Author: Irene Hawkins

The Russia-linked SolarWinds hack which targeted US government agencies and private corporations may be even worse than officials first realized, with some 250 federal agencies and business now believed affected, the New York Times reported. Microsoft has said the hackers compromised SolarWinds’ Orion monitoring and management software, allowing them to “impersonate any of the organization’s existing users and accounts, including highly privileged accounts.” The Times reports that Russia exploited layers of the supply chain to access the agencies’ systems. The Times reports that early warning sensors that Cyber Command and the NSA placed inside foreign networks to detect potential attacks…

This past week, the US government made the single biggest, most impactful set of changes to drone law we’ve yet seen — ruling that almost every drone in US airspace will need to broadcast their locations, as well as the location of their pilots, in order to “address safety, national security, and law enforcement concerns regarding the further integration of these aircraft into the airspace of the United States”. Google (technically, Alphabet) isn’t too happy about those new rules, as it turns out. The company’s drone delivery subsidiary Wing wrote a somewhat fearmongering post (via Reuters) titled “Broadcast-Only Remote Identification…

As Microsoft continues to investigate the massive SolarWinds attack, the company says it has discovered that its systems were infiltrated “beyond just the presence of malicious SolarWinds code.” In an update from its Security Response Center, Microsoft says that hackers were able to “view source code in a number of source code repositories,” but that the hacked account granting such access didn’t have permission to modify any code or systems. While Microsoft points to “a very sophisticated nation-state actor” as the culprit, the US government and cybersecurity officials have implicated Russia as the architects of the overall SolarWinds attack. The…

When we think about privacy and who can access our location data, we’re often focusing on our phones, and not on the machine that actually takes us places: our car. A recent report from NBC News goes into just how much data is collected by our vehicles, and how it can be used by police and criminals alike. Your car, depending on how new it is and what capabilities it has, could be collecting all sorts of data without your knowledge — including location data, when its doors were opened, and even recordings of your voice. The NBC article uses…

Just two days after Wonder Woman 1984 hit theaters and HBO Max, Warner Bros. says it has put the third installment in the franchise on the fast track. Gal Gadot will reprise her role as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman and Patty Jenkins will once again write and direct, Warner Bros. chairman Toby Emmerich said in a statement Sunday. “As fans around the world continue to embrace Diana Prince, driving the strong opening weekend performance of Wonder Woman 1984, we are excited to be able continue her story with our real life Wonder Women – Gal and Patty – who will return…

To all of you who got a new Apple device for Christmas, congrats! But you might have had some difficulty setting up and signing in to iCloud along with other Apple users. First reported by Apple Insider, as of Saturday morning, Apple’s system status page was showing “some users affected” by an issue that began at around 4:45AM ET on December 25th. Nearly 36 hours later, the issue appears to be over. A status update at 4:35PM ET Saturday shows the issue as “resolved.” The issue appeared to be affecting multiple devices. The system status page didn’t show issues with…

Tesla’s new holiday update will finally give people the ability to use a new Boombox mode, which can broadcast custom audio on the outside of the car (hence the name). As is common with new Tesla features, Boombox combines real utility with lowbrow humor: owners can use fart and goat sounds in lieu of normal, boring honking sounds car horns usually make. The mode rolled out with a number of other updates as part of Tesla’s firmware 2020.48.26 update, and is something Tesla fans have eagerly anticipated. In the new mode, which can be seen at the timestamped section in…

I did not expect to like the Amazon Echo Frames as much as I do. The concept is relatively simple: they’re a pair of eyeglasses with tiny little speakers and microphones embedded in the stems so you can listen to music and command Alexa. They run $249 and come with basic plastic lenses, but you can take them to an optometrist and get prescription lenses. It’s a much smarter strategy than the failed smart glasses that tried to add a display into the mix. Maybe that’s in the works, but as with many of its products, Amazon starts with a…

Cyberpunk 2077 is still fighting its way through some terrible (and hilarious) glitches, but developer CD Projekt Red is killing the nastiest bugs fairly quickly: today’s just-released 1.06 hotfix should keep your PC save files from getting irrevocably corrupted if they grow larger than 8MB in size. Yes, that was actually an issue before today. On console, the game should also have “fewer crashes” due to “improved memory management and stability,” and a character named Dum Dum (who I have not yet personally met in my first run at the game, please do not judge me, I have kids) will…

Verizon’s new nationwide 5G network is reportedly slower than its LTE network, to the point that users are apparently better off just disabling 5G entirely unless they’re near a mmWave network. The results come from testing done by PC Magazine’s Sascha Sagan, who points to Dynamic Spectrum Sharing, or DSS, as the culprit. The tech lets carriers run LTE and 5G networks side by side, which is useful if, like Verizon, you don’t yet have enough dedicated 5G spectrum. While the carrier has largely focused on its mmWave network until recently, it also has begun rolling out a mid-band nationwide…