Month: October 2016

Enlarge / 2015's MacBook Air, which was introduced in March of last year. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Update: Recode is now reporting that Apple plans to release new Macs as part of an event on October 27th "at or near Apple's Cupertino campus." There are no new details on the Macs we might see, but the post below still represents the most persistent rumors from the most reliable sources.

Original story: With the exception of the 12-inch MacBook, all of Apple's Macs are currently at least a year old, and many of them are significantly older. Rumors about new models have been making the rounds all year, but the most recent and most reliable say that we'll be getting some updates later this month.

The latest report is from Japanese site Mac Otakara, which is normally a reliable source of information from Apple's Asian supply chain. Its rumors about the MacBook Pro conform with others we've been hearing for most of the year. Both 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros are said to be getting thinner, and they will follow the thin-and-light MacBook in jumping to USB Type-C ports, but Apple is attempting to keep pro users happy by giving them more ports and adding Thunderbolt 3 support. Unique features like a customizable OLED function key bar and TouchID support are also said to be on tap, as are GPUs from AMD's "Polaris" family. Intel's Skylake CPUs seem like the best bet for the main processor, since "Kaby Lake" chips suitable for MacBook Pros aren't due until January at the earliest.

We're feeling lucky with the Google Assistant. (video link)

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is a quirky part of Google's history. The button still exists on the Google.com home page, but thanks to interface improvements, it has become something of a vestigial feature. The freshly released Google Assistant on the Google Pixel phones can be thought of as the next generation of Google Search, and sure enough, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" phrase has come along for the ride.

Say "OK Google, I'm Feeling Lucky" to the Google Assistant, and you'll be whisked away to a crazy audio-only trivia game show. Theme music starts playing, the Google Assistant introduces itself, the audience cheers, and the questions start. It's complete with audience reactions, a buzzer, and quippy one-liners from the Google Assistant. If you've ever played You Don't Know Jack before, you know the drill.

(credit: Gage Skidmore)

Hillary Clinton isn't the only one who may have had an e-mail security problem. A security researcher has discovered that the Trump Organization's mail servers all run on a version of Microsoft Windows Server that has been out of support for years, with minimal user security. The e-mail servers for Trump's hotels, golf courses and other businesses run on an unpatched version of Windows Server 2003 with Internet Information Server 6—making them a vulnerable target for anyone who might want to gain access to the organization's e-mails.

Security researcher Kevin Beaumont posted the finding on Twitter at 6:00pm on Monday:

Quick update on Trump corp email servers - all internet accessible, single factor auth, no MDM, Win2003, no security patching. pic.twitter.com/nIMTa9UmdL

— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) October 17, 2016

Beaumont also found the Trump Organization's Web-based e-mail access page. Until this morning, the Trump Organization allowed Outlook Web Access (OWA) logins from webmail.trumporg.com. Beaumont said he did not attempt to log into the e-mail system.

At this point, we're used to ultra-popular video game franchises being licensed out as film properties, from the somewhat obvious to the seemingly nonsensical. What's much less common—outside of the syndicated children's animated cartoon realm—is a video game making the leap to become a TV show. So our "huh?" sensors perked up a little when we read this morning that the ridiculously popular Candy Crush series of mobile games is being adapted into a game show for CBS.

Lionsgate TV and game maker King Ltd. are teaming up to produce the show, which will feature "teams of two people us[ing] their wits and physical agility to compete on enormous, interactive game boards featuring next generation technology to conquer Candy Crush and be crowned the champion," according to the announcement. Lionsgate chairman Kevin Beggs described the show in a release as "an incredibly visual, physical, and fun TV program," which has us picturing something like Nickelodeon's Double Dare, but with more candy. (We can dream, can't we?)

Matt Kunitz (the producer behind Wipeout and Fear Factor) will helm the show in collaboration with King Chief Creative Officer Sebastian Knutsson, ensuring that the TV adaptation doesn't introduce candies that aren't faithful to the mobile game, we suppose. No host has been announced.

(credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm is promising to launch its first 5G modem in 2018, even though basic standards for 5G have yet to be established, nor even which part of the radio spectrum it will use.

Dubbed the Snapdragon X50, the San Diego chipmaker says its new modem will be able to deliver blindingly fast peak download speeds of around 5Gbps.

The X50 5G will at first operate with a bandwidth of about 800MHz on the 28GHz millimetre wave (mmWave in Qualcomm jargon) spectrum, a frequency that's also being investigated by Samsung, Nokia, and Verizon. However, the powers that be have far from settled on this area of the spectrum, with 73GHz also being mooted. In the UK, Ofcom is investigating several bands in a range between 6GHz and 100GHz. As the industry as a whole is a long way from consensus, this could be Qualcomm's bid to get the final frequency locked down well before 2020—the year that 5G is expected to reach any kind of consumer penetration.