Month: October 2018

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On Tuesday morning, Tesla released its production and delivery results for Q3 2018. During those three months, it built a total of 80,142 electric vehicles, of which 53,239 were the somewhat more affordable Model 3. Over the same time period, the company delivered even more—83,500 vehicles in total. Overall, 55,480 of these were Model 3s compared to 14,470 Model Ss and 13,190 Model Xs.

That's a big increase on Q2 2018, when Tesla delivered 40,768 vehicles, and it's no doubt welcome news for a company that has been rocked by scandal of late. Tesla has recently navigated numerous resignations among senior staff and a now-settled lawsuit with the SEC over insider trading following CEO Elon Musk's Twitter-induced manipulation of the stock price.

These latest results from Tesla are solely limited to vehicle production numbers, so we can't yet say if the company has kept its promise from Q2 2018 to be cashflow positive. In its favor is the fact that those Q3 Model 3s were "limited to higher-priced variants"—Musk has previously stated on Twitter that Tesla could not yet afford to build a $35,000 version and survive.

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Amazon announced today it would raise its minimum wage for all US employees to $15 per hour. The change will take effect on November 1, and will apply to full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal workers. Overall, more than 250,000 Amazon workers will get a pay raise from this, in addition to more than 100,000 seasonal employees that the company hires at various times throughout the year.

“We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement.

The company's public policy team will also be advocating for an increase in the federal minimum wage, which is currently $7.25 per hour. The federal minimum wage hasn't risen since 2009.

BMW

On Tuesday, BMW used the Paris auto show to debut an all-new 3 Series. When it goes on sale in 2019, it will be the seventh model to wear the badge, adding to the more than 15 million 3 Series that BMW has sold since 1975. The 3 Series is one of those cars that defines an entire sector—in this case the small sporty sedan. But it's a sector that's dying out, as customer tastes shift to the convenience of the crossover. So BMW has sharpened up the attributes that made the 3 Series a name in the first place.

There's a lot that's new about the latest version, known to BMW nerds as the G20. The first to arrive on these shores next March will be the $40,200 330i (in rear wheel drive and xDrive all-wheel drive variations), both powered by a new iteration of BMW's 2.0L four-cylinder turbocharged engine. (No, BMW's naming scheme makes no sense anymore.) With 255hp (190kW) and 295lb-ft (400Nm) of torque, it's a little more powerful and a fair bit more torquey than the outgoing engine.

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ESET Research has published a paper detailing the discovery of a malware campaign that used repurposed commercial software to create a backdoor in computers’ firmware—a “rootkit," active since at least early 2017 and capable of surviving the re-installation of the Windows operating system or even hard drive replacement. While the malware had been spotted previously, ESET’s research is the first to show that it was actively attacking the firmware of computers to establish a tenacious foothold.

Dubbed “LoJax,” the malware is the first case of an attack leveraging the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot system being used in an attack by an adversary. And based on the way the malware was spread, it is highly likely that it was authored by the Sednit/Fancy Bear/APT 28 threat group—the Russian state-sponsored operation tied by US intelligence and law enforcement to the cyber-attack on the Democratic National Committee.

UEFI uh-oh

There have been a number of security concerns about UEFI’s potential as a hiding place for rootkits and other malware, including those raised by Dick Wilkins and Jim Mortensen of firmware developer Phoenix Technologies in a presentation at UEFI Plugfest last year. “Firmware is software and is therefore vulnerable to the same threats that typically target software,” they explained. UEFI is essentially a lightweight operating system in its own right, making it a handy place to put rootkits for those who can manage it.