Month: March 2020

Enlarge / From left to right: iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Earlier today, Apple continued its tradition of updating all of its operating systems at once. The day brought major new feature releases to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. The iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS updates are numbered 13.4, Apple Watches got watchOS 6.2, and Macs saw the release of macOS Catalina 10.15.4.

For many of its platforms, Apple releases annual overhauls labeled, say, iOS 13, and introduces new features through the year with just one "dot"—hence iOS 13.4. Smaller, bug-fix oriented updates are usually labeled something like iOS 13.4.1.

As the nomenclature suggests, this is a feature update. For the most part, the big features introduced today were already rumored or known to be planned. The big three are arguably full trackpad and pointer support for recent iPad, iCloud Drive folder sharing, and universal app purchases.

Enlarge / A model of the pirate ship Queen Anne's Revenge in the North Carolina Museum of History. (credit: Qualiesin)

A state government that infringes someone's copyright doesn't have to worry about getting sued, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday. The high court held that federalism trumps copyright law, effectively giving states a free pass.

The case pitted a North Carolina videographer, Frederick Allen, against the state of North Carolina. The state was the legal owner of a famous shipwreck, the Queen Anne's Revenge. It was the flagship of legendary pirate Blackbeard until it ran aground off the coast of North Carolina in 1718. A company discovered the wreck in 1996 and got a contract from the state to do recovery work. The company hired Allen to document those efforts with photos and videos.

Allen spent more than a decade documenting the recovery operation, and he retained copyright protection for his work. But North Carolina published some of his photos on its website without permission. Eventually, the state agreed to pay Allen $15,000 in compensation. But then North Carolina published his work online a second time without permission, and Allen sued.

Enlarge (credit: portal gda / Flickr)

Google Play, the company’s official repository for Android apps, has once again been caught hosting fraudulent and potentially malicious apps, with the discovery of more than 56 apps—many of them for children—that were installed on almost 1.7 million devices.

Tekya is a family of malware that generates fraudulent clicks on ads and banners delivered by agencies including Google’s AdMob, AppLovin’, Facebook, and Unity. To give the clicks the air of authenticity, the well-obfuscated code causes infected devices to use Android’s “MotionEvent” mechanism to imitate legitimate user actions. At the time that researchers from security firm Check Point discovered them, the apps went undetected by VirusTotal and Google Play Protect. Twenty-four of the apps that contained Tekya were marketed to children. Google removed all 56 of the apps after Check Point reported them.

The discovery “highlights once again that the Google Play Store can still host malicious apps,” Check Point researchers Israel Wernik, Danil Golubenko, and Aviran Hazum wrote in a post published on Tuesday. “There are nearly 3 million apps available from the store, with hundreds of new apps being uploaded daily–making it difficult to check that every single app is safe. Thus, users cannot rely on Google Play’s security measures alone to ensure their devices are protected.”

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  A rendering of Firefly's Genesis Moon lander. [credit: Firefly ]

NASA's Artemis plan to return humans to the surface of the Moon has gotten the lion's share of public attention over the last year, but the space agency's innovative program to deliver material to the surface of the Moon has arguably spurred more commercial activity.

The Commercial Lunar Services Program (or CLPS, which rhymes with chips) has put $2.8 billion on the table for delivery services. Over the next decade, a pool of more than a dozen companies is eligible to bid for contracts to deliver scientific instruments to the surface of the Moon. As an added benefit, NASA is helping to stimulate a cislunar economy.

Tom Markusic, founder of Firefly, said he sees the CLPS program as analogous to NASA's plan in 2006 to stimulate develop of private supply vehicles for the International Space Station. This program provided several hundred million dollars to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, which resulted in development of the Falcon 9 and Antares launch vehicles, as well as the Cargo Dragon and Cygnus supply ships.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

On Monday night, a panicked headline at The Intercept proclaimed that a potential treatment for COVID-19 had been classified as what's known as an "orphan drug," which are given to treatments for rare diseases, and that such a classification runs the danger of "potentially limiting [the drug's] affordability." At first glance, describing a COVID-19 treatment like this sounds insane, given that a pandemic is the exact opposite of a rare disease. So what exactly is going on, and does it mean that Gilead Sciences, the biotechnology company that makes the drug (called remdesivir) is going to jack up its prices so that only the rich survive?

It all goes back to 1983

By the late 1970s, it was clear that the incentives for profit-making drug companies did not align with the needs of people with rare diseases. Developing a new drug was extremely expensive even 40 years ago, and so if a drug company wanted to make its money back, it would focus on conditions where it could expect plenty of sales rather than those with just a handful of patients. The rare-disease advocacy community was understandably outraged by this cold-hearted economic analysis, and by 1983 it had successfully cajoled Congress into passing the Orphan Drug Act.

Once the law passed, the FDA was given the power to grant a drug "orphan" status, even to compounds without patent protection. If a company got its product approved as an orphan drug, it gained a period of market exclusivity, meaning that for seven years no one else would be allowed to sell that same product to treat that specific disease. What's more, all the costs associated with developing that orphan drug—including payroll for scientists and so on—was subject to a handy tax credit. Since the passage of the Orphan Drug Act, more than 800 orphan drugs and biologics have been approved by the FDA out of more than 5,300 applications.