Month: March 2022

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has halted all sales of its products in Russia as a response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine, the company announced this afternoon. Online sales were halted immediately, while the company says it stopped shipping products into Russian retail channels at some point last week.

Apple has also made changes to some of its services in response to the invasion; Russian state-controlled media companies RT and Sputnik have both had their apps removed from Apple’s App Stores in all territories outside Russia, and the company has stopped providing traffic and live incidents data for Ukraine within Apple Maps “as a safety and precautionary measure for Ukrainian citizens.” The Apple Pay service has also been “limited”—the company didn’t elaborate, but transactions are no longer supported through a number of Russian banks that have been hit by sanctions.

In an internal email (via MacRumors), Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the company was “donating to humanitarian relief efforts and providing aid for the unfolding refugee crisis.” Apple would also match employee donations to “eligible organizations” 2-to-1.

Enlarge / Blood samples for COVID-19 antibody testing. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

An estimated 140 million people in the US—around 43 percent—have had COVID-19, according to the latest analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention using data from the end of January.

The estimate of people infected with COVID-19 is nearly double the CDC's cumulative tally of cases reported at the end of January, which totaled around 74 million. These numbers are expected to differ because many COVID-19 cases are not detected or reported—i.e., people may not get tested at all or take a home-test that is not reported. That means officials case counts are expected to be a significant undercount of actual infections. However, case reports can also include infections in people who have tested positive multiple times, effectively counting some people more than once.

The CDC has been estimating actual infections over time, which provides more insight into the recent tsunami of cases from the ultratransmissible omicron variant. Based on data from the end of November, the CDC estimates that about 37 million people became infected with the pandemic coronavirus in December and January. The number of cases reported to the CDC during that time frame was around 26 million.

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Last August, academic researchers discovered a potent new method for knocking sites offline: a fleet of misconfigured servers more than 100,000 strong that can amplify floods of junk data to once-unthinkable sizes. These attacks, in many cases, could result in an infinite routing loop that causes a self-perpetuating flood of traffic. Now, content-delivery network Akamai says attackers are exploiting the servers to target sites in the banking, travel, gaming, media, and web-hosting industries.

These servers—known as middleboxes—are deployed by nation-states such as China to censor restricted content and by large organizations to block sites pushing porn, gambling, and pirated downloads. The servers fail to follow transmission control protocol specifications that require a three-way handshake—comprising an SYN packet sent by the client, a SYN+ACK response from the server, followed by a confirmation ACK packet from the client—before a connection is established.

This handshake limits the TCP-based app from being abused as amplifiers because the ACK confirmation must come from the gaming company or other target rather than an attacker spoofing the target’s IP address. But given the need to handle asymmetric routing, in which the middlebox can monitor packets delivered from the client but not the final destination that’s being censored or blocked, many such servers drop the requirement by design.

Enlarge / A technician works on the Orion spacecraft, atop the SLS rocket, in January 2022. (credit: NASA)

NASA Inspector General Paul Martin serves as an independent watchdog for the space agency's myriad activities. For nearly the entirety of his time as inspector general, since his appointment in 2009, Martin has tracked NASA's development of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.

Although his office has issued a dozen reports or so on various aspects of these programs, he has never succinctly stated his thoughts about the programs—until Tuesday.

Appearing before a House Science Committee hearing on NASA's Artemis program, Martin revealed the operational costs of the big rocket and spacecraft for the first time. Moreover, he took aim at NASA and particularly its large aerospace contractors for their "very poor" performance in developing these vehicles.

(credit: Photograph by imelda)

One of the more disturbing aspects of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is its ability to readily hop between a variety of species, ranging from domesticated animals like cats and mink to wild deer. This creates a potential risk. While spreading in other animals, the virus can pick up mutations that make it look unfamiliar to the human immune system or evolve to cause a different collection of symptoms.

These risks, however, depend on the virus being able to move back to humans after evolving in a different host. And, so far, the only cases where that's known to have happened all involve people who have worked on mink farms. But a pre-peer-review manuscript is now indicating that Canadian health authorities have identified an instance where a SARS-CoV-2 variant circulating in deer ended up back in a human patient.

Deer season

In response to findings in the US, where SARS-CoV-2 appears to be widespread in both wild and farmed deer populations, Canadian health authorities decided to initiate screening of their own deer population. During the last two months of 2021, which overlapped with deer hunting season, samples were collected from nearly 300 deer killed by hunters; those were all screened for the presence of SARS-CoV-2.

Exactly how quickly do you need your smartphone to charge? Oppo is setting new records for smartphone charging speeds, both for commercial smartphones and in a lab setting.

The headline-grabber today is the company's unbelievably fast 240 W "SUPERVOOC" charging prototype, which can power a 4500 mAh smartphone battery to 100 percent in nine minutes, hitting 50 percent in just three and a half minutes. That's one percent about every four or five seconds of charging time. The prototype Oppo brought to Mobile World Congress has a battery percentage readout that goes to two decimal places, so you can watch those numbers really fly upward.

240 W is just for a prototype phone, though, and there's no telling what these kinds of charging speeds would do to your battery after a few charging cycles. For a speed that Oppo is ready to commercialize while still balancing battery longevity, it's also announcing a 150 W charging scheme that will make it into phones this year, including a phone from Oppo's BBK sibling company, OnePlus. (The OnePlus 10 Pro, which launched earlier this year in China, is up to 80 W.)

Enlarge (credit: Drew Angerer | Getty Images)

Microsoft has been pushing harder to increase the baseline security features of Windows PCs for a couple of years now—the "secured-core PC" initiative launched back in 2019 was meant to guard against firmware-level attacks, and Windows 11's system requirements mandate support for many supported-but-optional security features from Windows 10. Microsoft justified these new requirements in part by pointing to the NotPetya data-wiping malware, which has widely been attributed to Russian hackers.

To help protect against similar cyberattacks, a post from Microsoft President & Vice Chair Brad Smith is detailing more about how the company is responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to the post, Microsoft was able to identify new wiper malware (dubbed "FoxBlade") and provided both mitigation strategies and updated Microsoft Defender definitions to the Ukrainian government "within three hours" of discovering it.

Reporting from The New York Times provides additional details of how Microsoft worked with US government agencies to distribute the FoxBlade fixes with other European countries to limit or prevent its potential spread.

Enlarge / The main newsroom of Sputnik news in Moscow on April 27, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Mladen Antonov)

Google said today that YouTube is blocking RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik throughout Europe. "Due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, we're blocking YouTube channels connected to RT and Sputnik across Europe, effective immediately," Google Europe announced on Twitter. "It'll take time for our systems to fully ramp up. Our teams continue to monitor the situation around the clock to take swift action."

Russia's government has been cracking down on news coverage of its invasion of Ukraine, telling media outlets not to call it "an attack," "invasion," or "declaration of war." The US government has called RT and Sputnik "critical elements in Russia's disinformation and propaganda ecosystem."

YouTube's move follows European Union officials saying they are "banning Russia Today and Sputnik from broadcasting" in the EU. "The state-owned Russia Today and Sputnik, as well as their subsidiaries, will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin's war and to sow division in our Union," EU President Ursula von der Leyen said on Sunday.