The "Bluetooth Headphone Jacking" talk at #39c3 was awesome, too. They reversed a popular SOC that powers Bluetooth earbuds and headphones.

They found that (even without being paired to the headphone), they could dump flash and RAM from the device. Then they dumped a bunch of info from the device - e.g. the #Bluetooth address and "master" encryption keys used for the communication with paired devices (e.g. a #phone).

Then they impersonated the headphone from their laptop and connected to the phone (pretending to be the headphone).
The headphone (or the laptop impersonating the phone) has permissions to do some things on the phone, e.g. accept calls, increase/decrease volume, etc.

Then they started recovering access a #WhatsApp account via some account recovery mechanisms. That required some one-time security key which would normally be delivered via SMS, but that could be delivered via phone call as a fallback option, too. Since the phone thought it was connected to the Bluetooth headphone, phone call audio would go to the laptop via Bluetooth.

As the cherry on top, they escalated into the victim's #Amazon account.

Scary shit. #YouCannotBeParanoidEnough #security

Garmin “Autoland” aka “Safe Return,” has been used for the first time, successfully.

Autoland is an emergency system, where a passenger can hit a big red button if the pilot is in incapacitated, which causes the airplane to make emergency radio calls, navigate to a nearby airport with a long runway and medical facilities, and conduct an instrument approach and landing, followed by a full shutdown when the aircraft comes to a stop on the runway. Large screens and voice announcements keep passengers updated along the way.

The nature of the medical emergency on Saturday, involving a King Air with an unconscious pilot, has not been disclosed.

https://avbrief.com/autoland-saves-king-air-everyone-reported-safe/ #avgeek

I doubt that anything resembling genuine "artificial general intelligence" is within reach of current #AI tools. However, I think a weaker, but still quite valuable, type of "artificial general cleverness" is becoming a reality in various ways.

By "general cleverness", I mean the ability to solve broad classes of complex problems via somewhat ad hoc means. These means may be stochastic or the result of brute force computation; they may be ungrounded or fallible; and they may be either uninterpretable, or traceable back to similar tricks found in an AI's training data. So they would not qualify as the result of any true "intelligence". And yet, they can have a non-trivial success rate at achieving an increasingly wide spectrum of tasks, particularly when coupled with stringent verification procedures to filter out incorrect or unpromising approaches, at scales beyond what individual humans could achieve.

This results in the somewhat unintuitive combination of a technology that can be very useful and impressive, while simultaneously being fundamentally unsatisfying and disappointing - somewhat akin to how one's awe at an amazingly clever magic trick can dissipate (or transform to technical respect) once one learns how the trick was performed.

But perhaps this can be resolved by the realization that while cleverness and intelligence are somewhat correlated traits for humans, they are much more decoupled for AI tools (which are often optimized for cleverness), and viewing the current generation of such tools primarily as a stochastic generator of sometimes clever - and often useful - thoughts and outputs may be a more productive perspective when trying to use them to solve difficult problems.