Month: April 2019

Enlarge (credit: iFixit)

The Galaxy Fold delay been an embarrassing mess for Samsung, and now the company is making things worse by attacking media outlets. Samsung has pressured iFixit to remove its Galaxy Fold teardown.

The Galaxy Fold teardown wasn't just a normal teardown. After the phone was delayed due to durability problems discovered by early reviewers, iFixit used the teardown to point out several flaws in its design.

When we wrote up iFixit's teardown, we openly wondered where the site managed to get a device that was never for sale and had all of its review units recalled. Apparently, the dubious origin of iFixit's Galaxy Fold (and the embarrassment of having the site poke holes in your $2000 smartphone design) was enough to draw Samsung's retaliation.

Enlarge / A drone with an Amazon package floats in front of the Amazon logistics center in Leipzig, Germany, 28 October 2014. Amazon did not comment on whether drones will fuel this default one-day speed boost for paying Amazon Prime subscribers' deliveries. (credit: Alamy / dpa Picture Alliance)

Amazon's latest earnings conference call included the reveal of a major shift for the paid Amazon Prime subscription service: an "evolution" to one-day shipping as a nationwide default.

"We're currently working on evolving our Prime free two-day shipping program to be a free one-day shipping program," Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said in the company's quarterly investor relations call. The news came as a response to questions about both incremental-spending and revenue-acceleration predictions in certain portions of the company's Q2 financial guidance, which Olsavsky said revolved significantly around this push for faster default Amazon Prime shipping speeds.

Amazon has not yet formally announced this initiative via any of its news or PR channels, and Olsavsky did not offer an estimate of exactly when this would become a nationwide default for the subscription service.

Enlarge / A West Covina firefighter pulls a hose away from a horse barn that burns as the Mendocino Complex Fire moves through the area on July 31, 2018, in Lakeport, Calif. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan)

The US mobile industry's top lobbying group is opposing a proposed California state law that would prohibit throttling of fire departments and other public safety agencies during emergencies.

As reported yesterday by StateScoop, wireless industry lobby group CTIA last week wrote to lawmakers to oppose the bill as currently written. CTIA said the bill's prohibition on throttling is too vague and that it should apply only when the US president or California governor declares emergencies and not when local governments declare emergencies.

The group's letter also suggested that the industry would sue the state if the bill is passed in its current form, saying the bill would result in "serious unintended consequences, including needless litigation."

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  SEVERODVINSK, RUSSIA - APRIL 23, 2019: The Belgorod nuclear-powered submarine (Special Project 09852), during the launching ceremony, that carries Poseidon strategic underwater drones. (Photo by Oleg Kuleshov/TASS via Getty Images) [credit: Oleg Kuleshov/TASS via Getty Images ]

On April 23, 2019, a hulking submarine named the K-139 Belgorod was christened and launched from Severodvinsk, Russia. It slid from Sevmash Shipyard into the Nikolskoye estuary off the White Sea. First laid down in 1992, the Belgorod is the world's longest submarine, surpassing Russia's Typhoon-class nuclear-missile sub and the US Navy's Ohio class. Its construction was paused for over a decade in 2000 after the disaster aboard its immediate predecessor, the Kursk—in which all the crew was lost after an explosion during missile tests. But Belgorod was resurrected with its design modified for a new purpose: carrying the Poseidon nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed torpedo "drone."

The Belgorod is a modification of the Soviet Navy's Project 949A design program—what Western military analysts have called the Oscar II class. Originally intended to be a cruise-missile submarine, the Belgorod was re-designated as Special Project 09852, a "special-purpose research and rescue submarine," in December 2012. The design was lengthened to add a docking compartment for crewed and uncrewed small submersible vehicles, such as submarine rescue vehicles. It was also apparently intended to do cable-laying operations and inspections, deployments of underwater equipment, and other tasks similar to those the US Navy constructed the USS Jimmy Carter for.

The submarine-rescue role was clearly at the front of the mind of the Russian Navy in the years after the Kursk debacle, in which Russia initially refused assistance from the United Kingdom and Norway. The incident was a major embarrassment to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who—just four months into his presidency—was on vacation in Sochi at the time of the accident and remained there for five days afterward.

Roger Nielsen, president and CEO of Daimler Trucks North America in Long Beach, April 2019. (credit: Daimler)

At a presentation in Long Beach, California, Daimler Trucks North America President and CEO Roger Nielsen on Wednesday laid out an electrification plan for Daimler's Freightliner brand, which makes medium- and heavy-duty trucks.

Freightliner announced two battery-electric vehicles last June: the heavy-duty eCascadia and the medium duty eM2. The company previously said that it would build the trucks at a facility in North Carolina, but yesterday Nielsen said that an existing Freightliner factory in Portland, Oregon, would be redesigned to build the two electric-vehicle lines.

The company decided to change the manufacturing location in order to take advantage of the factory's proximity to California, which has stringent low-carbon fuel standard rules about to take effect. In September, the state's Air Resources Board amended existing rules to require that lifecycle emissions for transportation fuels needs to drop by 20 percent by 2030, which will certainly drive up the price of diesel and gas in the state. Now, vehicle manufacturers like Freightliner are betting that freight companies that move shipments frequently or exclusively through the Golden State will start to see a cost advantage in shifting their fleet from diesel to a low-carbon alternative.

For many years, Microsoft has published a security baseline configuration: a set of system policies that are a reasonable default for a typical organization. This configuration may be sufficient for some companies, and it represents a good starting point for those corporations that need something stricter. While most of the settings have been unproblematic, one particular decision has long drawn the ire of end-users and helpdesks alike: a 60-day password expiration policy that forces a password change every two months. That reality is no longer: the latest draft for the baseline configuration for Windows 10 version 1903 and Windows Server version 1903 drops this tedious requirement.

The rationale for the previous policy is that it limits the impact a stolen password can have—a stolen password will automatically become invalid after, at most, 60 days. In reality, however, password expiration tends to make systems less safe, not more, because computer users don't like picking or remembering new passwords. Instead, they'll do something like pick a simple password and then increment a number on the end of the password, making it easy to "generate" a new password whenever they're forced to.

In the early days of computing, this might have been a sensible trade-off, because cracking passwords was relatively slow. But these days, with rainbow tables, GPU acceleration, and the massive computational power of the cloud, that's no longer the case—short passwords are a liability, so any policy that makes people favor short passwords is a bad policy. It's better instead to choose a long password and, ideally, multifactor authentication, supplementing the password with a time-based code or something similar.