TrickBot survived an initial takedown attempt, but Microsoft and its partners are countering TrickBot operators after every move, taking down any new infrastructure the group is attempting to bring up online. From a report: Last week, a coalition of cyber-security firms led by Microsoft orchestrated a global takedown against TrickBot, one of today's largest malware botnets and cybercrime operations. Even if Microsoft brought down TrickBot infrastructure in the first few days, the botnet survived, and TrickBot operators brought new command and control (C&C) servers online in the hopes of continuing their cybercrime spree. But as several sources in the cyber-security industry told ZDNet last week, everyone expected TrickBot to fight back, and Microsoft promised to continue cracking down against the group in the weeks to come. In an update posted today on its takedown efforts, Microsoft confirmed a second wave of takedown actions against TrickBot. The OS maker said it has slowly chipped away at TrickBot infrastructure over the past week and has taken down 94% of the botnet's C&C servers, including the original servers and new ones brought online after the first takedown.

Tesla has started the rollout of its Full Self-Driving Beta update, which Elon Musk said "will be extremely slow and cautious." From the report: We have been expecting the update for a while now. Over the last few months, Elon Musk has been talking about Tesla working on "a significant foundational rewrite in the Tesla Autopilot." He has been teasing the new core change to Autopilot, which should be able to interpret its environment in 4D instead of 2D after the update and should result in a rapid improvement in performance and new features being released quicker. More recently, the CEO has been referring to the update as "Full Self-Driving Beta" or "FSD Beta." Last week, Musk said that Tesla will start to release "Full Self-Driving Beta" to some customers on Tuesday. Yesterday, the CEO confirmed that the rollout is happening as planned tonight and added that the system will be "extremely slow and cautious."

Mozilla has responded to the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against Google, but rather than commending the DOJ's action, the Firefox browser maker has voiced concerns that its commercial partnership could make it "collateral damage" in the fight against Google's alleged monopolistic practices. From a report: The DOJ, with support from 11 U.S. states, confirmed yesterday that it is suing Google for allegedly violating anti-competition laws by crowding out rivals in the internet search and advertising markets. "Small and independent companies such as Mozilla thrive by innovating, disrupting, and providing users with industry-leading features and services in areas like search," Mozilla chief legal officer Amy Keating wrote in a blog post. "The ultimate outcomes of an antitrust lawsuit should not cause collateral damage to the very organizations -- like Mozilla -- best positioned to drive competition and protect the interests of consumers on the web."

Mozilla has a long and complicated history with Google. In recent years, Mozilla has launched countless privacy campaigns against the internet giant's various online properties, and just last month it introduced a new browser add-on to crowdsource research into YouTube's opaque recommendation algorithm. On the other hand, Mozilla relies heavily on royalties from a search engine partnership with Google. The duo recently extended their deal to make Google the default search engine inside Firefox in the U.S. and other markets, which will reportedly secure Mozilla up to $450 million over the next three years.

At least 2,000 law enforcement agencies have tools to get into encrypted smartphones, according to new research, and they are using them far more than previously known. From a report: In a new Apple ad, a man on a city bus announces he has just shopped for divorce lawyers. Then a woman recites her credit card number through a megaphone in a park. "Some things shouldn't be shared," the ad says, "iPhone helps keep it that way." Apple has built complex encryption into iPhones and made the devices' security central to its marketing pitch. That, in turn, has angered law enforcement. Officials from the F.B.I. director to rural sheriffs have argued that encrypted phones stifle their work to catch and convict dangerous criminals. They have tried to force Apple and Google to unlock suspects' phones, but the companies say they can't. In response, the authorities have put their own marketing spin on the problem. Law enforcement, they say, is "going dark." Yet new data reveals a twist to the encryption debate that undercuts both sides: Law enforcement officials across the nation regularly break into encrypted smartphones.

That is because at least 2,000 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states now have tools to get into locked, encrypted phones and extract their data, according to years of public records collected in a report by Upturn, a Washington nonprofit that investigates how the police use technology. At least 49 of the 50 largest U.S. police departments have the tools, according to the records, as do the police and sheriffs in small towns and counties across the country, including Buckeye, Ariz.; Shaker Heights, Ohio; and Walla Walla, Wash. And local law enforcement agencies that don't have such tools can often send a locked phone to a state or federal crime lab that does. With more tools in their arsenal, the authorities have used them in an increasing range of cases, from homicides and rapes to drugs and shoplifting, according to the records, which were reviewed by The New York Times. Upturn researchers said the records suggested that U.S. authorities had searched hundreds of thousands of phones over the past five years. While the existence of such tools has been known for some time, the records show that the authorities break into phones far more than previously understood -- and that smartphones, with their vast troves of personal data, are not as impenetrable as Apple and Google have advertised. While many in law enforcement have argued that smartphones are often a roadblock to investigations, the findings indicate that they are instead one of the most important tools for prosecutions.

Last month, Amazon announced a gaming platform called Luna that lets users play games via the cloud. The company is rolling out early access today, starting with a library of 50 games and support for Mac, PC, Fire TV, and iOS devices. The Verge's Chaim Gartenberg shares what it's like so far and how it compares to other streaming services out there like Microsoft xCloud and Google Stadia. Here's an excerpt from his report: The biggest question for Luna -- like any cloud gaming service -- is performance. For cloud gaming to work well, companies like Amazon need to rapidly deliver compressed video frames that respond to your button presses even if internet bandwidth dips and even if your house isn't located right next to an Amazon server farm. Amazon recommends a minimum connection speed of 10 Mbps for Luna, but your home's internal network also matters. We tested Luna on a variety of devices in two different Verge editors' homes across two different coasts with a variety of internet speeds and connection types. So far, 10 Mbps doesn't seem like nearly enough. We found that we needed a connection of at least 25 Mbps in order to have a consistently playable stream, with more bandwidth obviously being better. My colleague Sean Hollister limited his router to 10 Mbps, 15 Mbps, and 20 Mbps, but he'd still get stretches of choppy video.

The best performance (of course) came from a PC with a wired Ethernet connection and controller, with no other family members streaming video in the house. Playing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night on that solid of a connection was virtually indistinguishable from the game running natively. (Switching back and forth, you can tell it takes oh-so-slightly longer to swing a sword, but it felt perfectly playable.) Admittedly, there are few benefits to actually using Luna to stream the game on a capable PC. On the other hand, Metro: Exodus, one of the most graphically intensive games available to stream, looked and played decidedly worse streamed to a web browser than it does on a capable gaming PC. Honestly, it doesn't look great in either Luna or Stadia, but at least Stadia could keep up with a mouse and keyboard. Luna's mouse was extremely laggy.

Using wireless connections introduces a lot more variables into Luna's performance. If you have a steady, strong Wi-Fi connection, Luna works pretty well, with little to no lag, smooth HD video, and responsive enough gameplay to enjoy even fast-paced platformers like Sonic Mania on an iPhone with a paired Bluetooth controller. But when Luna has a bad connection, it's rough. For some reason, Amazon doesn't seem to degrade the quality of video streaming when connection speeds are bad; it just tries to power on through by dropping frames until speeds pick up. I also ran into issues where audio started to lag behind what was otherwise smooth gameplay, presumably due to a sluggish connection. Right now, it seems that Luna's performance is almost entirely dependent on having good internet. Further reading: iOS Web App, Game Library, and App Functionality

General Motors is investing about $2.2 billion in its U.S. manufacturing operations, largely to increase production of electric vehicles, the company announced Tuesday. CNBC reports: The investment is the latest for the Detroit automaker as it pivots toward EVs under GM CEO Mary Barra's "triple zero" vision of zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion -- an overarching goal for the company. Since March 2019, GM has committed to invest more than $4.5 billion in three U.S. manufacturing sites to prepare for EV-related production. The company has previously said it plans to release at least 20 new electric vehicles globally by 2023, including the upcoming GMC Hummer EV, which will be unveiled Tuesday night.

The $2.2 billion in new investments will occur in the coming years, according to the company. Roughly $2 billion of that money will go toward a plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, for production of future electric vehicles, including the recently unveiled Cadillac Lyriq crossover. Renovation work at the facility, which will be GM's third in the U.S. to produce EVs, will begin immediately, according to the automaker.

In connection with the announcement, GM will eventually move production of the GMC Acadia from the Tennessee plant to a facility in mid-Michigan. The company said it will invest more than $100 million at the Lansing Delta Township plant for assembly of the next-generation Acadia crossover at an undisclosed time. Separately from EVs, GM on Tuesday also announced new investments of roughly $53.3 million at four plants in Michigan to increase production of its heavy-duty pickup trucks, self-driving Cruise AV test vehicles and 10-speed transmissions.

Last month, Microsoft officials said they'd release a preview of the new Chromium-based Edge browser for Linux some time in October. On October 20, Microsoft made good on the promise, making available the Edge Dev Channel build for Linux. ZDNet reports: The new release supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE Linux distributions. Microsoft is planning to release weekly builds, like it does with the Dev Channel builds for other platforms. To get started, users can download and install a .deb or .rpm package directly from the Edge Insider site, which will configure a system to get future automatic updates. Or users can install Edge from Microsoft's Linux Software Repository. More detailed instructions are available on Microsoft's Chredge-on-Linux blog post.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg Law: The Federal Communications Commission is poised to delay $9 billion in rural 5G subsidies for 18 to 24 months so it can fix mapping flaws that bar the agency from determining which areas need the service. The holdup is the most recent delay in the FCC's nine-year effort to pay wireless carriers to expand service to remote areas that otherwise are too unprofitable to serve. The FCC scrapped a similar subsidy effort last year, after it found carriers' maps exaggerated existing coverage areas, meaning locations that needed the subsidies wouldn't have gotten them.

The commission plans to vote Oct. 27 on an order that would create the new $9 billion effort to replace the program it scrapped. Under the order, however, the agency would wait to award funds until it evaluates new data it's collecting on rural service locations. The replacement 5G program would distribute twice as many funds as its predecessor. As in the earlier effort, the subsidies would come from the agency's Universal Service Fund, which is raised from monthly fees on consumers' phone bills. It will likely take until at least mid-2022 for the FCC to collect the data, putting the commission on track to start awarding the funding to carriers later that year. That timeline assumes Congress appropriates the $65 million needed to fund the initiative next year, though there is bipartisan support to do so.

Google doled out more than $1 billion last year to U.S. mobile carriers to distribute its search engine, according to the landmark antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department. From a report: The DOJ suit, filed Tuesday, details several methods Google uses to make its search the default service on browsers, smartphones and other devices. That includes deals with Apple and Android manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics. Google also cut hefty revenue sharing agreements with major mobile carriers to box out competing search engines and browsers, the Justice Department said. In exchange for placing Google search as the default on phones, carriers received a portion of search advertising revenue. "If a carrier or manufacturer does not renew its revenue sharing agreement with Google, the distributor loses out on revenue share not only for new mobile devices but also for the phones and tablets previously sold and in the hands of consumers," the Justice Department said in the suit. "This provision is punitive to the carrier or manufacturer and helps to ensure that carriers and manufacturers will not stray from Google."

A hacking group is donating stolen money to charity in what is seen as a mysterious first for cyber-crime that's puzzling experts. smooth wombat writes: Darkside hackers claim to have extorted millions of dollars from companies, but say they now want to "make the world a better place." In a post on the dark web, the gang posted receipts for $10,000 in Bitcoin donations to two charities. One of them, Children International, says it will not be keeping the money. The move is being seen as a strange and troubling development, both morally and legally. In the blog post on 13 October, the hackers claim they only target large profitable companies with their ransomware attacks. The attacks hold organisations' IT systems hostage until a ransom is paid. They wrote: "We think that it's fair that some of the money the companies have paid will go to charity. No matter how bad you think our work is, we are pleased to know that we helped changed someone's life. Today we sended (sic) the first donations." The cyber-criminals posted the donation along with tax receipts they received in exchange for the 0.88 Bitcoin they had sent to two charities, The Water Project and Children International.

Imagine parallel parking a 15-passenger van into just two to three parking spaces surrounded by two-story boulders. On Oct. 20, a University of Arizona-led NASA mission 16 years in the making will attempt the astronomical equivalent more than 200 million miles away. A NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx will soon attempt to touch the surface of an asteroid and collect loose rubble. bobbied writes: OSIRIS-REx is the United States' first asteroid sample return mission, aiming to collect and carry a pristine, unaltered sample from an asteroid back to Earth for scientific study. The spacecraft will attempt to touch the surface of the asteroid Bennu, which is hurtling through space at 63,000 miles per hour. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will deploy an 11-foot-long robotic arm called TAGSAM -- Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism -- and spend about 10 seconds collecting at least two ounces of loose rubble from the asteroid. The spacecraft, monitored remotely by a team of scientists and engineers, will then stow away the sample and begin its return to Earth, scheduled for 2023. You can watch this sample collection "Touch-And-Go" maneuver Oct. 20 at 5 p.m. EDT/ 2 p.m. PDT on NASA Television and the agency's website. As senior vice president for research and innovation at UArizona and a mechanical engineer with a long career in space systems engineering, I believe this milestone for OSIRIS-REx captures perfectly the spirit of research and innovation, the careful balance of problem-solving and perseverance, of obstacle and opportunity.

In a report published today by cyber-security firm Rapid7, the company said it worked with Pakistani security researcher Rafay Baloch to disclose ten new address bar spoofing vulnerabilities across seven mobile browser apps. From a report: Impacted browsers include big names like Apple Safari, Opera Touch, and Opera Mini, but also niche apps like Bolt, RITS, UC Browser, and Yandex Browser. The issues were discovered earlier this year and reported to browser makers in August. The big vendors patched the issues right away, while the smaller vendors didn't even bother replying to the researchers, leaving their browsers vulnerable to attacks. "Exploitation all comes down to 'JavaScript shenanigans'," said Rapid7's Research Director, Tod Beardsley. The Rapid7 exec says that by messing with the timing between when the page loads and when the browser gets a chance to refresh the address bar URL, a malicious site could force the browser to show the wrong address.

Sweden banned Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE from its 5G mobile networks on Tuesday, citing China's "extensive intelligence gathering and theft of technology." From a report: Since the Trump administration announced its own ban last year, the U.S. government has increasingly pressured allies to follow its lead amid growing tensions between the West and China. In July, the United Kingdom became the first European country to announce plans to exclude Huawei from its networks by 2027. The Swedish government has given telecom companies until 2025 to remove Huawei and ZTE equipment from their infrastructure. "China is one of the biggest threats to Sweden," said Klas Friberg, head of Sweden's security services. He said Beijing's "extensive intelligence gathering and theft of technology, research and development" is key to its economic and military development, according to the Financial Times. "This is what we must consider when building the 5G network of the future. We cannot compromise with Sweden's security."

Google Photos is reviving its photo printing subscription service and introducing same-day prints. The company earlier this year had briefly tested a new program that used A.I. to suggest the month's 10 best photos, which were then shipped to your home automatically. But Google ended the test on June 30. From a report: During the trial, Google had offered users a $7.99 per month subscription that would automatically select 10 photos from one of three themes, including people and pets, landscapes, or "a little bit of everything" mix. The 4x6 photos were printed on matte, white cardstock with a 1/8-inch border. The new subscription, launching soon, leverages feedback from the early tests to now give users more control over which prints they receive and how they look. It also drops the price to $6.99 per month, including shipping and before tax. With the new Premium Print Series, as the subscription is called, Google Photos will use machine learning techniques to pick 10 of your recent photos to print. But users can edit the photo selection and they can choose either a matte or glossy finish or add a border before the photos ship.

Intel has agreed to sell its Nand memory unit to South Korea's SK Hynix for about $9 billion, a deal that allows the U.S. chipmaker to concentrate on its main business while shoring up the Asian company's position in a booming market. From a report: The chipmaker will pay 10.3 trillion won for the Intel unit, which makes flash memory components for computers and other devices. The acquisition, which will take place in stages through 2025, includes Intel's solid-state drive, Nand flash and wafer businesses, as well as a production facility in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian. The deal should shore up Hynix's position in a business that's boomed after Covid-19 drove demand for the chips used in everything from Apple's iPhones to data centers. It whittles down another player in an industry the Korean company dominates alongside Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology, potentially buoying Nand flash prices.

With competition among Earth's telecoms providers as fierce as ever, equipment maker Nokia has announced its expansion into a new market, winning a deal to install the first cellular network on the moon. From a report: The Finnish equipment manufacturer said it was selected by NASA to deploy an "ultra-compact, low-power, space-hardened" wireless 4G network on the lunar surface, as part of the US space agency's plan to establish a long-term human presence on the moon by 2030. The $14.1m contract, awarded to Nokia's US subsidiary, is part of Nasa's Artemis programme which aims to send the first woman, and next man, to the moon by 2024. The astronauts will begin carrying out detailed experiments and explorations which the agency hopes will help it develop its first human mission to Mars. Nokia's network equipment will be installed remotely on the moon's surface using a lunar hopper built by Intuitive Machines in late 2022, Nokia said. "The network will self-configure upon deployment," the firm said in a statement, adding that the wireless technology will allow for "vital command and control functions, remote control of lunar rovers, real-time navigation and streaming of high definition video."

Microsoft is teaming with Elon Musk's SpaceX and others as the software giant opens a new front in its cloud-computing battle with Amazon.com targeting space customers. From a report: Microsoft would help connect and deploy new services using swarms of low-orbit spacecraft being proposed by SpaceX [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], and more traditional fleets of satellites circling the earth at higher altitudes. Microsoft's initiative targeting commercial and government space businesses, formally launched Tuesday, comes about three months after Amazon Web Services, the e-retailer's cloud unit, disclosed its space-focused effort. Some analysts have projected that overall revenue from space-related cloud services could total about $15 billion by the end of the decade, at least several times higher than current levels. Competition in the cloud between Amazon, the market leader, and No. 2 Microsoft has been heating up in recent years. The pandemic has intensified the fight as companies accelerate their shift to the cloud and make vendor choices that could last for years. [...] SpaceX, which is in the process of deploying its Starlink project consisting of thousands of high-speed internet satellites intended to provide connectivity around the globe, makes a natural partner for Microsoft. A major reason is that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is pursuing his own low-orbit satellite constellation. Mr. Bezos also owns Blue Origin, a rocket company competing with SpaceX.

The Justice Department plans to accuse Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising in a lawsuit to be filed on Tuesday, the government's most significant legal challenge to a tech company's market power in a generation, according to officials at the agency. From a report: In its suit, to be filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C., the agency will accuse Google, a unit of Alphabet, of illegally maintaining its monopoly over search through several exclusive business contracts and agreements that lock out competition, said the officials, who were not authorized to speak on the record. Such contracts include Google's payment of billions of dollars to Apple to place the Google search engine as the default for iPhones. The agency will argue that Google, which controls about 80 percent of search queries in the United States, struck agreements with phone makers using Alphabet's Android operating system to pre-load the search engine on their phones and make it hard for rival search engines to become a replacement. By using contracts to maintain its monopoly, competition and innovation has suffered, the suit with argue.

The suit reflects the pushback against the power of the nation's largest corporations, and especially technology giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. Conservatives like President Trump and liberals like Senator Elizabeth Warren have been highly critical of the concentration of power in a handful of tech behemoths. Attorney General William P. Barr, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, has played an unusually active role in the investigation. He pushed career Justice Department attorneys to bring the case by the end of September, prompting pushback from lawyers who wanted more time and complained of political influence. Mr. Barr has spoken publicly about the inquiry for months and set tight deadlines for the prosecutors leading the effort. Update The Justice Department has filed the lawsuit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The writing was on the wall two years ago. The OpenStack Foundation was going to cover more than just the OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. Today, that metamorphosis is complete. The Foundation now covers a wide variety of open-source cloud and container technologies as the Open Infrastructure Foundation. Why so long? COO Mark Collier said, "They wanted to be sure they did this right." One reason for this was to make sure they could differentiate their group from The Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which covers much of the same ground.

The Open Infrastructure Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce said that, "OpenStack is still one of the top three most active open source projects in the world. It's just the landscape of infrastructure and there are many new exciting trends with open becoming more and more ubiquitous." To make use of all these different ways the cloud has evolved requires new software programs and that's where the Open Infrastructure Foundation comes in. The new Foundation's mission is to establish new open-source communities to help bring into production new emerging use cases. This includes AI/ML; CI/CD; container infrastructure; edge computing; 5G; and public, private and hybrid clouds.

Two recent articles from Electrek may have current and/or future Tesla owners concerned. According to Electrek, Tesla is now admitting that a design flaw in the Model 3 could cause the vehicle's rear bumper panel to fall off when driving through standing water. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Tesla admits that a problem with Model 3 vehicles led to them losing the body panel on their rear bumper when driving in puddles of water. Early on, the Model 3 had some issues with the body panel on the rear bumper falling off after driving through what drivers have described as heavy rain or water puddles. That's obviously not normal, and Tesla said that it was investigating the situation, but we never heard back from the automaker. Some owners had issue with Tesla performing the repair under warranty as the company argues over how deep the water was that car owners drove through.

Now fast-forward to earlier this year when a video of Tesla Model 3 losing its rear bumper panel in puddle of water went viral. It looks like this event made Tesla finally acknowledge [in a service bulletin] that a design defect on Model 3 vehicles built before May 21, 2019, lead to this problem. It apparently affects all Model 3 vehicles built up to May 2019, at which point Tesla apparently changed the rear fascia diffuser as well as the front and mid aero shields. Therefore, it seems like the previous design of these parts contributed to the problem with the water pulling off the rear panel. Thankfully, Tesla will perform the repair under warranty but the fact that it took over a year between when the defect was first reported and fixed, and two years before Tesla acknowledged it, "doesn't show the company at its best," writes Fred Lambert via Electrek.

That leads us to the second bit of news from Electrek: Tesla has weakened its used car warranty. From the report: Tesla used to offer 2 to 4 -year warranty on used Model S and Model X vehicles. Now Tesla has updated its used vehicle warranty to only one year or 10,000 miles over the original warranty: "Tesla used vehicles are covered by the remainder of 4 years or 50,000 miles left on the Basic Vehicle Limited Warranty. After expiration, the Used Vehicle Limited Warranty provides additional coverage of 1 year or 10,000 miles. If the Basic Vehicle Limited Warranty has already expired, the Used Vehicle Limited Warranty will provide coverage of 1 year or 10,000 miles, starting from your delivery date."

While the new used car warranty being added on top of the new car warranty is good for more recent used vehicles purchased from Tesla, it really cripples any kind of warranty on used Tesla vehicles from 2016 and older. Instead of getting 2 to 4 years of warranty, now they only get 1 year or 10,000 miles. The weakened warranty announcement comes just one week after Tesla canceled its "no questions asked" 7-day return policy.