Tag: #technologies

Tech Trends in the News: Vehicle Technology & Augmented Reality

October 1, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 101 of The Edge of Innovation, Paul Parisi & Dan Buckley are talking about the latest tech trends in the news today! They’re discussing vehicle technology & augmented reality!

Sections

Apps & Augmented Reality To Complement Our Driving Experience
Reward-Based Driving & Alexa Car
The Freedom of Having a Car
What Technology Should Car Manufacturers Invest In?
The Hybrid Era: Electric Cars
Companies Sharing Technology
Tesla and Secret Technology
More Episodes
Show Notes

Tech Trends in the News: Vehicle Technology & Augmented Reality

Apps & Augmented Reality To Complement Our Driving Experience

Dan: Hello! Welcome to the Edge of Innovation. My name is Dan Buckley and I’m here with Paul Parisi, and we’re going to discuss some tech trends in the news together today.
So welcome, Paul.

Paul: Thanks, Dan

Dan: Great to have you, as always.

I was looking at a curve or a graph of deaths per – I think it was a hundred million miles driving – and it seems to have gone down, which actually, to have steadily gone down over the past few decades, in some ways surprises me, with phones and people texting on roads and so forth.

Paul: That’s true. Good point.

Dan: And that’s interesting. The interaction of phones also, other sorts of apps, even augmented reality in the way in which that’s going to interact with driving. I think people think of it now they tend to think negatively that you’re distracted, you’re texting. However, you could also be using Waze. You could be finding smarter ways of beating traffic or to help you with your commute. So, I wonder what that might look like in the future as we go forward, what o sorts of apps or what sorts of even augmented reality we’re going to see kind of, complemented our driving experience.

Paul: Well, about fifteen years ago Cadillac introduced heads-up displays – might be twenty years now – but basically, they had a display mounted on your dashboard that reflected onto the window in front of you. I think they even had rare in it so that they could tell that there was something beyond your visual, so at night you’d be able to see beyond and it would alert you. I think it was well ahead of its time but I think those kinds of things are going to be really really cool and really beneficial.

The question is, does that heads-up display also give you, “Hey, you just got a text from your brother and do you want to read it now or it to be read to you?” And that’s going to be an interesting question. Do we allow that? Do the laws allow that? That’s going to be an interesting question. So, you know, there’s an accident coming up ahead, remain to the mission that you’re on of driving, but is the fact that you’ve just passed a McDonalds and it’s dinner time and you can stop there and get something. Or Dunkin Donuts is nearby.

Now, if you watch Waze, they do that when you’re stopped. Once you stop at a light they can say, “Hey, there’s a Dunkin Donuts down the street.” And so, they’re dealing through those issues. But I do think the integration of these things into heads-up displays would be a lot better than putting it to the right or to the left of the driver and then they have to look at it. And that’s why these voices in our face, you don’t need to look at a voice talking to you.

Reward-Based Driving & Alexa Car

Dan: That’s true. Yeah. I wonder about advertisers. They are already using Waze. I wonder if, when we have heads-up displays, sort of augmented reality, or augmented windshields, if you will. If advertisers would leverage that? Or to what extent they’ll be allowed to do that? Advertisers, as well as perhaps, services like Uber to be able to gamify driving or to be able to let people know to go in a certain direction.

Paul: Sure.

Dan: Or things that might be out there.

Paul: Yeah, rerouting and things like that. That’ll be interesting. I think one of the things that is fascinating that I’ve noticed is the –

Dan: The rewards-based systems?

Paul: Well, we need to be really careful with that. So, you know, Amazon has just come out with Alexa Car.

Dan: Oh, wow!

Paul: And so, now you can converse with your car. I was on the invite list and I forgot to do it so I lost it, so I’m waiting for the invite to see but that’s an interesting idea to be able to interface with a voice to do something. I don’t know what it’s going to do for me. I would hope it would be able to say, you know, play the radio show I want to play or play the music I want to play. That’s sort of a limited, minimum thing. I think you’re going to see as you see with Android Auto.

Dan: Watch a movie.

Paul: Yeah, watch a movie, exactly. Fast forward, rewind, or watch two movies. One for each eye.

Dan: Multitasking.

Paul: That’s right. But the thing is – we have Android Auto. We have, I don’t know what it’s called, iOS Auto, basically an iPhone for the car – Is they haven’t really integrated in, they have a touch panel, but they don’t have a heads-up display. So, I don’t know why that hasn’t happened yet.

Dan: Interesting. Yeah, the other idea I was thinking of is maybe – you have Uber already. Perhaps there could be other award-based or maybe something that that sensitizes you to move something from one place to another – or people – that says, “Oh, there are people over here. Or if you go that way you can give them a ride and maybe make some money. Yeah, I guess a rewards-based system. And in line with rewards, maybe also just rewards for good driving. I imagine, sometimes I see in Waze, it says, “Oh, there’s a policeman ahead.” I imagine that must not be popular among police forces necessarily, who are recording that.

Paul: It’s part of the game.

Dan: Yeah. It also lets you know, don’t use your phone while you’re driving and also, you’re going over the speed limit, excreta.

Paul: But it doesn’t tell you that. It just turns red to say that you’re going over the speed limit. It doesn’t say you should slow down, because I think people would say, “Who are you to tell me to slow down?”

Dan: To some people red, maybe that’s a positive combination.

Paul: There you go. Exactly.

Dan: They think they’re doing well.

Paul: They have a different and alternate view of reality.

The Freedom of Having a Car

Paul: One of the things I thought was interesting in Waze is that they have a carpool interface now where, basically, you can expose the fact that I’m a driver and I’m driving this way and then it can start to bring together the people that are traveling those similar routes because it knows all that stuff about you. So, that will be interesting to see what that works out to be.

Dan: It seems like there are more and more cars on the road, but there are also a lot of empty seats on the road with people that go the same ways. I tend to notice similar people on my commute and maybe they notice me. But yeah, it’s fascinating to think of that in terms of why does every individual person need his own giant chunk of metal with all these extra seats, all the time.

Paul: Well, that freedom seems to be germane to America. I mean, even before cars, you know, people had the freedom to take a horse and ride it out into the wilderness, out into the West, and homestead. That’s really hard to take out of the people. I think you almost need to break people to not want to do that. People enjoy their vehicles. They enjoy the freedom that comes with a vehicle. We have a big country and there’s lots of space between things and so a vehicle is very convenient for doing that.

Dan: Yeah.

What Technology Should Car Manufacturers Invest In?

Dan: So, in terms of other changes in transportation, if I’m a car company like Toyota or Suzuki or any other company, I’m thinking to myself, “What do I invest in?” Because there’s the autonomous stuff, there’s electrical, there’s a number of different options out there. I don’t know which direction to go in or which ones are actually happening, like there might be a lot of hearsay per say. And we see that happening to some extent, but what are the big players? What would you recommend the direction they could go in? Or how to tie these things together?

Paul: Well, I think that one of the things that was a bit of a surprise to me as I started to research this over the past couple of years, is that the efficiency of a gallon of gas is actually quite low. There’s a lot of power in a gallon of gasoline. But we don’t use it nearly as efficiently as we could. And so, the idea is that if we have electric vehicles, that we can produce electricity more efficiently that we can utilize the gasoline to produce horsepower. And there’s reasonable thought to say that, okay, we put together a generation system, an electrical generation system, whatever it might be, hydropower, whatever it might be. We’re going to be able to control that and generate electricity more efficiently than we can generate horsepower out of gasoline.

And also, all of the costs that go into gasoline and all the negative impacts of burning gasoline, and so those are generally real. I mean, I don’t like being an exhaust of anything. So, those aren’t the best things for us, but we’ve greatly improved it since the car was first invented. Most exhaust out of most cars is extremely clean so it’s not just that, but it’s the limited resources and how can we most efficiently generate that.

The Hybrid Era: Electric Cars

Paul: So, I think electric, you’ll see that more and more. We’re in a hybrid era right now. You have Tesla trying to be 100 percent electric and its very expensive so only early adopters can get it and it has that limit of limitation to your freedom. You can only drive four hundred miles or whatever the mileage is. So, those issues have to be dealt with and the efficiencies will be found and the ability to charge more quickly and things like that. But I think that, as we start to look at that, lighter materials means less power, all that kind of stuff, is going to add up, smaller vehicles.

And then also, in the big vehicles, a lot of our fuel is used by truckers and trucks are integral to everything that we consume. In order to have those efficiently getting us from point A to point B is critical, so I think you’re going to start to see partnerships with all of these companies that will be partnerships of ten or fifteen years and then they will sort themselves out and they will go off and produce them in the long run. If you look at the way Japan has worked through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, is you would find different companies partnering together to develop calculators for example. Casio and Sharp collaborated a lot on that and they actually seeded different parts of the market to each other. Those aren’t necessarily American ways of doing things.

Dan: Yeah, how do we stand up to that!

Companies Sharing Technology

Paul: Yeah, but I think you’re going to see some of that. And it’ll be interesting because as Tesla invents a lot of the future, are they going to license some of this stuff and make money that way – nobody’s saying they can’t make money – or are they going to keep it themselves? Everything that Tesla does is secret. There are no manuals for it. You can’t repair it yourself. All this kind of stuff, so it’s a very interesting way of doing things.

And there are other companies – and Apple’s the same way – But there are other companies that say, “Hey, we just invented a better way of doing this, let’s sell it to everybody. We’ll sell it to Apple. We’ll sell it to IBM. We’ll sell it to Lenova.” Whoever it is that wants to, they can pay a license fee and that’s how we make our money. And that hasn’t been the case over the past ten years. There has been patent infringements that force settlements between companies but most patents should result in a licensing agreement, not a “you cant make what you’re making.”

Dan: Yeah, it seems to me with innovations like this, if we’re going in the direction where it’s electrical or non-gasoline vehicles, it is going to take more than one company. It’s an infrastructural change to some extent. Because if I use my gas-based vehicle, it’s kind of easy for me. I know those people who are trained to work on my Honda vehicle. They know the parts. I go to a gas station – gas stations are everywhere. There’s a whole market for that skill set and so I wonder how long might take for people to become Tesla mechanics, to have the Tesla parts readily available or even to have other companies besides Tesla that will be part of that market and compete with Tesla even, based on having the license and being able to do similar sorts of things.

Tesla and Secret Technology

Paul: Well, as you said that, it became clear to me. It’s like that’s really interesting that Tesla would choose the closed route, as opposed to saying to all the car maintenance people out there – all the mechanics – learn how to service Tesla. Now they might be saying, “That’s crazy! We’ll get electrocuted!” But still, you’ve got to get them to that point and if you need to get your Tesla fixed, it almost needs to go back to the factory.

So that’s an interesting thing. Now, Apple just recently announced their service provider program, an authorized repair center program. They’ve been at odds with this at making all sorts of extreme statements like, “Oh, we don’t want a bad repair to endanger someone’s life on an iPhone,” and all this different stuff. And what they did was they forced all of the independent repair people out there to find alternate sourced parts. So, they would be getting a battery for your iPhone that was from “Joe’s Batteries” as opposed to from an Apple certified battery and so they’d put it in there and that would swell and break your iPhone and so Apple was saying, “See!” and the repair guys were saying, “Wait a minute! If you just let us buy Apple parts we could do that!” And Apple said, “Well, you’re not – they didn’t say this but I think what they meant here was you’re not smart enough to do that.” And it’s just not true.

Just recently they announced a new program which is going to allow independent repair people to get real parts, real schematics and all these different things. It took Apple ten, eleven years to figure that out with the iPhone and even the Mac and all the different products. Why is Tesla making the same mistake? Why wouldn’t they say, “Here’s how you fix it.” I just don’t understand that. That’s an interesting problem to say, “Oh, not only can you buy it from us but you have to have us fix it.” That’s not the business model they should be in.

Dan: Yeah.

Paul: They should be in the business of inventing really good cars and selling them and helping anybody who has one, make it work.

Dan: Yeah. Wow.

Well, this has been a fascinating conversation, Paul, and I appreciate it. We’ll have more information in our shownotes as well, with links to the articles we discussed.

Thank you for joining us, Paul.

Paul: Alright, thank you!

More Episodes:

This is Part 2 of 2 our Tech Trends Talk about autonomous vehicles. If you missed Part 1, you can listen to it here!

Show Notes:

Why Does the Hacker Hack?

February 5, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 84 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with hacker and security expert, Adriel Desautels of Netragard, about why hackers hack!

Sections

Why Does the Hacker Hack?
Hackers: Making a Name For Themselves
What’s Interesting at DEF CON & Black Hat
Alternative Conventions to DEF CON and Black Hat
Hacker Conventions Today Versus In The Past
Recommended Places To Find Information On Hacking
Advice For The Budding Hacker
The Definition of Hacking
More Episodes
Show Notes

Why Does the Hacker Hack?

Why Does the Hacker Hack?

Paul: So, from your experience and from your experience and knowledge of other people you know, why does the hacker hack?

Adriel: It all depends on who they are and what they’re really, I guess, geographic location is, monetary position, you know. So the majority of bad guys that are hacking right now hack for financial gain. They steal information, and they’re able to sell it on the black market. Some information sells for more than others, and that is always changing.

Then, of course, you have nation states. They’re hacking because they want to know about their foe. They want to learn about their enemy.

And then you have the guys that hack on behalf of their country, but they’re not directly affiliated with their country. They go out, and they steal information. The Chinese are notorious for this. They have groups of people that will hack and steal information about aircraft and all kinds of interesting things, and then they sell it to the next highest bidder within their country. And so that’s sort of a way of trying to say, “Hey, we don’t do this stuff,” but they buy the information. So, they’re not hacking, but they’re funding it by buying the information.

Paul: Sure. Let’s peel that back a layer, though. It’s maybe a superficial view, but why does the person sit down and spend that time searching for these obscure ways to exploit systems. What drives that emotion? Because they’re not necessarily going to get paid. So, I’m not saying they’re evil. I’m not saying they’re bad. But why is it that I’m going to try and do everything I can to break into this house, and I’m not going to give up either.

Adriel: Right. So, for some of us, it’s just a puzzle. It’s just a challenge, and it’s fun. It just boils down to that. Why is my partner, Phillipe, why is he building a robot to take his trash and haul it down his driveway that’s a quarter mile long? I mean, he’s literally doing that. And he’s found a way to build this crazy robot that will take his trash out for him. He’s doing it because it’s fun, and it’s a challenge, and it’s exciting. It’s the same reason why we do a lot of the things that we end up doing too.

Hackers: Making a Name For Themselves

The other angle to that is notoriety. Sometimes hackers will hack something because they’re trying to make a name for themselves, and so they’ll perform research against a really challenging target, write up, a white paper or publish something on it. And that makes the press. And all of sudden, those hackers, they’re well known. I can think of some pretty good hacks that happen with DNS and other types of things that they really helped companies promote themselves. So there’s that kind of angle.

And then, you tie it back into the monetary angle when you get to the zero-day market and zero-day exploitation. Hackers will perform research against like your iPhone, for example. They find a single vulnerability in an iPhone. Today that sells from anywhere from four to six million dollars per vulnerability. So, the motivation there is a lot of money. For a single, maybe three months of work, you make $6 million. It’s not a bad payday.

Paul: So it sounds, it sounds sorta like panning for gold.

Adriel: Yeah, in some cases it really can be because you never know what you’re going to encounter. And if you get the big nuggets, you’d be very rich very quickly.

Paul: And it could be that the gold that you get is notoriety. It could be just the fun of doing it, or it could be that you get a big chunk of gold. Interesting. So, I agree. It is interesting to see, and it would be interesting to have the same conversations with executive, CEO levels of saying, “Why wouldn’t you disclose this?”

And I can imagine it’s like “Well, we don’t want to admit that we knew the bridge was going to fall down,” if they were being really honest. And it’s like “What I don’t know, I can’t be held accountable for.” There’s a lot of that, I think.

Adriel: Yeah, there is.

What’s Interesting at DEF CON & Black Hat

Paul: So, we were talking about Black Hat and DEF CON. And what else did you see there? We heard a lot. I heard a lot in the press because I was listening for it. But our listeners are pretty diverse. What’s new? What’s interesting?

Adriel: Not much.

Paul: Is it like all old news already? Or is it just…?

Adriel: Yeah. I remember we were actually staying at the Caesar’s Palace so we could watch the talks from our rooms for DEF CON. And we were watching the talks. And some of them sounded very exciting. We thought there were new methods of doing things. And, I’d say just about every single time, when we got excited, we were very disappointed because the method that people were talking about were methods that we had already known about for years. That had already been used for years.

Unfortunately, DEF CON and Black Hat, I think they’ve outgrown themselves in much of the same way that the RSA Conference has and things like that.

Paul: I was wondering about that.

Adriel: Yeah. They’ve become very politicized, and they’ve got these vendor booths where vendors are spending a lot of money to advertise their products. That’s not really all that appealing anymore, to hackers that are strictly interested in learning about hacking.

They are still the biggest hacking conferences, and hackers will still go there. I mean, we were hanging out with Kevin Mitnick, and a bunch of other people were out there. But those people go because it gives you the option to meet other people that are going. So, we went there. We ended up meeting with a lot of our friends. And these guys are really hardcore researchers and the hardcore security people. And we also met some of our clients and things like that. So it’s a good team building exercise. From the perspective of learning something new, though, unless you’re talking to somebody or you know people that are going to be doing new research, you’re probably not going to pick it up at Black Hat and DEF CON.

Alternative Conventions to DEF CON and Black Hat

Paul: So is there something else out there? Blacker Hat or DEFfer CON? Something that’s a little better?

Adriel: There should be. DerbyCon is a little bit better.

Paul: DerbyCon?

Adriel: Yeah, DerbyCon. It’s a little bit better. A lot of the people that we associate with will go to DerbyCon. They’re growing in size too, but their content seems to be more aggressive. I guess you could say newer than what you’re seeing at those. And then, of course, there’s BSides, which, unfortunately, I’ve never been to, and I always intend to, but I never make it. BSides, from what I’ve heard, has a pretty good reputation for being fairly serious. A lot of the higher end people — and when I say “higher end,” maybe more capable researchers, more experienced researchers that I know have talked about going to both DerbyCon and BSides.

Paul: Interesting.

Adriel: Yeah. And they seem to really like those. Then you have your obscure conventions in Europe and things like that. I know some of my researchers go to those. Some are really good. Some are not.

Hacker Conventions Today Versus In The Past

It’s a lot different than it was in the ’90s and early 2000s. I mean, in the ’90s and the early 2000s, hackers were driven by curiosity and driven by research, and they met up with each other because they had something to share and something to discuss and, and so on, so forth. These days, it’s become so mainstream that you literally have groupies. You have people that show up in bizarre clothes with purple hair and all kinds of things. And they’re trying to show up and trying to fit in just because they think it’s cool. But they have nothing to offer. And that kind of distills things. And that kind of makes things less interesting.

And when I went to DEF CON, just this past DEF CON, I remember walking through these crowds of people, and I’m looking at these people, and I’m thinking, wow, the majority of these people are probably people working in IT or in security for corporate America. Very few of these people are actually hackers. And it’s unfortunately true. Very few of them were really the kinds of people who would be the researcher, the curiosity-driven kind of person.

It’s not to say that the conferences are useless because people do get a wealth of benefit from them, especially with regard to the training and the courses. And especially for businesses, IT people — IT personnel and security personnel — will learn a lot about the new technologies, the way hackers think and so on and so forth. And they’ll get to meet people that really are the real deal. So it’s much more useful, I think, if you’re going to business purposes now as opposed to if you’re a hacker trying to share knowledge and learn new things and so on, unless, of course, you’re networking.

Recommended Places To Find Information On Hacking

Paul: So do you have any recommended websites or places that you frequent that give valuable cutting-edge hacker information?

Adriel: There used to be. I mean, now the majority of the information I get is going to be from Reddit and Twitter. There are interesting posts that happen once in a while and conversations that happen once in a while if you follow the right people. You can follow places like The Hacker News and all that stuff. But they tend to not really provide anything that would be underground, as they would say.

IRC still exists, but it doesn’t really live in the same capacity that it did before. Back in the day, you could hang out on IRC, and you could get all kinds of really interesting information about who was being breached and so on and so forth. But now it’s not really working that way. Now what we actually see a lot of is we see different hacking groups. They have their own silk servers or servers or their own Slack setups — whatever it might be. And they kind of chat in a closed group like that.

You know, back in the day, you could login to IRC and, if you do a list search for the word “hacking,” you’d have thousands of hacking posts. And you had people who were doing all kinds of interesting things, and you could engage people in private conversations and private messages and really learn interesting stuff. It’s not quite the same anymore. It’s all been, I guess, distilled or intended it at some level or another.

The way that we stay sharp is literally, we all have Twitter accounts, and we pay attention to what people talk about. People know us through reputation, and so if people who are doing really neat work approach us and they say, “Hey, let’s talk about this. We need some help in this area,” then we learn about something. So, we end up staying in the loop because we’re approached just because of our name, brand, and our names as individuals. People want us to be involved in that stuff.

But unless you’ve established that kind of credibility and unless you already have this networking capability, I couldn’t really point you in any direction for anything that would be particularly eye-opening, aside from pay attention to the new vulnerabilities that are released. Pay attention to the names of the researchers associated with those vulnerabilities. Follow them on Twitter.

Advice For The Budding Hacker

Paul: So, if somebody woke up and said, “Hey, I want to be a hacker.” A ten-year old kid says, “I want to grow up to be a hacker,” it’s not like it used to be. You sort of can’t get that initial set of information. So what would your advice be to the budding hacker?

Adriel: Yeah. So anybody that tells me that they want to be a hacker, they’re probably never going to be a hacker. If you want to be a hacker, it’s because you almost already are. You’re born with this innate sense of curiosity. You’re born with this drive, this hunger to learn and tear things apart and solve problems and fix things, and you just love it. And because you love it, it doesn’t matter what you do in life. You’re always hacking something. You could be building the trash robot like Philippe because that just seems like a fun idea. Or maybe, like Kevin Finisterre, you’re building drones and then finding out ways to knock them out of the sky because you’re curious. Or you’ve got some of my researchers that do research on iPhones and all that. And they do it because they think, “Wow, there’s going to be a way to bypass this, even though Apple says we can’t. Let’s do it.” So it’s a curiosity thing.

So anybody who comes to me and says, “Hey, how do I become a hacker?” My answer is, you don’t. You either do this stuff natively—

Paul: You either are or you’re not.

The Definition of Hacking

Adriel: Right. You have that drive and you fix things in obscure ways. And, really a definition of hacking is creating an effective and a simple solution to an overly complex problem. And so if you are a solution creator and if you are able to take a problem of some sort — and the word “problem” is defined very loosely — and you were able to solve that challenge using a creative and effective and fairly easy-to-use solution, then you’re a hacker.

And I would argue that there are a lot of hackers that don’t know they’re hackers. Look at these guys that live off the land in Alaska. They have no technology to speak of. But, some of the things they put together to get water and to hunt and to trap, they’re ingenious! They’re hacking. They have a problem. They’re creating an incredible solution to a problem, and a lot of times, that solution gets used by other people in the same community. So that’s really what the essence of hacking is. So yeah. You’re born with it. You’ve got that talent and a gift or you don’t.

Paul: So I guess that in the venerable words of Yoda, “There is no try. Just do.”

Adriel: Right. That’s right.

More Episodes:

This is Part 2 of our interview with Adriel Desautels.
Be sure to listen to Part 3, “Computer Security: Is the Sky Falling?,” here!

If you missed Part 1, “What’s New in the World of Cybersecurity,” you can listen to it here!

Show Notes:

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