If you want to remap some mouse or keyboard keys, and you use Linux, it is easy. If you use Windows or another operating system, you can probably do that without too much trouble. But what if you use all of them? Or what if you don’t have access to the computer in question? Thanks to [jfedor2], you can reach for a Raspberry Pi Pico and make this handy key-and-mouse remapping hardware dongle.

But you can do more than just swapping control and caps lock because the software is pretty sophisticated. For instance, you can define layers like you might find in a custom keyboard setup — pressing one key can trigger a layer that redefines the functions of all of the other keys. There are programmable macros and a mechanism to differentiate between a key being tapped or held.

Since it also works with mice, you can trigger macros from mouse buttons, or remap your keyboard arrow keys to the mouse’s scroll wheel. And you can configure all of this from a web browser.

On the hardware side, the code supports several different off-the-shelf and custom boards. There’s also a nice enclosure to make it look like an off-the-shelf product. There are also serial and Bluetooth versions of the device, which map them to a USB HID connection.

This has applications for accessible devices. We can also envision it being useful with turnkey devices that you might want to customize without having to reverse-engineer the existing software. Because of the mouse/keyboard cross-functionality, this might have been just the ticket for resurrecting an old light pen, for instance. If you want to dive into the HID spec that makes this whole thing work, we can help with that. What will you do with it?

Since the very beginning, solid-propellants have been the cornerstone of amateur rocketry. From the little Estes rocket picked up from the toy store, to vehicles like the University of Southern California’s Traveler IV that (probably) crossed the Kármán line in 2019, a rapidly burning chunk of solid propellant is responsible for pushing them skyward. That’s not to say that amateur rockets powered by liquid propellants are completely unheard of … it’s just that getting them right is so ridiculously difficult that comparatively few have been built.

But thanks to [Half Cat Rocketry], we may start to see more hobbyists and students taking on the challenge. Their Mojave Sphinx liquid-fueled rocket is not only designed to be as easy and cheap to build as possible, but it’s been released as open source so that others can replicate it. All of the 2D and 3D CAD files have been made available under the GPLv3 license, and if you’re in the mood for a little light reading, there’s a nearly 370 page guidebook you can download that covers building and launching the rocket.

Now of course we’re still talking about literal rocket science here, so while we don’t doubt a sufficiently motivated individual could put one of these together on their own, you’ll probably want to gather up a couple friends and have a well-stocked makerspace to operate out of. All told, [Half Cat] estimates you should be able to build a Mojave Sphinx for less than $2,000 USD, but that assumes everything is done in-house and you don’t contract out any of the machining.

The design is the result of years of research and development that was aimed at distilling a liquid-fueled rocket down to its most basic form. There’s no gas generator, no turbine, no pumps of any kind. Controlling the flow of propellants within the rocket requires only a pair of servo-actuated valves thanks to the ingenious use of dual-acting vapor pressurization. Put simply, the rocket uses one large vertical tank that’s internally divided by a movable piston, with the oxidizer — nitrous oxide — on one side and the fuel — nearly any flammable liquid, such as alcohol or gasoline — on the other. The high-pressure nitrous oxide pushes down on the piston, which in turn pressurizes the fuel.

To get the most out of your investment, the Mojave Sphinx is designed to be entirely reusable. Assuming it makes a soft enough landing, you just need to refill the tank and launch it again. In practice it’s a bit more involved than that, but the team of [Half Cat] say they’ve managed to fly the same rocket multiple times in a single day. The handbook even has a handy maintenance schedule that tells you how often you should check or replace different components of the rocket. For example, it advises replacing the propellant piston o-rings every third flight.

The downside? There’s only so much performance you can wring out a rudimentary propulsion system like this. When compared to more simplistic solid-propellant rockets, the higher mass of the Mojave Sphinx puts the maximum altitude of the 96 inch (2.4 meter) long rocket at around 10,000 feet (3 kilometers). Still, we know plenty of folks who would call that a worthy compromise for being able to say they built their own liquid rocket.

Thanks to [concretedog] for the tip.

Toyota è stata colpita da un massiccio data breach, con 240 GB di dati sensibili esposti su un forum di cybercrime. L’attacco è stato rivendicato dal gruppo di hacker noto come ZeroSevenGroup. I dati esfiltrati sono disponibili al download su un noto forum di cybercrime.

Dettagli

L’infiltrazione ha permesso agli aggressori di esfiltrare una vasta gamma di informazioni, tra cui dati di clienti e dipendenti, informazioni finanziarie, contratti, e-mail e dettagli dell’infrastruttura di rete. Secondo ZeroSevenGroup, l’accesso è stato ottenuto utilizzando lo strumento open source ADRecon, che consente di estrarre informazioni dagli ambienti Active Directory. Gli aggressori hanno potenzialmente ottenuto l’accesso al server di backup, con i file esposti che risalgono al 25 dicembre 2022.

Sul noto forum sono disponibili al download tutti i dati esfiltrati, senza necessità di acquisto, come precisato dal gruppo nei commenti del post.

Immagine del post rinvenuta nel Dark Web

Commento al post precedente rinvenuto nel Dark Web

Implicazioni e Risposta di Toyota

Toyota ha dichiarato che l’impatto complessivo della violazione è stato limitato e che sta collaborando con le persone colpite per fornire assistenza. Tuttavia, l’azienda non ha fornito dettagli specifici sulla data della violazione o sulle modalità di attacco. Questo incidente segue una serie di altre violazioni che hanno colpito Toyota negli ultimi anni, inclusi attacchi ransomware e configurazioni errate nei servizi cloud che hanno esposto milioni di dati personali dei clienti.

Conclusione

Il recente data breach ai danni di Toyota evidenzia ancora una volta l’importanza della sicurezza informatica per le grandi aziende. Nonostante le misure di sicurezza implementate, le minacce persistono e richiedono una vigilanza costante. Toyota ha affermato di aver adottato ulteriori misure per monitorare e proteggere le sue infrastrutture, ma solo il tempo dirà se queste saranno sufficienti a prevenire futuri incidenti.

L'articolo Violazione di Sicurezza in Toyota: Dati Sensibili di Clienti e Dipendenti Compromessi proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) approved changes to Meta’s commitments regarding how it uses the data from customers using advertising, the authority announced on Tuesday (20 August).

euractiv.com/section/data-priv…

due testi di Luca Zanini

pontebianco.noblogs.org/post/2…

compostxt.blogspot.com/2024/08…

Wireless networking is all-pervasive in our modern lives. Wi-Fi technology lives in our smartphones, our laptops, and even our watches. Internet is available to be plucked out of the air in virtually every home across the country. Wi-Fi has been one of the grand computing revolutions of the past few decades.

It might surprise you to know that Australia proudly claims the invention of Wi-Fi as its own. It had good reason to, as well— given the money that would surely be due to the creators of the technology. However, dig deeper, and you’ll find things are altogether more complex.

Big Ideas

The official Wi-Fi logo.
It all began at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO. The government agency has a wide-ranging brief to pursue research goals across many areas. In the 1990s, this extended to research into various radio technologies, including wireless networking.

The CSIRO is very proud of what it achieved, crediting itself with “Bringing WiFi to the world.” It’s a common piece of trivia thrown around the pub as a bit of national pride—it was scientists Down Under that managed to cook up one of the biggest technologies of recent times!

This might sound a little confusing to you if you’ve looked into the history of Wi-Fi at all. Wasn’t it the IEEE that established the working group for 802.11? And wasn’t it that standard that was released to the public in 1997? Indeed, it was!

The fact is that many groups were working on wireless networking technology in the 1980s and 1990s. Notably, the CSIRO was among them, but it wasn’t the first by any means—nor was it involved with the group behind 802.11. That group formed in 1990, while the precursor to 802.11 was actually developed by NCR Corporation/AT&T in a lab in the Netherlands in 1991. The first standard of what would later become Wi-Fi—802.11-1997—was established by the IEEE based on a proposal by Lucent and NTT, with a bitrate of just 2 MBit/s and operating at 2.4GHz. This standard operated based on frequency-hopping or direct-sequence spread spectrum technology. This later developed into the popular 802.11b standard in 1999, which upped the speed to 11 Mbit/s. 802.11a came later, switching to 5GHz and using a modulation scheme based around orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM).
A diagram from the CSIRO patent for wireless LAN technology, dated 1993.
Given we apparently know who invented Wi-Fi, why are Australians allegedly taking credit? Well, it all comes down to patents. A team at the CSIRO had long been developing wireless networking technologies on its own. In fact, the group filed a patent on 19 November 1993 entitled “Invention: A Wireless Lan.” The crux of the patent was the idea of using multicarrier modulation to get around a frustrating problem—that of multipath interference in indoor environments. This was followed up with a later US patent in 1996 following along the same lines.

The patents were filed because the CSIRO team reckoned they’d cracked wireless networking at rates of many megabits per second. But the details differ quite significantly from the modern networking technologies we use today. Read the patents, and you’ll see repeated references to “operating at frequencies in excess of 10 GHz.” Indeed, the diagrams in the patent documents refer to transmissions in the 60 to 61 GHz range. That’s rather different from the mainstream Wi-Fi standards established by the IEEE. The CSIRO tried over the years to find commercial partners to work with to establish its technology, however, little came of it barring a short-lived start-up called Radiata that was swallowed up by Cisco, never to be seen again.

youtube.com/embed/HFngngjy4fk?…

Steve Jobs shocked the crowd with a demonstration of the first mainstream laptop with wireless networking in 1999. Funnily enough, the CSIRO name didn’t come up.

Based on the fact that the CSIRO wasn’t in the 802.11 working group, and that its patents don’t correspond to the frequencies or specific technologies used in Wi-Fi, you might assume that the CSIRO wouldn’t have any right to claim the invention of Wi-Fi. And yet, the agency’s website could very much give you that impression! So what’s going on?

The CSIRO had been working on wireless LAN technology at the same time as everyone else. It had, by and large, failed to directly commercialize anything it had developed. However, the agency still had its patents. Thus, in the 2000s, it contested that it effectively held the rights to the techniques developed for effective wireless networking, and that those techniques were used in Wi-Fi standards. After writing to multiple companies demanding payment, it came up short. The CSIRO started taking wireless networking companies to court, charging that various companies had violated its patents and demanding heavy royalties, up to $4 per device in some cases. It contested that its scientists had come up with a unique combination of OFDM multiplexing, forward error correction, and interleaving that was key to making wireless networking practical.
An excerpt from the CSIRO’s Australian patent filing in 1993. The agency’s 1996 US patent covers much of the same ground.
A first test case against a Japanese company called Buffalo Technology went the CSIRO’s way. A follow-up case in 2009 aimed at a group of 14 companies. After four days of testimony, the case would have gone down to a jury decision, many members of which would not have been particularly well educated on the finer points of radio communications. The matter was instead settled for $205 million in the CSIRO’s favor. 2012 saw the Australian group go again, taking on a group of nine companies including T-Mobile, AT&T, Lenovo, and Broadcom. This case ended in a further $229 million settlement paid to the CSIRO.

We know little about what went on in these cases, nor the negotiations involved. Transcripts from the short-lived 2009 case had defence lawyers pointing out that the modulation techniques used in the Wi-Fi standards had been around for decades prior to the CSIRO’s later wireless LAN patent. Meanwhile, the CSIRO stuck to its guns, claiming that it was the combination of techniques that made wireless LAN possible, and that it deserved fair recompense for the use of its patented techniques.

Was this valid? Well, to a degree, that’s how patents work. If you patent an idea, and it’s deemed unique and special, you can generally demand a payment others that like to use it. For better or worse, the CSIRO was granted a US patent for its combination of techniques to do wireless networking. Other companies may have come to similar conclusions on their own, but that didn’t get a patent for it and that left them open to very expensive litigation from the CSIRO.

However, there’s a big caveat here. None of this means that the CSIRO invented Wi-Fi. These days, the agency’s website is careful with the wording, noting that it “invented Wireless LAN.”
The CSIRO has published several comics about the history of Wi-Fi, which might confuse some as to the agency’s role in the standard. This paragraph is a more reserved explanation, though it accuses other companies of having “less success”—a bold statement given that 802.11 was commercially successful, and the CSIRO’s 60 GHz ideas weren’t. Credit: CSIRO website via screenshot
It’s certainly valid to say that the CSIRO’s scientists did invent a wireless networking technique. The problem is that in the mass media, this has commonly been transliterated to say that the agency invented Wi-Fi, which it obviously did not. Of course, this misconception doesn’t hurt the agency’s public profile one bit.

Ultimately, the CSIRO did file some patents. It did come up with a wireless networking technique in the 1990s. But did it invent Wi-Fi? Certainly not. And many will contest that the agency’s patent should not have earned it any money from equipment built to standards it had no role in developing. Still, the myth with persist for some time to come. At least until someone writes a New York Times bestseller on the true and exact history of the real Wi-Fi standards. Can’t wait.