Month: January 2020

Enlarge / The logo of Deutsche Telekom, owner of T-Mobile, seen at Mobile World Congress in February 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The United States government approved the T-Mobile/Sprint merger without fully investigating whether the deal's anti-competitive harms can be offset by merger conditions, state attorneys general argued in a court filing.

The US Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission both found that the merger would harm consumers, a group of states that are trying to block the merger pointed out in a court filing last week. The DOJ and FCC approved the deal with conditions they claim will make the merger good for consumers, but the states say both US agencies failed to properly evaluate whether the conditions are likely to achieve that goal.

The US approved the merger on the conditions that the merging companies deploy 5G nationwide and sell spectrum licenses and other assets to Dish Network to help Dish create a new mobile service. With states having sued the companies to block the merger, the DOJ and FCC last month urged the court to reject the lawsuit and trust the federal government's conclusions.

Enlarge / Citrix's ADC and Gateway products have a vulnerability that now has several exploits widely available, and attacks against Citrix customers are on the rise. (credit: Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images)

On December 16, 2019, Citrix revealed a vulnerability in the company's Application Delivery Controller and Gateway products—commercial virtual-private-network gateways formerly marketed as NetScaler and used by tens of thousands of companies. The flaw, discovered by Mikhail Klyuchnikov of Positive Technologies, could give an attacker direct access to the local networks behind the gateways from the Internet without the need for an account or authentication using a crafted Web request.

Citrix has published steps to reduce the risk of the exploit. But these steps, which simply configure a responder to handle requests using the text that targets the flaw, breaks under some circumstances and might interfere with access to the administration portal for the gateways by legitimate users. A permanent patch will not be released until January 20. And as of January 12, over 25,000 servers remain vulnerable, based on scans by Bad Packets.

This is not surprising, considering the number of Pulse Secure VPNs that have not yet been patched over six months after a fix was made available, despite Pulse Secure executives saying that they have "worked aggressively" to get customers to patch that vulnerability. And given that vulnerable Pulse Secure servers have been targeted now for ransomware attacks, the same will likely be true for unprotected Citrix VPN servers—especially since last week, proof-of-concept exploits of the vulnerability began to appear, including at least two published on GitHub, as ZDNet's Catalin Cimpanu reported.

Enlarge / Security guards stand in front of the closed Huanan wholesale seafood market, where health authorities say a man who died from a respiratory illness had purchased goods from, in the city of Wuhan, Hubei province, on January 12, 2020. (credit: Getty | Noel Celis)

A never-before-seen virus that sparked an outbreak of viral pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan has now killed one person and spread to Thailand via a sick traveler.

On Saturday, January 11, officials in Wuhan reported that a 61-year-old man died January 9. Testing indicated he was carrying the virus, which researchers have confirmed is a novel strain of coronavirus.

His is the first recorded death in the outbreak, which erupted last month in Wuhan and has been linked to a live-animal market there. Officials said that the man had been admitted to the hospital with respiratory failure and severe pneumonia. However, they also noted that he had other health issues, namely abdominal tumors and chronic liver disease.

Enlarge / Elon Musk celebrates the opening of a new Tesla factory in Shanghai, China. (credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Less than a month after Tesla's stock first rose above $400, the company's shares have now soared past $500 per share. As I write this, one share of Tesla stock is worth $516, which means the company as a whole is worth more than $93 billion.

The latest rally was sparked by a new report from Colin Rusch, an analyst at the Wall Street firm of Oppenheimer & Co. He revised his Tesla price target upwards from $385 to $612. But more fundamentally, the rising stock price reflects the fact that, after a couple years of near-constant chaos, the company seems to finally be executing smoothly.

Tesla delivered 112,000 cars in the fourth quarter of 2019 and 367,500 for the full year. Both were new records for the company; Tesla barely achieved its goal to deliver at least 360,000 cars for the year.

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  This is a gallery of stills from an animation of SpaceX's in-flight abort test. [credit: SpaceX ]

Over the weekend, SpaceX performed a static fire test of the Falcon 9 rocket that will launch its Crew Dragon on a key test this coming Saturday. The company is aiming for the top of a four-hour launch window, which opens at 8am ET (13:00 UTC), to conduct its in-flight abort test.

During the test, the Falcon 9 will launch a Crew Dragon spacecraft. Then, at an altitude of about 21km, when the launch vehicle reaches a critical velocity, Dragon's SuperDraco thrusters will ignite for several seconds to pull the capsule away from the rocket—simulating escaping from a rocket emergency.

The test is a critical one. An accident with the SuperDraco system destroyed a Crew Dragon spacecraft test in April, and the company and NASA have since said they have identified the cause of the problem. Approximately 100 milliseconds prior to ignition of Crew Dragon's eight SuperDraco thrusters, a leaking component allowed about one cup of liquid oxidizer (nitrogen tetroxide, or NTO) into the wrong fuel tank plumbing. The company has implemented a fix. Saturday's flight will also showcase the newer parachute system that will bring Dragon safely back down to the ocean.