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  The Asus ROG Phone 3. This phone is for elite gamers only, so expect lots of edgy laser beams in these photos. Asus even brought a fog machine. [credit: Asus ]

All hail the Asus ROG Phone 3, the new spec-sheet champion. Asus announced its new gaming phone today, and this thing's got bigger numbers than anything else on the market or really anything scheduled for the rest of the year.

The ROG Phone 3 is one of the first devices with the new Snapdragon 865 Plus, Qualcomm's brand-new chip that offers a modest frequency bump over the standard Snapdragon 865 that is in most 2020 flagships. The "Plus" version gets 10 percent higher clocks than standard, which means a CPU up to 3.1 GHz and a GPU that runs at 660MHz. Qualcomm's new chip will still get smoked by Apple's A13 Bionic SoC, but this is at least the fastest Android phone on the block, now.

The 6.59-inch, 2340×1080 display runs at 144Hz, making it one of the fastest displays ever fitted to a smartphone (although the first 144Hz display was the Nubia Red Magic 5G). Baseline RAM and storage are 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage, with options for 12 and 16GB of RAM, both with 512GB of storage. There's also a hefty 6000mAh battery. Samsung was previously Android's "more is more" manufacturer, but Asus is out-Samsunging Samsung with the ROG Phone. This is a faster SoC, faster display, and bigger battery than the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, and it even beats the rumored specs for the upcoming Galaxy Note 20 Ultra.

Enlarge (credit: David Sutterlütti / Flickr)

More than 1,000 unsecured databases so far have been permanently deleted in an ongoing attack that leaves the word “meow” as its only calling card, according to Internet searches over the past day.

The attack first came to the attention of researcher Bob Diachenko on Tuesday, when he discovered a database that stored user details of the UFO VPN had been destroyed. UFO VPN had already been in the news that day because the world-readable database exposed a wealth of sensitive user information, including:

• Account passwords in plain text
• VPN session secrets and tokens
• IP addresses of both user devices and the VPN servers they connected to
• Connection timestamps
• Geo-tags
• Device and OS characteristics
• Apparent domains from which advertisements are injected into free users’ Web browsers

Besides amounting to a serious privacy breach, the database was at odds with the Hong Kong-based UFO’s promise to keep no logs. The VPN provider responded by moving the database to a different location but once again failed to secure it properly. Shortly after, the Meow attack wiped it out.

Enlarge / Mozilla's new Wireguard-based service offers a very simple, attractive, and cleanly functional VPN user interface. (credit: Jim Salter)

Mozilla, the open source company best known for the Firefox Web browser, made its VPN service generally available in the United States this month. The cross-platform VPN is based on Wireguard and delivered in partnership with well-known and especially techie-friendly VPN provider Mullvad. Mullvad itself was, to the best of our knowledge, the first publicly available VPN provider to offer Wireguard support back in 2017.

The Mozilla VPN service costs $4.95 per month and offers server endpoints in 30-plus countries. It currently has VPN clients available for Windows 10, Android, and iOS—but users of other operating systems, such as MacOS and Linux, are going to have to wait. Mozilla says that support for MacOS and Linux is coming soon—but unfortunately, even if you're an advanced user who understands Wireguard configs, you can't just roll your own connection now.

The service authenticates via Firefox cloud account. When you sign up for a Mozilla VPN subscription, you'll be asked to create a Firefox account if you don't already have one. The Firefox account is an SSO (Single Sign On) service which uses oauth2, much like a Google account—but it's not tied to a Google account, so even if you sign up using a Gmail address tied to an Android device, that device won't be automatically logged in.

Enlarge (credit: Tesla / Aurich Lawson)

On Tuesday afternoon, Tesla announced that it ended the second quarter of 2020 with a GAAP profit of $104 million. That is now the fourth profitable quarter in a row for the US automaker, which may help the company move to the S&P 500 index. It took home $143 million in 19Q3, $105 million in 19Q4, and $16 million in 20Q1. However, the past 12 months' profits still don't offset the company's $408 million loss in 19Q2.

Tesla ends 20Q2 with a positive free cash flow of $418 million and $8.6 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Tesla says in its presentation to investors that lower operating costs and greater income from regulatory credits, plus recognizing $48 million in payments for its "Full Self Driving" feature, were big helps to the balance sheet. These contrast the costs it bore for having to shut down the factory due to a raging pandemic, as well as having to pay CEO Elon Musk $101 million for one of his compensation milestones.

The automaker had already released data on its 20Q2 deliveries earlier in July, but to reiterate, it built 6,326 Models S and X, delivering 10,614 of the same. Model 3 and Y production clocked in at 75,946; in total, it delivered 80,277 of these vehicles for the three months in question. Impressively, total deliveries are actually up 3 percent quarter-on-quarter and only down 5 percent year-on-year—not bad for the middle of a global pandemic that has cratered new vehicle sales across the globe. In total, the company's automotive business brought in $3.9 billion for the quarter.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Slack—the now-nearly ubiquitous, purple work-chatting platform—has filed a formal complaint alleging that tech titan Microsoft is unlawfully abusing its power to squeeze newer rivals out of the market—almost the exact same accusations Microsoft infamously faced 20 years ago.

San Francisco-based Slack filed a complaint with the European Commission detailing "Microsoft's illegal and anti-competitive practice of abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law," the company said today.

The complaint centers on Microsoft Teams, the company's chat and video-conference platform. Teams is a competitor product not only to Slack but also to popular conference service Zoom, Google's Meet and chat services, and other video services. Slack alleges that the way Microsoft bundles Teams into its distribution of Office—widely used enterprise software such as Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—gives Microsoft an unfair advantage against the competition.