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America’s Fastest Spy Plane May Be Back — And Hypersonic

A Lockheed Skunk Works executive implied last week at an aerospace conference that the successor to one of the fastest aircraft the world has seen, the SR-71 Blackbird, might already exist. Previously, Lockheed officials have said the successor, the SR-72, could fly by 2030. Bloomberg reports: Referring to detailed specifics of company design and manufacturing, Jack O’Banion, a Lockheed vice president, said a “digital transformation” arising from recent computing capabilities and design tools had made hypersonic development possible. Then — assuming O’Banion chose his verb tense purposely — came the surprise. “Without the digital transformation, the aircraft you see there could not have been made, ” O’Banion said, standing by an artist’s rendering of the hypersonic aircraft. “In fact, five years ago, it could not have been made.” Hypersonic applies to speeds above Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. The SR-71 cruised at Mach 3.2, more than 2, 000 mph, around 85, 000 feet. “We couldn’t have made the engine itself — it would have melted down into slag if we had tried to produce it five years ago, ” O’Banion said. “But now we can digitally print that engine with an incredibly sophisticated cooling system integral into the material of the engine itself and have that engine survive for multiple firings for routine operation.” The aircraft is also agile at hypersonic speeds, with reliable engine starts, he said. A half-decade before, he added, developers “could not have even built it even if we conceived of it.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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America’s Fastest Spy Plane May Be Back — And Hypersonic

‘Very High Level of Confidence’ Russia Used Kaspersky Software For Devastating NSA Leaks

bricko shares a report from Yahoo Finance: Three months after U.S. officials asserted that Russian intelligence used popular antivirus company Kaspersky to steal U.S. classified information, there are indications that the alleged espionage is related to a public campaign of highly damaging NSA leaks by a mysterious group called the Shadow Brokers. In August 2016, the Shadow Brokers began leaking classified NSA exploit code that amounted to hacking manuals. In October 2017, U.S. officials told major U.S. newspapers that Russian intelligence leveraged software sold by Kaspersky to exfiltrate classified documents from certain computers. (Kaspersky software, like all antivirus software, requires access to everything stored on a computer so that it can scan for malicious software.) And last week the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. investigators “now believe that those manuals [leaked by Shadow Brokers] may have been obtained using Kaspersky to scan computers on which they were stored.” Members of the computer security industry agree with that suspicion. “I think there’s a very high level of confidence that the Shadow Brokers dump was directly related to Kaspersky … and it’s very much attributable, ” David Kennedy, CEO of TrustedSec, told Yahoo Finance. “Unfortunately, we can only hear that from the intelligence side about how they got that information to see if it’s legitimate.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Very High Level of Confidence’ Russia Used Kaspersky Software For Devastating NSA Leaks

AMD Is Releasing Spectre Firmware Updates To Fix CPU Vulnerabilities

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: AMD’s initial response to the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws made it clear “there is a near zero risk to AMD processors.” That zero risk doesn’t mean zero impact, as we’re starting to discover today. “We have defined additional steps through a combination of processor microcode updates and OS patches that we will make available to AMD customers and partners to further mitigate the threat, ” says Mark Papermaster, AMD’s chief technology officer. AMD is making firmware updates available for Ryzen and EPYC owners this week, and the company is planning to update older processors “over the coming weeks.” Like Intel, these firmware updates will be provided to PC makers, and it will be up to suppliers to ensure customers receive these. AMD isn’t saying whether there will be any performance impacts from applying these firmware updates, nor whether servers using EPYC processors will be greatly impacted or not. AMD is also revealing that its Radeon GPU architecture isn’t impacted by Meltdown or Spectre, simply because those GPUs “do not use speculative execution and thus are not susceptible to these threats.” AMD says it plans to issue further statements as it continues to develop security updates for its processors. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD Is Releasing Spectre Firmware Updates To Fix CPU Vulnerabilities

Intel Launches 8th Gen Core Series CPUs With Integrated AMD Radeon Graphics

MojoKid writes: At CES 2018, Intel unveiled more details of its 8th generation Intel Core processors with integrated AMD Radeon RX Vega M graphics. Like cats and dogs living together, the mashup of an Intel processor with an AMD GPU is made possible by an Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB), which provides a high-speed data interconnect between the processor, GPU and 4GB of second-generation High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM2). Intel is delivering 8th generation H-Series Core processors in 65W TDP (laptops) and 100W TDP (desktops) SKUs that will take up 50 percent less PCB real estate, versus traditional discrete configs. Both the mobile and desktop variants of the processors will be available in Core i5 or Core i7 configurations, with 4 cores and 8 threads, up to 8MB of cache and 4GB of HBM2. The 65W mobile processors can boost up to 4.1GHz, while the Radeon RX Vega M GL GPU has base/boost clocks of 931MHz and 1011MHz, respectively. The AMD GPU has 20 compute units and memory bandwidth checks in at 179GB/s. Desktop processors ratchet the maximum boost slightly to 4.2GHz, while the base/boost clocks of the Radeon RX Vega M GH GPU jump to 1063MHz and 1190MHz, respectively. Desktop GPUs are also upgraded with 24 CUs and 204GB/s of memory bandwidth. Intel says that its 8th generation Core i7 with Radeon RX Vega M GL graphics is up to 1.4x faster than a Core i7-8550U with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 GPU in a notebook system. System announcements from Dell and HP are forthcoming, with availability in the first half of this year. Intel has also launched a new NUC small form factor gaming mini PC based on the technology as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Launches 8th Gen Core Series CPUs With Integrated AMD Radeon Graphics

After Intel ME, Researchers Find Security Bug In AMD’s SPS Secret Chip-on-Chip

An anonymous reader writes: AMD has fixed, but not yet released BIOS/UEFI/firmware updates for the general public for a security flaw affecting the AMD Secure Processor. This component, formerly known as AMD PSP (Platform Security Processor), is a chip-on-chip security system, similar to Intel’s much-hated Management Engine (ME). Just like Intel ME, the AMD Secure Processor is an integrated coprocessor that sits next to the real AMD64 x86 CPU cores and runs a separate operating system tasked with handling various security-related operations. The security bug is a buffer overflow that allows code execution inside the AMD SPS TPM, the component that stores critical system data such as passwords, certificates, and encryption keys, in a secure environment and outside of the more easily accessible AMD cores. Intel fixed a similar flaw last year in the Intel ME. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After Intel ME, Researchers Find Security Bug In AMD’s SPS Secret Chip-on-Chip

Linux Mint 19 Named ‘Tara’

BrianFagioli writes: Today, we get some information about the upcoming version 19 of Mint. The biggest news is that it will be called ‘Tara.’ If you aren’t aware, Mint’s distros are always named after a woman. Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint leader, shares the following information: “The development cycle only just started so it’s a bit early to give details about Linux Mint 19, but here’s what we can say already: Linux Mint 19 is estimated to be released around May/June 2018. Linux Mint 19.x releases will be based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and supported until 2023. Linux Mint 19.x will use GTK 3.22. GTK 3.22 is a major stable release for GTK3. From there on, the theming engine and the APIs are stable. This is a great milestone for GTK3. It also means Linux Mint 19.x (which will become our main development platform) will use the same version of GTK as LMDE 3, and distributions which use components we develop, such as Fedora, Arch..etc. This should ease development and increase the quality of these components outside of Linux Mint.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Mint 19 Named ‘Tara’

The World’s First 88-inch 8K OLED Display

From a report: Come CES, LG will be letting attendees get up close with its new 88-inch 8K OLED display, which is both the largest and the highest-resolution OLED panel to date. But as far as specs go, that’s all we have for now. Previously, the largest OLED screen size was 77 inches, and it “only” came in 4K. While this combination is currently offered to consumers by the likes of LG Electronics, Sony and Panasonic, they all source their large OLED panels from LG Display. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The World’s First 88-inch 8K OLED Display

Dutch Utility Plans Massive Wind Farm Island In North Sea

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Britain’s homes could be lit and powered by wind farms surrounding an artificial island deep out in the North Sea, under advanced plans by a Dutch energy network. The radical proposal envisages an island being built to act as a hub for vast offshore wind farms that would eclipse today’s facilities in scale. Dogger Bank, 125km (78 miles) off the East Yorkshire coast, has been identified as a potentially windy and shallow site. The power hub would send electricity over a long-distance cable to the UK and Netherlands, and possibly later to Belgium, Germany, and Denmark. TenneT, the project’s backer and Dutch equivalent of the UK’s National Grid, recently shared early findings of a study that said its plan could be billions of euros cheaper than conventional wind farms and international power cables. The sci-fi-sounding proposal is sold as an innovative answer to industry’s challenge of continuing to make offshore wind cheaper, as turbines are pushed ever further off the coast to more expensive sites as the best spots closer to land fill up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Dutch Utility Plans Massive Wind Farm Island In North Sea

Movie Ticket Sales Hit A 22-Year Low in 2017

An anonymous reader quotes the Los Angeles Times: Hollywood is celebrating the end of 2017 with astronomical sales from “Star Wars: The Last Jedi, ” which is on track to soon exceed $1 billion in global ticket sales and eventually become the biggest movie of the year. But that won’t be enough to write a happy storyline for the industry. Although movie ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada are expected to dip just below last year’s record of $11.38 billion, the number of tickets sold is projected to drop 4% to 1.26 billion — the lowest level since 1995, according to preliminary estimates from studio executives. The falloff in ticket sales can mostly be explained by a handful of movies that flopped, especially during the dreary summer season that posted the worst results in more than two decades. Even such massive hits as “Wonder Woman, ” “Thor: Ragnarok” and “It” couldn’t make up for a lackluster summer lineup populated by rickety franchises (“Alien: Covenant”) and poorly reviewed retreads (“The Mummy”). However, the long-term decline in attendance reflects systemic challenges facing the industry. Audiences are spending less time going to the movies and are consuming more entertainment on small screens and through streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon that are spending billions on original video content. At the same time, while higher ticket prices have helped to offset attendance declines, they have made consumers pickier about what movies they’re willing to go see. And those increasingly discerning consumers turn to social media and Rotten Tomatoes to decide what’s worth their time and money. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Movie Ticket Sales Hit A 22-Year Low in 2017

Construction Workers Find 30 Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Eggs

An anonymous reader quotes BGR: Chinese construction workers digging on Christmas day found a gift that was wrapped 130 million years ago in the form of 30 incredibly preserved dinosaur eggs. The discovery was made in the city of Ganzhou at the future site of a new middle school, but work on the new facility had to be put on hold after the ancient eggs were discovered. According to state media, the workers reported uncovering “oval-shaped stones” while clearing rock away using explosive blasts. The workers suspected they might be important so they alerted local law enforcement who took command of the site and contacted experts from a nearby museum who confirmed the “rocks” were actually fossilized dinosaur eggs. The eggs, which are thought to date from the Cretaceous period, are estimated to be as old as 130 million years. The location where they were discovered is believed to have once been an ancient lakeshore, which would have been a pleasant place for the dinosaurs to raise their brood. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Construction Workers Find 30 Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Eggs