Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi on Friday reported a record drop in fourth-quarter revenue as the company weathered a slowdown in consumption and disruptions due to China's COVID-19 curbs. Early signs suggest China's economy will only rebound slowly, as consumers remain cautious about spending money despite an easing of restrictions on domestic and international trave...
Cybersecurity researchers from Phylum have found a new form of malware in a PyPI package that was using Unicode to hide.
Unicode is a global encoding standard used for different languages and scripts, covering more than 100,000 characters, whose goal is to simplify and streamline how characters are viewed in electronic and digital devices. With Unicode, every letter, digit, and symbol, get a unique numeric value, that stays the same, regardless of the program or platform in use.
The malware is called “onyxproxy”, it is an infostealer on the hunt for developer login credentials and authentication tokens. It was available on PyPI for a week, before being shut down, and during that time, it managed to get 183 downloads, meaning that up to 183 different developers are at risk of credential and identity theft.
Hiding in plain sight
The malware carries a package called “setup.py” which, according to the researchers, has “thousands” of suspicious code strings which use a combination of Unicode characters.
Observed on the surface, the characters look normal and benign - however, what the human eye sees, and what the program sees, are two vastly different things.
In onyxproxy, there are three critical identifiers: “__import__”, “subprocees”, and “CryptoUnprotectData”. These have a large number of variants, which makes them ideal for beating string-matching-based defenses, the researchers explain.
While the technique might sound complicated, the researchers claim it isn’t exactly sophisticated. However, should the abuse of Unicode for hiding malicious Python code become a trend, it might become cause for concern.
"But, whomever this author copied this obfuscated code from is clever enough to know how to use the internals of the Python interpreter to generate a novel kind of obfuscated code, a kind that is somewhat readable without divulging too much of exactly what the code is trying to steal," concludes Phylum.
Nvidia has released a massive update on its Game Ready Driver, which will give plenty of the top PC titles a noticeable boost in performance and graphics over the next few weeks.
The first is Diablo IV’s open beta, which releases on March 24 and will give the title access to DLSS 2 support. Upon launch on June 6, the full version will be getting DLSS 3 support for gamers with RTX 4000-series graphics cards.
Then, on March 28, Forza Horizon 5 will be getting a DLSS 3 performance update as well. According to Nvidia, once that drops gamers will be able to hit 120 FPS at 4K resolution with every setting maxed out.
Cyberpunk 2077 will also be getting a new feature on April 11 called Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, which is essentially support for path-tracing or full ray-tracing. According to the official blog post, this process “accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene” which means that “practically all light sources cast physically correct soft shadows.”
Explained even further, any natural colored lighting will bounce multiple times throughout the game world, which in turn creates more realistic indirect lighting and occlusion. And considering how impressive the Cyberpunk 2077 world already looks with regular DLSS 3, a boost in that could mean one of the most visually stunning gaming worlds.
Other titles set to receive super-resolution upgrades from Game Ready Driver include Deceive Inc., Smalland: Survive the Wilds, and The Last of US Part I. Resident Evil 4 will receive a day one optimization as well and four other titles — Kerbal Space Program 2, Last Epoch, Like a Dragon: Ishin!, and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty — will be given optimal settings.
PC gaming is finally evolving
DLSS is an incredible technological advancement that brings out the best in many PC games, showcasing what the best graphics cards can really do. And it feels like this gen in particular has found its footing with DLSS 3.
One of the best examples, in my opinion, of how downright incredible a game can look and play with it is Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered. An absolute technical marvel, it’s a PC port that takes every advantage of PC hardware to become a superior port in every way possible.
And now with the RTX 4000-series graphics cards out, titles can be pushed even further. Achieving 4K resolution while having ray-tracing capabilities and settings maxed out, while the FPS still chugs along at over 100 on average, is not only obtainable but already happening right now. And on gaming laptops no less!
It’ll be exciting to see how much further PC game performance can be pushed if we’re already seeing such excellent results even now.
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Britain's parliament will block TikTok on all devices on its network following a similar ban on government devices, becoming the latest Western institution to bar the Chinese-owned video app over security concerns. A TikTok spokesperson called the action "misguided", saying it was based on fundamental misconceptions about the company.
In an effort to further reduce its environmental impact, Microsoft has signed a contract with the aptly named CarbonCapture to bury its CO2 emissions below ground.
The tech giant has been making various gestures towards going green in recent years, especially concerning the data centers used to power its cloud computing and CDN platform Azure. It was also one of the first companies to back projects that sought to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Although based in LA, CarbonCapture is building a new direct air capture (DAC) facility in Wyoming, titled Project Bison, which is slated to begin operations in late 2024. The company's modular technology will take CO2 emission from the air and store them in containers, which will themselves be stored underground.
Prevention vs capture
By 2030, Microsoft wants to be carbon negative, which will mean that it ends up removing more CO2 from the atmosphere than what it actually produces. And by 2050, it wants to remove same amount of CO2 that it has ever produced since its inception.
Currently, the technologies to capture this amount of carbon do not exist, but Microsoft seems confident that eventually they will, and that this new deal with CarbonCapture is setting them up on the right path. Phillip Goodman, director of Microsoft's Carbon Removal Portfolio, said:
"This agreement with CarbonCapture helps us move toward our carbon negative goal, while also helping to catalyze the growth of the direct air capture industry as a whole."
CarbonCapture, for its part, will only be able to capture 10,000 metric tons of CO2 a year according to its projections for Project Bison. However, it hopes to be able to increase this up to 5 million by 2030, a big ask considering all 18 DAC plants that are currently operational worldwide can only capture a combined total of just 0.01 million metric tons right now.
Despite this, CarbonCapture CEO and CTO Adrian Corless is excited about the deal with Microsoft, as it is the startup's biggest to date - larger even than all its other contracts combined - telling The Verge that it is "an important... validating step for our business."
Details are scarce regarding how just much of Microsoft's CO2 emissions will actually be captured by CarbonCapture, and how much the deal is worth. Microsoft has also bought carbon removal credits from another company, the Swiss-based Climeworks, again for an unknown amount. What we do know is that price per ton to buy captured CO2 from Climeworks is $600.
Tencent Holdings on Thursday said it would restrict its focus to its core business, while maintinaing cost-cutting and improving efficiencies, as it reported its first drop in annual revenue to date. The world's largest video game company and operator of the WeChat messaging platform posted revenue of CNY 554.55 billion (nearly Rs. 6,65,600 crore) for 2022, down 1 per...
Intel Graphics head Raja Koduri is leaving Team Blue to found an AI gaming company, putting a spotlight on the future of Intel's discrete graphics dreams.
Announced by Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger yesterday on Twitter, the departure of Koduri comes after five years at Intel where he recently headed up Intel's AXG graphics unit, responsible for producing the company's discrete GPU to rival the best graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia.
Thank you @RajaXg for your many contributions to Intel tech & architecture-especially w/high-performance graphics that helped bring 3 new product lines to market in ‘22. Wishing you success as you create a new software co. around generative AI for gaming, media & entertainment.March 21, 2023
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Koduri is leaving to found a generative AI gaming software startup, according to Tom's Hardware, and his departure comes after a promotion in 2022 to executive vice president before being moved back to the role of Chief Architect, the role he took on after joining Intel in 2017 from AMD's Radeon Graphics Unit.
Thank you Pat and @intel for many cherished memories and incredible learning over the past 5 years. Will be embarking on a new chapter in my life, doing a software startup as noted below. Will have more to share in coming weeks. https://t.co/8DcnNdso3rMarch 21, 2023
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Koduri's time at Intel has been a bit rocky in recent years, owing to the struggles Intel has had with its Intel Arc Alchemist graphics cards. Despite receiving decent reviews for those few reviewers who were able to get them in, finding the new graphics cards has been a challenge and those who have been able to get their hands on them have encountered performance issues tied to the drivers Intel has developed for the cards. Intel has since fixed some of these issues, but work remains to be done.
How that work will continue remains to be seen, as Gelsinger's message makes no mention of a replacement or anything about the future of Intel's AXG graphics group.
Raja Koduri's departure is a great opportunity for an Intel reset
There has been a lot of hype around Intel Arc Alchemist as well as a fair bit of letdown. Many of us have been hoping hard for Intel's success in this endeavour as the AMD and Nvidia dichotomy in the GPU space could really do with some disrupting and there really aren't that many players who can enter the GPU fray thanks to the enormous cost of entry.
That cost might be one that Team Blue is eager to cut in the coming months, and I genuinely hope that Raja Koduri's departure isn't a sign of things to come in that regard.
Market pressures are going to lean very heavily on Nvidia to invest in AI at the cost of its consumer products division, meaning more workstation GPUs and fewer graphics cards for gamers. The Nvidia RTX 5070 will still likely see the light of day in a couple of years, but with the way AI is going, I seriously doubt that we'll ever see an Nvidia RTX 6070.
That leaves AMD and Intel, and while Team Red makes some incredible products, lack of real competition can only stifle innovation long term, and AMD will need a fire under its ass if it is going to continue the very positive trends we're seeing.
And given the price inflation of the best AMD graphics cards in recent years, it's hard to call AMD the budget option anymore. No, we need something else to fill that gap in the market, and Intel is very well positioned to serve that very real need. Will they? I definitely hope so, and Koduri's exit should provide an opportunity for Intel to double down on its discrete graphics card ambitions rather than abandon them.
Intel Arc Alchemist might have been a semi-dud, but Battlemage can still succeed
To the intel graphics team in the battle arena🙏🙏🙏 https://t.co/DHjLeHkITLMarch 21, 2023
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Getting a new product launch is hard, and for a first effort Intel Arc Alchemist seems like a pretty decent enough offering. It could absolutely be better, but what we really need is for the next Intel GPU to knock it out of the park.
There is a lot of attachment to Arc Alchemist from the Intel Graphics team for obvious reasons, and there does seem to be some genuine affection between Koduri and the team he led. Adversity tends to produce that, especially when the world seems to be counting you out from the jump.
But given everything, new leadership might be what's needed to get Intel's graphics team back on track to make its next GPU a success. That GPU series, codenamed Battlemage, is undoubtedly in the works and this reset could be the perfect opportunity to shrug off the challenges of Alchemist, learn the lessons that need to be learned, and come in hot with a strong contender for the best cheap graphics card on the market in a year's time.
And while every manufacturer wants to be out here claiming the title of "The Best There Is", let's be real: that's the Nvidia RTX 4090, and that's a graphics card that like five people are going to buy. Almost everyone else is going to be looking for something they can afford that will give them the next-gen gaming experience that they have been missing out on for the past few years.
Arc Battlemage can more easily hit that target and make a real case for itself as a viable alternative to Nvidia and AMD while also earning the gratitude of a lot of gamers out there who are increasingly feeling boxed out by those companies.
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The integration of OpenAI's technology into Microsoft-owned Bing has driven people to the little-used search engine and helped it compete better with market leader Google in page visits growth, according to data from analytics firm Similarweb. Page visits on Bing have risen 15.8 percent since Microsoft unveiled its artificial intelligence-powered version on February...
Video streaming platform Lionsgate Play exposed sensitive data on millions of its users, cybersecurity researchers from Cybernews found.
The website's team found Lionsgate's platform kept an unprotected ElasticSearch instance, containing 20GB of server logs with roughly 30 million entries. Some of the data dates back to May 2022, and included user IP addresses as well as information on user devices, operating systems, and web browsers.
While this is not exactly personally identifiable information, it can still be used by threat actors to conduct intrusions, the researchers said.
Possible authentication secrets
“It can be useful in targeted attacks, especially when combined with other leaked or publicly available information,” Cybernews’ team said in its report.
By knowing the IP addresses, the attackers can deliver custom-built malicious payloads to the targets, they added.
But this is not the only data that was leaked via ElasticSearch. Usage data, such as content titles, IDs, and search queries, were also leaked. This data is usually used by analysts to track the platform’s and content’s performance. Furthermore, researchers discovered unidentified hashes with logged HTTP GET requests, which are user-made requests for data, stored on the server.
While the researchers couldn’t say what the hashes are used for, they did say they contain more than 156 characters, meaning they were supposed to stay unchanged for long.
“Hashes didn’t match any commonly used hashing algorithms. Since these hashes were included in the HTTP requests, we believe they could have been used as secrets for authentication, or just user IDs,” said researchers.
Not one to be restricted to just teaching languages, a recently discovered job posting indicates Duolingo is working on a new music app.
The company is keeping its cards close to its chest at the moment as the description doesn’t say much about what the software is planning. According to the posting, Duolingo is currently looking for someone who can teach certain musical concepts and has “substantial experience with music education” for both children and adults. Whoever gets hired will be put in charge of ensuring Duolingo Music (as we’ll refer to it) is based on “learning science” to teach music in a way “that is fun, fast-paced, and emphasizes ‘learning by doing’”. The posting also states the “Learning Scientist” will have to take the lead in creating a curriculum hinting the app is still in the early stages of development.
Beyond the description and what the company is looking for, not much else can be gleaned about Duolingo’s latest venture. It’s unknown what these "concepts" are exactly. Additionally, we don't know if the app will teach people how to read and write music or how to play an instrument. However taking a look at the company’s other education apps, Duolingo Music may follow a trajectory similar to how the company gamified other disciplines.
For instance, Duolingo Math teaches, well, math to both children and adults. None of it is super complex; no lessons on calculus or anything. The app instead focuses more on foundational math like multiplication and geometry. It also gamifies the lessons with the goal to ease off “math anxiety”. Duolingo claims 93 percent of U.S. adults have some sort of math anxiety making it difficult for some to learn. So, following that train of logic, the upcoming app could teach music lessons in an easygoing manner.
Still in the works
The launch date for the new service is obviously unknown since the job posting was only recently discovered. It is worth pointing out another posting from Duolingo was found on LinkedIn for a Music Composition and Curricular Consultant. The job is for a freelance composer who has experience writing songs to “teach novice learners” in a digital setting. The LinkedIn posting has since been filled, but at the time of this writing, the Learning Scientist position is still open. So if you live in the Pittsburgh area and have a Ph.D in music education or music theory, here’s your chance to boost musical literacy.
If and when the app launches, you may be itching for a way to show off those new skills. In that case, be sure to check out TechRadar’s list of the best free music-making software for March 2023.
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Apple will debut iOS 17 in a few months to the not-quite-as-new-anymore iPhone 14 and select older phones. The update is expected to bring changes to Apple’s first-party apps and improve the operating system overall.
Though competitor Google has already released Android 14 for testing (and teased a little of what it’s going to be about), Apple typically keeps completely mum on what to expect from the newest iOS till its debut at WWDC (its annual developer conference), which often takes place in June each year. Select other features will be revealed with the launch of the iPhone 15, later this year, likely in September.
It’ll be a while until we get more details of iOS 17, but we do have some idea of what the next version of iOS could look like, and below you can read up on what we already know, as well as a brief wish list of what we’d love to see from the new update, when it does eventually break cover.
As more rumors and reports emerge with fleshed-out details, we’ll be updating this article, so make sure to check back for further details regularly.
iOS 17: Cut to the chase
What is it? The next big update for iOS – the iPhone's operating system
When does it come out? Expected to drop in the middle of September
How much does it cost? It'll be a free upgrade
Which phones are supported? As yet unknown. Likely the iPhone XS and newer
iOS 17 release date
iOS 17 is expected to be released on or around the middle of September, to coincide with the expected iPhone 15 launch. Before that, Apple will unveil iOS 17 at WWDC in June. The dates for WWDC haven’t been released yet, but we assume the announcement will be made sometime in the next few weeks.
Shortly after WWDC, Apple will release two beta versions of iOS – a developer preview, and a public build. The public beta is often reliable enough to use on a daily phone about a month or two after the program starts.
iOS 17 expected features
When it comes to iOS 17’s features, one thing we can be reasonably sure about is that we won’t see a lot of big additions, like the lock screen or home screen widget upgrades that came with previous releases.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman – who’s a fairly reliable leaker of all things Apple – the company is allowing iOS and macOS to take a back seat this year, as it works on its new mixed-reality headset. This means that while there will be some new features, there won’t be as many as there might ordinarily be; with the company shifting focus to a new and potentially exciting product category.
“Apple’s focus on the xrOS operating system – along with iOS 16 snags – has also cost it some new features in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, the next major iPhone and iPad software updates. That software, codenamed Dawn, may have fewer major changes than originally planned,” Gurman said in his Power On newsletter.
Apple’s iOS updates often feature improvements to first-party apps, including Music and Messages. The Messages app is reportedly in line for a redesign this year, but details are light, at present. As for big changes to things like notifications, the company doesn’t typically overhaul its interface in the same way Google does every few years, but there are still a few changes we’d like to see.
iOS 17 feature wish list
Super Siri
(Image credit: Unsplash [Omid Armin])
ChatGPT is taking the world by storm, and Google and Microsoft have been quick to react. Apple set the world on fire with the launch of Siri, alongside the iPhone 4S, but the digital assistant still has yet to reach its full potential. As generative AI models grow in popularity, the large and very engaged iPhone user base would give Apple an advantage over its competitors, if it launched its own GPT-powered chatbot.
Improved notifications
(Image credit: Future)
This particular wish comes as standard – and goes ungranted – with every Apple update. The company has worked to slightly tweak iOS notifications every year, but they’re still horribly mediocre. There’s limited notification bundling or quick-reply support, and actionable notifications are still few and far between compared to Android.
Every year, we hope that Apple will bring Notification Center up to par – and every year Apple does the equivalent of placing a smiley band-aid on a gaping wound. Sometimes, Apple likes to do things its own way, and that’s fine; in this case, however, it's time for the company to swallow its pride and do the done thing.
RCS support
(Image credit: Apple)
RCS, or Rich Communication Services, is gaining popularity on Android phones. It essentially turns basic SMS messaging into the equivalent of more modern apps, like iMessage or Facebook Messenger. Now, it’s not necessary for Apple to make RCS work on iPhones, but it would be better than the plain old SMS we currently have.
You can see when someone's typing, get read receipts, send larger files and more. It’s an emerging standard – much like USB-C – and in countries where texting via the Messages app is more common than something like WhatsApp or Telegram, there’s no downside to upgrading the Messages experience for everyone, as iOS users who prefer not to enable iMessage for one reason or another will also to make use of RCS' additional functionality without compromise.
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