Month: April 2020

Enlarge / Fire-damaged cables protrude from the base of a telecom tower, reported in local media as being a 5G network mast on the EE network, operated by BT Group Plc, in Birmingham, U.K., on Monday, April 6, 2020. (credit: Getty Images)

At about 9.30pm on Easter Monday, in the small Dutch town of Almere near Amsterdam, the fire brigade was called to put out a blaze at a large telecoms mast—the second fire of its kind that night in the area.

Though neither of the Almere towers were equipped with any of the latest 5G telecoms equipment—in fact one was designed only for use by the emergency services—authorities soon concluded that the fires were perpetrated by vandals acting in the name of an unusual theory: that 5G networks have contributed to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Dutch mast fires are just the latest escalation in a series of similar attacks that have swept across the UK and Europe in recent weeks. Having first gained momentum online in early January, the 5G conspiracy theory—which alleges, among other things, that COVID-19 has either been caused by the frequencies used for the new wireless technology, or that those signals impair the human immune system—has spilled rapidly into the offline world.

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  Hi from this massive dragon statue, whose every block and piece reacts to the lights around it. This effect can only be found in the Minecraft RTX Beta (and every image in this dragon gallery has RTX enabled). [credit: Mojang ]

Minecraft's biggest-ever official visual overhaul, the Minecraft RTX Beta, is now live. It requires jumping through a few hoops, but as long as you own the game's Windows 10 "Bedrock" variant, you can dive in on PC without paying an additional penny.

To clarify, you don't have to buy more software. Hardware is another matter.

We went through the basics of Minecraft RTX Beta on Tuesday—read the article to catch up on the basics—but at that time, its handlers at Mojang and Nvidia prohibited us from mentioning our own hands-on impressions or analysis. We've actually been tinkering with Minecraft RTX Beta since late last week, and now, we're free to discuss our findings.

Enlarge (credit: portal gda / flickr)

In February, a researcher detailed a widely circulating Android backdoor that’s so pernicious that it survives factory resets, a trait that makes the malware impossible to remove without taking unusual measures.

The analysis found that the unusual persistence was the result of rogue folders containing a trojan installer, neither of which was removed by a reset. The trojan dropper would then reinstall the backdoor in the event of a reset. Despite those insights, the researcher still didn’t know precisely how that happened. Now, a different researcher has filled in the missing pieces. More about that later. First, a brief summary of xHelper.

A backdoor with superuser rights

The malicious Android app poses as a performance enhancer that removes old and unneeded files. Antivirus provider Malwarebytes has detected it on 33,000 devices, mainly located in the United States, while AV from Russia-based Kaspersky Lab found it on 50,000 devices. There's no evidence xHelper has ever been distributed through Google Play.