Month: November 2016

Enlarge / The OLED-toting Google Pixel (left) next to the iPhone 7 Plus' LCD panel. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

The iPhone 7 is just a couple of months old, which means that we are due for a fresh round of rumors about next year's model. Today The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is testing out "more than 10" different prototypes—presumably this includes not just next year's phone, but prototypes for phones beyond that as well as some that will never see the light of day—and that at least one of those prototypes includes a curved OLED screen.

OLED screens are more expensive than equivalent LCDs, but they offer faster refresh rates and better contrast. They can also be made thinner than LCD displays since they don't need separate layers for things like backlights or liquid crystal. Apple has always used LCD screens in its iPhones, but the company has reportedly asked suppliers like LG, Japan Display, and Sharp to submit prototype OLED displays for consideration.

OLED technology had lots of early teething issues, including poor color accuracy, greenish or purplish whites, and bad outdoor visibility, but many of those problems have been solved or substantially mitigated in recent years. In-depth analyses like those from DisplayMate have given top marks to the OLED screens in phones like Samsung's Galaxy S7 and the now-discontinued Note 7.

Enlarge / The kinds of colors on display here in Final Fantasy XV really pop on an HDR-compatible console and screen.

In our recent coverage of the PS4 Pro and Xbox One S, we've noted how the use of a high-dynamic range (HDR) color gamut has a striking effect on the apparent visual quality of a game (or a compatible video). Unfortunately, those expanded color benefits are only available on a select few titles for each console so far.

In a small bout of service journalism, we've compiled lists of titles that are compatible with HDR screens right now and will have support added in the near future. Reliable information on this is surprisingly hard to come by, though a list tweeted last night by Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg was a big help on the Xbox-side (he left off support for the upcoming Scalebound, however).

For the PS4, things are a bit more complicated, especially since many games that have been upgraded with higher resolutions or smoother frame rates on the PS4 Pro have pointedly not been improved with HDR color thus far. We've scoured announcements and update files for mention of HDR color support for PS4 titles and included the ones we could find reliable info for below.

Enlarge (credit: YouTube)

Black Friday was a black day for San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Agency, as an apparent crypto-ransomware infection spread across the Muni system's networks, taking down ticketing for Muni's train stations and systems used to manage the city's buses. The operator of the ransomware demanded $73,000 in exchange for restoration of Muni's data, according to a report from the San Francisco Examiner.

The malware's effects were visible on screens in station agents' booths at multiple Muni train stations, which displayed the message, "You Hacked, ALL Data Encrypted." The ransom message gave an e-mail address (cryptom27@yandex.com) that has been tied to ransomware attacks with variants of malware known as Mamba and HDDCryptor, a class of crypto-ransomware first identified from different samples in September by Morphus Labs and Trend Micro.

A mash-up of some basic malware code with open source and freeware Windows software, HDDCryptor goes after the entire network of its victims—encrypting entire local and networked drives. The malware uses an open source disk encryption tool called DiskCryptor and identifies physical and network shares to encrypt using Windows' "GetLogicalDrives" volume management function. It also uses code from the free network password recovery software Netpass.exe. HDDCryptor then overwrites the Master Boot Record of the infected machine—in some cases forcing a reboot of the system—to display its message.

(credit: Micah A. Ponce)

Last week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its final renewable fuel standards for 2017, requiring that fuel suppliers blend an additional 1.2 billion gallons of renewable fuel into US gas and diesel from 2016 levels. The rule breaks down the requirements to include quotas for cellulosic biofuels, biomass-based diesel, advanced biofuel, and traditional renewable fuel.

This has left corn and ethanol suppliers in the Midwest quite happy and oil and gas suppliers less so.

Reuters points out that the aggressive new biofuel standards will create a dilemma for an incoming Trump administration, given that his campaign courted both the gas and corn industries. “Balancing oil and farm interests is likely to prove a challenge for Trump, who has promised to curtail regulations on the oil industry but is already being reminded by biofuel advocates of the importance of the program to the American Midwest, where he received strong support from voters on November 8,” Reuters writes.

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Over the past few weeks—and particularly over the retail adventure widely referred to as "Black Friday"—many Apple device owners experienced a new form of unsolicited and unwanted messages: a swarm of calendar alerts for online "deals" from spammers. The messages took advantage of the default settings in Apple's iCloud calendar service, allowing senders to automatically push calendar alerts to Apple iOS and macOS users and bypass e-mail entirely.

Getting rid of these calendar "invites" is a problem in itself, as declining them sends a message back to the spammer—confirming that someone actually is monitoring the iCloud account they targeted and encouraging them to send more messages. Getting rid of the unwanted alerts requires a multi-step workaround. But blocking them entirely only requires a single change to iCloud settings.

To get rid of the invites without sending a response to the spammer, you'll need to do the following: