Enlarge (credit: Intel ) Remote management features that have shipped with Intel processors for almost a decade contain a critical flaw that gives attackers full control over the computers that run on vulnerable networks. That’s according to an an advisory published Monday afternoon by Intel. Intel has released a patch for the vulnerability, which resides in the chipmaker’s Active Management Technology, Intel Small Business Technology, and Intel Standard Manageability. Business customers who buy computers running vPro processors use those services to remotely administer large fleets of computers. The bug doesn’t affect chips running on consumer PCs. The chipmaker has rated the vulnerability critical and is recommending vulnerable customers install a firmware patch. In the company’s Monday post, Intel officials wrote: Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Intel patches remote code-execution bug that lurked in CPUs for 10 years
India’s energy minister has unveiled plans for every car sold in the country to be powered by electricity by the year 2030. “The move is intended to lower the cost of importing fuel and lower costs for running vehicles, ” reports The Independent. From the report: âoeWe are going to introduce electric vehicles in a very big way, ” coal and mines minister Piyush Goyal said at the Confederation of Indian Industry Annual Session 2017 in New Delhi. “We are going to make electric vehicles self-sufficient… The idea is that by 2030, not a single petrol or diesel car should be sold in the country.” Mr Goyal said the electric car industry would need between two and three years of government assistance, but added that he expected the production of the vehicles to be “driven by demand and not subsidy” after that. “The cost of electric vehicles will start to pay for itself for consumers, ” he said according to the International Business Times. “We would love to see the electric vehicle industry run on its own, ” he added. An investigation by Greenpeace this year found that as many as 2.3 million deaths occur every year due to air pollution in the country. The report, entitled “Airpocalypse, ” claimed air pollution had become a “public health and economic crisis” for Indians. It said the number of deaths caused by air pollution was only “a fraction less” than the number of deaths from tobacco use, adding that 3 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was lost to the levels of toxic smog. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
prisoninmate quotes Softpedia: Linux kernel 4.11 has been in development for the past two months, since very early March, when the first Release Candidate arrived for public testing. Eight RCs later, we’re now able to download and compile the final release of Linux 4.11 on our favorite GNU/Linux distributions and enjoy its new features. Prominent ones include scalable swapping for SSDs, a brand new perf ftrace tool, support for OPAL drives, support for the SMC-R (Shared Memory Communications-RDMA) protocol, journalling support for MD RAID5, all new statx() system call to replace stat(2), and persistent scrollback buffers for VGA consoles… The Linux 4.11 kernel also introduces initial support for Intel Gemini Lake chips, which is an Atom-based, low-cost computer processor family developed using Intel’s 14-nanometer technology, and better power management for AMD Radeon GPUs when the AMDGPU open-source graphics driver is used. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Sales of consumer ebooks plunged 17% in the U.K. in 2016, according to the Publishers Association. Sales of physical books and journals went up by 7% over the same period, while children’s books surged 16%. The same trend is on display in the U.S., where ebook sales declined 18.7% over the first nine months of 2016, according to the Association of American Publishers. Paperback sales were up 7.5% over the same period, and hardback sales increased 4.1%… Sales of e-readers declined by more than 40% between 2011 and 2016, according to consumer research group Euromonitor International. “E-readers, which was once a promising category, saw its sales peak in 2011. Its success was short-lived, as it spiraled downwards within a year with the entry of tablets, ” Euromonitor said in a research note. The article includes an even more interesting statistic: that one-third of adults tried a “digital detox” in 2016, limiting their personal use of electronics. Are any Slashdot readers trying to limit their own screen time — or reading fewer ebooks? Read more of this story at Slashdot.