The IRS Wants Help Hacking Cryptocurrency Hardware Wallets
April 29, 2021 | Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Vice
Press
"It seems like overkill," Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, told Motherboard in an online chat. "For most of these devices a choice of 'Either give us the password or rot in jail for contempt' might be sufficient."
The Problem With Apple’s Plan to Stop Facebook’s Data Collection
April 29, 2021 | Aaron Mak, Slate
“One of the problems is that there have been a lot of advances in security—good advances aimed at protecting users—that make it a lot harder to intercept the traffic, which at the same time we need to do to see what’s in it,” said [Serge] Egelman.
Google Promised Its Contact Tracing App Was Completely Private—But It Wasn’t
April 27, 2021 | Alfred Ng, The Markup
“This fix is a one-line thing where you remove a line that logs sensitive information to the system log. It doesn’t impact the program, it doesn’t change how it works, ” said Joel Reardon.
Android bug exposed COVID-19 contact tracing logs to preinstalled apps
April 27, 2021 | Nicole Wetsman, The Verge
The problem is an implementation issue and not inherent to the exposure notification framework, Serge Egelman, the chief technology officer at AppCensus, said in a statement posted on Twitter.
Hyperconnectivity and the Path to 6G
April 22, 2021 | Frank Schirrmeister, Semiconductor Engineering
A recent talk by Professor Gerhard Fettweiss reminded me of the duality of business and consumer drivers for the various generations of cellular communications.
NFT art boom: Are digital artworks worth the virtual paper they’re printed on?
April 22, 2021 | Mark Hanrahan, ABC News
“[An NFT] doesn't actually convey any ownership rights. You don't gain copyright over the NFT" [said Nick Weaver]
How To Measure ML Model Accuracy
April 01,2021, 2021 | Bryon Moyer, Semiconductor Engineering
“A rare outcome of an experiment is more surprising than a common outcome of an experiment,” said Gerald Friedland. “If each outcome is equally likely, all outcomes have the same surprise. The quantification in bits is explained by Shannon and used in many information-coding strategies, like assigning longer strings to rarer outcomes for compression.”
Defeating password spraying attacks
March 23, 2021 | Matt Lindley, Security Magazine
According to a study conducted by researchers from Google, UC Berkeley, and the International Computer Science Institute, in a single year (March 2016 to March 2017) the researchers were able to identify 1.9 billion usernames and passwords “exposed via data breaches and traded on black-market forums.”
NFTs could be the future of collecting - or a huge bubble. We talked to 3 experts about the risks to consider before buying in.
March 13, 2021 | Business Insider Australia
[Since] blockchain transactions are anonymous and irreversible, if someone gets into your computer and steals your assets, you’re pretty much out of luck, according to Weaver.
Explained: Why eminent economists say Bitcoin remains inefficient
February 24, 2021 | CNBC
Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, underlined something almost always ignored — that cryptocurrency exchanges are not like “regular stock exchanges”, adding these are “unregulated entities”. “For example, in a regular stock exchange, you’re not allowed to trade with yourself because that’s price manipulation. But that’s a regular occurrence on these cryptocurrency exchanges,” he further added.