Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
vpnMentor reports that its research team discovered that Theta360’s photo-sharing platform has suffered something of a pretty major data breach. The leak, they say, has exposed at least 11 million public and private photographs on the system.
They say that while most personal information was not released, usernames, first and last names along with the captions were exposed in the database alongside the images. Images that many users had chosen to keep private.
For one reason or the other, all of us delete plenty of photos from our phones while choosing the keepers. If you have an iPhone X, your “deleted” images are not entirely gone. As a result – they may be accessible to hackers. Two researchers have recently found a vulnerability that could let hackers access your images, even if you previously deleted them.
Earlier this year, GoPro launched GoPro Hero, a $220 simplified action camera. But according to some reports, it’s actually nothing else but a Hero 5 with crippled firmware. And allegedly, you can tweak the cheap GoPro Hero to load the Hero 5’s firmware.
There have been a lot of positive. useful and sometimes amusing stories about various image AI & machine learning systems over the past couple of years. There have also been some that are either quite creepy or simply the stuff of nightmares. Whatever you use image recognition AI for, though, it seems it can be easily fooled, with a little bit of work.
A team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratoy (CSAIL) these systems are even easier to fool than they thought. In a new paper, they’ve developed a system that is up to 1,000 times faster than existing methods. And it works with “black box” systems, too – these are closed source systems to which a hacker has no access to the code.
Rugged cases like Pelicans are great at protecting your gear. They’re waterproof, climate proof, indestructible and makes a great apple box when you need to sit or stand on something. After having more camera equipment than I am willing to carry on my shoulders, I bought a Pelican 1560 with padded dividers to carry it all.
The way the cases are structured, it is very difficult to put anything large inside, like reflectors or umbrellas into the case, and it is also very space consuming / uneconomical to put things like clamps and power cables and grip equipment inside the case, and almost always stupid to put water bottles inside the watertight case.
Chinese electronics component manufacturer Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology (Xiongmai) has said that its products inadvertently played a roll in Friday’s massive cyber attack that disrupted major internet sites including Twitter, Spotify and PayPal throughout the USA and other parts of the world on Friday.
Xiongmai are a vendor of Internet-connected cameras and DVRs. The company admitted that security vulnerabilities involving weak and unchanged passwords were partly to blame for the attacks. According to security researchers, an Internet of Things (IoT) bot called Mirai is responsible. It’s estimated that Mirai infects over 500,000 devices, and around 10% of these were used in Friday’s DDoS attack.
The internet is slowly (and painfully) discovering that security is a hard mistress. I mean fingerprints have been hacked, and passwords have not been delivering for a long time. Next step was having a camera look at your face to see if you are really you.
Of course, the early systems could be hacked with a high quality printed photo. So security added a “check if it’s alive” method. That in turn was hacked using tablets and videos. The next step was to check if the received images makes sense (so videos were out). But then hackers started using 3D printed masks.
But 3D masks are hard to create. Why not just grab a few of your social media photos, and use those to create a model that looks so real that it fools security systems.
And this is what the team at University of North Carolina did.
I needed an action camera to document DIYP’s trip to Photokina in September. I didn’t really want to have to fork out for a GoPro. It’s just not something I’d use often enough to justify the cost. So, I looked into the cheaper alternatives. This is when I found the Yi HD Action Camera, and some of the side-by-side examples I was seeing with the GoPro Hero3+ Silver just blew me away.
In a world of GoPros and a million cheap competitors, finding the good ones can often be difficult. It doesn’t help that every reviewer out there has a different definition of “good”. So, seeing side-by-side comparisons of footage taken with two cameras at the same time is usually the best way to really see the difference. Even if YouTube’s compression does often destroy what you really want to see.
If you’ve downloaded InstaAgent, an iOS and Android app designed to let you see who’s viewed your Instagram profile, you might want to delete it from your smartphone. According to a new report, the app – whose full name is ‘Who Viewed Your Profile – InstaAgent’ – is not only storing usernames and passwords in plaintext and sending them to a remote server, but also using those very credentials to log in and post unwanted images to users’ profiles.
InstaAgent has since been removed from both the Google Play Store and iOS App Store, but so long as it’s on your phone, it can still send your information.[Read More…]
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.
can change a lens mid-rappel, swap a memory card while treading water, or use a camel as a light stand.
To see more of his work please visit his studio website blurMEDIAphotography, or follow him on Twitter, 500px, Google Plus or YouTube.
JP’s photography is available for licensing at Stocksy United.
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