Friday, March 31, 2023

Hackers exploit WordPress plugin flaw that gives full control of millions of sites


Hackers exploit WordPress plugin flaw that gives full control of millions of sites

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Hackers are actively exploiting a critical vulnerability in a widely used WordPress plugin that gives them the ability to take complete control of millions of sites, researchers said.

The vulnerability, which carries a severity rating of 8.8 out of a possible 10, is present in Elementor Pro, a premium plugin running on more than 12 million sites powered by the WordPress content management system. Elementor Pro allows users to create high-quality websites using a wide range of tools, one of which is WooCommerce, a separate WordPress plugin. When those conditions are met, anyone with an account on the site—say a subscriber or customer—can create new accounts that have full administrator privileges.

The vulnerability was discovered by Jerome Bruandet, a researcher with security firm NinTechNet. Last week, Elementor, the developer of the Elementor Pro plugin, released version 3.11.7, which patched the flaw. In a post published on Tuesday, Bruandet wrote:

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Tesla and Musk Lose Ruling on Factory Union Issues


A court upheld a finding that Tesla wrongly fired a worker involved in labor organizing and that a Twitter post by Elon Musk was illegally anti-union.

The Future of AI: What Comes Next and What to Expect


Where we’re heading tomorrow, next year and beyond.

Police Relied on Hidden Technology and Put the Wrong Person in Jail


Randal Reid spent nearly a week in confinement, falsely accused of stealing purses in a state he said he had never even visited.

These angry Dutch farmers really hate Microsoft


Microsoft sign

Enlarge (credit: Jeremy Moeller/Getty Images)

As soon as Lars Ruiter steps out of his car, he is confronted by a Microsoft security guard, who is already seething with anger. Ruiter, a local councillor, has parked in the rain outside a half-finished Microsoft data center that rises out of the flat North Holland farmland. He wants to see the construction site. The guard, who recognizes Ruiter from a previous visit when he brought a TV crew here, says that’s not allowed. Within minutes, the argument has escalated, and the guard has his hand around Ruiter’s throat.

The security guard lets go of Ruiter within a few seconds, and the councillor escapes with a red mark across his neck. Back in his car, Ruiter insists he’s fine. But his hands shake when he tries to change gears. He says the altercation—which he will later report to the police—shows the fog of secrecy that surrounds the Netherlands’ expanding data center business.

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Twitter’s Blue Check Apocalypse Is Upon Us. Here’s What to Know.


Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, is changing the platform’s longstanding practice of verifying accounts. That has implications for a range of users. Reference :

Thursday, March 30, 2023

Trojanized Windows and Mac apps rain down on 3CX users in massive supply chain attack


Trojanized Windows and Mac apps rain down on 3CX users in massive supply chain attack

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Hackers working on behalf of the North Korean government have pulled off a massive supply chain attack on Windows and macOS users of 3CX, a widely used voice and video calling desktop client, researchers from multiple security firms said.

The attack compromised the software build system used to create and distribute Windows and macOS versions of the app, which provides both VoIP and PBX services to “600,000+ customers,” including American Express, Mercedes-Benz, and Price Waterhouse Cooper. Control of the software build system gave the attackers the ability to hide malware inside 3CX apps that were digitally signed using the company’s official signing key. The macOS version, according to macOS security expert Patrick Wardle, was also notarized by Apple, indicating that the company analyzed the app and detected no malicious functionality.

In the making since 2022

“This is a classic supply chain attack, designed to exploit trust relationships between an organization and external parties,” Lotem Finkelstein, Director of Threat Intelligence & Research at Check Point Software, said in an email. “This includes partnerships with vendors or the use of a third-party software which most businesses are reliant on in some way. This incident is a reminder of just how critical it is that we do our due diligence in terms of scrutinizing who we conduct business with.”

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Lightning Eyes 10-Minute Charging for its Motorbikes




Lightning Motorcycles is already known for record-setting speeds. In 2011, the company’s LS-218 SuperBike set a landspeed record for production electric motorcycles at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, with a 347.55 kilometer-per-hour (215.91 mile-per-hour) average run and a 351 kph (218 mph) peak. That SuperBike topped every internal combustion engine motorcycle en route to a Pikes Peak International Hill Climb win in 2013, on the Colorado gantlet that’s among the world’s highest-profile tech challenges for cars and motorcycles alike.

The Southern California company is looking to speed things up again—this time with record-setting charging stops. Founder Richard Hatfield claims that the company’s Lightning Strike motorcycle can fill its battery from 20 percent to 80 percent in a little over 10 minutes on a Level 3 DC fast charger. That time isn’t much longer than a gasoline fill-up, especially for motorcyclists who don’t mind some stretching and recovery after hours in the saddle.

Faster pit stops could also help unlock sales for electric two-wheelers, which have been slow to catch on due to dawdling charge times and limited riding range. Whereas electric cars have vastly more space for batteries, motorcycle purveyors can only stuff so many cells into a slender frame before a bike becomes impractically heavy, cumbersome to ride, or ungainly in appearance.

A white electric motorcycle charging in a parking lot. Lightning Motorcycles claims that the Lightning Strike motorcycle can fill its battery from 20 percent to 80 percent in a little over 10 minutes on a Level 3 DC fast charger. Lightning Motorcycles

“Costs are becoming competitive, so the last big issues are range and charge time,” Hatfield says. “For the bikes that don’t have Level 3 charging, it’s a big penalty if you’re trying to ride longer than the battery can take you.”

For the US $13,000 Lightning Strike, zippy charging stops begin with a pouch-format battery from Enevate, with a high concentration of silicon in its anode. That California company claims its silicon-dominant anode material has an impressive specific capacity of about 3,000 milliampere-hours per gram. Lightning Motorcycles integrated the Strike’s 24 kilowatt-hour battery in the same space as 20-kWh pack in its LS-218, for a 20 percent gain in capacity. The result is a curb weight of just under 227 kilograms (500 pounds), about 45 kilos (100 pounds) more than top sport bikes.

The battery pack holds more energy than the 22 kWh pack in BMW’s original i3 electric car that debuted in 2012. Lightning is also developing a 28-kWh pack for its race-oriented LS-218.

Acceleration comparison LMC vs HD

Hatfield says the Strike’s efficient battery delivers a useful real-world range of 150 miles at a 70-mph clip, and closer to 165 or 170 miles in mellower riding. When it’s time to stop, the Strike can absorb Level 3 juice at up to 120 kilowatts. The company posted a YouTube video pitting its bike’s charging time against a Harley-Davidson Live Wire and Zero Motorcycle’s SR/S.

In the video, the Strike adds 12 kWh of power in just under 11 minutes on a typical DC fast charger. That’s closer to a 50 percent recharge than the company’s 60 percent (from 20-to-80 percent) claim. Yet the bike still slurps juice nearly four times faster than the Harley’s 3.3-kilowatt rate, and more than 10 times faster than the Zero, which, like the vast majority of e-motos, is limited to Level 2 AC charging. The Strike’s silicon-anode cells are just one element of the fast pace.

“Every component in between—the cabling, interconnects, even the contactors, had to be reengineered,” Hatfield says.

As with any motorcycle, generating cooling air is no problem when the Lightning is on the move. But managing the intense temperatures generated by DC charging requires a half-dozen fans to move air through the bike’s fairing and migrate heat from components. Software keeps a close eye on thermal metrics during charging, “so we can push harder on a 50-degree morning than a 90-degree afternoon,” Hatfield says. “The cells could charge even faster, but we’re trying to get a balance of system to manage thermal issues.”

The Strike’s electrical architecture operates in the 300-to-400 volt range, depending on the application. But the company is developing an 800-volt architecture for the LS-218, on par with today’s fastest-charging electric cars, such as the Lucid Air, Porsche Taycan or models from the South Korean trio of Genesis, Hyundai, and Kia.

“If we’re doing 300 amps at 400 volts, that’s a (peak) 120-kilowatt charging rate,” Hatfield said. “But 300 amps at 800 volts, and now you’re at 240 kilowatts. That’s really the direction we need to go with this.”

That robust architecture could also generate more sheer force. The standard Strike has up to 132 kilowatts (180 horsepower) and an electric motor that peaks around 7,500 rpm. Boosting voltage, Hatfield said, could push the electric motor closer to 12,500 rpm, generating more than 149 kilowatts (200 horsepower). That figure would top every production ICE motorcycle, including the Aprilia RSV4 Factory’s 140 kilowatts (190 horsepower), as tested by Cycle World.

If there’s any downside, it’s that Lightning, like many other two-wheeled dreamers, hasn’t delivered many motorcycles. Hatfield would not reveal how many bikes the company has made, but said the company can satisfy an order in 90 days.

The company is also aiming to break its own electric speed record, beginning this spring with runs at El Mirage in California, and later at Bonneville—conditions willing on the otherworldly yet shrinking and deteriorating salt surface. The latest target is 402 kph (250 mph), a mind-bending pace on two wheels that requires a special, steely-nerved rider. That rider would be Joe Amo, who has already blown past those speeds on a specially-modified, gasoline-powered Kawasaki. (The Lightning holds the landspeed record for street-legal production motorcycles). But even the world’s fastest internal combustion engine bikes can’t match the Lightning’s tricks, including using a solar-panel array on a mobile van to provide electricity for those record-smashing runs.

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How to Use Chatbots, like ChatGPT, in Your Daily Life and Work


Large language models are already good at a wide variety of tasks.

Publishers Worry A.I. Chatbots Will Slash Readership


Many sites get at least half their traffic from search engines. Fuller results generated by new chatbots could mean far fewer visitors.

Sailboat Crew Rescued After Hitting Whale in Pacific Ocean


After the collision in the Pacific Ocean this month, Rick Rodriguez and three other sailors were rescued by a fellow boater, with an assist from a satellite internet signal.

Pro-Russian hackers target elected US officials supporting Ukraine


Locked out.

Enlarge / Locked out. (credit: Sean Gladwell / Getty Images)

Threat actors aligned with Russia and Belarus are targeting elected US officials supporting Ukraine, using attacks that attempt to compromise their email accounts, researchers from security firm Proofpoint said.

The campaign, which also targets officials of European nations, uses malicious JavaScript that’s customized for individual webmail portals belonging to various NATO-aligned organizations, a report Proofpoint published Thursday said. The threat actor—which Proofpoint has tracked since 2021 under the name TA473—employs sustained reconnaissance and painstaking research to ensure the scripts steal targets’ usernames, passwords, and other sensitive login credentials as intended on each publicly exposed webmail portal being targeted.

Tenacious targeting

“This actor has been tenacious in its targeting of American and European officials as well as military and diplomatic personnel in Europe,” Proofpoint threat researcher Michael Raggi wrote in an email. “Since late 2022, TA473 has invested an ample amount of time studying the webmail portals of European government entities and scanning publicly facing infrastructure for vulnerabilities all in an effort to ultimately gain access to emails of those closely involved in government affairs and the Russia-Ukraine war.”

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Wednesday, March 29, 2023

As Washington Calls for TikTok Ban, Its Owner Begins Pushing a New App


ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok, is trying to woo popular social media creators to join its new app, Lemon8, before it is officially introduced this year.

An Unopened 2007 iPhone Can Be Yours (for $32,000 or More)


A first-generation Apple smartphone is going up for auction. Reference :

What Makes Chatbots ‘Hallucinate’ or Say the Wrong Thing?


The curious case of the hallucinating software.

Elon Musk and Others Call for Pause on A.I., Citing ‘Risks to Society’


More than 1,000 tech leaders, researchers and others signed an open letter that urged a moratorium on the development of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems.

Robots Using Legs as Arms to Climb and Push Buttons




We’ve gotten used to thinking of quadrupedal robots as robotic versions of dogs. And, to be fair, it’s right there in the word “quadrupedal.” But if we can just get past the Latin, there’s absolutely no reason why quadrupedal robots have to restrict themselves to using all four of their limbs as legs all of the time. And in fact, most other quadrupeds are versatile like this: four-legged animals frequently use their front limbs to interact with the world around them for non-locomotion purposes.

Roboticists at CMU and UC Berkeley are training robot dogs to use their legs for manipulation, not just locomotion, demonstrating skills that include climbing walls, pressing buttons, and even kicking a soccer ball.


Training a robot to do both locomotion and manipulation at the same time with the same limbs can be tricky using reinforcement learning techniques, because you can get stuck in local minima while trying to optimize for skills that are very different and (I would guess) sometimes in opposition to each other. So, the researchers split the training into separate manipulation and locomotion policies, and trained each in simulation, although that meant an extra step smooshing those separate skills together in the real world to perform useful tasks.

Successfully performing a combined locomotion and manipulation task requires one high-quality expert demonstration. The robot remembers what commands the human gave during the demonstration, and then creates a behavior tree that it can follow that breaks up the tasks into a bunch of connected locomotion and manipulation sub-tasks that it can perform in order. This also adds robustness to the system, because if the robot fails any sub-task, it can “rewind” its way back through the behavior tree until it gets back to a point of success, and then start over from there.

This particular robot (a Unitree Go1 with an Intel RealSense for perception) manages to balance itself against a wall to press a wheelchair access button that’s nearly a meter high, and then walk out the open door, which is pretty impressive. More broadly, this is a useful step towards helping non-humanoid robots to operate in human-optimized environments, which might be more important than it seems. It’s certainly possible to modify our environments to be friendlier to robots, and we see this in places like hospitals (and some hotels) where robots are able to directly control elevators. This makes it much easier for the robots to get around, but it’s annoying enough to have to do that in some cases, it’s more practical (if not necessarily simpler) to just build a button-pushing robot instead. There’s perhaps an argument to be made that the best middle ground here is just to build broadly accessible infrastructure in the first place, by making sure that neither robots nor humans should have to rely on a specific manipulation technique to operate anything. But until we make that happen, skills like these will be critical for helpful legged robots.

Legs as Manipulator: Pushing Quadrupedal Agility Beyond Locomotion, by Xuxin Cheng, Ashish Kumar, and Deepak Pathak from Carnegie Mellon University and UC Berkeley, will be presented next month at ICRA 2023 in London.

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Elon Musk and Others Call for Pause on A.I., Citing ‘Risks to Society’


More than 1,000 tech leaders, researchers and others signed an open letter that urged a moratorium on the development of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems.

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

In Hundreds of TikTok Videos, Its Users Defend the App


After lawmakers grilled TikTok’s chief executive last week, the app’s users argued that the platform should not be banned in the United States over national security concerns.

How Chatbots and Large Language Models, or LLMs, Actually Work


Learning how a “large language model” operates.

Generative AI set to affect 300 million jobs across major economies


Empty cubicles in office

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Barwick via Getty)

The latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could lead to the automation of a quarter of the work done in the US and eurozone, according to research by Goldman Sachs.

The investment bank said on Monday that “generative” AI systems such as ChatGPT, which can create content that is indistinguishable from human output, could spark a productivity boom that would eventually raise annual global gross domestic product by 7 percent over a 10-year period.

But if the technology lived up to its promise, it would also bring “significant disruption” to the labor market, exposing the equivalent of 300 million full-time workers across big economies to automation, according to Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani, the paper’s authors. Lawyers and administrative staff would be among those at greatest risk of becoming redundant.

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Neurotech’s Battles Impact Our Brains’ Future




Neurotechnologies today—devices that can measure and influence our brains and nervous systems—are growing in power and popularity. The neurotech marketplace, according to Precedence Research, is worth USD $14.3 billion this year and will exceed $20 billion within four years. Noninvasive brain-computer interfaces, brain stimulation devices, and brain-monitoring hardware (measuring alertness and attention at work, for example) are no longer just laboratory experiments and technological curios. The societal and legal implications of widespread neurotech adoption may be substantial.

Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke University, has written a new book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology, which explores how our lives may be impacted by the use of brain-computer interfaces and neural monitoring devices.

Farahany argues that the development and use of neurotech presents a challenge to our current understanding of human rights. Devices designed to measure, record and influence our mental processes, used by us or on us, may infringe on our rights to mental privacy, freedom of thought, and mental self-determination. She calls this collection of freedoms the right to cognitive liberty. Spectrum spoke with Farahany recently about the future and present of neurotech and how to weigh its promises—enhanced capabilities, for instance, including bionics and prosthetics and even a third arm—against its potential to interfere with people’s mental sovereignty.

portrait of a smiling woman on a white background Author, Nita FarahanyMerritt Chesson

IEEE Spectrum: Your book The Battle for Your Brain defines cognitive liberty as the rights to mental privacy, freedom of thought, and self-determination. Please tell us more about that.

Nita Farahany: The umbrella right, the right to cognitive liberty, is the right to self-determination over our brains and mental experiences. The ways I see that right intersecting with our existing human rights are those three that you listed. The right to mental privacy, which covers all of our mental and effective functions; the right to freedom of thought, which I think relates to complex thoughts and visual imagery, like the things we think of as “thinking;” and self-determination which is really the positive side of cognitive liberty. Mental privacy and freedom of thought are the rights from interference with our brains and mental experiences, while self-determination is the right to access information about our own brains, the right to make changes and to be able to define for ourselves what we want our brains and mental experiences to be like.

Much of your book is forward-looking, considering what current brain-computer interface technologies are capable of today and how people, businesses and governments are using them. What current BCI capabilities, in your opinion, run counter to the rights of cognitive liberty?

Farahany: I think there are two ways to think about it: there’s what a technology can actually do, and there’s the technology’s chilling effect no matter what it can actually do. If you are some authoritarian regime and you are requiring people to wear brain sensors, even if the technology did nothing, using that at scale on people has a deeply and profoundly chilling effect

But it does do something, and the something that it does is enough to also cause real harm and danger by digging into the mental privacy of individuals, particularly when it’s used to probe information, and not just brain states. I think it’s dangerous enough when you’re trying to track attention, engagement, or boredom, or disgust or simple emotional reactions. It’s even more dangerous when what you’re trying to do is use evoked potentials to understand biases and preferences.

What are some ways that people are currently using evoked brain potentials? (a.k.a. event-related potentials or ERPs) What are the possible issues with those applications?

Farahany: This technique is being used pretty widely in neuromarketing already, and has been for a while. For them it’s another marketing technique. People’s self-reported preferences have long been understood to be inaccurate and don’t reflect their buying behaviors. Using ERPs to try to decode emotional brain states of interest or attention when products are shown—this video elicited a weak response, while another elicited a stronger response, for example.

ERP techniques have also been used to try to infer people’s affinity with particular political viewpoints. When recording ERP signals from a person while presenting them with a series of statements and images about societal issues or political parties, researchers have tried to see positive or negative responses and then predict what a person’s political preferences or persuasions or likelihood of voting for a particular party or candidate is based on that information. That’s one of the potential uses and misuses, particularly when that’s done without consent, awareness or transparency, or when used for the commodification of that brain data.

The same kind of signals are used in the criminal justice system through so-called brain fingerprinting technology. Scientifically, we should worry about the analytical validity of that quite a bit, but on top of concerns about validity we should also be deeply concerned about using interrogation techniques on a criminal defendant’s brain, as if that is a normalized or legitimate function of government, as if that is a permissible intrusion into their privacy. We should worry about whether people get it right, the pseudoscience of it, and then we should worry about the very fact that it is a technology that governments think is fine to use on human minds.

Your book describes different companies developing “lie detector” devices based on functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) signals. That sounds a lot like a shinier version of a polygraph, which are pretty widely understood to be inaccurate.

Farahany: And yet they drive a lot of confessions! It drives a lot of fear. Polygraphs already have a chilling effect on people. They already lead to false confessions and increased anxiety, but much less so, I think, than putting sensors on a person’s head and saying “it doesn’t matter what you say, because your brain is going to reveal the truth anyway.” That’s the future that has already arrived in countries already using this technology.

You discuss companies like SmartCap, which makes an EEG wakefulness monitor and markets it to shipping companies as a means of avoiding accidents caused by sleep deprivation. At the corporate level, how else might employers or employees use neurotechnology?

Farahany: Fatigue management has become something used at a relatively wide-scale across a number of companies internationally. When I presented this material at the World Economic Forum at Davos, I had a company that came up to me after my talk to say “we’re already using this technology. We plan on rolling it out at scale as one of the products we’re using.” I think in some ways, for things like fatigue monitoring and management, that’s not a bad use of it. If it improves safety, and the only data that’s used and extracted is quite limited, then I don’t find that to be a particularly troubling application. I worry when instead it’s used for productivity scoring or attention management or it’s integrated into wellness programs where the data being collected is not being disclosed to employees or being used to track people over time. We already talked about industries like neuromarketing, but other industries are already integrating this technology to gather brain heuristics into their workplaces at scale, and those uses are growing.

Do you think an interest in preserving cognitive liberty conflicts with the better interests of society?

Farahany: There are some aspects of cognitive liberty which are based on absolute rights, like freedom of thought, which protects a narrow category of our cognitive and effective functioning. And there are some aspects of cognitive liberty like mental privacy which is a relative right, where societal interests can in some instances be strong enough to justify intervention by the state and to limit the amount of liberty that a person can exercise.

It’s not that I think they’re in conflict, I think that it’s important to understand that individual liberties are always balanced against societal needs and interests. What I’m trying to do in the book is to show that cognitive liberty …isn’t always going to trump every interest that society has. There are going to be some instances in which we have to really find the right balance between the individual and the society at large.

Are current national and international rights frameworks and laws sufficient to protect cognitive liberty?

Farahany: I believe that the existing set of rights—privacy, freedom of thought and the collective right to self-determination—can be updated and expanded and interpreted. Human rights law is meant to evolve over time. …

A right, at the end of the day, has power on its own, but it’s really only as good as the enforcement of that right. What’s necessary is to enforce that right by looking at it in context-specific ways—in employment, in government use, in biometric use—and to understand what rules and regulations should be, how cognitive liberty translates into concrete rules and regulations worldwide.

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Monday, March 27, 2023

Have AI Chatbots Developed Theory of Mind? What We Do and Do Not Know.


Some researchers claim that chatbots have developed theory of mind. But is that just our own theory of mind gone wild?

A Sting Operation to Save Elephants, With No Stings


While live bees can be used as a deterrent to keep elephants away from farms, a new technology fills in for cases where a buzz without the sting is preferable.

CubeSat Operators Launch an IoT Space Race




A rocket carrying CubeSats launched into Earth orbit two years ago, on 22 March, 2021. Two of those CubeSats represented competing approaches to bringing the Internet of Things (IoT) to space. One, operated by Lacuna Space, uses a protocol called LoRaWAN, a long-range, low-power protocol owned by Semtech. The other, owned by Sateliot, uses the narrowband IoT protocol. And separately, in late 2022, the cellular industry standard-setter 3GPP incorporated satellite-based 5G into standard cellular service with its release 17.

In other words, there is now an IoT space race.

In addition to Lacuna and Sateliot, OQ Technology is also nipping at the heels of satellite telecom incumbents such as Iridium, Orbcomm, and Inmarsat for a share of the growing satellite IoT subscriber market. OQ has three satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) and plans to launch seven more this year, says OQ Technology’s chief innovation officer Prasanna Nagarajan. OQ has paying customers in the oil and gas, agriculture, and transport logistics industries.

Sateliot, based in Barcelona, Spain, has the satellite it launched in 2021 in orbit and plans to launch four more this year, says Sateliot’s business development manager Paula Caudet. It is inviting early adopters to sample its service for free this year while it builds more coverage. “Certain use cases are fine with flybys every few hours, such as agricultural sensors,” Caudet says. OQ and Sateliot claim they will launch enough satellites in 2024 to offer at least hourly coverage and enough in 2025 to offer near-real-time coverage.

Sateliot

Incumbent satellite operators are already offering IoT coverage, but so far they require specific IoT hardware tuned to their spectrum bands and protocols. Insurgent companies that make use of the 3GPP release 17 standard will be able to offer satellite connectivity to devices first designed to connect only to cellular towers.

New companies also see an opportunity to offer more attractive, lower pricing. “Legacy satellite providers were charging maybe $100 for a few kilobits of data and customers are not willing to pay so much for IoT,” says Nagarajan. “There seemed to be a huge market gap.” Another company, Swarm, which is a subsidiary of SpaceX, offers low-bandwidth connectivity via proprietary devices to its tiny satellites for US $5 per month.

Thanks to shared launch infrastructure and cheaper IoT-compatible modules and satellites, new firms can compete with companies that have had satellites in orbit for decades. More and more hardware and services are available on an off-the-shelf basis. “An IoT-standard module is maybe eight or ten euros, versus three hundred euros for satellite-specific modules,” says Caudet.

In fact, Sateliot contracted the construction of its first satellite to Open Cosmos. Open Cosmos mission manager Jordi Castellví says that cubesat subsystems and certain specialized services are now available online from suppliers including AlénSpace, CubeSatShop, EnduroSat, and Isispace, among others.

Open Cosmos

By building constellations of hundreds of satellites with IoT modules in LEO, IoT-satellite companies will be able to save money on hardware and still detect the faint signals from IoT gateways or even individual IoT sensors—such as those aboard shipping containers packed onto cargo ships at sea. They won’t move as much data as voice and broadband offerings in the works from AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global’s larger and more complex satellites, for example, but they may be able to meet growing demand for narrowband applications.

At first, users may not have direct contact with such providers; both Sateliot and OQ Technology have partnered with existing mobile network operators to offer a sort of global IoT roaming package. While in port, a customer’s IoT device will transmit via the local cellular network. Farther out at sea, it will switch to transmitting to satellites overhead. For now, OQ Technology, Swarm, and others offer these services via custom devices, but thanks to 3GPP’s IoT-friendly releases, the next generation of services may reach standard cellular IoT devices. “The next step is being able to integrate cellular and satellite services,” Caudet says.

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Android app from China executed 0-day exploit on millions of devices


Android app from China executed 0-day exploit on millions of devices

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Android apps digitally signed by China’s third-biggest e-commerce company exploited a zero-day vulnerability that allowed them to surreptitiously take control of millions of end-user devices to steal personal data and install malicious apps, researchers from security firm Lookout have confirmed.

The malicious versions of the Pinduoduo app were available in third-party markets, which users in China and elsewhere rely on because the official Google Play market is off-limits or not easy to access. No malicious versions were found in Play or Apple’s App Store. Last Monday, TechCrunch reported, Pinduoduo was pulled from Play after Google discovered a malicious version of the app available elsewhere. TechCrunch reported the malicious apps available in third-party markets exploited several zero-days, which are vulnerabilities that are known or exploited before a vendor has a patch available.

Sophisticated attack

A preliminary analysis by Lookout found that at least two off-Play versions of Pinduoduo for Android exploited CVE-2023-20963, the tracking number for an Android vulnerability Google patched in updates that became available to end users two weeks ago. This privilege-escalation flaw, which was exploited prior to Google’s disclosure, allowed the app to perform operations with elevated privileges. The app used these privileges to download code from a developer-designated site and run it within a privileged environment.

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Sunday, March 26, 2023

Twitter Says Parts of Its Source Code Were Leaked Online


The leak adds to the challenges facing the Elon Musk-owned company, which is trying to unmask the person responsible and any other people who downloaded the code.

Elon Musk Values Twitter at $20 Billion


The billionaire bought the social media company for $44 billion in October and took it private.

Gallium Nitride and Silicon Carbide Fight for Green Tech Domination




Can advanced semiconductors cut emissions of greenhouse gases enough to make a difference in the struggle to halt climate change? The answer is a resounding yes. Such a change is actually well underway.

Starting around 2001, the compound semiconductor gallium nitride fomented a revolution in lighting that has been, by some measures, the fastest technology shift in human history. In just two decades, the share of the global lighting market held by gallium-nitride-based light-emitting diodes has gone from zero to more than 50 percent, according to a study by the International Energy Agency. The research firm Mordor Intelligence recently predicted that, worldwide, LED lighting will be responsible for cutting the electricity used for lighting by 30 to 40 percent over the next seven years. Globally, lighting accounts for about 20 percent of electricity use and 6 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, according to the United Nations Environment Program.


Each wafer contains hundreds of state-of-the-art power transistorsPeter Adams

This revolution is nowhere near done. Indeed, it is about to jump to a higher level. The very semiconductor technology that has transformed the lighting industry, gallium nitride (GaN), is also part of a revolution in power electronics that is now gathering steam. It is one of two semiconductors—the other being silicon carbide (SiC)—that have begun displacing silicon-based electronics in enormous and vital categories of power electronics.

GaN and SiC devices perform better and are more efficient than the silicon components they are replacing. There are countless billions of these devices all over the world, and many of them operate for hours every day, so the energy savings are going to be substantial. The rise of GaN and SiC power electronics will ultimately have a greater positive impact on the planet’s climate than will the replacement of incandescent and other legacy lighting by GaN LEDs.

Virtually everywhere that alternating current must be transformed to direct current or vice versa, there will be fewer wasted watts. This conversion happens in your phone’s or laptop’s wall charger, in the much larger chargers and inverters that power electric vehicles, and elsewhere. And there will be similar savings as other silicon strongholds fall to the new semiconductors, too. Wireless base-station amplifiers are among the growing applications for which these emerging semiconductors are clearly superior. In the effort to mitigate climate change, eliminating waste in power consumption is the low-hanging fruit, and these semiconductors are the way we’ll harvest it.

This is a new instance of a familiar pattern in technology history: two competing innovations coming to fruition at the same time. How will it all shake out? In which applications will SiC dominate, and in which will GaN prevail? A hard look at the relative strengths of these two semiconductors gives us some solid clues.

Why Power Conversion Matters in Climate Calculations

Before we get to the semiconductors themselves, let’s first consider why we need them. To begin with: Power conversion is everywhere. And it goes far beyond the little wall chargers that sustain our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and countless other gadgets.

Power conversion is the process that changes electricity from the form that’s available to the form required for a product to perform its function. Some energy is always lost in that conversion, and because some of these products run continuously, the energy savings can be enormous. Consider: Electricity consumption in the state of California remained essentially flat from 1980 even as the economic output of the state skyrocketed. One of the most important reasons why the demand remained flat is that the efficiency of refrigerators and air conditioners increased enormously over that period. The single-greatest factor in this improvement has been the use of variable-speed drives based on the insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) and other power electronics, which greatly increased efficiency.

Gallium Nitride and Silicon Carbide: Where They Compete

A graph has fields of blue, green, and white to show applications in which GaN (blue) or SiC (white) dominate. A middle field of green shows where the two semiconductors are now competing, or will shortly. In the markets for high-voltage power transistors, gallium nitride devices dominate in applications below around 400 volts, while silicon carbide has the edge now for 800 V and above (the markets are relatively small above around 2,000 V). The landscape of the important battleground between 400 and 1,000 V will change as GaN devices improve. For example, with the introduction of 1,200-V GaN transistors—expected in 2025—the battle will be joined in the all-important market for electric-vehicle inverters.Chris Philpot

SiC and GaN are going to enable far greater reductions in emissions. GaN-based technologies alone could lead to a savings of over 1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2041 in just the United States and India, according to an analysis of publicly available data by Transphorm, a GaN-device company I cofounded in 2007. The data came from the International Energy Agency, Statista, and other sources. The same analysis indicates a 1,400-terawatt-hour energy savings—or 10 to 15 percent of the projected energy consumption by the two countries that year.

Wide-Bandgap’s Advantages

Like an ordinary transistor, a power transistor can act as an amplifying device or as a switch. An important example of the amplifying role is in wireless base stations, which amplify signals for transmission to smartphones. All over the world, the semiconductor used to fabricate the transistors in these amplifiers is shifting from a silicon technology called laterally diffused metal-oxide semiconductor (LDMOS) to GaN. The newer technology has many advantages, including a power-efficiency improvement of 10 percent or more depending on frequencies. In power-conversion applications, on the other hand, the transistor acts as a switch rather than as an amplifier. The standard technique is called pulse-width modulation. In a common type of motor controller, for example, pulses of direct-current electricity are fed to coils mounted on the motor’s rotor. These pulses set up a magnetic field that interacts with that of the motor’s stator, which makes the rotor spin. The speed of this rotation is controlled by altering the length of the pulses: A graph of these pulses is a square wave, and the longer the pulses are “on” rather than “off,” the more rotational speed and torque the motor provides. Power transistors accomplish the on-and-off switching.

Pulse-width modulation is also used in switching power supplies, one of the most common examples of power conversion. Switching power supplies are the type used to power virtually all personal computers, mobile devices, and appliances that run on DC. Basically, the input AC voltage is converted to DC, and then that DC is “chopped” into a high-frequency alternating-current square wave. This chopping is done by power transistors, which create the square wave by switching the DC on and off. The square wave is applied to a transformer that changes the amplitude of the wave to produce the desired output voltage. To get a steady DC output, the voltage from the transformer is rectified and filtered.

The important point here is that the characteristics of the power transistors determine, almost entirely, how well the circuits can perform pulse-width modulation—and therefore, how efficiently the controller regulates the voltage. An ideal power transistor would, when in the off state, completely block current flow even when the applied voltage is high. This characteristic is called high electric breakdown field strength, and it indicates how much voltage the semiconductor is able to withstand. On the other hand, when it is in the on state, this ideal transistor would have very low resistance to the flow of current. This feature results from very high mobility of the charges—electrons and holes—within the semiconductor’s crystalline lattice. Think of breakdown field strength and charge mobility as the yin and yang of a power semiconductor.

GaN transistors are very unusual because most of the current flowing through them is due to electron velocity rather than electron charge.

GaN and SiC come much closer to this ideal than the silicon semiconductors they are replacing. First, consider breakdown field strength. Both GaN and SiC belong to a class called wide-bandgap semiconductors. The bandgap of a semiconductor is defined as the energy, in electron volts, needed for an electron in the semiconductor lattice to jump from the valence band to the conduction band. An electron in the valence band participates in the bonding of atoms within the crystal lattice, whereas in the conduction band electrons are free to move around in the lattice and conduct electricity.

In a semiconductor with a wide bandgap, the bonds between atoms are strong and so the material is usually able to withstand relatively high voltages before the bonds break and the transistor is said to break down. The bandgap of silicon is 1.12 electron volts, as compared with 3.40 eV for GaN. For the most common type of SiC, the band gap is 3.26 eV. [See table below, “The Wide-Bandgap Menagerie”]

The Wide-Bandgap Menagerie

Speed of operation and the ability to block high voltage are two of the most important characteristics of a power transistor. These two qualities are in turn determined by key physical parameters of the semiconductor materials used to fabricate the transistor. Speed is determined by the mobility and velocity of charges in the semiconductor, while voltage blocking is established by the material’s bandgap and electric breakdown field. Source: The Application of Third Generation Semiconductor in Power Industry, Yuqian Zhang, E3S Web of Conferences, Volume 198, 2020

Now let’s look at mobility, which is given in units of centimeters squared per volt second (cm2/V·s). The product of mobility and electric field yields the velocity of the electron, and the higher the velocity the higher the current carried for a given amount of moving charge. For silicon this figure is 1,450; for SiC it is around 950; and for GaN, about 2,000. GaN’s unusually high value is the reason why it can be used not only in power-conversion applications but also in microwave amplifiers. GaN transistors can amplify signals with frequencies as high as 100 gigahertz—far above the 3 to 4 GHz generally regarded as the maximum for silicon LDMOS. For reference, 5G’s millimeter-wave frequencies top out at 52.6 GHz. This highest 5G band is not yet widely used, however, frequencies up to 75 GHz are being deployed in dish-to-dish communications, and researchers are now working with frequencies as high as 140 GHz for in-room communications. The appetite for bandwidth is insatiable.

These performance figures are important, but they’re not the only criteria by which GaN and SiC should be compared for any particular application. Other critical factors include ease of use and cost, for both the devices and the systems into which they are integrated. Taken together, these factors explain where and why each of these semiconductors has begun displacing silicon—and how their future competition may shake out.

SiC Leads GaN in Power Conversion Today…

The first commercially viable SiC transistor that was superior to silicon was introduced by Cree (now Wolfspeed) in 2011. It could block 1,200 volts and had a respectably low resistance of 80 milliohms when conducting current. Today there are three different kinds of SiC transistors on the market. There’s a trench MOSFET (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor) from Rohm; DMOSs (double-diffused MOSs) from Infineon Technologies, ON Semiconductor Corp., STMicroelectronics, Wolfspeed, and others; and a vertical-junction field-effect transistor from Qorvo.

One of the big advantages of SiC MOSFETs is their similarity to traditional silicon ones—even the packaging is identical. A SiC MOSFET operates in essentially the same way as an ordinary silicon MOSFET. There’s a source, a gate, and a drain. When the device is on, electrons flow from a heavily doped n-type source across a lightly doped bulk region before being “drained” through a conductive substrate. This similarity means that there’s little learning curve for engineers making the switch to SiC.

Compared to GaN, SiC has other advantages. SiC MOSFETs are inherently “fail-open” devices, meaning that if the control circuit fails for any reason the transistor stops conducting current. This is an important feature, because this characteristic largely eliminates the possibility that a failure could lead to a short circuit and a fire or explosion. (The price paid for this feature, however, is a lower electron mobility, which increases resistance when the device is on.)

…But GaN Is Gaining

GaN brings its own unique advantages. The semiconductor first established itself commercially in 2000 in the markets for light-emitting diodes and semiconductor lasers. It was the first semiconductor capable of reliably emitting bright green, blue, purple, and ultraviolet light. But long before this commercial breakthrough in optoelectronics, I and other researchers had already demonstrated the promise of GaN for high-power electronics. GaN LEDs caught on quickly because they filled a void for efficient lighting. But GaN for electronics had to prove itself superior to existing technologies: in particular, silicon CoolMOS transistors from Infineon for power electronics, and silicon-LDMOS and gallium-arsenide transistors for radio-frequency electronics.

GaN’s main advantage is its extremely high electron mobility. Electric current, the flow of charge, equals the concentration of the charges multiplied by their velocity. So you can get high current because of high concentration or high velocity or some combination of the two. The GaN transistor is unusual because most of the current flowing through the device is due to electron velocity rather than charge concentration. What this means in practice is that, in comparison with Si or SiC, less charge has to flow into the device to switch it on or off. That, in turn, reduces the energy needed for each switching cycle and contributes to high efficiency.

Enhancement-Mode GaN Transistor

A pair of illustrations shows the operation of an advanced gallium-nitride transistor. One of the two major types of gallium nitride transistor is called an enhancement-mode device. It uses a gate-control circuit operating at around 6 volts to control the main switching circuit, which can block 600 V or more when the control circuit is off. When the device is on (when 6 V are applied to the gate), electrons flow from the drain to the source in a flat region called a two-dimensional electron gas. In this region the electrons are extremely mobile—a factor that helps enable very high switching speeds—and confined beneath a barrier of aluminum gallium nitride. When the device is off, the region below the gate is depleted of electrons, breaking the circuit under the gate and stopping current flow.Chris Philpot

Meanwhile, GaN’s high electron mobility allows switching speeds on the order of 50 volts per nanosecond. That characteristic means power converters based on GaN transistors operate efficiently at frequencies in the multiple hundreds of kilohertz, as opposed to about 100 kilohertz for silicon or SiC.

Taken together, the high efficiency and high frequency enables the power converter based on GaN devices to be quite small and lightweight: High efficiency means smaller heat sinks, and operation at high frequencies means that the inductors and capacitors can be very small, too.

One disadvantage of GaN semiconductors is that they do not yet have a reliable insulator technology. This complicates the design of devices that are fail-safe—in other words, that fail open if the control circuit fails.

There are two options to achieve this normally off characteristic. One is to equip the transistor with a type of gate that removes the charge in the channel when there’s no voltage applied to the gate and that conducts current only on application of a positive voltage to that gate. These are called enhancement-mode devices. They are offered by EPC, GaN Systems, Infineon,Innoscience, and Navitas, for example. [See illustration, "Enhancement-Mode GaN Transistor"]

The other option is called the cascode solution. It uses a separate, low-loss silicon field-effect transistor to provide the fail-safe feature for the GaN transistor. This cascode solution is used by Power Integrations, Texas Instruments, and Transphorm. [See illustration, "Cascoded Depletion-Mode GaN Transistor"]

Cascoded Depletion-Mode GaN Transistor

A pair of schematic illustrations shows the operation of an advanced gallium-nitride transistor. For safety, when a power transistor’s control circuit fails, it must fail into the open state, with no current flow. This is a challenge for gallium nitride devices because they lack a gate-insulator material that is reliable both in the high-voltage blocking state and in the current-carrying on state. One solution, called cascoded depletion-mode, uses a low-voltage signal on a silicon field-effect transistor (FET) to control the much larger voltage on a gallium nitride high electron mobility transistor [above right]. If the control circuit fails, the voltage on the gate of the FET drops to zero and it stops conducting current [above left]. With the FET no longer conducting current, the gallium nitride transistor also stops conducting, because there is no longer a closed circuit between the drain and the source of the combined device. Chris Philpot

No comparison of semiconductors is complete without a consideration of costs. A rough rule of thumb is—smaller die size means lower cost. Die size is the physical area of the integrated circuit containing the devices.

SiC devices now generally have smaller dies than GaN ones. However, SiC’s substrate and fabrication costs are higher than those for GaN and, in general, the final device costs for applications at 5 kilowatts and higher are not much different today. Future trends, though, are likely to favor GaN. I base this belief on the relative simplicity of GaN devices, which will mean production costs low enough to overcome the larger die size.

That said, for GaN to be viable for many high-power applications that also demand high voltages, it must have a cost-effective, high-performance device rated for 1,200 V. After all, there are already SiC transistors available at that voltage. Currently, the closest commercially available GaN transistors are rated for 900 V, produced by Transphorm, which I cofounded with Primit Parikh. Lately, we have also demonstrated 1,200-V devices, fabricated on sapphire substrates, that have both electrical and thermal performance on a par with SiC devices.

Projections from the research firm Omdia for 1,200-V SiC MOSFETs indicate a price of 16 cents per ampere in 2025. In my estimation, because of the lower cost of GaN substrates, the price of first-generation 1,200-V GaN transistors in 2025 will be less than that of their SiC counterparts. Of course, that’s just my opinion; we’ll all know for sure how this will shake out in a couple of years.

GaN vs. SiC: Handicapping the Contests

With these relative advantages and disadvantages in mind, let’s consider individual applications, one by one, and shed some light on how things might develop.

Electric vehicle inverters and converters: Tesla’s adoption of SiC in 2017 for the onboard, or traction, inverters for its Model 3 was an early and major win for the semiconductor. In an EV, the traction inverter converts the DC from the batteries to AC for the motor. The inverter also controls the speed of the motor by varying the frequency of the alternating current. Today, Mercedes-Benz and Lucid Motors are also using SiC in their inverters and other EV makers are planning to use SiC in upcoming models, according to news reports. The SiC devices are being supplied by Infineon, OnSemi, Rohm, Wolfspeed, and others. EV traction inverters typically range from about 35 kW to 100 kW for a small EV to about 400 kW for a large vehicle.

However, it’s too soon to call this contest for SiC. As I noted, to make inroads in this market, GaN suppliers will have to offer a 1,200-V device. EV electrical systems now typically operate at just 400 volts, but the Porsche Taycan has an 800-V system, as do EVs from Audi, Hyundai, and Kia. Other automakers are expected to follow their lead in coming years. (The Lucid Air has a 900-V system.) I expect to see the first commercial 1,200-V GaN transistors in 2025. These devices will be used not only in vehicles but also in high-speed public EV chargers.

The higher switching speeds possible with GaN will be a powerful advantage in EV inverters, because these switches employ what are called hard-switched techniques. Here, the way to enhance performance is to switch very fast from on to off to minimize the time when the device is both holding high voltage and passing high current.

Besides an inverter, an EV also typically has an onboard charger, which enables the vehicle to be charged from wall (mains) current by converting AC to DC. Here, again, GaN is very attractive, for the same reasons that make it a good choice for inverters.

Electric-grid applications: Very-high-voltage power conversion for devices rated at 3 kV and higher will remain the domain of SiC for at least the next decade. These applications include systems to help stabilize the grid, convert AC to DC and back again at transmission-level voltages, and other uses.

Phone, tablet, and laptop chargers: Starting in 2019, GaN-based wall chargers became available commercially from companies such as GaN Systems, Innoscience, Navitas, Power Integrations, and Transphorm. The high switching speeds of GaN coupled with its generally lower costs have made it the incumbent in lower-power markets (25 to 500 W), where these factors, along with small size and a robust supply chain, are paramount. These early GaN power converters had switching frequencies as high as 300 kHz and efficiencies above 92 percent. They set records for power density, with figures as high as 30 W per cubic inch (1.83 W/cm3)—roughly double the density of the silicon-based chargers they are replacing.

Devices on an advanced semiconductor wafer are tested with probes. An automated system of probes applies a high voltage to stress test power transistors on a wafer. The automated system, at Transphorm, tests each one of some 500 die in minutes. Peter Adams

Solar-power microinverters: Solar-power generation has taken off in recent years, in both grid-scale and distributed (household) applications. For every installation, an inverter is needed to convert the DC from the solar panels to AC to power a home or release the electricity to the grid. Today, grid-scale photovoltaic inverters are the domain of silicon IGBTs and SiC MOSFETs. But GaN will begin making inroads in the distributed solar market, particularly.

Traditionally, in these distributed installations, there was a single inverter box for all of the solar panels. But increasingly installers are favoring systems in which there is a separate microinverter for each panel, and the AC is combined before powering the house or feeding the grid. Such a setup means the system can monitor the operation of each panel in order to optimize the performance of the whole array.

Microinverter or traditional inverter systems are critical to the modern data center. Coupled with batteries they create an uninterruptible power supply to prevent outages. Also, all data centers use power-factor correction circuits, which adjust the power supply’s alternating-current waveforms to improve efficiency and remove characteristics that could damage equipment. And for these, GaN provides a low-loss and economical solution that is slowly displacing silicon.

5G and 6G base stations: GaN’s superior speed and high power density will enable it to win and ultimately dominate applications in the microwave regimes, notably 5G and 6G wireless, and commercial and military radar. The main competition here are arrays of silicon LDMOS devices, which are cheaper but have lower performance. Indeed, GaN has no real competitor at frequencies of 4 GHz and above.

For 5G and 6G wireless, the critical parameter is bandwidth, because it determines how much information the hardware can transmit efficiently. Next-generation 5G systems will have nearly 1 GHz of bandwidth, enabling blazingly fast video and other applications.

Microwave-communication systems that use silicon-on-insulator technologies provide a 5G+ solution using high-frequency silicon devices where each device’s low output power is overcome with large arrays of them. GaN and silicon will coexist for a while in this space. The winner in a specific application will be determined by a trade-off among system architecture, cost, and performance.

Radar: The U.S. military is deploying many ground-based radar systems based on GaN electronics. These include the Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar and the Active Electronically Scanned Array Radar built by Northrup-Grumman for the U.S. Marine Corps. Raytheon’s SPY6 radar was delivered to the U.S. Navy and tested for the first time at sea in December 2022. The system greatly extends the range and sensitivity of shipborne radar.

The Wide-Bandgap Battle Is Just Beginning

Today, SiC dominates in EV inverters, and generally wherever voltage-blocking capability and power handling are paramount and where the frequency is low. GaN is the preferred technology where high-frequency performance matters, such as in base stations for 5G and 6G, and for radar and high-frequency power-conversion applications such as wall-plug adapters, microinverters, and power supplies.

But the tug-of-war between GaN and SiC is just beginning. Regardless of how the competition plays out, application by application and market by market, we can say for sure that the Earth’s environment will be a winner. Countless billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases will be avoided in coming years as this new cycle of technological replacement and rejuvenation wends its way inexorably forward.

Reference: https://ift.tt/TgmSP4E

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