Month: October 2020

Enlarge / This is happening whether you like it or not. (credit: Google)

It's time to talk about Google messaging again.

The company's latest blog lays out future plans for its suite of messaging services, which includes stripping features out of Google Hangouts as we head toward its eventual demise and the promotion of Google Chat to being the main messaging product.

Since it can be hard to keep track of the dozen-or-so messaging products Google has released over the years, before we get started, here's a glossary of the Google messaging apps that will be referenced in this article.

Enlarge / CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield. (credit: Getty | Alex Edelman)

The CDC has been neutered, shamed, and blamed amid the novel coronavirus pandemic and global crisis. From internal missteps that bungled the country’s rollout of diagnostic testing to blatant political interference and strong-arming on critical public health guidance, the CDC has gone from the world’s premier public health agency to a silenced, overridden, distrusted afterthought in the US response—an agency stripped of its ability to collect even basic health data from hospitals during a raging pandemic.

The heavy blows to the agency’s reputation and role have been well documented throughout the pandemic. President Trump and his administration have openly undermined the agency and, behind the scenes, attacked it while overriding expert public health advice on testing, school reopening, and the handling of outbreaks on cruise ships, among other things.

But while the broad strokes of the agency’s undoing were noted in real time, a set of new investigations and reports offers new details. In a sweeping investigative report by ProPublica, three journalists retraced a number of events, digging up emails, heated exchanges, and alarm within the agency. For instance, it provides fresh insight into how a single CDC researcher valiantly worked to develop diagnostic tests for the novel coronavirus, only to fumble, producing tests contaminated with genetic sequences of the virus. That contamination produced false positive results in public health labs around the country, rendering the tests useless and losing precious time to get ahead of the disease's spread.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

One of the most critical Windows vulnerabilities disclosed this year is under active attack by hackers who are trying to backdoor servers that store credentials for every user and administrative account on a network, a researcher said on Friday.

Zerologon, as the vulnerability has been dubbed, gained widespread attention last month when the firm that discovered it said it could give attackers instant access to active directories, which admins use to create, delete, and manage network accounts. Active directories and the domain controllers they run on are among the most coveted prizes in hacking because once hijacked, they allow attackers to execute code in unison on all connected machines. Microsoft patched CVE-2020-1472, as the security flaw is indexed, in August.

On Friday, Kevin Beaumont, working in his capacity as an independent researcher, said in a blog post that he had detected attacks on the honeypot he uses to keep abreast of attacks hackers are using in the wild. When his lure server was unpatched, the attackers were able to use a powershell script to successfully change an admin password and backdoor the server.

Enlarge / The front half of the Nikola Badger. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Nikola Motor Corporation)

Nikola CEO Mark Russell downplayed the company's Badger pickup truck in comments to the Financial Times on Thursday.

“The Badger was an interesting and exciting project to some shareholders, but our institutional shareholders are mostly focused on the business plan,” Russell said. “Our core business plan since before we became publicly listed always focused on heavy trucks and hydrogen infrastructure.”

Russell's comments were published after markets closed on Thursday. Nikola's stock price plunged on Friday morning and is currently down about 14 percent for the day.

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  iPhone 12 Pro.

Preorders began today for three major new Apple products: the iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPad Air. All these devices are available for order on Apple's website, but none is shipping right away.

The planned ship dates for all of these devices was October 23, but some are already backed up into November. In some cases, it depends on the configuration that you choose. At the time of this writing, some iPhone 12 and iPad Air configurations are shipping later, but others are still listing October 23 as the ship date. On the other hand, every iPhone 12 Pro configuration we looked at promises to ship either later in October or sometime in November.

Additionally, Apple seems to have normalized the cost of the iPhone across all carriers after an initial uproar about the phone being announced at a slightly cheaper price point on AT&T and Verizon.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Amazon Prime Day may be over, but the Dealmaster never stops. Today's discount roundup includes a number of Prime Day deals that are still available despite Amazon's sales event officially ending on Wednesday.

Among the offers still kicking is Apple's AirPods Pro available for $199, which matches the best price we've seen at a major retailer. It's still a great price for what we consider one of the best pairs of fully wireless headphones on the market, particularly if you want active noise-cancellation and already use an iPhone.

Elsewhere, Roku's Streaming Stick+ remains at its Prime Day price of $37. This still isn't the absolute lowest price we've seen, but it's the cheapest the speedy streamer has been since last Black Friday. If you can't wait until this Black Friday—when similar devices like Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K are likely to go on sale— and want a dead-simple way to stream video apps in 4K and HDR, it's a solid deal. If you can live with 802.11n Wi-Fi and a simpler remote without power and mute buttons, the Roku Premiere also does 4K and HDR and is still on sale for $27.

Enlarge / Pierre Gasly driving the Alpha Tauri Honda AT01 leads Alexander Albon in his Red Bull Racing RB16 during the F1 Eifel Grand Prix at Nürburgring on October 11, 2020 in Nürburg, Germany. The energy drink company Red Bull may quit the sport with both teams if it cannot find a solution to its engine supply problem. (credit: Dan Istitene - Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images)

At the beginning of October, Honda shocked the world of Formula 1 by announcing its decision to quit the sport at the end of 2021. Currently, it supplies a pair of teams—Red Bull Racing and Alpha Tauri—both owned by the Red Bull energy drinks company. Red Bull now has to find a replacement supplier for the fiendishly expensive, insanely complicated hybrid powertrains required by the rules. And it, too, might quit the sport in 2022 if it can't do that to its satisfaction, a warning issued this week by Red Bull's sporting director, Helmut Marko. So what the heck is going on?

F1’s hybrid era

The first F1 cars to add an electric motor to their internal combustion engine powertrains took to the track in 2009. These were 80hp (60kW) motor-generator units (MGUs) that could recover kinetic energy from the rear wheels under braking and return it to those same wheels for short bursts of additional power during a lap. However, only four teams adopted this idea—called KERS, for kinetic energy recovery system—during the year, and it was abandoned by mutual consent at the end of that season.

In 2014, the sport adopted its current technical ruleset. The old naturally aspirated 2.4L V8 engines were replaced by new 1.6L turbocharged V6s, now with two mandatory hybrid elements to the power train. In place of KERS, there was an MGU-K (for kinetic), and a new MGU-H (for heat), which captured or deployed energy to the engine's turbocharger. The new powertrains are hugely powerful, reaching around 1,000hp (746kW) in qualifying trim last year. And they use less fuel than ever: since this article was written in 2016, the V6es have actually now exceeded 50-percent thermal efficiency.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Peter Dazeley)

Twitter has changed its policy on sharing hacked materials after facing criticism of its decision to block users from tweeting links to a New York Post article that contained Hunter Biden emails allegedly retrieved from a computer left at a repair shop.

On Wednesday, Twitter said it blocked links to the Post story because it included private information and violated Twitter's hacked materials policy, which prohibits sharing links to or images of hacked content. But on late Thursday night, Twitter legal executive Vijaya Gadde wrote in a thread that the company has "decided to make changes to the [hacked materials] policy and how we enforce it" after receiving "significant feedback."

Twitter enacted the policy in 2018 "to discourage and mitigate harms associated with hacks and unauthorized exposure of private information," Gadde wrote. "We tried to find the right balance between people's privacy and the right of free expression, but we can do better." Twitter will thus change its hacked materials policy to "no longer remove hacked content unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them." Twitter will also "label Tweets to provide context instead of blocking links from being shared on Twitter."