Sunday, July 5, 2020
Motorola One Fusion+ to Go on Sale Today at 12 Noon via Flipkart
LA-based telehealth veterinary service Airvet raises $14M Series A led by Canvas Ventures (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)
LA-based telehealth veterinary service Airvet raises $14M Series A led by Canvas Ventures — Telemedicine is becoming more widely embraced by the day — and not just for humans. With a pet in roughly 65% of U.S. homes, there is now a dizzying number of companies enabling vets to meet …
LA-based Scalefast raises $22M Series B to help DTC brands launch e-commerce stores in as little as 15 days, bringing its total raised to $32M (Christine Hall/Crunchbase News)
LA-based Scalefast raises $22M Series B to help DTC brands launch e-commerce stores in as little as 15 days, bringing its total raised to $32M — Digital commerce solution Scalefast announced it raised a $22 million Series B round of funding Tuesday to help brands launch an e-store in as little as 15 days.
Inside Instagram's teen training camp for positive advocacy
UK tech companies say operating with remote workers has changed their approach to post-Brexit hiring: executives will be local to HQs, most other roles won't (Nate Lanxon/Bloomberg)
UK tech companies say operating with remote workers has changed their approach to post-Brexit hiring: executives will be local to HQs, most other roles won't — - Shift to remote working suggests many visas may not be needed — The pandemic taught Britain's technology executives …
Amid India-China tensions, Zomato is unable to access $100M of the $150M it secured from Ant Financial in January as the government reviews the latest tranche (Financial Times)
Amid India-China tensions, Zomato is unable to access $100M of the $150M it secured from Ant Financial in January as the government reviews the latest tranche — Indian food delivery start-up unable to access $100m of investment from Ant Financial — The $3bn Indian food delivery start …
iCloud Keychain in iOS 14 alerts users about passwords that are easy to guess and those that may have leaked on the web (Filipe Espósito/9to5Mac)
iCloud Keychain in iOS 14 alerts users about passwords that are easy to guess and those that may have leaked on the web — In addition to the redesigned Home screen with widgets, App Library, and features like Car Key, iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 brings important enhancements to iCloud Keychain.
New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
The threat of ransomware may seem ubiquitous, but there haven't been too many strains tailored specifically to infect Apple's Mac computers since the first full-fledged Mac ransomware surfaced only four years ago. So when Dinesh Devadoss, a malware researcher at the firm K7 Lab, published findings on Tuesday about a new example of Mac ransomware, that fact alone was significant. It turns out, though, that the malware, which researchers are now calling ThiefQuest, gets more interesting from there. (Researchers originally dubbed it EvilQuest until they discovered the Steam game series of the same name.)
In addition to ransomware, ThiefQuest has a whole other set of spyware capabilities that allow it to exfiltrate files from an infected computer, search the system for passwords and cryptocurrency wallet data, and run a robust keylogger to grab passwords, credit card numbers, or other financial information as a user types it in. The spyware component also lurks persistently as a backdoor on infected devices, meaning it sticks around even after a computer reboots, and could be used as a launchpad for additional, or "second stage," attacks. Given that ransomware is so rare on Macs to begin with, this one-two punch is especially noteworthy.
"Looking at the code, if you split the ransomware logic from all the other backdoor logic the two pieces completely make sense as individual malware. But compiling them together you're kind of like what?" says Patrick Wardle, principal security researcher at the Mac management firm Jamf. "My current gut feeling about all of this is that someone basically was designing a piece of Mac malware that would give them the ability to completely remotely control an infected system. And then they also added some ransomware capability as a way to make extra money."
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As COVID-19 spreads, researchers tracking an influenza virus nervously
Enlarge (credit: Liz West / Flickr)
SARS-CoV-2 wasn't the first coronavirus that spawned fears of a pandemic; there were worries about SARS and MERS before it arrived. But influenza viruses have also been a regular source of worries, as they can often spread from agricultural animals to us. Earlier this week, a report was released that described an influenza virus with what the researchers who identified it called "pandemic potential." The virus is currently jumping from agricultural animals to us, but it is not currently able to spread between humans.
Under surveillance
The institutions that some of these researchers are affiliated with—the Key Laboratory of Animal Epidemiology and Zoonosis, the Chinese National Influenza Center, and the Center for Influenza Research and Early-Warning—provide some indication of how seriously China has been taking the risk of newly evolved influenza strain.
For seven years, these centers supported the researchers as they did something that makes whatever you did for your thesis research seem pleasant: taking nasal swabs from pigs. Nearly 30,000 of these swabs came from random pigs showing up at slaughterhouses, plus another 1,000 from pigs brought in to veterinary practices with respiratory problems. Why pigs? Well, for one, some historic pandemics, named for their species of origin, are called swine flu. And there's a reason for this: pigs are known to be infected by influenza viruses native to other pigs, to birds, and to us humans—who they often find themselves in close proximity to.
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Homebound with EarthBound
EarthBound got a nice Nintendo Power push. But in retrospect, Nintendo of America, you could've tried a lot harder with this trailer.
Give me 10 minutes. I need to defeat five giant moles so the miner can find the gold... which I need to get $1 million and bail out the rock band... who can arrange a meeting with the evil real-estate-developer-turned-mayor I need to beat down.
My partner doesn't get it, which I completely understand. When I first tried EarthBound, I didn't either. The now-cult-classic SNES title first arrived in the United States in June 1995. And I, a nine-year-old, had no chance. I craved action as a kid gamer, and that largely meant co-op, multiplayer, and sports titles (a lot of NBA Jam, Street Fighter, and Turtles in Time). Nothing about EarthBound, particularly when only experienced piecemeal through a weekend rental window, would ever speak to me. As one of the most high-profile JRPGs of the early SNES era, it embodied all the stereotypes eventually associated with the genre: at-times batshit fantastical storylines; slow, s l o w pacing; virtually non-existent action mechanics.
Frankly, I wasn't alone. Based on its sales, not many gamers seemed to understand EarthBound, and it's not clear Nintendo did, either. What on Earth does the trailer above say to you? In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the company again and again (and again) tried to find a hit JRPG in the States without much success. Nintendo literally gave away games like Dragon Warrior—as a Nintendo Power pack-in—and still couldn't find an audience. Even the heralded Final Fantasy franchise struggled initially, as Nintendo brought it stateside with a big, splashy map-filled box that no one seemed to care about in the moment.
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NASA’s most iconic building is 55 years old and just getting started
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Construction progress of the Vehicle Assembly Building in August 1964. [credit: NASA ]
NASA's Kennedy Space Center is now nearly six decades old—it was formally created on July 1, 1962 as a separate entity from Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Construction began soon after.
At the time, the "Launch Operations Directorate" under Wernher von Braun and his team of German scientists was based at Marshall. But NASA's leaders realized they would need their own facilities in Florida alongside the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. So they created a new "Launch Operations Center" on nearby Merritt Island. President Lyndon B. Johnson would rename the facility Kennedy Space Center a week after President John F. Kennedy's November 1963 assassination in Dallas.
As plans for the Apollo Program developed, NASA also soon realized it would need a large building in which to assemble the Saturn V rocket that would power the Moon landings. Work began on what was then known as the Vertical Assembly Building (VAB), where the big rocket would be stacked in a vertical configuration before rolling out to the launch pad.
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With macOS 11 Big Sur, Apple seems to have lifted a ban on fun, allowing for an expressiveness in visual design that we haven't seen from it in almost a decade (Michael Flarup/Apply Pixels)
With macOS 11 Big Sur, Apple seems to have lifted a ban on fun, allowing for an expressiveness in visual design that we haven't seen from it in almost a decade — It's finally here. The thing I have been advocating for through my work, writing, videos and talks for years. A swing of the pendulum.
MeitY-NITI Aayog's new initiative looks to promote Indian apps
The challenges of holding a virtual Parliament session
On January 31, the EC will question Meta, X, Snap, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn on their plans to counter disinformation ahead of elections in Germany (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg)
Gian Volpicelli / Bloomberg : On January 31, the EC will question Meta, X, Snap, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn on their plans to counter d...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
