Apple may design its own servers to avoid government snooping

We’ve known for roughly two years the US government has programs devoted to intercepting computer hardware mid-shipment. These programs are used to insert backdoors or spyware deep into a system’s firmware before it even arrives at its destination. A new report claims Apple is looking into building its own servers as a way to thwart this type of insertion.

The Information (currently offline as of this writing) reported yesterday that:

Apple has long suspected that servers it ordered from the traditional supply chain were intercepted during shipping, with additional chips and firmware added to them by unknown third parties in order to make them vulnerable to infiltration, according to a person familiar with the matter. At one point, Apple even assigned people to take photographs of motherboards and annotate the function of each chip, explaining why it was supposed to be there. Building its own servers with motherboards it designed would be the most surefire way for Apple to prevent unauthorized snooping via extra chips.

Security isn’t Apple’s only motivation — the company has expressed unhappiness with Amazon Web Services and, according to VentureBeat, is working on a plan to build its own in-house data centers and software to run them. Currently, services like iTunes are mostly outsourced to other providers like Amazon or Microsoft’s competing Azure. Apple is far from the first company to take steps like this; Google publicly announced it would begin encrypting all data that travels through its data centers after information leaked that the NSA had tapped undersea cables to spy on Google’s data centers from the inside, where data was once unencrypted.

Whether or not this approach can actually lock out groups like the NSA is an incredibly difficult question. Apple could contract with companies like Foxconn to build hardware to its own specifications, but there’s no guarantee that the NSA wouldn’t find a different method of penetrating Apple’s security. A government agency that’s gone to the trouble of building infrastructure to intercept, bug, and re-ship network equipment and servers is obviously one that’s willing to spend top dollar to guarantee results. Apple can make the game more difficult, certainly, but can it close the loopholes altogether?

This rumor isn’t going to be well-received by the government, which has already indicated it believes Apple’s behavior is just shy of treasonous in various court filings related to the San Bernardino shooting. Building its own data centers and designing its own hardware from the ground up, at least partly for the express purpose of locking the government out, isn’t going to sit well with the folks in Washington.

Up to this point, the battle over encryption has largely been waged behind the scenes. The White House has declined to push for any legislation that would actually ban encryption or formally require companies to cooperate with the government in turning over keys and access. One likely reason for this state of affairs is that government agencies feel reasonably assured that they can get the data they want without the battle public legislation would spark. If government agencies start feeling less sure of their own ability to compel cooperation or access information at will, this fight could go more public than it has to date. The technology sector would ferociously oppose such legislative fiat (assuming Congress was willing to consider it in the first place), but whether that opposition would be sufficient to sway the final outcome is another unknown.

Both Republicans and Democrats have given great deference to the NSA, FBI, and their claims that warrantless wiretaps and mass surveillance are required if the American people are to be kept safe. Apple, however, isn’t alone in its efforts. Last year, Cisco’s security chief announced it purposefully shipped to fake locations to keep the NSA from targeting and intercepting its hardware.

A simple wireless technology promises to make driving much safer.

Hariharan Krishnan hardly looks like a street racer. With thin-rimmed glasses and a neat mustache, he reminds me of a math teacher. And yet on a sunny day last September, he was speeding, seemingly recklessly, around the parking lot at General Motors’ research center in Warren, Michigan, in a Cadillac DTS.

I was in the passenger seat as Krishnan wheeled around a corner and hit the gas. A moment later a light flashed on the dashboard, there was a beeping sound, and our seats started buzzing furiously. Krishnan slammed on the brakes, and we lurched to a stop just as another car whizzed past from the left, its approach having been obscured by a large hedge.“You can see I was completely blinded,” he said calmly.

The technology that warned of the impending collision will start appearing in cars in just a couple of years. Called car-to-car or vehicle-to-vehicle communication, it lets cars broadcast their position, speed, steering-wheel position, brake status, and other data to other vehicles within a few hundred meters. The other cars can use such information to build a detailed picture of what’s unfolding around them, revealing trouble that even the most careful and alert driver, or the best sensor system, would miss or fail to anticipate.

Already many cars have instruments that use radar or ultrasound to detect obstacles or vehicles. But the range of these sensors is limited to a few car lengths, and they cannot see past the nearest obstruction.

Car-to-car communication should also have a bigger impact than the advanced vehicle automation technologies that have been more widely heralded. Though self-driving cars could eventually improve safety, they remain imperfect and unproven, with sensors and software too easily bamboozled by poor weather, unexpected obstacles or circumstances, or complex city driving. Simply networking cars together wirelessly is likely to have a far bigger and more immediate effect on road safety.

Creating a car-to-car network is still a complex challenge. The computers aboard each car process the various readings being broadcast by other vehicles 10 times every second, each time calculating the chance of an impending collision. Transmitters use a dedicated portion of wireless spectrum as well as a new wireless standard, 802.11p, to authenticate each message.

Krishnan took me through several other car-to-car safety scenarios in the company’s parking lot. When he started slowly pulling into a parking spot occupied by another car, a simple alert sounded. When he attempted a risky overtaking maneuver, a warning light flashed and a voice announced: “Oncoming vehicle!”

More than five million crashes occur on U.S. roads alone every year, and more than 30,000 of those are fatal. The prospect of preventing many such accidents will provide significant impetus for networking technology.

Just an hour’s drive west of Warren, the town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, has done much to show how valuable car-to-car communication could be. There, between 2012 and 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the University of Michigan equipped nearly 3,000 cars with experimental transmitters. After studying communication records for those vehicles, NHTSA researchers concluded that the technology could prevent more than half a million accidents and more than a thousand fatalities in the United States every year. The technology stands to revolutionize the way we drive, says John Maddox, a program director at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute.

Shortly after the Ann Arbor trial ended, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced that it would start drafting rules that could eventually mandate the use of car-to-car communication in new cars. The technology is also being tested in Europe and Japan.

There will, of course, also be a few obstacles to navigate. GM has committed to using car-to-car communication in a 2017-model Cadillac. Those first Cadillacs will have few cars to talk to, and that will limit the value of the technology. It could still be more than a decade before vehicles that talk to each other are commonplace.

New satellites could bring 1 terabit of internet bandwidth to remote regions

Delivering internet access to remote areas is challenging, as the traditional method of running lines from connected regions is extremely expensive. There are a few approaches to doing this wirelessly — for example, Google’s Project Loon balloons. However, a company called ViaSat is teaming up with Boeing to provide super-fast internet access to remote areas from space. The just-announced ViaSat-3 satellite will have a terabit of available bandwidth. Yes, a terabit per second.

ViaSat has made this announcement a little early, though. It has yet to announce its second-generation satellite, the ViaSat-2 (below). That platform is supposed to head into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a few months. While the ViaSat-2 is no slouch, it will only have one-third of the available bandwidth of the planned ViaSat-3. Once its new generation of satellites is in orbit, ViaSat claims its platform could double the network capacity of the roughly 400 commercial communications satellites already circling the globe.

The 1Tbps satellites will provide fast connections, but those on the ground obviously won’t be able to suck down the full 1Tb of bandwidth. ViaSat plans to offer residential connections of about 100Mbps, which is still faster than many people in US cities can get. When you consider many of the regions ViaSat expects to serve have no broadband service at all, I don’t think anyone will complain about “only” getting 100Mbps. Users will still have to contend with the limitations of satellite internet, including line-of-sight requirements and higher latency than terrestrial wired connections. Any real-time applications like video chat will probably be unworkable despite the incredible speeds.

Residential service is only one part of what ViaSat wants to do with its space-based connections. A more robust version of the service will be made available to corporate installations that are in remote areas (like oil and gas platforms) that can reach speeds of up to 1Gbps. Commercial jets might also be able to use ViaSat’s connections as a faster version of the internet service they already offer.

The company says that work is already underway on two ViaSat-3 satellites, and Boeing expects them to be ready for launch by the end of 2019. That would put ViaSat a few years ahead of Elon Musk’s tentative plan to get thousands of micro-satellites into orbit in order to deliver high-speed internet to the globe. Whoever makes it work is immaterial to people who lack sufficient bandwidth, but help is on the way.

Under the Sea: Microsoft testing underwater data centers

Microsoft is evaluating the long-term prospects of underwater data centers, in a bid to cut latencies, improve service, and take advantage of some of the ocean’s unique characteristics. Saltwater and electronics aren’t historically considered to be great friends, but Microsoft’s prototypes are performing impressively well.

There are several hypothetical advantages to dropping data centers in the deep (relatively speaking). Air conditioning and cooling costs eat a sizable percentage of a data center’s budget. Water is far more effective at removing heat than forced-air cooling; deploying servers in the ocean would eliminate cooling overhead. Microsoft is reportedly considering deploying the servers with their own surface turbines or tidal energy systems to generate power on-site. While this would make the system less likely to be affected by land-based blackouts, it also increases the complexity and overhead of operation.

Microsoft is touting other advantages of this effort, codenamed Project Natick. Because half the world’s population lives within 50km of an ocean, deploying water-based servers would allow companies to offer guaranteed low-latency connections to large groups of people. The data centers themselves would be deployed quickly, possibly within three months. That’s far less time than it normally takes to build or scale out a data center, and the new systems could be integrated with existing land-based servers.

Microsoft recently built and tested a prototype system, which operated for 105 days underwater and experienced no problems. The system worked so well, in fact, that the engineers extended its operating time and used it to run some commercial workloads from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. The company is now working on an underwater system 3x larger than the first prototype and will partner with an unchosen developer of alternative-energy systems that utilize ocean / wave power.

There have been some concerns about using the oceans as waste heat disepnsers for data centers. While a few local units would make no difference, it’s easy to imagine that a large data center cluster could have a significant impact on a local marine ecosystem — these computers generate tremendous amounts of heat.

Microsoft has stated that its end goal is to create data centers that are recyclable and do not impact the local environment. In theory, this should be possible, depending on how much waste heat each chassis produces. Closed-loop coolers would still allow for heat exchange between the server pod and the water without pumping seawater in and out of the system (and dealing with the associated corrosion and filtering issues).

Will companies adopt this sort of solution? It’s still too early to tell. Microsoft is far from the first company to propose an underwater server concept, but to date, manufacturers keep opting to plunk them down on land.

Researchers index dark web, find most of it contains illegal material

The Internet is less of a wild west than it once was, but there are still corners of it that are hidden from view and quite shady. For instance, Tor hidden services have included numerous criminal enterprises like The Silk Road. Two researchers from King’s College London set out to discover just how much of Tor was devoted to illegal content. The result? Most of it.

Tor (which originally stood for The Onion Router) is a network composed of layers of encrypted relays through which data is passed. Each node in the network only knows where a packet just was and where it’s going next. After a few hops, the source of a packet is (almost) impossible to discern. Most people use Tor to reach sites on the open Internet anonymously, but there are also sites that are hosted entirely within Tor, called hidden services. The Silk Road was a hidden service, but there are innumerable others. It is these sites Daniel Moore and Thomas Rid sought to quantify.

It’s no easy task to find all the hidden services on Tor, let alone get a look at the data they’re hosting. Hidden services are ephemeral, often switching addresses and server locations without notice. To top it off, Tor addresses are just long strings of characters with a .onion domain at the end. In order to get a proper sample of all the hidden services lurking out there, the pair built a Python script that crawled the dark web, starting with the popular Tor search engines Onion City and Ahmia.

The bot’s job was to scrape the content from each page and upload it for analysis. When the bot found a link to another hidden service (the main way you find things on the dark web), it would hop to that one and scrape it too. The pair used an algorithm to process all the content collected and sort it into categories like drugs, social, pornography, and financial. The sorting was spot checked and found to be very accurate overall.

After the script had run its course, 5,205 live websites were indexed; a total of 2,723 pages were classified by content. Pages with fewer than 50 words and those with no content were dropped in the “none” category. According to the analysis, 57% of the sites hosted illicit content like drugs and child pornography. The Tor project estimates there are about 35,000 total hidden services active, so this is far from a full survey, but enough to be a representative sample.

Moore and Rid say their goal with this project was to establish a more moderate perspective on the role of encryption. Politicians are currently demanding unworkable backdoors to encryption, but Moore and Rid say that privacy activists fail to fully acknowledge the potential for abuse. They don’t have a solution in mind — they’re just making the data available.

Google unveils experimental Android app search-and-install process

It’s not exactly difficult to find and install Android apps the conventional way. But it seems Google wants to create a path of least resistance between thinking about an app you might want and actually installing it. Currently, there are at least four primary ways most of us probably search for and install an Android app:

1. Open the Android Play Store app, search for an app, and then install it;
2. Visit the Google Play Store in your desktop web browser, search for an app, and remotely install the app on your Android phone or tablet remotely without even touching your device;
3. Search for an app in your desktop web browser and then use method 2 above to complete the installation;
4. Search for an app in your mobile device web browser or the dedicated Google Search app, tap the Google Play Store link in the search results, and then install the app

Android Police, however, reports there is a fifth way appearing on some Android devices. Some people are seeing this new process on their Android devices that reduces the friction to find and install an app, according to the report. Or, it may simply appear to reduce friction by using a visual trick. It works like this

1. Launch the Google Search app. Or, if you use the Google Now Launcher, you can presumably skip this step;
2. Search for the app;
3. Press the install button in the search result;
4. A small permission window pops up asking you to grant the app various permissions;
5. A miniature version of the Google Play Store appears in a window overlaying your app search results;
6. You press install to actually install the app.

It seems there’s no reduction in the number of steps it takes to find and install an app using this reported new process. But an Android user may perceive less effort, because the search results window remains visible the entire time.

Fortune asked Google about the developments, but Google’s response to them didn’t confirm or deny the new process. Google merely said they are always trying new ways to search and find the content you need. Since the company didn’t directly answer the question, we do not know if this feature is merely experimental, or one that will appear in wide release soon.