Month: July 2018

"We're in for the communications ride of our lives," CNN's Greg Lefevre says in a January 2, 2000, broadcast dug up for the news network's latest decade documentary, The 2000s. "The coming years see cell phones small enough to fit in your pocket, the promise of video phones coming true, tiny hand sized computers that know your favorite subjects, and Internet everywhere."

Talk about prescience. Though most people reading this website can likely remember the 2000s as if it were yesterday, retrospectives and nostalgia have started to come in. And even if it feels a bit too soon-ish for such treatment, it's hard to argue with the need to acknowledge the time period's relevance and impact. The previous decade unequivocally changed the way we operate in a technological sense: the rise of smartphones, the start of companies like Facebook, Google, and YouTube, the ability to get whatever you want whenever you want it.

CNN has been producing these decade projects for a while now—its hour on tech in the 1990s ended up among our favorite hours of 2017 TV—and it would be easy for last night's installment to feel particularly unsurprising. After all, "The iDecade" episode of The 2000s sets out to detail the evolution of technology from 2000 through 2010, essentially spelling out how today became today.

XDA Forums

A pair of Pixel news items hit the Internet this weekend. First up, we have more leaked pictures of Google's upcoming Pixel 3 XL flagship, this time in white to go along with the previously leaked black version.

The pictures, which were taken by XDA forum user dr.guru, line up well with the previous Pixel pictures, showing a device with a very tall top notch, a bottom chin bezel, and what looks to be front-facing stereo speakers. It looks like Google is still bucking all the camera trends with two front-facing cameras and one rear camera. The post said the device was remote wiped by Google, but the bootloader shows a Snapdragon 845 device codenamed "Crosshatch," with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. The previous leak was a 128GB version.

Enlarge / This pop-up launches from an Apple support phishing site discovered this weekend by Ars. (credit: Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica)

India-based tech support scams have taken a new turn, using phishing emails targeting Apple users to push them to a fake Apple website. This phishing attack also comes with a twist—it pops up a system dialog box to start a phone call. The intricacy of the phish and the formatting of the webpage could convince some users that their phone has been "locked for illegal activity" by Apple, luring users into soon clicking to complete the call.

Scammers are following the money. As more people use mobile devices as their primary or sole way of connecting to the Internet, phishing attacks and other scams have increasingly targeted mobile users. And since so much of people's lives are tied to mobile devices, they're particularly attractive targets for scammers and fraudsters.

"People are just more distracted when they're using their mobile device and trust it more," said Jeremy Richards, a threat intelligence researcher at the mobile security service provider Lookout. As a result, he said, phishing attacks against mobile devices have a higher likelihood of succeeding.

Sony

When Gran Turismo Sport arrived for the Playstation 4 at the end last year, I wrote that it was a great game. Any lingering problems I'd had with the way Polyphony Digital had been simulating tire physics disappeared, plus it looked and sounded better than any prior installment of the franchise. But it also wasn't perfect, particularly for long-time fans of the series with little interest in racing other humans online.

Since the October launch, Polyphony Digital has been hard at work sending out regular updates, adding new tracks, new cars, and (perhaps most importantly for much of our audience) beefing up the single player mode. The latest of these updates was pushed out to PS4 consoles this morning, adding eight new cars and a new track. Among the additions are the 2017 championship-winning Mercedes AMG F1 car, the 1991 Le Mans-winning Mazda 787B, and a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO (serial number 3729GT for those who keep track). However, there is one tweak to the game that might enrage some: microtransactions.