Month: June 2021

Lenovo has revealed a number of tablets at Mobile World Congress, including a widely expected 13-inch Yoga Tab. The device has a built-in, stainless steel kickstand, which will make it easy to position for hands-free use. Alternatively, you can use the stand as a hanger. Just make sure it’s resting on a sturdy hook.

According to Lenovo, the Yoga Tab 13 can stream video for up to 12 hours on a single charge. It has a 2K Low Temperature PolySilicon display, with 400 nits of brightness, 100 percent sRGB color gamut, a 60Hz refresh rate and Dolby Vision HDR support. With an included micro-HDMI to USB cable, you can use Yoga Tab 13 as a portable secondary display for a laptop or PC.

There’s a front-facing 8MP camera with face unlock support. The Yoga Tab 13 has four JBL speakers, two of which are built into the soundbar cylinder. The tablet has Dolby Atmos support and, thanks to a bottom audio chamber, up to 450Hz bass performance. A USB-C to 3.5mm headphone jack adaptor is included as well.

The tablet is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 Mobile Platform and has 8GB of LPDDR5 memory, WiFi 6 support and a USB-C charging port. Dual mics can pick up your Google Assistant commands, and there’s support for the Lenovo Precision Pen 2.2. The device weighs 1.83 lbs (830g). The Yoga Tab 13 (known as Yoga Pad Pro in China) starts at $680 and should go on sale in July.

Additionally, Lenovo announced the new Yoga Tab 11. It too has a kickstand that doubles as a hanger, along with an 11-inch 2K IPS Touch Display Driver Integration (TDDI) display and Dolby Vision and Atmos support. The 1.44 lbs (655g) tablet runs on a MediaTek Helio G90T octa-core processor and has a UFS-based memory chip with up to 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 256GB of storage.

The Yoga Tab 11 has four speakers and dual mics, a video playback time of up to 15 hours, USB-C fast charging support and a face unlock function. There’s a front-facing 8MP camera and another on the rear. You can pick up an LTE variant of the tablet as well. The Yoga Tab 11 starts at $320 and it should arrive in August.

Lenovo

Also new is the Lenovo Tab P11 Plus, which boasts an 11-inch (2000 x 1200) display, four speakers with Dolby Atmos support, an octa-core MediaTek G90T chipset and up to 6GB of memory. It weighs 1.1 lbs (490g) and has a microSD slot for expandable storage. There’s LTE support, a USB-C port and 8MP front-facing and 13MP rear cameras. Lenovo says you’ll get up to 12 hours of video playback on a single charge. The Tab P11 Plus starts at $260 and you should be able to get your hands on it in August.

Elsewhere, Lenovo has refreshed the Tab M7 and Tab M8. They both have a built-in kids mode with Google Kids Space and TDDI displays. The processors have been upgraded and, on the Tab M8, you’ll get up to 15 hours of video playback, according to Lenovo. The Tab M7 should arrive in July, starting at $110. The third-gen Tab M8 will hit select markets later this year, but it won’t be coming to the US.

Lenovo’s latest tablets all support Google’s Entertainment Space feature. That brings together content from all of your media apps into a single hub, including games, books and things to watch.

Armies want autonomous vehicles to reduce the risk and workload for soldiers, and a new model is a prime example of how that will work, as Popular Science has reported. The excellently named Rheinmetall Mission Master XT can carry 2,204 pounds of supplies into battle, while operating over a range of over 460 miles. That would allow it to follow soldiers over rough terrain, transport a soldier or act as a scout. 

The Mission Master XT, designed and built by Rheinmetall Canada, can handle sandy, rocky and mountainous terrain, even in “ice, snow and zub-zero weather conditions,” the company said. It’s also fully amphibious so it can float and swim across water with its full ton-plus payload or mount hills as steep as 35 degrees. At the same time, the massive, low-inflation tires can function even with holes as deep as three-quarters of an inch in depth. 

The vehicle uses a diesel-powered engine to achieve its 460 mile range, but also packs lithium-ion batteries that can power electronics for up to six hours. That allows users to do “silent watch” operations like surveilling the enemy from up close without making any noise or emitting a thermal pattern that can be detected by the enemy. 

It can drive autonomously thanks to Rheinmetall’s custom PATH software and hardware that includes 3D Lidar, front and rear cameras and extra sensors to navigate where GPS might be unavailable. It also has a follow mode where it can track a soldier or vehicle ahead while maintaining a safe distance. At the same time, it has a place for a driver who can operate the vehicle with an integrated joystick. 

With those capabilities, the Mission Master XT is designed to haul supplies, ferry humans and carry wounded out of battle zones. However, it could potentially take a more active role, as well. It’s also designed to carry a gun with “much more firepower than the usual man-carried section weapon,” so it could potentially fight in “wolf packs” with two scouting vehicles and four armed robots. In that case, it would be operated remotely and not autonomously, presumably to avoid any ED-209 scenarios. 

There’s no shortage of vintage car restoration videos on YouTube, but baremetalHW doesn’t focus on classic Mustangs or GTOs. Their painstaking restorations instead bring vintage Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Tonka, and other toy cars back to life. At the start of each video the toys often look like they’ve been salvaged from a garbage dump, but by the end, through an often complicated multi-step restoration process that can often take weeks to complete for vehicles just a few inches long, the final results look better than when kids first tore these packaged toys open decades ago. It also doesn’t hurt that each of these videos features some of the most soothing narration you’ll find anywhere online.

In what looks to be a bigger push into the secured messaging space, Amazon’s AWS has just announced that it is acquiring Wickr.

Founded in 2011, Wickr’s core service is based around providing enterprise end-to-end encryption for messaging, teleconferencing, and file transfer, with Wicker also claiming the distinction of Wickr RAM being “the only collaboration service with full functionality to meet all security criteria outlined” by the NSA.

Even though AWS provides hosting capability for all manner of cloud services, AWS is a relatively small player in the messaging space with AWS’s only other similar offering being Chime, which is another meeting and video conferencing tool available as part of AWS’s growing portfolio of business services, though Chime does not support E2E encryption.

While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, TechCrunch says via Pitchbook that Wickr had raised $60 million in funding, and even with an outsized valuation, AWS’s acquisition of Wickr represents a drop in the bucket compared to AWS’s revenue of around $45 billion in 2020.

In AWS’s announcement post, AWS VP and chief information security officer Stephen Schmidt said AWS will begin offering Wickr’s services to AWS customers “immediately,” though Schmidt did not provide any guidance on how the acquisition of Wickr will impact Chime or other AWS services going forward.

That said, with Wickr’s claims about having encrypted communication that meets government guidelines, I wouldn’t be surprised if AWS plans to use Wickr to help win contracts to handle military communication in the future. Currently, Wickr services are broken up into several categories including solutions for the military, government services, state and local government, and enterprise.

In addition to providing secure collaboration tools allowing companies to share encrypted messages or files within their organization, Wickr also supports self-destructing messages that automatically delete themselves after a specified length of time.

An upgraded FAA operators license now allows Virgin Galactic to include paying customers on its space flights, in what is a major milestone for the company and also the nascent space tourism sector.

The space tourism industry is starting to heat up.

Blue Origin will attempt its first crewed launch of the New Shepard rocket in July, with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the winner of a $28 million auction on board for the ride. Bezos is poised to beat his rivals in the emerging cold war of billionaires trying to get to space before the other guy, but today’s news—that Virgin Galactic has secured an upgraded license to fly paying customers to space—means Richard Branson might actually be the first among them to see the curvature of Earth from suborbital space.

Virgin Galactic’s previous operators license, which dates back to 2016, authorized the company to include “non-deployed scientific, experimental, or inert payloads” on its flights. Paying customers were verboten, at least until Virgin Galactic was able to “verify the integrated performance of a vehicle’s hardware and any software in an operational flight environment,” according to FAA regulations. The verification process also needed to include flight testing, a requirement, along with others, that Virgin Galactic has successfully met.

In a statement, Virgin Galactic claims this is the first license to be issued by the FAA that allows a “spaceline to fly customers to space.” This comes as a surprise, given Blue Origin’s plans to do the same in July, so we reached out to them to inquire about their licensing status.

“We are progressing through our nominal timeline and established plan with the FAA, with expected timing aligned to our flight on July 20,” explained a Blue Origin spokesperson in an email.

That appears to be corporate-speak for not yet having FAA permission, but regardless, this is obviously a huge deal for Virgin Galactic, which kickstarted the project back in 2004, and the space tourism industry in general. News of the upgraded license saw the company’s share value jump by as much as 15%, as Bloomberg reported.

Virgin Galactic has had a painful journey to this achievement. In 2014, VSS Enterprise, a SpaceShipTwo test vehicle, crashed during a flight test, killing co-pilot Michael Alsbury and seriously injuring pilot Peter Siebold.

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo flight system doesn’t work like conventional rockets, which launch vertically from the ground. Instead, a spaceplane is lifted to high altitudes by a four-engine carrier. Once at heights of around 8.1 miles (13.1 kilometers), the spaceplane releases from the carrier and fires its rocket engines, taking it and its passengers to altitudes slightly in excess of 60 miles (95 km). The spaceplane stays in suborbit for several minutes, after which time it glides back to the spaceport, where it lands on a runway.

During its most recent flight test on May 22, VSS Unity reached an altitude of 55.5 miles (89.3 km) and a maximum speed of Mach 3. The FAA recognizes the boundary of space at 50 miles (80 km) above Earth, which is good enough for Virgin Galactic. This falls below the Karman Line, which recognizes space as beginning 62 miles (100 km) above the surface. Some might quibble, therefore, that Virgin Galactic’s vehicles aren’t actually reaching space. You can read more on this contentious subject in a post I wrote back in 2018, “Historic Virgin Galactic flight reminds us that space is just a concept, man.”

Speaking of the May 22 test flight, it actually went exceptionally well, and it paved the way for the FAA upgrade. It was the company’s third crewed flight, and its first from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Recent upgrades to the system worked properly, and the flight was able to include revenue-generating research experiments for NASA.

The newly upgraded license and the successful test on May 22 “give us confidence as we proceed toward our first fully crewed test flight this summer,” Michael Colglazier, Virgin Galactic CEO, said in a statement.

The date of that test flight, and two other scheduled flights, have not been disclosed, but speculation is already emerging that Branson could take part in the first flight and that it’ll happen before Jeff Bezos climbs into his New Shepard rocket. Nothing is confirmed, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Someone is using cracked copies of top video game titles to install crypto-mining malware on PCs belonging to hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting victims—a ploy that’s netted the criminals a hefty $2 million so far.

Researchers at Avast this week said newly discovered malware dubbed Crackonosh had been detected in pirated copies of PC games such as Grand Theft Auto V and NBA 2K19.

Crackonosh does not immediately go to work once the infected game is installed. Like many viruses, it takes a beat to avoid raising suspicion and catch its victims off guard. A malicious process is triggered after a handful of restarts, which forces the system into safe mode, rendering any security tools inert and easily deleted.

“Crackonosh installs itself by replacing critical Windows system files and abusing the Windows Safe mode to impair system defenses,” wrote Avast malware analyst Daniel Bene. “This malware further protects itself by disabling security software, operating system updates and employs other anti-analysis techniques to prevent discovery, making it very difficult to detect and remove.”

Avast disclosed Thursday, in fact, that it had discovered Crackonosh after hearing reports from redditors about its own antivirus software mysteriously being deleted.

Crackonosh’s main purpose is the installation of XMRig, a CPU/GPU miner. More than 222,000 infections have been detected so far, equally more than $2 million in mined Monero, a popular cryptocurrency—a clear demonstration of this attack’s profitability. The earliest infections date back to June 2018, researchers say.

Beneš said the spread of malicious coin miners would never cease as long cracked software remained widely in circulation.

“The key take-away from this is that you really can’t get something for nothing,” Beneš said, “and when you try to steal software, odds are someone is trying to steal from you.”