Month: October 2017

Enlarge / A cryptocurrency mining farm. (credit: Marco Krohn)

The Internet is awash with covert crypto currency miners that bog down computers and even smartphones with computationally intensive math problems called by hacked or ethically questionable sites.

The latest examples came on Monday with the revelation from antivirus provider Trend Micro that at least two Android apps with as many as 50,000 downloads from Google Play were recently caught putting crypto miners inside a hidden browser window. The miners caused phones running the apps to run JavaScript hosted on Coinhive.com, a site that harnesses the CPUs of millions of PCs to mine the Monero crypto currency. In turn, Coinhive gives participating sites a tiny cut of the relatively small proceeds. Google has since removed the apps, which were known as Recitiamo Santo Rosario Free and SafetyNet Wireless App.

Last week, researchers from security firm Sucuri warned that at least 500 websites running the WordPress content management system alone had been hacked to run the Coinhive mining scripts. Sucuri said other Web platforms—including Magento, Joomla, and Drupal—are also being hacked in large numbers to run the Coinhive programming interface.

Enlarge / A CenturyLink data center. (credit: CenturyLink)

CenturyLink expects to complete its acquisition of Level 3 by Wednesday this week, as the Federal Communications Commission has given the merger its final approval.

"The FCC's approval of CenturyLink's acquisition of Level 3 is great news and means we now have all the regulatory approvals we need to close the transaction," CenturyLink Senior VP John Jones said in an announcement today. The merger valued at $34 billion previously received approvals from the US Department of Justice and regulatory bodies in more than 20 US states including California and New York.

To preserve competition in local markets, the Justice Department required CenturyLink to divest Level 3 networks in Albuquerque, Boise, and Tucson. CenturyLink will also be required to offer leases of at least 25 years for dark fiber along 30 intercity routes traversing nearly 20 states. Without such provisions, the deal would have caused a "reduction in competition [that] likely would have led to higher prices, lower quality, and reduced access for consumers," Justice Department officials said.

Enlarge / You can just let characters idle like this indefinitely, which is great.

At first blush, Hidden Agenda smacks of Sony chasing yet another branded, mainstream accessible gimmick. It’s the “serious” game in the company’s trio of PlayLink-branded titles—games that are hosted on the PlayStation 4 but controlled by multiple players through their smartphones. If you’ve played any of Jackbox Games’ (mostly) wonderful Party Packs, you know the score.

The biggest difference between PlayLink and, say, the PlayStation Move—which tried to co-opt the early appeal of motion control that Nintendo popularized—is that players already have smartphones and likely won't have to buy or store any extra plastic accoutrements to join in. Those people are probably familiar enough with those smartphones to use simple touchscreen menus, too.

In the PlayLink app, players are assigned cursor colors and use their touchscreens to control what’s on the TV. In Hidden Agenda, that basically amounts to voting for what characters do and how they react, tapping the screen to respond to quick-time events. There are also a bare handful of timed pixel hunting sections. But even more than the You Don’t Know Jack games PlayLink is obviously cribbing from, it’s a heavy distillation of developer Supermassive Games’ own Until Dawn. Instead of direct control of playable characters, you just make (usually binary) choices in service of the story.

Said story centers on “The Trapper,” a serial killer who uses his victims to lure first responders to their deaths as well. Players fluctuate between one of the cops who arrested the Trapper and a District Attorney who thinks there's more to the case. It is a story told mostly through cramped close-ups of strangely inexpressive but otherwise very impressively rendered faces.

(credit: Tesla)

In late September, Volkswagen Group issued a call for long-term contracts with cobalt producers. Cobalt is an important component of lithium-ion batteries built for electric vehicles (EVs), and VW Group's call signaled that the company was ramping up its promise to focus on EVs in the aftermath of the company’s diesel emissions scandal.

But by mid-October, the Financial Times reported that VW Group’s overtures had failed, and the company could not find a company to contract with. Reportedly, the prices VW Group offered for cobalt were too low and the German automaker wanted to agree on a fixed price for the duration of the contract—at a time when cobalt prices were going up.

VW Group's failure to secure a contract exposed a lurking problem with lithium-ion batteries—that is, development and mass production of them can be held up and complicated by materials other than lithium. And because there aren't always great alternatives for the lightweight, energy-dense materials that make up these batteries, researchers are concerned about supply chains for the materials that drive innovation. Do we have enough lithium? And do we have enough of the secondary materials that make lithium-ion batteries work, like cobalt, nickel, manganese, and natural graphite?

Enlarge (credit: Mike Mozart)

The on-again, off-again merger of Sprint and T-Mobile USA is apparently off again—for now.

Sprint owner SoftBank is "abandoning its efforts" to merge the carrier with T-Mobile, The Wall Street Journal reported today while quoting "people familiar with the matter." A month ago, reports indicated that a merger would be announced by the end of October and that T-Mobile majority owner Deutsche Telekom would emerge with a majority stake in the combined company.

But SoftBank's board met this past weekend "and expressed concern about giving up control," the Journal wrote today. "Instead of a merger, Sprint plans to make a significant investment in its network," the Journal report also said.

With Los Angeles' E3 and Germany's Gamescom fading in memory, Sony used the opening of Paris Games Week today to reveal a bevy of new games for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR. The company also shared new footage of some anticipated, previously announced games. Most of these announcements came in the form of polished, non-interactive trailers, many of which provided very scant details of what the games themselves are actually like to play.

Above, we've captured a handful of representative shots from some of Sony's more interesting announcements along with what we can glean about the games themselves. Click through to find out more or just check out the trailers directly using the links below:

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | MarsBars)

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai wants to impose a budget cap on the Lifeline program that helps poor people buy broadband and phone service.

Under previous Chairman Tom Wheeler, the 32-year-old Lifeline program was expanded to let poor people use a $9.25 monthly household subsidy to buy Internet service. Previously, the subsidy could only be used for phone service.

But when Pai took over the chairmanship, he quickly got to work rolling back some of Wheeler's Lifeline changes. Pai, a Republican, ramped up his attempts to place limits on Lifeline last week with a proposal that will likely be approved by the commission at its meeting on November 16.