Month: October 2022

(credit: Pixabay)

Hackers have been exploiting a now-patched vulnerability in VMware Workspace ONE Access in campaigns to install various ransomware and cryptocurrency miners, a researcher at security firm Fortinet said on Thursday.

CVE-2022-22954 is a remote code execution vulnerability in VMware Workspace ONE Access that carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10. VMware disclosed and patched the vulnerability on April 6. Within 48 hours, hackers reverse-engineered the update and developed a working exploit that they then used to compromise servers that had yet to install the fix. VMware Workspace ONE access ​​helps administrators configure a suite of apps employees need in their work environments.

In August, researchers at Fortiguard Labs saw a sudden spike in exploit attempts and a major shift in tactics. Whereas before the hackers installed payloads that harvested passwords and collected other data, the new surge brought something else—specifically, ransomware known as RAR1ransom, a cryptocurrency miner known as GuardMiner, and Mirai, software that corrals Linux devices into a massive botnet for use in distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Enlarge / Palette.fm does AI photo colorization using text prompts for refinement. (credit: Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)

A Swedish machine learning researcher named Emil Wallner has released a free web tool called Palette.fm that automatically colorizes black-and-white photos using AI. After uploading a photo, users can choose a color filter or refine the colors using a written text description.

Palette.fm uses a deep learning model to classify images, which guides its initial guesses for the colors of objects in a photo or illustration. "I’ve made a custom AI model that uses the image and text to generate a colorization," Wallner wrote in a message to Ars. "One model creates the text and the other takes the image and the text to generate the colorization."

After you upload an image, the site's sleek interface provides an estimated caption (description) of what it thinks it sees in the picture. If you don't like any of the preset color filters, you can click the pencil icon to edit the caption yourself, which guides the colorization model using a text prompt.

Enlarge / Drone image of car driving through the NamibRand Nature Reserve, one of the fairy-circle regions in Namibia. (credit: Stephan Getzin)

So-called "fairy circles" are bare, reddish-hued circular patches notably found in the Namibian grasslands and northwestern Australia. Scientists have long debated whether these unusual patterns are due to termites or to an ecological version of a self-organizing Turing mechanism. A few years ago, Stephan Getzin of the University of Göttingen found strong evidence for the latter hypothesis in Australia. And now his team has found similar evidence in Namibia, according to a new paper published in the journal Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.

"We can now definitively dismiss the termite hypothesis, as the termites are not prerequisite to form new fairy circles," Getzin told Ars. This holds both for Australian and Namibian fairy circles.

As we've reported previously, Himba bushmen in the Namibian grasslands have passed down legends about the region's mysterious fairy circles. They can be as large as several feet in diameter. Dubbed "footprints of the gods," it's often said they are the work of the Himba deity Mukuru, or an underground dragon whose poisonous breath kills anything growing inside those circles.

Enlarge / Drone image of car driving through the NamibRand Nature Reserve, one of the fairy-circle regions in Namibia. (credit: Stephan Getzin)

So-called "fairy circles" are bare, reddish-hued circular patches notably found in the Namibian grasslands and northwestern Australia. Scientists have long debated whether these unusual patterns are due to termites or to an ecological version of a self-organizing Turing mechanism. A few years ago, Stephan Getzin of the University of Göttingen found strong evidence for the latter hypothesis in Australia. And now his team has found similar evidence in Namibia, according to a new paper published in the journal Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.

"We can now definitively dismiss the termite hypothesis, as the termites are not prerequisite to form new fairy circles," Getzin told Ars. This holds both for Australian and Namibian fairy circles.

As we've reported previously, Himba bushmen in the Namibian grasslands have passed down legends about the region's mysterious fairy circles. They can be as large as several feet in diameter. Dubbed "footprints of the gods," it's often said they are the work of the Himba deity Mukuru, or an underground dragon whose poisonous breath kills anything growing inside those circles.

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

The Pixel 7 might be Google's first-ever flagship smartphone sequel.

That might seem like a strange thing to say about "version 7" of a smartphone, but before now, every flagship Pixel has switched manufacturers or used an all-new design from year to year. This strategy is the exact opposite of the one used by the larger, more serious hardware companies like Apple or Samsung, from which you can expect steady, iterative smartphone designs, with big redesigns coming every few years. When you're scrambling to build a smartphone from scratch every year, it's hard to do much in the way of error correction, improvements, or adjusting to customer feedback.

The Pixel 6 Pro was already the best Android phone you could buy, so Google didn't have to do too much to turn in a good smartphone this year. All the important bits from the Pixel 6 are here, like the category-leading price tag, great camera, and speedy, clean software. But even with that solid base, Google did a good job of fixing some of our minor complaints about the Pixel 6. There's no reason to upgrade if you have a Pixel 6, but an actual "version 2" of Google's flagship smartphone might entice more people to try the brand.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Last month, Elon Musk offered activists protesting in Iran uncensored Internet access, and a US State Department official said that the US would also be taking steps to help Iranians connect. Without delay, Musk activated SpaceX’s satellite Internet service Starlink, and he said all he needed to get Iranian protesters online was to somehow install special terminals in Iran that could receive the signal. So far, Musk has tweeted that only a few terminals have been installed in the country.

More are still needed, and now it looks like the US could possibly be taking steps to help with that. CNN reports that multiple US officials have confirmed that the Biden administration is in talks with Musk to potentially follow through on Biden's promise earlier this month and actually help set up broad access to Starlink in Iran. CNN says it’s not clear yet if those discussions will lead to the US offering to pay for the special terminals to be set up, however.

“We have our foot on the gas to do everything we possibly can to support the aspirations of the Iranian people,” one senior administration official told CNN.

Enlarge / The Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. (credit: Anadolu Agency | Getty)

Evans Hankey, Apple vice president of industrial design since 2019, has announced plans to leave the company in the coming months. Apple confirmed her impending departure to Bloomberg.

She has been sitting in the post of hardware design lead once famously held by Jony Ive. Prior to taking the role, Hankey reported to Ive for several years. Since 2019 she has reported to Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer. She manages dozens of industrial designers at the company. Whereas Ive once oversaw both industrial and software design, Hankey's responsibility was on the hardware side only. Apple's head of software design, Alan Dye, will remain in his role, according to sources that spoke with Bloomberg.

Hankey announced her departure this week, saying she will stay for six months while Apple works out its future plans for the industrial design team. She has not publicly said what her next move is. Her role was also held for a short time by designer Richard Howarth from 2015 to 2017. Hankey took it on around the time of Ive's departure from the company just three years ago. Howarth is still with the company and could be a candidate to replace Hankey.