Prime Day Underway; Easier for Cops to Crack Phones; New HIV Drug 100% Effective So Far in Human Tests; Kaspersky Exiting the US

If Amazon Prime Day was an actual 24 hour day, it would be half over…but of course, it isn’t. Amazon has stretched Prime Day to 48 hours for several years now…I suspect it will be a week at some point in the future. At any rate, engadget.com reminds us that there are deals to be had even on gear from Apple…you can score AirPods Pro from $80 off, for example. Sony WH-1000XM5 Headphones are $298, that’s $102 off. Pick up an iRobot Roomba Combo Essential robot vacuum and mop for $190, a $110 discount. Amazon’s own Echo Show 8 is $85, a $65 reduction. You get the idea. 

We heard yesterday that the FBI had already gotten into the phone of the shooter who nicked former President Trump’s ear on Saturday. Theverge.com reports that the phone was sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, VA. It’s worth noting that nearly every police department in the country now has Cellebrite, the Israeli gadget that is made for extracting data from phones, and also has some capability to unlock phones. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also says that the FBI more than likely has its own in-house tools to hack into phones. Until recently, it had taken the FBI weeks or even months to get into a suspect’s phone. Just a reminder that tech often moves at warp speed. It now takes only minutes to brute-force a 4 digit password and just hours to crack a 6 digit one.

This is more bio-tech, but still pretty amazing. A clinical trial in Africa has found an HIV drug to be 100% effective in a human trial. According to bgr.com, the results were reported by The Conversation. The drug is called Lenacapavir, and it was trialed by Gilead at 25 different sites in South Africa and Uganda. This drug and two others were tested on 5,000 women. The Lenacapavir is an injection given twice a year. The 2134 women given this drug did not get HIV at all…the ones that got the other two drugs got some protection but not close to 100% protection. Hopefully this will get approval by various governments…it could be a boon to millions of people.

On the heels of the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioning 12 Kaspersky Lab execs and freeing their US assets, Kaspersky Lab will start shutting down operations in the US on July 20th. Bleepingcomputer.com reports they will lay off all US employees…but that only amounts to about 50 people. The Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security said in a release “Today’s Final Determination and Entity Listing are the result of a lengthy and thorough investigation, which found that the company’s continued operations in the United States presented a national security risk—due to the Russian Government’s offensive cyber capabilities and capacity to influence or direct Kaspersky’s operations—that could not be addressed through mitigation measures short of a total prohibition.” 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.