Nintendo’s third-party developer relations have never been as strong as Sony’s or Microsoft. Some consoles, like the Wii, had a great deal of third-party games, even if the console missed out on many of the most popular franchises that debuted on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. The Wii U’s third-party support was much worse, thanks to low lifetime platform sales. From the beginning, Nintendo has said it wanted to reverse this situation with the Switch, but it hasn’t been clear if the company could do so. The , after all, has a fraction of the hardware resources or thermal envelope of the Xbox One or PlayStation 4, and its differential resolution (up to 720p in handheld mode, up to 1080p when docked) sometimes means that handheld mode plays better than docked, due to bandwidth and performance constraints.
Earlier this week, we reported on news that the popular system maintenance app for nearly a month. We now know the attack was worse than initially thought. The CCleaner malware could be used to deliver a second-stage payload that would run on local systems and perform various tasks. This isn’t an unusual malware feature, but researchers didn’t think the capability had been used in this case. We now know that it was, and that some of the internet’s biggest players were targeted. We now know how many computers were affected — 2.27 million total, which is far less than the 5 million per day that was originally estimated based on CCleaner’s download popularity.
If you like iPhones, Apple’s iPhone 8 is a perfectly good phone. It adds new features like TrueTone, an updated camera (particularly on the iPhone 8 Plus), a hexa-core CPU built on a 10nm process, wireless charging, and the ability to shoot 4K video at 60fps (the iPhone 7 only supported 30fps). That’s a nice set of improvements, even if it’s not the meteoric leaps we saw 4-5 years ago, when smartphone technology was advancing much more quickly. But if early lines and sales are any indication, the iPhone 8 isn’t what the public wants. At store after store, the crowds that usually line up overnight to purchase a new iPhone were nowhere to be found.
Advances in have been slow to replace traditional manufacturing, but NASA is looking toward the technology as a way to fabricate parts for rockets. It’s already experimented with rocket components that were 3D printed from a single metal, but now it’s testing a process for printing in two different alloys. Using an advanced laser printing method, the agency has . As the name implies, a rocket igniter is used to initiate a rocket engine’s start sequence. It’s a surprisingly complex part that’s difficult to make, so it’s an ideal candidate for 3D printing. However, you can’t make a rocket igniter out of a single metal.
Who needs cryptocurrency-mining Trojans or worms, when you can infect someone via their web browser? That seems to be the thinking behind a new wave of cryptocurrency malware that’s loaded via websites and runs while you have a page open. In some cases, this may be the result of malware infecting a system, but in others, it’s a deliberate decision that’s being used to juice profits. First, The Pirate Bay — a website for torrenting software, video, music, and other content that no ET reader has, or would ever consider visiting — has been caught running a cryptocurrency miner on some pages.
In the Canadian Labrador region, temperatures during the short summers reach a balmy 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius) on average. That’s not bad for a province that’s partially tundra, but scientists now believe that Labrador was quite a bit hotter for a very short time in the distant past. In fact, Labrador some 36 million years ago when it was struck by a meteorite. Scientists have long known there was a large in the Labrador region (the mainland portion of the Newfoundland and Labrador province) thanks to the Mistastin crater. This 17-mile (28-kilometer) depression contains Mistastin Lake, which is quite obviously an impact crater when seen from above.
Historically, hot Jupiters — gas giant planets that orbit close to their home stars — have been a bit of a problem for our models of the solar system. When they started popping up in our extrasolar planet detection systems, it was initially thought these planets were anomalies that appeared to be more common than they really were because our detection mechanisms favored them. That’s become less likely as the number of exoplanets we’ve positively identified has risen; with more than 2,000 exoplanets identified today, hot Jupiters are clearly common. They’re also occasionally weird in ways we don’t expect.
CCleaner, the temporary file cleaner and registry optimizer of generally dubious utility in this day and age, has been flagged as containing malware. Worse, the company distributed infected versions of its products for nearly a month before realizing the problem. The infected payload affects two CCleaner products — CCleaner v5.33.6162 and CCleaner Cloud v1.07.3191. CCleaner Cloud users should have gotten an update already, but if you use CCleaner and don’t have automatic updates enabled, it would be a good idea to check the situation now. Talos Intelligence a blog post detailing its research and findings, and they aren’t great.
A new malware attack, dubbed BlueBorne, is spreading in the wild, thanks to a combination of eight different vulnerabilities affecting Android, iOS, IoT devices, Windows, and Linux. The security research firm Armis writes: BlueBorne allows attackers to take control of devices, access corporate data and networks, penetrate secure “air-gapped” networks, and spread malware laterally to adjacent devices. Armis reported these vulnerabilities to the responsible actors, and is working with them as patches are being identified and released. What sets BlueBorne apart from other malware is that the infected device doesn’t have to pair with your hardware to infect it.
