This Evil Office Printer Hijacks Your Cellphone Connection

JULIAN OLIVER HAS for years harbored a strange obsession with spotting poorly disguised cellphone towers, those massive roadside antennae draped in fake palm fronds to impersonate a tree, or even hidden as spoofed lamp posts and flag poles. The incognito base stations gave him another, more mischievous idea. What about a far better-disguised cell tower that could sit anonymously in office, invisibly hijacking cellphone conversations and texts?Earlier this week, the Berlin-based hacker-artist unveiled the result: An entirely boring-looking Hewlett Packard printer that also secretly functions as a rogue GSM cell base station, tricking your phone into connecting to it rather than your phone carrier’s tower, effectively intercepting your calls and text messages.For quite some time I’ve had an interest in this bizarre uncanny design practice of disguising cell towers as other things like trees,” says Oliver. “So I decided to build one into a printer, the most ubiquitous of indoor flora, and have it actually antagonize people’s implicit trust in these technologies.”

Oliver’s fake printer, which he calls the Stealth Cell Tower, could potentially eavesdrop on the voice calls and SMS messages of any phone that’s fooled into automatically connecting to it. Since it sits indoors near its victims, Oliver says it can easily overpower the signal of real, outdoor cell towers. But instead of spying, the printer merely starts a text message conversation with the phone, pretending to be an unidentified contact with a generic message like “Come over when you’re ready,” or the more playful “I’m printing the details for you now.” If the confused victim writes back, the printer spits out their response on paper as a creepy proof of concept. It’s also programmed to make calls to connected phones and, if the owner answers, to play an mp3 of the Stevie Wonder song “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” After five minutes, the printer drops its connection with the phone and allows it to reconnect to a real cell tower.

Oliver’s creation isn’t intended merely to stage an elaborate office prank. He wants to demonstrate the inherent privacy flaws of the cellular connections our phones depend on. His Stealth Cell Tower, after all, is no different from the devices known as IMSI catchers, or “stingrays,” that police use to hijack cellphone connections and spy on and track criminal suspects. “GSM is so broken and phones are so desperate to get hooked up that they’ll just hop onto anything that looks like a cell tower,” Oliver says. “IMSI catchers are most commonly deployed at protests. It’s worrying, when you’re looking at activist movements organizing themselves over SMS and calls.”

Instead, he says, his mischievous printer should serve as a reminder to the paranoid to end-to-end encrypt their communications. He recommends the free encryption app Signal. “My project is intentionally built to humiliate GSM in a sense,” says Oliver. “It’s broken, and we need to encrypt our stuff end-to-end.”Oliver built his spy printer from easy-to-buy hardware: A Raspberry Pi minicomputer, a BladeRF software-defined radio, two GSM antennae and of course, a Hewlett Packard Laserjet 1320 printer. He’s also released the code for Stealth Cell Tower on his website.

But don’t try this hacker trick at home—or at the office. Oliver admits his printer would break plenty of laws if used without certain safeguards. In the US, for instance, it likely violates the Wiretap Act and Federal Communications Commission regulations. Civil rights groups have even alleged that Baltimore Police broke the law when they used the same IMSI catching technique on criminal suspects.Oliver says that if he eventually displays the printer in a gallery or museum, he’ll consult his lawyers and post warnings that anyone who enters the room consents to have their phone’s communications intercepted.“The whole idea is to lure a phone over to an object in the room for this brief encounter, to create an unsettling, critical break,” says Oliver. “If you don’t want your phone to behave oddly, you should turn it off.”

Missing the MagSafe Charger in the New MacBook? Here’s Your Dongle

FFOR ALL THAT the new MacBook Pro has gained—a Touch Bar, Touch ID, more power, a space grey variant—it has also suffered a significant loss. In exclusively embracing USB-C, Apple has abandoned its MagSafe charging technology. You know, that magical magnetism that constantly saves you from tripping your $2,000 laptop off the coffee table.Worried about a MagSafe-less life? Don’t be. There’s a way out of this. One industrious accessory maker has recreated the experience for a USB-C world. It’s not MagSafe, but it’s the closest you can get right now.Griffin first introduced its BreakSafe Magnetic USB-C Power Cable in January, as an appeal to buyers of the then-new, also sans-MagSafe MacBook. It consists of two parts: A tiny nubbin that plugs into your laptop’s USB-C port, and a cable that attaches magnetically in a manner similar to MagSafe. It’ll break off cleanly if you tug on it, saving you from catastrophic trips and tugs.

The BreakSafe has always been clever, but its usefulness was limited on the MacBook. Apple’s revamped entry-level laptop has only one USB-C port, period, doing double or triple duty as a source of power and connectivity. It’s dongletown. Which makes clogging that one port for charging exclusively an impractical proposal.The new MacBook Pro suffers no such limitations. Its four USB-C ports (or two, on the entry model) mean you can keep one forever-stuffed with a BreakSafe, and still have ample room for additional peripherals.The caveat here is that while BreakSafe looks like a reasonable MagSafe facsimile, it is not actually MagSafe. Apple’s patented that specific tech every which way. The most immediate difference is that BreakSafe isn’t reversible, meaning you can’t plug it in however you want. You’ll need to use the BreakSafe cord exclusively. And the little donglet it connects to also juts out slightly from your laptop, a perpetual wart, and a reminder that the MacBook’s best feature has been put to rest.

Still, a pale imitation of the original beats no imitation at all. And $40 seems like a reasonable price to pay to reclaim the true value of MagSafe: a little peace of mind.

A Chain-Smoking Robot Isn’t Just Hilarious—It’s a Big Deal

ROBOTS ARE GREAT at a lot of things—brute force, repetition, and speed, for instance (though maybe not walking). Now add to that list one of the most human of human endeavors: smoking.

That’s right, researchers have built a chain-smoking robot. And not because they want a real-life Bender. Forcing a robot to smoke could help scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute solve the mysteries of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—the intense coughing and lung infections that plague smokers. And it’s far more humane than the other research method of forcing rats to smoke.

Here’s how it works. The researchers load as many as 12 cigarettes in a sort of gatling gun arrangement, and the robot fires up each with a lighter right out of a car. Then they program the machine to huff away at customizable intensities and frequencies.

The robot is passing the smoke into what’s known as a lung on a chip, which mimics a human airway. This transparent chip contains a channel of living lung cells, which produce mucus and hairlike structures called cilia that ferry the mucus around. Connected to this channel are tubes that move smoke in and out. By loading up one chip with lung cells from a patient with pulmonary disease and another chip with cells from a healthy patient, researchers can observe how the two react differently to smoke.

And early results, published in a paper last week, are a glimpse at what this technology can do for medicine. For one, by sending smoke through the chips, the scientists could confirm a hunch. “First of all, we were able to show that the chips that were lined by cells from COPD patients showed a much bigger inflammatory response to the cigarette smoke exposure than normal, which is consistent with cigarette exposure bringing a COPD patient to the emergency room,” says Donald Ingber, one of the robot’s creators and director of the Wyss Institute.The second bit gets deeper into the actual mechanisms involved. Because the researchers can see right into the chip, they can observe the beating cilia moving the mucus around. They found that smoke makes these cilia freak out a bit, beating at irregular intervals instead of their standard, uniform rate. “The cigarette smoke essentially interferes with their oriented cleansing motion, so you get distorted motion,” says Ingber, “and that’s probably why people who smoke are coughing and have more mucus.” Treating COPD, then, could be a matter of treating the wayward cilia.Great stuff, and all the better considering the robot doesn’t give a hoot if you force it to chain smoke. The alternative subjects in this type of experiment? Not so much. This sort of thing typically requires stuffing rats in a smoke-filled box. Not only is using a robot more humane, but it’s a better representation of human responses to smoke. Rats don’t breathe like we do—it’s all in and out through the nose—and a rodent’s immune response to smoke isn’t like that of a human.

So a big welcome to the chain-smoking robot. Your fellow smokers—human or otherwise—appreciate your habit.

You can finally control your Sonos with the Spotify app

By linking your Spotify and Sonos accounts, the individual speakers will show up as Spotify Connect speakers in the app’s interface, while also making it possible to play music on them while you’re not connect to your local Wi-Fi.Even though its speakers look and sound great, the horrible apps have always been a huge drawback for me. Performing an action as simple as playing a song could take seconds to register. Spotify’s apps are miles ahead both in terms of speed and design, and being able to use them makes for a way better experience.  Unfortunately you’ll still have to revert to the official Sonos app when you want to play tracks from other services, but it’s a step in the right direction.To get the feature before it rolls out to the general public, you need to get your devices on the 7.0 Public Beta by going into your Sonos desktop or mobile app settings and enrolling in the beta program.

Turkey has reportedly blocked Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp nationwide

Internet monitoring group Turkey Block reports that Turkey has restricted access to Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp  and YouTube  across the country.Connections to those services are being throttled or slowed down drastically by internet service providers, rendering them inaccessible.The shutdown is believed be connected to the overnight detention of 11 Members of Parliament belonging to the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in the mainly Kurdish southeast. Salon reports that in the wake of a failed coup in July to overthrow the right-wing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, opposition politicians have warned that the nation’s authoritarian leader is is implementing a slow-motion counter-coup, restructuring the entire government and circumventing democracy.

Apple might introduce a bendable iPhone – but it’s a feature, not a bug

Back in 2015, Apple had a major problem on its hands when numerous customers cried out their iPhone 6 devices are bending. It turned out the issue – now known as #bendgate – affected only a very small fraction of phones and the Cupertino giant weathered the storm.Now it appears Apple could be in for another #bendgate – but this time around, it’s a feature and not a bug. The Big A has purportedly been granted a patent for a futuristic bendable and foldable iPhone, Patently Apple reports.According to Patently Apple, the tech titan has made at least two other unsusccesful attempts to patent bendable technology for the iPhone in the past. 

While there’s little details about how the company will pull off the bendable screen, one of the materials that could be used is ceramic. This speculation also aligns with previous Apple patents, including one for an all-ceramic Apple Watch and iPhone.The iPhone-maker isn’t the only company working on bendable/foldable screen technology. Samsung has been exploring this path since at least 2015. Similarly, Xiaomi and LG have also been previously rumored to be developing bendable screen technology.As with all patents, there’s no telling when or whether this concept will come to fruition. But just in case: Get ready to bend it like it like Beckham.

Yahoo has been secretly scanning your email and handing it over to US intelligence [Updated].

For years, Yahoo has been scanning the email of unknowing users and then turning this information over to US intelligence agencies. Citing sources familiar with the matter, Reuters broke the story today that Yahoo is complicit in breaching the privacy of millions of potential users, even beyond its recent hack.The company complied with a US intelligence directive that saw millions of Yahoo Mail accounts scanned in near-real time as opposed to the stored message scanning relied on most commonly. This breach seemingly targeted millions of users, all of which were unaware they were being monitored..In fact, ‘complicit’ may be the wrong word. Yahoo actively built a tool that enabled this sort of covert surveillance on its users.According to two former employees, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer ordered the company’s compliance, a move that led to the departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos’ departure. Three others familiar with the matter reported the order came in the form of a classified directive sent to Yahoo’s legal team.Bulk data collection on US phone and internet companies is nothing new. Government officials and private surveillance experts claim they’ve not seen such a broad directive for real-time collection on the web.“I’ve never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a ‘selector,'” said Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented telecom companies on surveillance issues for the past 20 years. “It would be really difficult for a provider to do that.”A ‘selector,’ in this case, is a search query used to zero in on a particular target.Google and Microsoft didn’t respond to a request for comment. We had intended to ask whether either received similar orders and if they were compliant.