Month: September 2023

Enlarge / The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters stands in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday, March 14, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday recommended that everyone ages six months and older get an updated COVID-19 vaccine booster shot this fall or winter.

The recommendation came quickly on the heels of a meeting of CDC advisors who voted 13-to-1 strongly in favor of making the updated versions of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines available to everyone ages 6 months and older.

"The virus that causes COVID-19 is always changing, and protection from COVID-19 vaccines declines over time," the CDC said in an announcement. "Receiving an updated COVID-19 vaccine can restore protection and provide enhanced protection against the variants currently responsible for most infections and hospitalizations in the United States."

Enlarge / The Microsoft Surface Duo. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

RIP to the Surface Duo 1. As spotted by Windows Central, Microsoft is killing off support for its first self-branded Android phone. The device was an unmitigated disaster, and now the "three year" update plan, which only featured two exceedingly late major OS updates, means the Surface Duo will go down in history as the worst-supported premium Android phone ever. The $1,400 device never ran a current version of Android.

Things were weird with the Surface Duo from the very start. Microsoft unveiled the phone in October 2019 and didn't ship it until September 2020. After a long wait, the phone debuted to mostly negative reviews. Android couldn't take advantage of the ultra-fat 4:3 displays, and having two of them didn't help much when it made things like typing extremely difficult (there was no split keyboard). A massive amount of software issues made it the buggiest device in recent memory and coupled with the sky-high price, the sales pitch was not great. It was pretty to look at, though.

The fire sale started almost immediately. The phone had a $200 price drop a month after its launch, then a 50 percent price drop to $699, and eventually a 70 percent collapse to $409—an incredible $1,000 off the MSRP. Inexplicably, a second version was made, and support for that device ends in October 2024. It looks like a third version, at least following this form factor, is not in the cards.

Enlarge / The iPhone 13 mini. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Alongside the announcement of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro, Apple quietly ended the iPhone 13 mini's run today. That marks the end of life for arguably the best premium small phone designed for one-handed use.

It's not a surprise, of course. It became clear shortly after the launch of the first iPhone with the "mini" label—the iPhone 12 mini—that it wasn't selling that well. Market research has consistently shown that most users want bigger screens and batteries, which are incompatible with a smaller phone.

Further, the mini split the small-phone market with the much cheaper iPhone SE—even though the mini offered drastically improved features, like an OLED screen and better cameras.

Enlarge / A digital Trojan horse. (credit: Getty Images | posteriori)

A download site surreptitiously served Linux users malware that stole passwords and other sensitive information for more than three years until it finally went quiet, researchers said on Tuesday.

The site, freedownloadmanager[.]org, offered a benign version of a Linux offering known as the Free Download Manager. Starting in 2020, the same domain at times redirected users to the domain deb.fdmpkg[.]org, which served a malicious version of the app. The version available on the malicious domain contained a script that downloaded two executable files to the /var/tmp/crond and /var/tmp/bs file paths. The script then used the cron job scheduler to cause the file at /var/tmp/crond to launch every 10 minutes. With that, devices that had installed the booby-trapped version of Free Download Manager were permanently backdoored.

After accessing an IP address for the malicious domain, the backdoor launched a reverse shell that allowed the attackers to remotely control the infected device. Researchers from Kaspersky, the security firm that discovered the malware, then ran the backdoor on a lab device to observe how it behaved.

Enlarge / You don't need 2,000 hp to set a world record for the fastest time to 62 mph. (credit: ETH Zurich / Alessandro Della Bella)

There's a new world record for the fastest 0 to 62 mph (0–100 km/h), courtesy of a team of students at the Academic Motorsports Club Zürich and the Swiss universities ETH Zürich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. The team did so with a scratch-built EV, designing everything from its chassis to its circuit boards, and bested the existing record—set last year by students in Stuttgart, Germany—by more than a third.

The near-instant torque of an electric motor means that even a relatively low-powered hatchback like the Mini Cooper SE or Chevrolet Bolt feels quick off the line. In the days before electric propulsion's recent renaissance, a 0–60 mph time in the three-second range was the stuff of unobtainium. Now, you can buy a Tesla Model 3 that will hit 60 in 3.5 seconds for less than $50,000.

As the price point goes up, the 0–60 time comes down. Anything starting with a 2.x is quick enough that it overcomes even the most jaded road tester in a way that taking 1 second longer to get there doesn't. Tesla will sell you a Model S that will get you there that quick, and Porsche's Taycan Turbo S is designed to do hard launches all day long until the battery is drained.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

While new iOS releases always come out in September, Mac owners usually need to wait nearly a month to get the same improvements for their laptops and desktops. But the wait will be much shorter this year—Apple says that macOS 14 Sonoma will be available on September 26, just over a week after iOS 17 releases to the public on September 18. It will be the first update since 2018's Mojave to release in September rather than October.

A longer gap between releases can occasionally make things awkward for people who like to update on day one, since Apple sometimes adds new features to iCloud-connected apps like Notes, Reminders, and Photos that will only work in the latest OS releases. A shorter gap between releases will reduce that kind of awkwardness.

Sonoma is generally a low-key release, but it does include a few headlining features, including desktop widgets that can sync with your iPhone. A new Apple-made Game Porting Toolkit will make it easier for Windows game developers to get their titles up and running on Macs. Better screen sharing, revamped screen savers, an improved password manager, and a few other additions flesh out the update.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Today, US District Judge Amit Mehta heard opening statements in the Department of Justice's antitrust case challenging Google's search dominance.

Mehta alone will decide if Google maintained its role as the world's search leader by competing on its own merits—as Google has claimed—or through anticompetitive conduct—which the DOJ has alleged.

The DOJ's head of antitrust, Jonathan Kanter, kicked off the proceedings. He told Mehta that the DOJ plans to establish that since 2007, Google has illegally maintained monopoly power in search and advertising markets by focusing on "weaponizing" the "power" of being the default search engine on mobile devices.