Welcome to issue #15 of the Dithering Digest Weekly Tech Roundup of geeky news and links.
A major security bug in DNSSEC fixed before half the internet went down, more AI advances and the usual governments not really understanding technology and making sweeping silly laws.
Have a lovely weekend, and enjoy the links.
Canadian Government planning to ban Flipper Zero
The Government of Canada are planning a major crackdown on software defined radios including the popular Flipper Zero. The Flipper Zero is a cool little geek multi-tool for exploring and messing with NFC, WiFi and other radio protocols.
It seems a little of throwing the baby out with the bathwater as the Flipper Zero is not likely to be the main culprit in the spate of car crime. Either way I plan to get my hands on one before the UK government think the same!
Major internet outages averted in DNSSEC security flaw
A flaw was recently discovered in the BIND DNS server software (which runs large parts of the internet and would be considered critical infrastructure) that would allow attackers to crash a server with a single data packet. The bug was named ‘KeyTrap’ and was found by Professor Haya Schulmann and Niklas Vogel of the Goethe University Frankfurt; Elias Heftrig of Fraunhofer SIT; and Professor Michael Waidner at the Technical University of Darmstadt and Fraunhofer SIT.
Thankfully the researchers worked with the relevant software vendors to help develop a fix and coordinate deployment before making their findings public. Akamai exec Sven Dummer said
“You might not know it, but the global internet dodged a bullet: KeyTrap is a vulnerability in key infrastructure that is needed for the internet to function — and one of the worst ever discovered. With KeyTrap, an attacker could completely disable large parts of the worldwide internet.”
🔗 https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/13/dnssec_vulnerability_internet/
European Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption is illegal
This is a big one. The ECHR have declared that encryption engineered to allow a backdoor for companies or governments would be a breach of Human Rights. Several countries are considering forcing companies like Apple and WhatsApp to give them a “master key” to be able to decrypt chats. The problem with this approach is that bad guys could also get hold of these master keys, a fact the government don’t seem to grasp.
This Human Rights angle could help stop legislation like the UK Online Safety Act which is trying to gain the powers for the government. Here’s hoping they see sense and realise that weakened encryption is a bad thing.
🔗 https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/15/echr_backdoor_encryption/
Home Assistant makes more progress on Voice
Home Assistant announced that you can now have on-device wake word support thanks to some work by Kevin Ahrendt. He has written microWakeWord to run on ESPHome devices that will take the wake word processing away from Home Assistant and on to the listening device, speeding up responses and reducing network traffic.
I really need to dig into the Home Assistant voice enhancements more at home and see what cool integrations I can make with it.
🔗 https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/02/21/voice-chapter-6/
Nvidia passes Google market cap
Wow! Nvidia have now passed Google largely thanks to the boom in AI and the fact their graphics cards and GPUs are instrumental in providing the grunt needed for AI applications. And with AI only likely to progress at rapid pace, maybe buying shares in Nvidia might be a good idea…… (I am not a financial advisor)
Using Google’s Free AI Image Generator ImageFX
Many of the AI Image generators are now paid subscriptions but if you don’t need all of their bells and whistles then perhaps the free ImageFX from Google will suit. It looks like it is currently only available in the US but you can sign up to be notified when it is available in your location.
🔗 https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-use-imagefx-google-ai-generator/
OpenAI shows off Sora, text to video generator
This is where it starts to get a little scary. Being able to produce fake images relatively easily has ramifications for fake news. Deepfakes are increasingly an issue and it can be hard to tell what is real or not online. That makes the ability to create realistic video simply by asking for what you want really worrying. Have a look at the videos Sora is capable of producing at this early stage and judge for yourself.
This is not publicly available at the moment, but it can’t be too far away. I am simultaneously fascinated and terrified to see what people do with this.
Computer Joke of the Week
Why is everyone who works at the keyboard factory so rich?
They put in a lot of shifts.
If you have any cool projects or tinkering you are doing, let us know and we will feature it in future issues of the digest. I would love to hear what you are all dithering on!
Until next week, happy dithering!
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