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Google Assistant on Sonos speakers: we finally heard it work on the Beam and the One - The Verge
Patch Tuesday, January 2019 Edition - Krebs on Security
Nobody should buy Royole's flexible smartphone - The INQUIRER

Google Assistant on Sonos speakers: we finally heard it work on the Beam and the One - The Verge

Posted: 09 Jan 2019 08:00 AM PST

After months of promises and a missed deadline, we finally had a chance to see (well, hear) how Google Assistant will work on Sonos speakers. In a luxe suite in Las Vegas, Sonos and Google ran us through the features (and limitations) of saying "Hey Google" to a Sonos Beam and Sonos One.

The early version we saw is in a very limited beta (on the order of a "few thousand" people), and it had a few bugs. Those will surely get worked out in the beta, and if you're here to find out when the beta will end and Sonos will finally ship Google on its speakers, they're not willing to commit to a date.

Still, it works. You can do all of the typical Google stuff: ask questions, set reminders, trigger video playback on a Chromecast, those sorts of things. You can also ask to play music without having to specify a room; Assistant knows it's on a Sonos speaker. If you have a Sonos Beam, you can even use it for basic TV controls, just like you can with Alexa.

However, it doesn't work quite as seamlessly as I would have hoped for. It's all part of Sonos' philosophy of "continuity of control," meaning you can basically use whatever method you want to control the Sonos: the app, an assistant on the device, or an assistant anywhere else in the house. But once you really start getting into the details of which device can do what and which service talks to what, it can get really complicated really quickly.

None of these gotchas are really Sonos or Google's fault — some of these same gotchas exist with Alexa on Sonos, too — but they point to just how easy it is to paint yourself into a weird usability corner when you start mixing and matching services.

In that spirit, here's the main limitation you should be aware of: you're not going to be able to have both Google and Alexa active and listening on a single speaker. You can set one Sonos speaker to Google and another to Alexa, but you can't have both assistants active on one speaker at the same time.

We pressed both Google and Sonos a lot on whether that limitation was technical or philosophical, and the answers were a little squishy. As it has before, Google brought up user experience a lot. There's some merit to that. Say an alarm goes off on the speaker. You might not know whether it was Alexa or Google that set it off, and you'd be stuck guessing which one to ask to stop while it beeps.

Here's another limitation: you can only ask to start music from streaming services that Google Assistant supports natively. The list includes seven or so services, which, thankfully, includes Spotify but won't include Apple Music. However, you can use Google to do basic transport controls and even identify songs on other services, even if you start the music from AirPlay or something. This is the same limitation as Alexa on Sonos, but it means that Apple Music users will have to wait until Google and Apple reach some kind of deal.

One bright spot about how all of this works is that there are two sides to this integration. There's the "works on Sonos" side, which lets you bark your commands directly at the Sonos Speaker. There is also the "works with Sonos" side, which lets Sonos speakers serve as music endpoints that can be controlled by other Google speakers. In other words, if you have a Google Home and an older Sonos speaker (or a Sonos speaker set to Alexa), you can use your Google Home to start music on the Sonos.

If that sounds a little complicated in the details, it's because it is. And figuring out all of the nitty-gritty details is one of the reasons why Sonos and Google haven't shipped this functionality yet. Another example of something to be worked out: room definitions. Google has its own system for categorizing what stuff is in what room, and so does Sonos. Figuring out a way to reconcile those two systems (to say nothing of Alexa and Apple's own room classifications) is going to be an industry-wide job.

The technical details of Sonos' Google Assistant integration are endlessly fascinating if you're a certain kind of nerdy, and they go some way toward explaining why the release has been so delayed. Here's one example: Sonos speakers work with Google Assistant, but they don't work with Google Cast, Google's own multiroom streaming system. Cast is the system that Google best understands and knows how to work with. But for whatever reason, the two companies decided to teach Google how to talk to Sonos' platform instead of vice versa.

Another interesting technical detail: Sonos' microphones do beamforming completely differently than Google's usual two-mic array, and so the two companies had to work to figure out how to get Sonos' audio data to Google in a way that worked well for both companies.

Back out of the weeds a bit, and you can see that it's coming and that it works. And for the most common use cases — like asking for music, setting timers, or directing your Chromecast to start playing Netflix — it worked pretty well in our demo. There were the usual CES "blame it on the Wi-Fi, maybe" bugs and hiccups, but that's to be expected.

Sonos says that it is going to pay close attention to feedback from the beta, and that will determine when it will ship. But, again, there's no date to report. Sonos has been burned before, after all. Hopefully, it won't be too long.

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Patch Tuesday, January 2019 Edition - Krebs on Security

Posted: 09 Jan 2019 07:03 AM PST

Microsoft on Tuesday released updates to fix roughly four dozen security issues with its Windows operating systems and related software. All things considered, this first Patch Tuesday of 2019 is fairly mild, bereft as it is of any new Adobe Flash updates or zero-day exploits. But there are a few spicy bits to keep in mind. Read on for the gory details.

The updates released Tuesday affect Windows, Internet Explorer and Edge, Office, Sharepoint, .NET Framework and Exchange. Patches are available for all client and server versions of Windows, but none of the “critical” flaws — those that can lead to a remote system compromise without any help from users — apply to Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, according to Martin Brinkmann at Ghacks.net.

Mercifully, none of the vulnerabilities fixed in Tuesday’s bundle are being actively exploited, although one (CVE-2019-0579) was publicly disclosed prior to the patch release, meaning attackers may have had a head start figuring out how to exploit it. This bug is one of 11 that Microsoft fixed in its Jet Database Engine.

Among the more eyebrow-raising flaws fixed this week is CVE-2019-0547, a weakness in the Windows component responsible for assigning Internet addresses to host computers (a.k.a. “Windows DHCP client”). According to security vendor Tenable, this is the most severe bug of the entire patch batch.

“In order to exploit the vulnerability, an attacker would need to be able to send a specially crafted DHCP response to its target, allowing them to run arbitrary code on the client machine,” said Satnam Narang, senior research engineer at Tenable.

Tuesday’s update bundle also includes a fix that Microsoft released late last month as an emergency patch to plug a zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer (CVE-2018-8653) that attackers are already exploiting. Experts at Recorded Future say that vulnerability continues to be exploited in the wild, with several exploit kits now including the publicly released proof-of-concept code into their platforms.

“If you have not patched this vulnerability yet, it should be the number one priority,” writes Allan Liska, senior solutions architect at Recorded Future.

It generally can’t hurt for Windows users to wait a day or two after Microsoft releases monthly security updates before installing the fixes; occasionally buggy patches can cause serious headaches for users who install them before all the kinks are worked out.

Case in point: Computerworld’s Woody Leonhard notes that multiple organizations are reporting problems with their file-sharing operations after installing this month’s patch rollup.

Windows 10 likes to install patches all in one go and reboot your computer on its own schedule. Microsoft doesn’t make it easy for Windows 10 users to change this setting, but it is possible. For all other Windows OS users, if you’d rather be alerted to new updates when they’re available so you can choose when to install them, there’s a setting for that in Windows Update. Also, it’s a good idea to get in the habit of backing up your data before installing Windows updates.

Adobe released an update for its Flash Player plugin, but alas there don’t appear to be any security fixes in it. However, the company last Thursday did release new versions of its Adobe Acrobat and Reader that correct at least two critical vulnerabilities in each.

If you experience any problems installing any of these patches this month, please feel free to leave a comment about it below; there’s a good chance other readers have experienced the same and may even chime in here with some helpful tips.

Tags: Allan Liska, CVE-2018-8653, CVE-2019-0547, CVE-2019-0579, Ghacks.net, Martin Brinkmann, Patch Tuesday January 2019, Recorded Future, Satnam Narang, Tenable, Woody Leonhard

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2019 at 9:46 am and is filed under Time to Patch. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Nobody should buy Royole's flexible smartphone - The INQUIRER

Posted: 09 Jan 2019 03:09 AM PST

LAS VEGAS: YOU'VE PROBABLY never heard of Royole before, but the little-known display maker has beaten the likes of Huawei, LG and Samsung to launch the world's first flexible smartphone.

As a tech journalist who has been fondling lookalike black rectangles for the past few years, it's exciting to see something new, particularly at a CES lacking in innovative hardware announcements. However, it soon becomes clear that in its quest to earn the title of "first", Royole has cut more than a handful of corners.

At the company's CES booth, crowds were clambering to get their mitts on the FlexPai, desperate to fondle what could be our first glimpse of the future of smartphones.

However, here's hoping it's not an indication of what's to come. Sure, its AMOLED screen that transforms from a 7.8in tablet into two Android smartphones is a novelty at first, but it's clear that this product was hastily rushed to market to beat Samsung's incoming Galaxy Flex.

While it feels plenty durable (Royole claims the screen can withstand - for 200,000 folds) the handset's hinge mechanism is somewhat clunky and forms an unsightly wedge that's not only offensive to look at, but also means the FlexPai is awkward to use and near-impossible to shove into a skinny jeans pocket.

Things get even worse when it comes to gadget's software. While the FlexPai is one of the first devices to ship with Android 9 Pie, the device's interface - which comes topped with Royole's own, admittedly inoffensive Water OS - gets confused whenever the FlexPai transforms between tablet and smartphone-modes; apps became unresponsive and failed to display correctly, often overlapping with the onscreen widgets.

Perhaps even more confusingly, if you have an app open on one of the 4in screens and switch to look at the other display, you'll see, er, nothing but a blank homescreen. While Royole tells us that the handset can operate as two phone thanks to its dual-SIM report, the secondary screen is largely redundant, displaying only incoming calls and notifications.

And to round things off, the FlexPai's dual cameras, comprising 16MP and 20MP sensors, are absolutely awful. Not only do they come housed in a hefty bezel, adding what seems like unnecessary bulk to the already oversized handset. They were also painfully slow to launch and struggled to focus; Royole tells us that the software wasn't final, despite, er, having already started flogging the flexible device.

At present, the Royole FlexPai seems some sort of futuristic concept device, far from a piece of hardware that's ready for prime time; it's broken, clunky and - if, for some reason, you're in the market for a bork-prone flexible smartphone - wildly expensive. It's currently on sale in China for 8,999 yuan (around £1,050). µ

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