Equifax, one of the United States’ three major credit bureaus, that it had been affected by the worst known data breach in US history. An ocean of personally identifiable information (PII) for 143 million people has been stolen by hackers, including social security numbers, addresses, hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers, and other sensitive details. As we discussed earlier today, Equifax has set up a website that will (supposedly) inform you if your data has been stolen. The only problem is, use of the site also means you forfeit your right to sue the company and agree to mandatory and binding arbitration.
One ongoing question, ever since AMD launched its family, is how well the CPUs are selling. We’ve seen some arguments that claim AMD’s improved financials are unstable or temporary, based on the idea that GPUs were more profitable than CPUs (extremely unlikely), or that AMD’s lower profit margins meant Ryzen wasn’t selling well. We’ve been dubious of such claims, given how much AMD’s Computing and Graphics revenue rose in Q2. New evidence from Mindfactory.de, a German retailer, suggests AMD’s Ryzen family is selling very well. The graph above shows sales data for AMD (left) and Intel (right) CPUs from March through August of 2017.
Google’s car-mounted Street View cameras have been traversing the globe for a decade, offering users the opportunity to stroll down a street from the comfort of their computer screen. However, the cameras used to gather this data haven’t improved in eight years. Google is , and you’ll be able to see the results when they hit the roads. It’s not only about the pretty pictures, though — this is about feeding Google’s machine learning algorithms the data they need to index the real world. The current Street View rig has a distinctive cluster of 15 cameras inside a globe-shaped enclosure atop the car.
Hurricane Irma continued to strengthen on Tuesday into Wednesday morning, and, as of this writing, has been classified as a Category 5 storm with sustained winds reaching 185 mph. Islands in the direct path of the hurricane are already beginning storm preparations and evacuations. While there was some hope that Irma would turn north and miss the continental United States, that’s not going to happen. The only question at this point is exactly which parts of Florida are going to be hammered. While there’s some discussion of exactly how strong Irma is compared with previous hurricanes, you could drop the storm in a “Top 5” list already and not have to worry about whether it would fall below that point.
The shovelware PC OEMs ship on their hardware is definitionally terrible; the handful of exceptions to this only serve to prove the rule. In early 2015, however, news broke that Lenovo hadn’t simply shipped poor bundled software, but had fundamentally destroyed internet security on its products in the process. The entire sorry affair exposed a dearth of appropriate safeguards at the PC manufacturer, including the lack of meaningful software or oversight over the bundling process. An estimated 750,000 PCs were sold with Superfish installed in the US. Lenovo’s initial “fix” merely removed the offending software, as opposed to closing the gaping security hole it had opened.
The US Air Force’s mysterious X-37B space plane is set to go off on another secret mission in space, but its trip into space will come courtesy of a new partner: SpaceX. The launch is currently , just days ahead of the potential landfall of Hurricane Irma. There’s a chance the launch will be postponed due to weather, and no one knows what the X-37B will get up to even if it is launched successfully tomorrow. This will be the fifth flight for the and the first one performed by SpaceX. All previous X-37B missions have used an Atlas V rocket operated by United Launch Alliance (a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing).
South Korea’s defense minister has stated it would be worth considering redeploying nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula, 26 years after those missiles were originally removed. Song Young-moo spoke to Secretary of Defense Mattis on the worsening situation between North and South Korea. The North’s renewed nuclear testing on Sunday resulted in a blast that was significantly stronger than what we’ve seen previously, though exactly how much stronger remains open to debate. The United States Geological Survey picked up a 6.3 magnitude earthquake, which would be 1.2 magnitude points higher than the 5.1 earthquakes we’ve detected from previous tests.
The 2017 Honda Civic Type R is a race car with a civilized exhaust, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and license plates. Type R is to Honda as M is to BMW or AMG is to Mercedes-Benz, but at mainstream pricing. It’s a car you can drive to the track and then run flat out, lap after lap. It is front-drive-only, but with no sense of torque steer (more below). All this for $34,775, one trim, all features standard, and shipping included. While the Type R offers a comfort setting for the engine, suspension, and steering, every mile you drive (comfortably) on all but the smoothest public roads will have you waiting for the pothole that blows out the ultra-low-profile (30 series), $325 tires.
Over the past few years, the rate of hard drive density improvements has dropped significantly. While Seagate and Western Digital have both pushed ahead with larger hard drives (often thanks to more platters and the use of helium), the actual rate of areal density increase has slowed these last few years. As Seagate and Western Digital push towards 20TB, glass substrates could be a critical component of that effort. Right now, only laptop drives use glass substrates, which have several advantages over aluminum. First, glass is more rigid than aluminum, which allows the platters to be thinner (and lighter).
