ICS 382-51 Trevor's Blog

In a big win for privacy, the US Supreme court ruled that authorities must have a warrant to access a person's location information from their cell phone. The ruling was 5-4, so it definitely had people against it, but I do feel this is good to protect citizens from abuse by law enforcement and others. People may think this could make finding terrorists take longer, but I disagree, as if the authorities have proof or probable cause, they can surely get a warrant withing a couple of hours.  https://www.npr.org/2018/06/22/605007387/supreme-court-rules-police-need-warrant-to-get-location-information-from-cell-to

 In the exponentially growing tech world, there is a bit of an arms race back and forth between the U.S. and China. Until this past month, China held the distinction of having the fastest supercomputer in the world, Sunway TaihuLight. While China still has more supercomputers than the US, the US now has the distinction of having the fastest supercomputer, "Summit", containing at least double to power of the TaihuLight. This is wild how this computing power arms race is occurring, i can only hope the technologies trickle down. https://thehackernews.com/2018/06/summit-fastest-supercomputer.html

 This is a big deal. I saw this article and instantly knew this was the sort of thing that we are learning about, that this hack is so quintessential to why cyber security is a growing issue. One of the US Navy's many contractors had confidential data stolen off of their network, revealing project details and other confidential data. According to the article, this was most likely due to an unsecured network or workstation, or a combination of the two. This highlights a specific problem with using contractors for confidential projects, you normally dont have control over their networks, etc, as they are independent of yours. The only way I could see this being resolved is by requiring these contractors to use government machines, but this could pose an issue of selling government equipment, hostile agents having direct access to the machines, etc. https://gizmodo.com/china-hacked-a-navy-contractor-and-stole-600gb-of-data-1826689038

This is an interesting bit of information that I found that was posted this previous wednesday and I thought it was very intriguing. While most of the articles I read are less hardware and more software/firmware focused it was a nice change of pace to see an article focused on a hardware issue that has arisen. According to the article, computer scientists have discovered that " ...sonic and ultrasonic signals (inaudible to human) can be used to cause physical damage to hard drives just by playing ultrasonic sounds through a target computer's own built-in speaker or by exploiting a speaker near the targeted device. "  This is an interesting development as it wasn't something that I had thought could happen. Hard drives normally have protection features against outside interference such as vibrations, but according to the article, " To prevent a head crash from acoustic resonance, modern HDDs use shock sensor-driven feedforward controllers that detect such m...