Month: February 2021

Enlarge / North Dakota's capitol, in Bismarck, features convenient floral labeling. (credit: pabradyphoto | Getty Images)

The North Dakota state Senate is jumping into a simmering feud between Apple and iOS software developers with a bill that would make it illegal for device makers to require to use their app stores and payment systems.

The bill (PDF) has two main prongs. First, it would make it unlawful for companies such as Google and Apple to make their app stores the "exclusive means" of distributing apps on their platforms. Second, it would prohibit those providers from requiring third parties to use their digital transaction or in-app payment systems in their applications.

The proposed law applies to app stores for which gross sales receipts to North Dakota residents exceed $10 million in a calendar year. It applies to any "general-purpose hardware," including tablets and smartphones, but it explicitly excludes "special-purpose digital application distribution platforms" such as gaming consoles, music players, and "other special-purpose devices connected to the internet." Thread that needle, and you're left with a pretty firm arrow pointing directly at Google's and Apple's mobile app platforms. (It could also apply to the Mac OS and Windows app stores for laptop and desktop computers, but those platforms are already less restrictive.)

Enlarge / You can't argue with that green "safe" shield. (credit: ShareIt)

Trend Micro says it has found "several" security flaws in the popular Android app ShareIt. ShareIt has been downloaded over a billion times from the Play Store, and, according to App Annie, was one of the 10 most globally downloaded apps in 2019. The app was originally developed by Lenovo (it has since spun off into its own company) and for a time was pre-installed on Lenovo phones.

The report says ShareIt's vulnerabilities can "be abused to leak a user's sensitive data and execute arbitrary code with ShareIt permissions." ShareIt's permissions, as a local file-sharing app, are pretty extensive. According to the Play Store permissions readout, ShareIt requests access to the entire user storage and all media, the camera and microphone, and location. It can delete apps, run at startup, create accounts and set passwords, and do a whole lot more. It also has full network access. Trend Micro says compromising the app can lead to remote code execution. The security firm says it shared these vulnerabilities with ShareIt three months ago, but the company has yet to issue patches.

ShareIt's incredible success of a billion Android downloads and 1.8 billion users worldwide (there are also iOS, Windows, and Mac apps) has led to what looks like an incredible amount of app bloat. The app was considered one of the best for local file sharing, but today the Play Store listing shows an app that offers "Infinite Online Videos," "Tens of millions of high-quality songs," "GIFs, Wallpapers & Stickers," a "popular" media section that looks like a social network, a game store, a retail movie download section, COVID-19 check-in activity and case statistics, and what looks like its own form of currency. ShareIt's website (which, just like the app, does not default to HTTPS) says the service is "now a leading content platform" and popular in Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Russia.

Enlarge / Intrusion attempts on Pfizer servers have North Korea's fingerprints all over them, according to the South Korean NIS. (credit: Cleo Robertson / Cloudwatt)

This morning, South Korean intelligence officials warned the country's lawmakers of North Korean attempts to hack into a "local drug manufacturer" to illicitly obtain COVID-19 vaccine and treatment data.

As reported by The Washington Post, South Korean intelligence services committee member Ha Tae-Keung told reporters that the data sought included COVID-19 vaccine and treatment technology. Tae-Keung went on to say that South Korea detected a 32 percent year-on-year increase in North Korean cyber-attack attempts.

Pfizer has so far refused comment, leaving details vague on when the hack occurred or how successful it might have been. The newly reported hack attempts follow a spate of similar state-sponsored attempts against health organizations that Microsoft reported in November 2020. According to Microsoft, those attempts were made by Russian group Fancy Bear, along with North Korean groups Zinc and Cerium.

Enlarge (credit: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)

The price of one bitcoin briefly rose above $50,000 on Tuesday morning to set a new record. By noon Eastern Time, the price had fallen to around $48,500.

Bitcoin's price is now far above the previous peak of $19,500 reached in December 2017. Bitcoin's value has risen by almost 70 percent since the start of 2021.

No single factor seems to be driving the cryptocurrency's rise. Instead, the price is rising as more and more mainstream organizations are deciding to treat it as an ordinary investment asset. An important milestone came last week when Bank of New York Mellon announced that it plans to begin holding bitcoin on behalf of clients.

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  Shots from the reverse-engineered version of Grand Theft Auto III showing off the graphical improvements over the 2002 original.

A group of dedicated coders has generated complete reverse-engineered raw source code for the PC versions of Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City, which comprises hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ code, in a years-long process.

We've discussed in the past how video game fan coders use reverse-engineering techniques to deconstruct the packaged executable files distributed by a game's original developers. This painstaking, function-by-function process creates raw programming code that can generate exactly the same binary file when compiled.

With that code in hand, coders can examine what makes the game tick and make improvements and changes at a much more granular level than with traditional modding. In the case of Grand Theft Auto, those improvements include bug fixes, reduced load times, improved rendering, widescreen monitor support, and a free-floating camera system, to name a few examples. The source code can also be used to generate ports of the game to new platforms like Linux, Switch, and PlayStation Vita (though these recompiled versions all require the copyrighted art and music files extracted from the original game).