Month: July 2019

Enlarge / The Apple Watch series 4 running watchOS 5. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

As it often does, Apple has released updates for all of its device operating systems at once. iOS 12.4, watchOS 5.3, macOS 10.14.6, and tvOS 12.4 all arrive on supporting devices today.

iOS 12.4's tentpole feature is the ability to directly and wirelessly transfer all your data from one iPhone to another when setting the latter up. Onlookers are also speculating that it includes yet-to-be-activated support for the Apple Card credit card. This Goldman Sachs-driven consumer credit card will have a number of smart features and iPhone tie-ins, and, per Apple's announcement earlier this year, is due to launch by the end of the summer.

There are also some quality-of-life and UX improvements for Apple News+. These are Apple's iOS 12.4 release notes:

Enlarge (credit: One of the slides posted to Github)

A security researcher has published a detailed guide that shows how to execute malicious code on Windows computers still vulnerable to the critical BlueKeep vulnerability. The move significantly lowers the bar for writing exploits that wreak the kinds of destructive attacks not seen since the WannaCry and NotPetya attacks of 2017, researchers said.

As of three weeks ago, more than 800,000 computers exposed to the Internet were vulnerable to the exploit, researchers from security firm BitSight said last week. Microsoft and a chorus of security professionals have warned of the potential for exploits to sow worldwide disruptions. The risk of the bug, found in Microsoft's implementation of the remote desktop protocol, stems from the ability for attacks to spread from one vulnerable computer to another with no interaction required of end users.

“A pretty big deal”

One of the only things standing in the way of real-world attacks is the expertise required to write exploits that remotely execute code without crashing the computer first. Several highly skilled whitehat hackers have done so with varying levels of success, but they have kept the techniques that make this possible secret. Much of that changed overnight, when a security researcher published this slide deck to Github.

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  Chris Kraft, left, and Robert Gilruth monitor the launch of Apollo 5 in 1968. [credit: NASA ]

Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr.—one of NASA's founding engineers, its first flight director, and a key architect of the Apollo and space shuttle programs—has died at the age of 95.

Back during the earliest days of NASA, the head of the agency's Space Task Group, Robert Gilruth, assigned Kraft the job of drawing up rules and procedures for safely managing the flight of a human into space, through the great blackness, and back to the ground. Kraft was to do all of this without the aid of a calculator or sophisticated computer and without any reference material. And he had to hurry, because the Soviet Union had already taken a big lead in the Space Race.

Over time, the work Kraft did in writing those rules, as well as hiring a talented team of flight directors and controllers, helped NASA fly the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Kraft became, in the words of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the "control" in Mission Control. Today, NASA's Mission Control in Houston bears his name—the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center.

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  The ROG Phone 2. It looks a lot like the ROG Phone 1. [credit: Asus ]

Asus is still trying to make gaming phones a thing with the release of the Asus ROG (Republic of Gamers) Phone II. Just like last year, this is a high-end smartphone with a hyper-aggressive "gamer" design and a light-up back logo, but there are also genuinely impressive specs here that you won't find on any other smartphone right now.

The Asus Republic of Gamers Phone II is the first device to launch with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 855 Plus SoC. This 855 "Plus" is a mid-cycle upgrade for the Snapdragon 855 with higher clock speeds for the CPU and GPU. The SoC's single "Prime" CPU core gets bumped from 2.84GHz to 2.96GHz, while the GPU gets a 15% boost from 585MHz to 672MHz.

You're going to need that extra horsepower since the ROG Phone II has a 6.59-inch, 2340×1080 OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, which is up from 90Hz last year. This is one of the fastest displays you can get on a smartphone, alongside the 120Hz display on the Razer Phone 2, though that is an LCD. The 90Hz display on the OnePlus 7 Pro turned out to be one of the phone's best features even when you weren't gaming, thanks to the faster, smoother UI animations it enabled. I expect faster displays to show up in a ton more smartphones phones next year.

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  SpaceX has been assembling a Starship prototype in South Texas. This gallery highlights a recent static fire test. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann for Ars ]

This is a big week for SpaceX, which has an important Falcon 9 launch for NASA taking place from Florida and probably a key test flight in Texas as well.

On Wednesday, SpaceX is scheduled to attempt its ninth launch of 2019: a cargo supply mission to the International Space Station. The Dragon spacecraft will ferry about 2.5 metric tons of supplies, science experiments, and equipment to the orbiting laboratory. This will be the 18th supply mission SpaceX has flown for NASA.

With a static fire of the Falcon 9 rocket already complete, liftoff is presently scheduled for 6:24pm ET (22:24 UTC) Wednesday from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The weather forecast is not great, however, with a 70 percent chance of "no-go" conditions.This Falcon 9 first stage has flown once before, launching SpaceX's last supply mission to the station, in May. NASA may fly it for a third time later this year.