The Daily Nerd (December 3rd, 2013)

The Daily Nerd (December 3rd, 2013) #

New Wave Energy wants to put power plants in the sky

Harvesting power from the wind and the sun is nothing new. We’ve seen flying wind turbines and solar power plants that aim to provide clean renewable energy. UK-based New Wave Energy has a bolder idea in the works. The company plans to build the first high altitude aerial power plant, using networks of unmanned drones that can harvest energy from multiple sources and transmit it wirelessly to receiving stations on the ground.

Amazon’s drone delivery

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/98BIu9dpwHU&source=uds

badBIOS analysis of Weapons grade Malware

In 2010 in the weeks before his PacSec conference Dragos was installing 2 new Apple systems, one at a customer and one in his office when he noticed that the one in the office did a firmware upgrade on its own. Having two identical systems it was possible to spot the differences between them, files on the infected system changed compared to the reference system. Any attempts to reflash the BIOS on the Mac, or perform any other deep forencics was prevented as the infected computer refused to boot from CD-ROM. With his major conference taking all his attention Dragos decided to just wipe all the systems and move on. Little did he know at the time that the infection was wipe tolerant. When the convertion season was over Dragos looked at the systems again, But even with all his expertise he could neither 1) determine the infection vector nor 2) disinfect his systems. Eventually he concluded that the worm was not destructive and that there was nothing he could do at that point, but leave the systems infected.