Month: July 2021

Enlarge (credit: Suebsiri Srithanyarat / EyeEm / Getty Images)

As many as 1,500 businesses around the world have been infected by highly destructive malware that first struck software maker Kaseya. In one of the worst ransom attacks ever, the malware, in turn, used that access to fell Kaseya’s customers.

The attack struck on Friday afternoon in the lead-up to the three-day Independence Day holiday weekend in the US. Hackers affiliated with REvil, one of ransomware’s most cutthroat gangs, exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the Kaseya VSA remote management service, which the company says is used by 35,000 customers. The REvil affiliates then used their control of Kaseya’s infrastructure to push a malicious software update to customers, who are primarily small-to-midsize businesses.

Continued escalation

In a statement posted on Monday, Kaseya said that roughly 50 of its customers were compromised. From there, the company said, 800 to 1,500 businesses that are managed by Kaseya’s customers were infected. REvil’s site on the dark web claimed that more than 1 million targets were infected in the attack and that the group was demanding $70 million for a universal decryptor.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's edition of the Dealmaster is heavy on gaming deals: surfing the ongoing wave of PC game discounts from Steam's summer sale, we also have a new batch of PlayStation and Switch deals from GameStop's midyear sale, which began on Monday and runs through July 10.

While many of the deals in this latest promotion aren't worth the plunge—and while GameStop, the company, continues to be a bit of a meme—we have found numerous offers worth noting, which we've rounded up for you in our video games deals section below. As of this writing, many of the offers have also been price-matched at Amazon, if you already pay for a Prime membership and would prefer to shop there.

Among the standout offers here are Switch exclusives Super Mario Odyssey and Fire Emblem: Three Houses for $35 each. While these aren't the absolute lowest discounts we've seen in either game's case, discounts below $40 for first-party Switch games have been rare outside of Black Friday season. Odyssey remains one of the better entries in the Mario library, while Three Houses is a tense tactical RPG couched in a surprisingly layered (if deeply anime) political thriller. Note that GameStop says these two deals will only last through July 6, after which they'll bump back up to a more typical sale price for $40.

Enlarge (credit: US Department of Defense)

Following years of controversy and intrigue, the Pentagon canceled its JEDI cloud computing contract with Microsoft today.

Microsoft was awarded the contract in October 2019, but work stalled as Amazon, the other finalist, mounted a legal challenge. Now, the Department of Defense has scrapped the entire project, saying that it’s out of date.

“The Department has determined that, due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances, the JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets its needs,” a Pentagon spokesperson said in a statement.

NASA's Mars helicopter has now completed nine flights. (credit: NASA)

On Monday, NASA's Ingenuity helicopter made its ninth and most ambitious flight yet.

This time, the space agency said, the tiny flier took to the skies for 166.4 seconds and reached a maximum speed of 5 m/s. This is equivalent to 10 mph, or a brisk run. During this flight, Ingenuity covered about 625 meters.

A little more than two months have passed since Ingenuity's first flight, on April 19 of this year. During that initial test, the helicopter hovered to about 3 meters above the ground before landing again. Since then, the engineering team behind the helicopter has pushed the vehicle higher, farther, and faster across the surface of Mars.

Enlarge / A sign in front of a Broadcom office on June 03, 2021, in San Jose, California. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan )

The Federal Trade Commission on Friday said it charged Broadcom "with illegally monopolizing markets for semiconductor components used to deliver television and broadband Internet services" by preventing customers from purchasing from other vendors. The FTC simultaneously announced that it reached a settlement with Broadcom that requires the company to "stop requiring its customers to source components from Broadcom on an exclusive or near-exclusive basis."

The FTC said that "Broadcom is a monopolist in the sale of three types of semiconductor components, or chips, used in devices that deliver television and broadband Internet services" and that "Broadcom illegally maintained its power in the three monopolized markets by entering long-term agreements with both OEMs and service providers that prevented these customers from purchasing chips from Broadcom's competitors." The contracts required customers to purchase and use "Broadcom's chips on an exclusive or near-exclusive basis," the FTC said. "Broadcom entered these exclusivity and loyalty agreements with at least ten OEMs, including those with the most extensive engineering and design capabilities and the strongest ties to service providers."

Broadcom imposed similar contract requirements on TV and broadband providers, the FTC said. "By entering exclusivity and loyalty agreements with key customers at two levels of the supply chain [device makers and service providers], Broadcom created insurmountable barriers for companies trying to compete with Broadcom," the FTC said. The service providers that use devices with Broadcom chips include AT&T, Charter, Comcast, Dish, and Verizon, the FTC said.

Enlarge / Familiar to many an at-home podcaster. (credit: Jim Salter)

Over the fourth of July weekend, several open source news outlets began warning readers that the popular open source audio editing app Audacity is now "spyware."

This would be very alarming if true—there aren't any obvious successors or alternatives which meet the same use cases. Audacity is free and open source, relatively easy to use, cross platform, and ideally suited for simple "prosumer" tasks like editing raw audio into finished podcasts.

However, the negativity seems to be both massively overblown and quite late. While the team has announced that Audacity will begin collecting telemetry, it's neither overly broad in scope nor aggressive in how it acquires the data—and the majority of the real concerns were addressed two months ago, to the apparent satisfaction of the actual Audacity community.

Enlarge / In this aerial photo of Greenidge Generation's power plant outside Dresden, NY, Seneca Lake is visible in the background. The lake receives warm water from Greenidge's operations. (credit: Greenidge Generation LLC)

The fossil fuel power plant that a private equity firm revived to mine bitcoin is at it again. Not content to just pollute the atmosphere in pursuit of a volatile crypto asset with little real-world utility, this experiment in free marketeering is also dumping tens of millions of gallons of hot water into glacial Seneca Lake in upstate New York.

“The lake is so warm you feel like you’re in a hot tub,” Abi Buddington, who lives near the Greenidge power plant, told NBC News.

In the past, nearby residents weren’t necessarily enamored with the idea of a pollution-spewing power plant warming their deep, cold water lake, but at least the electricity produced by the plant was powering their homes. Today, they’re lucky if a small fraction does. Most of the time, the turbines are burning natural gas solely to mint profits for the private equity firm Atlas Holdings by mining bitcoin.

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  The Microsoft Surface Duo. It's very big. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Poor Microsoft. The company's Surface Duo phone was supposed to be the company's triumphant entry into the Android phone market, but instead, it will probably be remembered as one of the bigger flops in the industry. The latest chapter of Microsoft's dual-screen disaster involves a new low price for the ongoing fire sale: Amazon's Woot is selling the phone for $409, an incredible $990.99 off the $1399.99 MSRP. The one catch is that it's locked to AT&T.

It definitely feels like we've seen this trajectory before. The phone debuted in September 2020 for $1399 with poor reviews and a questionable spec sheet. A month after launch, it had a $200 price drop to $1199, and seven months in, it saw a 50 percent price drop down to $699. Today, at 71 percent off, the Surface Duo can now join the ranks of other market failures that ended up in the bargain bin, like the Amazon Fire Phone, the Essential Phone, and the Google Pixel Slate.

The Surface Duo is (was?) a very unique dual-screen smartphone design. Microsoft equipped the phone with a left 5.6-inch touchscreen and a right 5.6-inch touchscreen, and the whole thing folded up like a small notebook. It was visually beautiful, with an extreme emphasis on thinness and nothing but a flat pane of glass on the inside and outside.