Author name: Kris Guyer

judge-calls-foul-on-venu,-blocks-launch-of-espn-warner-fox-streaming-service

Judge calls foul on Venu, blocks launch of ESPN-Warner-Fox streaming service

antitrust, competition, ESPN, Fox, Policy, sports, streaming, syndication, warner bros. discovery / /

Out of bounds —

Upcoming launch of $42.99 sports package likely to “substantially lessen competition.”

–

Texas losing to Alabama in the 2010 BCS championship

Gina Ferazzi via Getty

A US judge has temporarily blocked the launch of a sports streaming service formed by Disney’s ESPN, Warner Bros and Fox, finding that it was likely to “substantially lessen competition” in the market.

The service, dubbed Venu, was expected to launch later this year. But FuboTV, a sports-focused streaming platform, filed an antitrust suit in February to block it, arguing its business would “suffer irreparable harm” as a result.

On Friday, US District Judge Margaret Garnett in New York granted an injunction to halt the launch of the service while Fubo’s lawsuit against the entertainment giants works its way through the court.

The opinion was sealed but the judge noted in an entry on the court docket that Fubo was “likely to succeed on its claims” that by entering the agreement, the companies “will substantially lessen competition and restrain trade in the relevant market” in violation of antitrust law.

In a statement, ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros Discovery said they planned to appeal against the decision.

Venu was aimed at US consumers who had either ditched their traditional pay TV packages for streaming or never signed up for a cable subscription. “Cord cutting” has been eroding the traditional TV business for years, but live sports has remained a primary draw for customers who have held on to their cable subscriptions.

Fubo TV was launched in 2015 as a sports-focused streamer. It offers more than 350 channels—including those carrying major sporting events such as Premier League football matches, baseball, the National Football League and the US National Basketball Association—for monthly subscription prices starting at $79.99. Its offerings included networks owned by Disney and Fox.

ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros said Venu was “pro-competitive,” aimed at reaching “viewers who currently are not served by existing subscription options.”

Venu was expected to charge $42.99 a month when it launched later this month. It “will feature just 15 channels, all featuring popular live sports—the kind of skinny sports bundle that Fubo has tried to offer for nearly a decade, only to encounter tooth-and-nail resistance,” Fubo said in a court filing seeking the injunction.

Venu was expected to aggregate about $16 billion worth of sports rights, analysts have estimated. It was not expected to have an impact on the individual companies’ ability to strike new rights deals.

Analysts had questioned its position in the marketplace. Disney plans to roll out ESPN as a “flagship” streaming service in August 2025 that will carry programming that appears on the TV network as well as gaming, shopping and other interactive content. Disney chief executive Bob Iger said he wants the service to become the “pre-eminent digital sports platform.”

Fubo shares rose 16.8 percent after the ruling, but the stock is down 51 percent this year.

© 2022 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

Judge calls foul on Venu, blocks launch of ESPN-Warner-Fox streaming service Read More »

rocket-report:-ula-is-losing-engineers;-spacex-is-launching-every-two-days

Rocket Report: ULA is losing engineers; SpaceX is launching every two days

falcon 9, Federal Aviation Administration, launch, NASA, rocket lab, rocket report, russia, Science, Space, starship, stoke space, united launch alliance / /

Every other day —

The first missions of Stoke Space’s reusable Nova rocket will fly in expendable mode.

–

A Falcon 9 booster returns to landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station following a launch Thursday with two WorldView Earth observation satellites for Maxar.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 booster returns to landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station following a launch Thursday with two WorldView Earth observation satellites for Maxar.

Welcome to Edition 7.07 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX has not missed a beat since the Federal Aviation Administration gave the company a green light to resume Falcon 9 launches after a failure last month. In 19 days, SpaceX has launched 10 flights of the Falcon 9 rocket, taking advantage of all three of its Falcon 9 launch pads. This is a remarkable cadence in its own right, but even though it’s a small sample size, it is especially impressive right out of the gate after the rocket’s grounding.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

A quick turnaround for Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab launched its 52nd Electron rocket on August 11 from its private spaceport on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, Space News reports. The company’s light-class Electron rocket deployed a small radar imaging satellite into a mid-inclination orbit for Capella Space. This was the shortest turnaround between two Rocket Lab missions from its primary launch base in New Zealand, coming less than nine days after an Electron rocket took off from the same pad with a radar imaging satellite for the Japanese company Synspective. Capella’s Acadia 3 satellite was originally supposed to launch in July, but Capella requested a delay to perform more testing of its spacecraft. Rocket Lab swapped its place in the Electron launch sequence and launched the Synspective mission first.

Now, silence at the launch pad … Rocket Lab hailed the swap as an example of the flexibility provided by Electron, as well as the ability to deliver payloads to specific orbits that are not feasible with rideshare missions, according to Space News. For this tailored launch service, Rocket Lab charges a premium launch price over the price of launching a small payload on a SpaceX rideshare mission. However, SpaceX’s rideshare launches gobble up the lion’s share of small satellites within Rocket Lab’s addressable market. On Friday, a Falcon 9 rocket is slated to launch 116 small payloads into polar orbit. Rocket Lab, meanwhile, projects just one more launch before the end of September and expects to perform 15 to 18 Electron launches this year, a record for the company but well short of the 22 it forecasted earlier in the year. Rocket Lab says customer readiness is the reason it will be far short of projections.

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s space reporting is to sign up for his newsletter, we’ll collect his stories in your inbox.

Defense contractors teaming up on solid rockets. Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are joining forces to kickstart solid rocket motor production, announcing a strategic teaming agreement today that could see new motors roll off the line as early as 2025, Breaking Defense reports. The new agreement could position a third vendor to enter into the ailing solid rocket motor industrial base, which currently only includes L3Harris subsidiary Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman in the United States. Both companies have struggled to meet demands from weapons makers like Lockheed and RTX, which are in desperate need of solid rocket motors for products such as Javelin or the PAC-3 missiles used by the Patriot missile defense system.

Pressure from startups … Demand for solid rocket motors has skyrocketed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the United States and its partners sought to backfill stocks of weapons like Javelin and Stinger, as well as provide motors to meet growing needs in the space domain. Although General Dynamics has kept its interest in the solid rocket motor market quiet until now, several defense tech startups, such as Ursa Major Technologies, Anduril, and X-Bow Systems, have announced plans to enter the market. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Going polar with crew. SpaceX will fly the first human spaceflight over the Earth’s poles, possibly before the end of this year, Ars reports. The private Crew Dragon mission will be led by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Chun Wang, and he will be joined by a polar explorer, a roboticist, and a filmmaker whom he has befriended in recent years. The “Fram2” mission, named after the Norwegian research ship Fram, will launch into a polar corridor from SpaceX’s launch facilities in Florida and fly directly over the north and south poles. The three- to five-day mission is being timed to fly over Antarctica near the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, to afford maximum lighting.

Wang’s inclination is Wang’s prerogative … Wang told Ars he wanted to try something new, and flying a polar mission aligned with his interests in cold places on Earth. He’s paying the way on a commercial basis, and SpaceX in recent years has demonstrated it can launch satellites into polar orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, something no one had done in more than 50 years. The highest-inclination flight ever by a human spacecraft was the Soviet Vostok 6 mission in 1963 when Valentina Tereshkova’s spacecraft reached 65.1 degrees. Now, Fram2 will fly repeatedly and directly over the poles.

Rocket Report: ULA is losing engineers; SpaceX is launching every two days Read More »

Navigating the Unique Landscape of OT Security Solutions

Navigating / /

Exploring the operational technology (OT) security sector has been both enlightening and challenging, particularly due to its distinct priorities and requirements compared to traditional IT security. One of the most intriguing aspects of this journey has been understanding how the foundational principles of security differ between IT and OT environments. Typically, IT security is guided by the CIA triad—confidentiality, integrity, and availability, in that order. However, in the world of OT, the priority sequence shifts dramatically to AIC—availability, integrity, and confidentiality. This inversion underscores the unique nature of OT environments where system availability and operational continuity are paramount, often surpassing the need for confidentiality.

Learning through Contrast and Comparison

My initial approach to researching OT security solutions involved drawing parallels with familiar IT security strategies. However, I quickly realized that such a comparison, while useful, only scratches the surface. To truly understand the nuances of OT security, I delved into case studies, white papers, and real-world incidents that highlighted the critical need for availability and integrity above all. Interviews with industry experts and interactive webinars provided deeper insights into why disruptions in service, even for a brief period, can have catastrophic outcomes in sectors like manufacturing, energy, or public utilities, far outweighing concerns about data confidentiality.

Challenges for Adopters

One of the most significant challenges for organizations adopting OT security solutions is the integration of these systems into existing infrastructures without disrupting operational continuity. Many OT environments operate with legacy systems that are not only sensitive to changes but also may not support the latest security protocols. The delicate balance of upgrading security without hampering the availability of critical systems presents a steep learning curve for adopters. This challenge is compounded by the need to ensure that security measures are robust enough to prevent increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, which are now more frequently targeting vulnerable OT assets.

Surprising Discoveries

Perhaps the most surprising discovery during my research was the level of interconnectedness between IT and OT systems in many organizations. While this is still developing, this convergence is driving a new wave of cybersecurity strategies that must cover the extended surface area without introducing new vulnerabilities. Additionally, the rate of technological adoption in OT—such as IoT devices in industrial settings—has accelerated, creating both opportunities and unprecedented security challenges. The pace at which OT environments are becoming digitized is astonishing and not without risks, as seen in several high-profile security breaches over the past year.

YoY Changes in OT Security

Comparing the state of OT security solutions now to just a year ago, the landscape has evolved rapidly. There has been a marked increase in the adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict and respond to threats in real time, a trend barely in its nascent stages last year. Vendors are also emphasizing the creation of more integrated platforms that offer both deeper visibility into OT systems and more comprehensive management tools. This shift toward more sophisticated, unified solutions is a direct response to the growing complexity and connectivity of modern industrial environments.

Looking Forward

Moving forward, the OT security sector is poised to continue its rapid evolution. The integration of AI and predictive analytics is expected to deepen, with solutions becoming more proactive rather than reactive. For IT decision-makers, staying ahead means not only adopting cutting-edge security solutions, but also fostering a culture of continuous learning and adaptation within their organizations.

Understanding the unique aspects of researching and implementing OT security solutions highlights the importance of tailored approaches in cybersecurity. As the sector continues to grow and transform, the journey of discovery and adaptation promises to be as challenging as it is rewarding.

Next Steps

To learn more, take a look at GigaOm’s OT security Key Criteria and Radar reports. These reports provide a comprehensive overview of the market, outline the criteria you’ll want to consider in a purchase decision, and evaluate how a number of vendors perform against those decision criteria.

If you’re not yet a GigaOm subscriber, sign up here.

Navigating the Unique Landscape of OT Security Solutions Read More »

saas-management-and-application-discovery

SaaS Management and Application Discovery

Management / /

The old saying, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” proves itself time and again with computers. In my recent analysis of SaaS management platforms (SMPs), it proved true once again, as I couldn’t help but observe how familiar the problem of getting a handle on software-as a-service (SaaS) sprawl felt.

The challenges inherent in discovery, visibility, and balancing concerns between stakeholders are elements in any kind of effective IT management. This iteration probably provides clues to future challenges that are difficult to anticipate.

How IT Got Started

Taking a retrospective look at the creation of IT departments through history provides insight into an important and ongoing management challenge. Some organizations had computer systems in the 1960s and 1970s, but those systems were necessarily expensive, purpose-built, and very clear on the problems being solved.

For example, a bank may have had a mainframe that served as a transactional database for millions of accounts. Although the system would be composed of many pieces, there wasn’t an application portfolio spanning thousands of systems with questions such as:

  • Who uses this software?
  • Is it redundant with other systems?
  • Where did it come from?
  • Can we get a better deal just by asking, or by easily switching to a competitor?
  • How does the business function tie to business capability (i.e., clearly it does something, and probably something that used to be done with a pencil, but what is its actual value?)
  • Is it integrated with [pick your favorite] new app?

Such systems were necessarily supported by dedicated staff, but that staff was organizationally tied to the business units they supported, and questions like these would have seemed comical at the time.

In the 1980s and especially 1990s, with the advent of personal computers and lower-cost terminal devices such as those seen in point of sale or inventory management, software systems expanded greatly along with the hardware to assist in a multitude of business functions. Email became a necessity, and any paper process became a clear opportunity for technologization. In many cases, the value, purpose, and deliberation were in place for those systems, but the sheer increase in size and shared overhead necessitated creating IT departments or outsourcing the management of computer systems to third parties such as MSPs or technology consulting firms. Often, the technical staff that previously supported a few critical technology systems on behalf of discrete business units inherited these burgeoning responsibilities.

Going Full Circle

That worked all right until around 2010, when another iteration of technological advancement challenged the existing model. Web technology and cloud computing were sufficiently established to make data centers the natural home for most business software, and it made ubiquitous smartphones, tablets, and laptops the terminals. SaaS became the norm, with a cost and deployment model that benefited both providers and consumers. With a market the size of the world, almost any niche business function is an arena for competitive development. A critical component of this latter advancement is that all of this became much easier and culturally commonplace.

Around this time, many IT departments found themselves with egg on their faces. For example, perhaps business units asked for a teleconferencing option and were met with long timelines and seemingly unreasonable budgets. Why does it take six months and millions of dollars when any cell phone has video conferencing capabilities ready to go in five minutes?

IT was on the defensive. What about data security? A sanctioned option will save money in the long run. The network must be ready to support the bandwidth. The list goes on. The partnership became strained. In some cases, words like “rogue” and “shadow IT” were used to describe business units that took matters into their own hands by discretely signing up for SaaS applications. It’s an understandable, if ironic, attitude toward things coming full circle. Business units are deploying and financing technology that they find valuable. What is this, 1980?

Today, there is growing acceptance of the idea that SaaS and BYOD options are good for everyone—they just require a way to manage business considerations that may not be apparent to (or appreciated by) all end users. Data and network security is not negotiable, and neither is auditing or compliance requirements. Integration with other corporate systems is valuable, but may not be necessary on day one. Licensing costs may be temporarily higher, but they can be optimized. Most of the pain points are temporary and solvable.

SMPs Address Most Pain Points

SaaS management platforms help to bridge those gaps. They allow IT departments and finance/procurement groups to achieve their goals without obstructing business units from taking advantage of the wealth of easily accessible software on the market. As custom software is gradually replaced with market alternatives, some IT departments may even get leaner and more focused on things like security and integration.

SaaS management platforms can only do so much though, especially with regard to application discovery. Ultimately, they can only “spider out” from known systems to discover unknown systems. They can integrate with corporate identity providers, monitor company email systems, integrate with browser extensions, and scour company expense records for clues as to which SaaS applications may be in use. Some even provide mobile device management integration to enhance the reach into mobile devices accessing the company network.

What about the case of an employee using their personal smartphone over the cell network and a free-tier teleconferencing account tied to a Gmail address? Or what about accidentally using the account of a different organization, such as a school or contracting agency? Was anything discussed on the call confidential? Did it contain clues to trade secrets, or did the data need to be audited or preserved for potential legal subpoena? The organization must evaluate those questions.

Only policy and good training can effectively mitigate these issues, but even that is not perfect and will face headwinds. Regardless, the race for expanded discovery is on, and at some point, it will probably include aggregation of disparate but available usage data with ML analysis, similar to the kind used for web marketing.

The alternative is to allow the organization additional visibility (surveillance software and managed configuration policies) into personal devices and personal accounts. If that loss of privacy does not concern you, bear in mind that the 21st-century mining-town model faces its own headwinds regardless, as seen by recently proposed legislation in California limiting the use of email off work hours.

In my opinion, that is the most compelling reason for software users to enthusiastically use business resources for business purposes. Respecting the integrity of business data effectively preserves the cultural border for personal privacy. If that distinction goes up for grabs, it is back to pencils and sticky notes.

Next Steps

To learn more, take a look at GigaOm’s SaaS management platform Key Criteria and Radar reports. These reports provide a comprehensive view of the market, outline the criteria you’ll want to consider in a purchase decision, and evaluate how a number of vendors perform against those decision criteria.

If you’re not yet a GigaOm subscriber, sign up here.

SaaS Management and Application Discovery Read More »

chinese-social-media-users-hilariously-mock-ai-video-fails

Chinese social media users hilariously mock AI video fails

AI, AI parody, AI-generated video, BiliBili, Biz & IT, china, Chinese social media, Gen-3 Alpha, machine learning, openai, Runway, Social Media, social media trend, Sora, tiktok, video synthesis, will smith / /

Life imitates AI imitating life —

TikTok and Bilibili users transform nonsensical AI glitches into real-world performance art.

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Still from a Chinese social media video featuring two people imitating imperfect AI-generated video outputs.

Enlarge / Still from a Chinese social media video featuring two people imitating imperfect AI-generated video outputs.

It’s no secret that despite significant investment from companies like OpenAI and Runway, AI-generated videos still struggle to achieve convincing realism at times. Some of the most amusing fails end up on social media, which has led to a new response trend on Chinese social media platforms TikTok and Bilibili where users create videos that mock the imperfections of AI-generated content. The trend has since spread to X (formerly Twitter) in the US, where users have been sharing the humorous parodies.

In particular, the videos seem to parody image synthesis videos where subjects seamlessly morph into other people or objects in unexpected and physically impossible ways. Chinese social media replicate these unusual visual non-sequiturs without special effects by positioning their bodies in unusual ways as new and unexpected objects appear on-camera from out of frame.

This exaggerated mimicry has struck a chord with viewers on X, who find the parodies entertaining. User @theGioM shared one video, seen above. “This is high-level performance arts,” wrote one X user. “art is imitating life imitating ai, almost shedded a tear.” Another commented, “I feel like it still needs a motorcycle the turns into a speedboat and takes off into the sky. Other than that, excellent work.”

An example Chinese social media video featuring two people imitating imperfect AI-generated video outputs.

While these parodies poke fun at current limitations, tech companies are actively attempting to overcome them with more training data (examples analyzed by AI models that teach them how to create videos) and computational training time. OpenAI unveiled Sora in February, capable of creating realistic scenes if they closely match examples found in training data. Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha suffers a similar fate: It can create brief clips of convincing video within a narrow set of constraints. This means that generated videos of situations outside the dataset often end up hilariously weird.

An AI-generated video that features impossibly-morphing people and animals. Social media users are imitating this style.

It’s worth noting that actor Will Smith beat Chinese social media users to this trend in February by poking fun at a horrific 2023 viral AI-generated video that attempted to depict him eating spaghetti. That may also bring back memories of other amusing video synthesis failures, such as May 2023’s AI-generated beer commercial, created using Runway’s earlier Gen-2 model.

An example Chinese social media video featuring two people imitating imperfect AI-generated video outputs.

While imitating imperfect AI videos may seem strange to some, people regularly make money pretending to be NPCs (non-player characters—a term for computer-controlled video game characters) on TikTok.

For anyone alive during the 1980s, witnessing this fast-changing and often bizarre new media world can cause some cognitive whiplash, but the world is a weird place full of wonders beyond the imagination. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” as Hamlet once famously said. “Including people pretending to be video game characters and flawed video synthesis outputs.”

Chinese social media users hilariously mock AI video fails Read More »

bmw-makes-the-internet-happy,-brings-m5-station-wagon-to-the-us

BMW makes the Internet happy, brings M5 station wagon to the US

Cars / /

trombone delivery car —

After denying us previous M5 station wagons, BMW now thinks the time is right.

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A BMW M5 Touring drives through a volcanic landscape

Enlarge / Everyone loves a wagon, especially when it’s an M5.

Fabian Kirchbauer Photography/BMW

Telling someone they can’t have something is a great way to make them want it. Take the station wagon, for example. This once-popular form factor for family transport has all but disappeared from new car showrooms in North America, consequently making the station wagon all kinds of cool in the process. At the apex are the superwagons, factory-tuned models with prodigious power outputs, with one in particular attaining legendary status in large part because BMW chose never to import the M5 Touring across the Atlantic. Until now.

BMW first made a Touring—or station wagon—version of the M5 in 1992 with the second-generation (better known as the E34) 5 series. When I was growing up in the UK, these were unavailable, as they were in the US, quickly giving the five-door M5 an extra level of cachet that the four-door lacked, despite a starring role in Ronin.

Truth be told, the E34 M5 Touring looked very cool, but it wasn’t the greatest sales success.

The same could be said for the next M5 Touring, which turned up in 2007 with the E61 generation 5 Series and a V10 under the hood. Only about 5 percent of E61 M5s were the five-door wagon, and US customers were again denied the chance to buy one. For the American M5 Touring devotee, the answer seemed to be “wait for the 25-year rule to apply,” something that has meant E34 M5 Tourings have been eligible for import for a few years now.

The M5 Touring skipped a generation, but BMW decided to bring it back for the newest iteration of its midsize continent crusher. And while it looked for a while like the Touring would again be a Euro-only thing, BMW’s North American arm has decided that the market is now ready for its most practical of performance machines.

  • The two-box shape looks so well-proportioned when it’s a wagon.

    Fabian Kirchbauer Photography/BMW

  • The 2025 M5 launch will take place toward the end of this year.

    Fabian Kirchbauer Photography/BMW

  • Colors other than bright red are available.

    Fabian Kirchbauer Photography/BMW

  • The Touring is still hugely practical.

    BMW

  • E34 M5 Touring are eligible for import under the 25-year rule.

    BMW

  • The E61-generation Touring body was most handsome.

    BMW

People say it’s too heavy

The G60-generation (or G61, for the Touring) M5 is a bit of a controversial car, however. It uses the same plug-in hybrid powertrain as the XM SUV, generating 717 hp (535 kW) and 738 lb-ft (1,000 Nm)—more than double the power and torque of the E34 M5.

While there are obvious advantages to a PHEV performance car in both performance (electric motors deliver their torque immediately) and efficiency (since it can run on just electric motors in low-speed situations), there is a bit of a drawback when it comes to weight. Adding a 14.8 kWh (useable) lithium-ion battery pack and the 194 hp (145 kW) electric motor have pushed the M5 Touring’s curb weight to 5,530 lbs (2,508 kg).

That’s 1,683 lbs (763 kg) heavier than the first M5 Touring, and all that mass has made enthusiasts mad (though almost every road test and first drive has come back aglow about the car’s capabilities). And I’m pretty sure that the 1992 M5 Touring didn’t have heated and cooled seats or an infotainment system capable of playing video or games. And it definitely didn’t have a torque-vectoring rear differential.

BMW debuted the US version of the M5 Touring on Thursday as part of Monterey Car Week and also announced the pricing. If you want a car that can carry loads of up to 57.6 cubic feet (1,632 L) and accelerate to 60 mph in 3.5 seconds, be prepared to pay BMW at least $122,675.

BMW makes the Internet happy, brings M5 station wagon to the US Read More »

google’s-threat-team-confirms-iran-targeting-trump,-biden,-and-harris-campaigns

Google’s threat team confirms Iran targeting Trump, Biden, and Harris campaigns

APT42, Biz & IT, Donald Trump, Gmail, Google, google tag, Iran, Kamala Harris, phishing, President Biden, Roger Stone, Security, spearphishing, threat analysis group / /

It is only August —

Another Big Tech firm seems to confirm Trump adviser Roger Stone was hacked.

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Roger Stone, former adviser to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, center, during the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee on July 17, 2024.

Enlarge / Roger Stone, former adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, center, during the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee on July 17, 2024.

Getty Images

Google’s Threat Analysis Group confirmed Wednesday that they observed a threat actor backed by the Iranian government targeting Google accounts associated with US presidential campaigns, in addition to stepped-up attacks on Israeli targets.

APT42, associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, “consistently targets high-profile users in Israel and the US,” the Threat Analysis Group (TAG) writes. The Iranian group uses hosted malware, phishing pages, malicious redirects, and other tactics to gain access to Google, Dropbox, OneDrive, and other cloud-based accounts. Google’s TAG writes that it reset accounts, sent warnings to users, and blacklisted domains associated with APT42’s phishing attempts.

Among APT42’s tools were Google Sites pages that appeared to be a petition from legitimate Jewish activists, calling on Israel to mediate its ongoing conflict with Hamas. The page was fashioned from image files, not HTML, and an ngrok redirect sent users to phishing pages when they moved to sign the petition.

A petition purporting to be from The Jewish Agency for Israel, seeking support for mediation measures—but signatures quietly redirect to phishing sites, according to Google.

A petition purporting to be from The Jewish Agency for Israel, seeking support for mediation measures—but signatures quietly redirect to phishing sites, according to Google.

Google

In the US, Google’s TAG notes that, as with the 2020 elections, APT42 is actively targeting the personal emails of “roughly a dozen individuals affiliated with President Biden and former President Trump.” TAG confirms that APT42 “successfully gained access to the personal Gmail account of a high-profile political consultant,” which may be longtime Republican operative Roger Stone, as reported by The Guardian, CNN, and The Washington Post, among others. Microsoft separately noted last week that a “former senior advisor” to the Trump campaign had his Microsoft account compromised, which Stone also confirmed.

“Today, TAG continues to observe unsuccessful attempts from APT42 to compromise the personal accounts of individuals affiliated with President Biden, Vice President Harris and former President Trump, including current and former government officials and individuals associated with the campaigns,” Google’s TAG writes.

PDFs and phishing kits target both sides

Google’s post details the ways in which APT42 targets operatives in both parties. The broad strategy is to get the target off their email and into channels like Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp, or possibly a personal email address that may not have two-factor authentication and threat monitoring set up. By establishing trust through sending legitimate PDFs, or luring them to video meetings, APT42 can then push links that use phishing kits with “a seamless flow” to harvest credentials from Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo.

After gaining a foothold, APT42 will often work to preserve its access by generating application-specific passwords inside the account, which typically bypass multifactor tools. Google notes that its Advanced Protection Program, intended for individuals at high risk of attack, disables such measures.

Publications, including Politico, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, have reported being offered documents from the Trump campaign, potentially stemming from Iran’s phishing efforts, in an echo of Russia’s 2016 targeting of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. None of them have moved to publish stories related to the documents.

John Hultquist, with Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant, told Wired’s Andy Greenberg that what looks initially like spying or political interference by Iran can easily escalate to sabotage and that both parties are equal targets. He also said that current thinking about threat vectors may need to expand.

“It’s not just a Russia problem anymore. It’s broader than that,” Hultquist said. “There are multiple teams in play. And we have to keep an eye out for all of them.”

Google’s threat team confirms Iran targeting Trump, Biden, and Harris campaigns Read More »

new-geekbench-ai-benchmark-can-test-the-performance-of-cpus,-gpus,-and-npus

New Geekbench AI benchmark can test the performance of CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs

AI, Geekbench, Tech / /

hit the bench —

Performance test comes out of beta as NPUs become standard equipment in PCs.

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New Geekbench AI benchmark can test the performance of CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs

Primate Labs

Neural processing units (NPUs) are becoming commonplace in chips from Intel and AMD after several years of being something you’d find mostly in smartphones and tablets (and Macs). But as more companies push to do more generative AI processing, image editing, and chatbot-ing locally on-device instead of in the cloud, being able to measure NPU performance will become more important to people making purchasing decisions.

Enter Primate Labs, developers of Geekbench. The main Geekbench app is designed to test CPU performance as well as GPU compute performance, but for the last few years, the company has been experimenting with a side project called Geekbench ML (for “Machine Learning”) to test the inference performance of NPUs. Now, as Microsoft’s Copilot+ initiative gets off the ground and Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple all push to boost NPU performance, Primate Labs is bumping Geekbench ML to version 1.0 and renaming it “Geekbench AI,” a change that will presumably help it ride the wave of AI-related buzz.

“Just as CPU-bound workloads vary in how they can take advantage of multiple cores or threads for performance scaling (necessitating both single-core and multi-core metrics in most related benchmarks), AI workloads cover a range of precision levels, depending on the task needed and the hardware available,” wrote Primate Labs’ John Poole in a blog post about the update. “Geekbench AI presents its summary for a range of workload tests accomplished with single-precision data, half-precision data, and quantized data, covering a variety used by developers in terms of both precision and purpose in AI systems.”

In addition to measuring speed, Geekbench AI also attempts to measure accuracy, which is important for machine-learning workloads that rely on producing consistent outcomes (identifying and cataloging people and objects in a photo library, for example).

Geekbench AI can run AI workloads on your CPU, GPU, or NPU (when you have a system with an NPU that's compatible).

Enlarge / Geekbench AI can run AI workloads on your CPU, GPU, or NPU (when you have a system with an NPU that’s compatible).

Andrew Cunningham

Geekbench AI supports several AI frameworks: OpenVINO for Windows and Linux, ONNX for Windows, Qualcomm’s QNN on Snapdragon-powered Arm PCs, Apple’s CoreML on macOS and iOS, and a number of vendor-specific frameworks on various Android devices. The app can run these workloads on the CPU, GPU, or NPU, at least when your device has a compatible NPU installed.

On Windows PCs, where NPU support and APIs like Microsoft’s DirectML are still works in progress, Geekbench AI supports Intel and Qualcomm’s NPUs but not AMD’s (yet).

“We’re hoping to add AMD NPU support in a future version once we have more clarity on how best to enable them from AMD,” Poole told Ars.

Geekbench AI is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS/iPadOS, and Android. It’s free to use, though a Pro license gets you command-line tools, the ability to run the benchmark without uploading results to the Geekbench Browser, and a few other benefits. Though the app is hitting 1.0 today, the Primate Labs team expects to update the app frequently for new hardware, frameworks, and workloads as necessary.

“AI is nothing if not fast-changing,” Poole continued in the announcement post, “so anticipate new releases and updates as needs and AI features in the market change.”

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Mpox outbreak is an international health emergency, WHO declares

africa, CDC, health, Infectious disease, mpox, outbreak, Science, WHO / /

PHEIC —

The declaration is “the highest level of alarm under international health law.”

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A negative stain electron micrograph of a mpox virus virion in human vesicular fluid.

Enlarge / A negative stain electron micrograph of a mpox virus virion in human vesicular fluid.

The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared an international health emergency over a large and rapidly expanding outbreak of mpox that is spilling out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It is the second time in about two years that mpox’s spread has spurred the WHO to declare a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), the highest level of alarm for the United Nations health agency. In July 2022, the WHO declared a PHEIC after mpox cases had spread across the globe, with the epicenter of the outbreak in Europe, primarily in men who have sex with men. The outbreak was caused by clade II mpox viruses, which, between the two mpox clades that exist, is the relatively mild one, causing far fewer deaths. As awareness, precautions, and vaccination increased, the outbreak subsided and was declared over in May 2023.

Unlike the 2022–2023 outbreak, the current mpox outbreak is driven by the clade II virus, the more dangerous version that causes more severe disease and more deaths. Also, while the clade I virus in the previous outbreak unexpectedly spread via sexual contact in adults, this clade II outbreak is spreading in more classic contact patterns, mostly through skin contact of household members and health care workers. A large proportion of those infected have been children.

To date, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the virus is endemic, has reported more than 22,000 suspect mpox cases and more than 1,200 deaths since the start of January 2023. In recent months, the outbreak has spilled out into multiple neighboring countries, including Burundi, Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Kenya, and Uganda.

Earlier on Wednesday, the WHO convened an emergency committee to review the situation, in which experts from affected countries presented data to independent international experts. The committee concluded that the outbreak constituted a PHEIC, and WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus followed their recommendation.

“The emergence of a new clade of mpox, its rapid spread in eastern DRC, and the reporting of cases in several neighboring countries are very worrying,” Tedros said in a statement announcing the PHEIC. “On top of outbreaks of other mpox clades in DRC and other countries in Africa, it’s clear that a coordinated international response is needed to stop these outbreaks and save lives.”

On Tuesday, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared a similar emergency. Africa CDC Director General Dr. Jean Kaseya said the declaration will “mobilize our institutions, our collective will, and our resources to act—swiftly and decisively. This empowers us to forge new partnerships, strengthen our health systems, educate our communities, and deliver life-saving interventions where they are needed most.”

For now, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assess the risk to the US public to be “very low,” given that there is limited and no direct travel between the US and the epicenter of the outbreak. So far, no clade I cases have been detected outside of central and eastern Africa.

Mpox outbreak is an international health emergency, WHO declares Read More »

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Kraven the Hunter’s new trailer gives us a dark, gore-filled revenge story

culture, Entertainment, film trailers, Kraven the Hunter, Sony Pictures, Sony's Spider-Man University, Trailers / /

“When the man comes around” —

It’s the latest installment in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, which has floundered recently.

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Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Bullet Train) plays the title character in the forthcoming film Kraven the Hunter.

Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU) got off to a strong start with Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), both of which racked up high box office earnings despite mixed-to-negative reviews from critics. But then the studio foundered badly with a couple of box office flops: 2022’s Morbius and 2024’s Madame Web.

Sony hopes to right the ship with a third Venom film in October (The Last Dance) and the much-delayed Kraven the Hunter this December. We’ve got a new trailer for the latter, leaning heavily into R-rated gore and set to Johnny Cash’s moodily atmospheric “The Man Comes Around.” It’s an entirely different, darker vibe from prior offerings: a revenge narrative rife with violence and daddy issues. Color us intrigued.

Comic book fans are well acquainted with Kraven as one of Spider-Man’s most formidable foes, a founding member of the Sinister Six. He’s a Russian immigrant with an aristocratic background who fled his home country when Tsar Nicholas II’s reign collapsed in 1917. He’s a big game hunter with enhanced abilities thanks to ingesting a mysterious potion made from jungle herbs. He’s very hard to injure, has super-human strength, and enhanced sight, hearing, and smell, as well as being a good tactician with excellent hand-to-hand combat skills.

Screenwriter Richard Wenk has said that Sony intended to adapt the critically acclaimed 1987 storyline in Kraven’s Last Hunt by J.M. DeMatteis, Mike Zeck, and Bob McLeod, which leaned heavily into the character’s Russian origins to create a very Dostoyevsky-like arc of a tortured soul. That storyline features an older Kraven whose health is failing who decides to hunt Spider-Man one last time, whereas the film is clearly an origin story. And Kraven actually dies by suicide in that comic arc, but we’re guessing Sony has plans to use him in other SSU films, with or without his arch-nemesis Spider-Man.

Per the official premise:

Kraven the Hunter is the visceral, action-packed origin story of how and why one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Kraven, a man whose complex relationship with his ruthless father, Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe), starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared.

In addition to Taylor-Johnson and Crowe, the cast includes Ariana DeBose as the voodoo priestess Calypso, Kraven’s love interest; Fred Hechinger as Dmitri Smerdyakov, aka Chameleon, Kraven’s half-brother; Alessandro Nivola as Aleksei Sytsevich, aka Rhino, a Russian mercenary who can transform into a human/rhino hybrid; Christopher Abbott as a mercenary and assassin called the Foreigner; and Levi Miller as young Sergei.

Kraven the Hunter hits theaters on December 13, 2024.

Listing image by YouTube/Sony Pictures

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disney-fighting-restaurant-death-suit-with-disney+-terms-“absurd,”-lawyer-says

Disney fighting restaurant death suit with Disney+ terms “absurd,” lawyer says

Disney, disney springs, Florida, Policy, raglan road Irish pub, streaming service, Walt Disney World resorts, wrongful death / /
Raglan Road Irish Pub at Disney Springs in Orlando, Florida, USA.

Enlarge / Raglan Road Irish Pub at Disney Springs in Orlando, Florida, USA.

After a woman, Kanokporn Tangsuan, with severe nut allergies died from anaphylaxis due to a Disney Springs restaurant neglecting to honor requests for allergen-free food, her husband, Jeffrey Piccolo, sued on behalf of her estate.

In May, Disney tried to argue that the wrongful death suit should be dismissed because Piccolo subscribed to a one-month free trial of Disney+ four years before Tangsuan’s shocking death. Fighting back this month, a lawyer representing Tangsuan’s estate, Brian Denney, warned that Disney was “explicitly seeking to bar its 150 million Disney+ subscribers from ever prosecuting a wrongful death case against it in front of a jury even if the case facts have nothing to with Disney+.”

According to Disney, by agreeing to the Disney+ terms, Piccolo also agreed to other Disney terms vaguely hyperlinked in the Disney+ agreement that required private arbitration for “all disputes” against “The Walt Disney Company or its affiliates” arising “in contract, tort, warranty, statute, regulation, or other legal or equitable basis.”

However, Denney argued that “there is simply no reading of the Disney+ Subscriber Agreement, the only Agreement Mr. Piccolo allegedly assented to in creating his Disney+ account, which would support the notion that he was agreeing on behalf of his wife or her estate, to arbitrate injuries sustained by his wife at a restaurant located on premises owned by a Disney theme park or resort from which she died.”

“Frankly, any such suggestion borders on the absurd,” Denney said.

Denney argued that Disney’s motion to compel arbitration was “so outrageously unreasonable and unfair as to shock the judicial conscience.”

It’s particularly shocking, Denney argued, because of a “glaring ambiguity” that Disney “ignores”—that Piccolo more recently agreed to other Disney terms that “directly conflict” with the terms that Disney prefers to reference in its motion.

Denney argued that Disney is “desperately” clinging to “Piccolo’s purported consent to the Disney Terms of Use in November of 2019, because the My Disney Experience Terms and Conditions he allegedly consented to in 2023″—when purchasing tickets on Disney’s website to Epcot that went unused—”do not contain an arbitration provision.”

Those terms instead “rather expressly contemplate that the parties may file lawsuits and requires those suits to be filed in Orange County Florida and to be governed by Florida law,” Denney said. They also specify that the My Disney Experience terms prevail amid any conflict with other terms.

This renders “the arbitration provision in the Disney Terms of Use unenforceable,” Denney argued, requesting Disney’s motion be denied and suggesting that Disney is attempting “to deprive the Estate of Kanokporn Tangsuan of its right to a jury trial.”

He also reminded the court that in nursing home cases, Florida courts have “repeatedly held that a resident’s estate will not be bound by an arbitration agreement signed by a spouse or other family member in their individual capacity.”

Disney is hoping that its Disney+ terms argument will push the litigation out of the court and behind closed doors of arbitration, arguing that “Piccolo’s remaining claims against Great Irish Pubs”—which does business as Raglan Road Irish Pub—”should be stayed as well.” That would be proper, Disney argued, because Piccolo’s claims against Disney “are based entirely on Great Irish Pubs’ alleged misconduct” and “it would be problematic for this litigation to continue since each tribunal may decide the issues differently.”

Disney also noted that the litigation should also be stayed if Great Irish Pubs joined the arbitration, which Disney “would not oppose.”

Denney argued that Disney’s motion to compel arbitration was “fatally flawed for numerous independent reasons.”

“There is not a single authority in Florida that would support such an inane argument,” Denney argued. It’s “preposterous,” he said, that Disney is arguing that “when Jeffrey Piccolo, individually, allegedly signed himself up for a free trial of Disney+ back in 2019 or bought Epcot tickets in 2023, he somehow bound the non-existent Estate of Kanokporn Tangsuan (his wife, who was alive at both times) to an arbitration agreement buried within certain terms and conditions.”

Disney fighting restaurant death suit with Disney+ terms “absurd,” lawyer says Read More »

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Classic PC game emulation is back on the iPhone with iDOS 3 release

App Store, Apple, DOS games, emulator, gaming, iDOS, iDOS 3, MS-DOS, Tech / /

Emulation —

Apple amended its App Store rules to allow PC emulators, not just console ones.

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An MS-DOS command line prompt showing the C drive

Enlarge / The start of any journey in MS-DOS.

Samuel Axon

After a 14-year journey of various states of availability and usefulness amid the shifting policies of Apple’s App Store approval process, MS-DOS game emulator iDOS is back on the iPhone and iPad. It’s hopefully here to stay this time.

iDOS allows you to run applications made for MS-DOS via DOSBox, with a nice retro-styled interface. Its main use case is definitely playing DOS games, but it has seen a rocky road to get to this point. Initially released over a decade ago, it existed quietly for its niche audience, though it saw some changes that made it more or less useful in the developer’s quest to avoid removal from the App Store after it violated Apple’s rules. That culminated in it being removed altogether in 2021 after some tweets and articles brought attention to it.

But earlier this year, Apple made big changes to its App Store rules, officially allowing “retro game emulators” for the first time. That cleared the way for a wave of working console game emulators like Delta and RetroArch, which mostly work as you might expect them to on any other platform now. But when iDOS developer Chaoji Li and other purveyors of classic PC emulator software attempted to do the same for old PC games for MS-DOS and other non-console computing platforms, they were stymied. Apple told them that it didn’t consider their apps to be retro game console emulators and that they violated rules intended to prevent people from circumventing the App Store by running applications from other sources.

PC emulator UTM released a version of its software that worked around Apple’s rules, but it was a subpar experience. But on August 2, Apple amended its App Store rules to explicitly allow emulators of classic PC games. That opened the door for iDOS, which has made its triumphant return and works quite well.

Developer Chaoji Li’s announcement of iDOS 3’s availability didn’t have a tone of triumph to it, though—more like exhaustion, given the app’s struggles over the years:

It has been a long wait for common sense to prevail within Apple. As much as I want to celebrate, I still can’t help being a little bit cautious about the future. Are we good from now on?

Get iDOS3 on AppStore

I hope iDOS can now enjoy its turn to stay and grow.

P.S. Even though words feel inadequate at times, I would like to say thank you to the supporters of iDOS. In many ways, you keep iDOS alive.

Given that Apple’s policy changes were driven by regulatory concerns, it seems likely it’ll stick this time, but after everything that’s happened, you can’t blame Li for putting a question mark on this.

In any case, if you’re among the dozens (or maybe several hundred) of people looking to play Commander Keen, Might and Magic: The World of Xeen, Wolfenstein 3D, or Jill of the Jungle on your iPhone, today is your day.

Classic PC game emulation is back on the iPhone with iDOS 3 release Read More »