Thursday, July 30, 2020
Samsung Galaxy M31s vs Galaxy M31 - What's the Difference?
Twitter hackers used “phone spear phishing” in mass account takeover
Enlarge (credit: Tom Raftery)
The hackers behind this month’s epic Twitter breach targeted a small number of employees through a “phone spear phishing attack,” the social media site said on Thursday night. When the pilfered employee credentials failed to give access to account support tools, the hackers targeted additional workers who had the permissions needed to access the tools.
“This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems,” Twitter officials wrote in a post. “This was a striking reminder of how important each person on our team is in protecting our service. We take that responsibility seriously and everyone at Twitter is committed to keeping your information safe.
Thursday's update also disclosed that the hackers downloaded personal data from seven of the accounts, but didn't say which ones.
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Sources: Facebook has completed deals with the three largest music companies, Universal, Sony, and Warner, for the right to show music videos (Bloomberg)
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Emails from Jeff Bezos and other Amazon employees suggest the acquisition of Ring was for "market position - not technology" (Makena Kelly/The Verge)
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In an update to the July 15 hack, Twitter says a few employees were targeted in a phone spear phishing attack, and it had since limited access to internal tools (Jay Peters/The Verge)
In an update to the July 15 hack, Twitter says a few employees were targeted in a phone spear phishing attack, and it had since limited access to internal tools — ‘This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees’ — Twitter provided an update …
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Ford Bronco reservations surpass 150,000
The reception to Bronco 2021 — Ford’s flagship series of 4×4 vehicles that were revealed earlier this month — surpassed expectations of the company’s most optimistic initial projections, CEO Jim Hackett said in an earnings call Thursday.
More than 150,000 customers have plunked down $100 to reserve a spot to order one of the vehicles, according to Ford.
“We think this family of vehicles has big upside potential in the growing off-road category and this is a category with a leading OEM has not been seriously challenged until now,” Hackett said.
These are, of course, mere reservations, not actual orders. The deposits are refundable. Now, Ford is focused on the due diligence required to determine how many of these reservations will be converted to orders as it lay outs its manufacturing strategy for the brand.
The Ford Bronco 2 and Bronco 4 will be built at Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Michigan. The Bronco Sport will be assembled at plant in Mexico. The company is now determining how many shifts to staff at each factory in order to match actual orders.
“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Ford COO Jim Farley said in a call with analysts Thursday. “But the mix is great.”
The Bronco is a brand that leans heavily on nostalgia, customization, functional design and technology, such as the automaker’s next-generation infotainment system and a digital trail mapping feature that lets owners plan, record and share their experiences via an app.
While the response to the Bronco has been palatable, there are a number of competitors also aiming to win over customers. GM released a video this week teasing its all-electric GMC Hummer. While the video was a promotional mashup of buzzwords, it also showed that GM had clearly identified Ford Bronco and Tesla Cybertruck as its main competitors. Then there’s electric upstart Rivian, which plans to start production of its EV pickup and SUV in 2021.
Rakuten confirms it is shutting its US online retail store, originally known as Buy.com, over the next two months; Rakuten bought Buy.com for $250M in 2010 (Devin Coldewey/TechCrunch)
Rakuten confirms it is shutting its US online retail store, originally known as Buy.com, over the next two months; Rakuten bought Buy.com for $250M in 2010 — Japanese conglomerate Rakuten has pulled the plug on its U.S. online retail store, originally known as Buy.com …
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Self-driving startup Argo AI hits $7.5 billion valuation
Autonomous vehicle technology startup Argo AI is valued at $7.5 billion, just a little more than three years after the company burst on the scene with a $1 billion investment from Ford.
The official valuation was confirmed Thursday nearly two months after VW Group finalized its $2.6 billion investment in Argo AI. Under that deal, Ford and VW have equal ownership stakes, which will be roughly 40% each over time. The remaining equity sits with Argo’s co-founders as well as employees. Argo’s board is comprised of two VW seats, two Ford seats and three Argo seats.
Ford’s announcement in February 2017 that it was investing in Argo AI surprised many. The startup was barely six months old when it was thrust into the spotlight. Its founders, Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander, were known in the tight knit and often overlapping autonomous vehicle industry; prior to forming Argo, Salesky was director of hardware development at the Google self-driving project (now Waymo) and Rander was the engineering lead at Uber Advanced Technologies Group. But even those insiders who knew Salesky and Rander wondered what to make of the deal.
Since then, Argo has focused on developing the virtual driver system — all of the sensors, software and compute platform — as well as high-definition maps designed for Ford’s self-driving vehicles.
That mission now extends to VW Group as well. Ford and VW will share the cost of developing Argo AI’s self-driving vehicle technology under the terms of the deal. The Pittsburgh-based company also has offices in Detroit, Palo Alto and Cranbury, N.J. It has fleets of autonomous vehicles mapping and testing on public roads in Austin, Miami, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.
The investment by VW expands its workforce and operations to Europe. Autonomous Intelligent Driving (AID), the self-driving subsidiary that was launched in 2017 to develop autonomous vehicle technology for the VW Group, is being absorbed into Argo AI. AID’s Munich offices will become Argo’s European headquarters. In all, Argo now employs more than 1,000 people.
While the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles will be a long journey — a remark shared Thursday by Ford CEO Jim Hackett — the Argo investment has already provided the automaker with a short-term and timely gain.
The automaker said Thursday it netted $3.5 billion in the second quarter from selling some of its Argo equity to Volkswagen. That gain gave the automaker a one-time boost in its second-quarter earnings.
Ford posted a $1.1 billion profit in the second quarter, if the Argo transaction is counted. Ford lost $1.9 billion in the quarter before interest and taxes and one-time items. Ford reported a revenue of $19.4 billion, a 50% decrease from the same period in 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic which caused the company to idle its factories for weeks.
Still, the result could have been far worse. Ford had previously warned that it could post as much as a $5 billion net loss in the second quarter.
Despite these COVID-19 headwinds, Hackett said Ford is still committed to the long-term pursuit of AVs, a point reiterated by CFO Tim Stone, who said the automaker continues to make investments to commercialize its autonomous vehicle business, including product development, engineering and testing.
“The AV journey will be a long one, but Ford is now well positioned to run this race and compete like few others can,” Hackett added.
The hearing at times felt like gaslighting, with the CEOs trying to convince lawmakers that the evidence the House collected wasn't really evidence of anything (Kevin Roose/New York Times)
The hearing at times felt like gaslighting, with the CEOs trying to convince lawmakers that the evidence the House collected wasn't really evidence of anything — It is less clear that tech executives' strategy of evasive answers will continue to work now that lawmakers have begun doing their homework.
A profile of Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters, who led the company's successful crackdown on password sharing and is now pushing a focus on live programming (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)
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