Month: June 2019

(credit: ABC Photo Archives / Getty Images)

Microsoft is finally catching on to a maxim that security experts have almost universally accepted for years: periodic password changes are likely to do more harm than good.

In a largely overlooked post published late last month, Microsoft said it was removing periodic password changes from the security baseline settings it recommends for customers and auditors. After decades of Microsoft recommending passwords be changed regularly, Microsoft employee Aaron Margosis said the requirement is an “ancient and obsolete mitigation of very low value.”

The change of heart is largely the result of research that shows passwords are most prone to cracking when they’re easy for end users to remember, such as when they use a name or phrase from a favorite movie or book. Over the past decade, hackers have mined real-world password breaches to assemble dictionaries of millions of words. Combined with super-fast graphics cards, the hackers can make huge numbers of guesses in off-line attacks, which occur when they steal the cryptographically scrambled hashes that represent the plaintext user passwords.

(credit: Jeffrey Sauger / Chevrolet)

GM and Fiat Chrysler have reported that they purchased federal greenhouse gas emissions credits from Tesla, according to filings made to the state of Delaware and viewed by Bloomberg.

Both the US federal government and California offer automaker credits for selling zero-emissions vehicles. Those automakers can then sell those credits to automakers who exceed their pollution restrictions in a sort of cap-and-trade system that imposes extra cost on automakers not improving the fuel efficiency of their fleet.

Tesla has reported sales of its credits for years, but generally the buyers have been kept private. An exception to this occurred in April, when the Financial Times discovered a deal between Fiat Chrysler and Tesla that was reportedly worth hundreds of millions of euros. According to FT, Tesla had allowed Fiat to pool its European fleet with Tesla's in order to meet strict EU average fuel-economy emissions laws.

Enlarge / Access to playable scenes like this are why I bought a Tesla and not a PS4. (credit: Studio MDHR)

After March's announcement that the hard-as-nails, retro-stylized platformer Cuphead was coming to the Nintendo Switch, we wondered what platform might be the next to see a port. Anything from iOS or PS4 to Linux or Google's upcoming Stadia seemed at least plausible.

We did not, however, think of the Tesla car line as the next Cuphead port platform. And yet here we are, listening as Elon Musk announced during a podcast interview this week that Cuphead is "working" on the car's central-console touchscreen.

Maja Moldenhauer from Cuphead developer Studio MDHR confirmed the work on the limited port to IGN's Ryan McCaffrey, saying Tesla only required that the game "play super, super clean" on the car's internal hardware. For this reason, the game will only work by plugging in a wired USB controller rather than allowing for controls directly on the touchscreen itself (or with the Tesla's steering-wheel buttons). And before you ask, the car has to be in park to play the game, a move that probably makes Tesla's lawyers very happy.

Apple just dropped the first full-length trailer for its forthcoming sci-fi space-race series, For All Mankind. Developed by Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore, the series is meant to explore an alternate reality where the global space race never really ended.

For All Mankind (not to be confused with the 1989 documentary of the same name) joins a host of other TV series in development for Apple TV Plus, a new video subscription service launching this fall that features Apple original programming—yet another contender in the streaming wars. At a conference in March, Apple CEO Tim Cook called the fledgling streaming platform "the new home for the world's most creative storytellers, featuring exclusive original shows, movies, and documentaries."

Details about the series are scarce, but it will star Joel Kinnaman (of Altered Carbon fame, fresh off his stint as Erik Heller in the TV reboot of Hanna) as Edward Baldwin, possibly a US astronaut, judging from the new trailer footage. It opens with a recreation of the first crewed lunar landing in 1969, with a twist: the first man to set foot on the moon is not NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong but Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. (The real Leonov was part of the Voskhod 2 mission, becoming the first man to perform a 12-minute spacewalk on March 18, 1965.) "The shock across the nation at this event is just... indescribable," the trailer's fictional news anchor intones.

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  "Look, ma, I'm in Minecraft!" Play Minecraft Earth at a real-world scale... [credit: Apple / Mojang ]

Mojang, the Microsoft-owned studio behind Minecraft, used Monday's WWDC keynote to unveil the world's first live gameplay look at its next smartphone-exclusive game, Minecraft Earth. This demo also included the firmest tease yet about when series fans will get their hands on the augmented-reality game: "coming this summer to iOS." This specific tease didn't include any indication of whether that means the game's promised Android version will take longer to land as a public beta.

The onstage demo began with two Mojang employees aiming their iOS devices at a table, where a blocky Minecraft game world appeared that both users could simultaneously interact with. By walking around the table and aiming their devices' cameras, the staffers could use items and weapons, interact with switches, and drop or plant items in their inventories. One staffer also placed her Minecraft-styled avatar into the game world like a doll, which she could then animate by moving her real-world body. iOS's upcoming ARKit 3.0 appears to support body gestures like hand-waving, and we saw one-handed and two-handed waves in this portion of the demo.

This was followed by a world shift from the top of a table to all around the WWDC stage, which resulted in the Mojang reps appearing as real people inside the blocky, virtual Minecraft Earth world—and having their bodies occluded by virtual content (like when one staffer hid behind a freshly planted bundle of flowers). While the players could walk around the real-world space to reach new parts of the virtual world, they largely relied on aiming their phones' views to manipulate distant objects or lay down torches.

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

In addition to expected updates to WatchOS and iOS, Apple's Monday WWDC keynote included an announcement of a new iOS fork: iPadOS. This new updated OS focuses squarely on the larger-screen capabilities of iPads—though Apple didn't confirm which iPad models will be supported. The OS' beta period will begin "today," with a full release slated for "this fall."

In the demo, Apple's Craig Federighi showed off features that are likely familiar to anyone who has used larger Android phones and tablets, including the ability to pin homescreen widgets and a "fanning" interface to pick through recently opened apps.

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  Pin widgets! Where have we seen this before...

iPadOS does put a welcome, Apple-like spin on multi-window support: supported apps will allow users to grab and drop content between windows. Federighi showed this off by using a "tap-and-drag" feature to move attachments and links from one Mail window to another on the same screen. He pointed out that third-party apps like Microsoft Word will also support the feature. But he said nothing about such multi-window support working with multiple apps on the same screen—such as dragging-and-dropping Safari content into a Microsoft Word window.