Google Reaches for the Stars, Takes You to Outer Space in Your Browser

Image Credit: Google

You ready to space out? Literally? Google’s got just the trick, and no, it’s not another Doodle.

The company’s creative lab has put together a new project called 100,000 Stars. Dubbed an “experiment,” the search-engine giant has plotted 100,000 starts in an interactive map of outer space. Using imagery and data from NASA, the European Space Agency and other sources together with the Chrome browser’s support for advanced web technologies (HTML 5, WebGL and CSS3D), the team was able to put together a beautiful site, which lets you pan and zoom around the stars closest to the sun. Zoom in on the stars, and you will see their names and more from Wikipedia, including just how hot it is with a color index map.

Of course, Google decided to focus only on 100,000 stars, not the billions out there. “As you explore this experiment, we hope you share our wonder for how large the galaxy really is. It’s incredible to think that this mist of 100,000 measurable stars is a tiny fraction of the sextillions of stars in the broader universe,” Google’s Aaron Koblin said in a post on the company’s Chrome blog.

The imagery is really stunning, but Google emphasizes that it’s an artist’s rendition. It shouldn’t be seen as a scientific document, and the music by Sam Hulick, who composed tracks for video games, makes that pretty obvious.

With that, we’ll let you get out of here and go check it out yourselves here.

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Obama Now Taking Your Donations Via Text

Image credit: Obama for America

If you had any doubt that the smartphone was playing a bigger role than ever before in this election, this should do the trick. Today the Obama campaign announced that it will now accept campaign donations via text message. It is the first political campaign to do so.

Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and U.S. Cellular customers will be able to donate via text starting this week; the donations will be billed to their monthly cellular bills. All you have to do is text GIVE to 62262 and you can donate $10 at a time. Yes, 62262 spells out OBAMA.

It is limited to $50 per billing cycle right now. Standard text messaging rates also apply.

Previously the Obama campaign had accepted donations via text, but you had to register your credit card and phone number on the campaign’s website. Now customers will be able to make small donations without signing in. The campaign plans to run ads with the information, making it easy for people to donate.

Mitt Romney’s campaign is expected to offer the same text donations soon, says Reuters. Donors to the Romey campaign will be able to text 466488, which spells out GOMITT.

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Don’t trust that text: How the iPhone SMS spoof works

A hacker claims to have found an SMS trick to which iPhones are particularly vulnerable, but how does it work, and why can't Apple stop it?

Late Friday, a blog focused on iOS security research claimed to have found a severe security flaw in iOS. It’s not a way to install malware or otherwise run destructive code, but it is an effective way to create fraudulent text messages that could be used in phishing schemes. While any phone that uses SMS text messaging is vulnerable, UI aspects of the iPhone make it a particularly tempting target. Since then, Apple has claimed the vulnerability lies in SMS technology, not iOS, and that it has no way of fixing it. So how does such a gaping hole in SMS security work?

As pod2g’s security blog explains, the vulnerability originates in the Protocol Description Unit system that’s used to transmit text messages. When you create an SMS message on your phone and hit the Send button, your phone translates the message into PDU terms, tosses it across the network to its recipient, and the phone at the other end catches the bundle of PDU code and translates it into whatever display format the recipient phone uses. But if you’re handy with raw code, you can bypass all the technology that UI designers have worked so hard to make nice and instead create a message in raw PDU text format.

That’s where shenanigans can begin. Just by typing a few words into a text string, a nasty spammer can change the User Data Header in the PDU code, and make it appear to the recipient that the text is coming from their beloved “Mother,” “The FBI,” “Messengers From Space,” or any other recipient they choose to specify. So you could get a message from “Mom” asking you to “Please log into this bank site so we can pay for your Uncle’s kidney surgery” or some other piece of  phishing trickery. Even more maliciously, someone who knew the name of your trusted contacts could send, for example, a message that appears to be from your buddy Dave claiming to have had an affair with your house-pet, driving you into a jealous frenzy for nothing but their own amusement. More seriously, courts have used SMS messages as evidence, so this scam could be used to falsely prove that someone violated a restraining order, or is engaged in criminal conspiracy.

The iPhone is especially vulnerable because of its SMS user interface. In a typically Jobsian pursuit of cleanliness, the iPhone doesn’t display the phone number of whoever sent you a message, only the name of the sender. So if “Uncle Jed” is texting you from a phone number in Kazakhistan, there’s no way to tell that you’re getting messages from a suspicious number. Obviously, the iPhone isn’t the only phone to keep those ugly integers tucked away in the pursuit of elegance, but it’s by far the most prominent, and therefore the one with the most to lose if its interface gets regarded as a security risk.

Apple has dealt with phishing vulnerabilities on the iPhone before, as well as phishing scams built around the Apple ID. Unfortunately, this vulnerability is inherent to the SMS protocol, making it much harder to unilateraly fix it. Seth Bromberger, a security consultant at NCI Security, suggests that the iPhone should display an originating number but it’s hard to imagine Apple cluttering up its clean lines with the kind of numeral strings that we all stopped remembering the day we got a built-in contacts list. For now, Apple has issued a statement telling users to be careful, and mentioning that hey, by the way, if you and all your friends just used iPhones exclusively then you would automatically be texting with the iMessage system, where these problems can’t happen. So perhaps the solution to this iPhone vulnerability is to buy an iPhone for all the people who might text you. Everybody wins. 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com