Abgaswerte: Fiat will jährlich 80.000 Elektroversionen des Fiat 500 bauen

Fiat Chrysler (FCA) investiert 790 Millionen US-Dollar in eine neue Montagelinie in seinem Werk in Turin, auf der dann jährlich 80.000 elektrisch betriebene Fiat 500 gebaut werden können. (Fiat Chrysler, Technologie)

Fiat Chrysler (FCA) investiert 790 Millionen US-Dollar in eine neue Montagelinie in seinem Werk in Turin, auf der dann jährlich 80.000 elektrisch betriebene Fiat 500 gebaut werden können. (Fiat Chrysler, Technologie)

Spiegellos: Sigma FP als winzige Vollformatkamera vorgestellt

Sigma hat mit der FP eine Mini-Vollformatkamera ohne Spiegel präsentiert. Sie ist mit einem Bajonett der L-Mount-Alliance ausgerüstet, erreicht eine Auflösung von 24 Megapixeln und wiegt ohne Objektiv 422 Gramm. (Digitalkamera, Bildstabilisierung)

Sigma hat mit der FP eine Mini-Vollformatkamera ohne Spiegel präsentiert. Sie ist mit einem Bajonett der L-Mount-Alliance ausgerüstet, erreicht eine Auflösung von 24 Megapixeln und wiegt ohne Objektiv 422 Gramm. (Digitalkamera, Bildstabilisierung)

Website driveby attacks on routers are alive and well. Here’s what to do

Researchers detect 4.6 million attempts over 2 months in Brazil alone.

D-Link's DI-514 802.11b router. It was a perfectly cromulent router for its time... but those were dark days, friend, dark days indeed.

D-Link's DI-514 802.11b router. It was a perfectly cromulent router for its time... but those were dark days, friend, dark days indeed. (credit: source unclear, GNU Free Documentation License.)

Website driveby attacks that try to boobytrap visitors’ routers are alive and well, according to antivirus provider Avast, which blocked more than 4.6 million of them in Brazil over a two-month span.

The attacks come from compromised websites or malicious ads that attempt to use cross-site request forgery attacks to change the domain name system settings of visitors’ routers. When successful, the malicious DNS settings redirect targets to websites that spoof Netflix and a host of banks. Over the first half of the year, Avast software detected more than 180,000 routers in Brazil that had hijacked DNS settings, the company reported.

The attacks work when routers use weak administrative passwords and are vulnerable to CSRF attacks. Attackers use the malicious DNS settings to phish passwords, display malicious ads inside legitimate webpages, or use a page visitor’s computer to mine cryptocurrencies.

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Microsoft Teams is now officially bigger than Slack

It’s the first official milestone for Microsoft’s group chat, and it’s a big one.

A Microsoft office (not to be confused with Microsoft Office).

Enlarge / A Microsoft office (not to be confused with Microsoft Office). (credit: Julien GONG Min / Flickr)

Microsoft Teams may have only been around for two years, but the group-chat platform is already larger than one of its main competitors. Microsoft announced that Teams has more than 13 million daily active users. The amount rises to 19 million when looking at weekly active users. That means the service is now officially bigger than Slack, an independent platform for online chatting and collaboration.

This is the most specific Microsoft has gotten yet with information about its group-chatting platform. The only other update the company gave was back in March, when it revealed that 500,000 organizations were using the service.

In addition to the audience news, Microsoft shared some upcoming features for Teams. Today, it is rolling out what it's calling "announcements," which allows important news to be highlighted in a channel. It plans to roll out channel moderation and priority notifications, which will ping a recipient every two minutes until a response is made, later this month. Finally, cross-channel posting will be coming "soon."

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Acer Swift 7 review: ultra-thin, ultra-light 14 inch laptop

Pick up the Acer Swift 7 (2019) laptop and you almost won’t believe that it is a laptop. It’s barely thicker than an iPhone, measuring just 9.95mm (0.4 inches thick). And weighing just 890 grams (a little under 2 pounds, it’s lighter …

Pick up the Acer Swift 7 (2019) laptop and you almost won’t believe that it is a laptop. It’s barely thicker than an iPhone, measuring just 9.95mm (0.4 inches thick). And weighing just 890 grams (a little under 2 pounds, it’s lighter than some hardcover books. Acer’s laptop has a 14 inch display, but it’s more […]

The post Acer Swift 7 review: ultra-thin, ultra-light 14 inch laptop appeared first on Liliputing.

Savage tick-clone armies are sucking cows to death; experts fear for humans

Spreading invasive tick spawns without mating and can transmit deadly disease.

Scary arachnid is fat.

Enlarge / Engorged Haemaphysalis longicornis female tick. (credit: Commonsource)

Ravenous swarms of cloned ticks have killed a fifth cow in North Carolina by exsanguination—that is, by draining it of blood—the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services warned this week.

Experts fear that the bloodthirsty throngs, which were first noticed in the United States in 2017, will continue their rampage, siphoning life out of animals and eventually transmitting diseases, potentially deadly ones, to humans.

Just last month, infectious disease researchers in New York reported the first case of the tick species biting a human in the US. The finding was “unsurprising” given the tick’s ferocious nature, according to Dr. Bobbi S. Pritt, director of the Clinical Parasitology Laboratory in Mayo Clinic. And it’s “extremely worrisome for several reasons,” she wrote in a commentary for the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

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Google workers listen to your “OK Google” queries—one of them leaked recordings

News service identified Google users by listening to 1,000 leaked recordings.

Three different Google Home smart speakers sitting next to each other on a table.

Enlarge / The Google Home Mini, the original Google Home, and the Google Home Max. (credit: Google)

Google today defended its practice of having workers listen to users' Google Assistant queries, following the leak of 1,000 voice recordings to a media outlet. Google also said it will try to prevent future leaks of its users' voice recordings.

VRT NWS, a news organization run by a public broadcaster in the Flemish region of Belgium, said it "was able to listen to more than a thousand [Google Assistant] recordings" that it received from a Google subcontractor.

Google Assistant is used on Google Home smart speakers, Android devices, and Chromebooks.

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Dealmaster: Take 30% off one of our recommended dash cams for your car

Prime users only, though. Plus deals on robot vacuums, microSD cards, and more.

Dealmaster: Take 30% off one of our recommended dash cams for your car

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a one-day deal on the Vava Dash Cam, which is down to $83 on Amazon. That's a little more than 30% off its usual going rate of $120—though the catch is that the discount is only available for Prime members.

Still, while Vava isn't exactly a household name, we liked this dash cam enough to include it in the most recent update to our dash cam buying guide. It shoots 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second, includes GPS, and has a built-in power bank that allows it to keep running for up to 30 minutes after you turn off your car.

Aside from being adept at keeping another set of eyes on the road, we also like the Vava cam for video sharing. It only has one camera built in, but its swivel design makes it easy to turn around and use for recording any shenanigans you and your friends may want to capture in the car. A surprisingly capable mobile app makes sharing those videos on social media fairly straightforward. You can get an adequate dash cam that does the basics for less, but at this price, the Vava cam is a solid choice for something a little more full-featured.

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Facebook AI Pluribus defeats top poker professionals in 6-player Texas Hold ‘em

Pluribus beat five other human players with an unconventional bet-sizing strategy.

This video shows sample hands from Pluribus' experiment against professional poker players. Cards are turned face up to make it easier to see Pluribus' strategy. Courtesy of Carnegie-Mellon University.

Poker-playing AIs typically perform well against human opponents when the play is limited to just two players. Now Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook AI research scientists have raised the bar even further with an AI dubbed Pluribus, which took on 15 professional human players in six-player no-limit Texas Hold 'em and won. The researchers describe how they achieved this feat in a new paper in Science.

Playing more than 5,000 hands each time, five copies of the AI took on two top professional players: Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, six-time winner of World Series of Poker events, and Darren Elias, who currently holds the record for most World Poker Tour titles. Pluribus defeated them both. It did the same in a second experiment, in which Pluribus played five pros at a time, from a pool of 13 human players, for 10,000 hands.

Co-author Tuomas Sandholm of Carnegie Mellon University has been grappling with the unique challenges poker poses for AI for the last 16 years. No-Limit Texas Hold 'em is a so-called "imperfect information" game, since there are hidden cards (held by one's opponents in the hand) and no restrictions on the size of the bet one can make. By contrast, with chess and Go, the status of the playing board and all the pieces are known by all the players. Poker players can (and do) bluff on occasion, so it's also a game of misleading information.

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Eavesdropping flaw prompts Apple to suspend Walkie-Talkie app

Apple Watch app can let attackers listen to iPhone mic without permission.

Apple Watch.

Enlarge / Apple Watch. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Apple has suspended use of the Walkie-Talkie app in the Apple Watch until the company fixes a recently discovered vulnerability that could let someone listen to a person’s iPhone without permission, news site TechCrunch reported.

The Walkie-Talkie app allows people who accept an invitation to talk with friends in real-time without the hassle of making a phone call. Parties press a button when speaking and release it to hear what the other party says. Apple introduced the feature last year as part of its WatchOS 5 update.

Apple told TechCrunch that the flaw could allow someone to listen through another party’s iPhone without consent. Apple didn’t provide specifics of the vulnerability or exactly how it could be exploited. The company said it learned of the vulnerability through its vulnerability reporting page. Apple apologized for the temporary suspension while engineers investigate and fix the issue.

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