Technology News

The top iPhone and iPad apps on App Store

Top Paid iPhone Apps:

1. Minecraft, Mojang

2. Bloons TD 6, Ninja Kiwi

3. HotSchedules, HotSchedules

4. Heads Up!, Warner Bros.

5. Incredibox, So Far So Good

6. Procreate Pocket, Savage Interactive Pty Ltd

7. Geometry Dash, RobTop Games AB

8. Monopoly, Marmalade Game Studio

9. True Skate, True Axis

10. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Rockstar Games

Top Free iPhone Apps:

1. Bubble Ouch: Pop it Fidgets, Wannaplay LLC

2. TikTok, TikTok Pte. Ltd.

3. YouTube: Watch, Listen, Stream, Google LLC

4. Instagram, Instagram, Inc.

5. Snapchat, Snap, Inc.

6. Google Maps, Google LLC

7. Facebook, Facebook, Inc.

8. Messenger, Facebook, Inc.

9. Queen Bee!, Rollic Games

10. Gmail – Email by Google, Google LLC

Top Paid iPad Apps:

1. Procreate, Savage Interactive Pty Ltd

2. Minecraft, Mojang

3. GoodNotes 5, Time Base Technology Limited

4. Notability, Ginger Labs

5. Bloons TD 6, Ninja Kiwi

6. Geometry Dash, RobTop Games AB

7. Toca Life: Hospital, Toca Boca AB

8. Incredibox, So Far So Good

9. Toca Kitchen 2, Toca Boca AB

10. Monopoly, Marmalade Game Studio

Top Free iPad Apps:

1. Disney+, Disney

2. YouTube: Watch, Listen, Stream, Google LLC

3. Netflix, Netflix, Inc.

4. Run of Life, Voodoo

5. Roblox, Roblox Corporation

6. Queen Bee!, Rollic Games

7. Paper Fold, Good Job Games

8. TikTok, TikTok Pte. Ltd.

9. Body Run 3D, Voodoo

10. Count Masters: Crowd Runner 3D, Tap2Play LLC

The top 10 books on the Apple Store

US Bestseller List – Paid Books

Book Title by Author Name – ISBN – (Publisher)

1. The Sixth Wedding by Elin Hilderbrand – 9780316309172 – (Little, Brown and Company)

2. The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave – 9781501171369 – (Simon & Schuster)

3. Freed by Helen Hardt – 9781642632729 – (Waterhouse Press)

4. Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid – 9781524798666 – (Random House Publishing Group)

5. Stealth Attack by John Gilstrap – 9780786045556 – (Pinnacle Books)

6. The President’s Daughter by Bill Clinton & James Patterson – 9780316540735 – (Little, Brown and Company and Knopf)

7. Freed by E L James – 9781728251059 – (Sourcebooks, Inc)

8. When Stars Collide by Susan Elizabeth Phillips – 9780062973108 – (William Morrow)

9. Golden Girl by Elin Hilderbrand – 9780316256667 – (Little, Brown and Company)

10. The Maidens by Alex Michaelides – 9781250304476 – (Celadon Books)

Update on the latest in business:

FINANCIAL MARKETS

US stocks move lower, oil prices pull back after spike

NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks were mostly lower in midday trading Tuesday, as U.S. trading resumed after the Independence Day holiday and investors reassess after last week’s record highs. The S&P 500 index was down 0.8%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.1% and the Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.5%. Oil prices pulled back after jumping overnight when talks among members of the OPEC cartel and allied oil producing countries broke off in the midst of a standoff with the United Arab Emirates over production levels. Bond yields fell and weighed on banks, which led the broad slide along with industrial stocks.

ECONOMY-SERVICES

US service sector grows, albeit slightly slower in June

SILVER SPRING, Md. (AP) — Growth in the services sector, where most Americans work, slowed in June following record expansion in May. The Institute for Supply Management said Tuesday that its monthly survey of service industries retreated to a reading of 60.1, following a all-time high reading of 64 in May. Any reading above 50 indicates the sector is expanding. It’s the 13th straight month of expansion in the services sector following a two-month contraction in April and May of last year. The employment index fell into contraction territory with a reading of 49.3, suggesting many companies are still struggling to hire enough workers.

CHINA-POLITICS

China’s Xi attacks calls for technology blockades

BEIJING (AP) — China’s leader Xi Jinping has attacked calls from some in the U.S. and its allies to limit their dependency on Chinese suppliers and block the sharing of technologies. In a speech to representatives of leftist political parties in more than 100 countries, Xi said China’s ruling Communist Party has succeeded in raising the country from poverty and created a new model of development. He says such experiences should be shared and no country should “obstruct the development of other countries and harm their people’s lives through political manipulation.” Xi’s speech comes days after he delivered a defiant address marking the ruling Communist Party’s centenary, saying China will not be bullied and will punish anyone who tries.

CYBERSECURITY-KASEYA-RANSOMWARE-ATTACK

Number of victims in major ransomware attack still unclear

UNDATED (AP) — The software company whose software was exploited in the biggest global ransomware attack on record says it so far it appears that fewer than 1,500 businesses were compromised. But cybersecurity experts suspected the estimate was low and note that victims are still being identified. The ransomware was spread Friday to victims in at least 17 countries from a compromised server of Miami-based Kaseya. The tool exploited manages networks and is designed to protect them from malware. However, the Russia-linked ransomware gang behind the attack cleverly used to distribute software that scrambles data that the criminals unlock only after receiving an extortion payment.

PENTAGON-JEDI CONTRACT

Pentagon cancels disputed JEDI cloud contract with Microsoft

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon said it has canceled a cloud-computing contract with Microsoft that could eventually have been worth $10 billion and will instead pursue a deal with both Microsoft and Amazon. The Pentagon said in a statement that: “With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JEDI Cloud contract, which has long been delayed, no longer meets the requirements to fill the DoD’s capability gaps.” It cited industry advances and “evolving requirements” in cloud computing services, but did not directly mention the legal battle it faced with Amazon’s challenge of the original $1 million contract awarded to Microsoft.

FARM RULES

New US rules to protect animal farmers expected soon

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — The Biden administration plans to issue a new rule to protect the rights of farmers who raise cows, chickens and hogs against the country’s largest meat processors as part of a plan to encourage more competition in agriculture. It will make it easier for farmers to sue companies they contract with over unfair practices. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is also expected to tighten the definition of what it means for meat to be labeled a “Product of USA” to exclude animals that are raised abroad but processed in the United States. A USDA official familiar with the White House’s plan says an executive order will be announced this week that will clear the way for the new rules.

CONGRESS-INFRASTRUCTURE-DEMOCRATS

WASHINGTON (AP) — Top congressional Democrats are trying to craft legislation financing President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar agenda of bolstering the economy and helping families. But first, they have to figure out how to satisfy the party’s rival moderate and progressive wings. Biden wants to spend roughly $4 trillion for roads and other infrastructure projects and for helping families with programs like health care and child care. Progressives want to spend more than that, moderates less. But Democrats have virtually no votes to spare in the closely divided Congress. And with saber rattling by both Democratic factions, leaders are finding their search for middle ground isn’t easy.

ECONOMY-TEENS GETTING JOBS

As employers struggle to fill jobs, teens come to the rescue

WASHINGTON (AP) — The owners of restaurants, amusement parks and retail shops, many of them desperate for workers, are sounding an unusual note of gratitude this summer: Thank goodness for teenagers. As the U.S. economy bounds back with unexpected speed from the pandemic recession and customer demand intensifies, high school-age kids are filling jobs that older workers can’t — or won’t. The result is that teens who are willing to bus restaurant tables or serve as water-park lifeguards are commanding $15, $17 or more an hour, plus bonuses in some instances or money to help pay for school classes.

Biden: US damage appears minimal in big ransomware attack

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Tuesday that damage to U.S. businesses in the biggest ransomware attack on record appears minimal, though information remained incomplete. The company whose software was exploited said fewer than 1,500 businesses worldwide appeared compromised but cybersecurity experts caution that the incident isn’t over.

Also Tuesday, a security researcher who chatted online with representatives of the Russia-linked REvil gang behind the attack said they claimed to have stolen data from hundreds of companies, but offered no evidence.

Answering a reporter’s question at a vaccine-related White House event, Biden said his national security team had updated him Tuesday morning on the attack, which exploited a powerful remote-management tool run by Miami-based software company Kaseya in what is known as a supply-chain attack.

“It appears to have caused minimal damage to U.S. businesses but we’re still gathering information,” Biden said. “And I’m going to have more to say about this in the next several days.” An official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, speaking on condition they not be further identified, said no federal agencies or critical infrastructure appear to have been impacted.

On Wednesday, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will lead an interagency meeting to discuss the administration’s efforts to counter ransomware.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki held out the prospect of retaliatory action. What Biden told President Vladimir Putin in Geneva last month still holds, she said: “If the Russian government cannot or will not take action against criminal actors residing in Russia, we will take action or reserve the right to take action on our own.”

What sort of action that would be is unclear.

Biden has said repeatedly that the Kremlin bears responsibility for giving ransomware criminals safe harbor, even if it is not directly involved. There is no indication that Putin has moved against the gangs. Psaki said Russian and U.S. representatives were meeting next week and would discuss the matter.

Further underscoring the geopolitical stakes in cyberspace, the Republican National Committee said Tuesday that it had been informed over the weekend that one of its contractors had been breached, though it was not immediately clear by whom. The RNC said no data was accessed.

The contractor, Synnex, initially said that the action “could potentially be in connection with the recent cybersecurity attacks of Managed Service Providers,” a likely reference to the breaches last week. But it backed away from that claim in a second statement late Tuesday.

Friday’s attack hobbled businesses in at least 17 countries. It shuttered most of the 800 supermarkets in the Swedish Coop chain over the weekend because cash registers stopped working, and reportedly knocked more than 100 New Zealand kindergartens offline.

Kaseya said it believes only about 800 to 1,500 of the estimated 800,000 to 1,000,000 mostly small business end-users of its software were affected. They are customers of companies that use Kaseya’s virtual system administrator, or VSA, product to fully manage their IT infrastructure.

Cybersecurity experts said, however, it is too early for Kaseya to know the true impact given its launch on the eve of the Fourth of July holiday weekend in the U.S. They said many targets might only discover it upon returning to work Tuesday.

Ransomware criminals infiltrate networks and sow malware that cripples them by scrambling all their data. Victims get a decoder key when they pay up. Most ransomware victims don’t publicly report attacks or disclose if they’ve paid ransoms. In the U.S, disclosure of a breach is required by state laws when personal data that can be used in identity theft is stolen. Federal law mandates it when healthcare records are exposed.

Security researchers said that in this attack, the criminals did not appear to have had time to steal data before locking up networks. That raised the question whether the motivation behind the attack was profit alone, because extortion through threatening to expose sensitive pilfered data betters the odds of big payoffs.

But Ryan Sherstobitoff, threat intelligence chief of the cybersecurity firm Security Scorecard, said REvil representatives claimed Saturday to have stolen data from hundreds of companies and were threatening to sell it if ransom demands of up to $5 million for bigger victims — they were seeking $45,000 per infected computer — were not met.

“The operators are claiming that, though there is not necessarily direct evidence,” added Sherstobitoff, who said he masqueraded as a victim to engage the criminals. He said the criminals claimed banks were among victims.

REvil offered a universal software decoder to free all victims in exchange for a lump sum payment of $50 million, he added. On Sunday, that sum rose to $70 million in a post on the criminals’ dark web site.

Analysts say the chaos ransomware criminals have wrought in the past year — hitting hospitals, schools, local governments and other targets at the rate of about one every eight minutes — serves Putin’s strategic agenda of destabilizing the West.

Most of the more than 60 Kaseya customers that company spokeswoman Dana Liedholm said were affected are managed service providers (MSPs), with multiple customers downstream.

“Given the relationship between Kaseya and MSPs, it’s not clear how Kaseya would know the number of victims impacted. There is no way the numbers are as low as Kaseya is claiming though,” said Jake Williams, chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm BreachQuest. Others researchers also questioned Kaseya’s visibility into crippled managed service providers.

The hacked VSA tool remotely maintains customer networks, automating security and other software updates. Essentially, a product designed to protect networks from malware was cleverly used to distribute it.

In an interview on Sunday, Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola estimated the number of victims in “the low thousands.” The German news agency dpa had reported that an unnamed German IT services company told authorities that several thousand of its customers were compromised. Also among reported victims were two Dutch IT services companies.

A broad array of businesses and public agencies were hit, apparently on all continents, including in financial services, travel and leisure and the public sector — though few large companies, the cybersecurity firm Sophos said.

Liedholm, the Kaseya spokeswoman, said the vast majority of the company’s 37,000 customers were unaffected and said the company expected to release a patch Wednesday.

REvil, previously best known for extorting $11 million from the meat-processing giant JBS after hobbling it on Memorial Day, broke into at least one Kaseya server after identifying a “zero day” vulnerability, cybersecurity researchers said.

Dutch researchers said they alerted Kaseya to the zero day and a number of “severe vulnerabilities” ahead of the attack. Neither they nor Kaseya would say how far in advance.

____

Associated Press reporters Darlene Superville and Eric Tucker in Washington and Alan Suderman in Richmond, Virginia, contributed to this report.

Pentagon cancels disputed JEDI cloud contract with Microsoft

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon said Tuesday it canceled a disputed cloud-computing contract with Microsoft that could eventually have been worth $10 billion. It will instead pursue a deal with both Microsoft and Amazon and possibly other cloud service providers.

“With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JEDI Cloud contract, which has long been delayed, no longer meets the requirements to fill the DoD’s capability gaps,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

The statement did not directly mention that the Pentagon faced extended legal challenges by Amazon to the original $1 million contract awarded to Microsoft. Amazon argued that the Microsoft award was tainted by politics, particularly then-President Donald Trump’s antagonism toward Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, who stepped down Monday as the company’s chief executive officer. Bezos owns The Washington Post, a newspaper often criticized by Trump.

The Pentagon’s chief information officer, John Sherman, told reporters Tuesday that during the lengthy legal fight with Amazon, “the landscape has evolved” with new possibilities for large-scale cloud computing services. Thus it was decided, he said, to start over and seek multiple vendors.

Sherman said JEDI will be replaced by a new program called Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, and that both Amazon and Microsoft “likely” will be awarded parts of the business, although neither is guaranteed. Sherman said the three other large cloud service providers — Google, IBM and Oracle — might qualify, too.

Microsoft said in response to the Pentagon announcement, “We understand the DoD s rationale, and we support them and every military member who needs the mission-critical 21st century technology JEDI would have provided. The DoD faced a difficult choice: Continue with what could be a years-long litigation battle or find another path forward.”

Amazon said it understands and agrees with the Pentagon’s decision. In a statement, the company reiterated its view that the 2019 contract award was not based on the merits of the competing proposals “and instead was the result of outside influence that has no place in government procurement.”

Oracle, which had earlier sought the JEDI contact but didn’t make it to the final round, declined comment Tuesday. In separate statements, IBM said it was evaluating the new Pentagon approach and Google said it looked forward to discussing it with Pentagon officials.

The JEDI project began with the $1 million contract award for Microsoft, meant as an initial step in a 10-year deal that could have reached $10 billion in value. The project that will replace it is a five-year program; Sherman said no exact contract value has been set but that it will be “in the billions.” Sherman said the government will negotiate the amount Microsoft will be paid for having its 2019 deal terminated.

Amazon Web Services, a market leader in providing cloud computing services, had long been considered a leading candidate to run the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI. The project was meant to store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the U.S. military to improve communications with soldiers on the battlefield and use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities.

The JEDI contract became mired in legal challenges almost as soon as it was awarded to Microsoft in October 2019. The losing bidder, Amazon Web Services, went to court arguing that the Pentagon’s process was flawed and unfair, including that it was improperly influenced by politics.

This year the Pentagon had been hinting that it might scrap the contract, saying in May that it felt compelled to reconsider its options after a federal judge in April rejected a Pentagon move to have key parts of Amazon’s lawsuit dismissed.

The JEDI saga has been unusual for the political dimension linked to Trump. In April 2020, the Defense Department inspector general’s office concluded that the contracting process was in line with legal and government purchasing standards. The inspector general found no evidence of White House interference in the contract award process, but that review also said investigators could not fully review the matter because the White House would not allow unfettered access to witnesses.

Five months later, the Pentagon reaffirmed Microsoft as winner of the contract, but work remained stalled by Amazon’s legal challenge.

In its April 2020 report, the inspector general’s office did not draw a conclusion about whether the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp. was appropriately declared the winner. Rather, it looked at whether the decision-making process was proper and legal. It also examined allegations of unethical behavior by Pentagon officials involved in the matter and generally determined that any ethical lapses did not influence the outcome.

That review did not find evidence of White House pressure for the Pentagon to favor the Microsoft bid, but it also said it could not definitely determine the full extent of White House interactions with the Pentagon’s decision makers.

—

AP writers Matt O’Brien and Joseph Pisani contributed to this report.

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