Month: June 2020

Enlarge / Customers and staff in an Apple Store mid-pandemic. (credit: Apple)

Apple is reopening 70 more stores in the United States and Canada, after an ongoing back-and-forth that saw the company closing stores due to the COVID-19 pandemic, then starting to reopen them, then closing them again because of the widespread protests and rioting that occurred after the death of George Floyd.

It's been an unprecedented bit of chaos for Apple's retail efforts as customers, governments, and workers focused on more critical concerns than iPhones and MacBooks. The 70 stores opening over the course of this week include locations in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ontario, Pennsylvania, and Quebec.

Apple retail and HR head Deirdre O'Brien wrote this note to staff, as quoted in 9to5Mac:

(credit: Global Panorama / Flickr)

The US Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday announced a crackdown on four homeopathic companies selling injectable products said to contain highly toxic substances, including lead, mercury, deadly nightshade, and strychnine.

These products—some meant to be injected directly into the bloodstream—are illegal and pose “serious risks to patient health,” the FDA said in an announcement. The agency also made public the warning letters it sent to each of the sellers, all dated June 11.

“These unapproved injectable drugs are particularly concerning because they inherently present greater risks to patients because of how they are administered,” Donald Ashley, director of the Office of Compliance in the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement. “These products are further concerning given that they are labeled to contain potentially toxic ingredients intended for injection directly into the body. These warning letters reflect our continued commitment to patient safety.”

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  The HTC U20 5G. [credit: HTC ]

HTC still exists! The company has somehow scraped together enough cash and resources to release two new smartphones. The HTC U20 5G and HTC Desire 20 Pro were announced today, with the U20 5G being the company's first 5G smartphone.

The U20 5G is the most interesting device, a Snapdragon 765G phone that runs NT$18,990 (~$640). If you can't tell from the currency, the phone is going up for pre-order in HTC's home country of Taiwan first, on July 1, with the company promising availability in "other markets" in the future.

On the front, we've got a generic-looking design with a hole-punch camera in the top left corner, a 6.8-inch, 2400×1080 display, and a bit of a chin on the bottom of the phone. The display is actually an LCD, which means that instead of the usual in-screen fingerprint reader, you get an old-school capacitive reader on the back. In-screen fingerprint readers usually live under OLED displays, which are translucent. It's not impossible to put an in-screen fingerprint reader in an LCD, but there are no commercial solutions on the market yet. Also on the back are four cameras, a 48MP main camera, an 8MP wide-angle camera, a 2MP depth cam, and a 2MP macro lens.

Enlarge (credit: Library of Congress)

In early 2017, WikiLeaks began publishing details of top-secret CIA hacking tools that researchers soon confirmed were part of a large tranche of confidential documents stolen from one of the agency's isolated, high-security networks. The leak—comprising as much as 34 terabytes of information and representing the CIA's biggest data loss in history—was the result of "woefully lax" practices, according to portions of a report that were published on Tuesday.

Vault 7, as WikiLeaks named its leak series, exposed a trove of the CIA's most closely guarded secrets. They included a simple command line that agency officers used to hack network switches from Cisco and attacks that compromised Macs, in one case using a tool called Sonic Screwdriver, which exploited vulnerabilities in the extensible firmware interface that Apple used to boot devices. The data allowed researchers from security firm Symantec to definitively tie the CIA to a hacking group they had been tracking since 2011.

Proliferation over security

Agency officials soon convened the WikiLeaks Task Force to investigate the practices that led to the massive data loss. Seven months after first Vault 7 dispatch, the task force issued a report that assessed the extent and the cause of the damage. Chief among the findings was a culture within the CIA hacking arm known as the CCI—short for the Center for Cyber Intelligence—that prioritized the proliferation of its cyber capabilities over keeping them secure and containing the damage if they were to fall into the wrong hands.