to travel further and deeper inside large buildings — particularly hospitals — which have thickened walls to protect others from X-rays and other radiation. Pagers also work across long distances, including in cell service dead-spots.
But few were thinking about message security when pager use was at its peak.
“They aren’t secure,” Andy Keck, an electronics and amateur radio hobbyist, told TechCrunch. Keck said messages sent over the pager network are encoded when they are converted into a burst of radio waves and broadcast over the air.
“But people don’t necessarily understand the difference between encryption and encoding,” he said.
Because the two widely used pager protocols — POCSAG and FLEX — are not encrypted, it’s easy to understand what messages are broadcast over the airwaves using free and open-source software.
For years one of the largest barriers to intercepting and decoding pager messages — or any other radio waves — was that hobbyists needed custom, often expensive hardware. But with the advent of software-defined radios, most hobbyists can get by with a $20 plug-in dongle and an antenna.
“It’s just enter the command to start the application, sit back, and start decoding in real time on the screen,” he said.
Although the number of pagers has dropped to near-zero from their height in the 1980s, pagers still carry a considerable amount of information every day.
Pager messages can travel over a large distance, said Keck, depending on how high the transmitter is located. Most major cities are covered with some pager service. Given the geography of the U.K., amateur radio hobbyists can often pick up pager messages from different sources.
The NHS still uses about 130,000 pagers, according to the U.K. government’s latest count, or about 10 percent of the world’s current pagers in use. But the NHS has been told to stop using pagers altogether by 2021.
But it’s not clear how many trusts are exposing medical information — if at all. According to NHS spokesperson Oliver Michelson, “each NHS organization is responsible for its own IT equipment and security.”
Pagers receive encoded, but not encrypted messages. (Image: Getty Images)
One NHS trust we spoke to said they had around 1,600 pagers and are managed by the trust. (We are not naming the trust, as it would expose their communications.) When asked if the trust was aware that pager messages are not encrypted and can be intercepted by amateur radio hobbyists, the spokesperson responded: “Yes.”
Another trust we spoke to said they were “aware” that the handful of pagers it operates do not encrypt their messages. The trust said their pagers were managed by a third-party.
PageOne, the last remaining pager network in the U.K., says in a brochure that its pager service can deliver “real-time messaging cost effectively and securely to their staff.”
But a spokesperson told TechCrunch: “PageOne ensures customers are aware of the ability to intercept messages in its terms and conditions” and that encrypted services “are available if required.”
The company said the majority of NHS pagers are operated on private pager networks operated by the trusts themselves.
Amateur radio hobbyists know all too well the risks posed by unencrypted pagers.
Over the years there have been numerous headlines of hobbyists picking up signals from nearby hospitals, including patients’ names and medical information. Some have even turned eavesdropping on hospital pagers into an art project.
Last month, hospitals in Vancouver were found broadcasting unencrypted patient medical data across the city.
Sarah Jamie Lewis, executive director at Open Privacy, who first revealed the issue, said the hospital pager messages were “trivially interceptable” by anyone nearby.
“It tends to be pretty common knowledge in the amateur radio community that these kind of broadcasts are going on but it’s only recently that we started seeing a culture of disclosure,” said Lewis.
In the U.K., it’s legal for amateur radio hobbyists to scan the airwaves but unlawful to disclose the contents of messages. That’s put some security-focused hobbyists who disclose exposed sensitive messages in a tough legal spot.
“You get this horrible situation where not disclosing is bad, but people have a right to know that their health data is being breached,” said Lewis.
But the penalties could be far steeper for organizations that expose sensitive health data. Exposing personally identifiable and health information violates GDPR, the Europe-wide data protection laws that came into force last year. Organizations can be fined heavily for breaching the rules.
With more than a year on the clock before the NHS pager ban comes into effect, it’s not a problem that can be easily fixed.
The obvious solution would be not to send sensitive health or medical data over pager messages. Clearly, as seen by the amateur hobbyist’s radio rig, that message isn’t getting through.
Got a tip? You can send tips securely over Signal and WhatsApp to +1 646-755-8849. You can also send PGP email with the fingerprint: 4D0E 92F2 E36A EC51 DAAE 5D97 CB8C 15FA EB6C EEA5.
Source: TechCrunch
