Chalk this up to inevitability. The iMac Pro is soon to be no more. First noted by 9to5Mac, TechCrunch has since confirmed with Apple that the company will stop selling the all-in-one once the current stock is depleted.
One configuration of the desktop is still available through Apple’s site, listed as “While Supplies Last” and priced at $5,000. Some other versions can also still be found from third-party retailers, as well, if you’re so inclined.
WHEN NEWS HIT earlier this week that Chinese hackers were actively targeting Microsoft Exchange servers, the cybersecurity community warned that the zero-day vulnerabilities they were exploiting might have allowed them to hit countless organizations around the world. Now it’s becoming clear just many email servers they hacked. By all appearances, the group known as Hafnium breached as many victims they could find across the global internet, leaving behind backdoors to return to later.
Hafnium has now exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Exchange servers’ Outlook Web Access to indiscriminately compromise no fewer than tens of thousands of email servers, according to sources with knowledge of the investigation into the hacking campaign who spoke to WIRED. The intrusions, first spotted by security firm Volexity, began as early as January 6, with a noticeable uptick starting last Friday and spiking early this week. The hackers appear to have responded to Microsoft’s patch, released Tuesday, by ramping up and automating their hacking campaign. One security researcher involved in the investigation who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity put the number of hacked Exchange servers at more than 30,000 in the US alone, and hundreds of thousands worldwide, all apparently by the same group. Independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs first reported that 30,000 figure Friday, citing sources who had briefed national security officials.
When the lockdowns hit in March, business at Jersey Mike’s dropped 45 percent in a week. And with fall sports on hiatus, CEO and founder Peter Cancro lost the ability to reach his football-loving customers with game-day commercials. So he went on the offensive: He shifted his marketing dollars to Fox News, NBC, CNN, and ABC.
“Everyone was watching the news, so they saw we were still open,” says Cancro, who used the marketing blitz to reaffirm his small-business roots. One commercial, for instance, opens on a photo of Cancro posing with his high school football coach, Rod Smith — the banker who famously went on to lend him $125,000 to buy his original sub shop in 1975.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is getting into the city-building business.
On Tuesday, Musk tweeted about “creating the city of Starbase, Texas.” He followed that up with a few other details, some of which are typically Muskian — for example, he says the city will be dog friendly and its leader will be The Doge, a pun on a medieval elected lord title of the same name and the cryptocurrency DOGE, which is Musk’s favorite.
However, it appears that Musk is serious about creating a new city. SpaceX’s launch and development site for Starship resides in the unincorporated community in Cameron County, Texas. Musk claims he wants to incorporate the village and the land that surrounds it into a much bigger city called Starbase.
Peanut butter purists called and Reese’s answered.
Reese’s latest iteration of its wildly popular peanut butter cup will be all peanut butter, no chocolate, Hershey (HSY) announced on Monday.
The Reese’s Ultimate Peanut Butter Lovers Cup is made entirely of peanut butter, both inside and in the peanut butter candy-flavored outer shell.
This is the first time in the company’s 90-year-history that its peanut butter cups have taken chocolate completely out of the equation. Versions of the Peanut Butter Lovers Cup came out in 2019 and 2020, but those still contained some chocolate.
Facebook has turned the news back on.
In Australia, the websites that were previously blocked by Facebook are now accessible and sharable once again.
But the battle involving social networks and news is just beginning.
This week Australia’s government passed a law this week that offered a glimpse at the future for Facebook and media consumers around the world.
The News Media Bargaining Code, passed Wednesday, effectively forces big tech platforms to pay publishers for news content
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use on Saturday (Feb. 27), making it the third shot cleared for use in the country.
“The authorization of this vaccine expands the availability of vaccines, the best medical prevention method for COVID-19, to help us in the fight against this pandemic, which has claimed over half a million lives in the United States,” Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said in a statement.
An FDA analysis showed that the single-shot vaccine had a 72% overall efficacy rate in the U.S. and 64% in South Africa, where a highly-transmissible coronavirus variant is causing most new cases, The New York Times reported. The efficacy rate in South Africa is slightly higher than the company had estimated in a recent report, up by seven percentage points.
Houston-based electric company Griddy has been hit with a class-action lawsuit seeking “monetary relief of over $1 billion” after a rash of customers reported astronomically high energy bills after last week’s winter storm, even as millions in the state went without power during the height of the deep freeze
It’s been a rough 24 hours for bitcoin traders. The cryptocurrency has plunged 16% from its all-time high in just one day, falling from $58,000 on Sunday to just over $46,000 as of the time of this writing. So what happened? Two things. Or, rather, two people may be the reason why:
WhatsApp recently announced it would be changing its privacy policy, in a move that has many users worried about how much of their data will be shared with WhatsApp’s parent company, Facebook. Now, the service has revealed what will happen to the accounts of users who don’t agree to the new policy by the May 15 deadline.
TechCrunch contacted WhatsApp for more details on what would happen to users’ accounts if they didn’t agree to the new privacy policy. It reports that WhatsApp will “slowly ask” its users to agree to the new privacy changes, warning that they need to do so to continue having full access to the app’s features. Users who decline to accept the new policy will be able to continue using the app for a few weeks, but only in a limited way. “For a short time, these users will be able to receive calls and notifications, but will not be able to read or send messages from the app,” the company told TechCrunch.
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