4K may save the day for Blu-ray

As I predicted a number of years back Bluray discs never really made it into the market in the same way that DVDs did. With the advent of 4K that may change, or at least the Blu-ray industry is hoping that it will. It turns out that 288,000 4K Ultra Blu-ray discs were sold in the first half of 2016. The 4K discs were only released last year and they are only worth it if you have a 4K Blu-ray player and a TV to match. According to the British trade association BA, a third were sold between October and Dec as gifts so looking for a trend at this point is hardly conclusive. Since to take advantage of the technology means replacing major components in your home entertainment system, then I expect it will be as slow as the original Blu-ray to be adopted. Given the TV world is not transmitting in 4K this may provide some temporary boost but I don’t see it being a major one. Also to keep you confused most “4K” TVs sold are actually Ultra HD (3840x2160) and not 4K (4096x2160).

Minecraft for the Oculus Rift. Think about that for a moment. The Windows 10 Edition Beta of Minecraft from Mojang has been updated so that you can run the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. For those that have seen Minecraft it is reminiscent of the 1980s block graphics games but with a few more colours. So those with the headset can relive those heady graphics days in 3D. Woot, woot.

For those that haven’t heard of homomorphic encryption, and you will be in the majority, it was a plan to secure data in the cloud by allowing data to be worked on without software encrypting it. If that didn’t make sense, they do this by operating directly with the encrypted data so that when the results are decrypted they would match the same operation carried out on plain (unencrypted) text. It is processor intensive, slow, and now it has been found to be vulnerable. Enter some researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne who showed that a relatively simple plain text attach was good enough to break the encryption. The good news in this case is that the system is not yet implemented so those working on it can go back to the drawing board and see if they can strengthen it. Given that people can crack encryption before it comes out, James’ theory of anything in the digital world is crackable is still safe.

So you have an air gapped computer, i.e. one that is not connected to a network so that people can’t hack into it from the outside. Think again. Some video researchers from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Cyber Security Research Center have found a way to find out what is going on in your computer by listening to the noise generated by hard drives. It requires malware to be loaded into your machine first. This uses the drive’s actuator arm to generate audio tones that can be listened to from some distance away.

This kind of technology is not that new, with earlier versions using the computer speaker, the cabinet fans and so on to generate similar noise that is then decoded. Even earlier versions detected the signals sent to the old cathode ray tube. Since then people have removed fans, speakers and microphones and use LED screens. That leaves hard drives, until you replace them with SSDs that is. For the time being the malware would search for sensitive information and then transmit it to the waiting listeners. The researchers have tested the process on hard drives with automatic acoustic management (AAM) that are designed to reduce drive noise and they could still pick up the information on the normal setting. There is some good news. Using a smartphone you need to be within six feet and the data transfer speed is around 180 bits per minute which is really slow. At those speeds you won’t be able grab an unreleased movie or detailed engineering plans but you could grab some passwords. If you are interested, you can find out more here arxiv.org/pdf/1608.03431v1.pdf.

This week’s feel-good story is brought to you by hackers. It turns out that some Indians running a tech support scam picked on a security expert’s parents. You may have seen these scams yourself. You get a message saying that your computer is infected and you have to call a number. Ivan Kwiatkowski, a French malware analyst, responded by giving them a call. He hooked the Indians in with a Virtual Machine they remotely logged into where they pretended to demonstrate that it was indeed infected. He then sent them an image of his supposed credit card to fix his machine but it contained the infamous Locky ransomware. When the scammer opened the picture it started moving through their computer encrypting files and possibly all connected devices, but that is unknown since the scammer hung up. Some people would call this karma.