Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from DefenseScoop: A group of NATO countries are set to begin implementing a new project aimed at improving the alliance's ability to quickly share intelligence gathered by space-based assets operated by both member nations and the commercial sector. Seventeen NATO members signed a memorandum of understanding for the Alliance Persistence Surveillance from Space (APSS) program as part of the annual NATO summit being held in Washington this week, the alliance announced Tuesday. Members will now move into a five-year implementation phase of the project, during which allies will contribute more than $1 billion "to leverage commercial and national space assets, and to expand advanced exploitation capacities," according to a press release. The United States is one of the nations signed onto the initiative, as well as Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden and Turkey, according to a NATO source. The transatlantic organization created APSS last year with the intent to establish a "virtual constellation" -- dubbed Aquila -- comprising both national and commercial space systems, sensors and data that can be used by NATO's command structure and other allies. The project is considered "the largest multinational investment in space-based capabilities" in the alliance's history, and is set to increase NATO's ability "to monitor activities on the ground and at sea with unprecedented accuracy and timeliness," a press release stated. Participating nations will be able to use their own space systems, provide tools for intelligence collection and analysis, or purchase space-based data gathered by commercial constellations. "Integrating and exploiting data from space effectively has been a growing challenge over time," a NATO press release stated. "By leveraging latest technologies from industry, APSS will help advance NATO's innovation agenda and offer a new platform to engage with the growing space industry." The APSS project is part of the larger implementation of NATO's overarching space policy adopted in 2019, which officially recognized space as a new operational domain. Since then, the alliance has worked to bolster its presence in space -- including the establishment of a NATO Space Centre in 2020 and approval of an official Space Branch within the Allied Command Transformation in June.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers from Cornell University have developed a novel urine collection and filtration system for spacesuits, designed to improve hygiene and comfort for astronauts during long spacewalks. This new system, inspired by the 'stillsuits' from the Dune franchise, recycles urine into potable water using a vacuum-based external catheter and a forward-reverse osmosis unit. It's expected to be tested for use in upcoming NASA moon and Mars missions. Phys.Org reports: [Researchers] have now designed a urine collection device, including an undergarment made of multiple layers of flexible fabric. This connects to a collection cup (with a different shape and size for women and men) of molded silicone, to fit around the genitalia. The inner face of the collection cup is lined with polyester microfiber or a nylon-spandex blend, to draw urine away from the body and towards the inner cup's inner face, from where it is sucked by a vacuum pump. A RFID tag, linked to an absorbent hydrogel, reacts to moisture by activating the pump. Once collected, the urine is diverted to the urine filtration system, where it gets recycled with an efficiency of 87% through a two-step, integrated forward and reverse osmosis filtration system. This uses a concentration gradient to remove water from urine, plus a pump to separate water from salt. The purified water is then enriched in electrolytes and pumped into the in-suit drink bag, again available for consumption. Collecting and purifying 500ml of urine takes only five minutes. The system, which integrates control pumps, sensors, and a liquid-crystal display screen, is powered by a 20.5V battery with a capacity of 40 amp-hours. Its total size is 38 by 23 by 23 cm, with a weight of approximately eight kilograms: sufficiently compact and light to be carried on the back of a spacesuit. Now that the prototype is available, the new design can be tested under simulated conditions, and subsequently during real spacewalks. The design has been published in the journal Frontiers in Space Technology.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Constellation Energy is in talks with the Pennsylvania governor's office and state lawmakers to help fund a possible restart of part of its Three Mile Island power facility, the site of a nuclear meltdown in the 1970s, three sources familiar with the discussions said on Tuesday. The conversations, which two sources described as "beyond preliminary," signal that Constellation is advancing plans to revive part of the southern Pennsylvania nuclear generation site, which operated from 1974 to 2019. The nuclear unit Constellation is considering restarting is separate from the one that melted down. The sources said that a shut Michigan nuclear plant, which was recently awarded a $1.5 billion conditional loan to restart from the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, could serve as a private-public sector blueprint for Three Mile Island. The sources asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the discussions. "Though we have determined it would be technically feasible to restart the unit, we have not made any decision on a restart as there are many economic, commercial, operational and regulatory considerations remaining," Constellation spokesperson Dave Snyder said in an email. Snyder did not comment on the specifics of discussions about reopening the Pennsylvania site. Last month, Constellation told Reuters that it had cleared an engineering study of Three Mile Island, though it was unknown if the Baltimore, Maryland-based energy company would move forward with plans to reopen the site. Constellation also said that given the current premium placed on nuclear energy, acquiring other sites was generally off the table and the company would instead look to expand its existing fleet. The Three Mile Island unit that could be restarted is different to the site's unit 2, which experienced a partial meltdown in 1979 in the most famous commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history. The report notes that "no U.S. nuclear power plant has been reopened after shutting." A restart will not only be costly, but it will be challenged over safety and environmental concerns.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is close to a breakthrough with a new project called "Strawberry," which aims to enhance its AI models with advanced reasoning abilities. Reuters reports: Teams inside OpenAI are working on Strawberry, according to a copy of a recent internal OpenAI document seen by Reuters in May. Reuters could not ascertain the precise date of the document, which details a plan for how OpenAI intends to use Strawberry to perform research. The source described the plan to Reuters as a work in progress. The news agency could not establish how close Strawberry is to being publicly available. How Strawberry works is a tightly kept secret even within OpenAI, the person said. The document describes a project that uses Strawberry models with the aim of enabling the company's AI to not just generate answers to queries but to plan ahead enough to navigate the internet autonomously and reliably to perform what OpenAI terms "deep research," according to the source. This is something that has eluded AI models to date, according to interviews with more than a dozen AI researchers. Asked about Strawberry and the details reported in this story, an OpenAI company spokesperson said in a statement: "We want our AI models to see and understand the world more like we do. Continuous research into new AI capabilities is a common practice in the industry, with a shared belief that these systems will improve in reasoning over time." On Tuesday at an internal all-hands meeting, OpenAI showed a demo of a research project that it claimed had new human-like reasoning skills, according to Bloomberg, opens new tab. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the meeting but declined to give details of the contents. Reuters could not determine if the project demonstrated was Strawberry. OpenAI hopes the innovation will improve its AI models' reasoning capabilities dramatically, the person familiar with it said, adding that Strawberry involves a specialized way of processing an AI model after it has been pre-trained on very large datasets. Researchers Reuters interviewed say that reasoning is key to AI achieving human or super-human-level intelligence.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 2023 red team exercise by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at an unnamed federal agency exposed critical security failings, including unpatched vulnerabilities, inadequate incident response, and weak credential management, leading to a full domain compromise. According to The Register's Connor Jones, the agency failed to detect or remediate malicious activity for five months. From the report: According to the agency's account of the exercise, the red team was able to gain initial access by exploiting an unpatched vulnerability (CVE-2022-21587 - 9.8) in the target agency's Oracle Solaris enclave, leading to what it said was a full compromise. It's worth noting that CVE-2022-21587, an unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) bug carrying a near-maximum 9.8 CVSS rating, was added to CISA's known exploited vulnerability (KEV) catalog in February 2023. The initial intrusion by CISA's red team was made on January 25, 2023. "After gaining access, the team promptly informed the organization's trusted agents of the unpatched device, but the organization took over two weeks to apply the available patch," CISA's report reads. "Additionally, the organization did not perform a thorough investigation of the affected servers, which would have turned up IOCs and should have led to a full incident response. About two weeks after the team obtained access, exploit code was released publicly into a popular open source exploitation framework. CISA identified that the vulnerability was exploited by an unknown third party. CISA added this CVE to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog on February 2, 2023." [...] After gaining access to the Solaris enclave, the red team discovered they couldn't pivot into the Windows part of the network because missing credentials blocked their path, despite enjoying months of access to sensitive web apps and databases. Undeterred, CISA managed to make its way into the Windows network after carrying out phishing attacks on unidentified members of the target agency, one of which was successful. It said real adversaries may have instead used prolonged password-praying attacks rather than phishing at this stage, given that several service accounts were identified as having weak passwords. After gaining that access, the red team injected a persistent RAT and later discovered unsecured admin credentials, which essentially meant it was game over for the agency being assessed. "None of the accessed servers had any noticeable additional protections or network access restrictions despite their sensitivity and critical functions in the network," CISA said. CISA described this as a "full domain compromise" that gave the attackers access to tier zero assets -- the most highly privileged systems. "The team found a password file left from a previous employee on an open, administrative IT share, which contained plaintext usernames and passwords for several privileged service accounts," the report reads. "With the harvested Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) information, the team identified one of the accounts had system center operations manager (SCOM) administrator privileges and domain administrator privileges for the parent domain. "They identified another account that also had administrative permissions for most servers in the domain. The passwords for both accounts had not been updated in over eight years and were not enrolled in the organization's identity management (IDM)." From here, the red team realized the victim organization had trust relationships with multiple external FCEB organizations, which CISA's team then pivoted into using the access they already had. The team "kerberoasted" one partner organization. Kerberoasting is an attack on the Kerberos authentication protocol typically used in Windows networks to authenticate users and devices. However, it wasn't able to move laterally with the account due to low privileges, so it instead used those credentials to exploit a second trusted partner organization. Kerberoasting yielded a more privileged account at the second external org, the password for which was crackable. CISA said that due to network ownership, legal agreements, and/or vendor opacity, these kinds of cross-organizational attacks are rarely tested during assessments. However, SILENTSHIELD assessments are able to be carried out following new-ish powers afforded to CISA by the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the same powers that also allow CISA's Federal Attack Surface Testing (FAST) pentesting program to operate. It's crucial that these avenues are able to be explored in such exercises because they're routes into systems adversaries will have no reservations about exploring in a real-world scenario. For the first five months of the assessment, the target FCEB agency failed to detect or remediate any of the SILENTSHIELD activity, raising concerns over its ability to spot genuine malicious activity. CISA said the findings demonstrated the need for agencies to apply defense-in-depth principles. The cybersecurity agency recommended network segmentation and a Secure-by-Design commitment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Tyson reports via Tom's Hardware: The German Navy is searching for a new storage system to replace the aging 8-inch (20cm) floppy disks which are vital to the running of its Brandenburg class F123 frigates. According to an official tender document, the ideal answer to the German Navy's problems would be a drop-in floppy disk replacement based upon a storage emulation system, reports Golem.de. Germany's Brandenburg class F123 frigates were commissioned in the mid 1990s, so it is understandable that floppy disks were seen as a handy removable storage medium. These drives are part of the frigates' data acquisition system and, thus "central to controlling basic ship functions such as propulsion and power generation," according to the source report. The F123s are specialized in submarine hunting, and they are also being upgraded in terms of the weapon systems and weapon control systems. Swedish company Saab is the general contractor for the F123 modernizations. It won't be trivial to replace three decades old computer hardware seamlessly, while retaining the full functionality of the existing floppies. However, we note that other companies have wrestled similar problems in recent years. Moreover, there are plenty of emulator enthusiasts using technologies for floppy emulation solutions like Gotek drives which can emulate a variety of floppy drive standards and formats. There are other workable solutions already out there, but it all depends on who the German Navy chooses to deliver the project.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Southwest Airlines has signed a deal with Archer Aviation to develop plans for an on-demand eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) service in California. The Verge reports: The service will operate using Archer's battery-powered, four-passenger, tilt-rotor Midnight aircraft, which are designed to take off and land vertically from a landing strip like a helicopter. As part of the deal, the aircraft will get access to 14 California airports where Southwest operates. [...] Archer claims that trips that normally take 60-90 minutes by car can be done in 10-20 minutes in the company's air taxis. Archer came out of stealth in spring 2020 after having poached key talent from Wisk and Airbus' Vahana project. (That fact spurred a lawsuit from Wisk for alleged trade secret theft, which was finally settled last year.) The company has a $1 billion order from United Airlines for its eVTOL aircraft and a deal to mass-produce its eVTOL craft with global automaker Stellantis. Archer recently received a Part 135 air carrier certification from the Federal Aviation Administration, which the company will need to operate an on-demand air taxi service. Archer has said it plans on launching before the end of 2025. [...] As part of the deal, Archer will work with Southwest and its partners on the development of an air taxi network across California. That includes the unions of Southwest employees, like the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: John Binns, a U.S. citizen who has been incarcerated in Turkey, is linked to the massive data breach of metadata belonging to nearly all of AT&T's customers that the telecommunications giant announced on Friday, three sources independently told 404 Media. [...] As 404 Media reported in January, Binns has already been indicted for allegedly breaking into T-Mobile in 2021 and selling stolen data on more than 40 million people. Now, he is allegedly connected to the latest breach against AT&T, which the company said it detected in April. The AT&T data was lifted from a Snowflake instance, a data warehousing tool, AT&T told 404 Media. Snowflake has been at the center of a series of massive and high profile breaches, including Ticketmaster and Santander. In a blog post published in June which covered a threat actor targeting Snowflake instances, cybersecurity company Mandiant said the threat actor, which it dubs UNC5537, "comprises members based in North America, and collaborates with an additional member in Turkey." In its breach announcement, AT&T said authorities had already apprehended one of the people involved in the breach. Binns was recently arrested and detained in Turkey, The Desk reported in May. That report, which is the last public information about his whereabouts, says he was detained following an extradition request from the U.S. Before he was arrested, Binns told 404 Media in January that he had "reasons to not be concerned" about being extradited.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon's AI chatbot Rufus is now live for all U.S. customers. Engadget's Lawrence Bonk reports: So what does it do? It's an Amazon chatbot so it helps with shopping. You can ask for lists of recommended products and ask what specific products do and stuff like that. I've tooled around with it a bit this morning and it seems fine, though a bit boring. I will say that I cross-referenced some of the recommended products with the web version and Rufus does not automatically list promoted items, at least for now. It spit out a seemingly random list of well-reviewed products on several occasions. That's fine by me, though I'm not about to buy something based on the word of a one-day old chatbot. You can also ask specific questions about products, but the answers seem to be pulled directly from the descriptions. As any regular Amazon customer knows, some of these descriptions are accurate and others aren't. The chatbot is tied to your personal account, so it can answer questions about upcoming deliveries and the like. Amazon says that the bot has been trained on its product catalog, along with customer reviews, community Q&As and public information found throughout the web. However, it hasn't disclosed what websites it pulled that public information from and to what end. It didn't even confirm that these were retail-adjacent websites. You can try Rufus by updating to the latest version of the Amazon Shopping app. It'll be available in the bottom navigation bar with a typical AI icon consisting of bubbles and sparkles/stars.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jowi Morales reports via Tom's Hardware: There's a vast difference between hardware and software developers, which opens up pitfalls for those trying to coordinate the two teams. Arm and x86 researchers encountered it years ago -- and Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, fears RISC-V development may fall into the same chasm again. "Even when you do hardware design in a more open manner, hardware people are different enough from software people [that] there's a fairly big gulf between the Verilog and even the kernel, much less higher up the stack where you are working in what [is] so far away from the hardware that you really have no idea how the hardware works," he said (video here). "So, it's really hard to kind of work across this very wide gulf of things and I suspect the hardware designers, some of them have some overlap, but they will learn by doing mistakes -- all the same mistakes that have been done before." [...] "They'll have all the same issues we have on the Arm side and that x86 had before them," he says. "It will take a few generations for them to say, 'Oh, we didn't think about that,' because they have new people involved." But even if RISC-V development is still expected to make many mistakes, he also said it will be much easier to develop the hardware now. Linus says, "It took a few decades to really get to the point where Arm and x86 are competing on fairly equal ground because there was al this software that was fairly PC-centric and that has passed. That will make it easier for new architectures like RISC-V to then come in."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket was grounded by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday after one broke apart in space and doomed its payload of Starlink satellites, the first failure in more than seven years of a rocket relied upon by the global space industry. Roughly an hour after Falcon 9 lifted off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday night, the rocket's second stage failed to reignite and deployed its 20 Starlink satellites on a shallow orbital path where they will soon reenter and burn up in Earth's atmosphere. The attempt to reignite the engine "resulted in an engine RUD for reasons currently unknown," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote early on Friday on his social media platform X, using an industry acronym for Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly that usually means explosion. The Falcon 9 will be grounded until SpaceX investigates the cause of the failure, fixes the rocket and receives the agency's approval, the FAA said in a statement. That process could take several weeks or months, depending on the complexity of the failure and SpaceX's plan to fix it. Musk said SpaceX was updating the software of the Starlink satellites to force their on-board thrusters to fire harder than usual to avoid a fiery atmospheric re-entry. "Unlike a Star Trek episode, this will probably not work, but it's worth a shot," Musk said. The satellites' altitude is so shallow that Earth's gravity is pulling them 3 miles (5 km) closer toward the atmosphere with each orbit, SpaceX later said, confirming they would inevitably "re-enter Earth's atmosphere and fully demise." SpaceX said the second stage's failure occurred after engineers detected a leak of liquid oxygen, a propellant. The mishap occurred on Falcon 9's 354th mission. It was the first Falcon 9 failure since 2016, when a rocket exploded on a launch pad in Florida and destroyed its customer payload, an Israeli communications satellite. The failure "breaks a success streak of more than 300 straight missions," notes Reuters. "We knew this incredible run had to come to an end at some point," Tom Mueller, SpaceX's former vice president of propulsion who designed Falcon 9's engines. "... The team will fix the problem and start the cycle again."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung unveiled new wearable devices at its Unpacked event earlier this week, drawing comparisons to Apple's offerings. The Galaxy Watch Ultra, set for release on July 24, bears striking similarities to Apple's Watch Ultra 2 launched last September. Both feature titanium cases, orange-accented buttons, and specialized bands. Samsung's version, priced at $650, undercuts Apple's $800 model. Business Insider adds: But the strategy has its downsides. If you spot someone wearing Galaxy Watch Ultra, there's a good chance you'd mistake it for Apple's model -- which doesn't help Samsung differentiate itself. In a statement to Business Insider, Samsung said that the design choices for its new smartwatch were "made to ensure comfort, usability, and durability in a variety of use cases." It didn't mention what went into naming the device. The similarities extend to Samsung's new earbuds. The Galaxy Buds 3 Pro and the Galaxy Buds 3 -- also announced at Unpacked -- got a revamp that steps away from previous designs to make Samsung's Bluetooth earbuds shaped more like Apple AirPods. The Galaxy Buds 2 Pro are stemless and come in light purple, but their successor only comes in silver or white. Similar to the AirPods Pro, Galaxy Buds 3 Pro owners will be able to control their earbuds with gestures.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists say "a reservoir of disease" is being created after discovering bacteria that naturally occur in rivers are becoming resistant to antibiotics due to the impact of sewage. From a report: Researchers at the University of Suffolk said bacterial strains found on the non-tidal section of the River Deben in Suffolk had acquired resistance by exchanging DNA with antibiotic resistant E. coli. Some bacteria have become resistant to the antibiotic carbapenem, which is used as the last line of defence in fighting infections already resistant to traditional antibiotics. Dr Nick Tucker, a microbiologist leading the research, described the discovery as "particularly worrying." "Organisms that are currently low risk are being mixed with pathogenic organisms from sewage," he said. "We're needlessly adding pathogenic and virulence genes to bacteria found in the environment, and that could be creating a reservoir of disease." The team has been working closely with citizen scientists from the Deben Climate Centre, who have been taking water samples for two years. They have also been working with scientists at the government's CEFAS laboratories, who have helped identify the new strains that are being screened for their resistance to six of the most commonly-used antibiotics. The River Deben rises in Debenham, Suffolk, before flowing through Woodbridge and down to the North Sea.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India's antitrust watchdog has concluded that Apple abused its dominant position in the iOS app store market, according to a confidential report seen by Reuters, marking a significant development in the country's scrutiny of tech giants. The Competition Commission of India, which initiated an investigation into Apple in 2021, has determined that the company engaged in "abusive conduct and practices" by compelling developers to utilize its proprietary in-app purchase system, Reuters added. The report asserts that Apple wields "significant influence" over the distribution of digital products to consumers through its iOS platform and App Store, characterizing the tech giant as an "unavoidable trading partner" for app developers who have little choice but to comply with Apple's terms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Conversation: Reading and writing articles published in academic journals and presented at conferences is a central part of being a researcher. When researchers write a scholarly article, they must cite the work of peers to provide context, detail sources of inspiration and explain differences in approaches and results. A positive citation by other researchers is a key measure of visibility for a researcher's own work. But what happens when this citation system is manipulated? A recent Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology article by our team of academic sleuths -- which includes information scientists, a computer scientist and a mathematician -- has revealed an insidious method to artificially inflate citation counts through metadata manipulations: sneaked references. People are becoming more aware of scientific publications and how they work, including their potential flaws. Just last year more than 10,000 scientific articles were retracted. The issues around citation gaming and the harm it causes the scientific community, including damaging its credibility, are well documented. Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors' names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication. These details are stored as metadata, not visible in the article's text directly, but assigned to a digital object identifier, or DOI -- a unique identifier for each scientific publication. References in a scientific publication allow authors to justify methodological choices or present the results of past studies, highlighting the iterative and collaborative nature of science. However, we found through a chance encounter that some unscrupulous actors have added extra references, invisible in the text but present in the articles' metadata, when they submitted the articles to scientific databases. The result? Citation counts for certain researchers or journals have skyrocketed, even though these references were not cited by the authors in their articles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of astronomers want to change the definition of a planet. Their new proposed definition wouldn't bring Pluto back into the planetary fold, but it could reclassify thousands of celestial bodies across the universe. From a report: The International Astronomical Union's (IAU) current definition of a planet, established in 2006, includes only celestial bodies that are nearly round, are gravitationally dominant and orbit our Sun. This Sun-centric definition excludes all of the bodies we've discovered outside our solar system, even if they may fit all other parameters. They are instead considered exoplanets. Those behind the new proposal critiqued the IAU's definition in an upcoming paper in the Planetary Science Journal, arguing it's vague, not quantitative and unnecessarily exclusionary. Their new proposal would instead classify planets based on their mass, considering a planet to be any celestial body that: 1. orbits one or more stars, brown dwarfs or stellar remnants and, is more massive than 10ÂÂ kilograms (kg) and, is less massive than 13 Jupiter masses (2.5 X 10^28Âkg).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's been tried before, more than once, but if it comes as a stock feature, maybe people will actually start to use the feature. Google's Pixel 9 range of fondleslabs is coming soon, and the company has already announced an event, Made by Google, for August 13th at 1000 Pacific Time (that's 1700 UTC, and 1800 for Brits.) The new devices are very likely to run Android 15 -- whose first developer preview appeared in February. Android Police reports that one of the less obvious features of the beta may continue to final release and could become more apparent: the desktop mode that can be activated in Android 14 QPR3 Beta 2.1. Having a desktop mode in Android isn't of itself a new thing. Samsung has offered its Dex feature since the Galaxy S8, and various vultures ventured Dex-wards in 2017 and again in 2018. The snag was that you needed a special dock to try it. Android 10 gained a hidden desktop mode in its developer features, but it wasn't easy to find. These days, though, the baseline is rather closer. Monitors with USB C connections are quite ordinary now, with ordinary prices to match, unlike, say, their prices five years ago. You can even get affordable portable ones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a new analysis, research firm Bernstein challenges the conventional wisdom surrounding Apple's iPhone sales fluctuations, arguing that perceived market share shifts between Apple and Android devices are largely illusory. The report, which Bernstein sent to its clients, contends that the majority of iPhone buyers are existing users upgrading their devices, rather than switchers from Android platforms. Bernstein posits that year-to-year changes in iPhone unit sales are predominantly driven by Apple's upgrade rates within its established user base. This dynamic creates the appearance of significant market share gains or losses, particularly in China, where consumers are highly sensitive to new features. The analyst notes that upgrade cycles in China tend to be more pronounced than in other markets, leading to exaggerated perceptions of market share volatility. He suggests that the company's struggles in the region are more likely attributed to poor upgrade rates within its existing customer base rather than a mass exodus to competitors like Huawei.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The vast majority of the massive, metallic towers the city commissioned to help low-income neighborhoods access high-speed 5G internet still lack cell signal equipment -- more than two years after hundreds of the structures began sprouting across the five boroughs. Just two of the nearly 200 Link5G towers installed by tech firm CityBridge since 2022 have been fitted with 5G equipment, company officials said. Delayed installations and cooling enthusiasm around 5G technology have discouraged carriers like Verizon from using the towers to build out their networks, experts say. The firm only has an agreement with a single telecommunications carrier to deliver high-speed internet, stymieing its efforts to boost mobile connectivity citywide. The 32-foot-tall structures, which resemble giant tampon applicators emerging from the sidewalk, offer the same services as the LinkNYC electronic billboards that popped up around the city in 2016. Those were also installed by CityBridge. Both the original Link kiosks and the 5G towers provide free limited-range Wi-Fi, charging outlets and a tablet to connect users to city services. Data shared by the company shows that 16 million people have used the internet at kiosks since 2016, and the attached tablets are used to call for city services thousands of times each month. But unlike the LinkNYC kiosks, each new tower is topped with a 12-foot-tall cylindrical mesh chamber containing five empty shelves reserved for companies like Verizon and T-Mobile to store the equipment they use to transmit high-speed 5G internet service to paying customers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indonesia said it is beginning to recover data that had been encrypted in a major ransomware attack last month which affected more than 160 government agencies. From a report: The attackers identified as Brain Cipher asked for $8 million in ransom to unlock the data before later apologising and releasing the decryption key for free, according to Singapore-based cybersecurity firm StealthMole. The attack has disrupted multiple government services including immigration and operations at major airports. Indonesian officials have acknowledged that the bulk of the data had not been backed up. Chief Security Minister Hadi Tjahjanto said in a statement late on Thursday that data for 30 public services overseen by 12 ministries had been recovered using a "decryption strategy" without elaborating.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.