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Enlarge / The Chromebook Pixel 2. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Earlier this week, comments from Google hardware SVP Rick Osterloh suggested that the company was totally out of the first-party laptop business.

"Google hasn't backed away from laptops," he said, referring to the company's Chromebook efforts. "But we have no plans for Google-branded laptops." The statement understandably prompted a wave of stories about the death of the Chromebook Pixel and related projects—the last version of the Pixel was introduced in March of 2015 and unceremoniously discontinued in August of 2016.

Now, Osterloh has modified his comments somewhat, tweeting that Google simply has "no plans to share at this time." That doesn't mean Google laptops aren't dead—the company has still discontinued its only first-party laptop without a replacement—but it leaves the door open for future projects. It has been suggested that a Chromebook Pixel 3 could be a trial balloon for the "Andromeda" OS, a marriage of Android and ChromeOS that could unify Google's desktop and mobile software platforms.

A representative patent image showing how Smartflash's "data storage and access system" works. (credit: USPTO)

The dreams of patent riches have gone up in smoke after a panel of appeals judges ruled that all three of Smartflash's patents are invalid as overly abstract. At this point in history, a one-employee patent-holding company with no novel legal argument has an infinitesimal chance of getting the attention of the US Supreme Court, so Smartflash's path has ended with the opinion (PDF) published yesterday.

Smartflash is owned, at least in part, by Patrick Racz, the named inventor on US Patent Nos. 7,334,720, 8,118,221, and 8,336,772. Racz lives on the English Channel's Isle of Jersey and filed for the patents in the late 1990s when Smartflash was an operating company with a real product, a type of early digital media player. But by 2002, Smartflash was out of business. Racz kept the patent applications alive, though, and saw them through to issuance.

Enlarge (credit: Abraxas3d)

Researchers at Cisco's Talos threat research group are publishing research today on a targeted attack delivered by a malicious Microsoft Word document that goes to great lengths to conceal its operations. Based entirely on Windows PowerShell scripts, the remote access tool communicates with the attacker behind it through a service that is nearly never blocked: the Domain Name Service.

The malware was first discovered by a security researcher (@simpo13) who alerted Talos because of one peculiar feature of the code that he discovered: it called out Cisco's SourceFire security appliances in particular with the encoded text, "SourceFireSux."

Welp, someone doesn't like SourceFire pic.twitter.com/NzuGXZ0WgC

— simpo (@Simpo13) February 24, 2017

Delivered as an e-mail attachment, the malicious Word document was crafted "to appear as if it were associated with a secure e-mail service that is secured by McAfee," wrote Talos researchers Edmund Brumaghin and Colin Grady in a blog post to be published later today.