At least two civilians have been killed less than two hours into a truce in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta, activists said, as Syrian government forces launched fresh attacks in the rebel-held Damascus suburb.

Syrian warplanes launched several air raids in Douma and Harasta on Tuesday, Mahmoud Adam, a spokesman for Syria’s Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets, told Al Jazeera.

In Douma, one of Eastern Ghouta’s main towns, two people, including a woman, lost their lives and several others have been wounded, Adam said.

Alaa al-Ahmed, a local activist, told Al Jazeera that the attacks started at 9:30am (7:30 GMT) on Tuesday, 30 minutes after a Russia-backed ceasefire began.

The truce was meant to allow civilians to evacuate from the rebel-held enclave, which has been under continuous aerial bombardment since February 18.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had ordered the ceasefire from 9am to 2pm (7:00 to 12:00 GMT) on Tuesday, as air raids and ground operations killed more than 550 civilians in the last eight days, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

According to al-Ahmed, Russia did not provide a guarantee or a “trusted third party” to help evacuate the injured out of the area.

“How could people trust Russia – the same people bombing us – with assisting in the safe evacuation of the injured?” he said. “There is huge contradiction.”

The bombardment of the Damascus suburb, home to some 400,000 people, has been one of the most intense in Syria’s seven-year war.

“What happened this morning is a clear violation of the truce – which is merely propaganda,” al-Ahmed said.

The suburb’s humanitarian situation has been deteriorating, causing widespread international condemnation, with UN secretary-general describing the situation in the enclave as “hell on earth”.

On Monday, a suspected chemical attack killed one child, according to Syria’s Civil Defence.

The reported chlorine gas attack injured at least 18 others when it hit Eastern Ghouta’s al-Shifaniyah town close to the front lines, where rebels are fighting Syrian ground forces who have been trying to penetrate into the besieged enclave since Sunday.

Nour Othman, a local journalist based in Douma, told Al Jazeera that warplanes also struck the al-Marj area on Tuesday morning, a town near the outskirts of Douma.

“Tens of people have been injured,” he said.

And in the town of Misraba, at least seven people have been wounded as a result of surface-to-surface missiles, Othman added.

“The medical facilities are in a state of chaos – either because of the shelling or due to the high number of admitted injuries,” he explained.

No ‘safe corridors’ 

The truce was supposed to establish “safe corridors” to facilitate the evacuation process, but activists say there has been no attempt at doing so.

“To this moment, not a single person inside Eastern Ghouta has been evacuated,” Adam said, describing the truce as “dishonest”. 

“Shelling is ongoing, and there have been barrel bombs used in the outskirts of Douma,” he added.

Syrian state news agency, SANA, said rebels had fired several rockets in the path of a “safe corridor” that was supposed to allow for the evacuation of civilians.

Syria’s Civil Defence team have started transferring people to medical facilities.

Similarly, Firas al-Abdullah, an activist in Eastern Ghouta, confirmed that at least three towns were hit on Tuesday after the ceasefire was set to take effect.

“No one left, no one entered – there has been nothing of this sort,” he said of the proposed evacuation plan.

Locals have also noted that several government warplanes are flying over villages on the outskirts of Douma.

On Saturday, an earlier attempt to implement a 30-day ceasefire in Syria failed, when a UN Security Council resolution was not upheld.

Eastern Ghouta has been under rebel control since 2013, after which President Bashar al-Assad’s government imposed a siege on the area in an attempt to drive out opposition fighters.

The blockade has caused a food and medicine shortage, has caused inflation rates to soar and aid convoys have not been able to deliver much of the desperately needed supplies.

Greetings for snowy Barcelona. Sure we’ve still got several days of Mobile World Congress ahead of us, but we’ve entered the point in the week when all of the big names have already wrapped up their press conferences and revealed their hands.

With that in mind, this seems like the perfect opportunity to take a good look at how the industry’s big names fared at the show. Barring any sort of unforeseen circumstances, here’s a list of this week’s biggest winners and losers.

HMD (Nokia): HMD scored a coup for a second year in a row, led by another nod to Nokia’s former successes. This time out, it was a return for the much loved Nokia 8110 Matrix slider, featuring 4G, a handful of big name social media apps and, yes, Snake. The company also unveiled a quartet of new Nokia Android phones and announced its intentions to “lead the charge” with Google’s Android One initiative.

Score: 9/10

HTC: The Taiwanese company is struggling more than most to stay relevant in an ever-shifting smartphone landscape. It’s telling, then, that HTC’s big announcements this week revolved around investing more of its existing resources in its VR play. It was crickets on the smartphone front, as the company made the Vive the centerpiece of its booth at the show.

Score: 3/10

Huawei: After a messy CES, Huawei really could have used a big win at MWC. Of course, a new flagship phone launch would have helped. Instead, the company announced two new moderately interesting tablets and a MacBook competitor with an awkwardly placed webcam. Just in case you were worried, though, it parked a giant truck outside the convention center noting that its upcoming P20 was, indeed, coming soon. The device is set to launch next month.

That said, the self-driving car promotion was kind of neat.

Score: 5/10

Lenovo: Lenovo was extremely quiet on the mobile front, but the company did announce a slate of fairly compelling laptops. Most interesting of all is the $219 100e. The Chromebook has fairly middling specs, but it looks to be nigh indestructible, as evidence by the vaguely upsetting image above. Meanwhile, a leaked render of the Moto E5 served as this week’s reminder that Motorola’s still kicking.

Score: 6/10 

LG: LG’s big announcement was the very definition of more of the same. The company announced this week that it will be reissuing a sort of director’s cut edition of its V30 flagship sporting the decidedly clunky V30S ThinQ name. The product features AI-based image recognition designed to improve photos. It’s a cool trick that may ultimately prove more novel than it is useful.

More importantly, however, the device marks a new six month refresh cycle for the company that will offer a slightly souped-up version of its latest flagship between major upgrades.

Score: 5/10

Samsung: Samsung was declared MWC’s big winner well in advance of the actual event. The company happily took some of the wind out of its own sails back at CES, when it announced that its next big thing would be arriving this month, offering up teasers all along the way. A few days in, few major competitors have emerged for the title. Even if it wasn’t an off-year, it’s tough to imagine anyone being able to compete with a new flagship for the world’s largest smartphone maker.

The Galaxy S9 isn’t a revolutionary device on most accounts, but it bring enough solid upgrades to keep the company’s fanbase happy and remain competitive with Apple’s everything and the kitchen sink iPhone X. As promised, most of the big upgrades are camera related, bringing improved low light through a dual-aperture camera and some really neat real-time translation tricks with Bixby vision.

The device’s AR Emojis are admittedly kind of creepy, but a deal with Disney was a nice poke in Apple’s eye after the launch of Animoji. Samsung also upgraded DeX and continued kicking the ball forward with the promise of a new version of Bixby around the corner.

Score: 8/10

Sony: The Japanese electronics giant launched the XZ2 and XZ2 Compact at this years show. The devices will more than likely run up against the same sort of problems that have plagued the Xperia for as long as anyone can remember, never really becoming the kind of smartphone competitor the company is truly capable of. But the devices do mark a step toward Sony taking these devices more serious as consumer products, rather than simple showcases for its camera tech.

During its press conference, the company reintroduced us to the Xperia Ear Duo and teased Samsung by noting that it had released its own Super Slow Motion camera tech last year. Of course, none of that means a whole lot if nobody’s buying. Sony also teased its own upcoming take on low-light shooting, but wasn’t ready to offer a timeline.

Score: 6/10

Xiaomi: While, the smartphone maker has been having a pretty solid last couple of years, it didn’t have much to offer this week at the show. Sure Xiaomi’s got a booth, but it’s saving the big announcements for another day. That said, a company spokesperson did take to Twitter to note that a big announcement is, indeed, around the corner, teasing Snapdragon 845-sporting Mi Mix 2S.

Score: 3/10

ZTE: ZTE had an all around decent week, announcing a new mid-tier Blade device, featuring some premium-level features, including a dual-lens camera. The company also revealed that its Tempo Go handset will be the first phone to arrive in the States sporting Android Go, Google’s mobile operating system designed for low cost phones with serious hardware limitations.

Score: 6/10

The rest:

-Apple’s never been a player here, but the company did grab some residual points as the iPhone X was invoked with nearly ever mention of Samsung’s new phone.

-Crickets from TCL’s BlackBerry branding initiative. The KeyOne was a big hit from last year’s show. This year, nothing.

According to a Forbes report, Israeli company Cellebrite is now able to unlock some very recent iPhones. Cellebrite is a well-known company that sells mobile forensics tools to extract data from locked devices.

While early versions of iOS weren’t really secure, this has changed quite a lot in recent years. All iOS devices now ship with a secure enclave, all data is encrypted if you use a passcode and there are multiple security checks when you boot and use your device.

In other words, if you don’t have the passcode, you’re going to have a hard time getting your hand on the data on the device. Many firms try to find vulnerabilities to unlock mobile devices. It has become a lucrative industry as intelligence agencies often pay forensics companies to unlock mobile devices.

Those forensics methods often lag behind. For instance, it’s quite easy to find a device to unlock an iPhone 6 running iOS 8. But if Forbes’ report and Cellebrite’s website are right, governments can now pay Cellebrite to unlock an iPhone 8 running iOS 11. It’s also worth noting that Cellebrite can unlock recent Android devices as well.

It’s unclear if it works with the most recent version of iOS 11 (11.2.6) or just the operating system version that was available back in September (11.0). It’s also unclear if it works with all iOS devices or if it only works with some devices. Forbes found a warrant that mentions an unlocked iPhone X.

This is a cat-and-mouse game, and Apple engineers are now probably working hard to fix all the vulnerabilities they can find. As always, if you don’t want to let authorities read your personal data, you should keep your devices up-to-date.

In addition to new features, security patches protect you against the most common attacks. And malicious hackers might use the same vulnerabilities against you.

The only compelling reason for someone to buy an iPhone over more open, less expensive competitors was @Apple‘s str… twitter.com/i/web/status/9…

—
Edward Snowden (@Snowden) February 26, 2018

AAPL has been on the rise since bottoming out at $150.24 on February 9, one day after the Dow Jones plunged over 1,000 points. The broader selloff in the stock market proved to be short lived, as many technology stocks have since rebounded, and the Dow Jones is up nearly eight percent compared to a few weeks ago.

The all-time high comes after billionaire investor Warren Buffett said his company Berkshire Hathaway has purchased more shares of Apple than any other stock over the past year. Berkshire Hathaway increased its Apple holdings by 23.3 percent, to 165.3 million shares, according to recent filings with the SEC.

Apple shares have technically traded for higher prices, but today’s all-time high accounts for multiple stock splits that have occurred over the years.

A hacker who was arrested and pleaded guilty last year—not because he hacked someone, but for creating and selling a remote access trojan that helped cyber criminals—has finally been sentenced to serve almost three years in prison.

Taylor Huddleston, 26, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, pleaded guilty in July 2017 to one charge of aiding and abetting computer intrusions by building and intentionally selling a remote access trojan (RAT), called NanoCore, to hackers for $25.

Huddleston was arrested in March, almost two months before the FBI raided his house in Hot Springs, Arkansas and left with his computers after 90 minutes, only to return eight weeks later with handcuffs.

This case is a rare example of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) charging someone not for actively using malware to hack victims’ computers, but for developing and selling it to other cybercriminals.

Huddleston admitted to the court that he created his software knowing it would be used by other cybercriminals to break the law.

He initially started developing NanoCore in late 2012 with a motive to offer a low-budget remote management software for schools, IT-conscious businesses, and parents who desired to monitor their children’s activities on the web.

However, Huddleston marketed and sold the NanoCore RAT for $25 in underground hacking forums that were extremely popular with cybercriminals around the world from January 2014 to February 2016. He then sold ownership of NanoCore to a third-party in 2016.

NanoCore RAT happens to be popular among cybercriminals on underground hacking forums and has been linked to intrusions in at least ten countries. Among the victims was a high-profile assault on Middle Eastern energy firms in 2015.

Huddleston also agreed with prosecutors that NanoCore RAT and available third-party plugins offered a full set of features including:

• Stealing sensitive information from victim computers, such as passwords, emails, and instant messages.
• Remotely activating and controlling connected webcams on the victims’ computers in order to spy on them.
• Ability to view, delete, and download files.
• Locking infected PCs and holding them to ransom.
• Using infected PCs to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on websites and similar services.

In July plea, Huddleston also took responsibility for creating and operating a software licensing system called “Net Seal” that was used by another suspect, Zachary Shames, to sell thousands of copies of Limitless keylogger.

Shames used Net Seal to infect 3,000 people that were, in turn, used it to infect 16,000 computers, according to the DoJ.

In his guilty plea, Huddleston admitted that he intended his products to be used maliciously.

Besides the 33-month prison sentence handed down by judges on Friday, Huddleston also gets two years of supervised release.