Thousand Robots

According to a patent filed by Apple, the company may be working on a new super-matte black finish for its lineup of gadgets.

The patent, spotted by Patently Apple and titled “Anodized Part Having a Matte Black Appearance,” suggests the colorway would not just be your typical matte black finish. These can still show smudges and scratches; these are really more of a dark grey. The patent instead seems to point to a finish a bit closer to an ultra-black material like Vantablack, able to absorb “generally all visible light.”

If you’re not familiar with Vantablack and other ultra-dark materials,

As it opens this week, AWS re:Invent is not taking place in Vegas but is virtual and free. Virtual events are a silver lining of the pandemic because they keep me off airplanes and eliminate seven miles of walking each day at the bigger public cloud conferences. Maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, but the time that virtual events save seems to be more productive.

Not to pick on AWS, but when we look at the announced innovations at public cloud events during the past year, few were game changers. Yes, most vendors will continue to move toward

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Welcome to the latest edition of Pardon The Intrusion, TNW’s bi-weekly newsletter in which we explore the wild world of security.

Google Project Zero‘s elite team of bug hunters needs no introduction.

The white-hat hackers have been adept at finding flaws in Android and iOS, but this impressive new disclosure from Ian Beer beats everything that came before it.

Beer spent six months of his lockdown single-handedly devising a method to remotely hijack iPhones, showing that with just a Raspberry Pi, off-the-shelf Wi-Fi adaptors that cost a total of $100, and a

Salesforce has re-architected its underlying infrastructure to make all of its CRM solutions run in the public cloud as part of a program it calls Hyperforce.

Hyperforce may not have been Salesforce’s headline announcement during this year’s Dreamforce—the CRM giant’s big annual conference—but for IT professionals tasked with managing CRM platforms, it is an important one.

Salesforce has long had a strong relationship with infrastructure-as-a-service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), and has also built relationships with Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Google Cloud Platform over the past few years.

For customers who opt to switch to Hyperforce,

“SQL on everything” is the tagline associated with Presto, the query engine that was initially developed by Facebook to rapidly analyze massive amounts of data — particularly data that lay scattered across multiple formats and sources. Since its release as an open source project in 2013, Presto has been adopted broadly across hundreds of enterprises. Today, a strong worldwide community contributes to its ongoing development.

A decade or so previously, the traditional approach for a company to handle its data processing needs was to set up a data center, stock it with CPUs and hard drives, and acquire all

“LIDAR is a fool’s errand. Anyone relying on LIDAR is doomed. Doomed! Expensive sensors that are unnecessary. It’s like having a whole bunch of expensive appendices. Like, one appendix is bad, well now you have a whole bunch of them, it’s ridiculous, you’ll see.” Elon Musk, April 2019.

Tesla’s approach to driverless vehicle technology has been controversial at best. A series of increasingly poor marketing and branding choices have made it difficult to ascertain exactly what the company’s actual benchmark for autonomous driving is.

On the one hand, it’s clear that Tesla has one of the world’s most advanced driver-assistance