Just last week, AT&T announced the first handful of cities where it’ll roll out its 5G network later this year. Today at Mobile World Congress, T-Mobile and Sprint did the same.

Sprint’s first 5G networks will go live in Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington, DC and Houston.

T-Mobile will fire up 5G in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Dallas first, promising to have it up and running in 30 cities total by the end of the year.

So what does this mean for you? Right now… not much. Eventually, 5G will mean waaaaay faster speeds on your various compatible smart devices. How fast, exactly, is still sort of up in the air as telecoms groups nail down and finalize the standards — but it’s fast. Companies have already demonstrated connections upwards of 500 megabytes (not megabits) per second.

The catch: Even if you live in any of the aforementioned cities, you’ll need a 5G-compatible phone to get on that network… and, well, those won’t be available until next year.

Doogee’s Mobile World Congress press conference is mostly what you’d expect from a company you’ve never heard of: small, low key, in the second basement meeting room at a hotel across from the convention center. It’s a bit like the smartphone farm system, the company’s hoping it can gin up enough awareness to rise above the din of news from the world’s largest mobile companies.

It’s a big ask from a company still really taking its first baby steps toward global recognition. Founded in 2013, Doogee’s been building up an odd assortment of international markets. The company believes it’s cracked the top five in places like Hungary, the Czech Republic and Algeria. It’s also using this trip to Barcelona to help gain a foothold in Spain, through local big box store,  MediaMarkt.

The company’s CEO Xinchao told TechCrunch that the US is on the company’s radar as well — though it acknowledges that carriers are going to be a major hurdle, particularly in light of the recent issues with fellow Chinese companies ZTE and OnePlus have been running into here in the States.

In fact, the young company appears to be actively looking into practically all markets, save for its native China, where full access to Google services is barred. The company says it’s using its forums actively engaging demand in various markets to engage its user base. It’s a strategy that’s certainly worked for OnePlus in the past.

This year’s big announcement was the Doogee V — the company’s low-cost iPhone X knockoff. The product borrows more than a few design cues from Apple’s latest flagship, and a rep for the company quickly invoked the device when describing the company’s new phone.

When the device launches at the end of April, it will be considerably less expensive than Apple and Samsung’s flagships (though exact pricing is still TBD). And honestly, in person the device (or a prototype of the device, at least) looks considerably less slick than those devices. What it does feature, however, is a fingerprint sensor built into the display. The system essentially shines a bright OLED on the fingerprint, sending the image to the sensor.

Like just about everyone else in the industry, the company is pushing toward an all-screen display. At present, it features a familiar iPhone X-style notch up top. The company also showed off a handful of different prototypes designed to deal with the camera “problem,” including a small one that swivels up from the back of the device (part of a growing trend, it seems) and another that pops up in a manner similar to those old-school slider cellphones.

This is also the latest in a long line to show off a bendable screen prototype. It promises to actually use that tech to deliver something to the market, in the form of a handset that closes like a clamshell and opens to reveal a larger screen, in a manner similar to ZTE’s Axon M — but hopefully without the big gap between.

Remember, if you own a second- or third-generation Apple TV, you can still use your iOS device as a remote, but you’ll need to download the dedicated Apple TV Remote app from the App Store.

Before continuing, make sure that your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is updated to iOS 11: Open the Settings app, tap General -> About, and look for the version number. If you need to update, tap back to Settings, select Software Update, and follow the onscreen instructions, then meet us back here when installation is complete.

How to Set Up Apple TV Remote in iOS 11’s Control Center

1. Turn on your Apple TV and the TV/monitor connected to it, and make sure your iOS device and Apple TV are connected to the same Wi-Fi network.
   
2. Launch the Settings app on your iOS device.
   
   
3. Select Control Center from the options list.
   
4. Tap Customize Controls.
   
5. In the More Controls list, tap the entry called Apple TV Remote.
   
6. Next, launch the Control Center on your iOS device in the following manner: On iPad, double-tap the Home button; on iPhone 8 or earlier, swipe up from the bottom of the screen; or on iPhone X, swipe down from the upper right “ear”.
   
   
7. Tap the Apple TV button that now appears in the Control Center grid of options.
   
8. In the Remote overlay that appears, choose the Apple TV that you want to connect to from the list.
   
9. Enter the four-digit passcode that appears on your Apple TV’s display to connect.
   
   

The touch interface that appears on your iPhone or iPad screen will replicate the function of the original Apple TV Remote except for the volume buttons. If your Apple TV is set up to stream audio to an AirPlay/Bluetooth speaker or headset, then you can use the volume buttons on your iOS device to adjust the output volume. Otherwise, you’ll have to continue to adjust sound levels using the dedicated remote, your television, or any hi-fi equipment your Apple TV is connected to. With that in mind, here’s a quick breakdown of the touchscreen controls that are available to you.

How to Use the Apple TV Remote in iOS 11’s Control Center

• 
• The large gray space in the middle of the onscreen interface acts as the touchpad. You can swipe it to move through Apple TV menus, tap it to select items, and use both actions to rewind and fast-forward media during playback.
• The big Menu button can be used to go back a level in menu screens. A quick double tap on it will also activate the Apple TV screensaver.
• During playback, two buttons will appear on either side of the Menu button that allow you to jump forward and back 10 seconds.
• The Play/Pause button in the lower left of the interface can be used to start the selected item straight away, bypassing any associated content info screens.
• The Home button (the one with the TV icon) takes you to the Home screen where all your installed Apple TV apps live in a grid formation. It may also take you to the TV app, depending on your settings.
• The Microphone button activates Siri input, allowing you to perform a variety of voice commands from anywhere in the system. Activating a search field will also bring up a pop-up window that lets you either type using your iOS device’s keyboard or dictate your search term. Either of these options is significantly easier than navigating the Apple TV’s onscreen keyboard.

For more details on the functions you can perform using the Apple TV Remote’s controls, be sure to check out our dedicated tips and tricks guide.

Facebook is trying to play extra nice with local news publishers by putting $3 million behind the launch of the Local News Subscriptions Accelerator. The three-month pilot program will help 10 to 15 U.S.-based metropolitan news organizations gain more digital subscribers both on and off Facebook.

“We often talk to publishers about what the future of journalism looks like and local news publishers tell us that digital subscribers are critical to the long-term sustainability of their business,” Facebook Head of News Partnerships Campbell Brown wrote in a blog post. “We know Facebook is one part of the strategy to engage readers and ultimately drive paid subscriptions.”

This comes about a month after Facebook announced it would make it easier for people to see local news and other information that is relevant to where people live. At the time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “local news helps build community” and plays a vital role in ensuring time spent on Facebook is valuable.

So far, publishers like The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Seattle Times and others are participating in Facebook’s local news accelerator. Throughout the three-month program, local news publications will meet in person once a month with “digital subscription experts” to receive tips and tricks. Publishers also will participate in weekly trainings about digital subscriptions marketing.

“This initiative is a part of our ongoing efforts to provide tools and trainings to newsrooms and journalists, and to ensure our platform connects people to the quality, trusted and local news that is most important to them,” Brown wrote. “We will be making additional investments in organizations and programs committed to strengthening and advancing the future of journalism, and sharing more on that soon.”

Meanwhile, the News Media Alliance, a newspaper industry trade group that represents more than 2,000 newspapers in the U.S., launched a political action committee to ask Congress for an anti-trust safe harbor against Google and Facebook, Axios reported earlier today. The aim is to enable publishers to be able to better negotiate with Google and Facebook, which account for the vast majority of online referral traffic, around intellectual property protections, support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data.

Cybercriminals have figured out a way to abuse widely-used Memcached servers to launch over 51,000 times powerful DDoS attacks than their original strength, which could result in knocking down of major websites and Internet infrastructure.

In recent days, security researchers at Cloudflare, Arbor Networks, and Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 noticed that hackers are now abusing “Memcached” to amplify their DDoS attacks by an unprecedented factor of 51,200.

Memcached is a popular open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system that allows objects to be stored in memory and has been designed to work with a large number of open connections. Memcached server runs over TCP or UDP port 11211.

The Memcached application has been designed to speed up dynamic web applications by reducing stress on the database that helps administrators to increase performance and scale web applications. It’s widely used by thousands of websites, including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and Github.

Dubbed Memcrashed by Cloudflare, the attack apparently abuses unprotected Memcached servers that have UDP enabled in order to deliver DDoS attacks 51,200 times their original strength, making it the most prominent amplification method ever used in the wild so far.

How Memcrashed DDoS Amplification Attack Works?

Like other amplification methods where hackers send a small request from a spoofed IP address to get a much larger response in return, Memcrashed amplification attack also works by sending a forged request to the targeted server (vulnerable UDP server) on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim’s IP.

According to the researchers, just a few bytes of the request sent to the vulnerable server can trigger the response of tens of thousands of times bigger.

“15 bytes of request triggered 134KB of response. This is amplification factor of 10,000x! In practice we’ve seen a 15-byte request result in a 750kB response (that’s a 51,200x amplification),” Cloudflare says.

According to the researchers, most of the Memcached servers being abused for amplification DDoS attacks are hosted at OVH, Digital Ocean, Sakura and other small hosting providers.

In total, researchers have seen only 5,729 unique source IP addresses associated with vulnerable Memcached servers, but they are “expecting to see much larger attacks in future, as Shodan reports 88,000 open Memcached servers.” Cloudflare says.

“At peak we’ve seen 260Gbps of inbound UDP memcached traffic. This is massive for a new amplification vector. But the numbers don’t lie. It’s possible because all the reflected packets are very large,” Cloudflare says.

Arbor Networks noted that the Memcached priming queries used in these attacks could also be directed towards TCP port 11211 on abusable Memcached servers.

But TCP is not currently considered a high-risk Memcached reflection/amplification vector because TCP queries cannot be reliably spoofed.

The popularly known DDoS amplification attack vectors that we reported in the past include poorly secured domain name system (DNS) resolution servers, which amplify volumes by about 50 times, and network time protocol (NTP), which increases traffic volumes by nearly 58 times.

Mitigation: How to Fix Memcached Servers?

One of the easiest ways to prevent your Memcached servers from being abused as reflectors is firewalling, blocking or rate-limiting UDP on source port 11211.

Since Memcached listens on INADDR_ANY and runs with UDP support enabled by default, administrators are advised to disable UDP support if they are not using it.

The attack size potentially created by Memcached reflection cannot be easily defended against by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), as long as IP spoofing is permissible on the internet.