Last week, news broke of a serious security flaw in Intel business chipsets dating back seven years. The flaw, which doesn’t affect consumer hardware, concerned products with Intel’s Active Management Technology, Intel’s Small Business Technology, and Intel Standard Manageability. Intel’s description of the flaw is as follows: There is an escalation of privilege vulnerability in Intel® Active Management Technology (AMT), Intel® Standard Manageability (ISM), and Intel® Small Business Technology versions firmware versions 6.x, 7.x, 8.x 9.x, 10.x, 11.0, 11.5, and 11.6 that can allow an unprivileged attacker to gain control of the manageability features provided by these products. This vulnerability does not exist on Intel-based consumer PCs with consumer firmware, Intel servers utilizing Intel® Server Platform Services (Intel® SPS), or Intel® Xeon® Processor E3 and Intel® Xeon® Processor E5 workstations utilizing Intel® SPS firmware.
As strange bedfellows go, canning jars and spy satellites don’t seem to have much in common. But Ball Corp. produces both. And one of their spy satellites . Mum’s the official NRO word on the launch, which makes sense if the payload is a sensitive one. The FAA launch license claimed a low-Earth orbit. Next up for the Falcon 9 is a May 15 mission to put an Inmarsat communications satellite in orbit. At the end of the month, SpaceX is also slated to send a CRS Dragon to the International Space Station. China and Europe are in talks to build a moon base.
Looking for an activation key for Windows 10 Pro on the cheap? With today’s coupon code in play, the folks at SCDKey are offering up an activation code for just 14 bucks — an outstanding deal. • (Coupon code: TECHBARGAINS) If you’re used to Windows 7, Windows 10 has a number of big improvements. Not only will you gain access to hundreds of thousands of apps in the Windows Store, but you’ll benefit from the Cortana personal assistant, DirectX 12, the dedicated Xbox One app, the new Edge browser, and a much improved user interface.
Mechanical keyboards have gotten incredibly popular in the last few years. You can now go buy a mech on Amazon for a reasonable amount of money. The surge of interest in mechs also supports a small but thriving custom keyboard community. I make no secret of my obsession with custom mechanical keyboards, which offer a number of great features over the “mainstream” mechs you can buy on Amazon. They’re more configurable, come in different form factors, and offer a wider variety of switches. It can take a lot of legwork to get your hands on the perfect board — you might have to build it yourself and fumble with buggy firmware tools to program it.
People who buy the latest and greatest high-end Intel CPUs fit into a particular niche — they expect high performance. Some owners of Core i7-7700 and chips have been complaining for months about mysterious temperature spikes, and now Intel has responded. However, that response was , which has served only to further enrage affected users. The Core i7-7700 and 7700K are both quad-core chips with Hyper-Threading to bring the number of threads to eight. These are both designed to be enthusiast CPUs, but the K variant is particularly popular. The 7700K has a clock speed of 4.2GHz compared with 3.6GHz for the regular 7700, and you can push it far past the stock setting thanks to its unlocked multiplier.
Scientists have been speculating about what we would find in the space between Saturn and its innermost rings, and the Cassini probe is finally putting those hypotheses to the test. A recent course correction has sent the spacecraft , and the team has found this previously unexplored region of space to be much more empty than they expected. Cassini has been exploring Saturn and its moons since 2004, but it’s running low on fuel now. That means it’s time for NASA to take some risks with the spacecraft to study new parts of the planet. They call it , a series of close orbits passing between the planet and its rings, a gap measuring just 1,500 miles (2,000 kilometers).
In the midst of fulminating about an approaching robot apocalypse, a strange and disturbing counter trend is taking place: the rise of violence against robots. While fears of robots often turn upon suppositions that are still largely unproven, such as whether robots will achieve super-intelligence or come to dominate the workplace, the latter phenomena is fast accruing a solid and tangible corpus of evidence. At least three important questions emerge from the consideration of violence against robots– is it a real trend, is it worth caring about, and what, if anything, should be done about it. The trend Robots have long been a common feature of the manufacturing world, where they can be found tirelessly churning out Tesla’s latest supercar, assembling Samsung’s refrigerators, or laboring over a whole galaxy of other commodities.
Last week, we discussed rumors that Intel would rebrand its Xeon products. The company has officially announced its new hardware naming system, and given some additional information on how and why it’s making this transition. Instead of naming chips with an E/EP/EX system (think Haswell-E), Intel will use metallic classifications to identify specific parts. This new branding system is being referred to as the Xeon Scalable Processor Family, and it includes a number of different technologies, as shown below: Omnipath, high-speed Internet, and all get a shout-out here, and there’s a reason for that. Instead of marketing all of these technologies under separate brands, Intel appears to be introducing a unified product system.
Your phone has a microphone ostensibly so you can talk to people. But apps can also use your microphone to listen to the world around you. Some apps might even be using the microphone to do things you’d prefer they weren’t doing. For example, apps can employ ultrasound cross-device tracking (uXDT) to find out where you are or what you’re watching. A new analysis of apps finds the usage of uXDT is increasing — but this isn’t quite as doom and gloom as it seems at first. There are a number of companies that make use of uXDT in their SDKs, including Shopkick, Lisnr, and SilverPush.
