Month: September 2020

Enlarge / One of many devices introduced today, the 4th-generation Echo devices is a cloth-covered sphere with a halo at the base, contrasting with the squat plastic cylinders of earlier generation Echoes. (credit: Amazon)

Today at Amazon's hardware launch event, the company announced new Ring, Echo, Eero, and Fire devices. Amazon also announced a new gaming service called Luna, which we're covering in its own article.

Ring Always Home Cam

The Ring Always Home Cam is the newest device in the Ring family, which is better known for doorbells with cameras in them. The Always Home Cam is a tiny, self-docking drone designed to fly around inside your home, streaming video off to the cloud for review in smartphone apps. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff says the Always Home Cam is intended to provide multiple interior viewpoints without the need for multiple interior cameras and that it's an "obvious product that's very hard to build."

The drone operates fully autonomously, but the setup procedure involves mapping areas of the house in which it's allowed to fly and what paths it's allowed to take. After setup, the drone can be asked to fly directly, or it can fly on its own to visit disturbances detected by Ring alarm systems. Its 1080p camera is blocked by the dock itself, so if the drone is not in flight, it's not streaming or recording. Like most small drones, it integrates automatic obstacle avoidance and uses propeller shrouds to protect both the blades themselves and any objects, persons, or pets that might otherwise encounter them.

Enlarge / The Food and Drug Administration headquarters in White Oak, Maryland. (credit: Getty | Congressional Quarterly)

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he may reject the Food and Drug Administration’s plan to issue stricter safety and efficacy standards for COVID-19 vaccines, calling the plan a “political move.”

The new standards are aimed at bolstering public confidence in the FDA and its vaccine review process, which has been severely damaged by many reports of political meddling and interference by the Trump administration. Those reports include claims that the FDA was pressured by the White House into allowing COVID-19 patients to be treated with unproven blood plasma and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which was personally touted by Trump. (The authorization of hydroxychloroquine was later revoked by the FDA.) Just last week, Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, revoked the FDA’s authority to sign new regulations.

Trump himself has continually undercut federal public health guidance and government scientists, particularly Robert Redfield, his director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Trump has also repeatedly pushed for a pre-election release of a vaccine, though experts have, in turn, repeatedly pointed out that such a speedy release is nearly impossible based on the timeline of the clinical trials underway and the amount of data needed to make even preliminary evaluations of safety and efficacy.

Enlarge / A stand of TikTok (Douyin) at The First International Artificial Products Expo Hangzhou on October 18, 2019, in Hangzhou, China. (credit: Long Wei | VCG | Getty Images)

A federal judge today gave the Trump administration until Friday to either defend its planned ban of short-form-video app TikTok in court or hold off on it, adding one more wrinkle to the seemingly endless on-again, off-again saga.

If the government doesn't voluntarily postpone the planned TikTok ban by 2:30pm (EDT) on Friday, then it will have to show up for a hearing on Sunday morning, where he will rule on TikTok's request for an injunction on the ban, Judge Carl Nichols of the US District Court for DC said today.

Nichols said that the ban, if it takes effect, could prevent potentially hundreds of thousands of new users per day from signing up for TikTok. "I don't think [a ban] merely preserves the status quo," he said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Back in July, during the virtual San Diego Comic-Con@Home, Amazon Studios released a beguiling teaser for Truth Seekers, the forthcoming sci-fi/horror/comedy series starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. It looked like a lot of fun—how could you go wrong with a reunion of Pegg and Frost? The full trailer just dropped, and it definitely reinforces that positive first impression. We also now have a release date: Amazon will screen the first two episodes at the Canneseries festival on October 10 and will release the full series on Prime Video on October 30, 2020.

As we reported previously, the series was created by Pegg, Frost, James Serafinowicz, and Nat Saunders. It's envisioned as a cross between The X-Files and the British TV series Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. Each of the eight episodes will focus on a specific paranormal incident, a throwback to a classic monster-of-the-week format. Rather than going with pure spoof, Truth Seekers will apparently take its horror aspects seriously.

Per the official synopsis:

Enlarge / Major developers are sick and tired of Apple's rules and they've made a website about it. (credit: Coalition for App Fairness)

Exactly how much power app store owners should have over developers has been a contentious issue lately, and now several high-profile app developers are banding together to form the "Coalition for App Fairness." The group describes itself as "an independent nonprofit organization founded by industry-leading companies to advocate for freedom of choice and fair competition across the app ecosystem."

Just about every app developer that has publicly clashed with Apple in the past few months is among the 13 founding members of the coalition. They include Epic Games, which had the smash-hit game Fortnite banned from the App Store for implementing its own in-app payment system; Spotify, which filed an antitrust complaint against Apple in the EU over Apple's 30 percent cut of sales; ProtonMail, whose CEO said Apple was holding developers "hostage" with the 30 percent fee; and also Basecamp, which called Apple's policies "exploitative" after updates to its Hey email app were blocked for using the same non-Apple billing technique that Netflix uses.

The coalition has a website, AppFairness.org, that lays out its demands. The website exclusively targets Apple's App Store with three main issues: anti-competitive policies that favor Apple's apps over competitors, the 15-30 percent fee in the app store being too high, and Apple's ban on competing app stores and payment methods.

(credit: Pixabay)

One of the highest-impact Windows vulnerabilities patched this year is now under active exploitation by malicious hackers, Microsoft warned overnight, in a development that puts increasing pressure on laggards to update now.

CVE-2020-1472, as the vulnerability is tracked, allows hackers to instantly take control of the Active Directory, a Windows server resource that acts as an all-powerful gatekeeper for all machines connected to a network. Researchers have dubbed the vulnerability Zerologon, because it allows attackers with only minimal access to a vulnerable network to login to the Active Directory by sending a string of zeros in messages that use the Netlogon protocol.

Zerologon carries a critical severity rating from Microsoft as well as a maximum of 10 under the Common Vulnerability Scoring System. Despite the high rating, the escalation-of-privileges vulnerability received scant, if any, attention when Microsoft patched it in August, and Microsoft deemed the chances of actual exploitation “less likely.”

Enlarge (credit: Chesnot | Getty Images)

Speaking to Congress today, the former Facebook manager first tasked with making the company make money did not mince words about his role. He told lawmakers that the company "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset" and arguing that his former employer has been hugely detrimental to society.

Tim Kendall, who served as director of monetization for Facebook from 2006 through 2010, spoke to Congress today as part of a House Commerce subcommittee hearing examining how social media platforms contribute to the mainstreaming of extremist and radicalizing content.

"The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding—at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war."