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Friday, March 24th, 2023
| Time |
Event |
| 12:32p |
Exploding USB Sticks In case you don’t have enough to worry about, people are hiding explosives—actual ones—in USB sticks:
In the port city of Guayaquil, journalist Lenin Artieda of the Ecuavisa private TV station received an envelope containing a pen drive which exploded when he inserted it into a computer, his employer said.
Artieda sustained slight injuries to one hand and his face, said police official Xavier Chango. No one else was hurt.
Chango said the USB drive sent to Artieda could have been loaded with RDX, a military-type explosive.
More:
According to police official Xavier Chango, the flash drive that went off had a 5-volt explosive charge and is thought to have used RDX. Also known as T4, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (PDF), militaries, including the US’s, use RDX, which “can be used alone as a base charge for detonators or mixed with other explosives, such as TNT.” Chango said it comes in capsules measuring about 1 cm, but only half of it was activated in the drive that Artieda plugged in, which likely saved him some harm.
Reminds me of assassination by cell phone. | | 8:31p |
A Hacker’s Mind News My latest book continues to sell well. Its ranking hovers between 1,500 and 2,000 on Amazon. It’s been spied in airports.
Reviews are consistently good. I have been enjoying giving podcast interviews. It all feels pretty good right now.
You can order a signed book from me here.
For those of you in New York, I’m giving at book talk at the Ford Foundation on Thursday, April 6. Admission is free, but you have to register. | | 10:30p |
Friday Squid Blogging: Creating Batteries Out of Squid Cells This is fascinating:
“When a squid ends up chipping what’s called its ring tooth, which is the nail underneath its tentacle, it needs to regrow that tooth very rapidly, otherwise it can’t claw its prey,” he explains.
This was intriguing news and it sparked an idea in Hopkins lab where he’d been trying to figure out how to store and transmit heat.
“It diffuses in all directions. There’s no way to capture the heat and move it the way that you would electricity. It’s just not a fundamental law of physics.”
[…]
The tiny brown batteries he mentions are about the size of a chiclet, and Hopkins says it will take a decade or more to create larger batteries that could have commercial value.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here. |
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