Month: April 2017

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After nearly a year of intense pressure from advocacy groups, Kentucky Fried Chicken has announced that it will phase out serving chicken raised on medically important antibiotics by the end 2018.

In making the announcement, KFC joins many of its peers and fierce competitors. With KFC, 11 of the 15 top restaurant chains in the country have now made some form of commitment to be better stewards of antibiotics. Those other top, drug-conscious brands include McDonald's, Subway, Chick-Fil-A, Chipotle, Wendy’s, Panera Bread, and Taco Bell.

In a press statement, Kevin Hochman, president and chief concept officer for KFC US said:

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Nearly a year after its launch, Google Duo now supports audio calling for all users worldwide. At the Google I/O conference last year, the company launched the minimalistic video-chat app for Android and iOS alongside its newest messaging app, Google Allo. Google pushed this new audio-calling feature to Duo users in Brazil last month, but it's only now making its way to all users across the globe. Justin Uberti, principal engineer at Google, announced the feature's availability today on Twitter.

According to a screenshot in Uberti's tweet, Duo users can choose to start an audio or video call by switching a toggle at the top of the app's interface. Duo launched as just a video-chatting app—and a basic one at that. It only allows one-to-one video calls and is only available for mobile devices, as it has no Web, Chrome, or desktop apps. You don't even need a Google account to use it—all you need is your phone number and your contact list to get in touch with someone using Duo.

Now that Duo isn't just a video-calling app, it could be better positioned to compete with the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook messenger, which both offer audio- and video-chat options. However, those other services also offer simple text messaging as well, and Google continues to scatter its messaging features across multiple apps. Allo is the text messaging portion that Duo would need to best compete with similar services, but Google intentionally launched both as separate apps last year. Allo is a "smarter" version of Google Hangouts (which also has audio- and video-calling capabilities) that incorporates Google Assistant to provide answers to questions in the chat window and offer contextual information like flight times or nearby restaurants, depending on what you ask it for. It seems unlikely that Google would add a text messaging component to Duo in the future, but we can't rule it out, especially if enough Duo users ask for it as they did with this voice-calling feature.

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On April 8, as part of a long, awkwardly worded rant about President Donald Trump's betrayal of his "base," the individual or individuals known as the Shadow Brokers posted the password to an encrypted archive containing what appear to be components of a toolkit associated with the National Security Agency's alleged Equation Group hacking campaign. But those hoping for even more spectacular exploits than those leaked earlier by the Shadow Brokers will likely be disappointed. However, the files do include a number of tools that may still be usable, as well as significant amounts of information about systems that appear to have been hacked by the NSA.

Many information security analysts were unimpressed.

The Shadow Brokers are the No Man's Sky of the hacker world.

— Jonathan Nichols (@wvualphasoldier) April 9, 2017

In many respects, the files leaked earlier by the Shadow Brokers—in particular the Cisco router and firewall exploits—were potentially far more damaging, as in many cases they worked against currently deployed Internet infrastructure. The tools in the master file, however, appear to be much older and targeted operating systems that are generally no longer in service—though some of the systems that they were apparently used to compromise are still online.

Malware that WikiLeaks purports belongs to the Central Intelligence Agency has been definitively tied to an advanced hacking operation that has been penetrating governments and private industries around the world for years, researchers from security firm Symantec say.

Longhorn, as Symantec dubs the group, has infected governments and companies in the financial, telecommunications, energy, and aerospace industries since at least 2011 and possibly as early as 2007. The group has compromised 40 targets in at least 16 countries across the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa, and on one occasion, in the US, although that was probably a mistake.

Uncanny resemblance

Malware used by Longhorn bears an uncanny resemblance to tools and methods described in the Vault7 documents. Near-identical matches are found in cryptographic protocols, source-code compiler changes, and techniques for concealing malicious traffic flowing out of infected networks. Symantec, which has been tracking Longhorn since 2014, didn't positively link the group to the CIA, but it has concluded that the malware Longhorn used over a span of years is included in the Vault7 cache of secret hacking manuals that WikiLeaks says belonged to the CIA. Virtually no one is disputing WikiLeaks' contention that the documents belong to the US agency.

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The late Carrie Fisher will appear in Star Wars: Episode IX, the third and final film of the new Star Wars trilogy, her brother Todd Fisher confirmed.

Carrie Fisher's daughter Billie Lourd and Todd Fisher have granted Disney the requisite rights to use recent footage of the actress for the finale. An extensive CGI recreation will not be used. Fisher is understood to have completed filming for Star Wars: The Last Jedi (episode 8), with extra footage from that filming likely to make up the bulk of her appearance in Episode 9.

However, given that Fisher's character General Leia was set to play a larger role in Episode 9, it remains to be seen whether there's enough footage to complete the film as planned without CGI, or whether there will be rewrites.

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Humanity has been granted one last attempt to beat its artificially intelligent overlords: Ke Jie, the world's top-ranked Go player, will face down against DeepMind's AlphaGo in China in a three-game match starting May 23.

The odds are not good for Ke Jie: back in January AlphaGo secretly played 51 online matches against some of the world's best players, including Ke Jie, and didn't lose a single one. Still, as Homo sapiens' last redoubt against in silico domination, he has to try.