Tech Round Table Meeting 4/12/23

Padlock and USB
Padlock and USB

April 12, 2023 Tech Round Table meeting on Zoom

The meeting topics included digital burglaries, USB juice jacking, Bard getting a math question wrong, the new OpenAI bug bounty program, Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster” and video of a compressed natural gas car exploding in a filling station.

Digital Burglaries

Jack Sharp offered an article on digital burglaries. It pointed out that off-brand or older smart devices like baby monitors, door bells and cameras are vulnerable. Successful breaches could enable viewing inside the home.

Items like changing the default user names and passwords to stronger user names and passwords, having up-to-date software running the devices, two-factor authentication and discarding older tech as ways to stay safe and private.

USB Juice Jacking Etc.

Jack Sharp shared an article on how your USB devices can be hacked. This included juice jacking, viruses, Trojans and malware.

Particularly disturbing is charging using a USB port. This called juice jacking. USBs have data lines where the charging stations might use for hacking. This means airports, hotels, shopping centers, cafes or perhaps even a friend’s house.

A way to prevent juice jacking is to use a USB data blocker. USB data blockers are inexpensive dongles that eliminate the data lines. See the links section for USB data blockers you can buy.

OpenAI Bug Bounty Program

OpenAI has a program that rewards participants with hard cash if you find bugs in their software. The rewards are $200 for low-severity findings to up to $20,000 for “exceptional discoveries”. See the links section for more or to sign up for the program.

Compressed Natural Gas Car Explosion

Ken Powell provided a video of a compressed natural gas car exploding in a filling station for such fueled vehicles. Originally the video was thought to be about an electric vehicle charging. The video is not available on the internet.

Bard Getting Math Question Wrong

On April 2nd Bruce had send an email to me showing how Bard got a math prompt wrong.

Prompt: find z such that 64 percent of the standard normal curve lies between z and -z

This is unexpected since Google makes it clear that Bard can be inaccurate and is still learning.

Bruce explained the math to us. I tried the prompt at the meeting and Bard got it correct according to Bruce. That lends some credence to Google’s claim that Bard is still learning.

Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster”

Lunar lobster is the 38th release of Ubuntu’s desktop Linux distribution. The release number is translated as April 2023.

It has a new installer, improvements in the system user interface, thumbnails in the file browser, copy image and paste to create an image file and mouse/touch-pad/keyboard setting UI improvements to mention a few. An article with details is in the links section.

Links

By Lon Hosford

Internet and Mobile Development Educator and Consultant Independent software developer with practical engineering project experience for clients such as AT&T, Avis, Bristol Myers Squibb, Ortho BioTech, Chanel, Avaya, Green Birdie Video, Aztec Learning Systems and Verizon Wireless. Lon is well known for translating client needs into useful applications. An interesting aspect of Lon's consulting work was the creation of industry jobs that did not exist before. That lead to hiring and training college students who were taught dead technologies at a time academia was woefully behind on the paradigm shifts in personal computing, the internet and today the distributed device environment often called mobile. Lon has taught thousands of students internet web development, animation and programming topics over two decades both privately and academically. He developed Multimedia Associated Degree program and courses for Raritan Valley Community College in the 1990s at a time when Macromedia Authorware and Director were tools. He is the founder, developer and educator for Raritan Valley Community College Web Developer Certification program also having its roots in the 1990s at the dawn of the internet. He also was a key curriculum developer and instructor for one of the Nation's first Web Developer Certification program offered through New Jersey Institute of Technology. Lon was also a technology instructor at the University of Phoenix Online. Lon over the years has produced educational video for topics including Paradox, Cobol, Java, Jasmine, C, C++, Linux, Flash, Cocos 2d and HTML. These courses were distributed and taught in Universities internationally when global was an emerging term.