US lifts the ZTE trade ban

Well that was a roller coaster ride. After months of back and forth, the US has lifted the ban that prohibited US companies from selling goods to Chinese electronics company ZTE. The trade restrictions were put in place in response to ZTE violating US …

Well that was a roller coaster ride. After months of back and forth, the US has lifted the ban that prohibited US companies from selling goods to Chinese electronics company ZTE. The trade restrictions were put in place in response to ZTE violating US sanctions against Iran and North Korea… and then failing to comply […]

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Burglar breaks into “escape room” business, panics, and calls 911

“We now have a zero percent escape rate with criminals,” business owner jokes.

Enlarge (credit: NW Escape Experiences)

A burglar in Vancouver, Washington made four panicked 911 calls after breaking into an "escape room" business last weekend—and having trouble getting out.

Escape rooms are timed challenges that let groups of customers test their wits against a series of intricate puzzles. But NW Escape Experience's three escape rooms apparently so unnerved accused burglar Rye Wardlaw that he called 911 on himself.

The company offers customers three different rooms to choose from, including the "Kill Room," described by the Washington Post as "blood-spattered and designed to look like a serial killer’s basement hideout."

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12 Russian intel officers indicted for hacking the DNC and Clinton campaign

Charges are part of the probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Enlarge / Red Square in Moscow, circa 1990. (credit: DEA / W. BUSS/De Agostini/Getty Images)

The US Justice Department on Friday filed criminal indictments that accused 12 Russian intelligence officers of carrying out the 2016 hacks on the Democratic National Committee and the campaign of Hillary Clinton. The officers—one of whom operated under the persona of Guccifer 2.0—then allegedly dispersed sensitive communications in an attempt to influence the results of the 2016 election, prosecutors alleged.

The indictments were filed by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is investing possible collusion between the presidential campaign of President Donald Trump and the Russian spies US intelligence agencies say interfered with the 2016 election. So far, Mueller’s team has indicted 32 people, including members of a Russian company that blanketed social media with fake news stories and senior members of the Trump campaign. Friday’s indictments were disclosed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at a press conference in Washington, DC.

The documents said that Mueller’s team has determined that a person calling himself Guccifer 2.0 and leaked sensitive DNC documents in the months leading to the 2016 election, is a Russian intelligence officer. Guccifer 2.0 had insisted that he was a Romanian who hacked the DNC independently with no involvement from Russia. Russia has also denied any connection to the breach. Prosecutors said they were able to establish Guccifer 2.0 was really a Russian agent when one of the individuals maintaining Guccifer 2.0's online presence forgot to use a virtual private network when accessing a US-based social media platform. Instead, the person left an Internet Protocol address located in Moscow in the service's logs.

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Daily Deals (7-13-2018)

This year Acer started equipping its laptops with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant to play music, get weather, news and traffic updates, play games, or add items to your shopping list, just to name a few possibilities. Right now Acer is running a s…

This year Acer started equipping its laptops with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant to play music, get weather, news and traffic updates, play games, or add items to your shopping list, just to name a few possibilities. Right now Acer is running a sale, knocking $50 off the price of its Alexa-enabled notebooks. The company is […]

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Tesla drops $35,000 price from Model 3 page—insists plans haven’t changed

Tesla spokesperson says the company still plans to introduce a $35,000 model.

Enlarge (credit: Tesla)

The release of the Model 3 was supposed to be the moment when Tesla finally made a car that was affordable for the masses.

"In terms of price, it'll be $35,000," Musk said at the March 2016 Model 3 announcement event. "And I want to emphasize that even if you buy no options at all, this will still be an amazing car."

For the last two years, Tesla's page for the Model 3 has touted a starting price of $35,000. "Model 3 achieves up to 310 miles of range while starting at only $35,000 before incentives," the page read on Thursday morning.

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Ars on your lunch break, week 4: Our closing remarks on Fermi’s Paradox

We talk about the tools that search the deep dark for life, and what might be found.

Enlarge / "OMG I love this song." (credit: Warner Bros.)

Today, we present the third and final installment of my interview British astronomer Stephen Webb on the subject of Fermi’s paradox. Please check out parts one and two if you missed them. Otherwise, press play on the embedded player, or pull up the transcript—both of which are below.

We open by talking about some of the amazing instruments and projects that are coming online in the coming decade—both to extend the search for extraterrestrial life and to advance the much broader field of astrophysics. There’s some profoundly exciting gear on the horizon, which will do business under such wild and whimsical names as “The Extremely Large Telescope.”

We then talk about some of the signals this new apparatus might detect, which could be highly suggestive of life. Either oxygen or methane in a distant planet’s atmosphere would be electrifying, but not entirely definitive proof. Both of them together put the matter beyond a reasonable doubt (although there would still be many doubters, to be sure).

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Hyper-targeted attack against 13 iPhones dropped malicious apps via MDM

Installed hacked versions of Telegram, WhatsApp, and tracked users’ location and SMS.

Enlarge / Messages like this one would have come up every time hackers pushed a modified app to their victims. But YOLO, apparently. (credit: Cisco Talos)

In what appears to be a case of highly focused social engineering against a small group of iPhone users, malicious actors managed to get 13 iPhones registered on their rogue mobile device management (MDM) servers and then pushed out applications that allowed the hackers to track the locations of the phones and read victims' SMS messages.

The attacks, reported by Cisco's Talos, used the "BOptions" sideloading technique to modify versions of legitimate applications, including WhatsApp and Telegram. The initiative inserted additional libraries into the application packages, and the modified applications were then deployed to the 13 victim iPhones via the rogue mobile device management systems.

"The malicious code inserted into these apps is capable of collecting and exfiltrating information from the device, such as the phone number, serial number, location, contacts, user's photos, SMS, and Telegram and WhatsApp chat messages," wrote Talos researchers Warren Mercer, Paul Rascagneres, and Andrew Williams in a post on the attack. "Such information can be used to manipulate a victim or even use it for blackmail or bribery."

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Adobe plans to bring full version of Photoshop to the iPad next year

But how well will it truly mimic the Photoshop experience on a desktop PC?

Enlarge / The 10.5-inch iPad Pro. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Adobe is working on a full version of the popular photo-editing program Photoshop for Apple's iPad, according to a Bloomberg report. Sources claim the software company plans to announce the new app at its annual MAX conference this October, with the app's launch scheduled for sometime in 2019.

The new app would reportedly allow users to run a full version of Photoshop on an iPad and continue edits on another device like a desktop PC. Scott Belsky, Adobe's Creative Cloud product head, told Bloomberg that the company is working on "cross-platform iteration of Photoshop and other applications," but he declined to provide a timeline for their release.

“My aspiration is to get these on the market as soon as possible,” Belsky said. “There’s a lot required to take a product as sophisticated and powerful as Photoshop and make that work on a modern device like the iPad. We need to bring our products into this cloud-first collaborative era.”

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Update: Microsoft’s dual-screen “Andromeda” device isn’t (quite) dead

Microsoft has reportedly been working on a pocket-sized device with a folding display that allows you to use the little computer as a tablet or as a handheld, phone-sized device. Code-named “Andromeda,” Microsoft has yet to officially confi…

Microsoft has reportedly been working on a pocket-sized device with a folding display that allows you to use the little computer as a tablet or as a handheld, phone-sized device. Code-named “Andromeda,” Microsoft has yet to officially confirm the device’s existence, but details have been leaking for the past year. After learning a few weeks […]

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Nokia 6.1 Review—The best answer to “What Android phone should I buy?”

HMD does nearly everything right with this $269 wonder phone.

Ron Amadeo

As someone who spends a lot of time with smartphones, I often get asked, "Hey Ron, what Android phone should I buy?" The high-end answer is usually easy: buy a Pixel phone. But not everyone is willing to shell out $650+ for a smartphone, especially the types of casual users that ask for advice. Beyond the flagship smartphones, things get more difficult within the Android ecosystem. Motorola under Google used to be great at building a non-flagship phone, but since the company was sold to Lenovo (which gutted the update program), it has been tough to find a decent phone that isn't super expensive.

Enter HMD's Nokia phones, an entire lineup of cheap smartphones ranging from $100 to $400. HMD recently launched the second generation of its lineup, with phones like the Nokia 2.1, 3.1, and 5.1. We recently spent time with the highest end phone in this series that happens to be one of the few HMD devices for sale in the US: the Nokia 6.1. And for $269, you get a pretty spectacular-sounding package of a Snapdragon 630, a 5.5-inch 1080p screen, stock Android 8.1, fast updates, and a metal body.

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