Month: September 2020

Enlarge / These are OnePlus Buds. They are a real product made by a real company, despite what US Customs seems to think. (credit: OnePlus)

US Customs and Border Protection this weekend proudly tweeted about a high-value seizure of counterfeit electronic goods at John F. Kennedy International Airport. "That's not an ," the agency wrote yesterday, sharing two pictures and linking to a press release.

"CBP officers seized 2,000 counterfeit Apple Airpod Earbuds from Hong Kong destined for Nevada at an air cargo facility," the agency wrote in the press release, dated Friday. " If the merchandise were genuine, the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) would have been $398,000."

CBP was right about two things, at least: the earbuds shipped from Hong Kong, and they are not Apple AirPods. But that's about all the credit you can give it. Judging by the pictures CBP itself shared in both the press release and the tweet, the earbuds are not in any way counterfeit Apple products. They do not say "Apple" on the packaging, they do not have an Apple logo anywhere, and they do not feature any other images or text linking them to Apple.

Enlarge / This redacted sample record from the leaked Elasticsearch data shows someone's June 24 purchase of a $2,600 gaming laptop. (credit: Volodymyr Dianchenko)

In August, security researcher Volodymyr Diachenko discovered a misconfigured Elasticsearch cluster, owned by gaming hardware vendor Razer, exposing customers' PII (Personal Identifiable Information).

The cluster contained records of customer orders and included information such as item purchased, customer email, customer (physical) address, phone number, and so forth—basically, everything you'd expect to see from a credit card transaction, although not the credit card numbers themselves. The Elasticseach cluster was not only exposed to the public, it was indexed by public search engines.

I must say I really enjoyed my conversations with different reps of @Razer support team via email for the last couple of week, but it did not bring us closer to securing the data breach in their systems. pic.twitter.com/Z6YZ5wvejl

— Bob Diachenko (@MayhemDayOne) September 1, 2020

Diachenko reported the misconfigured cluster—which contained roughly 100,000 users' data—to Razer immediately, but the report bounced from support rep to support rep for over three weeks before being fixed.

Enlarge / This might be the best listing image Aurich has ever created. The duck just kills me. Look at his little hat! (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

In this third installment of our series explaining what we can expect from 5G, we're going to focus on how 5G deployment can impact rural and underserved areas.

A brief refresher: What is 5G?

If you didn't read the first article in the series, you might need a refresher on what 5G actually is—and is not. The term "5G" itself doesn't refer to any particular frequency range; it just specifies the communications protocol being used—like 2G, 3G, and 4G before it. You may sometimes also see the term 5G NR, which simply means "fifth generation, new radio"—the two terms are interchangeable. Fortunately, and unlike earlier generations, there are no competing standards—5G is just 5G.

Common frequencies used by consumer-oriented wireless devices. Look at all that mmWave spectrum! (credit: Jim Salter)

With that said, much of what you've heard about 5G likely does refer to specific frequencies that it can operate at. There are three general bands allocated for 5G, which are further subdivided and leased to individual carriers. Those are the low, mid, and high bands. The low and mid bands are 600MHz-900MHz and 2.5GHz-4.2GHz, respectively. These bands share similar radio characteristics with existing 4G LTE low and high bands; taken together, you may also hear the pair of them referred to as "sub-6GHz" or "5G FR1."