A US House antitrust committee is getting set to grill tech’s biggest CEOs, but Microsoft wants them to focus on one in particular: Apple’s Tim Cook. Microsoft President Brad Smith met with the committee several weeks ago and relayed concerns about how Apple manages its App Store, according to the The Information (via Bloomberg).
Smith complained specifically about Apple’s arbitrary App Store approval policy which recently caused a ruckus over the rejection of Basecamp’s Hey email app. He also railed against Apple’s payment requirement that allows it to take as much as a 30 percent cut of developers’ revenue. That policy is currently the subject of an EU antitrust investigation launched at the behest of Spotify.
The antitrust committee originally called Smith to get Microsoft’s take on the current antitrust climate, given that the company was the subject of US investigations in the 2000s. Smith said that Apple’s App Store rules impede competition to a much higher degree than Microsoft did with Windows when it was found guilty of antitrust violations two decades ago. Smith didn’t criticize other tech companies during the interview.
Apple has largely avoided the privacy-related investigations faced by Google and Facebook, but now finds itself in the middle of antitrust probes on both sides of the Atlantic. With its old frenemy Microsoft adding to the complaints, Apple could face a lot of heat when the House Judiciary Antitrust hearings kick off next Monday on July 27th.
Tim Sweeney, CEO of Fortnite developer Epic Games, criticized Apple and Google for having an “absolute monopoly” on app stores in a Friday interview with CNBC. There aren’t many viable options for distributing mobile software outside the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, and Sweeney chides both for taking a 30 percent fee from in-app purchases.
Epic Games launched the Epic Games Store in late 2018 for Windows and Mac computers, and only charges other publishers a 12 percent fee on in-app purchases. The Epic Games Store hasn’t made it to the App Store because of Apple’s strict guidelines against competing software stores.
“They [Apple] are preventing an entire category of businesses and applications from being engulfed in their ecosystem by virtue of excluding competitors from each aspect of their business that they’re protecting,” Sweeney said.
Epic previously made Fortnite available to Android devices not by offering it on the Google Play Store, but instead through a launcher on the Fortnite website that downloaded the game. This allowed Epic to sidestep the 30 percent fee from Google. But the download process was too involved for many users, so Fortnite eventually launched on Google Play earlier this year. Sweeney said the company still plans to bring the Epic Games Store to Android. “Google essentially intentionally stifles competing stores by having user interface barriers and obstruction,” Sweeney said.
Epic isn’t the first company to speak out against Apple and Google’s 30 percent fee. In March of last year, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek filed an unfair competition complaint against Apple with the European Commission, citing the fee as forcing them to artificially inflate the price of its Spotify Premium membership. Last July, Tinder introduced a default payment process into its Android app meant to bypass the Google Play Store fee.
Garmin is reportedly being asked to pay a $10 million ransom to free its systems from a cyberattack that has taken down many of its services for two days.
The navigation company was hit by a ransomware attack on Thursday, leaving customers unable to log fitness sessions in Garmin apps and pilots unable to download flight plans for aircraft navigation systems, among other problems. The company’s communication systems have also been taken offline, leaving it unable to respond to disgruntled customers.
Garmin employees have told BleepingComputer that the company was struck down by the WastedLocker ransomware. Screenshots sent to BleepingComputer show long lists of the company’s files encrypted by the malware, with a ransom note attached to each file.
The ransom note tells the recipient to email one of two email addresses to “get a price for your data”. That price, Garmin’s sources have told BleepingComputer, is $10 million.
Crippled Garmin
The ransomware attack has crippled many of the company’s systems. Reports claim that Garmin’s IT department shut down all of the company’s computers, including those of employees working from home who were connected by VPN, to halt the spread of the ransomware across its network.
Garmin’s Taiwan factories have reportedly closed production lines yesterday and today while the company attempts to unpick the ransomware.
The shutdown is having a big effect on Garmin’s customers. DownDetector reveals a huge spike today in people having trouble accessing Garmin Connect, the app that logs fitness routines for the company’s devices. More people are likely to be using such devices at the weekend.
DownDetector shows how Garmin customers continue to be affected
DownDetector
The problem is even more serious for Garmin’s aviation device customers. Pilots have told ZDNet that they are unable to download a version of Garmin’s aviation database onto their airplane navigation systems, which is an FAA requirement.
Garmin has issued very little public comment about the problem. On Thursday, the company issued a tweet saying “we are currently experiencing an outage that affects Garmin Connect,” adding that the outage “also affects our call centers and we are currently unable to receive any calls, emails or online chats”.
Garmin has been approached for comment, but as you can appreciate from the statement above, that’s somewhat complicated…
Space seems empty and therefore the perfect environment for radio communications. Don’t let that fool you: There’s still plenty that can disrupt radio communications. Earth’s fluctuating ionosphere can impair a link between a satellite and a ground station. The materials of the antenna can be distorted as it heats and cools. And the near-vacuum of space is filled with low-level ambient radio emanations, known as cosmic noise, which come from distant quasars, the sun, and the center of our Milky Way galaxy. This noise also includes the cosmic microwave background radiation, a ghost of the big bang. Although faint, these cosmic sources can overwhelm a wireless signal over interplanetary distances.
Depending on a spacecraft’s mission, or even the particular phase of the mission, different link qualities may be desirable, such as maximizing data throughput, minimizing power usage, or ensuring that certain critical data gets through. To maintain connectivity, the communications system constantly needs to tailor its operations to the surrounding environment.
Imagine a group of astronauts on Mars. To connect to a ground station on Earth, they’ll rely on a relay satellite orbiting Mars. As the space environment changes and the planets move relative to one another, the radio settings on the ground station, the satellite orbiting Mars, and the Martian lander will need continual adjustments. The astronauts could wait 8 to 40 minutes—the duration of a round trip—for instructions from mission control on how to adjust the settings. A better alternative is to have the radios use neural networks to adjust their settings in real time. Neural networks maintain and optimize a radio’s ability to keep in contact, even under extreme conditions such as Martian orbit. Rather than waiting for a human on Earth to tell the radio how to adapt its systems—during which the commands may have already become outdated—a radio with a neural network can do it on the fly.
Such a device is called a cognitive radio. Its neural network autonomously senses the changes in its environment, adjusts its settings accordingly—and then, most important of all, learns from the experience. That means a cognitive radio can try out new configurations in new situations, which makes it more robust in unknown environments than a traditional radio would be. Cognitive radios are thus ideal for space communications, especially far beyond Earth orbit, where the environments are relatively unknown, human intervention is impossible, and maintaining connectivity is vital.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Penn State University, in cooperation with NASA, recently tested the first cognitive radios designed to operate in space and keep missions in contact with Earth. In our tests, even the most basic cognitive radios maintained a clear signal between the International Space Station (ISS) and the ground. We believe that with further research, more advanced, more capable cognitive radios can play an integral part in successful deep-space missions in the future, where there will be no margin for error.
Future crews to the moon and Mars will have more than enough to do collecting field samples, performing scientific experiments, conducting land surveys, and keeping their equipment in working order. Cognitive radios will free those crews from the onus of maintaining the communications link. Even more important is that cognitive radios will help ensure that an unexpected occurrence in deep space doesn’t sever the link, cutting the crew’s last tether to Earth, millions of kilometers away.
Cognitive radio as an idea was first proposed by Joseph Mitola III at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, in 1998. Since then, many cognitive radio projects have been undertaken, but most were limited in scope or tested just a part of a system. The most robust cognitive radios tested to date have been built by the U.S. Department of Defense.
When designing a traditional wireless communications system, engineers generally use mathematical models to represent the radio and the environment in which it will operate. The models try to describe how signals might reflect off buildings or propagate in humid air. But not even the best models can capture the complexity of a real environment.
A cognitive radio—and the neural network that makes it work—learns from the environment itself, rather than from a mathematical model. A neural network takes in data about the environment, such as what signal modulations are working best or what frequencies are propagating farthest, and processes that data to determine what the radio’s settings should be for an optimal link. The key feature of a neural network is that it can, over time, optimize the relationships between the inputs and the result. This process is known as training.
The EU has demanded that Google make major concessions relating to its $2.1 billion acquisition of fitness-tracking company Fitbit if the deal is to be allowed to proceed imminently, according to people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
Since it was announced last November, the acquisition has faced steep opposition from consumer groups and regulators, who have raised concerns over the effect of Google’s access to Fitbit’s health data on competition.
EU regulators now want the company to pledge that it will not use that information to “further enhance its search advantage” and that it will grant third parties equal access to it, these people said.
The move comes days after the EU regulators suffered a major blow in Luxembourg, losing a landmark case that would have forced Apple to pay back €14.3 billion in taxes to Ireland.
Brussels insiders said that a refusal by Google to comply with the new demands would probably result in a protracted investigation, adding that such a scenario could ultimately leave the EU at a disadvantage.
“It is like a poker game,” said a person following the case closely. “In a lengthy probe, the commission risks having fewer or no pledges and still having to clear the deal.”
They added that the discussions over the acquisition were “intense,” and there was no guarantee that any agreement between Brussels and Google would be reached.
Google had previously promised it would not use Fitbit’s health data to improve its own advertising, but according to Brussels insiders, the commitment was not sufficient to assuage the EU’s concerns nor those of US regulators also examining the deal.
Twitter said on Saturday that the perpetrators “manipulated a small number of employees and used their credentials” to log into tools and turn over access to 45 accounts. here On Wednesday, it said that the hackers could have read direct messages to and from 36 accounts but did not identify the affected users.
The former employees familiar with Twitter security practices said that too many people could have done the same thing, more than 1,000 as of earlier in 2020, including some at contractors like Cognizant.
Twitter declined to comment on that figure and would not say whether the number declined before the hack or since. The company was looking for a new security head, working to better secure its systems and training employees on resisting tricks from outsiders, Twitter said. Cognizant did not respond to a request for comment.
“That sounds like there are too many people with access,” said Edward Amoroso, former chief security officer at AT&T. Responsibilities among the staff should have been split up, with access rights limited to those responsibilities and more than one person required to agree to make the most sensitive account changes. “In order to do cyber security right, you can’t forget the boring stuff.”
Threats from insiders, especially lower-paid outside support staff, are a constant worry for companies serving large numbers of users, cyber security experts said. They said that the greater the number of people who can change key settings, the stronger oversight must be.
[…]
On a call to discuss company earnings on Thursday, Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey acknowledged past missteps.
“We fell behind, both in our protections against social engineering of our employees and restrictions on our internal tools,” Dorsey told investors.
Researchers have spotted large waves of martian sand migrating for the first time. The discovery dispels the long-held belief that these “megaripples” haven’t moved since they formed hundreds of thousands of years ago. They’re also evidence of stronger-than-expected winds on the Red Planet.
It’s pretty staggering that humans can detect these changes on Mars, says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who was not involved in the research. “We can now measure processes on the surface of another planet that are just a couple times faster than our hair grows.”
Megaripples are found in deserts on Earth, often between dunes. Waves in the sand spaced up to tens of meters apart, they’re a larger version of ripples that undulate every 10 centimeters or so on many sand dunes.
But unlike dunes, megaripples are made up of two sizes of sand grains. Coarser, heavier grains cap the crests of megaripples, making it harder for wind to move these features around, says Simone Silvestro, a planetary scientist at Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics in Naples.
Since the early 2000s, Mars rovers and orbiters have repeatedly spotted megaripples on the Red Planet. But they didn’t seem to change in any measurable way, which led some scientists to think they were relics from Mars’s past, when its thicker atmosphere permitted stronger winds.
Now, using images captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Silvestro and his colleagues have shown that some megaripples do creep along—just very slowly.
The researchers focused on two sites near the equator of Mars. They analyzed roughly 1100 megaripples in McLaughlin crater and 300 in the Nili Fossae region. They looked for signs of movement by comparing time-lapse images of each site—taken 7.6 and 9.4 years apart, respectively. Megaripples in both regions advanced by about 10 centimeters per year, the team reports in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. That’s about how fast megaripples move in the Lut Desert of Iran.
It’s a surprise that megaripples move at all on Mars, says Jim Zimbelman, a planetary geologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum. Just a few decades ago, there was no evidence that sands on Mars were mobile, he says. “None of us thought that the winds were strong enough.”
More than 1,000 unsecured databases so far have been permanently deleted in an ongoing attack that leaves the word “meow” as its only calling card, according to Internet searches over the past day.
IP addresses of both user devices and the VPN servers they connected to
Connection timestamps
Geo-tags
Device and OS characteristics
Apparent domains from which advertisements are injected into free users’ Web browsers
Besides amounting to a serious privacy breach, the database was at odds with the Hong Kong-based UFO’s promise to keep no logs. The VPN provider responded by moving the database to a different location but once again failed to secure it properly. Shortly after, the Meow attack wiped it out.
Representatives of UFO didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Since then, Meow and a similar attack have destroyed more than 1,000 other databases. At the time this post went live, the Shodan computer search site showed that 987 ElasticSearch and 70 MongoDB instances had been nuked by Meow. A separate, less-malicious attack tagged an additional 616 ElasticSearch, MongoDB, and Cassandra files with the string “university_cybersec_experiment.” The attackers in this case seem to be demonstrating to the database maintainers that the files are vulnerable to being viewed or deleted.
Just for fun
It’s not the first time attackers have targeted unsecured databases, which have become increasingly common with the growing use of cloud computing services from Amazon, Microsoft, and other providers. In some cases, the motivation is to make money through ransomware rackets. In other cases—including the current Meow attacks—the data is simply wiped out with no ransomware note or any other explanation. The only thing left behind in the current attacks is the word “meow.”
One database affected by the Meow attack.
“I think that in most [of the latter] cases, malicious actors behind the attacks do it just for fun, because they can, and because it is really simple to do,” Diachenko told me. “Thus, it is another wake-up call for the industry and companies which ignore cyber hygiene and lose their data and data of their customers in a blink of an eye.”
“Comet Neowise has been the brightest and most visible space snowball in a generation, but it’s also the first naked-eye comet to visit us in the new era of satellite mega-constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink,” writes CNET.
“In just the latest episode of Starlink ‘trains’ irritating astronomers, a number of images have been circulating of the satellites photo-bombing Comet Neowise glamour shots…”
Live Science explains: Visible just above the horizon right now, the comet appears faint and small to the naked eye, but can be seen clearly through cameras with long, telephoto lenses. Usually, when photographers capture objects like this in the night sky they use long exposure times, leaving the camera aperture open to collect light over the course of several seconds. But now comet-chasers report that a new fleet of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites is leaving bright smears across their NEOWISE snaps, as the shiny orbiters streak through their frames during long exposures.
The AI that DutchSteamMachine uses is called Depth-Aware video frame INterpolation, or DAIN for short. This AI is open source, free and constantly being developed and improved upon… “People have used the same AI programs to bring old film recordings from the 1900s back to life, in high definition and colour,” he said. “This technique seemed like a great thing to apply to much newer footage….”
DutchSteamMachine does this work in his spare time, and posts it for free on his YouTube page. His tagline is “Preserving the past for the future…” And he’s planning to keep it all coming. “I plan to improve tons of Apollo footage like this,” he said. “A lot more space and history-related footage is going to be published on my YT channel continuously.” He also has a Flickr page with more enhanced imagery. [And a Patreon page…]
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 calls it “similar to what Peter Jackson did with old World War I footage for They Shall Not Grow Old.”
Apple’s iOS 14 beta has proven surprisingly handy at sussing out what apps are snooping on your phone’s data. It ratted out LinkedIn, Reddit, and TikTok for secretly copying clipboard content earlier this month, and now Instagram’s in hot water after several users reported that their camera’s “in use” indicator stays on even when they’re just scrolling through their Instagram feed.
According to reportsshared on social media by users with the iOS 14 beta installed, the green “camera on” indicator would pop up when they used the app even when they weren’t taking photos or recording videos. If this sounds like deja vu, that’s because Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, had to fix a similar issue with its iOS app last year when users found their device’s camera would quietly activate in the background without their permission while using Facebook.
In an interview with the Verge, an Instagram spokesperson called this issue a bug that the company’s currently working to patch.
[…]
Even though iOS 14 is still in beta mode and its privacy features aren’t yet available to the general public, it’s already raised plenty of red flags about apps snooping on your data. Though TikTok, LinkedIn, and Reddit may have been the most high-profile examples, researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk found more than 50 iOS apps quietly accessing users’ clipboards as well. And while there are certainly more malicious breaches of privacy, these kinds of discoveries are a worrying reminder about how much we risk every time we go online.
Video games look really good these days. I boot up almost any PS4 game released in the last few years and I’m impressed. But while games might look nicer than ever before, we lost cool looking “heads-up displays”, HUDs, in the process. Was it worth it?
I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey lately. A lot. And it got me interested in the past games, most of which I played long ago when they first released. In going back and looking at these games, I immediately noticed something. Their HUDs were so much cooler than what’s in Odyssey.
Look at the weird map! And the cool looking DNA-inspired life bar. I also like how high contrast it feels. Odyssey’s HUD is clean and efficient. It gets the job done, for sure, but it lacks personality. And if we go back even further, to the PS2 era of gaming, we can find even more wild HUDs, as pointed about by Twitter user @BlacWeird a few months back.
Here’s what the HUD looked like in SkyGunner. It’s got a steampunk vibe to it.
Or how about Project Snowblind. What is happening in that mini-map in the top right? I have no idea.
Screenshot: Edios / Square Enix
And even a less obscure PS2 game, the original God of War, had a giant sword for its health meter.
Screenshot: Sony
Compared that last screen to this screenshot from the newest entry in the God of War series, confusingly named God of War, released on PS4 back in 2018.
Screenshot: Sony
Again, like Odyssey, it works great. But it also has almost no personality. It’s boring. And yet, for the most part, this is what all video game HUDs have become. Clean, slightly transparent boxes and white lines that often fade away when not needed. I understand, and even agree, that these new HUDS are more effective at translating information and data to players. But there has to be a middle ground?
An example of a game that has HUD graphics that aren’t boring, but not too weird or big is last year’s Devil May Cry 5.
Screenshot: Capcom
The text is sharp and clean and the icons are small, but there’s also a variety of colors, a weird devil face, and some broken glass on the corners. It has style. It doesn’t look like a console from a JJ Abrams Star Trek film. It looks exciting but also I can clearly understand what information the game is sharing with me, which is always vital.
