While we’re still waiting for worldwide shipments to go positive, both IDC and Gartner report that PC shipments in the US have increased for the first time in more than a year. IDC reports that shipments have increased by 4.9 percent, and Gartner says they’ve risen by 1.4 percent.
Source: PC shipments return to growth in the US | The Verge
Worldwide, PC shipments are still on a decline. Gartner estimates a 5.2 percent drop, and IDC calculates around a 4.5 percent decrease in shipments.
Increasingly, attacks focus on social engineering or phishing that lures users onto compromised websites that can steal information or serve ransomware.
Those websites are so short-lived that antivirus software often doesn’t update fast enough to recognize them, Sjouwerman added.
Source: Could antivirus software make your computer less safe?
Yet despite the talk of a borderless currency, a handful of Chinese companies have effectively assumed majority control of the Bitcoin network. They have done so through canny investments and vast farms of computer servers dispersed around the country. The American delegation flew to Beijing because that was where much of the Bitcoin power was concentrated.
Source: How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin’s Civil War – The New York Times
Mr. Ng, 36, said he had become an expert in finding cheap energy, often in places where a coal plant or hydroelectric dam was built to support some industrial project that never happened. The Bitcoin mining machines in his facilities use about 38 megawatts of electricity, he said, enough to power a small city.
The reliance on static underground features is LGPR’s advantage as a complement to other localization methods, even in fair weather conditions. The use of a subsurface map reduces the need for continual modifications to high-resolution road maps. Fusing GPS, lidar, camera, and LGPR results yields a system that can accurately localize even when one of the sensing modes fails. This “fail-safe” capability will be necessary to the development of dependable autonomous vehicles that can handle demanding ground environments.
Because Symantec uses a filter driver to intercept all system I/O, just emailing a file to a victim or sending them a link to an exploit is enough to trigger it – the victim does not need to open the file or interact with it in anyway. Because no interaction is necessary to exploit it, this is a wormable vulnerability with potentially devastating consequences to Norton and Symantec customers.
An attacker could easily compromise an entire enterprise fleet using a vulnerability like this. Network administrators should keep scenarios like this in mind when deciding to deploy Antivirus, it’s a significant tradeoff in terms of increasing attack surface.
Source: Project Zero: How to Compromise the Enterprise Endpoint
Each processor core can run its own small program independently of the others, which is a fundamentally more flexible approach than so-called Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data approaches utilized by processors such as GPUs; the idea is to break an application up into many small pieces, each of which can run in parallel on different processors, enabling high throughput with lower energy use, Baas said.
Because each processor is independently clocked, it can shut itself down to further save energy when not needed, said graduate student Brent Bohnenstiehl, who developed the principal architecture.
In the U.S. — typically social media’s most lucrative market — Instagram use was down 36.2 percent, Twitter was down 27.9 percent, Snapchat was down 19.2 percent and Facebook fell 6.7 percent
Source: People are spending much less time on social media apps: Report
Ken describes how he injected a virus into a compiler. Not only did his compiler know it was compiling the login function and inject a backdoor, but it also knew when it was compiling itself and injected the backdoor generator into the compiler it was creating. The source code for the compiler thereafter contains no evidence of either virus.
Ken wrote, In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
Source: The Ken Thompson Hack
The lens is quite unlike the curved disks of glass familiar from cameras and binoculars. Instead, it is made of a thin layer of transparent quartz coated in millions of tiny pillars, each just tens of nanometres across and hundreds high.
Singly, each pillar interacts strongly with light. Their combined effect is to slice up a light beam and remould it as the rays pass through the array
Source: Flat lens promises possible revolution in optics – BBC News
“The quality of our images is actually better than with a state-of-the-art objective lens. I think it is no exaggeration to say that this is potentially revolutionary.”
Much of that success can be attributed to the game’s open structure and limitless potential. Players can build anything they imagine, provided its outward-facing geometry is made up of simple, colorful blocks. The focus on creativity is why so many players, young and old, have been drawn to the game and continue to play years after its release.
Source: ‘Minecraft’ tops 100 million sales
Apart from Tetris, few games have come anywhere close to hitting the 100 million mark.