Month: August 2016

Huawei might not be well known in the US, but after Samsung and Apple, it's the third most popular smartphone OEM worldwide. The company's sub brand, "Honor," launched in the US in the beginning of the year, and today the company took the wraps off its second US-bound phone, the Honor 8. The device is more-or-less a cheaper version of the Huawei P9.

For $399, you get a 5.2-inch 1920×1080 LCD, an eight-core HiSilicon Kirin 950 SoC, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (with an SD card slot), and a 3000mAh battery. There's also the option of upgrading to a 64GB model for $449.99.

Don't worry if you've never heard of a "HiSilicon Kirin 950 SoC." Huawei is one of the few companies that makes its own SoCs, and this division is called "HiSilicon." The Kirin 950 uses four 2.3GHz Cortex A72s and four 1.8GHz A53s, making it a high-end chip that should be within the ballpark of a Snapdragon 820 or Exynos 8890. Other goodies on the Honor 8 include a totally-not-optional 3.5mm headphone jack, NFC, a USB Type C plug, fingerprint sensor, and an IR LED.

(credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

Multiple media outlets reported Tuesday that Gawker Media, the embattled online media company that has been the target of multiple lawsuits, announced that it had been acquired by Univision for $135 million. Univision beat out a lower bid by Ziff Davis.

The deal must formally be approved by the federal judge overseeing Gawker’s bankruptcy case.

Univision, which owns the largest Spanish-language television network in the United States, has recently been expanding its online holdings. Earlier this year it bought out Disney’s stake in the Fusion network and website. Univision also expanded investments in The Onion, a humor site, and The Root, a site that focuses on African-American news.

(credit: cinefil_)

Thanks to a judge's order, Google must face another proposed class-action lawsuit over its scanning of Gmail. The issue is a lingering headache for the search giant, which has faced allegations for years now that scanning Gmail in order to create personalized ads violates US wiretapping laws.

In a 38-page order (PDF), US District Judge Lucy Koh rejected Google's argument that the scanning takes place within the "ordinary course of business."

"Not every practice that is routine or legitimate will fall within the scope of the 'ordinary course of business'," Judge Koh wrote.

(credit: Windell Oskay)

Tesla is making headlines this week over some of its communications choices. First Reuters reported that the company dropped the translated term “Autopilot” and “self-driving” on its Chinese language website. Then, the AP reported that Tesla had reversed course and said that removing the term "Autopilot” was a mistake, though the company admitted it had revised some language on the site.

Next, in an unrelated report, the Wall Street Journal did some communications analysis of its own, finding that CEO Elon Musk has made 20 projections for the company that haven’t quite panned out in the timeframe he stated.

The Chinese Autopilot debacle

This weekend, Reuters reported that Tesla had removed the Chinese translation for the terms “self-driving” and “Autopilot” from the company’s website, after a 33-year-old Tesla owner side-swiped an illegally parked Volkswagen. The accident took place in Beijing earlier this month while the car was in Autopilot mode.

Back in 2014, Hello Games' Sean Murray acknowledged in a Game Informer interview that official modding tools were practically a must for No Man's Sky. "I almost feel like we need to give them the [modding] tools; otherwise then they're just going to start making them, tearing apart your game," Murray said at the time. "That's what I have more of a fear of."

Fast forward to today, and some PC No Man's Sky players (who can manage to get the game running) are indeed just tearing apart the game to make their own mods. Despite the current lack of official mod tools, players are extracting game files and tinkering with them to create unsupported mods just days after the game's PC release.

This short video outlines the basic process used to create these unofficial mods. Interestingly enough, the PC version of the game seems to be built on top of a host of files in the PlayStation Archive format, though they've been renamed to the more generic PAK extension for Windows. Regardless, these files can be uncompressed using a PSARC decompiler tool, and then edited and recompiled to get a modified version of the game up and running.

The leak over the weekend of advanced hacking tools contains digital signatures that are almost identical to those in software used by the state-sponsored Equation Group, according to a just-published report from security firm Kaspersky Lab.

"While we cannot surmise the attacker's identity or motivation nor where or how this pilfered trove came to be, we can state that several hundred tools from the leak share a strong connection with our previous findings from the Equation group," Kaspersky researchers wrote in a blog post published Tuesday afternoon.

The finding is significant because it lends credibility to claims made by a mysterious group calling itself ShadowBrokers. When members of the previously unknown group claimed in a blog post that they hacked Equation Group and obtained never-before-seen exploits and implants it used, outsiders were understandably skeptical. The publication of state-sponsored hacking tools is an extremely rare if not unprecedented event that is sure to catch the attention of leaders all over the world.