Pokemon Go Physical Pokeball Catches ‘Em All

There’s something irresistible about throwing Pokeballs at unexpectedly appearing creatures. But wait. When did you actually, physically throw a Pokeball? Swiping over colored pixels wasn’t enough for [Trey Keown], so he built a real, throwable, Pokemon-catching Pokeball for Pokemon Go.

For his build, [Trey] acquired an off-the-shelf foam Pokeball, from which he removed the original “light and sound” guts and some of the foam filling to make space for actual, real Pokemon a TI SensorTag 2.0. This little, self-contained IoT development board comes with BLE and an accelerometer, so on the hardware side, there wasn’t much more to do than stuffing it into the prepped foam ball.

[Trey] went on to write an iOS app that accesses the accelerometer data from his Pokeball. If the acceleration values surpass a certain threshold, his app writes a trigger command to a file that he set up to be regularly polled by a user input emulation macro app named AutoTouch. AutoTouch emulates the swipe that throws the Pokeball in the game.

Even if it was just translucent CGI, it might actually have been a real bummer for some fans, that Pokemon Go was released without any sort of physical Pokeballs after they had such a prominent role in the game’s trailer. A missed merchandise opportunity for Nintendo and Niantic, or one yet to come? Let us know in the comments, and enjoy the video, where [Trey] demonstrates his build:

Filed under: iphone hacks, nintendo hacks

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Ever Buy Music From Apple? Use Linux? You Need This Tool

Sure, you’re a hardcore superuser, but that doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy the finer things in life — like shiny squircles and getting every new app first. But, what’s an OS-indiscriminate person like yourself going to do when it comes time to purchase music? That’s where the recover_itunes tool shines, and if you’re a Linux user with an iPhone, it might just be your new best friend.

iPhones and other Apple products work great when you’ve purchased music from iTunes, but can be a headache when your music comes from other sources. On the other hand, music purchased from iTunes is notoriously difficult to listen to on anything other than an Apple product. One major reason for the difficulty with the latter is in the way that iTunes handles metadata.

By some miracle of chance, or sheer will, our music libraries — and all of the programs we use to listen to them — have mostly stuck to a standard of saving metadata in the music file itself; metadata for important things like the artist, album, and song title. Unfortunately “mostly” doesn’t include Apple. Apple uses a separate file that contains all of that information.

So, knowing all of that, what happens when you copy your iTunes library to your Linux PC? You’ll be left with files containing no useful information. All you’ll be able to do is play Russian roulette with the shuffle button, like it’s the ’90s and you’ve pushed Random on your Discman. Except now you’ve got 5,000 songs to skip through to find “MMMBop” instead of just the 21 on the CD (seriously, check it out, there are 8 silent tracks on that CD. Why not just use one long silent track?)

The recover_itunes program, created by [kleute], solves this problem, with virtually no effort on the user’s part. Point it towards your music directory and it’ll search for iTunes metadata to match any M4A files, saving copies of the files with the metadata inserted. As a bonus, it’ll even try to find the matching album artwork, which should look great on the HTPC you’ve been meaning to build.

[thanks to Peter]

Filed under: iphone hacks, linux hacks, musical hacks

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IPhone Polarizing Camera Solves Filter Orientation Problem Using Flash

Apple Introduces Their Answer To The Raspberry Pi

FBI vs Apple: A Postmortem

By now you’ve doubtless heard that the FBI has broken the encryption on Syed Farook — the suicide terrorist who killed fourteen and then himself in San Bernardino. Consequently, they won’t be requiring Apple’s (compelled) services any more.

A number of people have written in and asked what we knew about the hack, and the frank answer is “not a heck of a lot”. And it’s not just us, because the FBI has classified the technique. What we do know is that they paid Cellebrite, an Israeli security firm, at least $218,004.85 to get the job done for them. Why would we want to know more? Because, broadly, it matters a lot if it was a hardware attack or a software attack.

Software or Hardware?

If the attack was hardware, it may not be such a big deal. The iPhones supposedly prevent a brute-force (guessing) attack against the password by wiping memory or delaying after a fixed number of wrong guesses. The basic idea behind a possible hardware attack is to dump the memory from an NAND flash chip on board, try a few passwords, and then re-flash the memory to the initial state before tripping the security. Another possibility, if there’s a timeout on password guesses, is to associate the phone with a fake cell tower, and push new times to the phone every time they get locked out. Delays are meaningless if you can arbitrarily set the time on the phone.

The hardware attacks, if these are they, aren’t a big deal because they require physical control of the phone, potentially for a long time. This isn’t something that a criminal gang is going to use to steal your bank account data, but something that governments can do in limited situations, legally, and with warrants. In contrast, an unknown flaw in the OS’s security model could be remotely exploitable, and would likely work on any phone in a lot shorter time. If the flaw became known to criminal gangs before Apple, millions of Americans with iPhones will be at risk.

Responsible Disclosure?

If the FBI is sitting on an OS flaw, and it is one that’s in principle exploitable by criminals, they owe it to their constituency — US citizens — to disclose that information to Apple so that it can get fixed. But because the FBI has classified the hack, they’re not going to be compelled to tell anyone how they did it.

It’s certainly the case that if we had hacked this phone, we’d be subject to charges under the DMCA or worse. And we’d certainly be under a moral, if not legal, obligation to inform Apple so that they could fix things. We hope that this means that the crack was hardware based. It’s worth mentioning that what the FBI was demanding from Apple was a software attack — this may be further evidence that they don’t have one.

More Legal Battles Ahead

So the Farook case is over, which means we can all rest assured that our phones are safe, right? (Or at least they’re safe from anyone who hasn’t hired Cellebrite.) After all, the FBI director publicly stated that this was just about unlocking only a single (terrorist’s) phone, and not about setting a precedent, so they’ll stop trying to force firms to break their own encryption, right?

We don’t believe that for a second. The Farook case was intended to capitalize on the public’s fear of terrorism to force Apple to play along and take actions that harm all of their customers. The FBI will be trying to establish precedent to compel decryption again, and will try until they find a judge to agree with them.

Sounds like a conspiracy theory? Don’t listen to some crackpot writer for a niche tech website. Richard Clarke, former national security advisor and head of counter terrorism weighed in on the subject:

“[The FBI] is not as interested in solving the problem as they are in getting a legal precedent,” Clarke said. “Every expert I know believes the NSA could crack this phone. They want the precedent that government could compel a device manufacturer to let the government in.”

“The FBI director is exaggerating the need for this, trying to build it up as an emotional case … It’s Jim Comey. And the Attorney General is letting him get away with it.”

What Clarke said is consistent with our crackpot conspiracy theories. The FBI has been systematically trying to compel firms to backdoor their own encryption. If they were interested in just one phone, they’d pay an Israeli security firm $200,000 to get the job done. (We have no inside information about if or why the NSA wouldn’t play along.)

The FBI has been after Apple since they announced that they were expanding encryption coverage. Read this headline from December 2014. Does that sound familiar? It’s exactly the same legal argument they used in the Farook case. Only the FBI got shut down instead of hiring an outside hacking firm. That didn’t stop the FBI from telling Apple employees that they would be killing children by enabling encryption on their phones.

You don’t need to look very far into the future to find the FBI’s next test case, either. Indeed, there are currently at least a dozen open cases at the moment, all justified under the All Writs Act. It’s hard to believe Director Comey’s argument that Farook was about a single phone.

(As we were writing this article, the Justice Department essentially declared victory in Farook, and now seems to say that it will use the Farook result as precedent. That was fast!)

Which Side Are They On?

There is a real problem at both the NSA and the FBI at the moment. They’re tasked with getting information on potential terrorists and prosecuting crimes, while at the same time protecting American citizens’ data and property. In particular, the NSA helps develop civilian cryptography, and the FBI is responsible for interstate Internet fraud. In cases like this, the same agencies have both an interest in the public’s benefit from strong encryption but also the desire to decrypt individual’s phones as evidence. They’re required to be schizophrenic. One can only hope that they’re balancing the conflicting demands appropriately.

If the Farook case has shown us anything, it’s that the FBI is behaving as if they value their offensive mandate more heavily than their defensive one — even though it weakens the security of US citizens with legitimate interests in keeping their confidential information safe.

The FBI testified that only Apple could unlock the phone while seeking an outside firm to unlock the phone. Indeed, it was cracked just over a month after this testimony. They picked an emotionally charged case and touted it heavily in the public press, something that they don’t do with their other cases — most notably those where the judges decide against their interpretation of the All Writs Act. They’re asking for a software-based attack, which is something with far-reaching consequences (and dangers if it falls into the wrong hands). And finally, they’ve relied on misleading and hyperbolic testimony to push the issue. In short, they’re playing dirty pool and stretching the truth, which is what one expects of the prosecution.

This would be uncontroversial if they’re weren’t also tasked with protecting the interests of American citizens.

Filed under: iphone hacks, news, security hacks

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Bullet-time Video Effect by Throwing Your Phone Around

Ski areas are setting formal policies for drones left and right, but what happens when your drone isn’t a drone but is instead a tethered iPhone with wings swinging around you like a ball-and-chain flail as you careen down a mountain? [nicvuignier] decided to explore the possibility of capturing bullet-time video of his ski runs by essentially swinging his phone around him on a tether. The phone is attached to a winged carrier of his own design, 3D printed in PLA.

One would think this would likely result in all kinds of disaster, but we haven’t seen the outtakes yet, and the making-of video has an interesting perspective on each of the challenges he encountered in perfecting the carrier, ranging from keeping it stable and upright, to reducing the motion sickness with the spinning perspective, and keeping it durable enough to withstand the harsh environment and protect the phone.

He has open sourced the design, which works for either iPhone or GoPro models, or it is available for preorder if you are worried about catastrophic delamination of your 3D printed model resulting in much more bullet-like projectile motion.

Thank you [Remeton] for pointing us to this nausea-inducing (ish) hack.

Filed under: iphone hacks, video hacks

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The Contrarian Response To Apple’s Need For Encryption

On December 2, 2015, [Syed Rizwan Farook] and [Tashfeen Malik] opened fire at a San Bernardino County Department of Public Health training event, killing 14 and injuring 22. This was the third deadliest mass shooting in the United States in recent memory, and began a large investigation by local, state, and federal agencies. One piece of evidence recovered by the FBI was an iPhone 5C belonging to one of the shooters. In the days and months after the shooting, the FBI turned to Apple to extract data from this phone.

A few days ago in an open letter to customers, [Tim Cook], CEO of Apple, stated they will not comply with FBI’s request to build a backdoor for the iPhone. While the issue at hand is extracting data from an iPhone recovered from the San Bernardino shooting, [Cook] says building a new version of iOS to extract this data would allow the FBI to unlock any iPhone. Needless to say, there are obvious security implications of this request.

Apple does not publish open letters to its customers often. Having one of the largest companies on the planet come out in support of privacy and encryption is nearly unprecedented. There is well-founded speculation this open letter to the public will be exhibit A in a supreme court case. Needless to say, the Internet has gone a little crazy after this letter was published, and rightly so: just imagine how better off we would be if AT&T said no to the NSA in 2002 – [Snowden] might just be another IT geek working for a government contractor.

There is a peculiar aspect of public discourse that doesn’t make any sense. In the absence of being able to say anything interesting, some people have just decided to add a contrary viewpoint. Being right, having a valid argument, or even having evidence to support assertions doesn’t matter; being contrary is far more interesting. Look at any comment thread on the Internet, and you’ll find the longest comment chain is the one refuting the parent article. Look up the ratings for a cable news channel. You’ll find the highest rated show is the one with the most bickering. When is the last time you saw something from the New York Times, Washington Post, or LA Times on Facebook or your favorite news aggregator? Chances are, it wasn’t news. It was an op-ed, most likely one that was espousing a view contrary to either public opinion or public policy.

As with any headline event on the Internet, the contrarians have come out of the woodwork. These contrarians are technically correct and exceedingly myopic.

The Contrarian Opinion to Apple’s letter

The netsec industry is odd. Every day, my inbox is accosted by unsolicited emails from PR agencies, asking if I’d like to do an interview with a CEO or chief scientist on the security issue du jour. From the unending reminders to upgrade to Windows 10 to the security implications of a virus designed to destroy Iranian centrifuges, I have been offered an interview with someone who is uniquely qualified to speak on the subject. As expected, the first offers for an interview turned up in my inbox ten hours after news of Apple’s refusal to cooperate with the FBI crashed around the world.

The gist of the first pitch for this interview is as follows: Apple could have easily complied with this court order. This is not a crypto war. To quote this interview pitch directly and without attribution:

Apple didn’t need to react this way – it was premature and apples and oranges. Forensically speaking and legally speaking the Judge asked for reasonable assistance on unlocking THIS SPECIFIC phone. Even if that requires them to modify the firmware with a key they have they don’t have to give that software to the FBI. They can simple do a few steps:

• Give phone to Apple
• apple runs their secret sauce and makes a backup image of the data/phone info
• they give that image backup to FBI which only contains the data not the key. This is how forensics on mobile devices are done, by a backup image.

There is no threat to mass surveillance here. it was a reasonable search warrant request no different than a warrant to the free webmail services or face books asking for data. You’re not giving them your keys to ALL your data, you’re only giving them the very specific data of the account that was requested.

While this is an interesting counter to [Tim Cook]’s argument, it lacks the technical details required of a matter that requires a passing knowledge of topics ranging from electrical engineering to 18th century case law. Fortunately, the default mode of discourse these days is contrarianism, and there’s always someone else ready to glom onto the most important thing to happen in the Internet this week.

On the Trail of Bits Blog, [Dan Guido] plainly states Apple can comply with the FBI court order without compromising security for millions of iPhones, and gives a reasonable technical breakdown of how Apple can do it.

In plain English, the court order asks Apple to create a special version of iOS that works on only one iPhone – the phone recovered from the San Bernardino shooting. This custom version of iOS would never leave the Apple campus. After all, according to the court order, the FBI only wants the data on the phone and not a method to extract data from every iPhone they come across.

This is technically possible. New firmware can be uploaded to the recovered iPhone via DFU. This new firmware would require a valid signature from Apple, and the FBI does not have the keys Apple uses to sign firmware. [Dan Guido] ends his teardown with the conclusion it is technically feasible for Apple to comply with all of the FBI’s requests. This request would not necessarily make every iPhone insecure, and to limit the risk of abuse, the tools created to assist in this request can be customized to only work with the iPhone recovered from the San Bernardino shooting.

This is a Unique Moment in History

Apple’s refusal to comply with court orders is the largest news item to hit the Internet in a very long time. The CEO of Google has weighed in on the issue, concurring with [Tim Cook]. It is now inevitable that every god of silicon valley will weigh in on the issue, most likely in agreement with Apple’s stance.

Yet the contrarians remain. The entire argument of one of these contrarians – a chief scientist at a highly regarded security firm – revolves around “secret sauce”. It’s entirely possible for Apple to get around the encryption of the iPhone 5c recovered in San Bernardino, and doing so wouldn’t really be creating a backdoor for every iPhone. Are these assertions correct? Maybe. Possibly, even.

The metaphor of not seeing the forest for the trees is too often used, and anyone can be correct while still being incredibly dumb. Apple’s response to the FBI’s request is unprecedented. Apple is standing up to a court order – defying a court order – in the pursuit of privacy and security.

Historically, large companies haven’t cared about your privacy. The best example would be NSA equipment installed in an AT&T office in 2003, hoovering up Internet backbone traffic and sending that information off to points unknown. This wasn’t the first time AT&T provided data to the NSA; that occurred in 1985, with phone and email data being collected at points around the United States and sent off to NSA repositories.

Ma’ Bell isn’t alone, and for every conspiracy theory on government surveillance spoken in hushed tones over the years, there is always news telling us, ‘yes, the government is spying on you, and here are the companies that helped.’ Instead of the usual way of doing things, Apple is saying what anyone who knows anything about security has been saying forever. If a backdoor exists, you are not secure. Apple will not provide that backdoor, and Google concurs with Apple’s view.

What we have here is one of the largest companies on the planet, a company that is sitting on over two hundred billion dollars – cash – and wants to take this issue public. If anyone has the resources to stand up to a surveillance state, it is Apple.

And yet the contrarians continue to prove there is a difference between intelligence and wisdom. Just because Apple could comply with a court order, doesn’t mean they should. Just because you have a unique viewpoint doesn’t mean you should post it on your Medium blog. This is an opportunity for a company with a deep pocketbook to go up against a surveillance state that has acted against your interests time and time again. This opportunity will not come again.

Filed under: Featured, iphone hacks, news, security hacks

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