Month: November 2017

Ron Amadeo

OnePlus is back with another end-of-year "T" upgrade for its flagship. Last year it bumped the OnePlus 3 to "3T" with a slightly newer processor and a bigger battery. This year, there's not much in the way of new specs to boast about, but the OnePlus 5T has an all-new front. OnePlus has taken a big leap with the 5T and modernized the design with slim bezels, software navigation buttons, and a rear fingerprint reader. This makes it look a lot like every other 2017 flagship, but the key for OnePlus is that the 5T is only $499 (€499, £449). This means you get flagship-class specs and design for $300 less than the competition.

OnePlus' slim bezel design means the front is now sporting a 6-inch, 2160×1080 OLED display with an extra-tall 18:9 aspect ratio. OnePlus describes this as an "AMOLED" display, which is a Samsung trademark, so this is a Samsung display. Sure enough, you get a high-quality, crystal clear image even at low brightness, with none of the issues that have been plaguing LG-made OLED displays. Slimming down the bezels means removing nearly everything from the front that isn't made of pixels, so in addition to moving the fingerprint reader to the back, the OnePlus 5's capacitive navigation buttons are gone, replaced with on-screen buttons. The result is that OnePlus can upgrade from a 5.5-inch screen to 6 inches while keeping the phone body essentially the same size. In person, the OnePlus 5T looks every bit as good as an $800-$1,000 flagship smartphone.

Google is rolling out a new look for Points of Interest (POI) on Google Maps. These are the little business location icons that pop up when you're browsing the map or viewing search results.

Google says it has updated Maps to "better highlight the information most relevant to each experience (think gas stations for navigation, train stations for transit, and so on)." You probably don't care about local gas stations when you're looking up subway locations, so Maps will be smarter about which icons it shows you.

Dallara

Racing fans will no doubt know the name Dallara. The Italian company doesn't field its own team, but you've almost certainly seen its cars race. Every chassis used in IndyCar is a Dallara. The same goes for Formula E. It's responsible for the carbon-fiber tubs used by the Haas team in Formula 1 and the Cadillac DPi cars that have been so successful in IMSA's WeatherTech series this year. It even built the chassis for many of Audi's legendary Le Mans prototypes. Now, Dallara is going to put its name to a road car the rest of us can buy and drive on the street: the Dallara Stradale. (Stradale means 'road' in Italian.)

And what a car it looks to be. The antidote to today's bloated vehicles, it's a lightweight (1,884lb/855kg), mid-engined roadster. As you might expect from a company known for its skill working carbon fiber, the use of composites in the Stradale are extensive. The monocoque chassis is made from "pre-preg"—that's the really expensive stuff that's hand-laid before being cured by autoclave. But Dallara says it's also using "long fiber compression moulding" for structural bodywork. Although the images you see here are of a barchetta, there is an optional windscreen, and it can even be configured as a targa or closed coupe (with the addition of gullwing doors).

Dallara

Racing fans will no doubt know the name Dallara. The Italian company doesn't field its own team, but you've almost certainly seen its cars race. Every chassis used in IndyCar is a Dallara. The same goes for Formula E. It's responsible for the carbon-fiber tubs used by the Haas team in Formula 1 and the Cadillac DPi cars that have been so successful in IMSA's WeatherTech series this year. It even built the chassis for many of Audi's legendary Le Mans prototypes. Now, Dallara is going to put its name to a road car the rest of us can buy and drive on the street: the Dallara Stradale. (Stradale means 'road' in Italian.)

And what a car it looks to be. The antidote to today's bloated vehicles, it's a lightweight (1,884lb/855kg), mid-engined roadster. As you might expect from a company known for its skill working carbon fiber, the use of composites in the Stradale are extensive. The monocoque chassis is made from "pre-preg"—that's the really expensive stuff that's hand-laid before being cured by autoclave. But Dallara says it's also using "long fiber compression moulding" for structural bodywork. Although the images you see here are of a barchetta, there is an optional windscreen, and it can even be configured as a targa or closed coupe (with the addition of gullwing doors).

Enlarge (credit: Liftarn (Public Domain))

Oracle issued a set of urgent security fixes on Tuesday that repair vulnerabilities revealed today by researchers from the managed security provider ERPScan at the DeepSec security conference in Vienna, Austria. The five vulnerabilities include one dubbed "JoltandBleed" by the researchers because of its similarity to the HeartBleed vulnerability discovered in OpenSSL in 2014. JoltandBleed is a serious vulnerability that could expose entire business applications running on PeopleSoft platforms accessible from the public Internet.

The products affected include Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, Human Capital Management, Financial Management, and Supply Chain Management, as well as any other product using the Tuxedo 2 application server. According to recent research by ERPScan, more than 1,000 enterprises have their PeopleSoft systems exposed to the Internet, including a number of universities that use PeopleSoft Campus Solutions to manage student data.

JoltandBleed is a memory leakage vulnerability in Oracle's proprietary Jolt protocol, used by the Tuxedo 2 application server. Crafted network packets sent to the HTTP port controlled by the Jolt service could potentially extract data from memory on the app server, including session information, user names, and passwords in plain text, as demonstrated in a video at the conference: