The New iPhone’s (Almost) Here!

If you don’t get the headline, go back and watch Steve Martin’s “The Jerk.”  It’ll make you smile on a long Labor (free) Day holiday.

But the new iPhones are apparently almost here. Or at least almost announced.

Tuesday, September 10, 10 AM, Steve Jobs Theater on the Apple Park Campus in Cupertino.

Macrumors writes the following could be on offer: 

• Three iPhones, two OLED models in 5.8 and 6.5 inches and on LCD that’s 6.1, and all with camera improvements.
• 3D Touch goes, haptic feedback makes a resurgence…bilateral wireless charging, bigger batteries, new AMX co-processor and A13 chip.

Likely see a new Apple Watch, new iPad Pros, new 10.2-inch iPad, and a high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro.

Me, I’m still doing well with my dual phone strategy, an iPhone 7+ and a 2008 Nokia E71 that keeps me off-the-grid and that I use mainly for phone calls and texts (which if you’re moving around can admittedly drop the signal). But for $20/month, you can’t beat it (sorry, no data).

My take on the new Apple lineup: The iPhone XR is going to start looking like a fantastic next-gen iPhone for those who don’t aspire to the new 11s. (The retail price of the low-end XR is still $750 on the Apple website, a deal compared to the higher-end Xs and, I would imagine, the 11s). 

Stuxnet Two?

The New York Times is reporting that a cyberattack against Iran in June took out a database used by Iran’s paramilitary arm used to plot attacks against oil tankers. The attack also degraded Tehran’s ability to target shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf, and Iran is still trying to recover information destroyed in the June 20 attack and get back online.

This attack came right around the time that Iran shot down a U.S. drone, a retaliatory attack for which the Trump Administration called off at the eleventh hour.

MIT Review reports the attack has had a lingering impact on the Iranian military’s ability to target oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, and noted the database wiped out belong to Iran’s paramilitary forces known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

U.S. officials said there has been no escalation from Iran, but the Times reports there have been doubts about whether the benefits of the operation outweighed the cost — “lost intelligence and lost access to a critical network used by the Guard.”

The entire episode is reminiscent of Stuxnet, a cyber operation thought to be developed by the U.S. and Israel that targeted and destroyed controller systems for centrifuges in Iran’s uranium enrichment program — only this time at a much faster pace.