Month: December 2020

Enlarge / Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

11:25 pm EST Update: The US Food and Drug Administration has issued an emergency use authorization for the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.

In a late-night statement, Peter Marks, Director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said:

“While not an FDA approval, today’s emergency use authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine holds the promise to alter the course of this pandemic in the United States... With science guiding our decision-making, the available safety and effectiveness data support the authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine because the vaccine’s known and potential benefits clearly outweigh its known and potential risks.

The announcement comes just hours after reports that the Trump administration pressured the agency and reportedly threatened FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn to finalize the authorization Friday. The FDA announced Friday morning that it was "rapidly" working to finalize the issuance, which was initially expected Saturday.

Enlarge / The iPhone 12. (credit: Samuel Axon)

As rumored many months ago, Apple's silicon ambitions don't end with replacing Intel CPUs with its own in Macs—it plans to ditch Qualcomm modems in favor of its own custom-designed chips for iPhones, according to Apple hardware tech lead Johny Srouji.

Srouji confirmed the company's plans when speaking to employees during an internal town hall meeting, as reported by Bloomberg today. Apple acquired Intel's 5G smartphone modem business last summer. That acquisition of Intel's intellectual property and resources was key for Apple's new efforts.

Quoted in the Bloomberg story, Srouji told Apple employees:

The company behind Cydia, an iPhone app store that launched before Apple's own App Store, has sued Apple arguing that Apple has monopolized the market for iOS app stores, violating antitrust law in the process.

When the iPhone was introduced in 2007, it didn't have any mechanism for natively running third-party software. Instead, Steve Jobs encouraged developers to create Web apps that would run in the iPhone's Safari browser.

But people soon figured out how to jailbreak the iPhone and began making iPhone apps without Apple's help. Seeing an opportunity, software developer Jay Freeman created a program called Cydia that made it easy for users to download and install native iPhone apps—an app store before the App Store.

Enlarge (credit: Red Hat)

In an unexpected announcement earlier this week, Red Hat killed off the free-as-in-beer CentOS variant of their flagship distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The announcement—which clearly stated "CentOS Stream is not a replacement for CentOS Linux"—left thousands of CentOS users stunned and bewildered. In many cases, CentOS users had migrated to CentOS 8—which they expected to receive support until 2029—only to find out that their "until-2029" distro had become an "until-2021" distro just a few months after they'd installed it in the first place.

I can't pretend this is good news for CentOS users, but I can offer some good news: CentOS might be dead, but it's far from your only option for a "rebuild" distro that's binary-compatible with RHEL. Let's take a look at a few of the most likely options below.

Enlarge (credit: Lino Mirgeler/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Facebook said it has linked an advanced hacking group widely believed to be sponsored by the government of Vietnam to what's purported to be a legitimate IT company in that country.

The so-called advanced persistent threat group goes under the monikers APT32 and OceanLotus. It has been operating since at least 2014 and targets private sector companies in a range of industries along with foreign governments, dissidents, and journalists in South Asia and elsewhere. It uses a variety of tactics, including phishing, to infect targets with fully featured desktop and mobile malware that’s developed from scratch. To win targets’ confidence, the group goes to great lengths to create websites and online personas that masquerade as legitimate people and organizations.

Earlier this year, researchers uncovered at least eight unusually sophisticated Android apps hosted in Google Play that were linked to the hacking group. Many of them had been there since at least 2018. OceanLotus repeatedly bypassed Google’s app-vetting process, in part by submitting benign versions of the apps and later updating them to add backdoors and other malicious functionality.

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  Meet Spot, the robodog. [credit: Boston Dynamics ]

Fresh off of selling ARM to Nvidia for $40 billion, Softbank is again divesting itself of a flashy company. This time it's selling Boston Dynamics, the state-of-the-art robotics company, to Hyundai Motor Group. Hyundai is acquiring an 80 percent stake in Boston Dynamics in a deal valuing the company at $1.1 billion. Softbank will retain a 20 percent stake.

Boston Dynamics was spun out of MIT as a private company in 1992 and survived for a long time on military contracts. The company became famous by sharing its work on its YouTube channel, where the better-than-sci-fi robot footage would reliably go viral. Google bought Boston Dynamics in 2013 with a plan to build a robotics division, but as Google is wont to do, it lost interest in robotics and decided to sell the company to Softbank in 2017. Softbank had an even shorter fling with Boston Dynamics than Google, and it was forced to sell the company after its investments in Uber, WeWork, and the now-dead satellite-broadband provider OneWeb tanked. Hopefully, this sale means Boson Dynamics has finally found a stable home.