Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Samsung teased two new devices to debut ahead of its Unpacked conference. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung has opted to release some new hardware ahead of its Unpacked conference next week. A shadowy teaser video gives launch dates for two new products: a tablet and a smartwatch.

The tablet is likely a full-featured Galaxy Tab S6. The most recent entry in the tech company’s tablet lineage was the midrange Galaxy Tab S5e, which combined a selection of high-end offerings and lightweight design at a $399 price point. The video shows that the new Tab will once again come with an S Pen stylus, and a keyboard cover will at least be an optional upgrade if not the default. More details will drop from Samsung tomorrow, with July 31 set as the tablet’s unveiling date.

The smartwatch will get its official introduction on August 5. Samsung’s February Unpacked event included a refresh of its wearables products, and the teased smartwatch is likely the follow-up to the Galaxy Watch Active. Expect to see only minor tweaks to the design and specs with the Galaxy Watch Active 2, since the original version only just hit the market a few months ago.

Enlarge / A Teva facility in France. (credit: Getty | Fred Dufour)

With four settlement agreements, the state of California will get nearly $70 million from pharmaceutical companies that allegedly cut illegal deals to keep affordable generic drugs off the market, shielding pricey brand-name products from competition.

The settlements also include injunctions that temporarily prevent the drugmakers from entering into such “pay-for-delay.”

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra argued that the deals violate antitrust laws and can lead consumers to pay as much as 90% more for prescription drugs.

Enlarge / Georgia State Police and Capitol Police had their laptops taken offline by ransomware in the latest of many attacks on state and local government agencies. (credit: Scott Olson / Getty Images)

Yesterday, the Georgia Department of Public Safety revealed that laptop computers in state police and Capitol police vehicles—as well as laptops used by Georgia's Motor Carrier Compliance Division (the officers who operate trucking scales and safety spot checks)—had been taken offline by ransomware. The attack comes a week after Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards declared a statewide emergency after "a malware attack on a few North Louisiana school systems," bringing state resources to assist in the response. And also last week, the city power company in Johannesburg, South Africa, was hit by ransomware, taking down payment systems and causing power outages.

These are just the latest episodes in a long line of state and local government organizations that have fallen to ransomware attacks. As Louisiana was declaring a state of emergency, the Board of Estimates of the City of Baltimore was approving $10 million in spending to recover from the city's nearly month-long IT outage caused by the RobbinHood ransomware. So today, the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), the National Governors Association (NGA), and the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) issued a warning urging organizations to take immediate steps to protect themselves against ransomware attacks. The hope is that state and local agencies will heed the warning and blunt the damage being done by recent ransomware variants.

The three steps urged by CISA, MS-ISAC, NGA, and NASCIO are fairly basic security hygiene: run daily backups, train staff on "cybersecurity awareness," and "revisit and refine cyber incident response plans." Unfortunately, these three steps may be beyond the capabilities of the organizations most likely to be hit by ransomware—school districts, government agencies, and small and mid-sized businesses that have IT budgets that place them below the information security poverty line.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

AT&T is eliminating the DirecTV Now brand name it uses for its struggling Internet-based TV service. DirecTV Now will become "AT&T TV Now" later this summer, AT&T announced today. DirecTV Now (the future "AT&T TV Now") offers a bundle of linear TV channels, similar to traditional cable or satellite services, and AT&T said its core offering won't be changed.

AT&T's 2015 purchase of DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite TV network, doesn't seem to be paying off as AT&T hoped. AT&T launched DirecTV Now—a stripped-down, online-only version of DirecTV—in 2016, and it was immediately plagued by multiple outages, unexpected blackouts of live local sports games, and missing channels.

While the technical problems got sorted out, AT&T's subscriber gains were short-lived. As we wrote last week, AT&T lost 946,000 TV subscribers in Q2 2019 after announcing a series of price increases.

Enlarge (credit: Dan Lundberg / Flickr)

In the past 20 years, China has become a key player for global greenhouse gas emissions. Due to its large population, rapid economic development launched it into position as the top-emitting nation, despite having per-capita emissions that are about half those of the United States. Many Western countries have had roughly stable emissions levels, but China's have still been rising. This means that China's future trajectory will have a huge influence on the global trajectory.

China's pledge, submitted as part of the international 2015 Paris Agreement, was to ensure its emissions peaked and stabilized before the end of the deal’s window in 2030. This is no small feat considering the country's emissions had more than doubled in the last 10 years or so.

Of course, that could include everything from a 2016 peak to a 2029 peak, and a lot of effort has gone into analyzing emissions trends in Chinese industry and electrical generation. As of 2015, some slowing economic growth and government directives were already combining to mark a shift in China's emissions trend. Some studies have found that China may, in fact, be very close to peak emissions already thanks to transitions toward cleaner industries and renewable energy.

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  The Nissan Leaf Plus starts at $36,550. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

Electric vehicles are the future of driving, even if it might take us a few more decades to get there. They were also the past of driving; early automobiles, as often as not, ran on battery power, and even Henry Ford's wife eschewed one of his creations for a more sophisticated European-made EV. It's just that right now, EVs aren't really the present of driving. I'm sure global EV sales will set another new record for year-on-year growth, but 2018's banner year still represented just 2.1% of global light-passenger vehicle sales.

Of course, people can only buy electric cars if someone builds them. And it has taken a combination of draconian European carbon fines and diesel's utter disgrace for the world's biggest car makers to truly catch that religion. But there were some early converts. Like the charismatic car company CEO who bet big on mass-produced EVs and lithium-ion batteries, earning a description from Wired as "either a brilliant visionary or crazy as a loon."

No, not that CEO, although I did discover that quote reading Edward Niedermeyer's forthcoming book on Tesla. I am referring to Carlos Ghosn, former CEO of Nissan and Renault, who wanted his companies building a half-million EVs a year—back in 2013. Obviously, that plan didn't quite work out, but Nissan sold almost 300,000 Leafs (Leaves?) by the time the second-generation Leaf went on sale in 2017.