Month: June 2020

Enlarge / An odd coincidence: YouTube TV and AT&T rolled out price hikes on the same day. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Chances are, if you pay for a streaming alternative to live cable TV in the United States, your bills are about to go up, thanks to a glut of Tuesday announcements.

First up is YouTube TV, which announced a 30 percent price hike, its largest since rolling out as a product in 2017, effective immediately for all customers. The news came at the end of a lengthy announcement of various new channels, which users cannot opt out of, all coming from the CBS/Viacom family of cable TV networks.

Brand-new customers can expect to pay $65/mo for the service from here on out, while existing customers will see the price jump from $50 to $65 on their July bill. Shortly after mentioning the new price point, YouTube TV VP Christian Oestlien directed users to this landing page to pause or cancel their service if they want to.

Enlarge (credit: Ivan Radic)

Foreign hackers backed by a well-resourced government are likely to exploit a critical vulnerability in a host and VPN and firewall products sold by Palo Alto Networks, officials in the US federal government warned on Tuesday.

In worst-case scenarios, the security vendor said in a post, the flaw allows unauthorized people to log in to networks as administrators. With those privileges, attackers could install software of their choice or carry out other malicious actions that have serious consequences. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-2021, can be exploited when an authentication mechanism known as Security Assertion Markup Language is used to validate that users gave the proper permission to access a network. Attackers must also have Internet access to an affected server.

Shortly after Palo Alto Networks issued the advisory, the official Twitter account for the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that the vulnerability is likely to be exploited in the wild by APTs, short for advanced persistent threats. APT is the term many researchers use for sophisticated hacker groups that attempt to breach select targets of interest over extended periods of time.

Enlarge / A Qualcomm watch. (credit: Qualcomm)

After years of repackaging the same basic smartwatch chip over and over again, Qualcomm has graced Wear OS with a modern smartwatch SoC. Meet the Snapdragon Wear 4100, a Qualcomm smartwatch chip that, for the first time ever, is faster than the previous chip.

The Wear 4100 uses four 1.7GHz Cortex A53 CPUs built on a 12nm manufacturing process, a major upgrade from the 28nm Cortex A7s that every other Qualcomm smartwatch chip has been up until now. It's not the state-of-the-art 7nm process that Qualcomm's high-end chip uses, and the Cortex A53 is an old CPU design, but for Qualcomm, it's a major upgrade. Between the new CPU, the Adreno 504 GPU, and faster memory, Qualcomm is promising "85% faster performance" compared to the Wear 3100.

There are actually two versions of the 4100, the vanilla "4100" and the "4100+." The plus version is specifically for smartwatches with an always-on watch face, and like previous Wear SoCs, comes with an extra low-power SoC (based around a Cortex-M0) to keep the time updated and log sensor data (like step counts). Qualcomm is promising a better display image quality in this low-power mode, with more colors and a smoother display.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Comcast is scheduled to reinstate its home-Internet data cap tomorrow, July 1, after more than three months in which customers were provided unlimited data to help them through the coronavirus pandemic.

AT&T, by contrast, announced today that it is "continuing to waive home-Internet data overage charges for AT&T Internet customers through September 30." There is a big caveat with AT&T, though: the company's announcement said the extended data-cap waiver does not apply to DSL and fixed wireless. While AT&T fiber customers will have unlimited data for another three months, other AT&T home-broadband customers will apparently face data caps and overage fees starting tomorrow.

Comcast and AT&T suspended their data caps and overage fees in mid-March, initially promising two months of unlimited data. The companies later extended that pledge to June 30, but Comcast hasn't granted any further extensions. We contacted Comcast yesterday but didn't receive answers to questions about its data cap, and Comcast's website still says the data-cap waiver only goes through June 30. While Comcast didn't answer the data-cap questions, a spokesperson pointed out that the cable company extended other pandemic offers for college students and people with low incomes beyond June 30, and it is keeping its Wi-Fi hotspots open to the public for free for the rest of 2020.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by an Amazon Gold Box sale on storage products from SanDisk and WD. The discounts cover a number of microSD cards, SD cards, flash drives, and portable hard drives, among other devices.

The highlights include the 128GB version of SanDisk's microSDXC Card for Nintendo Switch, a speedy and reliable microSD card we recommended in our guide to the best Nintendo Switch accessories, down to $22.35. This isn't the lowest price we've ever seen, but it's a nice drop from its usual $28 and the cheapest this model has been since it went for $20 on Black Friday. If you're more concerned with storage space than performance, the 400GB SanDisk Ultra is a slower card but offers a much lower cost-per-GB ratio for devices like the Switch. It's currently down to $48 from its usual $60.

Elsewhere, the SanDisk Extreme is a durable portable SSD we've tested and recommended before—its 1TB model is down to $136 from a typical street price around $170. The company's iXpand Flash Drive Go, meanwhile, is a useful flash drive with a Lightning connector that's about $10 off its normal going rate. There are plenty more deals beyond that, but just note that, like all Gold Box sales, the deals are available for today only.

Enlarge / Chinese President Xi Jinping learns about the progress on a COVID-19 vaccine during his visit to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing on March 2, 2020. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency)

China has approved an experimental COVID-19 vaccine for use in its military after early clinical trial data suggested it was safe and spurred immune responses—but before larger trials that will test whether the vaccine can protect against SARS-CoV-2 infections.

This marks the first time any country has approved a candidate vaccine for military use. China’s Central Military Commission made the approval June 25, which will last for a year, according to a filing reported by Reuters.

The vaccine, developed by biotech company CanSino Biologics and the Chinese military, is a type of viral vector-based vaccine. That means researchers started with a viral vector, in this case a common strain of adenovirus (type-5), which typically causes mild upper respiratory infections. The researchers crippled the virus so that it doesn’t replicate in human cells and cause disease. Then, they engineered the virus to carry a signature feature of SARS-CoV-2—the coronavirus’s infamous spike protein, which juts out from the viral particle and allows the virus to get a hold on human cells.

Enlarge / An Amazon worker in a fulfillment center in the Orlando area, April 2019. (credit: Paul Hennessy | NurPhoto | Getty Images)

After eliminating temporary "hazard" pay raises, Amazon is saying "thank you" to its hourly workers with a one-time bonus of $500, while at least one Amazon warehouse has been found to have a COVID-19 rate four times higher than the general population nearby.

Amazon yesterday announced its one-time bonuses for "front-line" employees. Full-time workers in warehouses and Whole Foods stores, as well as full-time delivery drivers, will receive $500. Part-time workers in those roles will get $250, and Amazon Flex drivers who worked 10 hours or more will get $150. Managers on-site in distribution centers or Whole Foods stores will get $1,000, and owners of the third-party firms that handle delivery for Amazon will get $3,000.

The company saw a massive spike in consumer demand as in-person retail shuttered around the nation and the world this spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon hired an additional 175,000 employees in its warehouses, logistics, and grocery businesses since early March to meet increased demand. The company also increased wages by $2 in warehouses, to a minimum of $17 per hour, to get new workers in the door.