Category Archives: Technology Insights

Spyware in the Beijing Olympics Apps

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Jonathan Scott, a PhD candidate that researches mobile malware/spyware/forensics in Boerne, TX, recently decrypted and decompiled the 2022 official Beijing Olympics Apps that athletes are required to install on their iPhone or Android phones. They are supposed to be used for data collection for COVID-19 and for Olympic medal notification. Instead, what he found, was that the apps not only record and send audio from the phone microphone and capture clipboard contents, but they contain AI technology that was trade blacklisted in the United States back in 2019.

While the spying in particular is not a huge surprise, what IS a surprise is that the app either 1) Got past both Apple and Google’s safety-assurance processes ensuring apps are safe to use (in fact, Apple specifically states there is no data collection from this app). , or 2) These apps were given special treatment by Apple and Google to work around the usual process for app approval.

Do I believe that Apple and Google, the top 2 of 3 technology companies in the world, had their top security experts fooled into thinking the app was safe? Well, certainly both have had instances of being caught not doing their due diligence, but both companies, about the same app? Interesting.

No comment from most U.S. press and government so far. The very first news agencies are just picking up on this story.

Decompiled App source code from Jonathan’s GitHub: https://github.com/jonathandata1/2022_beijing

A 5 1/4″ floppy drive connected with USB?

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Yup…that’s a 5 1/4″ Floppy Disk Drive, connected via USB to my computer. This board called a Greaseweazle reads the raw flux transitions from a floppy disk and recreates them as disk drive image files for modern computers. I just found disks full of music, sound files, and BASIC source code that I haven’t heard or seen since 1991, lost deep in formatted-over disks on an obsolete media that was impossible to read. Until now…If you have any IBM-PC formatted 5 1/4″ disks that might have some memories on them, I’m your guy.

Next, I need to work on reading old Apple ][ disks.

Display Systems 19S-8 Vintage Eggcrate Display Clock

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There was a reason that CBS and other television networks used these type of displays on game shows when they had bright studio lights to contend with. The light is piercing from these!

Tonight, I got 22 wires soldered on 22 pins to mate with a Molex connector on the back of each display. Both digits are now directly connected up to the relay board. The software I developed can display an arbitrary 2-digit number, and then count up or down from that number until it reaches 00 or 99.

This has been a cool project! I’ll probably try to make a more detailed video in the future on the parts I selected and how all this works together.

Check out how this display worked on “Classic Concentration” hosted by Alex Trebek in the late 1980s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1izUPd87wmw

A relic and mainstay of all classic 80s gameshows…

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Initial Test of a Display Systems 19S-8 Vintage Eggcrate Display (Light Bulb Matrix), common to television game shows of the 1970s-1990s.

This is one of two Display Systems 19S-8 eggcrate displays that I purchased from Surplus Sales of Nebraska. I plan to integrate both into a working count up/count down timer powered by a ESP8266 microcontroller module and a couple of relay boards.

This eggcrate display uses a common 28 volt DC power source on one pin. Then, depending on which pin the ground is connected, will light each of one possible digit: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0 and $. It’s also possible to display strange characters by connecting multiple grounds between pins.

I plan to use a single 150 watt 12 volt DC power supply to power dual boost controllers that will output the needed 28 volts. The 12 volts is still needed for the relay boards. The ESP8266 module will be connected to a 5 volt DC output from the relay board.

In both displays, I only needed to replace one lamp upon receiving them. The lamp is a common 1820 mini-bayonet style incandescent.

The First Computer Bug

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The First Computer Bug…

In 1945, Grace Murray Hopper was working on the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator. On the 9th of September, 1945, when the machine was experiencing problems, an investigation showed that there was a moth trapped between the points of Relay #70, in Panel F. The operators removed the moth and affixed it to the log. The entry reads: “First actual case of bug being found.”

Grace Murray Hopper, who lived from 1906-1992, found the first computer bug while working in a temporary World War I building at Harvard University on the Mark II computer where a moth had been beaten to death in the jaws of a relay. She glued it into the logbook of the computer and thereafter when the machine stops (frequently) they say that they are “debugging” the computer.

The very first bug still exists in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. The word bug and the concept of debugging had been used previously, perhaps by Edison, but this was probably the first verification that the concept applied to computers.

Google’s Role in Social Distancing

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I thought this was interesting! Google is taking anonymized, aggregate data from Google Maps for public health officials to understand responses to social distancing guidance related to COVID-19.

Here is the data I pulled for the state of Minnesota. It looks like in general, 38% less people are travelling to work, 35% less people are travelling to grocery stores and pharmacies, and 58% less people are travelling to restaurants, cafes, and shopping centers. Rice County seems to be doing slightly worse at sheltering-in-place compared to the average in Minnesota, except in the travelling to work and parks categories.

Source: COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports (https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility)

The more you know!

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The more you know!

Does a USB drive get heavier as you store more files on it?
Believe it or not, they get lighter. USB drives use Flash memory, which means the the ones and zeros of your data are stored on transistors. When you save data, a binary zero is set by charging the float gate of the transistor, and a binary one is set by removing the charge. To charge it, we add electrons, and the mass of each electron is 0.00000000000000000000000000091 grams. This means that an empty USB drive (which mostly holds zeros) weighs more than a full USB drive (which has ones and zeros). Add data, reduce the weight. However, you would need to weigh more USB drives than exist on the planet together at once before the difference in weight became easily measurable.