Month: April 2019

Enlarge / Elon Musk. (credit: Robyn Beck-Pool/Getty Images)

Tesla delivered 63,000 vehicles to customers in the first quarter of 2019, the company announced on Wednesday evening. That's a dramatic 31 percent decline from the previous quarter, when Tesla delivered 90,700 vehicles.

Analysts have been expecting that Tesla would announce a quarter-to-quarter decline in deliveries, but this drop exceeded Wall Street's expectations. Wall Street analysts were expecting Tesla to deliver around 75,000 cars.

Analysts expected Tesla to have a down quarter because the US tax credit for buying a Tesla was scheduled to fall from $7,500 to $3,750 on January 1. So Americans thinking about buying a Tesla late last year made sure take delivery by December 31, causing US demand to dry up in January.

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

The Apache HTTP Server, the Internet’s most widely used Web server, just fixed a serious vulnerability that makes it possible for untrusted users or software to gain unfettered control of the machine the software runs on.

CVE-2019-0211, as the vulnerability is indexed, is a local privilege escalation, meaning it allows a person or software that already has limited access to the Web server to elevate privileges to root. From there, the attacker could do just about anything. The vulnerability makes it possible for unprivileged scripts to overwrite sensitive parts of a server’s memory, Charles Fol, the independent researcher who discovered the bug, wrote in a blog post. A malicious script could exploit the vulnerability to gain root.

The vulnerability poses the most risk inside Web-hosting facilities that offer shared instances, in which a single physical machine serves content for more than one website. Typically, such servers prevent an administrator of one site from accessing other sites or from accessing sensitive settings of the machine itself.

Enlarge / The blazing fast conclusion of Verizon's speed test. (credit: David Weissmann)

It was a bit earlier than scheduled, but Verizon switched on parts of its 5G network today, debuting in "select areas" of Minneapolis and Chicago. Every carrier out there likes to slice and dice definitions to have the "First 5G" everything, but in terms of using a real, mmWave 5G signal and something approximating a 5G smartphone, Verizon has made the most progress yet in getting a 5G ecosystem up and running.

5G is still in its very early stages, with access in only a few cities and almost zero device support. So it's been hard to know what 5G will really be like in the real world. Verizon spokesperson David Weissmann shared the best look yet at 5G on Twitter, where he showed a real-life 5G speed test, running on a real smartphone, getting data from a real 5G tower. Specifically Weissmann was out in Minneapolis, pulled out his Verizon™ Moto Z3 phone with the Moto 5G Mod attached, and loaded up the Ookla Speedtest.net app. Behold his speed test:

Thrilled to be in Minneapolis as @verizon 5G UWB makes history!

Speed test here in front of US Bank Stadium

Impressive! pic.twitter.com/jvW4YlYPMA

— David Weissmann (@djweissmann) April 3, 2019

Weissmann's speed test ended with a blazing-fast 762Mbps down and a 19ms ping (the video does not show upload speeds). Unless you are rocking gigabit fiber Internet at home, this is probably much faster than your home Internet connection. Ookla's latest aggregate speed reports peg the average US mobile download speed at 27Mbps, while the average fixed broadband download in the United States is at 96Mbps.

Enlarge / Bleached coral in March 2017. (credit: G Torda / ARCCOE / Flickr)

Australia's Great Barrier Reef was hit hard by warm ocean water in 2016 and 2017, causing back-to-back disasters filled with widespread coral die-offs. During marine heatwaves, corals are forced to expel the single-celled symbiotes that photosynthesize inside them. This leaves the corals a pallid white color—a process called "bleaching."

If this bleaching lasts too long, the corals die. That's what happened along much of the Great Barrier Reef (the southern end has largely avoided bleaching). And, if the reef doesn't recover quickly, it could suffer from a long-term degradation.

The question—asked with fingers firmly crossed—was whether the reefs would find a way to bounce back quickly, repopulating with a new generation of corals. Unfortunately, a new study published this week shows that the first year's data is not encouraging.

Enlarge (credit: Eelke)

An Ohio teen has been charged with 40 felonies and 33 misdemeanors after a multi-state investigation revealed that he had placed dozens of hoax emergency calls in a practice known as "swatting."

The investigation was triggered by an August call to the sheriff's department in Putnam County, New York. A caller claimed he had shot his wife and was holding his son hostage with an AR-15.

Thankfully, that turned out to be a lie. The house was unoccupied, and the police were able to check the story without anyone getting hurt. But the sheriff's department didn't let the issue drop. They began investigating who had placed the call.

Enlarge / Sorry. (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

As company executives try to rebrand Facebook as a privacy company, the company is still apparently struggling to instill a privacy culture internally and with third-party developers. As Kevin Poulson of the Daily Beast reported on April 2, some new Facebook users were being asked to provide both their email address and their email password in order to register accounts.

And in a blog post today, researchers from the cloud security firm UpGuard reported that they had discovered two publicly accessible caches of Facebook user data created by third-party applications that connected to the Facebook platform. Both caches were hosted by Amazon Web Services' Simple Storage Service (S3) in the AWS public cloud.

Password, please

The email password practice was first noticed by a software developer and information security expert who goes by the handle “e-sushi”:

Enlarge / Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) speaks on April 1, 2019 in Washington, DC. (credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

In 2017, criminals stole the personal data of about 143 million people from the credit rating system Equifax. It was a huge embarrassment for the company and a headache for the millions of people affected. Equifax's then-57-year-old CEO Richard Smith retired in September 2017, weeks after the breach was discovered, with a multi-million dollar pay package.

Massachusetts US Senator turned Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren wants to make sure that CEOs who preside over massive data breaches in the future don't get off so easily. On Wednesday, she announced the Corporate Executive Accountability Act, which would impose jail time on corporate executives who "negligently permit or fail to prevent" a "violation of the law" that "affects the health, safety, finances or personal data" of 1 percent of the population of any state.

A CEO could get up to a year in prison for a first offense. Repeat offenders could get three years.

Pretty much every part of that "Buy Sell Trade" sign is suffering in GameStop's latest fiscal year.

One of the world's biggest video game retailers just announced its worst annual performance in decades, raising renewed questions about the health of the physical video game market as downloadable games continue their ascent. Net sales for GameStop were down 3 percent for the 52-week period ending February 2, a slide that helped flip last year's modest $34.7 million profit to a sizable $673 million operating loss. On top of that, the company expects sales to decline another 5 to 10 percent in the next fiscal year.

GameStop's massive loss is the largest ever reported by the company, and only the third annual loss since it grew out of the corporate remains of FuncoLand in 2000. GameStop last posted a loss in 2012, when it lost nearly $270 million thanks in part to weak holiday sales near the end of that era's console generation.

But more than the amount, the reason behind the new loss could be cause for long-term concern at the retailer's thousands of worldwide storefronts. While hardware sales were roughly flat and new software sales fell about 4 percent year over year, pre-owned software sales cratered nearly 12 percent for the year, continuing a years-long slide.

Enlarge / Raman microscopy images can pick out the details of different chemicals inside a cell. (credit: NSF)

I had a remarkable experience last week. A scientific paper crossed my desk that seemed to take a theoretical idea that I and my colleagues developed and made it work. This simply does not happen to people like me. On closer inspection, the imaging technique that was demonstrated is closely related to—but slightly different from—the ideas we had developed. Still, I was pretty excited by the paper, and now you have to be as well.

The reading of the day

Before we get to the good stuff, let me wax lyrical about imaging. Imaging is without a doubt our best scientific tool. Whenever it is possible to turn data into an image, we do it. Why? Because the cliché “a picture is worth a thousand words” is wrong: it is off by about two orders of magnitude. A picture is worth 100,000 words. 

The proof is in progress. We’ve gone from telescopes and microscopes that use visible light to telescopes that create images from microwaves and radiowaves. We use electrons to create images of tiny features on surfaces, and we use electrons to image through thin samples and see the positions of atoms. We run tiny needles along surfaces to create images of surfaces at atomic resolution. And we combine huge magnets with microwaves to image blood flow in the brain. 

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  The new Bubbles UI in action. Showing this working with Google Hangouts, which is due to shut down and will never actually support bubbles, is really rubbing salt in the wound. [credit: Google ]

Google is releasing the second Android Q Beta today. As we learned with the first release, Android Q is bringing support for foldable smartphones, better privacy and permissions controls, and a grab bag of other features. We've yet to install the second beta on one of our own devices, but Google's release blog post promises "bug fixes, optimizations, and API updates," as well as a crazy new multitasking feature and an emulator for foldables.

Android loves multitasking. So far we've had split screens and floating windows, and Android Q Beta 1 even had a hidden desktop mode. Beta 2 brings us a new multitasking feature called "Bubbles." Bubbles let you minimize an app into a little circle, which floats around on the screen above all your other apps. Tapping on a bubble will open a small UI. The only demo Google shows is one for a messaging app. Each bubble is a contact, and tapping on the bubble shows a small chat UI. If you remember Facebook's "Chat Head" UI for Messenger, Bubbles is that, but built into the OS.

Google offers a few suggested use cases for Bubbles, saying, "Bubbles are great for messaging because they let users keep important conversations within easy reach. They also provide a convenient view over ongoing tasks and updates, like phone calls or arrival times. They can provide quick access to portable UI, like notes or translations, and can be visual reminders of tasks too."