This week in science and technology

August 17, 2018 / Tags: twistech - science - technology - alexa - ai - voice ui - automotive - blockchain - elections - cybersecurity

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Amazon launched Alexa Automotive Core SDK, alias Alexa Auto. While it may be true not many Amazon Echo device owners had been using their smart speakers for shopping, we can see that gaining foothold and eventually dominance as an intelligent voice assistant in the cars is an important goal for Alexa. With this open source release posted in Github, developers get a new set of tools to enable in-vehicle access to Alexa skills such as those for checking weather and streaming music, and to seamlessly integrate Alexa with automotive infotainment systems. (Quartz, Tom’s Guide, CNET)

Blockchain voting planned for midterm election. So, the state of West Virginia had contracted Voatz, a Boston-based startup focusing on mobile voting to run a pilot program dubbed Secure Military Mobile Voting Pilot to allow overseas troops cast their ballots via smartphone in the state’s upcoming federal general midterm election. The system uses a public permissioned blockchain built on the Hyperledger framework to record the data on up to 16 verified nodes located in the US and Canada. While this adds convenience and arguably, better transparency, it also makes possible a new attack vector that concerns computer security experts considering recent indications that Russian actors are aggresively trying to interfere in the midterm elections. (MIT Technology Review, Venture Beat, Hacker Noon, TechCrunch, UPI)

State election website hacked in 10 minutes by an 11-year-old. Coincidentally, this happened over the weekend at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas, underlining the vulnerabilities of America’s current voting infrastructure. And sadly, fixing the critical issues highlighted in the conference requires funding and resources that US states simply do not and likely will not have in time for the election. (BBC News, WIRED)

The curiously embarrassing “hacky hack hack” incident. While on the subject of teen hacking, a 16-year-old Australian fan of Apple Computer managed to break into the company’s servers and downloaded some 90 gigabytes worth of “secure” files into a folder on his Apple laptop aptly titled “hacky hack hack” — not once, not twice, but numerous times and “flawlessly” over the course of more than a year. It took the FBI and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to crack the case and to get the high-schooler identified, picked up, likely direct from his parents’ basement, and arrested. (The Hacker News)

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This week in science and technology / August 17, 2018

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