Elie Bursztein

It doesn't need to be a sex toy, obviously. $5 worth of parts from Ali Baba could be assembled into a signaling tool: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Type-C-Bluetooth-5-0-Audio_1600… There's even prebuilt solutions for things like poker: https://www.cardslenses.com/remote-contorl-poker-game-vibrator.shtml https://elie.net/blog/security/royal-flush-an-in-depth-look-at-poker-c…

https://elie.net mostly about the research we do at Google. Generated statically and hosted on firebase. The design was custom made for it.

Elie Bursztein leads Google's anti-abuse research, and recently mentioned on Google+ that he moved his personal web site to GAE: http://www.elie.net/ I can load his GAE-hosted web site in ~300ms, and there's a useful performance box on the right sidebar of his site that breaks down how long each component takes to load on GAE: $ time curl http://www.elie.net/ > /dev/null % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 36146 0 36146 0 0 113k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 114k real 0m0.316s user 0m0.005s sys 0m0.005s I've been thinking of doing the same with my personal web site but haven't yet.

Here's an article from 2017 talking about this class of devices: https://elie.net/blog/security/fuller-house-exposing-high-end-poker-ch…

Google's Elie Burzstein and Jean Michel Picod gave a fascinating talk at Defcon last week about silicon-level SCAs: https://elie.net/talk/a-hackerguide-to-deep-learning-based-side-channe… Disclosure: also work at G.

Already done, sort of. Blizzard was not amused, as botting makes the game less fun, so it wasnt released. https://elie.net/blog/hearthstone/i-am-a-legend-hacking-hearthstone-wi…

You can also get cheating devices [1] where the edges of all the cards are printed with IR barcodes, then a special camera (concealed in a modified phone or car key fob) can tell you upcoming cards by looking at the edge of the deck. Of course, you need to convince people to play with your deck of cards first, so you can't just walk into a casino with these things. [1] https://www.elie.net/blog/security/fuller-house-exposing-high-end-poke…

Hi, I put together a newsletter called Interesting Things that curates 40+ interesting stories and links every week about tech with a splash of business and science. Looking through the past few editions, there has been an average of one AI/deep-learning/neural-network related article per week: Issue #001 Shedding light on fairness in AI with a new data set — Facebook publishes a dataset of of 45,186 human face-to-face videos with an emphasis on fairness and diversity across age, gender, skin tone, & ambient lighting. — https://ai.facebook.com/blog/shedding-light-on-fairness-in-ai-with-a-n… Issue #002 Geometric foundations of Deep Learning — An attempt to unify a broad class of ML problems from the perspectives of symmetry and invariance. — https://towardsdatascience.com/geometric-foundations-of-deep-learning-… Latest Neural Nets Solve World’s Hardest Equations Faster Than Ever Before — New approaches to solve entire families of partial differential equations and make it easier to model complicated systems. — https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-neural-networks-solve-hardest-equat… Issue #004 Superhistory, Not Superintelligence — Simpler algorithms and more data do better than more complex algorithms with less data. What are the implications? — https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/superhistory-not-superintelligenc… Reimagining Databases for Vector Embeddings — How is a vector database different from a conventional…

But this all hinges on the naive assumptions that this is a one off and will never happen again, and that later generation devices are immune from any circumvention attempt. History says this isn't how this plays out. If you crack the encryption once you'll get orders to crack it again and again, and in much lower profile and lower stake cases. Look at the prevalence of espionage tactics such as Stingrays and "parallel construction" by law enforcement. There may not always be someone you can pump up into an crack international terrorist, but there's always some low level drug courier, or a "quality of life" criminal to use your new toys on. Also you're saying hat this doesn't set a precedent, but it does. Sure there's not a court case to point to, but it's a precedent none the less. It's that the company not only has the means, but the will to do it. What's stopping the government from coming back a second time, or a third time about this? What argument do you have on either a legal court or the court of public opinion to make when you stand up and say, "That first time was an exigent situation, and so was the second, and the third... But this time, the fourteenth time, THIS TIME we really mean no more!" Finally, I don't think this trick only works on older devices. The FBI wants them to be able to brute force the passcode through a USB connection instead of making some sort of robot to tap the screen a bunch of times. Also presumably the FBI wants the the two many…