Alphabet's Loon Partners with Telesat
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| Alphabet's Loon Partners with Telesat | |
| Number | 740 |
| Broadcast Date | FEBRUARY 1, 2019 |
| Episode Length | 5:19 |
| Hosts | Rich Stroffolino |
Apple revokes Enterprise Certificates for Facebook and Google, Alphabet’s Loon partners with Telesat, and Panasonic doles out details on its mirrorless full-frame cameras.
Headlines
- SS7, a telecom protocol that coordinates texts and calls around the world... is exploitable. SS7 has the ability to track phones across the world, and those who want to intercept text messages and phone calls without hacking the phone itself can technically do so. Motherboard reports this capability is much more widely available in cybercriminal groups that use it to empty bank accounts. SS7 attacks against banks are on the rise, according to the report, and now The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the defensive arm of the UK’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ, confirmed that SS7 is being used to intercept codes used for banking. Metro Bank also confirmed it had faced an SS7 attack, and in a statement said it supported a law enforcement investigation into SS7 attacks across the industry.
- Apple temporarily revoked Google's Enterprise Certificate for the App Store, preventing use of iOS apps for internal testing by the company. This was spurred by a TechCrunch report that Google was violating Apple's rules for these certificates by distributing the Screenwise Meter app outside of Apple's App Store. Facebook faced a similar temporary loss of its Enterprise Certificate from Apple after TechCrunch reported on the Facebook Research VPN app violated its terms of service. Revoking the security certificates not only disabled the violating apps, but reportedly broke all internal testing iOS apps and tools used by the organizations. As of Thursday night, Apple confirmed that both Facebook's and Google's Enterprise certificates were restored.
- Apple issued an apology for the group FaceTime bug that allowed callers to received audio and video from recipients before accepting the call. The company stated the server side security bug has been fixed and that it will issue software updates next week to re-enable the feature for users.
- Alphabet's Loon subsidiary announced a partnership with the Canadian telecommunications company Telesat to use Loon's “temporal-spatial” software defined-network to manage Telesat's new fleet of low Earth Orbit satellites. Loon originally developed the proprietary software to provide internet access via an LTE balloon fleet. It can adjust the shape of the network to account for the shifts of both nodes and end-users in physical orientation and across time simultaneously. Telesat plans to use the tech to provide internet connectivity to remote areas like ships at sea and planes in flight.
- France's competition regulator issued a preliminary injunction against Google to review its policy for blocking ads. The injunction comes from a complaint brought by the phone directory service Amadeus alleging the policy was anti-competitive. Google claimed ads by Amadeus violated its terms that prohibit ads for services that can be obtained for free or at a lower price from the government or another public source. The injunction ordered that Google add clarifying language to this policy, provide a warning before blocking advertisers, and provide additional training to ad sales staff.
- Amazon reported Q4 earnings per share of $6.04 on revenue of $72.4 billion. Analysts had expected earnings of $5.65 on revenue of $71.88 billion. Amazon Web Services revenue grew 45% on the year to $7.43 billion. While AWS now accounts for 10% of overall revenue, it represents 58% of operating income, with $2.18 billion on the quarter. Amazon's "Other" segment, which largely consists of ad sales, grew 95% on the year to $3.39 billion in revenue.
- In its Q3 earnings report, Nintendo revealed 9.41 million Switch consoles were sold in the quarter for a total of 14.48 million for the financial year. Despite the figures, the company doubts it will meet its sales target of 20 million for all four quarters and has revised its target down to 17 million. Engadget notes, however, that the Switch has a lifetime total of 32.27 million units sold world wide making it 660,000 units shy of the popular Nintendo 64. Other sales bits included 12.08 million units of Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, 10 million units of Pokemon: Let’s Go, and 5.3 million units of Super Mario Party helping to pad the company’s 608 billion yen in revenue for the quarter up from 483 billion same time last year. Operating profit came in at 159 billion yen up from 117 billion yen same time last year.
- Panasonic released details about their upcoming mirrorless full frame cameras, the Lumix S1 and S1R. The S1R is aimed at photographers offering 47.3MP of base resolution with the capability to capture 187MP RAW files via sensor shifting, and an ISO range up to 25,600. The S1 focuses on videographers, offering 4K full sensor readouts at up to 60 frames per second and will eventually support 4:2:2 10-bit 4K/30p internal recording. Both cameras have in-body stabilization, SD and a XQD card slots, illuminated rear buttons, and a 5.76 million dot OLED viewfinder with a changeable refresh rate. The S1 will retail for $2499 with the S1R starting at $3699, and are expected to launch in March.
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| Preceded by: "Apple To Put New 3-D Cam In iPhone?" |
Alphabet's Loon Partners with Telesat |
Followed by: "Week in Review for the Week of 1/28/19" |