Month: April 2016

Platinum mass & well-formed crystals from Russia. (public display, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA) (credit: James St. John)

Microsoft's Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team works to track down and identify hacking groups that perpetrate attacks. The focus is on the groups that are most selective about their targets and that work hardest to stay undetected. The company wrote today about one particular group that it has named PLATINUM.

The unknown group has been attacking targets in South East Asia since at least 2009, with Malaysia being its biggest victim with just over half the attacks, and Indonesia in second place. Almost half of the attacks were aimed at government organizations of some kind, including intelligence and defense agencies, and a further quarter of the attacks were aimed at ISPs. The goal of these attacks does not appear to have been immediate financial gain—these hackers weren't after credit cards and banking details—but rather broader economic espionage using stolen information.

Microsoft doesn't appear to know a great deal about the team doing the hacking. They have often used spear-phishing to initially penetrate target networks and seem to have taken great pains to hide their attacks. For example, they've used self-deleting malware to cover their tracks, customized malware to evade anti-virus detection, and malware that limits its network activity to only be active during business hours, so its traffic is harder to notice. Redmond suggests that the adversary is likely a government organization of some kind, due to its organization and the kinds of data it has sought to steal.

Apple's two biggest moneymakers, the iPhone and iPad, are down year-over-year. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple has just released its earnings report for the second quarter of fiscal 2016, which runs from the beginning of January to the end of March. As CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri warned in last quarter's earnings call, iPhone sales were down year-over-year for the first time since the product's launch in 2007. Since the iPhone accounts for around two-thirds of Apple's revenue, this means that Apple is also reporting its first year-over-year quarterly revenue decline since 2003, something CEO Tim Cook referred to as a "pause in [Apple's] growth." iPad and Mac sales are also down, though the Services and "Other products" categories ticked upward.

Apple made $10.5 billion in profit and $58 billion in revenue, compared to $13.6 billion in profit and $58 billion in revenue in Q1 of 2015. Its gross margin was 39.4 percent. These results beat the low end of Apple's guidance for the quarter, which predicted revenue between $50 billion and $53 billion and a profit margin between 39 and 40 percent.

The company predicts that the year-over-year quarterly decline will continue next year—Apple expects it will make between $41 and $43 billion in revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2016 with profit margins between 37.5 and 38 percent. This is well below the $49.6 billion in revenue that Apple made in Q3 of 2015.

(credit: Fullscreen)

YouTube Red isn't the only digital video service to put YouTube stars at the forefront of its content. The media company Fullscreen launched its online video subscription service featuring shows that star YouTube personalities, including Grace Helbig and Shane Dawson. The ad-free subscription service will be free for the first month and then users can pay $4.99 per month to continue watching.

Fullscreen started out as a type of talent agency that worked with social media stars to secure ad-sponsored deals on free sites like Instagram. Fullscreen's founder George Strompolos told the BCC, "Social media is a great place to make quick, inexpensive content to engage a fanbase. But when it comes to longer form or premium productions, the economics of producing it on the free web just don't work out." Now, with the company's roster of more than 75,000 partners (many of which are from YouTube), it will create a "premium destination" with original content featuring a lot of online personalities that young people already know, as well as licensed shows and movies.

Fullscreen didn't waste time in going for the big stars on YouTube. Comedian and personality Shane Dawson of ShaneDawsonTV has a huge following of more than 7.3 million subscribers, one movie under his belt with another on the way, and a podcast he's been recording for the past three years. Fullscreen will take his Shane and Friends podcast and produce it in video format, so fans who want to watch Dawson and his cohost Jessie Buttafuoco interact with guests can do so, while others can still listen to the podcast for free on iTunes or Soundcloud.

(credit: Kieran McCarthy)

The 2017 Agriculture Appropriations Bill may not seem like a stirring piece of legislation to most, but it raised quite a few eyebrows last week as it passed through a House subcommittee with a key amendment—one that aims to spare the vast majority of electronic cigarettes from impending federal regulations.

The bipartisan effort to protect the burgeoning e-cig market is just the latest in a long-smoldering debate reignited by the Food and Drug Administration’s plans this year to begin regulating the new devices as it does traditional tobacco products. The crux of the controversy is about whether e-cigarettes act more as a gateway into or a ticket out of dangerous tobacco use, the single largest cause of preventable deaths in the US.

E-cig flavors. (credit: Wikimedia)

Proponents argue that the new FDA regulations will protect children from bad habits. For instance, one of the proposed rules will prevent e-cig makers from using youth-based marketing—like edgy, rebellious ads and candy-flavored e-cigs—that can hook kids into lifelong nicotine addictions and deadly tobacco habits. Such marketing strategies were first used by tobacco companies decades ago and were highly successful until the FDA banned the practice. With e-cig companies already copying the tactics, many politicians and public health experts have chided the FDA for not rolling out regulations faster. The agency first proposed rules back in 2014.