Conti ransomware group threatens to oust Costa Rica’s government as crisis deepens

Last week, Costa Rica declared a state of emergency following a massive Conti ransomware attack on its government. Now, Conti has boosted its threat, saying its aim is nothing less than to overthrow the government, The Associated Press has reported. “We have our insiders in your government,” the group said. “We are also working on gaining access to your other systems, you have no other options but to pay us.”

The group, which also doubled its ransom demand to $20 million, may be trying to take advantage of the fact that Costa Rica’s President Rodrigo Chaves has only been in office for a week. “We are at war and that’s not an exaggeration,” Chaves said, adding that officials were dealing with a national terrorist group with collaborators inside the nation. He says that the scale is broader than thought, with 27 government institutions, including municipalities and state utilities, affected. 

The US State Department has declared a $10 million bounty on Conti, saying the attack “severely impacted the country’s foreign trade by disrupting its customs and taxes platforms.” It’s reported to have affected Costa Rica’s ministries of finance, labor and social security, among other bodies. 

Conti was also in the news recently after attacking Parker Hannifin, a major component supplier for Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It reportedly infiltrated current and former employees, stealing information like their social security numbers, passport numbers, bank and routing numbers and more. 

However, the threat to overthrow Costa Rica’s government is likely just a ruse to extort more money, according to a ransomware analyst cited by the AP. “I believe this is simply a for-profit cyber attack,” said Emisoft’s Brett Callow. “Nothing more.”

Sony details the game library for PlayStation Plus’ new high-end tiers

Sony has revealed the first games set to arrive with the launch of its new PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium subscriptions services, and it’s an impressive lineup. PlayStation Studios titles include Demon’s Souls (PS5) and Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut (PS4/PS5), along with third-party games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (PS4/PS5) and NBA 2K22 (PS4/PS5). Those games will arrive in the “launch time frame,” starting May 24th, according to Sony, on the PlayStation Plus Extra ($15/month) and Premium ($18/month) tiers.

Along with the main lineup, PlayStation Plus Premium members will get access to classic games “with some titles that will show improved frame rates and higher-quality resolution compared to their original launch versions,” Sony wrote. Some of those include Ape Escape, Hot Shots Golf, Tekken 2 and Worms Armageddon, along with remasters like Dark Cloud, Rogue Galaxy and Borderlands The Handsome Collection. Premium members will also get access to PS3 games like Infamous, Hot Shots and the Ratchet & Clank series.

As part of all that, Ubisoft announced that Ubisoft+ is coming to PlayStation Plus starting on May 24th. On top of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, titles arriving include The Division and For Honor, “as well as beloved classic games like Child of Light, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, Watch Dogs, Werewolves Within, and more,” Ubisoft wrote in its blog. Again, all of these titles will be available on the PlayStation Plus Extra and/or Premium tiers, but not the Essential ($10/month) plan.

Sony will also let Premium (aka Deluxe in certain regions) members get time-limited trials with two hours of gameplay available before purchasing. Some of those on offer include Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, Horizon Forbidden West, Cyberpunk 2077 and Tiny Tina’s Wonderland. 

All tiers including Essential, Extra and Premium/Deluxe will see monthly games, much as you get right now on PlayStation Plus. “We have yet to announce the monthly games for June, but stay tuned to PS Blog,” Sony wrote. 

On top of all that, new games will be added regularly, with updates on the first Tuesday of the month for PlayStation Plus Essential, and in the middle of each new month for Extra and Premium/Deluxe plans. The service is launching in Asia on May 24th, followed by Japan on June 2nd, North and South America on June 13th and Europe, Australia and New Zealand on June 23rd. There’s more information available at the PlayStation Plus website and for a full list of games coming on launch, check Sony’s announcement post. 

Amazon’s Fire TV sale cuts its streaming devices by up to 42 percent

Amazon is knocking up to 42 percent off most of the Fire TV Stick streaming devices in its lineup, making it a good time to update or increase your streaming capabilities. The deals start at $20 for the Fire TV Stick Lite ($10 or 33 percent off) to the Fire TV Stick 4K ($35 instead of $50) and the Fire TV Cube, available for $70 for a savings of 42 percent. 

Buy Amazon Fire TV devices

The best deal is on Amazon’s best streaming device, the Fire TV Cube ($70). We gave it an 84 score when it first came out, thanks to the Dolby Vision and HDR+ support, speedy performance and more. It has the best processor out of all Fire TV devices and it includes an Ethernet adapter for reliable wired performance. In addition to using Alexa voice commands to control what your watching, the Fire TV Cube can effectively transform your TV into an Echo Show smart display. You can ask it to play music, control smart home devices, check in on video camera feeds and more.

If it’s a cheaper model you’re seeking for a spare bedroom, for instance, the Fire TV Stick Lite is available in two versions, with and without TV controls for $20 and $25 respectively. While 4K isn’t on offer here, you get full HD streaming with all the popular services, with convenient TV controls for the latter version.

Moving up to 4K, the sweet spot is the Fire TV Stick 4K, on sale for $35 instead of $50, for a savings of 30 percent. You get Ultra HD support with Dolby Vision, HDR and HDR10+, along with Dolby Atmos surround sound — giving you a full home theater experience while taking up minimal room. It also offers Alexa Voice Remote with TV controls, smart home control and more. Taking that up a notch is the Fire TV Stick 4K Max, on sale for $45 or $10 off, which adds WiFi 6, live view picture-in-picture and 2GB of memory. 

Finally, there’s Amazon’s Fire TV Recast on sale for $155, or 33 percent of the regular $230 price. On top of letting you stream Netflix, Prime Video and other services, you can connect an over-their-air antenna to view terrestrial TV channels like ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, PBS or the CW. It has a built-in DVR, letting you record any shows, and comes with 2 tuners and 500 GB (75 hours) of memory. It’s Alexa enabled, letting you search for shows, control the channel guide and manage recordings. 

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Apple staff are already using ‘Tap to Pay’ at the HQ visitor center

In February Apple unveiled Tap to Pay, a new feature that will enable merchants to accept payments with only an iPhone — something that could cut into the business of companies like Square. Now, it turns out that Apple is already testing the feature at its own Apple Park visitor center in Cupertino. 

A video tweeted by user @NTFTWT, spotted by MacRumors, shows the system in action, with a customer making an Apple Pay payment directly to the iPhone of an Apple staffer. They simply needed to touch their iPhone to the other iPhone, with no payment terminal in sight. 

As we detailed earlier, the technology requires an iPhone XS or later device. It works with Apple Pay, of course, but will also support contact-free credit and debit cards, third-party payment platforms and other digital wallets. Stripe has already detailed plans to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone to business customers in the spring, with other platforms and apps scheduled to come later in 2022. Dutch processor Adyen will work with Lightspeed Commerce, Newstore and other commerce platforms to help them use Tap to Pay. 

Apple promised a future iOS beta giving developers a look at Tap to Pay, but it has yet to release a date. Now that it seems to be operational at Apple’s own office, though, it might be a sign that it’ll launch soon in the US and around the world. 

Uber Eats is launching two autonomous delivery pilots in Los Angeles

Uber Eats is launching not just one but two autonomous delivery pilots today in Los Angeles, TechCrunch has reported. The first is via an autonomous vehicle partnership with Motional, originally announced in December, and the second is with sidewalk delivery firm Serve Robotics, a company that spun out of Uber itself.

The trials will be limited, with deliveries from just a few merchants including the Kreation juicery and organic cafe. Serve will do short delivery routes in West Hollywood, while Motional will take care of longer deliveries in Santa Monica. “We’ll be able to learn from both of those pilots what customers actually want, what merchants actually want and what makes sense for delivery,” an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Uber will apparently charge for the deliveries from Serve. However, autonomous vehicle deliveries in California require a permit that Motional reportedly doesn’t possess, so it appears that customers won’t be charged for deliveries from their vehicles, for now. In addition, human operators will take control when near the drop-off locations “to ensure a convenient and seamless experience for customers,” a spokesperson said. 

Serve’s robots, meanwhile, will mostly be able to operate autonomously, but remote operators will take control in certain cases, as when crossing a street. 

Customers within specific test zones will have an option to have their food delivered by an autonomous vehicle and can track it as with a regular delivery. When the food arrives, they’ll be able to unlock the vehicle with a passcode to obtain their meals, either from a Serve cooler or the backseat of a Motional car. “The hope is that [the trials] are successful and that we learn over the coming months and then figure out how to scale,” Uber’s spokesperson said. 

Amazon offers cashback rewards if you scan receipts through its Alexa app

Alexa has introduced “Shopping List Savings” to the Alexa App, letting you scan receipts on eligible products from any store to gain cashback rewards, TechCrunch reported. It won’t cost you a thing to use it and you’ll get cash back to your Amazon gift card to use on any item on Amazon. The catch is that the system will provide Amazon with a ton of valuable data on your shopping habits, even when you’re not shopping on its site.

Using it is pretty straightforward. You just search the Alexa app to find available offers, then add them to your shopping list. You can shop the offers at your “go-to grocery store” (or pharmacy, or any store where you can get an itemized receipt) and scan the receipt and product barcodes to redeem them. That’ll get you cash directly on your Amazon gift card, usually in 24-48 hours, which can be used to buy anything on Amazon. 

Amazon doesn’t explain how your data will be used or promise to anonymize it, as TechCrunch notes. Instead, it simply states that “we will get any information you provide, including receipt images and information we may extract from those receipts, and the offers you activate. You understand and acknowledge that your personal information may be shared with Amazon’s service providers.” 

Amazon isn’t the only company to offer such a service, as you can also get cash rewards from Fetch, Ibotta and other companies in exchange for your shopping data. The amount of reward per product appears to be on an offer-by-offer basis, and you can check on payment status any time on the Get Paid page on “Browse Savings.” The offer appears to be limited to the US, for now.

Elon Musk says his deal to buy Twitter is ‘temporarily on hold’

Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is “temporarily on hold” pending confirmation that spam and fake accounts do represent less than 5 percent of users, he tweeted. Attached to the tweet was a Reuters link reporting that Twitter estimated in a regulatory filing that those types of accounts represented 5 percent of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter of 2022.

It appears that Musk may have some concerns about those figures, judging by the tweet. It’s not clear what steps he and Twitter will take to verify them, however. 

If you’ve been somehow disconnected from the internet (lucky you!), Musk is in the process of buying Twitter for $44 billion. He aims to quadruple the user base and has said he’ll defeat spam bots, authenticate all humans and make its algorithms open source, while also championing free speech and walking back content moderation. As part of that, he said he’d reverse the Twitter ban on Donald Trump and other users.

However, some experts on social media content moderation have said that those goals conflict with each other. Facebook’s former security chief Alex Stamos, for one, recently tweeted that Musk’s ideals for Twitter may conflict with European laws, pointing out that there’s “a large mismatch between the US and the UK’s Online Safety Bill and EU Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Acts.” Stamos also noted that Twitter is saturated in the developed world, so any growth “will require even more dealing with the challenges of autocracies and developing democracies.”

Update: 05/13/22 – 7:51am ET: Musk has since tweeted that he is still “committed to [the] acquisition.” Twitter shares are down 10 percent in pre-market at the time of this update.

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet is now available to order in 32 countries

Starlink’s internet service is now available in 32 countries around the world, the Elon Musk-owned company tweeted. Countries and regions marked on its map as “available,” including parts of Australia, Brazil, Chile, the US, Canada and most of Europe, can have their equipment shipped “immediately.” The service has steadily expanded since exiting beta last year, with availability in 12 countries as of September 2021 and 25 countries last February.

Starlink’s map shows areas marked as “available” (light blue), “wait list” (medium blue) and “coming soon” (dark blue). The service has a potential near-global reach at latitudes below around 60 degrees north, but availability is granted on a country-by-country basis. 

The kits recently rose in price and now cost $549 for reservation holders or $599 for new orders, and include a satellite antenna dish, a stand, a power supply and a WiFi router. Service prices also shot up from $99 to $110 per month. Users can also now add a portability feature, letting them take the kit while traveling, for an additional $25 per month fee.  

The company is primarily targeting remote regions that can’t get connected otherwise, to start with. It offers very respectable speeds of 104.97/12.04 Mbps (download/upload) in the US as of Q4 2021, nearly up to fixed US internet speeds. In theory, speeds climb as the company adds more satellites and ground stations. Latency is slower than fixed broadband (40 compared to 14 milliseconds) but far better than other satellite options including HughesNet (729 milliseconds) and Viasat (627 milliseconds).

Starlink has not been without controversy. Astronomers have complained that the thousands of satellites in its constellation have interfered with Earth telescope observations, and the company recently lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm. In addition, Starlink’s license to operate in France was temporarily cancelled by the nation’s regulator ARCEP, with a final decision expected soon. 

Apple begins arming store managers with anti-union talking points

As workers at some of its Stores attempt to unionize, Apple is giving talking points to managers to tamp those efforts down, Vice has reported. It’s telling employees that they could lose career opportunities, personal time off and work flexibility, adding that the company will pay “less attention to merit” in union stores. 

The scripts have been given to leaders at multiple Apple Stores, according to Vice. Managers have used the scripts during “downloads,” or employee meetings that start shifts. “There are a lot of things to consider. One is how a union could fundamentally change the way we work,” they reportedly read. “What makes a Store great is having a team that works together well. That can’t always happen when a union represents a Store’s team members.”

Employees of Apple’s Atlanta Cumberland Mall Store were the first to try to unionize, hoping to join the Communications Workers of America (CWA). They’ve complained about relatively low pay for their region, difficult working conditions and limited promotion opportunities. 

“Everybody deserves the opportunity to be able to not worry about whether they can afford food or pay their bills. Everybody deserves to be able to afford to live in the city that they work in,” employee Elli Daniels told Engadget last month. 

Apple didn’t respond directly to Vice about the report, but repeated a statement it has given before. “We are fortunate to have incredible retail team members and we deeply value everything they bring to Apple. We are pleased to offer very strong compensation and benefits for full time and part time employees, including health care, tuition reimbursement, new parental leave, paid family leave, annual stock grants and many other benefits,” it told Vice. Engadget has reached out for comment. 

Apple has reportedly hired the same law firm Starbucks is using for its anti-union campaign and its talking point rhetoric resembles arguments used by Amazon and Starbucks during worker meetings. One Amazon union buster warned employees they could end up with lower pay after unionization, before walking that back under employee questioning. 

However, research has shown that unions improve wages and benefits compared to non-union workers in the same industries, while also narrowing race and gender disparities, as Vice noted. The Atlanta union vote is set for next month, and other stores in Maryland and New York are also reportedly pursuing unionization bids.

Xbox update brings noise suppression to Party Chat

Chatting while gaming on your Xbox One Series X/S can be fun, but party chat members’ poor quality mics that let in every barking dog and blaring TV? Not so much. Now, Microsoft is doing something about it by introducing noise suppression to party chat in the latest Xbox update. 

“We’ve enabled a new feature which will process your microphone input through a noise suppression step to help produce cleaner audio in your Party Chat session,” it wrote in the Xbox blog. ” The setting is enabled by default but can be toggled from the dropdown options menu.”

The feature appears to be taking a cue from Discord’s Krisp audio filters, along with NVIDIA’s underrated Broadcast tech. Krisp has been a mixed bag — while the AI filters out most noises (mechanical keyboards, chip crunching) except for voices, some users have complained about reduced audio quality.

The Xbox update also includes various fixes for audio, controllers, HDMI CEC, Guide and more. It’s entering the alpha skip-ahead ring today, but should roll out more widely in the near future.