Month: May 2020

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a modest yet notable discount on Apple's AirPods Pro, which are currently down to $228 on Amazon. You'll see the full discount at checkout. While we've seen the AirPods Pro go for a couple dollars less at other retailers, this is the lowest they've been on Amazon to date. The deal takes about $20 off Apple's standard MSRP and about $12 off the average street price; given that deep discounts on the noise-cancelling earphones have been fairly rare, we consider this a decent drop.

We recommended the AirPods Pro in our travel tech gift guide last holiday season. While we don't think they're the absolute best true wireless earphones on the market, they're the best noise-cancelling earphones in their class, and they're a marked improvement over the standard AirPods in almost every meaningful way. Their active noise cancellation can't match that of the best over-ear headphones from Sony and Bose—and we're aware of reports saying that past firmware updates have lessened the overall ANC strength—but, generally speaking, the earphones still isolate noise well enough to be useful on a train or busy sidewalk. Their in-ear tips create a tighter seal than the earbud design of the regular AirPods, which helps them produce more bass and better isolate noise passively. The included eartips are soft and relatively comfortable as well.

The AirPods Pro have a largely neutral sound quality that doesn't emphasize the bass or treble too much. It's not spectacular for the money, but it's inoffensive and better than most other true wireless models. The earbuds are still dead simple to pair with an iPhone, and they rarely suffer from connection hiccups. Apple's transparency mode, which blends your audio with noise from the outside world, works beautifully. Battery life still isn't great at roughly five hours a charge, but the included charging case is at least easy to carry around. Likewise, the earphones' sensor-based controls are less consistent than physical buttons, but they're not enough of a nuisance to ruin the experience.

Enlarge / The Broadway production of Hamilton won 11 Tony awards in 2016, as well as the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Now a "live capture" film version is coming to Disney+. (credit: Walt Disney Company )

Rise up and rejoice, Hamilton fans, because the filmed performance of the blockbuster Broadway musical is coming to Disney+ a year earlier than anticipated, just in time for Fourth of July festivities. It's an unusual move for the Mouse House, which paid a whopping $75 million for the worldwide rights back in February and had originally set a theatrical release date of fall 2021. But with the pandemic shuttering so many cinemas and theaters worldwide, Disney is clearly betting on its hugely successful streaming service (which just surpassed 50 million subscribers) to recoup its investment.

“No other artistic work in the last decade has had the cultural impact of Hamilton—an inspiring and captivating tale told and performed in a powerfully creative way. In light of the extraordinary challenges facing our world, this story about leadership, tenacity, hope, love, and the power of people to unite against the forces of adversity is both relevant and impactful,” Bob Iger, executive chairman of The Walt Disney Company, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to bring this phenomenon to Disney+ on the eve of Independence Day, and we have the brilliant Lin-Manuel Miranda and the team behind Hamilton to thank for allowing us to do so more than a year before planned.”

For those who have inexplicably missed the Hamilton juggernaut of the last several years, it's the creation of Lin-Manuel Miranda (In the Heights), who was inspired after reading Ron Chernow's 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton. The musical follows the high points of the founding father's colorful life in two acts, with music that expertly blends a wide variety of styles: hip-hop R&B, traditional show tunes, pop, and soul. (The rap-based "Cabinet Battle #1" and "Cabinet Battle #2" are instant classics; in fact, the entire original cast recording will have you humming the tunes for weeks.)

Enlarge (credit: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)

The bitcoin network underwent a significant change on Monday as the number of new bitcoins produced in each block fell by half. This is according to a schedule established by bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto almost 12 years ago.

Previously, each block in the blockchain came with 12.5 new bitcoins worth roughly $110,000. Now each block includes only 6.25 new bitcoins worth around $55,000.

That's a challenge for the bitcoin mining industry, which derives the lion's share of its income from these block rewards. But it has a happy side effect for everyone else: the bitcoin network's energy consumption is likely to fall in the coming months as lower profits from bitcoin mining force miners to tighten their belts.

Enlarge (credit: Haotian0905)

There’s a new attack that uses off-the-shelf equipment to take full control of a PC—even when locked—if a hacker gets just a few minutes alone with it. The vector is a familiar one, the Thunderbolt ultrafast interface that connects graphics cards, storage systems, and other peripherals to millions of computers.

The hack, which took years to develop, is elegant. Its adept mix of cryptanalysis, reverse engineering, and exploit development punches a major hole in defenses that Thunderbolt creator Intel spent considerable time and resources to erect. Ultimately, though, the technique is an incremental advance in an attack that has existed for more than a decade. While the weakness it exploits is real and should be closed, the vast majority of people—think 99 percent—shouldn’t worry about it. More about that later. For now, here are the bare-bones details.

Accessing Memory Lane

Thunderspy, as its creator Björn Ruytenberg has named the attack, in most cases requires the attacker to remove the screws from the computer casing. From there, the attacker locates the Thunderbolt chip and connects a clip, which in turn is connected to a series of commodity components—priced about $600—which is connected to an attacker laptop. These devices analyze the current Thunderbolt firmware and then reflash it with a version that’s largely the same except that it disables any of the Intel-developed security features that are turned on.