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iOS apps can secretly record and take pictures once you’ve given them camera permission

31 Oct

If you want to be sure nobody is spying on you through your laptop’s webcam, the best thing you can do is cover the lens—but the same might actually be true for the camera on your Apple smartphone.

Felix Krause, a developer at Google, has found that any iOS app could secretly use the iPhone’s camera to record images and video of the user, once given permission to access the camera at all. Krause developed an app for demonstration purposes that shows how an app could use either front or rear cameras to capture images and video in the background. The resulting footage or images could be directly transferred to cloud servers without the user being aware or receiving any notifications.

The camera could also be used to run real-time face recognition, possibly even identifying the user.

The good news is that Krause’s app is not approved for distribution through the iTunes App Store; hopefully such malicious behavior would be picked up during Apple’s pretty strict review process. However, if you want to be entirely certain you’re not being spied on, the best options seem to be covering the lens or not granting camera access to any app you don’t 100 percent trust.

For a better idea of the issue, watch the video below that shows Krause’s proof-of-concept app in action, or read the full report on his website.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Virtual Heist: 2 Artists Secretly 3D-Scan an Ancient Artifact

04 Mar

[ By WebUrbanist in Culture & History & Travel. ]

3d art figure scan

An usually high-tech form of pseudo-theft, executed by a pair of artists, has resulted in a high-resolution scan of the famous Queen Nefertiti statue at the heart of a dispute between Germany and Egypt. Avoiding the watchful gaze of four guards at the Neues Museum in Berlin, Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles painstakingly scanned the 3,500-year-old bust over the course of three hours using a Kinect.

3d nefriti statue scan

Technically, nothing was taken, but the exact contours of the bust are now publicly available, open-sourced by the artists in question.

3d rendered egyptian artifact

Their work, itself a sort of art project, is in part a commentary on the question of art ownership and accessibility. The statue in question has been in Germany for over 100 years, but the Egyptian government has been lobbying to get it back.

3d figure copy

Since the release of their data dump, thousands of people have downloaded a virtual copy of the statue either to examine or 3D-print a copy. While this is not the same as preservation, it does add layers of redundancy for future researchers should something ever happen to the original figure. Many galleries are already making high-resolution images of famous paintings and drawings available on the web, and there is no reason a similar tactic could not be taken with three-dimensional works as well.