Tag Archives: Sensors

Websites Grabbing User-Form Data Before It’s Submitted

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Websites are sending information prematurely: …we discovered NaviStone’s code on sites run by Acurian, Quicken Loans, a continuing education center, a clothing store for plus-sized women, and a host of other retailers. Using Javascript, those sites were transmitting information from people as soon as they typed or auto-filled it into an online form. That way, the company would have it… Continue reading Websites Grabbing User-Form Data Before It’s Submitted→

Websites Grabbing User-Form Data Before It’s Submitted

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Websites are sending information prematurely: …we discovered NaviStone’s code on sites run by Acurian, Quicken Loans, a continuing education center, a clothing store for plus-sized women, and a host of other retailers. Using Javascript, those sites were transmitting information from people as soon as they typed or auto-filled it into an online form. That way, the company would have it… Continue reading Websites Grabbing User-Form Data Before It’s Submitted→

Sense All the Things with a Synthetic Sensor

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What will it take to make your house smarter than you? Judging from the price of smart appliances we see in the home centers these days, it’ll take buckets of cash. But what if you could make your home smarter — or at least more observant — with a few cheap, general purpose “supersensors” that watch your every move?

Sounds creepy, right? That’s what [Gierad Laput] and his team at the Carnegie Mellon Human-Computer Interaction Institute thought when they designed their broadband “synthetic sensor,” and it’s why they purposely omitted a camera from their design. But just about every other …read more

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Hacklab’s Logo Changes with the Habitat of a Beet Plant

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Zaragoza, Spain hacklab La Remolacha (“The Beet”) sports a logo which responds to human interaction with a beet plant growing in the space. Sensors keep track of temperature as well as humidity for both air and ground, while buttons add more water, plant food, light, and music.

The shape and activity of the visualization responds to the sensors. The higher the temperature, the more folds in the shape. More distortions appear when there’s more humidity in the soil, while rotation speed increases with air humidity. Adding food increases the size of the visualization, and music triggers more vibrations.

An Arduino …read more

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Stealing Browsing History Using Your Phone’s Ambient Light Sensor

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There has been a flurry of research into using the various sensors on your phone to steal data in surprising ways. Here’s another: using the phone’s ambient light sensor to detect what’s on the screen. It’s a proof of concept, but the paper’s general c… Continue reading Stealing Browsing History Using Your Phone’s Ambient Light Sensor→

Stealing Browsing History Using Your Phone’s Ambient Light Sensor

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There has been a flurry of research into using the various sensors on your phone to steal data in surprising ways. Here’s another: using the phone’s ambient light sensor to detect what’s on the screen. It’s a proof of concept, but the paper’s general conclusions are correct: There is a lesson here that designing specifications and systems from a privacy… Continue reading Stealing Browsing History Using Your Phone’s Ambient Light Sensor→

Acoustic Attack Against Accelerometers

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Interesting acoustic attack against the MEMS accelerometers in devices like FitBits. Millions of accelerometers reside inside smartphones, automobiles, medical devices, anti-theft devices, drones, IoT devices, and many other industrial and consumer applications. Our work investigates how analog acoustic injection attacks can damage the digital integrity of the capacitive MEMS accelerometer. Spoofing such sensors with intentional acoustic interference enables an out-of-spec… Continue reading Acoustic Attack Against Accelerometers→