Month: September 2020

Enlarge (credit: Corey Gaskin)

Apple's latest smartwatch, the Apple Watch Series 6, gives us almost every feature one could ask for in a fitness tracker while reasserting Apple Watch's position as the most fun, connected, and complete smartwatch experience.

To be fair, the Apple Watch Series 5 also held those distinctions in its time. You could argue the same going for annual releases farther back in the Apple Watch's history. But with the Series 6 addition of native sleep tracking and blood oxygen measurements to complement the already solid fitness foundation, there isn't much more you could ask for in a fitness tracker, or smartwatch, at this point. So, to sweeten the deal, Apple finally gave us some fun colors to keep our eyes from wandering. And at the company's recent fall event, Apple also introduced the less-expensive Apple Watch SE.

With the Series 6 and SE sitting alongside the even more affordable and still available Apple Watch Series 3, we now have a hard time telling anyone they should buy any other smart watch instead of one of Apple's. Instead, the more pressing question in 2020 is, "Which one?"

Enlarge / Firefly tests the first stage of its Alpha rocket. (credit: Firefly Aerospace)

Welcome to Edition 3.17 of the Rocket Report! Weather and technical issues permitting, we're looking at a busy weekend in Florida, with a Delta IV Heavy booster set for liftoff early on Saturday, followed by a Falcon 9 launch on Sunday morning. In the meantime, catch up on all the booster news below.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

New Shepard scrubs launch attempt. On Thursday, Blue Origin scrubbed the first launch attempt of its first New Shepard rocket since December 2019. The mission was due to fly several commercial payloads and some lunar landing technology for NASA. "We've detected a potential issue with the power supply to the experiments," Blue Origin stated. The company added that it would try to launch again on Friday, September 24, at 15:00 UTC.

Enlarge / Computer chip with Chinese flag, 3d conceptual illustration. (credit: Steve McDowell / Agefotostock)

Fortune 500 companies aren’t the only ones flocking to cloud services like Microsoft Azure. Increasingly, hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government are also hosting their tools in the cloud, and that’s keeping people in Redmond busy.

Earlier this year, members of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center suspended 18 Azure Active Directory applications after determining they were part of a sprawling command-and-control network. Besides the cloud-hosted applications, the members of the hacking group Microsoft calls Gadolinium also stored ill-gotten data in a Microsoft OneDrive account and used the account to execute various parts of the campaign.

Microsoft, Amazon, and other cloud providers have long touted the speed, flexibility, and scale that comes from renting computing resources as needed rather than using dedicated servers in-house. Hackers seem to be realizing the same benefits. The shift to the cloud can be especially easy thanks to free trial services and one-time payment accounts, which allow hackers to quickly get up and running without having to have an established relationship or even a valid payment card on file.