Month: April 2020

We here at Ars do not typically indulge in the online prankery that comes with April Fool's Day and are even less inclined to do so in the current climate. But it does provide an opportunity to revisit one of the most famous media hoaxes of the 20th century: the so-called "spaghetti-tree hoax," the result of a two-and-a-half-minute prank segment broadcast on the BBC's Panorama current-affairs program on April Fool's Day in 1957. It's a fun, albeit cautionary, tale of not believing everything you see on television (or read online).

The man largely responsible for the hoax was Austrian-born Panorama cameraman Charles de Jaeger, who liked to play practical jokes. As a kid, one of his school teachers used to tell the class, "Boys, you're so stupid, you'd believe me if I told you that spaghetti grows on trees." De Jaeger had always wanted to turn this into an April Fool's prank, and in 1957, he saw his chance. April Fool's Day fell on a Monday, the same night Panorama aired. He argued that he could do the shoot cheaply while working on another assignment in Switzerland, and Panorama editor Michael Peacock approved a tiny budget of £100 for the project.

The sequence was shot at a hotel in Castiglione on the shore of Lake Lugano. De Jaeger bought 20 pounds of uncooked homemade spaghetti and hung the strands from the branches of the laurel trees around the lake to make it seem like they were "spaghetti trees." (Cooked spaghetti just slipped off the branches. De Jaeger had to keep the uncooked fresh spaghetti between damp cloths before shooting to ensure it didn't dry out.)

Enlarge (credit: Christopher Blizzard)

Users of Zoom for Windows beware: the widely used software has a vulnerability that allows attackers to steal your operating system credentials, researchers said.

Discovery of the currently unpatched vulnerability comes as Zoom usage has soared in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. With massive numbers of people working from home, they rely on Zoom to connect with co-workers, customers, and partners. Many of these home users are connecting to sensitive work networks through temporary or improvised means that don’t have the benefit of enterprise-grade firewalls found on-premises.

Embed network location here

Attacks work by using the Zoom chat window to send targets a string of text that represents the network location on the Windows device they’re using. The Zoom app for Windows automatically converts these so-called universal naming convention strings—such as //attacker.example.com/C$—into clickable links. In the event that targets click on those links on networks that aren’t fully locked down, Zoom will send the Windows usernames and the corresponding NTLM hashes to the address contained in the link.

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  Teams will offer features for families. [credit: Microsoft ]

Starting April 21, Microsoft’s Office 365 personal and family subscription suite will be renamed Microsoft 365 in a move that heralds an effort by the company to win over more consumer users.

Seeking to make a point with the rebranding, Microsoft calls it “a subscription service for your life,” which might conjure visions of Amazon Prime. Microsoft 365 will cost $6.99 per month, and a six-user, $9.99 family plan will also be offered. Its apps will be available on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

It will include Office applications like Word and Excel as Office 365 has, but it comes with a promise of new apps and services both today and in the future. In a blog post describing the new service, Microsoft wrote that Microsoft 365 will offer “new artificial intelligence (AI), rich content and templates, and cloud-powered experiences.”

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  The Moto G Power. [credit: Motorola ]

The Motorola Moto G is no longer the fantastic phone it used to be, but Lenovorola is still pumping out yearly editions of the low-end smartphone. As was announced back in February, this year there are two Moto G phones, the Moto G Power and the Moto G Stylus, and they're up for pre-order today, with a ship date of April 16.

The two phones look basically identical, with 6.4-inch 2300×1080 LCDs, mostly all-screen designs (with a slightly taller bezel at the bottom), front cameras that live in a circular display cutout, and a vertical strip of cameras on the back. Both phones have the Snapdragon 665 SoC with 4GB of RAM, which is an 11nm, with eight Cortex A73-derivative CPUs running at 2.2Ghz.

The differences between the two phones are in the storage, battery, cameras, the stylus accessory, and, of course, the price. The cheaper Moto G Power is $250, with 64GB of storage, a 5000mAh battery, and three cameras: a 16MP main sensor, a 2MP macro lens, and a 8MP ultra-wide. The G Stylus loses a lot of battery in exchange for that stylus storage, and it's also 0.5mm thinner than the Power, so the $300 device has only a 4000mAh battery and 128GB of storage. The main camera is 48MP, then there's a 2MP macro lens, a 16MP "action cam," and the addition of laser autofocus.

Enlarge / T-Mobile CEO John Legere waves during an interview on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, April 30, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

T-Mobile completed its $31 billion acquisition of Sprint today and announced that CEO John Legere has resigned from the carrier's top job a month sooner than planned.

With today's close, T-Mobile said it has "successfully completed its long-planned Chief Executive Officer transition from John Legere to Mike Sievert ahead of schedule." T-Mobile had previously said Legere would leave at the end of April.

"I had originally planned to stay on through the end of my contract on April 30, 2020, but it makes much more sense to transition this responsibility to Mike today," Legere said. Legere "will continue as a member of the Board of Directors for the remainder of his current term, through the Annual Meeting of Shareholders scheduled in June 2020," the carrier said.