AT&T bypasses man's two factor authentication for PayPal even when their logs clearly show that he was being attacked all day...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/att_falls_for_hacker_tricks/

Android Auto’s biggest upgrade ever is finally rolling out

It has a darker design and more multitasking capabilities.
Earlier this year at Google I/O, Google announced a big upgrade to Android Auto, its smartphone-powered car interface and competitor to Apple's CarPlay. Now, around three months later, the interface is finally rolling out to the general public via an app update. This version of Android Auto represents the interface's first major upgrade since its launch in 2014.

Tesla 3 is out...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/tesla_model_3_elon_musk_electric_car/

Google confirms “Play Pass” subscription service for Android apps

Screenshots show $4.99 a month service for "hundreds" of apps and games.
Google is testing a new "Play Pass" subscription service for the Google Play Store. The company confirmed testing of the new service to Android Police, after the site was sent screenshots of the subscription service by a user.
Screenshots show the service would have users sign up right inside the Play Store, allowing them to pay a monthly fee for access to "Hundreds of premium apps and games." The promo mentions "no purchases, no ads, and in-app purchases unlocked" for "a curated catalog spanning puzzle games to premium music apps and everything in between."

Now this is quite the find.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/13/100_euro_typewriter_turns_out_to_be_45000_euro_enigma_machine/

8chan is all the way down—“It’s DNS. It’s always DNS.”

To find the what, why, and where of a dead site, you start with its DNS.
Earlier today in the Ars Technica staff Slack channel, a call went out—"is 8chan down for other people? I can't get it to load anymore." This brings up the interesting question of how to check where and why a site might be down, as well as whether it can even load for anyone.
But first a little background.
When Cloudflare finally had enough of 8chan and fired it, the site—notoriously a haven for mass shooters and their fans—immediately jumped ship for BitMitigate, the same CDN that hosts far-right white nationalist site The Daily Stormer. The site also changed DNS and Web hosting to Epik, which is the parent company to BitMitigate and the host of far-right social media platform Gab.

Headline of the day goes to...

A detailed look at AMD’s new Epyc “Rome” 7nm server CPUs

Epyc "Rome" continues its little sibling the Ryzen 3000's mad dash forward.
When AMD debuted the 7nm Ryzen 3000 series desktop CPUs, they swept the field. For the first time in decades, AMD was able to meet or beat its rival, Intel, across the product line in all major CPU criteria—single-threaded performance, multi-threaded performance, power/heat efficiency, and price. Once third-party results confirmed AMD's outstanding benchmarks and retail delivery was a success, the big remaining question was: could the company extend its 7nm success story to mobile and server CPUs? Yesterday, AMD formally launched its new line of Epyc 7002 "Rome" series CPUs—and it seems to have answered the server half of that question pretty thoroughly. Having learned from the widespread FUD cast at its own internally generated benchmarks at the Ryzen 3000 launch, this time AMD made certain to seed some review sites with evaluation hardware well before the launch.
The short version of the story is, Epyc "Rome" is to the server what Ryzen 3000 was to the desktop—bringing significantly improved IPC, more cores, and better thermal efficiency than either its current-generation Intel equivalents or its first-generation Epyc predecessors.

@dbeato said in What Are You Watching Now:

Watching the Magic School bus with the daughter

That's such a good show.

Huawei announces its first operating system, HarmonyOS

Huawei is the next mobile challenger after Microsoft, Mozilla, RIM, and Samsung.
Ever since the Trump administration's export ban on Huawei threatened the company's Android phones, Huawei has been making claims that it didn't really need Android and could start its own operating system if it needed to. Today, Huawei's saber-rattling reached a new volume with the announcement of "HarmonyOS," Huawei's home-grown operating system. At the "Huawei Developer Conference 2019," Huawei gave a Chinese-language presentation on HarmonyOS, which included only a vague overview of the OS and no screenshots or demos. HarmonyOS isn't quite targeting smartphones yet, and the OS will first debut on the "Honor Smart Screen" (which sounds like an Echo Show or Google Home Hub) and Huawei TVs. Huawei said an expansion to smartphones could happen sometime over the next three years, but for now, it wants to stick with Android.

In other news... cops fake evidence....

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/cop-didnt-know-his-body-cam-was-on-footage-shows-him-planting-drugs/

Parallels Desktop 15 for Mac moves to Metal for DirectX 11 and more

Update promises better graphics performance in games and CAD applications.
Today, popular virtualization software Parallels Desktop 15 for Mac becomes available to new and current users. The flagship feature is support for DirectX in virtual Windows machines via Apple's proprietary Metal graphics API. Other additions include a handful of new macOS Catalina-related features and improvements to transitions between Mac and Windows software running on the same machine. When we wrote about Parallels Desktop 14 around this time last year, we asked about Metal support. The application then still relied entirely on OpenGL in macOS, and Apple had already announced that continued support for OpenGL would end. We were told it was coming, and we were not misled: the new version of Parallels Desktop now supports DirectX 9, 10, and 11 via Metal. Previously, DirectX 9 and 10 were supported via OpenGL and DirectX 11 was not supported at all. Parallels' rep noted to us that "Metal and DirectX work best in Catalina."

Welcome @BoardinJunky

Microsoft Finds Two New 'Wormable' Flaws in Windows

The flaws affect Windows 10, Windows 7 SP1, and Windows 8.1. If exploited, they can be used to launch a computer worm to attack vulnerable machines that have Remote Desktop Services activated.
Microsoft has discovered two serious flaws in Windows 10 and Windows 7 SP1 that the company fears could be weaponized to launch a computer worm targeting PCs and servers across the world. Both flaws are "wormable," meaning they could pave the way for malware that automatically jumps from one vulnerable machine to the next, without any action from the user, Microsoft said in a blog post on Tuesday. Other operating systems affected include Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012. (Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and 2008 are immune to the threat.)

Welcome @dukeofkanabec

Apple gives third-party repair shops more access to authorized parts

The program provides parts and resources for out-of-warranty iPhones.
Apple has been a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to iPhones and independent repair shops. Earlier this month, we discovered that people are running into problems with third-party iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max repairs due to a particular chip on the battery. And repair specialists like iFixit have repeatedly called Cupertino's design decisions "user-hostile." But on Thursday, Apple announced a new independent repair program for out-of-warranty iPhones. "To better meet our customers’ needs, we’re making it easier for independent providers across the US to tap into the same resources as our Apple Authorized Service Provider network,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer in a press release. "When a repair is needed, a customer should have confidence the repair is done right. We believe the safest and most reliable repair is one handled by a trained technician using genuine parts that have been properly engineered and rigorously tested."

Bitcoin split as was being discussed at MangoCon...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/why-the-bitcoin-network-just-split-in-half-and-why-it-matters/

In How To: XKCD author offers absurd advice for ordinary tasks

Review: A book of deliberately, hilariously, wrong advice—with explainers and diagrams
Any time physicists gets together, one of them will tell a very old joke about a farmer who wants to make their farm more efficient. In the joke, a list of inappropriate professionals offer the farmer reasonable suggestions. The punchline comes from the physicist who responds "Well, let's assume that cows are spheres... " The actual punchline isn't in the joke itself—it's what happens next: one of the physicists listening to the joke will lecture the rest on how the approximation isn't that bad really. They will end with a list of all the things you can learn about the world from spherical cows. The joke only ends when the bar closes. Physicists: ruining jokes, cows, farming, and most of biology since 1687. Randall Munroe's new book, How To, is the spherical cows joke relentlessly replicated and explained without—and this is the important part—removing the humor. Munroe has, as the subtitle Absurd Advice for Real-World Problems explains, produced a book of absurd scientific advice. It is, essentially, a "how you shouldn't" manual. With that in mind, you should not read How To as you would an ordinary book

First Hyperloop test has been completed!!

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/hyperloop-one-says-it-sent-a-demo-pod-down-its-test-track/

SSDs are on track to get bigger and cheaper thanks to PLC technology

Storage of five bits in every NAND cell is coming, courtesy of Intel and Toshiba.
Wednesday, Intel announced it's joining Toshiba in the PLC (Penta-Level Cell, meaning 5 bits stored per individual NAND cell) club. Intel has not yet commercialized the technology, so you can't go and buy a PLC SSD yet—but we can expect the technology will lead eventually to higher-capacity and cheaper solid state drives. To understand how and why this works, we need to go over a little bit of SSD design history. One of the most basic architectural features of a solid state disk is how many bits can be stored in each individual NAND cell. The simplest and most robust design is SLC—Single Layer Cell—in which each floating-gate NAND cell is either charged or not, representing a 1 or a 0. SLC flash can be written at very high speed and typically survives several times more write cycles than more complex designs can. (Endurance levels are specified per drive, but National Instruments uses 100K, 20K, and 3K as sample program/erase cycle endurance levels for SLC, eMLC, and MLC drives here.)