Month: July 2021

Enlarge / Apple Pay on an iPhone and Apple Watch. (credit: Apple)

Apple will continue to expand beyond traditional technology projects with a new feature the company is internally calling "Apple Pay Later," according to a new report from Bloomberg.

With Apple Pay Later, users making either retail or online purchases with Apple Pay will have the option of paying over time rather than entirely up front. Customers will not need an Apple Card (the company's recently launched credit card service) to take advantage of Apple Pay Later, according to the report.

Apple will offer two payment options. "Apple Pay Monthly Installments" will allow users to pay off a loan, with interest, in monthly installments. "Apple Pay in 4" will let users pay for purchases with four interest-free payments due every two weeks.

Enlarge / Image released by Amazon when it announced a deal with United Launch Alliance to use launch vehicles for Project Kuiper. (credit: Amazon)

Facebook has sold its small-satellite Internet division to Amazon and said it has no plans to become an Internet service provider. Amazon and Facebook both confirmed the sale to Ars today.

The Information first reported that "Amazon has acquired a team of more than a dozen wireless Internet experts from Facebook in an effort to boost its multibillion-dollar effort to launch thousands of satellites... The workers are in the Los Angeles area and included physicists as well as optical, prototyping, mechanical, and software engineers who had previously worked on aeronautical systems and wireless networks, according to their LinkedIn pages." One of those is Jin Bains, who is now a director at Amazon's Project Kuiper. The employees reportedly moved to Amazon in April.

Facebook asked the FCC for permission to launch a low-Earth-orbit satellite in 2018, but the company called it a small research and development experiment and did not publicly commit to offering Internet service. Today, Facebook said that "it has not been our plan to launch a constellation of satellites, become an ISP, mobile operator, or tech vendor. We've long held the belief that satellite technology will enable the next generation of broadband infrastructure, and as part of our ongoing connectivity efforts, this team was focused on designing and testing new ways to advance satellite connectivity using optical communications and radio frequency systems and solutions. We are really proud of the work this team has accomplished and are excited to see what they will continue to build [at Amazon]."

Enlarge / Google's Sycamore processor. (credit: Google)

The current generation of quantum hardware has been termed "NISQ": noisy, intermediate-scale quantum processors. "Intermediate-scale" refers to a qubit count that is typically in the dozens, while "noisy" references the fact that current qubits frequently produce errors. These errors can be caused by problems setting or reading the qubits or by the qubit losing its state during calculations.

Long-term, however, most experts expect that some form of error correction will be essential. Most of the error-correction schemes involve distributing a qubit's logical information across several qubits and using additional qubits to track that information in order to identify and correct errors.

Back when we visited the folks at Google's quantum computing group, they mentioned that the layout of their processor was chosen because it simplifies implementing error correction. Now, the team is running two different error-correction schemes on the processor. The results show that error correction clearly works, but we'll need a lot more qubits and a lower inherent error rate before correction is useful.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The Russian state hackers who orchestrated the SolarWinds supply chain attack last year exploited an iOS zero-day as part of a separate malicious email campaign aimed at stealing Web authentication credentials from Western European governments, according to Google and Microsoft.

In a post Google published on Wednesday, researchers Maddie Stone and Clement Lecigne said a “likely Russian government-backed actor” exploited the then-unknown vulnerability by sending messages to government officials over LinkedIn.

Moscow, Western Europe, and USAID

Attacks targeting CVE-2021-1879, as the zero-day is tracked, redirected users to domains that installed malicious payloads on fully updated iPhones. The attacks coincided with a campaign by the same hackers who delivered malware to Windows users, the researchers said.

Enlarge / Image not found: why has it taken Microsoft five days (and counting) to upload fresh developer VM images for non-Hyper-V platforms? (credit: Sean Gladwell / Getty Images)

Microsoft typically makes Windows 10 Enterprise virtual machine images available to independent developers via its developer.microsoft.com portal. For some reason, that process has fallen through the cracks this month—images are available now for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor but are conspicuously missing for competing hypervisors VMWare, Parallels, and VirtualBox.

Ars first became aware of this problem via impassioned tweets from Matthew Boyette, an Ars reader and independent developer whose workflow depends on these Windows 10 Enterprise VM images. The images themselves are decidedly ephemeral—they expire each month, requiring devs using the program to download new, refreshed images.

June's developer VM images expired five days ago (on July 10), and despite several days of Boyette's angry tweets, the VM images are still missing. While VM images for Hyper-V—Microsoft's own hypervisor—were uploaded to the portal on time, devs who use VMWare, VirtualBox, or Parallels to host their virtual machines are still out of luck.

Enlarge / Lina Khan speaks to the Senate Commerce Committee on April 21, 2021, when her nomination to the FTC was being considered. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

In an attempt to avoid government scrutiny, Facebook today petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to have Chair Lina Khan removed from the antitrust case against the social media giant.

Facebook's petition comes shortly before the FTC must decide whether to continue its lawsuit against Facebook, which seeks to break up the company. The agency would have to submit an amended complaint because a judge dismissed the agency's first attempt, which was filed by the FTC during the last weeks of the Trump administration.

Today's Facebook petition was sent to the FTC and Khan, asking them "to recuse Chair Khan from participating in any decisions concerning whether and how to continue the FTC's antitrust case against the company." Facebook's petition comes two weeks after Amazon filed one asking Khan to remove herself "from any antitrust investigation, adjudication, litigation, or other proceeding in which Amazon is a subject, target or defendant."

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  The Super Mario watch. [credit: TAG Heuer ]

The unlikely combination of TAG Heuer and Nintendo has announced the "TAG Heuer Connected ✕ Super Mario Limited Edition" smartwatch. Like previous TAG Heuer Connected watches, this is an extremely expensive ($2,150) Wear OS smartwatch with extremely dated internals. You'll mostly be paying for the TAG Heuer and Nintendo name.

TAG Heuer's website is still counting down the time to the July 15 release date, but several sites have already published the details of the watch. The specs match the 2020 TAG Heuer Connected, so that means a 45mm watch with a Snapdragon Wear 3100 SoC, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, a 1.39-inch, 454×454 OLED display, a 430 mAh battery, Wi-Fi, NFC, GPS, water resistance, and a heart-rate sensor. In terms of the computer hardware, you could get the same thing from a $300 Wear OS device.

What you are getting is TAG Heuer design and materials, like a steel watch body and a superhard sapphire touchscreen. The hardware has a few Mario-specific touches, like a mushroom, warp pipe, and a star for the 3, 6, and 9-hour indicators on the bezel. The watch crown and clasp have engraved "M" logos, just like Mario's cap. There also seem to be two watchbands: one red rubber strap and another black leather strap with red highlights.

Enlarge / A Super Heavy booster rolled out of SpaceX's production facilities in South Texas earlier this month. (credit: Elon Musk)

SpaceX seems to have gone a long time without launching—or blowing up—a rocket at its South Texas launch site. A little more than two months have passed since the company launched its SN15 Starship prototype to an altitude of 10 km before safely landing the vehicle on May 5.

The SpaceX engineering team apparently got the data it needed from that test flight, because the company scrapped plans to fly its next prototype (the SN16) in favor of moving toward higher flights. Accordingly, activity at the so-called "Starbase" facility near Boca Chica, Texas, has focused on building up capabilities for an orbital launch attempt of the Starship system.

During the last two months SpaceX has constructed a massive launch tower to support a full stack of the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage. The company has also built several new large tanks as part of the ground-support equipment that fuels the massive vehicles with liquid oxygen and methane.