Month: July 2018

Nintendo

Despite anecdotal evidence that Nintendo's cardboard-filled Labo series hasn't yet sold gangbusters, the Japanese game maker is apparently going full-speed ahead with the weird series.

Nintendo took a late-Thursday opportunity to unveil the Labo Vehicle Kit, coming this September to Nintendo Switch. The $69.99 product will include three separate build-your-own steering chassis: the Toy-Con Car, Toy-Con Plane, and Toy-Con Submarine. (Toy-Con is Nintendo's term for toys that combine folded cardboard pieces and Switch Joy-Con controllers.)

(credit: sonnen)

A new report from GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association (ESA) says that US homeowners added 36 megawatt-hours (MWh) worth of batteries to their residences in the first quarter of 2018. That's more than the previous three quarters combined.

The gains were driven by local and state policies that actually reduced the value of standalone solar installations, the report said. Where once a California or Hawaii homeowner might have received significant compensation from the local utility for producing rooftop electricity, now those programs are being limited, so homeowners are turning to batteries to capture excess energy made during the day. In California, utilities are adopting so-called Time of Use pricing, so investing in a battery can help homes continue to run when prices are highest. Consequently, "California and Hawaii together constitute 74 percent of residential deployments on the quarter," according to the ESA.

Outside of the residential sector, past policies have created the appearance of volatility in the energy storage industry. The market as a whole, including utility-grade storage and commercial storage (like batteries serving warehouses, for example), grew 26 percent quarter-over-quarter but declined 46 percent year-over-year in terms of megawatt-hour added in Q1 2018. This is largely due to the fact that California mandated that utilities build out significant amounts of energy storage in 2017, after the Aliso Canyon natural gas leak depleted the fuel that the state had stored.

Enlarge (credit: HTC)

Taiwanese electronics manufacturer HTC used its position as a VR headset maker to shoot back at the industry's critics on Thursday. The resulting story HTC tells is an interesting one, both because it makes new claims about VR revenue figures and because any brags from beleaguered HTC about revenue drip with irony by default.

The Thursday blog post from its USA arm, titled "Think VR is dying? It’s just getting started," cites reports about declining VR sales figures at sellers like Amazon. Rather than dispute a rapid decline in VR headset sales at Amazon or clarify whether other stores' and chains' sales figures tell a different story, HTC's blog post offers its own simple explanation: inventory issues.

"VIVE has paced at its highest sales velocity of all time, for weeks on end, and we sold out," the post reads. "For a consumer electronic product in its third calendar year, this continued trajectory is nearly unheard of."

Enlarge (credit: Pete)

When the Spectre and Meltdown attacks were disclosed earlier this year, the initial exploits required an attacker to be able to run code of their choosing on a victim system. This made browsers vulnerable, as suitably crafted JavaScript could be used to perform Spectre attacks. Cloud hosts were susceptible, too. But outside these situations, the impact seemed relatively limited.

That impact is now a little larger. Researchers from Graz University of Technology, including one of the original Meltdown discoverers, Daniel Gruss, have described NetSpectre: a fully remote attack based on Spectre. With NetSpectre, an attacker can remotely read the memory of a victim system without running any code on that system.

All the variants of the Spectre attacks follow a common set of principles. Each processor has an architectural behavior (the documented behavior that describes how the instructions work and that programmers depend on to write their programs) and a microarchitectural behavior (the way an actual implementation of the architecture behaves). These can diverge in subtle ways. For example, architecturally, a program that loads a value from a particular address in memory will wait until the address is known before trying to perform the load. Microarchitecturally, however, the processor might try to speculatively guess at the address so that it can start loading the value from memory (which is slow) even before it's absolutely certain of which address it should use.

(credit: COSCO)

COSCO’s computer networks in the Americas remained completely severed from the Internet on Thursday, almost 48 hours after the Chinese shipping giant reported it was hit by a ransomware attack.

In a statement published Thursday, COSCO officials said the failures affected networks in the US, Canada, Panama, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Uruguay. The statement said people who wanted to reach COSCO employees in those countries should use special email addresses, many of which were hosted by Yahoo and Gmail. Attempts to reach COSCO’s US-based website were unsuccessful. COSCO officials said main business operation systems were performing stably and that ports in California and the UK remained open.

The statement—and posts on COSCO’s official Twitter and Facebook accounts—didn’t disclose the reason for the outage. The Press-Telegram of Long Beach, California, however, reported on Tuesday that the China state-owned shipping company was infected by ransomware. The report didn’t identify the name or strain of the ransomware, which generally encrypts computer hard drives and demands a payment by digital currency to decrypt it.