Tag: consumer

iOS 10.2.1 is all about fixing bugs and patching security holes

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham) After several weeks of beta testing, Apple has released iOS 10.2.1 to the public today. The update is fairly minor and includes no major improvements to core iOS apps or features. The release notes say only that it fixes bugs and includes security improvements. The security page for the update lists a number of vulnerabilities in the kernel, WebKit, and the Contacts app that have all been fixed. Apple also addressed a bug that could allow attackers  to briefly access the home screen on an Activation Locked iPad that had been reset . The update is available for everything that runs iOS 10: the iPhone 5 and newer, the fourth-generation iPad and newer, the iPad Mini 2 and newer, both iPad Pros, and the sixth-generation iPod Touch. Small updates for watchOS 3 and tvOS 10 , both of which are iOS-based, have been released as well. The release of iOS 10.2.1 clears the deck for betas of iOS 10.3, which is likely to be the final major revision to iOS 10 before work begins in earnest on iOS 11. We don’t know much about what Apple plans to include in this next update, but older rumors suggest that it may renew focus on the iPad in advance of some new tablet launches in the spring. Hope also springs eternal about a dark mode for iOS. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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iOS 10.2.1 is all about fixing bugs and patching security holes

Nintendo’s Fire Emblem Heroes will launch on Android before iOS

iOS users will have to wait longer for Nintendo’s next major smartphone game release. Nintendo’s push towards smartphone gaming will continue on February 2 with the launch of Fire Emblem Heroes , a touch-only take on the company’s longtime tactical RPG series—and possibly the company’s most micro-transaction driven game yet. Like Super Mario Run before it, Fire Emblem Heroes will have a period of platform exclusivity—but in a surprise twist, that exclusivity is reversed. Android users will get first crack at Heroes on that release date, while iOS users have been told their version is coming “soon.” (For an estimate of how long the left-behind platform might have to wait, remember:  Super Mario Run has yet to launch on Android over a month after its iOS release.) During this announcement, Nintendo did not mention  Animal Crossing , the other series set to receive a smartphone port in the near future. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nintendo’s Fire Emblem Heroes will launch on Android before iOS

Windows is getting its own built-in book store in the Creators Update

Enlarge (credit: MSPoweruser ) The Windows Store—which already includes apps, games, movies, and TV shows—is going to include books in the Creators Update. This is according to pictures obtained by MSPoweruser . Based on images from an internal Windows 10 Mobile build, books will have their own dedicated section within the Store. The whole process will work much the same way as it does for any other purchase. It appears that Microsoft is not building a dedicated reading application for these purchases. Instead, the Edge browser in the Creators Update has been updated to include support for EPUB books, affording some customization of their appearance in the browser’s reading mode. This isn’t Microsoft’s first foray into the electronic book world. Long, long ago it had an app called Reader, which supported a proprietary HTML-based format. Reader was developed for Pocket PC and Windows Mobile, and notably, it was in Reader that Microsoft first used ClearType sub-pixel anti-aliasing. A Reader app was also available for desktop Windows, though not Windows Phone. The company even had its own online catalog of e-books using its proprietary format, which linked to third-party sites actually selling the books. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows is getting its own built-in book store in the Creators Update

How a robot got Super Mario 64 and Portal “running” on an SNES

If you missed it live, watch TASBot’s AGDQ 2017 run then read about it below. Can you really, playably emulate games like Super Mario 64 and Portal on a stock standard SNES only by hacking in through the controller ports? The answer is still no, but for a brief moment at this week’s Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) speedrunning marathon, it certainly looked like the impossible finally became possible. For years now , AGDQ has featured a block where TASBot (the Tool-Assisted Speedrun Robot) performs literally superhuman feats on classic consoles simply by sending data through the controller ports thousands of times per second. This year’s block (viewable above) started off simply enough, with some show-offy perfect play of Galaga and Gradius on the new NES Classic hardware (a system that TASbot organizer Allan Cecil says is “absolutely horrible” when it comes to automation). After that, TASBot moved on to a few “total control runs,” exploiting known glitches in Super Mario Bros. 3 and Mega Man to insert arbitrary code on the NES. This is nothing new for the computer-driven TASBot —the basics of the tricks vary by game, but they generally involve using buffer overflows to get into memory, then bootstrapping a loader that starts reading and executing a stream of controller inputs as raw assembly level opcodes. The method was taken to ridiculous extremes last year, when TASbot managed to “beat” Super Mario Bros. 3 in less than a second with a very specific total control glitch. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How a robot got Super Mario 64 and Portal “running” on an SNES

Quickly Improve a Smartphone Portrait in Photoshop with a Simple Depth of Field Effect

A portrait is often defined with a little depth of field of effect that makes the person in focus really pop. Most smartphone’s can’t produce this effect, but How-To Geek shows off a way to use a single Photoshop effect to create the same look. Read more…

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Quickly Improve a Smartphone Portrait in Photoshop with a Simple Depth of Field Effect

Android Ransomware Infects LG Smart TV, Company ‘Refuses’ To Help

Security firms have been warning us for more than a year about the possibility of Android malware jumping from phones and tablets to other Android-powered devices, such smart TVs. The latest incident involving ransomware on a smart TV involves software engineer Darren Cauthon, who revealed that the LG smart TV of one of his family members was infected with ransomware right on Christmas day. What’s worse? He claims LG wouldn’t help him with perform factory reset of the device. From a report: Based on a screenshot Cauthon posted online, the smart TV appears to be infected with a version of the Cyber. Police ransomware, also known as FLocker, Frantic Locker, or Dogspectus. The infected TV is one of the last generations of LG smart TVs that ran Google TV, a smart TV platform developed by Google together with Intel, Sony, and Logitech. Google TV launched in 2010, but Google discontinued the project in June 2014. In the meantime, LG has moved on from Google TV, and the company’s TVs now run WebOS. Cauthon says he tried to reset the TV to factory settings, but the reset procedure available online didn’t work. When the software engineer contacted LG, the company told him to visit one of their service centers, where one of its employees could reset his TV. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Android Ransomware Infects LG Smart TV, Company ‘Refuses’ To Help

Russians Used Malware On Android Devices To Track and Target Ukraine Artillery, Says Report

schwit1 quotes a report from Reuters: A hacking group linked to the Russian government and high-profile cyber attacks against Democrats during the U.S. presidential election likely used a malware implant on Android devices to track and target Ukrainian artillery units from late 2014 through 2016, according to a new report released Thursday. The malware was able to retrieve communications and some locational data from infected devices, intelligence that would have likely been used to strike against the artillery in support of pro-Russian separatists fighting in eastern Ukraine, the report from cyber security firm CrowdStrike found. The hacking group, known commonly as Fancy Bear or APT 28, is believed by U.S. intelligence officials to work primarily on behalf of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. The implant leveraged a legitimate Android application developed by a Ukrainian artillery officer to process targeting data more quickly, CrowdStrike said. Its deployment “extends Russian cyber capabilities to the front lines of the battlefield, ” the report said, and “could have facilitated anticipatory awareness of Ukrainian artillery force troop movement, thus providing Russian forces with useful strategic planning information.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Russians Used Malware On Android Devices To Track and Target Ukraine Artillery, Says Report

2016 MacBook Pro Fails To Receive a Recommendation From Consumer Reports

Consumer Reports has released its evaluation of the new MacBook Pro laptops, and it’s not good. The 2016 MacBook Pro is the first MacBook to fail to receive a recommendation from the nonprofit organization dedicated to unbiased product testing. 9to5Mac reports: In a post breaking down the decision not to recommend the new MacBook Pros, Consumer Reports explains that while the new models held up well in terms of display quality and performance, the battery life issues were too big of an issue to overlook. The organization tested three MacBook Pro variants: a 13-inch Touch Bar model, a 15-inch Touch Bar model, and a 13-inch model without the Touch Bar. The general consensus was that “MacBook Pro battery life results were highly inconsistent from one trial to the next.” Consumer Reports explains that the 13-inch Touch Bar model saw battery life of 16 hours in one test and 3.75 hours in another, while the non-Touch Bar model maxed out at 19.5 hours, but also lasted just 4.5 hours in another test. The 15-inch model ranged from 18.5 hours to 8 hours. Generally, according to the report, it’s expected for battery life to vary from one trial to another by less than 5 percent, meaning that the battery life variances with the new MacBook Pro are very abnormal. Once that was completed, Consumer Reports experimented by conducting the same test using Chrome and “found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs.” While the organization can’t let that affect its final decision due to its protocol to only use the first-party browser, it’s something users may want to try. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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2016 MacBook Pro Fails To Receive a Recommendation From Consumer Reports

Why Apple and Microsoft Are Using Last Year’s Skylake Processors In Their New Computers

Apple released new MacBook Pros yesterday that feature Intel’s year-old Skylake microarchitcure, as opposed to the newer Kaby Lake architecture. Two days earlier, Microsoft did the same thing when it released the Surface Studio. Given the improvements Kaby Lake processors have over Skylake processors, one would think they would be included in the latest and greatest products from Microsoft and Apple. Gizmodo explains why that’s not the case: In the case of the new 15-inch MacBook the answer is simple. “The Kaby Lake chip doesn’t exist yet, ” an Apple rep told Gizmodo. Kaby Lake is being rolled out relatively slowly, and it’s only available in a few forms and wattages. The 15-inch MacBook Pro uses a quad-core processor that has no Kaby Lake equivalent currently. That particular laptop really does have the fastest processor available. The same goes for the Microsoft Surface Studio and updated Surface Book — both also use a quad-core Skylake processor with no Kaby Lake counterpart. But the Studio and Surface Book are also using much older video cards from the Nvidia 900 series. Nvidia has much faster and less power-hungry chips (the 1000 series) available based on the Pascal architecture. Microsoft’s reasoning for going with older video cards is nearly identical to Apple’s for going with a slower processor in its 13-inch MacBook Pro: the Nvidia 1000 series came out too late. The major intimation was that Kaby Lake and Pascal came so late in the design process that it would have delayed the final products if they’d chosen to use them. New technology, no matter how amazing an upgrade it might be, still requires considerable testing before it can be shipped to consumers. One minor bug, particularly in a system as engineered as the Surface Studio or MacBook Pro, can turn catastrophic if engineers aren’t careful. In the case of Microsoft, it’s frustrating, because that old GPU is significantly slower than the Pascal GPUs available. It’s a little less frustrating in Apple’s case, largely because of the old processor microarchitecture that Apple elected to shove into its new 13-inch MacBook Pro. Apple went with a new Skylake dual core processor that draws a lot of power — more so than any Kaby Lake processor available. It then uses all that extra power to ramp up the speeds of the processor. Which means it is capable of pulling off speeds that can actually match those of the fastest Kaby Lake processor out there. The only downside to this decision is battery life. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Why Apple and Microsoft Are Using Last Year’s Skylake Processors In Their New Computers

Tesla bans customers from using autonomous cars to earn money ride-sharing

Enlarge On Thursday night, Tesla announced the new Model X and Model S electric vehicles will now come with the necessary hardware to allow them to drive completely autonomously at a future point in time. But buried in the notes about this new functionality there was also a warning to future Tesla owners: don’t expect to be able to use your EV driving for Uber, Lyft, or any other ride-sharing service that isn’t owned by Tesla. On Tesla’s website , the section that describes the new “Full Self-Driving Capability” (A $3,000 option at the time of purchase, $4,000 after the fact) states “Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year.” In Elon Musk’s ” Master Plan part 2 ,” the company’s CEO included plans for a Tesla ride-sharing network, which we know know will be called the Tesla Network. However, no other information about this program has escaped into the wild as yet. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tesla bans customers from using autonomous cars to earn money ride-sharing