Month: April 2017

Enlarge / The Verily Study Watch, strategically photographed to not show how thick it is. (credit: Verily)

Alphabet's Life Sciences division, called Verily, is giving the world a peek at its health-focused smartwatch. The Google sister company introduced the "Verily Study Watch" on its blog today, calling it an "investigational device" that aims to "passively capture health data" for medical studies.

Many wearables technically capture health data with simple heart-rate sensors, but Verily's watch aims to be a real medical device. The blog post says the device can track "relevant signals for studies spanning cardiovascular, movement disorders, and other areas." The Study Watch does this by using electrocardiography (ECG) and by measuring electrodermal activity and inertial movements.

The ECG is the biggest addition to the watch over a normal smartwatch device. According to a report from MIT Technology Review, which has been tracking the Verily watch's progress for some time, the watch uses a two-point ECG. One contact point is the watch on the wrist, and the other point is formed when the user touches the metal bezel of the watch with their other hand.

Apple wants to get on those California roads. (credit: nrg_crisis (off and on))

On Friday, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) updated its website to reflect that Apple now has a permit to test self-driving cars on public roads.

Apple has been hiring automotive experts—particularly those with experience in autonomous driving—for years. (In 2015, Tesla CEO Elon Musk even taunted the company saying, “If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple.”) But the company has long kept quiet about its aspirations. That began to change in December, when Apple wrote a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) saying that it was “investing heavily” in machine learning to support autonomous systems, especially in transportation.

The update on the California DMV website confirms that, after years of speculation, Apple is serious about building self-driving car software.

In 1970, Charles Spencer King saw something no one else saw. King designed a new truck-like Rover model that year, which he gave the name "Range Rover." No one could have predicted that he was foreshadowing the future so accurately. King strove to simultaneously improve both the comfort and off-road capability of the traditional Land Rover. He wanted what Range Rover likes to call a "wide breadth of capability," which makes it at home in the rough and muddy as well as on the city avenue.

But King also wanted the Range Rover to have a dash of style. Despite being a mechanical engineer and not a designer, he personally sketched what would become the final, original Range Rover design, which only went through minor tweaks on the way to actual production. In the process, he gave birth to the luxury SUV.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Dimitri Otis)

A Federal Communications Commission plan to eliminate price caps in much of the business broadband market uses a new test for determining whether customers benefit from competition. Even if a business that needs broadband has only one choice today, the FCC would consider the local market competitive if there's a second broadband provider within a half mile.

The proposal from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will hurt small business customers of ISPs, according to a federal office that advocates on behalf of small businesses. But at least for now, the FCC plans to move ahead with a final vote at its meeting on April 20.

You may be thinking, "There are no price caps for broadband in the US!" That's true for the home Internet service market, but the FCC imposes price regulation on certain types of business broadband. So-called Business Data Services (BDS) provided by traditional phone companies like AT&T and Verizon use dedicated links to deliver "secure, reliable, and low-delay transmission service for moving voice, data, and video traffic" at speeds of up to 45Mbps upstream and downstream, the FCC's deregulation proposal says.

Enlarge / A computer screen displaying Eternalromance, one of the hacking tools dumped Friday by Shadow Brokers. (credit: Matthew Hickey)

The Shadow Brokers—the mysterious person or group that over the past eight months has leaked a gigabyte worth of the National Security Agency's weaponized software exploits—just published its most significant release yet. Friday's dump contains potent exploits and hacking tools that target most versions of Microsoft Windows and evidence of sophisticated hacks on the SWIFT banking system of several banks across the world.

Friday's release—which came as much of the computing world was planning a long weekend to observe the Easter holiday—contains close to 300 megabytes of materials the leakers said were stolen from the NSA. The contents (a convenient overview is here) included compiled binaries for exploits that targeted vulnerabilities in a long line of Windows operating systems, including Windows 8 and Windows 2012. It also included a framework dubbed Fuzzbunch, a tool that resembles the Metasploit hacking framework that loads the binaries into targeted networks. Independent security experts who reviewed the contents said it was without question the most damaging Shadow Brokers release to date.

"It is by far the most powerful cache of exploits ever released," Matthew Hickey, a security expert and co-founder of Hacker House, told Ars. "It is very significant as it effectively puts cyber weapons in the hands of anyone who downloads it. A number of these attacks appear to be 0-day exploits which have no patch and work completely from a remote network perspective."

Enlarge / Microsoft's inspiration, evidently. (credit: Jerry )

Citing "sources familiar with the matter," Windows Central is reporting that Microsoft could be bringing a tabbed interface to Windows 10 apps. There have long been calls for Explorer to support tabs, so that multiple locations on the file system can be browsed without a proliferation of windows, but the report says that Microsoft may be going a step further, bringing tabs to just about every window.

The feature is apparently called "Tabbed Shell;" it'd allow any application with multiple windows to have those windows collapsed onto one another by creating a tab bar. Conversely, tabs can be torn off the tab bar to create separate windows, providing an appearance and experience that mirrors that of the Edge browser.

With this, Microsoft could neatly meet the demand for tabs in Explorer and similar requests to have tabs for the command-line.

Enlarge / This art for 2Dark also serves as a handy artist's conception of Denuvo trying to hold off crackers.

In the endless back-and-forth war between DRM makers and crackers, it looked like Denuvo had established a temporary beachhead recently. A revamped version of the piracy protection (which the community is referring to as "v4") had started appearing in a handful of games in recent months, and v4 seemed more resistant to the kind of quick cracks that had plagued titles like Resident Evil 7 and Mass Effect Andromeda, which each ran older Denuvo versions.

But the Denuvo beachhead has now been breached, as cracking collective CPY has released a DRM-free version of 2Dark, an Alone in the Dark spiritual successor that launched with v4 Denuvo protection about a month ago.

The vagaries of Denuvo mean other games with similar protection (including Dead Rising 4, Nier: Automata, and the recently released Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition) will still need to be cracked individually. Still, the 2Dark crack proves that the newly revamped version of the DRM is just as breakable as the old version (which was itself considered unbreakable for quite a while). That also means Mass Effect: Andromeda, which had Denuvo v4 patched in alongside other improvements after launch, may soon see a cracked version that includes the game's post-launch updates.