CTL launches a pair of 14 inch Chromebooks for $279 and up

CTL is taking pre-orders for two new Chromebooks with 14 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel displays, Intel Gemini Lake Refresh processors, and at least 6 years of official support from Google. The CTL NL81 features an Intel Celeron N4020 processor, a non-touchs…

CTL NL81

CTL is taking pre-orders for two new Chromebooks with 14 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel displays, Intel Gemini Lake Refresh processors, and at least 6 years of official support from Google. The CTL NL81 features an Intel Celeron N4020 processor, a non-touchscreen display, and a $279 price tag, while the CTL NL81T is a $379 touchscreen model […]

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Tesla’s slow self-driving progress continues with green light warning

Tesla is adding Autopilot features much slower than Musk predicted last year.

High-end automobile infotainment system.

Enlarge / The interior of a Tesla Model X at the Brussels Expo in January 2020. (credit: Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images)

Tesla has released a new version of its Autopilot software that adds the ability to read speed limit signs, improving the accuracy of the speed limits displayed on the dashboard. The new version of the software also recognizes when a stoplight turns green. The car will notify the driver but won't start moving on its own.

Tesla first added the ability to spot stoplights and stop signs back in April. The initial version of the stoplight feature would slow down for a stoplight whether it was red or green. The driver had to signal the car to proceed through the intersection if the light was green—otherwise, the car would stop.

The first version of Autopilot, which was based on technology from Mobileye, included the ability to recognize speed limit signs. But Tesla split with Mobileye in 2016 and began building more of its Autopilot technology in-house. As a result, prior to the latest software update, newer Tesla vehicles displayed speed limits based on a GPS-based database of roadway speed limits.

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Tesla’s slow self-driving progress continues with green light warning

Tesla is adding Autopilot features much slower than Musk predicted last year.

High-end automobile infotainment system.

Enlarge / The interior of a Tesla Model X at the Brussels Expo in January 2020. (credit: Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images)

Tesla has released a new version of its Autopilot software that adds the ability to read speed limit signs, improving the accuracy of the speed limits displayed on the dashboard. The new version of the software also recognizes when a stoplight turns green. The car will notify the driver but won't start moving on its own.

Tesla first added the ability to spot stoplights and stop signs back in April. The initial version of the stoplight feature would slow down for a stoplight whether it was red or green. The driver had to signal the car to proceed through the intersection if the light was green—otherwise, the car would stop.

The first version of Autopilot, which was based on technology from Mobileye, included the ability to recognize speed limit signs. But Tesla split with Mobileye in 2016 and began building more of its Autopilot technology in-house. As a result, prior to the latest software update, newer Tesla vehicles displayed speed limits based on a GPS-based database of roadway speed limits.

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Attackers are trying to exploit a high-severity zeroday in Cisco gear

Exploits can exhaust memory in hardware used by telecoms and cloud providers.

A complex network of wires and computing devices.

Enlarge (credit: Cisco)

Telecoms and data-center operators take note: attackers are actively trying to exploit a high-severity zeroday vulnerability in Cisco networking devices, the company warned over the weekend.

The security flaw resides in Cisco’s iOS XR Software, an operating system for carrier-grade routers and other networking devices used by telecommunications and data-center providers. In an advisory published on Saturday, the networking-gear manufacturer said that a patch is not yet available and provided no timeline for when one would be released.

Memory exhaustion

CVE-2020-3566, as the vulnerability is tracked, allows attackers to “cause memory exhaustion, resulting in instability of other processes” including but not limited to interior and exterior routing protocols. Exploits work by sending maliciously crafted Internet Group Management Protocol traffic. Normally, IGMP communications are used by one-to-many networking applications to conserve resources when streaming video and related content. A flaw in the way iOS XR Software queues IGMP packets makes it possible to consume memory resources.

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Lenovo’s new lineup: An Android tablet, leather laptops, and a gaming machine

Plus, new tablets and more from Lenovo’s holiday lineup.

PC- and gadget-maker Lenovo has announced a suite of consumer products for the holiday season this year, including three new Yoga-brand Windows laptops.

The company had already announced other laptops in this line—including the Yoga Slim 7i, the Yoga Slim 7i Pro, the Yoga Slim 7 pro, the Yoga 6, and the 2-in-1 Yoga 7i—earlier this month. Today brings details about the Yoga Slim 9i (14 inches) and the convertible Yoga 9i (available in 14- and 15-inch versions).

The new models include new-generation Intel Core CPUs and Intel Xe graphics. The 9i's 15-inch model offers CPU configurations maxing out with an Intel Core i9 HK, can be configured with discrete graphics cards as speedy as Nvidia's GTX 1650 Ti, and offers up to 16GB of DDR4 RAM and 2TB of SSD storage. The 9i can also include a 4K touchscreen with a maximum brightness of 500 nits—just enough to qualify for the bare minimum HDR specification. The 14-inch variant of the 9i includes two Thunderbolt 4 ports, while the 15-inch version (and the 9i Slim) offer three.

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Lenovo Yoga 9i and IdeaPad Slim 9i Tiger Lake laptops coming this fall

Lenovo is introducing two new 14 inch laptops with 11th-gen Intel Tiger Lake processors. The Lenovo Yoga 9i is a 3.1 pound convertible laptop with up to a 4K touchscreen display, an optional leather cover, and a $1399 starting price, while the Lenovo …

Lenovo Yoga 9i

Lenovo is introducing two new 14 inch laptops with 11th-gen Intel Tiger Lake processors. The Lenovo Yoga 9i is a 3.1 pound convertible laptop with up to a 4K touchscreen display, an optional leather cover, and a $1399 starting price, while the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 9i is a clamshell model with a 180-degree hinge and a thinner, […]

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The Pirate Bay: Expert Appears to Reconsider Existence of VPN Provider Logs

In its legal action to track down The Pirate Bay, anti-piracy group Rights Alliance presented the court with testimony from an expert who found that VPN provider OVPN probably had some useful information on its alleged customer. However, OVPN has now produced comments from the same person who, given additional information, may have reconsidered.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

pirate bayBack in June, movie companies Svensk Filmindustri and Nordisk Film, supported by anti-piracy partner Rights Alliance, began legal action to try and pick up a trail on The Pirate Bay.

In an effort to get closer to the location of the site and then presumably its operators, Rights Alliance filed requests with Cloudflare and subsequently filed a lawsuit in Sweden against VPN provider OVPN.

According to Rights Alliance, The Pirate Bay had used OVPN to shield its location and the company should therefore have useful information to share.

The case has taken multiple twists and turns since but on the whole, a successful outcome in the case appears to have been leaning in favor of OVPN, which insists that as a no-logs provider, it has nothing useful to hand over.

Testimony From Expert VPN Company Penetration Tester

Earlier this month, however, Rights Alliance handed testimony to the court from an expert with substantial experience with VPN services. Jesper Larsson works at security company Ox4a but is involved with Cure 53 where he says he “regularly” performs penetration tests against the ten largest VPN providers in the world.

We covered his opinion in detail in our earlier report but it essentially concluded that it should be “considered extremely likely” that the user or identity associated with the specific type of VPN configuration allegedly used by The Pirate Bay would have been stored in a database at some point.

“OVPN should thus be able to search its VPN servers for the given IP address, or alternatively search in their user databases or in backups of these to locate a given user or identity,” the opinion read.

While in ordinary circumstances that would be a reasonable conclusion to reach, in our report following the filing of the expert’s opinion, we published statements from OVPN indicating special circumstances, ones that suggested that it is unable to search its userbase or recover data from backups from the period in question. This is something that Larsson probably wasn’t aware of at the time.

Has the Expert Hired By Rights Alliance Reconsidered?

OVPN founder David Wibergh is part of a pretty large Telegram group which has around 339 members. According to screenshots made available by him, Jesper Larsson is also a member of that same group.

On August 22, 2020, a user of the group posted a link to our article of August 21 which reported that Rights Alliance had hired Larsson to assess the security and potential logging abilities of OVPN. As previously noted, the article also presented comments from OVPN on the limited usefulness of databases and backups in this matter, which were only made public after Larsson’s opinion was filed.

As the image posted by OVPN and reproduced below reveals, a discussion ensued – including a response from Larsson himself.

OVPN Larsson

All comments are in Swedish but Wibergh has provided commentary and translations.

“[T]hree days after his remark in the Patent and Market Court – [Larsson] seems to have changed his position in a group conversation on Telegram. In the conversation, Jesper comments on our business. Jesper first states that he ‘believes that ovpn has clearly done a good job with its integrity and privacy’,” Wibergh writes.

In a follow-up comment, Larsson says: “I guess the account with the static IP-address is not linked to any ounce of PII data that can be traced to any person or organization”

Wibergh notes that ‘PII data’ stands for Personally Identifiable Information about an individual.

“The security specialist’s statement in the group conversation thus seems to be in direct conflict with his conclusions in the statement to the court,” Wibergh says.

“It will be exciting to see what the Rights Alliance now comes up with as their own expert agrees that OVPN does a good job regarding integrity and privacy, and that he does not believe that there is any identifiable information to retrieve.”

For clarity, it’s worth noting the sequence of events. While Larsson appears to have changed his opinion on the existence of useful information at OVPN, that came after Wibergh’s commentary on the company’s backup procedures. These were a response to statements made in the earlier technical opinion, suggesting that backups (if they exist) would be useful.

Other Events Over the Course of the Case

Rights Alliance’s case against OVPN has been running all summer but it hasn’t been straightforward. First of all, it is based on a simple and direct conflict – Rights Alliance insists that OVPN has information to hand over on The Pirate Bay and OVPN insists that it does not.

The battle, therefore, has centered on both parties trying to convince the court that the other is wrong, with both sides producing statements and testimony, such as that provided by the third-party security expert, to back up or add weight to various claims.

However, OVPN is questioning the claim that Rights Alliance “is run by independent consultants” since the movie companies’ case is being run by Rights Alliance chief Sara Lindbäck who has presented comments by her colleague Anders Nilsson (concerning how OVPN’s systems work) as ‘evidence’ when OVPN’s lawyer believes it shouldn’t be considered as such.

“With regard to the memorandum referred to as ‘evidence’, it is noted that – as previously submitted memorandums – it was written by an employee at the Rights Alliance, ie. the applicants’ representatives,” OVPNs lawyer wrote.

“In OVPN’s view, this is to be seen as a supplementary submission to the Applicants rather than evidence,” he continued, adding that in any event, the submission is “speculative and vague” since the person writing the memorandum doesn’t appear to know how the company’s system works at all.

OVPN suggests that this type of educated guesswork, carried out by outsiders who have no real knowledge of how the company operates, has become a feature of the case on more than one occasion. However, the bottom line is that it does not have the information requested so cannot hand it over, no matter how the requests are framed.

OVPN believes that a final decision from the Patent and Market Court (PMC) should arrive in September.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

China announces new export rules that could prevent sale of TikTok

Microsoft, Walmart, and Oracle are all vying to buy TikTok’s US operations.

Steel-and-glass office building.

Enlarge / TikTok's Los Angeles Office in Culver City. (credit: Xinhua via Getty Images)

China has announced new export restrictions for artificial intelligence technology that could complicate ByteDance's plans to sell off the US operations of its wildly popular TikTok app. The Trump administration has ordered ByteDance to spin off its US operations or shut them down by November.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Chinese government announced new restrictions on Friday that "cover such computing and data-processing technologies as text analysis, content recommendation, speech modeling and voice-recognition." A key part of TikTok's success has been its sophisticated algorithms for making personalized video recommendations. So a ban on transferring such technology could make it more difficult to transfer the app to a Western buyer or prevent a sale altogether.

ByteDance is reportedly close to announcing its decision. CNBC reports that the leading bidders are Microsoft (in partnership with Walmart) and Oracle. An announcement could come as early as Tuesday, with an expected sale price between $20 billion and $30 billion, according to CNBC.

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Daily Deals (8-31-2020)

Dell, HP, and Lenovo are running labor day sales (even though Labor Day is a week away). Meanwhile eBay is running a 25th anniversary sale, where you can save 25-percent on select products when you use the coupon code PARTYFOR25 at checkout. All of wh…

amazon echo buds

Dell, HP, and Lenovo are running labor day sales (even though Labor Day is a week away). Meanwhile eBay is running a 25th anniversary sale, where you can save 25-percent on select products when you use the coupon code PARTYFOR25 at checkout. All of which is to say, you can find some pretty good deals […]

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Raumfahrtunternehmen: OHB will Internetsatelliten extra für Deutschland bauen

Der Chef von OHB will Versorgungslücken in Deutschland gezielt mit zwei geostationären Satelliten mit Datenraten von 100 GBit/s ausgleichen können. (Satelliteninternet, Technologie)

Der Chef von OHB will Versorgungslücken in Deutschland gezielt mit zwei geostationären Satelliten mit Datenraten von 100 GBit/s ausgleichen können. (Satelliteninternet, Technologie)