Month: November 2018

Enlarge / Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. (credit: Microsoft)

For a brief period today, Microsoft achieved greater market value than Apple, which is often called the world's most valuable company. The temporary shift recalls a long, up-and-down history of a rivalry between the two companies—though they are partners in many areas today.

Microsoft reached a market capitalization of close to $813 billion today, with Apple falling only about a billion behind. Apple has fallen a long way since earlier this year, and Microsoft has also seen declines along with many other tech companies, but Microsoft's struggles have not been as pronounced, at least in terms of investor confidence.

The last time Microsoft secured this lead was in 2010. Earlier this year, Apple became the world's first company to achieve a $1 trillion market cap. Amazon followed shortly after. Microsoft has still not reached that milestone, and all three are below it now following a trying period for tech stocks.

Enlarge / Damian Collins, chairman of U.K. House of Commons' digital culture and sport committee poses for a photograph outside the Houses of Parliament in London, U.K., on Tuesday, March 20, 2018. Collins asked Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg Tuesday to answer for a "catastrophic failure of process" as reports emerged concerning Cambridge Analytica, the U.K. firm at the center of the privacy scandal. (credit: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A member of the UK parliament who recently ordered the seizure of a cache of internal Facebook documents has shown no signs of backing down.

Meanwhile, a California county judge is irked that documents that he ordered kept secret under a protective order have now been shared abroad.

The years-long legal dispute between Facebook and the tiny app company Six4Three has now intersected with an ongoing British investigation into Facebook's privacy practices—resulting in a strange twist.

(credit: Jeremy Brooks / Flickr)

A hacker or hackers sneaked a backdoor into a widely used open source code library with the aim of surreptitiously stealing funds stored in bitcoin wallets, software developers said Monday.

The malicious code was inserted in two stages into event-stream, a code library with 2 million downloads that’s used by Fortune 500 companies and small startups alike. In stage one, version 3.3.6, published on September 8, included a benign module known as flatmap-stream. Stage two was implemented on October 5 when flatmap-steam was updated to include malicious code that attempted to steal bitcoin wallets and transfer their balances to a server located in Kuala Lumpur. The backdoor came to light last Tuesday with this report from Github user Ayrton Sparling. Officials with the NPM, the open source project manager that hosted event-stream, didn’t issue an advisory until Monday, six days later.

NPM officials said the malicious code was designed to target people using a bitcoin wallet developed by Copay, a company that incorporated event-stream into its app. This release from earlier this month shows Copay updating its code to refer to flatmap-stream, but a Copay official said in a Github discussion that the malicious code was never deployed in any platforms. After this post went live, Copay officials updated their comment to say they did, in fact, release platforms that contained the backdoor.

Enlarge / Solar panels sit on the roof of Google headquarters in Mountain View. (credit: Kimberly White/Corbis via Getty Images)

Solar panels are cheap and getting cheaper. A recent study found that the cost per kilowatt-hour of solar has fallen below coal and gas. Even a recent US tariff on Chinese solar cells and modules (the components that make up solar panels) hasn't been enough to make a dent in the solar industry.

Now, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have built a model to quantify which factors contributed the most to cost-per-watt changes for solar panels since the 1980s.

The results were that better module efficiency was the No.1 cause of declines in solar panel cost per watt between 1980 and 2012, with money from government and private research and development contributing to the bulk of those efficiencies. By 2001, however, economies of scale started playing more of a role in solar panel cost declines.

Enlarge / He Jiankui, the scientist who has claimed to have led an effort to gene-edit humans.

On Sunday, news reports indicated that the first gene-edited human babies had been born in China. As of right now, the information on what, exactly, has been accomplished is confusing. The scientist behind the announcement has made a variety of claims but has not submitted his data to the community in order for his claims to be verified. But even in its current state, the announcement has set off a firestorm of criticism within the scientific and ethics communities. Most scientists feel that the technology isn't ready for use in humans and that there are better ways to deal with the problem the work was addressing: HIV infection.

Editing genes

The most complete report we currently have comes from the Associated Press. Its reporters talked to the researcher behind the announcement, He Jiankui of Shenzhen, China, in advance of his public announcement. That public announcement came at the start of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, taking place this week in Hong Kong. The summit is intended to help work out the "science, application, ethics, and governance of human genome editing," but He apparently chose to go ahead in advance of those being settled.

He is expected to present more details of his work on Wednesday, but it's clear that he used biotechnology called CRISPR to perform the gene editing. CRISPR is a system that evolved in bacteria to protect them from viruses by allowing them to recognize and cut viral DNA. By changing part of the CRISPR system, it's possible to direct it to cut an arbitrary DNA sequence. That can include sequences within the human genome.

Enlarge / Staff at the Jet Propulsion Lab celebrate as InSight sends its first picture down from Mars.

LA CAÑADA FLINTRIDGE, Calif.—Since humans began trying in 1962, only seven lander and rover missions have ever touched down safely on the surface of Mars, phoned home, and prepared to carry out their scientific missions.

On Monday, an eighth mission joined their ranks—NASA's InSight lander. During its descent, the spacecraft experienced up to eight Gs of force. Its heat shield burned away in the thin Martian atmosphere before its parachute deployed to slow it further.

Throughout the spacecraft's descent, two little CubeSats followed its trajectory from orbit and transmitted data for most of the journey. This is the first time CubeSats have gone interplanetary, and they played a critical role in providing real-time data as InSight slowed 20,000 km/hour from the top of the Martian atmosphere down to the surface.

Enlarge / Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, in Washington, DC, in 2015. (credit: Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Fortune/Time Inc)

GM is laying off thousands of workers and closing five plants, the company announced on Monday. The company is aiming to reduce its salaried headcount by 15 percent in the coming months.

The sobering news comes at a time when GM as a whole is doing relatively well. The company is profitable and beat Wall Street's expectations with its most recent quarterly earnings results.

But after several years of strong growth, the last year has seen signs of weakening vehicle sales across the automotive industry. GM executives are worried that the sales slump could continue into 2019.

Enlarge / All of those Xbox Adaptive Controller ports can now work with the Nintendo Switch... if you buy a $25-ish adapter. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

The May unveil of the Xbox Adaptive Controller included a pledge from Microsoft: the company didn't care if other gaming companies jumped on board, or even piggybacked on Microsoft's product, to get more limited-mobility users into console gaming.

Neither Sony nor Nintendo has followed suit by unveiling official support for the $100 XAC, but one enterprising user has confirmed what we long suspected. Other consoles (in today's case, the Nintendo Switch) can nimbly support Microsoft's ambitious controller after jumping through simple hoops.

YouTube user MyMateVince posted his confirmation over the weekend (embedded below) along with a step-by-step guide of what's needed to open the Nintendo Switch up to the XAC—and, thus, its support for USB joysticks and 3.5mm-port switches and pedals. The biggest requirement is a third-party USB adapter, and this test used the Mayflash MAGIC-NS Wireless Controller Adapter (currently under $25 at Amazon). This adapter was chosen in part because its retail box includes a USB Type-C adapter, which works with the XAC whether you set up the Nintendo Switch in docked or handheld mode. (Though this adapter is advertised as a wireless one, this test only confirmed wired XAC support.)

Part of the group Cydnidae, these are a type of shield bug. These two are apparently on the verge of producing a number of additional shield bugs. (credit: jacinta lluch valero (jaclluch at Flickr))

The important data loss bug that interrupted the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, version 1809, may be fixed, but it turns out there are plenty of other weird problems with the release.

As spotted by Paul Thurrott, the update also breaks the seek bar in Windows Media Player when playing "specific files."

This is the kind of bug that leaves me scratching my head, wondering what changed to break such a thing, and why. The various old and new Windows media stacks are certainly complicated beasts, but it's not clear what the October 2018 Update even changed in this area. At least this time around, it doesn't seem that the bug was reported before 1809 actually shipped, though it's hard to be definitive about this given the difficulty in finding anything in the Feedback Hub bug reporting tool. Microsoft does promise to fix the bug, but the timeframe is vaguely open-ended: it will be "in an upcoming release."