Month: July 2016

(credit: Sinclair et al, Nature Communications)

Twenty years ago this month, Dolly the sheep started her life in a laboratory. She quickly gained farm animal fame as the first successfully cloned mammal. Despite her stardom, Dolly’s life was cut short by an unusually early case of osteoarthritis. Some observers thought she aged too quickly. At just six-and-a-half years old, veterinarians put her down. And with her went a lot of optimism about cloning’s potential.

Still, many hopeful scientists hypothesized that her test-tube origins had nothing to do with her tragic fate. And it turns out they were probably right.

Kevin Sinclair, a developmental biologist at the University of Nottingham in England, joined his colleagues in putting 13 other cloned sheep, some in their golden years, through a battery of tests. He and his fellow researchers found that the cloned sheep are not only healthy, but they’re aging completely normally. Four of those sheep were cloned from the exact same batch of cells as Dolly.

Epic Games Founder Tim Sweeney (credit: Epic Games)

Tim Sweeney doesn't like Windows 10 or Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform, the common development platform that allows developers to create software that can run on Windows on PCs, phones, tablets, HoloLens, and the Xbox. In March he published an op-ed in The Guardian saying that UWP "can, should, must, and will die" because, he claimed, Microsoft could use UWP to create a walled garden, with UWP games not available through competing stores such as Steam. Still apparently concerned with the health of the PC gaming industry, Sweeney is now claiming, through in an interview with the print-only Edge magazine, that Microsoft will use Windows updates to kill Steam.

Sweeney's complaints about UWP were technically off-base. His issues are based on the assumption that all UWP apps had to be individually vetted by Microsoft and could only be delivered by the Windows Store. This was somewhat true in Windows 8—apps built using the WinRT platform (the predecessor branding to UWP) could not be trivially sideloaded, as the ability was officially restricted to enterprise users only. But it's not true in Windows 10. Sideloading is enabled by default in Windows 10, and any third party store could download and install UWP-based games in much the same way as they already do for software that uses the Win32 API.

Sweeney's Steam concerns are once again driven by UWP:

Google Maps has announced a new update that tweaks the look of the map and adds a feature that highlights "hotspots" in your area.

Google says the new map design is cleaner and easier to read. The company has "removed elements that aren’t absolutely required (like road outlines)" and "improved the typography of street names, points of interest, transit stations, and more" to make the map more readable. Google's more "subtle" visual scheme lets you know what kind of location you're looking at just by the color and even provides a color key.

With the map cleaned up, Google is adding a new feature to the base layer of the map. When zoomed out to a sufficient level, clusters of popular points of interest become highlighted in orange. Zoom in and the individual places appear, also highlighted in orange, letting you know how popular they are.

April 29, Pinewood Studios, UK—Writer/Director/Producer JJ Abrams (top center right) at the cast read-through of Star Wars Episode VII at Pinewood Studios with (clockwise from right) Harrison Ford, Daisy Ridley, Carrie Fisher, Peter Mayhew, Producer Bryan Burk, Lucasfilm President and Producer Kathleen Kennedy, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Mark Hamill, Andy Serkis, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, Adam Driver, and writer Lawrence Kasdan. (credit: David James)

On Tuesday, a UK-based Disney subsidiary pleaded guilty to two criminal charges of failing to protect its employees on the set of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, specifically Harrison Ford, whose leg was broken by a hydraulic door on the Millennium Falcon set.

The charges were brought by the UK’s Health and Safety regulator, which sued the Disney subsidiary—called Foodles Production—back in February over the 2014 incident.

Ford, then 71, was struck by the Millennium Falcon door and had to be airlifted to a nearby hospital for treatment. A spokesperson for the Health and Safety regulator said in a press release that “the power of the door’s drive system was comparable to the weight of a small car.”

Sales of the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus haven't been as stellar as the 6 and 6 Plus. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple's quarterly profit fell 27 percent in Q3 2016, to $7.80 billion from $10.68 billion a year ago, but the company's shares rose today as the earnings beat analysts' expectations. Quarterly revenue was $42.36 billion, down from $49.60 billion in the year-ago quarter, a drop of 14.6 percent.

The third quarter results "reflect stronger customer demand and business performance than we anticipated at the start of the quarter," CEO Tim Cook said. When Apple announced its previous results three months ago, the company said it expected to make between $41 and $43 billion in revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2016, with profit margins between 37.5 and 38 percent. Actual results were near the top end of the estimates; gross margin was 38 percent.

"Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters estimated that Apple would post earnings of $1.38 a share on revenue of $42.1 billion," The Wall Street Journal reported. Actual earnings per share were $1.42.

Why go to the trouble of playing Pokémon Go when this bot offers to do it for you?

Last week, we took a look into the growing world of Pokémon Go hacks that reveal the location of usually hidden Pokémon nearby. Now, a new wave of PC-based Pokémon Go "bots" take the hacking a step further, spoofing locations and automating actions to essentially play the game for you while you sit in the comfort of your own home.

There are a number of competing bots out there, from the open source Necrobot to the pre-compiled Pokébuddy to MyGoBot, which recently started charging $4.99 for its automation tool following a three-hour free trial. All of them work on the same basic principles, sending artificial data to the Pokémon Go servers to simulate an extremely efficient, entirely tireless player.

The user first provides a latitude and longitude as a starting point (the center of any major city is a good place to start) and some Pokémon Go account credentials to authenticate with the servers. The bot then finds any nearby Pokémon (using those previously discussed mapping functions) and simulates a "walk" to the nearest one by sending spoofed GPS coordinates to the server at appropriate intervals. When the bot gets close enough to a Pokémon, it can use a simple API call to quickly catch it before moving on to the next target.

Sometimes, the fierce competition in the booming crypto ransomware market works in the favor of the victims whose priceless data is held hostage. That appears to be what played out on Tuesday when the criminals behind a package known as "Mischa" published what's purported to be the secret crypto keys for the rival Chimera malware.

"Earlier this year we got access to big parts of their deveolpment [sic] system, and included parts of Chimera in our project," the Mischa developers wrote in a message posted to Pastebin. "Additionally we now release about 3500 decryption keys from Chimera."

Translation: As if breaking in to the Chimera developers' network and stealing their code wasn't enough of an affront, the competing Mischa gang now claims to have leaked the keys that defang Chimera forever.