Month: September 2020

Enlarge (credit: Christiaan Colen / Flickr)

Federal and state officials are seeing a big uptick in infections coming from LokiBot, an open source DIY malware package for Windows that’s openly sold or traded for free in underground forums. It steals passwords and cryptocurrency wallets, and it can also download and install new malware.

In an alert published on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency and the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center said LokiBot activity has scaled up dramatically in the past two months. The increase was measured by “EINSTEIN,” an automated intrusion-detection system for collecting, correlating, analyzing, and sharing computer security information across the federal civilian departments and agencies.

“CISA has observed a notable increase in the use of LokiBot malware by malicious cyber actors since July 2020,” Tuesday’s alert stated. “Throughout this period, CISA’s EINSTEIN Intrusion Detection System, which protects federal, civilian executive branch networks, has detected persistent malicious LokiBot activity.”

Enlarge / Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wears a Washington Nationals protective mask after a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, June 23, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

A public affairs officer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is out of a day job after a report found he was moonlighting pseudonymously as an editor for a conservative website, where he regularly trashed his agency and its director, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The RedState managing editor known as "streiff" is actually William Crews, The Daily Beast reported yesterday. Crews was, until this week, a public affairs specialist at NIAID, which is one of the 27 institutes and centers that comprise the National Institute of Health.

As streiff, Crews "derided his own colleagues as part of a left-wing anti-Trump conspiracy and vehemently criticized the man who leads his agency," according to The Daily Beast. Additionally, he described his boss as "attention-grubbing and media-whoring Anthony Fauci" and "a mask nazi."

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

One sign of the transition from summer to fall in the Northern Hemisphere is the annual minimum point in Arctic sea ice extent. Last year tied 2016 and 2007 for second place behind 2012’s record-low coverage. But after another warm year on a warming planet, 2020 hit a lower mark and claimed the No.2 spot free and clear.

Sea ice is floating, frozen seawater, and so its melting does not materially contribute to sea level rise, unlike glacial ice on land. Sea ice coverage in both polar regions grows over the winter and shrinks over the summer. In the Arctic, losses bottom out and give way to growth in mid-September. Around this time of year, scientists watch satellite data carefully, waiting for several days of stability or slight growth to call the minimum.

That minimum likely occurred on September 15, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. (It’s possible that a weird turn of weather could cause the extent to drop again to a lower minimum in the next few days, but this probably wouldn’t change the numbers much.) The center put the minimum extent at 3.74 million square kilometers (1.44 million square miles).

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  Opening up the Apple Watch Series 6 reveals a slightly larger battery. [credit: iFixit ]

The Apple Watch Series 6 isn't a radical leap forward from its predecessor. It adds a few new features, like blood-oxygen monitoring, but at its heart, it's the same Apple Watch people have been buying and wearing for a bit now. That said, repairability advocates (and repair-tool vendors) iFixit did a teardown of the Watch to find out just how different or similar it is inside.

The verdict is that the Series 6 is indeed mostly the same Watch, with a few key differences. First, it opens a little differently—it "opens to the side like a book." This is a slightly different approach to getting inside the Watch. iFixit posits that this change may be possible in part because the hardware for Force Touch has been removed from the Watch, just as it was in recent iPhones. As with the iPhones, Apple has replaced Force Touch with long-presses.

The battery is notably bigger, at 1.17Wh for the 44-millimeter model and 1.024Wh for the 40mm. That's a modest, single-point increase for both. There are fewer display cables to disconnect when disassembling the device, and there's a larger Taptic Engine in the Watch, too. And of course, iFixit found the pulse oximeter sensor inside.

Google's big yearly hardware event is scheduled for September 30, and as usual, we're expecting a big pile of products to be announced. Google has a hard time keeping anything under wraps before the event, so we're doing a roundup of all the leaks so far. We're expecting four products: the Pixel 5 (and Pixel 4a 5G), the "Nest Audio" smart speaker, a new Chromecast with a remote and Android TV, and maybe even a new Nest thermostat.

The Pixel 5 (and Pixel 4a 5G)

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  An official render of the Pixel 5. [credit: WinFuture ]

No yearly Google hardware event would be complete without the launch of a new smartphone, and this year we're getting two phones: the Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G. We don't need rumors for the basics on this one: these phones were officially confirmed by Google in the Pixel 4a launch blog post. The Pixel 4a (5G) even has an official price: $499.

This year we should see Google's Pixel line change from ultra-premium, ultra-expensive flagship phones to a lower price with a lower specs. Between leaks from WinFuture and a prototype Pixel 5 in the wild, we can piece together a 6-inch, 2340×1080 90Hz display, a Snapdragon 765G SoC, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 4080mAh battery. The phone has a rear capacitive fingerprint reader instead of the in-screen reader every other high-end Android phone has. It also has wireless charging. Besides a wide-angle camera, the Pixel 5 disappointingly has the same main camera sensor as the Pixel 4, which has the same sensor as the Pixel 3, which, with a minor revision, has the same sensor as the Pixel 2. Google has been staying atop the camera comparisons all these years thanks to pure software magic, but you've got to wonder what the company could do with a bigger, more modern sensor. WinFuture lists the price in Germany as "629 euros," which would work out to $736.84.

Enlarge / Facebook's European headquarters in Dublin. (credit: Brian Lawless - PA Images / Getty)

Facebook has warned that it could be forced to pull out of the European market if European regulators push forward with limits on data sharing between the European Union and the United States.

Until this year, an arrangement called Privacy Shield allowed US technology companies to move data easily between the two jurisdictions. But Europe's highest court nixed that arrangement in July, arguing that US law lacks robust protections against surveillance by the US government.

In the wake of that ruling, Ireland's privacy regulator ordered Facebook to stop sending data on European users to its US data centers. Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) leads enforcement of European privacy regulations with respect to Facebook because Facebook's official European headquarters is in Dublin.