This teardown is no precision iFixit job, but if you just want to see what parts and pixie dust are holding Samsung's Galaxy Fold together, some images from an apparently now-deleted Weibo post can help. Not surprisingly for a first-gen new device, the design is seems incredibly complex and highlights some of the points of failure that may have lead to quickly-broken review units.
According to GSM Arena, the original poster said the flexible 7.3-inch display was "soft like rubber" when removed, although they "shattered" the Fold's small external display while taking it apart. The hinge mechanism seems quite complicated with watch-like gears, and looking inside shows where ribbon cables flow across the joint that's supposed to hold up to hundreds of thousands of bends. Other interesting elements include its inside and outside cameras, as well as two separate battery packs.
This teardown is no precision iFixit job, but if you just want to see what parts and pixie dust are holding Samsung's Galaxy Fold together, some images from an apparently now-deleted Weibo post can help. Not surprisingly for a first-gen new device, the design is seems incredibly complex and highlights some of the points of failure that may have lead to quickly-broken review units.
According to GSM Arena, the original poster said the flexible 7.3-inch display was "soft like rubber" when removed, although they "shattered" the Fold's small external display while taking it apart. The hinge mechanism seems quite complicated with watch-like gears, and looking inside shows where ribbon cables flow across the joint that's supposed to hold up to hundreds of thousands of bends. Other interesting elements include its inside and outside cameras, as well as two separate battery packs.
Marcus Hutchins, a 24-year-old blogger and malware researcher arrested in 2017 for allegedly authoring and selling malware designed to steal online banking credentials, has pleaded guilty to criminal charges of conspiracy and to making, selling or advertising illegal wiretapping devices.
Marcus Hutchins, just after he was revealed as the security expert who stopped the WannaCry worm. Image: twitter.com/malwaretechblog
Hutchins, who authors the popular blog MalwareTech, was virtually unknown to most in the security community until May 2017 when the U.K. media revealed him as the “accidental hero” who inadvertently halted the global spread of WannaCry, a ransomware contagion that had taken the world by storm just days before.
In August 2017, Hutchins was arrested by FBI agents in Las Vegas on suspicion of authoring and/or selling “Kronos,” a strain of malware designed to steal online banking credentials. A British citizen, Hutchins has been barred from leaving the United States since his arrest.
Many of Hutchins’ supporters and readers had trouble believing the charges against him, and in response KrebsOnSecurity published a lengthy investigation into activities tied to his various online personas over the years.
As I wrote in summary of that story, the clues suggested “Hutchins began developing and selling malware in his mid-teens — only to later develop a change of heart and earnestly endeavor to leave that part of his life squarely in the rearview mirror.” Nevertheless, there were a number of indications that Hutchins’ alleged malware activity continued into his adulthood.
In a statement posted to his Twitter feed and to malwaretech.com, Hutchins said today he had pleaded guilty to two charges related to writing malware in the years prior to his career in security.
“I regret these actions and accept full responsibility for my mistakes,” Hutchins wrote. “Having grown up, I’ve since been using the same skills that I misused several years ago for constructive purposes. I will continue to devote my time to keeping people safe from malware attacks.”
Hutchins pleaded guilty to two of the 10 counts for which he was originally accused, including conspiracy charges and violating U.S.C. Title 18, Section 2512, which involves the manufacture, distribution, possession and advertising of devices for intercepting online communications.
Creating malware is a form of protect speech in the United States, but selling it and disseminating it is another matter. University of Southern California law professor Orin Kerr‘s 2017 dissection of the government’s charges is worth a read for a deep dive on this sticky legal issue.
According to a copy of Hutchins’ plea agreement, both charges each carry a maximum of up to five years in prison, and up to a $250,000 fine, and up to one year of supervised release. However, those charges are likely to be substantially tempered by federal sentencing guidelines, and may take into account time already served in detention. It remains unclear when he will be sentenced.
The plea agreement is here (PDF). “Attachment A” beginning on page 15 outlines the government’s case against Hutchins and an alleged co-conspirator. The government says between July 2012 and Sept. 2015, Hutchins helped create and sell Kronos and a related piece of malware called UPAS Kit.
Despite what many readers here have alleged, I hold no ill will against Hutchins. He and I spoke briefly in a friendly exchange after a chance encounter at last year’s DEF CON security conference in Las Vegas, and said at the time I was rooting for him to beat the charges. I sincerely hope he is able to keep his nose clean and put this incident behind him soon.
Yours Truly shaking hands with Marcus Hutchins in Las Vegas, August 2018.
This entry was posted on Friday, April 19th, 2019 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Ne'er-Do-Well News.
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Sony and Microsoft have been walking the same path for nearly 20 years, when it comes to gaming hardware. Instead of leaves, shiny silver game discs dangle from the trees, while black and white boxes of varying sizes line the underbrush, covered in decades of debris and Doritos dust. Both companies know this trail well -- but it's about to split in two.
Microsoft is taking the right fork. This one doesn't have game discs at all: The latest Xbox, revealed just this week, is called the One S All-Digital Edition and it's designed for online, download-centric gaming. It doesn't have an optical drive.
Sony, meanwhile, is staying the course. The path forward is clear and well-trod, but it's also slightly brighter and more crisp than the road behind. The next PlayStation, known as the PlayStation 5 for now, is an upgraded version of its existing hardware, promising to run faster and smoother than the PlayStation 4 Pro, with support for 8K graphics and 3D audio. It has an optical disc drive.
Physically, the optical drive is a small feature, but it represents a gigantic shift in the video game ecosystem. Streaming video games are on their way, whether established broadband networks are ready or not, and the industry is moving toward a borderless, cross-platform, digital-focused marketplace.
Sales of physical media have been steadily declining for the past decade, according to Statista. In 2009, 80 percent of all game sales came from physical discs and cartridges, and just 20 percent was digital. By 2017, those figures had swapped, with 80 percent of the industry's software sales stemming from digital transactions. Even Nintendo, a company that's been historically reluctant to add online features to its games and consoles, has finally embraced modernity with the Switch, allowing cross-platform play, adding online features and building out its digital store.
And then there's the new competition. Google recently revealed Stadia, a device-agnostic game-streaming service with aggressive goals, such as loading a game in under five seconds, from a link, in a Chrome browser on any device with a screen. Google promises streams at up to 4K and 60fps with HDR, with no lag and a slew of built-in social features. Stadia is due to roll out later this year.
This is the reality that Microsoft and Sony are contending with as they prepare to launch their next consoles. Microsoft, a company with cloud technology to rival Google, is happy to embrace the digital age. The Xbox One S All-Digital Edition is a console built specifically for this awkward transition period, with the ghost of physical media clinging to the industry's shirtsleeves. There's no graphics upgrade here -- the All-Digital Edition is simply an Xbox One S, sans an optical drive. The benefit for consumers, Microsoft argues, is the price -- the console runs $250 and it will always cost $50 less than the Xbox One S.
The All-Digital Edition is a vessel for Microsoft's online subscription services, Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass. Xbox Live Gold unlocks cloud saves and online multiplayer capabilities in many games -- a necessary feature for the top titles of the day, including Fortnite, Overwatch, PUBG, Rainbow Six Siege, Rocket League, Grand Theft Auto Online, Apex Legends and Minecraft. Gold costs $60 a year. Game Pass, meanwhile, grants access to a library of more than 100 games, all available to download and play as long as your subscription is active. Game Pass is $10 a month, or $120 a year.
This week, Microsoft revealed Game Pass Ultimate, a bundle that combines Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass into a single subscription of $15 a month, or $180 a year. That's the same price as buying Gold and Game Pass separately, by the way. It's no coincidence this announcement was paired with the reveal of the All-Digital Edition, which is made for online-focused gaming.
Microsoft has its eyes on launching its own games-streaming service. Project xCloud is its version of Google Stadia, for all intents and purposes, and it's set to enter beta this year.
This has all been a long time coming for Microsoft.
This has all been a long time coming for Microsoft. When it announced the Xbox One in 2013, it pitched the console as an "always-on" device that would be regularly connected to Microsoft servers, offering on-the-fly updates and digital downloads galore. But, players hated the idea of forced connectivity and after a few weeks of pushback, Microsoft reversed course and announced the Xbox One would function just like a traditional console, no online functions required.
At the time, Sony was soaking in schadenfreude and pitching the PlayStation 4 as something familiar but better, no internet connection required and no restrictions on game sharing. Sony trolled Microsoft with a skit demonstrating how easy it was to share used games, something that sounded complex in the Xbox One's always-on, digital-focused biosphere. In the video, a Sony executive simply handed a game disc to another executive.
That video was uploaded to YouTube on June 10, 2013. According to Statista, 2013 is the first year that digital video game sales overtook physical, claiming 54 percent of the market.
It's now 2019 and Sony is sticking to its traditional strategy, one that has bolstered the console industry for generations. Designed by legendary hardware architect Mark Cerny, the PlayStation 5 is a powerful machine built to rival most gaming PCs, with a third-generation, 8-core Ryzen CPU built on Sony's 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. A custom GPU enables ray-tracing and 3D immersive audio, and the console will have an SSD that drastically reduces load times. It'll also support graphics up to 8K, a goal that no game today comes close to hitting. All of this, plus the new console is backward compatible with PS4 games and the PlayStation VR headset.
Still, the most notable aspect of the PS5 is its optical drive. Sony is banking on the long tail of physical game sales and the collections of discs that players have accumulated over the years. While Microsoft and other companies are attempting to get ahead of what's next, Sony is banking on familiarity.
This isn't a bad bet. One of the (many) reasons Microsoft had such a hard time selling the Xbox One as an always-on console in 2013 was the fact that it was different. Change, while constant and often good, is inherently scary on a mass scale, and Microsoft did a poor job of assuaging these fears and presenting a clear future improved by its hardware. In comparison, the PS4 looked like a stable, desired upgrade and Sony seemed like a savvy company biding its time.
Today, Microsoft doesn't have to convince consumers that digital media is the future -- because it's the present. An all-digital Xbox One S makes perfect sense today, in a market dominated by downloaded games and online play, and it sets the stage for Microsoft's true goal: getting players hooked on subscription services and, eventually, its own Netflix-style games-streaming system.
PlayStation Now still doesn't work well enough.
Cloud gaming isn't a foreign concept to Sony. It purchased a few streaming companies in the industry's early days and launched PlayStation Now, a cloud-gaming subscription service, in January 2015. It worked, but not well -- streamed titles tended to be littered with latency and gameplay issues, when they loaded at all. As of early 2019, PlayStation Now still doesn't work well enough to be the proof-of-concept that game-streaming needs. Sony is keeping it alive, though, charging $20 a month or $100 a year.
It's unclear how much the PS5 will cost, but considering the specs and based on historical pricing patterns, it'll likely be much more than $250, the price of the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition. The PS5 is significantly more powerful than the All-Digital Edition. Plus, it has an optical drive (though that may not be worth much, after all).
As they approach the fork in the road, Sony and Microsoft are focused on different features. Sony's head is down, studying the systems that work now and have worked for generations, improving on them in expected, yet still highly anticipated ways. Microsoft is looking ahead. It's attempting to build a different future, and it's taking a risk by removing its gaze from the beaten path. There's a ton of momentum behind streaming and all-digital gaming right now, but these services could fail. Broadband and mobile networks may not be ready for low-latency, stutter-free cloud gaming, even in 2019. In fact, it's probable they're not. Microsoft is preparing for this future regardless, eyes up and more likely to trip -- but that might be exactly why it saw the branching path in the first place.
The Samsung Galaxy Fold doesn’t release until April 26th, but if you’ve been eagerly awaiting a glimpse under the hood, a pre-production version of the folding phone has already been disassembled and laid out piece by piece in photos. These were originally hosted on microblogging site Weibo, though the originals have since been removed.
Something that shouldn’t be much of a surprise: it takes a lot of parts to build a foldable phone. They’re all arranged in a manner that looks quite difficult to repair, though that likely comes down to the Fold being a first-generation product, which you might not guess when you’re holding the Fold’s sleek exterior.
The hinge is the heart of the Fold that helps its 7.3-inch foldable screen unfold and keeps it safe. It looks pretty sturdy from the inside, and we can see it’s reinforced at three points, perhaps to keep it from collapsing in the event of a fall. Several photos above show two ribbon cables routed through the hinge, presumably to drive both the large, foldable screen and the smaller 4.6-inch display on its front, and perhaps also to send power to the phone’s second battery (yes, there are two) when it’s on a charger.
Speaking of the batteries, one of them has “TBD mAh” of capacity listed, indicating that this is likely a pre-production unit.
Both of the cables stretching through the hinge have “L” and “R” printed on them. That might help explain the display’s “jelly scrolling” effect that we spotted in our review, if it turns out that the left and right halves of the display are sent different video signals. As seen in the GIF above, text and images appear to be a bit behind on the left side of the foldable display compared to the right side.
Before our review of the Fold published, its flexible screen was giving us some issues, to say the least. We weren’t the only ones to have problems with it, but some debris found its way into our review unit after one day of using it. The photos don’t necessarily highlight any areas of particular weakness that would have allowed that to happen. One of the photos shows the flexible display removed from the phone’s chassis, and there don’t seem to be any parts keeping it in. Since the documentation of the teardown has been removed from Weibo, it’s not clear if this screen has the all-too-easy-to-remove, yet vital protective layer still applied, or if it’s removed.
These photos offer up a glimpse into the Galaxy Fold, but there are still more questions than answers. We don’t know the teardown methodology, so it’s tough to know exactly what each component is responsible for, and how difficult this phone will actually be to repair.
In 2017, Marcus Hutchins went from relatively unknown, to being a worldwide hero, to facing criminal charges all in a span of a few months. After he shut down the rapidly spreading WannaCry malware by finding a killswitch domain in the software, UK tabloids exposed his real name. Then in August of that year, just as he was about to leave Las Vegas after the Defcon event there, US authorities arrested Hutchins, claiming he'd played a part in creating a different type of malware, Kronos, years earlier.
Today he pleaded guilty to a pair of charges related to the malware, for which he faces up to ten years in prison. In a statement posted on his personal website, he said:
As you may be aware, I've pleaded guilty to two charges related to writing malware in the years prior to my career in security. I regret these actions and accept full responsibility for my mistakes. Having grown up, I've since been using the same skills that I misused several years ago for constructive purposes. I will continue to devote my time to keeping people safe from malware attacks.
As described in court documents published by ZDNet, the government's case was that Hutchins developed the malware, known both as UPAS Kit and Kronos, to collect info, while targeting banking information. He worked with partners to distribute and sell the malware to others who made use of the tools.
Marcus "MalwareTech" Hutchins, the British security researcher known for stopping the WannaCry ransomware outbreak, has pleaded guilty today to writing malware in the years prior to his prodigious career as a malware researcher.
"I regret these actions and accept full responsibility for my mistakes," Hutchins wrote in a statement posted on his website. "Having grown up, I've since been using the same skills that I misused several years ago for constructive purposes. I will continue to devote my time to keeping people safe from malware attacks."
Up to ten years in prison
According to court documents obtained by ZDNet, Hutchins pleaded guilty to two counts, and the government agreed to drop the other eight.
He pleaded guilty to entering a conspiracy to distribute malware and aiding and abetting its distribution.
For each count, Hutchins faces up to five years in prison, up to $250,000 in fines, and up to one year of supervised release.
US authorities arrested Hutchins at the Las Vegas international airport in August 2017, when the researcher was trying to return home to the UK after participating at the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences.
Hutchins was charged with developing the Kronos and UPAS-Kit malware strains --two banking trojans.
He was also charged with working with a co-conspirator --identified only as "Vinny," "VinnyK," and "Aurora123"-- to advertise and sell the two malware strains online. This happened between July 2012 and September 2015, before Hutchins built a career as a talented security researcher.
Controversial case
Hutchins' arrest was controversial, and for many reasons. He argued that he was detained and interrogated while sleep-deprived and intoxicated, and that FBI agents misled him about the true intentions of the interrogation.
Further, his lawyers also argued that Hutchins' actions happened while he was still a minor, and outside the standard five-year statute of limitations.
The prosecution responded by piling new charges --such as developing the UPAS-Kit trojan (he was initially only charged with developing the Kronos malware) and with lying to the FBI during his interrogation. These later charges were deemed ludicrous by some US legal experts.
Ultimately, Hutchins' team failed in their attempt to suppress statements made during the FBI's interrogation following his arrest, and his case was locked for a jury trial in Madison, Wisconsin.
Hutchins' sentencing hearing has not been set.
Helping the infosec community
After his arrest, Hutchins has been released on bail and has been living in Los Angeles while awaiting trial.
He was prohibited from working for his employer, US-based cyber-security firm Kryptos Logic, but Hutchins has turned his focus on sharing his malware analysis skills with the rest of the information security (infosec) community.
Over the course of the past one and a half year, Hutchins has been publishing written and video malware analysis tutorials. He is considered one of today's most talented security researchers.
Hear! Hear! - Marcus has taught me a great deal during my journey with #emotet. I am still amazed that he has worked with me and the @Cryptolaemus1 team to help us with our battle. Without his help, we would still be in the stone age fighting this botnet!
