Scientists are still unsure if liquid water exists on Mars, but we know there’s plenty of water ice. The ice on Mars is usually diffuse and found in small pockets mixed with frozen carbon dioxide, but the Mars Express probe just beamed back images of a massive deposit of pristine water ice in an impact crater. This isn’t a new discovery, but it’s the best photo we’ve ever gotten of the Korolev crater. Scientists named Korolev crater after Soviet-era rocket engineer Sergei Korolev, a man so important to the Russian space program that his name was a closely guarded secret.
When GlobalFoundries announced it was pulling the plug on its 7nm process node and would instead invest more heavily in custom foundry work around its 22FDX and 12FDX processes, one immediate question was what would happen to IBM and its own Power line of products. Just over four years ago, GlobalFoundries and IBM signed a deal for the former to provide manufacturing capabilities and upgrades to Big Blue. With GF gone, IBM and Samsung have signed a deal instead for Samsung to provide manufacturing capacity for IBM on 7nm and beyond. Over at NextPlatform, Timothy Morgan has written a on the history of cooperation between IBM and Samsung.
Apple’s iPad has undergone its most radical redesign in years with the new iPad Pros. These tablets are thinner than ever with less bezel around the display. However, there are questions as to whether they’re durable enough. Some owners have complained about slight bends in their spendy new tablets, and now Apple confirms some iPad Pros . However, it says that’s normal. Welcome to Bendgate 2.0. In the weeks since Apple shipped the updated iPad Pro, multiple users of the have posted images of their new tablets with unusual bends in the frame. Some say they developed the curve through regular use like being transported in a backpack while others insist they came like that out of the box.
Conventional wisdom says that adding two-factor authentication (2FA) will keep your accounts safe from most phishing scams, but a new wave of sophisticated automated attacks is reminding us that 2FA isn’t infallible. As with all measures, it’s only as secure as the weakest link — the human one. The new phishing campaign tricks people into handing over their . The report comes from Amnesty International, which doesn’t usually publicize cybersecurity news. In this case, Amnesty has a stake in things because the attacks have mainly targeted activists and journalists in the Middle East and North Africa. As Amnesty explains, there are several distinct phishing campaigns ongoing that are likely linked.
Yesterday’s dramatic closure of the UK’s Gatwick airport because of drone activity has raised the interest in additional UAV regulation to a new level. The airport remained closed for nearly an entire day after at least 50 reports of drones over or near the runways, and around 1,000 flights have been canceled — so the incident is certainly clear as a call to action for those looking to tighten regulations on drones. However, as with regulating in general, simply making up rules doesn’t necessarily solve the problems. We’ll walk through some of the current rules for hobbyist drones in the US (they are fairly similar in the UK, as it turns out), and the technology used now and likely in the future to enforce them.
There are rumors, sparked in part by Intel’s manufacturing announcement yesterday, that Santa Clara is preparing to exit the custom manufacturing business. DigiTimes, , isn’t known for being a solid single source in every instance, but the points made in the article not only echo what’s been obvious in the larger semiconductor industry, but they also reflect the general state of Intel’s roadmap as well. LG was originally announced as a major Intel 10nm customer, but obviously, the company wasn’t going to ship customer hardware before it had the node online for its own use. DigiTimes sources claim that Intel’s manufacturing prices are higher than those offered by TSMC and Samsung, and that the ongoing 10nm delay has tightened supply of 14nm and 22nm products as well.
AMD has announced its imminent addition to the NASDAQ 100, a list composed of the 100 largest companies on the NASDAQ stock market based on total market capitalization. AMD’s stock price has increased enormously over the past few years and doubled since early January 2017. While it’s fallen from its high earlier this year, that drop has occurred in the context of a great deal of stock market uncertainty and concerns about the overall impact of the crypto market’s decline. In retrospect, AMD was hit less-hard by the fall-off in crypto sales than Nvidia, which has publicly declared that it would ship virtually no midrange GPUs this quarter in order to reduce its overall inventory levels.
Earlier this week, a former intern working on Microsoft Edge that Google had deliberately broken YouTube to disadvantage Microsoft’s browser in competitive battery life tests. Chrome has become the dominant browser; Chrome and Chromium will now account for a massive 80 percent of the desktop browser market. Firefox, the only actively maintained, cross-platform competitor, currently accounts for about 9 percent of the space. Browsers like Safari, with its macOS limitation, accounts for roughly 5 percent. The rest is scraps and pieces, like the now-discontinued-but-still-shambling Internet Explorer. Google the accusation that it took any action to disadvantage Edge and is claiming that this problem was simply the result of a bug.
December 19th was supposed to be a banner day for the spaceflight industry. We expected as many as five launches in just one day, but things took a turn early on as the first rockets were set to take off. Of the five possible launches, only two of them headed into space as planned. Wednesday’s launch docket included some big names: SpaceX, Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance (ULA), Arianespace, and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The ISRO gave us early hope things would go well on Wednesday with its successful launch of a GSLV rocket (above) from Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
