The US is making it even harder for Huawei phones to get Android updates – The Verge
The US is making it even harder for Huawei phones to get Android updates The Verge
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New Mac ransomware is even more sinister than it appears
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The threat of ransomware may seem ubiquitous, but there haven’t been too many strains tailored specifically to infect Apple’s Mac computers since the first full-fledged Mac ransomware surfaced only four years ago. So when Dinesh Devadoss, a malware researcher at the firm K7 Lab, published findings on Tuesday about a new example of Mac ransomware, that fact alone was significant. It turns out, though, that the malware, which researchers are now calling ThiefQuest, gets more interesting from there. (Researchers originally dubbed it EvilQuest until they discovered the Steam game series of the same name.)
In addition to ransomware, ThiefQuest has a whole other set of spyware capabilities that allow it to exfiltrate files from an infected computer, search the system for passwords and cryptocurrency wallet data, and run a robust keylogger to grab passwords, credit card numbers, or other financial information as a user types it in. The spyware component also lurks persistently as a backdoor on infected devices, meaning it sticks around even after a computer reboots, and could be used as a launchpad for additional, or “second stage,” attacks. Given that ransomware is so rare on Macs to begin with, this one-two punch is especially noteworthy.
“Looking at the code, if you split the ransomware logic from all the other backdoor logic the two pieces completely make sense as individual malware. But compiling them together you’re kind of like what?” says Patrick Wardle, principal security researcher at the Mac management firm Jamf. “My current gut feeling about all of this is that someone basically was designing a piece of Mac malware that would give them the ability to completely remotely control an infected system. And then they also added some ransomware capability as a way to make extra money.”
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Say It With Me Now, Australia: Beer And Wine Are Not The Same Thing, Not Even For Trademarks
While I’ve done a fair share of posts here on the topic of trademarks and the alcohol industries, one of the most frustrating sub-types for those posts is the sort where the dispute exists between one wine maker and one brewery. There appears to be some misconception that alcohol is one big market or industry for the purposes of trademark. While it is true that far too few countries explicitly recognize that wine and beer are different markets in their trademark laws, most of the countries do still have customer confusion as a key test for infringement. And, I feel it’s safe to say, the general public can tell the difference between beer and wine, and typically know enough about each’s crafters to tell their branding apart.
Now the general public in Australia is facing this test in a way, with a large liquor chain trying to oppose the trademark application for a craft beer gift service over a wine trademark it holds, but doesn’t seem to be using.
The Beer Drop was officially launched in October 2019, with founder Evan Reitano filing to register its trademark in June 2019.
In January this year Coles opposed the trademark, saying it was “contrary to law” as it had substantially identical or deceptively similar trademarks – in this case, ‘Wine Drop’ which is currently not in use, and whose web page redirects to First Choice.
“Our Wine Drop subscription service was a popular service for our First Choice customers and the www.winedrop.com.au website currently redirects customers to the First Choice Liquor webpage,” a Coles representative told Brews News.
This appears to be as close to an admission that a trademark is no longer in use as one could hope for. “Was” a popular service. The website redirects to a different branded page. And that’s all before we get to the simple fact that wine and beer are not the same thing. Add to that that the word “drop” isn’t particularly source identifying and you begin to wonder how there’s a case to be made by Coles at all. And then we can add to all of that my suspicion that the Australian public can probably discern between a big retailer and a startup craft beer gift service. With that, this all begins to look silly.
It looks as though Beer Drop will be focusing on Coles’ failure to use the trademark, however, rather than beer and wine being distinct markets.
Reitano undertook a small business course before launching The Beer Drop and said it was invaluable to his IP experience so far, but what really stung was the references to ‘bad faith’”, he said.
“I read over it and I laughed it off at first, I had never heard of the Wine Drop, the first thing I did was jump onto Google. Being a Coles Liquor business you’d think it would be in the top one or two search hits which it wasn’t, and I can’t find any trace of it. It’s strange because they’ve said in their opposition that they’ve built a reputation with that brand, it feels like they expected me to read it and say shit, it’s Coles Liquor, let’s back off.”
Part of the reason for that may have been that Reitano worked for another Coles liquor brand in his past. Some folks have claimed that, since he worked for a Coles brand, he must have known about the Wine Drop trademark. That is obviously silly. Expecting a line employee to know about every trademark a company is no longer using is insane. And it’s also entirely besides the point because, again, this all ultimately boils down to the potential for customer confusion and here there is none.
It’s Not Even Clear If Remdesivir Stops COVID-19, And Already We’re Debating How Much It Can Price Gouge
You may recall in the early days of the pandemic, that pharma giant Gilead Sciences — which has been accused of price gouging and (just last year!) charging exorbitant prices on drug breakthroughs developed with US taxpayer funds — was able to sneak through an orphan works designation for its drug remdesevir for COVID-19 treatment. As we pointed out, everything about this was insane, given that orphan works designations, which give extra monopoly rights to the holders (beyond patent exclusivity), are meant for diseases that don’t impact a large population. Gilead used a loophole: since the ceiling for infected people to qualify for orphan drug status is 200,000, Gilead got in its application bright and early, before there were 200,000 confirmed cases (we currently have over 1.3 million). After the story went, er… viral, Gilead agreed to drop the orphan status, realizing the bad publicity it was receiving.
After a brief dalliance with chloroquine, remdesivir has suddenly been back in demand as the new hotness of possible COVID-19 treatments. Still, a close reading of the research might give one pause. There have been multiple conflicting studies, and Gilead’s own messaging has been a mess.
On April 23, 2020, news of the study’s failure began to circulate. It seems that the World Health Organization (WHO) had posted a draft report about the trial on their clinical trials database, which indicated that the scientists terminated the study prematurely due to high levels of adverse side effects.
The WHO withdrew the report, and the researchers published their results in The Lancet on April 29, 2020.
The number of people who experienced adverse side effects was roughly similar between those receiving remdesivir and those receiving a placebo. In 18 participants, the researchers stopped the drug treatment due to adverse reactions.
But then…
However, also on April 29, 2020, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announced that their NIH trial showed that remdesivir treatment led to faster recovery in hospital patients with COVID-19, compared with placebo treatment.
“Preliminary results indicate that patients who received remdesivir had a 31% faster time to recovery than those who received placebo,” according to the press release. “Specifically, the median time to recovery was 11 days for patients treated with remdesivir compared with 15 days for those who received placebo.”
The mortality rate in the remdesivir treatment group was 8%, compared with 11.6% in the placebo group, indicating that the drug could improve a person’s chances of survival. These data were close to achieving statistical significance.
And then…
“In addition, there is another Chinese trial, also stopped because the numbers of new patients with COVID-19 had fallen in China so they were unable to recruit, which has not yet published its data,” Prof. Evans continues. “There are other trials where remdesivir is compared with non-remdesivir treatments currently [being] done and results from some of these should appear soon.”
Gilead also put out its own press release about another clinical trial, which seems more focused on determining the optimal length of remdesivir treatment. Suffice it to say, there’s still a lot of conflicting data and no clear information on whether or not remdesevir actually helps.
Still, that hasn’t stopped people from trying to figure out just how much Gilead will price gouge going forward:
The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), which assesses effectiveness of drugs to determine appropriate prices, suggested a maximum price of $ 4,500 per 10-day treatment course based on the preliminary evidence of how much patients benefited in a clinical trial. Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen on Monday said remdesivir should be priced at $ 1 per day of treatment, since “that is more than the cost of manufacturing at scale with a reasonable profit to Gilead.”
Some Wall Street investors expect Gilead to come in at $ 4,000 per patient or higher to make a profit above remdesivir’s development cost, which Gilead estimates at about $ 1 billion.
So… we’ve got a range of $ 10 to $ 4,500 on a treatment that we don’t yet know works, and which may or may not save lives. But, given that we’re in the midst of a giant debate concerning things like “reopening the economy” — something that can really only be done if the public is not afraid of dying (or at least becoming deathly ill) — the value to the overall economy seems much greater than whatever amount Gilead wants to charge. It seems the right thing to do — again, if it’s shown that remdesevir actually helps — is to just hand over a bunch of money to Gilead, say “thank you very much” and get the drug distributed as widely as possible. Though, again, it should be noted that a decent chunk of the research around remdesevir was not done or paid for by Gilead, but (yet again) via public funds to public universities, which did the necessary research. The idea that it’s Gilead that should get to reap massive rewards for that seems sketchy at best. But the absolute worst outcome is one in which Gilead sticks to its standard operating procedure and prices the drug in a way that millions of Americans can’t afford it, and it leads to a prolonging/expanding of the pandemic.