Technology - Google News

The Morning After: Valve made a $399 handheld gaming PC - Engadget
Microsoft: New Unpatched Bug in Windows Print Spooler - Threatpost
Apple Stock Earns IBD Rating Upgrade; Ramps Up IPhone Production - Investor's Business Daily

The Morning After: Valve made a $399 handheld gaming PC - Engadget

Posted: 16 Jul 2021 04:15 AM PDT

Valve just surprised us all with a handheld console. The $399 Steam Deck will arrive in December, with availability expanding to more regions later.

Looking like some unholy alliance of Sega's Game Gear and the Nintendo Switch, the hardware includes a seven-inch touchscreen at 1,280 x 800 resolution at 60Hz refresh rate. There is no shortage of control options either, with dual thumbsticks, two pretty large square trackpads, an old-school directional pad, four main face buttons, triggers and a quartet of grip buttons.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's just shy of a foot long. Eesh. Valve has ensured there's enough power inside to tempt PC gamers that already have an expansive Steam library. There's an AMD 2.4-3.5GHz processor and a 1.0 to 1.6GHz GPU with eight RDNA 2 compute units. There's 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM inside, too. Valve promises a battery life of between two and eight hours on a single charge, depending on how much power you need for your games. Given the power many AAA PC games require, you can probably expect a lot of experiences to hover around the lower estimates.

While the Steam Deck might not be as powerful as your gaming PC, Valve is using Proton, a compatibility layer that lets games run without developers having to do any work porting titles across — you'll apparently have access to your full library of games. This price point makes it slightly more expensive than the Switch, and the same price as the digital-only PS5. Due to its Steam hooks, however, it's a very different proposition. How well will PC games play on a seven-inch handheld?

— Mat Smith

It's good hardware for streamers.

Elgato's first $200 web camera isn't all that unique. It's a chunky rectangular box you can easily clip on top of a monitor, and it lacks a mic or anything approaching 4K resolution. It shoots 1080p at 60 fps, which should be enough for streamers who use the camera output as picture-in-picture. Continue reading.

The film features three quotes that Bourdain never recorded.

Today, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain opens in US theatres. Like many documentaries, the film pieces together archival footage, including interviews and show outtakes, to tell the story of its subject in their own words. It also includes words Bourdain never spoke to a camera before his suicide in 2018, and yet you'll hear his voice saying them. The film's director, Morgan Neville, explained to The New Yorker that there were three quotes he wanted Bourdain to narrate, and to do so, Neville recreated them with software instead, making an AI model of Bourdain's voice from existing audio. The system was apparently fed about a dozen hours of audio to an AI model. Continue reading.

Emojipedia has shared a list of draft characters

Tomorrow is World Emoji Day, and it's the cut-off for new draft emoji options. The list includes a melting smiley face (thanks global warming), a saluting emoji, a disco ball, beans and new pointing fingers, and there are more diverse skin tone options for existing hand emojis. That's notable as, due to technical limitations, it was one of the few characters you couldn't modify with a skin tone in previous versions of Unicode. Continue reading.

Think paperclip, think Clippy.

Twenty years after being retired from Microsoft Office, Clippy is back to ruin your day. As part of Microsoft's update to 1,800 emoji, the one-time assistant will replace the paperclip emoji in Office, Teams and Windows. Microsoft is updating its emoji library to make the characters 3D and add animation to around 900 of the icons. The company said it plans to roll out the new characters to Windows and Teams sometime in the upcoming holiday season. Continue reading.

And social companies need to do more to stop it.

US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has issued an advisory warning of the dangers posed by health misinformation, calling it an "urgent threat" that social media companies and technology platforms need to do more to address. The advisory includes a 22-page report on steps that individuals, health organizations, researchers and journalists can take to help mitigate the spread of misinformation. Continue reading.

But wait, there's more...

Candace Parker is NBA 2K's first female cover athlete

'Resident Evil Re:Verse' gets a last-minute delay to 2022

Elgato's Stream Deck MK.2 supports seven cute faceplates

Millionaire is sending his son into space

Can Richard Branson really call himself an astronaut after Sunday's Virgin Galactic flight?

Aston Martin's Valhalla hybrid supercar hints at its EV future

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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Microsoft: New Unpatched Bug in Windows Print Spooler - Threatpost

Posted: 16 Jul 2021 04:57 AM PDT

Another vulnerability separate from PrintNightmare allows for local elevation of privilege and system takeover.

Microsoft has warned of yet another vulnerability that's been discovered in its Windows Print Spooler that can allow attackers to elevate privilege to gain full user rights to a system. The advisory comes on the heels of patching two other remote code-execution (RCE) bugs found in the print service that collectively became known as PrintNightmare.

The company released the advisory late Thursday for the latest bug, a Windows Print Spooler elevation-of-privilege vulnerability tracked as CVE-2021-34481. Microsoft credited Dragos vulnerability researcher Jacob Baines for identifying the issue.

The vulnerability "exists when the Windows Print Spooler service improperly performs privileged file operations," according to Microsoft.

Attackers who successfully exploit the bug can run arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges, allowing them to install programs, view, change or delete data, or create new accounts with full user rights, the company said.

To work around the bug, administrators and users should stop and disable the Print Spooler service, Microsoft said.

Slightly Less of a 'PrintNightmare'

The vulnerability (CVE-2021-1675) is the latest in a flurry of problems discovered in Windows Print Spooler, but seems slightly less dangerous, as it can only be exploited locally. It rates 7.8 out of 10 on the CVSS vulnerability-severity scale.

Indeed, Baines told BleepingComputer that while the bug is print driver-related, "the attack is not really related to PrintNightmare." Baines plans to disclose more about the little-known vulnerability in an upcoming presentation at DEF CON in August.

The entire saga surrounding Windows Print Spooler began Tuesday, June 30, when a proof-of-concept (PoC) for an initial vulnerability in the print service was dropped on GitHub showing how an attacker can exploit the flaw to take control of an affected system.

The response to the situation soon turned into confusion. Though Microsoft released an update for CVE-2021-1675 in it its usual raft of monthly Patch Tuesday updates, fixing what it thought was a minor elevation-of-privilege vulnerability, the listing was updated later in the week after researchers from Tencent and NSFOCUS TIANJI Lab figured out it could be used for RCE.

However, soon after it became clear to many experts that Microsoft's initial patch didn't fix the entire problem. The federal government even stepped in last Thursday, when CERT/CC offered its own mitigation for PrintNightmare that Microsoft has since adopted — advising system administrators to disable the Windows Print Spooler service in Domain Controllers and systems that do not print.

To further complicate matters, Microsoft also last Thursday dropped a notice for a bug called "Windows Print Spooler Remote Code Execution Vulnerability" that appeared to be the same vulnerability, but with a different CVE number—in this case, CVE-2021-34527. The company explained that the second bug was similar to the earlier PrintNightmare vulnerability but also its own distinct entity.

Eventually, Microsoft last Wednesday released an emergency cumulative patch for both PrintNightmare bugs that included all previous patches as well as protections for CVE-2021-1675 as well as a new fix for CVE-2021-34527.

However, that fix also was incomplete, and Microsoft continues to work on further remediations as it also works to patch this latest bug, CVE-2021-34481. In the meantime, affected customers should install the most recent Microsoft updates as well as use the workaround to avoid exploitation, the company said.

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Apple Stock Earns IBD Rating Upgrade; Ramps Up IPhone Production - Investor's Business Daily

Posted: 15 Jul 2021 11:27 AM PDT

On Thursday, Apple (AAPL) received an upgrade to its Relative Strength (RS) Rating, from 67 to 74. The Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant plans to boost iPhone production order to 90 million devices for 2021, up from 75 million level in 2020.

When looking for the best stocks to buy and watch, be sure to pay attention to relative price strength.

This unique rating identifies technical performance by showing how a stock's price movement over the last 52 weeks measures up against that of the other stocks in our database.

Decades of market research reveals that the stocks that go on to make the biggest gains typically have an 80 or better RS Rating as they launch their largest climbs. See if Apple can continue to rebound and hit that benchmark.

Looking For The Best Stocks To Buy And Watch? Start Here

Apple stock is within a buying range after breaking past a 145.19 buy point in a consolidation. The proper buying range is up to 5% above the initial entry. Once a stock moves above that range, it's best to wait for it to set up another buying opportunity. Check out "These Are The 5 Best Stocks To Buy And Watch Now." Also, take a look at "Stocks To Buy And Watch: Top IPOs, Big And Small Caps, Growth Stocks."

In terms of fundamental health, Apple has posted rising EPS growth over the last two quarters. Revenue growth has also increased over the same time frame. The company is expected to release its next quarterly numbers on or around July 30.

Apple stock holds the No. 1 rank among its peers in the Telecom-Consumer Products industry group.

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