By Roblimo from
Slashdot's everything-you-own-must-now-connect-to-the-internet department:
You remember Peter Hoddie, right? He was one of the original
QuickTime developers at Apple. He left in 2002 to help found a startup called
Kinoma, which started life developing multimedia players and browsers for mobile devices. Kinoma was acquired in 2011 by
Marvell Semiconductor, whose management kept it as a separate entity.
The latest creation from Peter and his crew is the 'Kinoma Create,' AKA the 'JavaScript-Powered Internet of Things Construction Kit.' With it, they say, you can 'quickly and easily create personal projects, consumer electronics, and Internet of Things prototypes.'
EE Times mentioned it in March, and they're not the only ones to notice this product. Quite a few developers and companies are jumping on the 'Internet of Things' bandwagon, so there may be a decent -- and growing -- market for something like this. (
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By timothy from
Slashdot's note-the-passive-voice-and-weasel-words department:
Bruce66423 (1678196) writes with this story from the Guardian:
The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, issued an extraordinary apology to leaders of the US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, conceding that the
agency employees spied on committee staff and reversing months of furious and public denials. Brennan acknowledged that an internal investigation had found agency security personnel transgressed a firewall set up on a CIA network, called RDINet, which allowed Senate committee investigators to review agency documents for their landmark inquiry into CIA torture." (Sen. Diane Feinstein was one of those
vocally accusing the CIA of spying on Congress; Sen. Bernie Sanders has raised a
similar question about the NSA.)
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By timothy from
Slashdot's thinkgeek-had-something-funnier-years-ago department:
An anonymous reader writes with s snippet from Ars Technica that should make you (even more) skeptical about plugging in random USB drives, or allowing to persons unknown physical access to you computer's USB ports :
When creators of the state-sponsored Stuxnet worm used a USB stick to infect air-gapped computers inside Iran's heavily fortified Natanz nuclear facility, trust in the ubiquitous storage medium suffered a devastating blow. Now, white-hat hackers have devised a feat even more seminal—an exploit that transforms keyboards, Web cams, and other types of USB-connected devices into highly programmable attack platforms that can't be detected by today's defenses. Dubbed BadUSB, the hack reprograms embedded firmware to give USB devices new, covert capabilities. In a demonstration scheduled at next week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, a USB drive, for instance, will take on the ability to act as a keyboard that surreptitiously types malicious commands into attached computers. A different drive will similarly be reprogrammed to act as a network card that causes connected computers to connect to malicious sites impersonating Google, Facebook or other trusted destinations. The presenters will demonstrate similar hacks that work against Android phones when attached to targeted computers. They say their technique will work on Web cams, keyboards, and most other types of USB-enabled devices.Read Replies (0)