Xbox Series X: First Look at New Next-Gen Games, From Dirt 5 to Assassin’s Creed

At Xbox Series X gameplay event, Microsoft showcased a total of 13 games, with reveal trailers for Dirt 5, Madden NFL 21, and several indie titles, alongside gameplay trailers for Assassin’s Creed Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

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The Best Apple Arcade Games You Can Play: May 2020

Apple Arcade continues to add quality games to the catalogue, and this month, we’ve compiled a list of the best games you can play on the subscription gaming platform right now.

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5G on Apples iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro wont be equals

Rumours around the upcoming iPhone 12 have been coming out every other day, and now, a new leak suggests that the iPhone 12 could come with a Sub-6GHz 5G radio while the iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max could sport the mmWave 5GF radio.

Jon Prosser, a tech analyst and the leakster who gave the world the release date for the iPhone SE (2020) is the man behind this leak. He is also the one who a few days ago leaked the possible pricing for the upcoming iPhone 12 models. According to Prosser, Apple will forego the more expensive mmWave 5G radio in the iPhone 12, and instead use a sub-6GHz radio instead. The iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max will come with both sub-5 and mmWave 5G compatibility. Along similar lines, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo had noted in an investor note a few weeks ago that Apple’s 5G-enabled iPhones may come a month late due to the impact of the Coronavirus.

Currently, operators around the world are implementing 5G networks either in the sub-6GHz band or in mmWave band, which lies between 24GHz and 39GHz. The advantage of mmWave is that it is a high capacity, high bandwidth 5G model, but the problem with current mmWave signal is that it degrades extremely fast over larger distances. This is where sub-6, or sub-6GHz 5G steps in. 5G signals carried below the 6GHz frequency will have far greater penetration, as the frequencies do not degrade in the presence of objects. This means that you may not have the ultra-fast 5G speeds that come thanks to the use of mmWave, but you will have a much stronger 5G signal more of the time than when compared to mmWave. Speeds on the mmWave 5G network have shown to hit 1Gbps while the sub-6 5G networks report speeds between 100-400Mbps.

India is expected to deploy its 5G infrastructure in the Sub-6 band, meaning both the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 12 Pro models will work with the Indian 5G infrastructure. The challenge will be for those customers who buy the iPhone 12 with its sub-6 5G radio and then travel to areas where the network provider uses mmWave standard for 5G.

The announcement for the next iPhone 12 series is still slated for September 2020. We’re not sure if Apple will host an event like they always do, given the fact that they cancelled the WWDC 2020 physical event. This year, Apple has announced that the annual developer conference would be a virtual one, and if the COVID-19 situation does not improve, it is possible that the iPhones would be launched in a similar fashion.

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Nintendo Switch Annual Sales Cross 21 Million Units, Says Animal Crossing Is Device's Fastest-Selling Game

Nintendo has defied scepticism over its ability to draw in consumers beyond a hardcore base in the Switch's fourth year with the runaway success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which has become the console's fastest-selling title since launching on March 20.

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Zoom introduces new security measures to tackle hackers

Zoom had a meteoric rise to fame over the last few months as the Coronavirus ravaged the world and forced much of the working population to stay home. With the popularity also came intense scrutiny, and also unwanted attention from miscreants. Hackers have continued to wreak havoc on Zoom calls, with an act called “Zoom Bombing.” Zoom has announced new measures it taking to stop this kind of behaviour.

The new changes are geared specifically towards free users. Zoom is now going to make it mandatory for free users to use passwords for all meetings. The new change in policy will go into effect on May 9, 2020. A new level of encryption will also be introduced across the platform from 30 May, which it says will "provide increased protection for meeting data and resistance against tampering.”

However, Zoom has still not implemented end-to-end encryption on its platform, which is problematic. While free or even paying users may not care much for end-to-end encryption, anyone using the app for sensitive conversations would find the lack of end-to-end encryption problematic. This also makes Zoom a no-go when it comes to using it in political setups or even enterprises, which value privacy and security over anything else.

Zoom has had a number of issues plague its popularity, one of the biggest ones revolving around security. Zoom Bombing has been one of the worst things to experience as a user of the platform. Zoom Bombing is when an uninvited individual hacks their way into a Zoom video call and ends up subjecting the attendees to unpleasant experiences. Many Zoom Bombing incidents have reported cases of racism, harassment and the likes. Recently, there was an incident where a hacker posted a video depicting child abuse in one of the meetings, prompting a strong response from the creators of the app.

Lately, Zoom has been doing a lot to address all the criticism that has been directed its way. The introduction of mandatory passwords for all meetings seems to be a step in the right direction, but it's only a matter of time until we find out whether this is an effective move or not.

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Aarogya Setu privacy flaw can leak COVID-19 information, Indian government dismisses security researchers claim

Aarogya Setu, India’s own contact tracing app built for keeping a check on people who may have been infected with Coronavirus has been in the limelight ever since it was announced by the Indian government on April 2. With the app being scrutinized for collecting an immense amount of personal data, privacy features and government access, we might just be scraping the tip of the iceberg that is Aarogya Setu.

French security researcher Robert Baptiste who goes by the pseudonym Elliot Alderson (a character from the TV show Mr. Robot) on the Internet has warned the Indian government of the security lapses in the said contact tracing app. In a blog post published by Baptiste, he details the security and privacy flaw discovered in Aarogya Setu as he navigated around the app and used the various features it offers. 

Contact tracing apps have seen a rise in various countries owing to the ongoing health crisis. Aarogya Setu as such uses your phone’s Bluetooth and GPS to generate a social graph in order to ascertain whether you have been near a COVID-19 positive person. The flaw in the app is that any malicious attacker can access a person’s information from anywhere including details about their self-assessment test and can even change their location and search radius to gather more Coronavirus related information from different regions.

In a statement to Wired, Robert said, “The developers of this app didn’t think that someone malicious would be able to intercept its requests and modify them to get information on a specific area. With [location] triangulation, you can very closely see who is sick and who is not sick. They honestly didn’t consider this use of the app."

The National Informatics Centre that has developed Aarogya Setu was quick to issue a public statement denouncing the findings by Alderson. The Indian government says that Aarogya Setu does fetch a user’s location by design but the information is stored in a secure and encrypted manner on the server. As for the triangulation vulnerability, the developers categorically denied that the location radius cannot be changed to any other arbitrary value, something that Alderson did as part of his analysis. Even though the government states that a user can change their latitude and longitude to gather data from multiple locations, it dismissed Alderson’s claims as an in-built feature of the app. 

“All this information [COVID-19 statistics] is already public for all locations and hence does not compromise on any personal or sensitive data,” the statement reads.

How does an attacker target an area?

Triangulation and Trilateration are two techniques that can be used to determine the location of Coronavirus positive people in a targeted area from Aarogya Setu. The attacker can create a boundary around a particular area by using either of these techniques to determine the number of infected people with much more precision. 

Aarogya Setu allows users to check the number of people performing self-assessment test in their areas and Alderson found that a user’s location (latitude and longitude) is sent to the servers and returns with statistics on the number of infected people, unwell persons, users declared “Bluetooth positive”, self-assessment test performed and the total number of Aarogya Setu users nearby.

This led to the discovery of the privacy issue that lets anyone in the world check who’s infected in India around a particular location. Alderson, who lives somewhere in France was able to find out the number of infected or unwell people in the Prime Minister Office, Ministry of Defence, the Indian Parliament and the Indian Army Headquarters. This information allows hackers to perform a triangulation attack that can provide them with precise information about the status of Aarogya Setu users in a particular area.

Why data privacy matters now more than ever?

Notwithstanding its security and privacy lapses, the Indian government is determined to make it’s citizens install the app on their Android and iOS smartphones (there’s a feature phone version incoming as well) and in cities like Noida and Greater Noida, not having the app on your phone can result in criminal prosecution under Section 188 of the Indian Penal Code by local authorities. 

India doesn’t have data protection laws and rules in place to check something like a privacy violation yet, however, the Constitution grants the right to privacy as a fundamental right. The Personal Data Protection Bill that safeguards citizens private data is currently under review by a Parliament committee. Once passed, the bill has a provision for setting up a Data Protection Authority as the central point of contact for ensuring the safety of personal data of users. Taking this into account, the Internet Freedom Foundation has already challenged the order under Section 144 for mandatory imposition of Aarogya Setu in Noida and Greater Noida. 

As Aarogya Setu collects extensive personal data such as name, age, gender, profession, countries visited in the past 30 days and smoking habits (if at all), sharing user’s private data with the government isn’t currently based upon the consent of a citizen as it has already directed states and companies to ensure it’s employees install the apps on their smartphones.

Having said all of that, the issue at hand cannot be resolved by installing just an app on your smartphone when more than half of Indian citizens use a feature phone. The concept of data privacy in India is a pretty distant thought as you can easily get any person to install an app on their smartphones these days. And when you make it as mandatory and involuntary as Aarogya Setu, the general consensus overlooks the security lapses.

As for the privacy issues, people need to first understand what data privacy means in the larger scheme of things and how their data can be misused by people who may not seem very different from them. Until that happens and the Data Protection Bill is passed to monitor the privacy and security of the Indian citizens, they need to take precautions while giving away their personal data to anyone.

 

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AMD announces Ryzen Pro 4000 processors for business laptops 8 cores, 16 threads, 15W TDP

AMD has announced the availability of Ryzen Pro processors aimed at business and professional notebooks. Today’s announcement includes three new Ryzen Pro 4000 series processors along with five Ryzen 4000 U-series processors which were released earlier in March but are now rated for 15W TDP which makes them optimal for laptops that are being designed for longer battery life. The key differentiator that makes these processors stand out from the normal Ryzen processors are the AMD Pro-series features such as AMD Memory Guard, Pro Security, Pro Manageability and Pro Business Ready. Like the consumer Ryzen 4000 processors that were released in March 2020, these are based on the 7nm Zen 2 architecture and have Vega graphics with up to 7 cores.

Compared to the Ryzen Pro 3000 series, these new Ryzen Pro 4000 series feature higher core counts, greater cache memory and slightly improved frequencies while being at the same power level of 15 TDP. AMD says this has resulted in 29% higher single-thread performance, 132% higher multithread performance and 13% higher graphics performance.

AMD Ryzen Pro 4000 Series processors for business laptops

These are three AMD Ryzen Pro 4000 processors being launched today. Core counts have doubled compared to the previous gen of Pro mobile processors as the flagship Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U has 8 cores with multi-threading. For the Ryzen 5 Pro processor, we see two additional cores and for the Ryzen 3 Pro, we get multi-threading.

Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U : 8 Cores/ 16 Threads; 1.7 GHz Base Frequency; 4.1 GHz Boost Frequency; 7 Graphics Cores; 1600 MHz Graphics Frequency; 15W TDP Ryzen 5 PRO 4650U : 6 Cores/ 12 Threads; 2.1 GHz Base Frequency; 4.0 GHz Boost Frequency; 6 Graphics Cores; 1500 MHz Graphics Frequency; 15W TDP Ryzen 3 PRO 4450U : 4 Cores/ 8 Threads; 2.5 GHz Base Frequency; 3.7 GHz Boost Frequency; 5 Graphics Cores; 1400 MHz Graphics Frequency; 15W TDP

AMD Ryzen 4000 Series processors for business laptops

Here are the previously released Ryzen 4000 processors aimed at business use cases. These do not have the Pro features but are rated for better power consumption.

Ryzen 7 4800U : 8 Cores/ 16 Threads; 1.8 GHz Base Frequency; 4.2 GHz Boost Frequency; 8 Graphics Cores; 1750 MHz Graphics Frequency; 15W TDP Ryzen 7 4700U : 8 Cores/ 8 Threads; 2.0 GHz Base Frequency; 4.1 GHz Boost Frequency; 7 Graphics Cores; 1600 MHz Graphics Frequency; 15W TDP Ryzen 5 4600U : 6 Cores/ 12 Threads; 2.1 GHz Base Frequency; 4.0 GHz Boost Frequency; 6 Graphics Cores; 1500 MHz Graphics Frequency; 15W TDP Ryzen 5 4500U : 6 Cores/ 6 Threads; 2.3 GHz Base Frequency; 4.0 GHz Boost Frequency; 6 Graphics Cores; 1500 MHz Graphics Frequency; 15W TDP Ryzen 3 4300U : 4 Cores/ 4 Threads; 2.7 GHz Base Frequency; 3.7 GHz Boost Frequency; 5 Graphics Cores; 1400 MHz Graphics Frequency; 15W TDP

AMD Ryzen Pro 4000 based business laptops

Several partners have already lined up with laptop configurations using the newly announced AMD Ryzen Pro 4000 processors. These include the Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 1, T14s Gen 1, X13 Gen 1, L14/15 Gen 1. And from HP there is the HP ProBook x360 435 G7 and ProBook 445/455 G7. Availability of these laptops in the Indian market remains unknown given the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic.

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