Month: July 2021

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

The latest smartphone OEM to be caught playing games with device power is OnePlus. Depending on who you want to believe, the company is either benchmark cheating or "optimizing performance." But everyone—OnePlus included—seems to agree that OnePlus is taking control of app performance out of the hands of users and deciding what is and isn't allowed to run at maximum speed on the user's device.

The story starts with Andrei Frumusanu of AnandTech. Frumusanu recently did some digging into the behavior of the OnePlus 9 and found it dramatically throttled Chrome and other popular apps. At times, Chrome was apparently limited to the Cortex-A55 cores only, ignoring most of the phone's computing horsepower, which is present in the bigger A78 and X1 cores.

Why would any OEM want to make its phone slower on popular apps? Frumusanu assumed this was a roundabout way of benchmark cheating:

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

The latest smartphone OEM to be caught playing games with device power is OnePlus. Depending on who you want to believe, the company is either benchmark cheating or "optimizing performance." But everyone—OnePlus included—seems to agree that OnePlus is taking control of app performance out of the hands of users and deciding what is and isn't allowed to run at maximum speed on the user's device.

The story starts with Andrei Frumusanu of AnandTech. Frumusanu recently did some digging into the behavior of the OnePlus 9 and found it dramatically throttled Chrome and other popular apps. At times, Chrome was apparently limited to the Cortex-A55 cores only, ignoring most of the phone's computing horsepower, which is present in the bigger A78 and X1 cores.

Why would any OEM want to make its phone slower on popular apps? Frumusanu assumed this was a roundabout way of benchmark cheating:

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

An emergency patch Microsoft issued on Tuesday fails to fully fix a critical security vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that allows attackers to take control of infected systems and run code of their choice, researchers said.

The threat, colloquially known as PrintNightmare, stems from bugs in the Windows print spooler, which provides printing functionality inside local networks. Proof-of-concept exploit code was publicly released and then pulled back, but not before others had copied it. Researchers track the vulnerability as CVE-2021-34527.

A big deal

Attackers can exploit it remotely when print capabilities are exposed to the Internet. Attackers can also use it to escalate system privileges once they’ve used a different vulnerability to gain a toe-hold inside of a vulnerable network. In either case, the adversaries can then gain control of the domain controller, which as the server that authenticates local users, is one of the most security-sensitive assets on any Windows network.

Enlarge / Temperatures compared to averages on June 27. (credit: NASA EO)

The last week of June saw shocking temperatures in Oregon, Washington state, and British Columbia. Differentiating a forecast in Canada from a forecast in Phoenix is usually a breeze, but not in June. All-time high-temperature records—not just daily records—were smashed across the region. Portland International Airport broke its all-time record of 41.7°C (107°F) by a whopping 5°C (9°F). The small town of Lytton set a new record high for the entire country of Canada at 49.6°C (121.3°F) on June 29. In the days that followed, most of the town burned in a wildfire.

Folks in this region are not accustomed to such extreme heat, with something like half of homes having air conditioners. The number of heat-related deaths is not yet fully known.

Maximum annual temperatures recorded at Portland International Airport. (credit: Philip et al./WWA)

As with other extreme weather events, the World Weather Attribution team has generated a rapid analysis of this heat wave in the context of climate change. The results were released Wednesday. The team coordinates scientists to perform a standard set of analyses—the method has been peer-reviewed, but this new paper obviously has not, yet.

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  Matthias Schweighöfer was a comic highlight in Army of the Dead as brilliant safecracker Ludwig Dieter. [credit: Netflix ]

If, like me, you thoroughly enjoyed Zack Snyder's gory comic/horror zombie thriller Army of the Dead, you'll be intrigued by Netflix's prequel series, Army of Thieves, one of two upcoming Snyder projects set in the same fictional universe. Co-producer Deborah Snyder has said Army of Thieves will be a standalone film and compared the "romantic comedy heist" to 2003's The Italian Job (itself a remake of the 1969 British film).

Army of the Dead followed Dave Bautista and his team of mercenaries as they ventured into zombie-infested Las Vegas to recover millions in cash from a casino vault. Naturally, brain-munching carnage ensued. As I wrote in my review, "While Snyder's distinctive directorial style is plainly evident, he has reined in his worst impulses to give us a clever, entertaining twist on the zombie apocalypse, featuring all the flesh-eating carnage one expects from the genre."

Bautista received top billing as Scott Ward, who brings the team together for the Vegas heist in hopes of having something to leave his estranged daughter, Kate (Ella Purnel). But the entire ensemble cast was terrific. In addition to Tig Notaro's delightfully cynical pilot and Samantha Win's martial arts fireworks, viewers loved the dynamic between zombie-killing-machine Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick) and the brilliantly nerdy, high-strung German safecracker Ludwig Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer). Not only did the two forge a believable (albeit reluctant) bond, Dieter's well-timed high-pitched screams whenever a zombie charged was one of several running gags. So naturally Dieter is getting his own prequel.

Enlarge / A mob of Trump supporters stormed and breached the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump's incitement of the mob led to his bans from major social networks. (credit: Getty Images | The Washington Post)

Former President Donald Trump today sued Twitter, Facebook, Google subsidiary YouTube, and their CEOs, claiming that all three companies are guilty of "impermissible censorship" that violates "the First Amendment right to free speech."

Trump's lawsuits are almost certainly doomed. The First Amendment does not require private companies to host speech—the Constitutional amendment only imposes limits on how the government can restrict speech. In addition to the First Amendment, US law gives online platforms immunity from lawsuits over how they moderate user-submitted content. The law does so via Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Despite those two titanic legal barriers, Trump's lawsuits seek reinstatement of his social media accounts along with financial damages from the companies and from their chief executives, namely Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Trump's lawsuits seek class-action status with him as the lead plaintiff, and they claim the CEOs are liable for damages because they are "personally responsible" for their companies' "unconstitutional censorship" of Trump and other users.