Month: December 2017

Enlarge / The iPhone X's display, with rounded edges and the sensor housing—also called the notch. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Just over a month after the iPhone X debuted, Apple is now selling carrier-agnostic models of the iPhone X. US customers can place orders on Apple's website for SIM-free iPhone Xs, rather than ordering a device that's already married to a specific carrier.

Previously, the iPhone X could only be purchased on AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, or Verizon networks, but the unlocked option allows users to insert any SIM card they want. The iPhone X supports GSM and CDMA networks, so users can get on nearly any network they want with a SIM card.

The high price tag of the iPhone X remains for the unlocked models: a 64GB device costs $999 while the 256GB model costs $1,149. Carriers offer the option to pay the price of the smartphone in monthly installments, but those options aren't available when you buy a SIM-free iPhone X. However, Apple does offer its 24-month special financing program for specific credit card customers.

Enlarge / Bots everywhere! (credit: avatarr8 (old))

Attackers have used an advanced new strain of the Mirai Internet-of-things malware to quietly amass an army of 100,000 home routers that could be used at any moment to wage Internet-paralyzing attacks, a researcher warned Monday.

Botnet operators have been regularly releasing new versions of Mirai since the source code was openly published 14 months ago. Usually, the new versions contain minor tweaks, many of which contain amateur mistakes that prevent the new releases from having the punch of the original Mirai, which played a key role in a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks that debilitated or temporarily took down Twitter, GitHub, the PlayStation Network and other key Internet services.

Sophisticated approach

What sets this latest variant apart is its ability to exploit a recently discovered zeroday vulnerability to infect two widely used lines of home and small-office routers even when they're secured with strong passwords or have remote administration turned off altogether, Dale Drew, chief security strategist at broadband Internet provider CenturyLink, told Ars. One of the affected Huawei devices is the EchoLife Home Gateway, and the other is the Huawei Home Gateway. Roughly 90,000 of the 100,000 newly infected devices are one of the two Huawei router models. The new malware also has a dictionary of 65,000 username and password combinations to try against other types of devices.

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen die. Threadripper has two of these in a multi-chip module. Epyc has four of them. (credit: AMD)

Microsoft will soon be offering virtual machines in its Azure cloud service based on AMD's Epyc processors.

The growth of the cloud computing market has, until now, been a success story for Intel's Xeon server processors, as the rise of cloud computing came at the same time as Intel was particularly dominant in the x86 processor market. Intel's traditional competitor, AMD, had processors intended for server markets, but its uncompetitive performance meant that the cloud space was ceded to Intel.

But 2017 has been a turning point for AMD. A new family of chips built around its Zen architecture has offered Intel a level of competition it hasn't experienced since the early 2000s. In the desktop space, AMD's Ryzen processors offered a viable alternative to Intel's chips. Meanwhile, in the server space, the new Epyc processors threatened to do the same for Xeon.

Seated in Mission Control, Chris Kraft neared the end of a tedious Friday afternoon as he monitored a seemingly interminable ground test of the Apollo 1 spacecraft. It was January 1967, and communications between frustrated astronauts inside the capsule on its Florida launch pad and the test conductors in Houston sputtered periodically through his headset. His mind drifted.

Sudden shouts snapped him to attention. In frantic calls coming from the Apollo cockpit, fear had replaced frustration. Amid the cacophony, Kraft heard the Apollo program’s most capable astronaut, Gus Grissom, exclaim a single word.

Fire!