Month: October 2019

Enlarge / Saudi defence ministry spokesman Colonel Turki bin Saleh al-Malki displays pieces of what he said were Iranian cruise missiles and drones recovered from the attack site that targeted Saudi Aramco's facilities, during a press conference in Riyadh on September 18, 2019. US officials have now said that the US responded with a cyber attack against Iran's "propaganda" infrastructure. (credit: FAYEZ NURELDINE / Getty Images)

Reuters reports that the United States launched a "secret cyber operation" against Iran in September, following the alleged drone and missile attack by Iran on Saudi Arabian oil facilities. Unnamed officials told Reuters that the late-September cyberattack targeted Iran's "propaganda" infrastructure. The attack, one official said, affected physical hardware. But no further details were provided.

Just how effective this targeted attack was, or if it actually did any damage, is far from clear. When asked about the claimed attack today by Iran's Fars news agency, Iran Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi replied, “They must have dreamt it.”

US, Saudi, German, French and British officials have all concluded that Iran was responsible for the attack on the Aramco Abqaiq oil refinery, based on forensic evidence collected from the missiles and drones involved in the strike and other data related to the direction from which the attack was launched. Iran continues to deny involvement, and the Ansar Allah—the Houthi militia in Yemen—has claimed responsibility.

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  The Google Pixel 4. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

NEW YORK—Google's big hardware event wrapped up yesterday, and, after a brief session with the Pixel 4, I'm back to report my initial findings. It's a phone.

The feel of the Pixel 4 varies greatly based on which color you get. The black version is the most boring, with a regular glossy, greasy, glass back. The orange and white versions are where things get interesting, though. These have the whole back covered in a soft-touch material (which is still glass) that looks and feels great. It's reminiscent of the soft-touch back that was on the Pixel 3 but with a number of improvements. First, you can't dent it with a fingernail. It feels a lot stronger and tougher than the Pixel 3 back, while still being soft and grippy to the touch. Second, it doesn't seem to absorb and show fingerprint grease at the rate of the Pixel 3 back. It's interesting that the orange and white versions get this soft-touch treatment, while the black version gets a glossy back. The black version is what had so many problems with the soft-touch coating last year.

I think the white version, in particular, looks great from the back. You get an alternating white-and-black color scheme: the sides get a grippy black soft-touch coating, the back is a brilliant white, and the square camera bump is black. It's a lovely color scheme. The Google "G" on the back is the only thing that doesn't get a soft-touch coating. There is actual depth to the G, making it seem like it was masked off when the soft-touch coating was applied, leaving it inset on the phone back, exposing the colored white glass.

Enlarge / Stock photos continue to be a gift to the world. Maybe it's sometimes on par with open-source software. (credit: cnythzl / Getty Images)

Free and open source software enables the world as we know it in 2019. From Web servers to kiosks to the big data algorithms mining your Facebook feed, nearly every computer system you interact with runs, at least in part, on free software. And in the larger tech industry, free software has given rise to a galaxy of startups and enabled the largest software acquisition in the history of the world.

Free software is a gift, a gift that made the world as we know it possible. And from the start, it seemed like an astounding gift to give. So astounding in fact that it initially made businesses unaccustomed to this kind of generosity uncomfortable. These companies weren't unwilling to use free software, it was simply too radical and by extension too political. It had to be renamed: "open source."

Once that happened, open source software took over the world.