The conventional wisdom with malware is that you can kill it once and for all by wiping a system and starting from scratch. However, a particularly clever piece of surveillance software tied to the Russian government appears much more resistant. Even replacing drives won’t kill LoJax, more than eight months after researchers from Arbor Networks detailed the malware. Usually, malware becomes of little use once security experts uncover it. LoJax is almost invulnerable, though. It’s common for one piece of malicious software to include components from one or more past malware variants. However, LoJax has a unique origin that makes it incredibly tough to combat.
When AMD announced the 3rd generation of Ryzen products (Matisse) at CES last week, it also showed a bare shot of the actual CPU package. The CPU layout shows that there’s clearly room for another chiplet on-package, just below the I/O die. (AMD has separately hinted that it has plans for this handy bit of empty space, but has given no details.) When AMD announced that it would shift to a chiplet design and a central I/O die, the company discussed how it could potentially use chiplets for functionality besides additional CPU cores. In theory, specialized processing blocks, including a GPU, could be attached in this manner as well.
Apple has a tendency to announce products when it’s convenient, but not necessarily when they’re done. This has led to some significant waits for the company’s promised technological marvels to actually hit store shelves. The most recent example of this is the AirPower charging pad, which Apple announced alongside the iPhone X in 2017. After nearly a year and a half of silence, Apple of launching its first-party wireless charger. It’s common for Apple to come up with its own Apple-only standards instead of adopting what everyone else is using (see: Lightning connectors). Surprisingly, Apple went with the nearly universal Qi standard for wireless charging on the iPhone X and iPhone 8.
LAS VEGAS — Call it the Car Electronics Show. The honchos at CES were so remote from tech in the early 1990s that somebody else grabbed the CES.org URL before it could be landed by what was until recently the Consumer Electronics Show. Now they’ve gotten religion so much that CES 2019 has become as much about cars, car tech and future transportation as any other form of consumer electronics. Here’s our take on the more, ah, unusual — can we say “weird-ass” online? — aspects of CES 2019. Weird is not bad. Hyundai’s walking-and-wheeled vehicle (main image) represents serious thinking outside the Transformers box.
Microsoft is currently locked into Windows 10 for the foreseeable future, but a significant share of global users are still on older versions like Windows 7. Anyone still clinging to Windows 7 is going to be counting the days with dread from here on out. In exactly one year, Microsoft will end official support operations for Windows 7. Released in 2009, Windows 7 was an instant hit after consumers struggled to deal with Windows Vista for the preceding three years. Windows 7 brought improved interface elements, window management, and it was easier on system resources. That was a big deal in 2009 when ultra-low-power Netbooks were commonplace.
Ever since AMD launched its Threadripper 2990WX, there have been questions about how effectively it could scale in multi-threaded workloads. Initially, the performance drops and slowdowns in certain workloads were attributed to the asymmetric memory controller configuration — only some Threadripper die have direct access to memory controllers, while others connect only indirectly. This appeared to cause significant performance loss in certain benchmarks. But information quickly surfaced suggesting the issue wasn’t in hardware. Under Linux, the 2990WX maintained high levels of performance, even when it sagged in the same configuration in Windows. Clearly, there was more to the story.
LAS VEGAS — CES 2019 was knee deep in the technology building blocks that will enable the self-driving cars and electric vehicles of the next decade. With all the bubble cars and cubes-on-wheels that have no steering wheels, just big comfy facing seats, the containers for the 2030-ish future has seemingly been figured out. All that remains is making Level 3, 4 and then 5 of autonomy actually work. ers used CES for multiple purposes: meetings with component suppliers, public showings of new technologies, and just plain showing off cars that the 150,000-plus attendees might want to buy. Here’s a look at some of the best automotive technologies, and cars, of CES 2019.
LAS VEGAS — It takes a lot more than a few photos to convey the mad whirlwind that is CES. With over 180,000 attendees (plus exhibitors), it is like being on a crowded, noisy, and delayed subway train for the better part of a week. That said, there are always plenty of interesting scenes here worth capturing. One big improvement in my quality of life this year is that I captured all of my show images on a smartphone, instead of having to lug my Nikon D850 around the show floor. I used a Google Pixel 3 — my favorite for simple single shots, as it fits nicely in my shirt pocket and has good defaults — and a Huawei Mate 20 Pro, which has telephoto and wide-angle lenses, and also does a great job letting me tweak its settings for difficult scenes.
Vizio — a company recently fined by the FTC for — has some thoughts on why Smart TVs spy on customers and how that silent data collection is actually good for you. spent some time with Vizio CTO Bill Baxter at CES 2019. According to Baxter, Vizio believes it’s the industry leader in disclosing how tracking is occurring and allowing people to opt out of it. Again, that’s a simply hilarious statement from a company literally found to be tracking people regardless of whether they’d agreed to be tracked. One point he makes, however, is likely true: If companies like Vizio didn’t engage in user tracking and data collection, he said, they’d likely have to charge more for televisions:
