101–109 of 109 posts
No inside information, but from what I glean reading between the lines in various podcasts, books, etc. this tech has been used already in Afghanistan & Iraq by US special assets. I would expect it is in use elsewhere in the intelligence community. If so, that's all fine with me provided it doesn't become a warrantless tracking method employed by DHS/FBI either directly or indirectly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, so a small chip sitting on the SPI bus for the flash would fit all of what you said and give attackers another capability: persistency in the face of replacing the flash itself. And yes, it'd probably be something small, like rewriting one of the keys stored in flash. And BMC networks are extremely high value targets. Tons of exploits from running ancient code, and DMA access to the the rest of the system, oft…
The Bloomberg article doesn't talk about BMCs however. That's __me__ talking about BMCs. I don't need the Bloomberg article distracting the discussion. Its clear that the Bloomberg article was just fully and completely useless. It contributed no useful, technical details to the discussion. We're sitting here arguing about how Bloomberg might have written the article better. At some point, we just gotta realize that B…
You also seem to confuse an article being helpful to you with an article being correct. You clearly are not in a line of work where you need to worry about this, and that is ok. But it does not invalidate the article at all.
The NSA's TRINITY chip circa 2008 was smaller than a penny and the workhorse behind implants that hid inside ethernet headers on motherboards and USB cables. The CIA has a team dedicated to interdicting shipments and modifying firmware or hardware. It is absolutely foolish to assume other countries intelligence services are not capable of the same.
No inside information, but from what I glean reading between the lines in various podcasts, books, etc. this tech has been used already in Afghanistan & Iraq by US special assets. I would expect it is in use elsewhere in the intelligence community. If so, that's all fine with me provided it doesn't become a warrantless tracking method employed by DHS/FBI either directly or indirectly.
AKA "smartdust" > The concepts for Smart Dust emerged from a workshop at RAND in 1992 and a series of DARPA ISAT studies in the mid-1990s due to the potential military applications of the technology.[2] The work was strongly influenced by work at UCLA and the University of Michigan during that period, as well as science fiction authors Stanislaw Lem (in novels The Invincible in 1964 and Peace on Earth in 1985), Neal…
This is an idea that has been extensively explored since 1996, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_sensor_nodes It's a pity that the theme is now surveillance as the utility of sensor networks is rather high. Perhaps larger devices that could roam the planet and especially the oceans would be to better to spend money on. There's so much to learn yet we waste the opportunity snooping on each other.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither the researchers nor the media outlet said anything about pollution
FTA > It's neither a bird nor a plane, but a winged microchip as small as a grain of sand that can be carried by the wind as it monitors such things as pollution levels or the spread of airborne diseases.
These devices don't even have space for an antenna (limited by physical size). The power required by the sensors is dwarfed by RF transmit. The current challenges of powering a radio device with an MPU at this size are far too great for this to be useful. Unless there is a breakthrough in radio physics, drones need to be a certain size that is much larger than this. Unless they plan to release a billion of these, swe…
Or just, you know, use a high frequency. There are tiny antennas. You can just power it via induction (like RFID) and you're set. It still couldn't transmit super far but I bet it would work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FTA > It's neither a bird nor a plane, but a winged microchip as small as a grain of sand that can be carried by the wind as it monitors such things as pollution levels or the spread of airborne diseases.
I meant no one said anything about monitoring pollution
No inside information, but from what I glean reading between the lines in various podcasts, books, etc. this tech has been used already in Afghanistan & Iraq by US special assets. I would expect it is in use elsewhere in the intelligence community. If so, that's all fine with me provided it doesn't become a warrantless tracking method employed by DHS/FBI either directly or indirectly.
what possible application could this have in warfare?