Embedded Systems Weekly – Issue 73

Issue 73- 07 October 2016

Hardware

Qualcomm: Why NXP Would Be A Waste Of Money

Although the stock market reacted positively to reports that Qualcomm might buy NXP Semiconductors, Mark Hibben explains why he views the transaction as singularly destructive to Qualcomm’s long-term interests and its fundamental business model.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Bendable, twistable, flexible lithium-ion battery

Panasonic Corporation announced that it has developed a × Flex is exhibiting at Internet of Things Applications USA 2016 Santa Clara, CA, USA 16 – 17 Nov 2016 Flexible Lithium-ion Battery with a thickness of only 0.55mm, or about 0.022 inches. Suitable for use in card-type and wearable devices, this rechargeable battery can retain its characteristics even after repeatedly bent into a radius of 25mm or twisted to an angle of 25 degrees.
Read more at: http://www.printedelectronicsworld.com/articles/10042/bendable-twistable-flexible-lithium-ion-batteryShare on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Demystifying Hardware Security – Part I

Competent information security professionals are constantly learning and adapting to the changing threat landscape. However, embedded device security is the elephant in the room that many seem to ignore. These devices generally take a back seat to the security concerns of the software running on servers and workstation machines, but they are becoming one of the leading information security concerns of our time.
See also: Part II & Part IIIShare on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Xeon+FPGA Platform for the Data Center

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Software

The Mysterious Fiber Bomb Problem: A Debugging Story

A month or two ago, Sandstorm started seeing a mysterious problem in production: every now and then, one of our Node.js web server processes supporting Sandstorm Oasis would suddenly jump to 100% CPU usage (of one core) and stay there until it was killed. The problem wasn’t an infinite loop, though: the process continued to respond to requests, just slowly. Since the process continued to respond to requests, it continued to pass health checks and was never restarted automatically. But for users assigned to that shard, the service was essentially unusable, as every action would take seconds to complete. The problem left nothing at all suspicious in the logs – other than a gap in which far fewer requests that normal were being handled. At first, the problem only struck about once a week, seemingly at random.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Lock up your raspberry Pi with Google Authenticator

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Misc

Amazon introduces the Alexa Prize

The Alexa Prize is an annual competition for university students dedicated to accelerating the field of conversational AI. The inaugural competition is focused on creating a socialbot, a new Alexa skill that converses coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics and news events. Participating teams will advance several areas of conversational AI including knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, context modeling, commonsense reasoning and dialog planning.
Amazon will award the winning team $500,000. Additionally, a prize of $1 million will be awarded to the winning team’s university if their socialbot achieves the grand challenge of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Build a Compact 4 Node Raspberry Pi Cluster

Over the weekend Alasdair Allan sat down and built a small Raspberry Pi cluster consisting of 4 nodes. He used three Raspberry Pi 2 boards for compute nodes and an original Model B for the head node. He wanted the cluster — more commonly known as a ‘bramble’ — to be as compact as possible, with just two cables coming out, one for power and the other for network. The small cluster sitting on his desk lets him test code out before deploying jobs to the much more extensive, and expensive, cluster he is using for grunt work on the project.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Glitchy Descriptor Firmware Grab

To understand a program, it helps to see it first. This episode is all glitching and USB, turning a chip’s environment against it to slurp out hidden code.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Distributed censorship or extortion? The IoT vs Brian Krebs

The particular website that was hit by a record-breaking distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack was that of white-hat security journalist Brian Krebs: Krebs on Security.
During the DDOS attack, his site got 600 Gigabits per second of traffic. It didn’t involve amplification or reflection attacks, but rather a distributed network of zombie domestic appliances: routers, IP webcams, and digital video recorders (DVRs). All they did was create HTTP requests for his site, but there were well in excess of 100,000 of these bots.
In the end, Krebs’ ISP, Akamai, had to drop him. He was getting pro bono service from them to start with, and while they’ve defended him against DDOS attacks in the past, it was costing them too much to continue in this case. An Akamai exec estimates it would have cost them millions to continue defending, and Brian doesn’t blame them. But when Akamai dropped the shields, his hosting provider would get slammed. Krebs told Akamai to redirect his domain to localhost and then he went dark.
Krebs’ takeaway from the whole event is summarized in his blog post (now that he’s back online): “The Democratization of Censorship“.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Photo by Giovanni Portelli