Month: June 2021

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A researcher has uncovered one of the more unusual finds in the annals of malware: booby-trapped files that rat out downloaders and try to prevent unauthorized downloading in the future. The files are available on sites frequented by software pirates.

Vigilante, as SophosLabs Principal Researcher Andrew Brandt is calling the malware, gets installed when victims download and execute what they think is pirated software or games. Behind the scenes, the malware reports the file name that was executed to an attacker-controlled server, along with the IP address of the victims’ computers. As a finishing touch, Vigilante tries to modify the victims’ computers so they can no longer access thepiratebay.com and as many as 1,000 other pirate sites.

Not your typical malware

“It’s really unusual to see something like this because there’s normally just one motive behind most malware: stealing stuff,” Brandt wrote on Twitter. “Whether that’s passwords, or keystrokes, or cookies, or intellectual property, or access, or even CPU cycles to mine cryptocurrency, theft is the motive. But not in this case. These samples really only did a few things, none of which fit the typical motive for malware criminals.”

Enlarge / The Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet, which runs Amazon's Fire OS. (credit: Amazon)

Apparently following the lead of Apple and Google, Amazon has announced that it will take a smaller revenue cut from apps developed by teams earning less than $1 million annually from their apps on the Amazon Appstore. The same applies to developers who are brand-new to the marketplace.

The new program from Amazon, called the Amazon Appstore Small Business Accelerator Program, launches in Q4 of this year, and it will reduce the cut Amazon takes from app revenue, which was previously 30 percent. (Developers making over $1 million annually will continue to pay the original rate.) For some, it's a slightly worse deal than Apple's or Google's, and for others, it's better.

Amazon's new indie-friendly rate is 20 percent, in contrast to Apple's and Google's 15 percent. Amazon seeks to offset this difference by granting developers 10 percent of their Appstore revenue in the form of a credit for AWS. For certain developers who use AWS, it could mean that Amazon's effective cut is actually 10 percent, not 15 or 20 percent.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Earlier this week, we highlighted an excellent deal on Nintendo Switch Online memberships. Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a range of discounts on Nintendo Switch games, including several titles we've recommended in the past. The deals are currently available at several retailers—including Amazon, Target, Walmart, GameStop, Best Buy, and Nintendo's own eShop—and primarily apply to digital codes, not physical cartridges.

Among the sale's highlights is Hades, which is discounted to $17.49, the lowest price we've tracked for the Switch version of the stylish roguelike we named the best game of 2020. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, the adorable XCOM-style RPG whose sequel was announced at E3 this past week, is down to $10. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the modern classic whose sequel was also teased at E3, is down to $42.

Other first-party games like Paper Mario: The Origami King and Fire Emblem: Three Houses are also discounted, as are notable indies like the roguelike Dead Cells, the hard-as-nails run-and-gunner Cuphead, the puzzle game/trolling simulator Untitled Goose Game, and the hardcore Metroidvania Hollow Knight, among many others. You can see our full list of recommended offers from the sale below; not everything is the cheapest it's ever been, but each of our picks is priced lower than its typical going rate on the Switch.

Enlarge / In 2017, Tux was sad that he had a Microsoft logo on his chest. In 2021, he's mostly sad that Microsoft's repositories were down for most of a day. (credit: Jim Salter)

Yesterday, packages.microsoft.com—the repository from which Microsoft serves software installers for Linux distributions including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and more—went down hard, and it stayed down for around 18 hours. The outage impacted users trying to install .NET Core, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft SQL Server for Linux (yes, that's a thing) and more—as well as Azure's own devops pipelines.

We first became aware of the problem Wednesday evening when we saw 404 errors in the output of apt update on an Ubuntu workstation with Microsoft Teams installed. The outage is somewhat better-documented at this .NET Core issue report on Github, with many users from all around the world sharing their experiences and theories.

The short version is that the entire repository cluster that serves all Linux packages for Microsoft was completely down—issuing a range of HTTP 404 (content not found) and 500 (Internal Server Error) messages for any URL—for roughly 18 hours. Microsoft engineer Rahul Bhandari confirmed the outage roughly five hours after it was initially reported, with a cryptic comment about the infrastructure team "running into some space issues."

Enlarge / The Food and Drug Administration headquarters in White Oak, Maryland. (credit: Getty | Congressional Quarterly)

A leading advocacy and watchdog group is calling for the ouster of three top officials at the Food and Drug Administration—including its acting commissioner—after the regulator issued a highly contentious approval last week of the unproven and now highly priced Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm (generic name: aducanumab).

The call for fresh FDA leadership comes atop a chorus of harsh criticism over the decision, which outside researchers and industry experts have called “disgraceful” and “dangerous,” among other things.

Since Aduhelm’s approval was announced June 7, three expert advisers to the FDA have resigned in protest, with one calling the decision “probably the worst drug-approval decision in recent US history.” The three experts were part of an 11-member advisory committee that reviewed the clinical data for the Alzheimer’s drug last November and voted nearly unanimously against approval (10 voted against, 1 voted “uncertain”).

Enlarge / One of the 40 kg mirrors that has approached its quantum ground state. (credit: Matt Heintze/Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab)

Objects that obey the rules of quantum mechanics behave very differently from those in the familiar world around us. That difference leads to an obvious question: is it possible to get an everyday item to start behaving like a quantum object?

But seeing quantum behavior requires limiting an object's interactions with its environment, which becomes increasingly difficult as objects get larger. Still, there has been progress in increasing the size of the objects we can place in a quantum state, with small oscillators and even grains of sand being notable examples.

So far, researchers have approached this challenge largely by scaling up systems that were relatively easy to work with. But in today's issue of Science, researchers report that they've gotten close to putting a big object into its quantum ground state—a really big object: the 40 kilogram mirrors of the gravitational-wave observatory known as LIGO.

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  The inside of the store is wood-on-wood, with these crazy bendy poles everywhere.

After years of flirting with the idea of opening a physical store, Google announced its first-ever permanent retail location last month. Today, June 17, is the official grand opening, and Google celebrated with a blog post detailing what the store is like.

Officially, this is "The Google Store Chelsea," and it lives in New York City on 15th and 9th, aka the Chelsea Market building, aka the headquarters of Google's New York City campus. Unlike the stark white Apple Stores that Google is chasing after, the Google Store has a natural look, with warm wood walls and furniture. Whimsical bendy rods shoot out of the floor and decorate the store, looking like a giant version of a bead maze from a pediatrician's office. The store was designed by Ivy Ross, Google’s VP of hardware design.

What can you buy in a Google Store? It's essentially an offline version of store.google.com. That means it will sell Pixel phones, earbuds, Pixelbook laptops, Chromecasts, Google TVs, Stadia controllers, and Nest-branded speakers, smart displays, thermostats, smoke detectors, cameras, Wi-Fi routers, and doorbells. Google also notes that it will "have experts on hand to help visitors get the most out of their device, such as troubleshooting an issue, fixing a cracked Pixel screen, or helping with installations."