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Review: Much-improved Iris GPU makes the Skylake NUC a major upgrade

Andrew Cunningham The new Skylake NUC. 10 more images in gallery Intel’s “Next Unit of Computing” (NUC) mini desktops started off as interesting curiosities, experiments to see just how much computer could fit in a desktop PC that you could hold in your hand. Each subsequent generation has refined the overall concept and added other niceties, making it more and more like a solid consumer-ready computer (albeit one that makes you provide your own RAM and SSD and OS). We looked at Intel’s fourth-generation NUC based on its still-relatively-new Skylake processors. On the outside, less has changed than ever before—Intel has settled on a “look” for the NUC and it’s not messing with the design much. On the inside, you get enough cool upgrades that you can almost forgive Intel’s CPU performance for improving so little in the last three or four years. Model breakdown Specs at a glance: Intel NUC NUC6i7SYK (as reviewed) OS Windows 10 x64 CPU 1.8GHz Core i5-6260U (Turbo Boost up to 1.9GHz) RAM 16GB 2133MHz DDR4 (supports up to 32GB) GPU Intel Iris 540 (integrated with 64MB eDRAM) HDD 256GB Samsung SM951 PCIe SSD Networking 867Mbps 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, Gigabit Ethernet Ports 4x USB 3.0, 1x mini DisplayPort 1.2, 1x HDMI 1.4b, headphones, SD card slot Size 4.53” x 4.37” x 1.26” (115 x 111 x 32mm) Other perks Kensington lock, swappable lids, IR receiver Warranty 3 years Price ~$400 (barebones), about $755 as configured There are four Skylake NUCs as of this writing. Two include a Core i5-6260U with an Iris 540 integrated GPU, and two use a slower Core i3-6100U processor and a slower HD 520 GPU. Each processor comes in two cases: a taller one that makes room for a 2.5-inch hard drive or SSD, and a shorter one that doesn’t. Otherwise, all models share the same basic design, port layout, and other features. Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Review: Much-improved Iris GPU makes the Skylake NUC a major upgrade

Encrypted WhatsApp messages frustrate new court-ordered wiretap

(credit: Hernán Piñera ) The US Department of Justice has opened another legal front in the ongoing war over easy-to-use strong encryption. According to a Saturday report in The New York Times , prosecutors have gone head-to-head with WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook. Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported that “as recently as this past week,” federal officials have been “discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp’s encryption.” The case, which apparently does not involve terrorism, remains under seal. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Encrypted WhatsApp messages frustrate new court-ordered wiretap

16 years later, Blizzard is still patching Diablo II

No rest for the weary. These days, you’re lucky if some titles from certain big publishers get a year or two of post-launch online support for their games before they’re unceremoniously dropped . And then there’s Diablo II . Blizzard issued a new version 1.14 patch for the nearly 16-year-old game Thursday, five years after the game was last officially updated (not to mention, four years since the game’s sequel launched with its own attendant post-release problems and patches ) The new Diablo II patch doesn’t add any new gameplay features, balance tweaks, or anything like that. Instead, Blizzard has added compatibility with modern operating systems like Windows 10 and OS X. But Blizzard says it’s working on improvements to the game’s “cheat-detection and hack-prevention capabilities” and hints at more improvements to come. “There is still a large Diablo II community around the world, and we thank you for continuing to play and slay with us,” Blizzard writes . “This journey starts by making Diablo II run on modern platforms, but it does not end there. See you in Sanctuary, adventurers.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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16 years later, Blizzard is still patching Diablo II

TP-Link blocks open source router firmware to comply with new FCC rule

A TP-Link router. (credit: TP-Link. ) Networking hardware vendor TP-Link says it will prevent the loading of open source firmware on routers it sells in the United States in order to comply with new Federal Communications Commission requirements. The FCC wants to limit interference with other devices by preventing user modifications that cause radios to operate outside their licensed RF (radio frequency) parameters. The FCC says it doesn’t intend to ban the use of third-party firmware such as DD-WRT and OpenWRT; in theory, router makers can still allow loading of open source firmware as long as they also deploy controls that prevent devices from operating outside their allowed frequencies, types of modulation, power levels, and so on. But open source users feared that hardware makers would lock third-party firmware out entirely, since that would be the easiest way to comply with the FCC requirements. The decision by TP-Link—described by the company in this FAQ —shows that those fears were justified. (Thanks to Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo for bringing it to our attention.) Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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TP-Link blocks open source router firmware to comply with new FCC rule

Man hacks Tesla firmware, finds new model, has car remotely downgraded

The image that hacker Jason Hughes found hidden in Tesla’s latest Model S firmware. (credit: Jason Hughes) It seems Tesla is set to bump the battery capacity of its Model S sedan up to a hefty 100kWh some time in the near future. We know this thanks to the work of a white-hat hacker and Tesla P85D owner named Jason Hughes. Hughes—who previously turned the battery pack from a wrecked Tesla into a storage array for his solar panels—was poking around in the latest firmware of his Model S (version 2.13.77) and discovered an image of the new car’s badge, the P100D. Hughes let the world know via a cryptic tweet: @elonmusk @teslamotors #tesla I know your secret. SHA256 of best part: 5fc38436ec295b0049f186651ebba5fd55e8d7b81eb61cbd00d3f1bf18dd9c81 — Jason Hughes (@wk057) March 4, 2016 That message was soon decrypted by enthusiasts on the Tesla Motors Club forum, at which time Hughes posted a copy of the picture: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Man hacks Tesla firmware, finds new model, has car remotely downgraded

SQL Server for Linux coming in mid-2017

Apparently. (credit: Microsoft) It’s not April 1. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Group, announced today that next year Microsoft will be releasing a version of SQL Server that runs on Linux . A private preview is available today that includes the core relational database features of SQL Server 2016. The announcement implies two things. Either there is a large number of Linux-using corporations out there that are desperate for SQL Server’s feature set (as opposed to open source databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MaxDB, or the proprietary ones such as IBM’s DB2 and, of course, Oracle’s Oracle), or there is a large number of SQL Server-using organizations out there that are keen to ditch the cost of their Windows licenses but happy to continue to pay for their SQL Server licenses. Neither seems obvious to us. The Windows version will go into general availability later this year, with a wave of launch-related events starting on Thursday. SQL Server 2016 boasts new in-memory database capabilities that can make some workloads 30-100 times faster and support for encryption for data at rest, in memory, and on the wire. It also offers analytics support using R. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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SQL Server for Linux coming in mid-2017

No longer virtual: First impressions—and many hours—with HTC’s Vive Pre

The HTC Vive Pre comes with everything seen here. Some assembly required. Your parents help you put it together. From HTC! (credit: Kyle Orland) For about a year now , we’ve been absolutely wowed by short, controlled demos of the virtual reality tech in the SteamVR-powered HTC Vive. But enjoying a slick demo in a curated show floor booth is one thing. Having a Vive in your house to play with at your leisure is another. Ahead of its upcoming consumer launch, Valve has sent us loaner units of its near-final HTC Vive Pre to test in the Ars Orbiting HQ . I’ve spent a large portion of the past few days immersed in Valve’s room-scale vision of virtual reality, whiling away hours blind to the real world around me and trying not to kill myself walking around my office (which has never been cleaner, to make sure there are no tripping hazards about). We’ll have fuller reviews of the hardware and the most interesting VR experiences as we get closer to the Vive’s early April 9 release. For now, here are some scattered impressions of what it’s like having room-scale virtual reality in your very own room. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Stretchable, glowing capacitors used to make a touch-sensitive robot

(credit: Larson, et. al., Science) For many of us, the term “robot” still evokes an image of R2D2 or a terminator-style collection of metal parts. But there’s no reason to limit our construction materials to hard parts. A number of labs are working on soft-bodied robots, and have shown they can do some rather interesting things, like squeezing through narrow spaces . A team of researchers from Cornell and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia have taken a soft-bodied robot and made it glow. Their method of producing the light, however, has some interesting side effects: it allows the robot to determine how much it has flexed, and it makes the robot responsive to touch. These days, “glow” is usually synonymous with “LED.” But the authors used a very different technique, relying on what’s called an electroluminescent phosphor—basically, something that glows when it’s place in an alternating electric field. The phosphors (zinc sulfide, in this case) can be embedded in a silicone gel, making them stretchable and bendable. Different dopants in the phosphor will cause it to glow in different colors. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Stretchable, glowing capacitors used to make a touch-sensitive robot

Pentium? Core i5? Core i7? Making sense of Intel’s convoluted CPU lineup

Intel’s Skylake-based Pentium G4500. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Our creative director Aurich Lawson is building a PC to power a custom arcade cabinet, and he was having trouble picking a processor. Not because he didn’t know what he needed, but because he was having trouble matching what he needed (the cheapest quad-core CPU that meets the recommended requirements for Street Fighter V ) with what Intel was offering (five different obfuscated brands spread out over multiple sockets and architectures). And if you’re building a PC now after having been out of the game for a few years, it can be exceptionally confusing. Around the turn of the millennium you just had Celeron and Pentium. One name meant “cut-down low-end” and one meant “high-end, more features,” and you just bought the fastest one you could reasonably afford. Things got a little more confusing in the Core and Core 2 days (the Core branding continues to survive alongside the Celeron and Pentium brands), but you could at least use names like “Core Solo” and “Core 2 Quad” to guess which architecture and how many cores you were getting. Now there are three separate Core brands, Pentium and Celeron brands, and a long series of letters that you need to know to figure out what CPU you’re getting. It’s been a few years since the last time we demystified Intel’s CPU lineup, and in truth things haven’t changed too much. In broad strokes, the rules are the same. But Intel has introduced and retired a few CPU architectures and brands since then. We’ll run down the basics for both desktops and laptops to help you make some sense of things whether you’re building a computer or buying one from someone else. Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Microsoft kills off Qik, the video messaging service you didn’t know it had

Playing back a conversation, on the Windows Phone version. You’ll be forgiven for having forgotten about Skype Qik, the short video messaging service from Skype that Microsoft launched in October 2014. It offered low friction messaging—no need to create an account, merely having a phone number would do—similar to WhatsApp, SMS, or all sorts of other popular messaging services. Well, now it’s going away. The company says that the major features of Qik have been rolled into the regular Skype apps; video messaging already existed in Skype when Qik was released, and filters were added in October last year. As such, the app isn’t really needed any more, and Qik will stop working on March 24. Skype Qik was a successor to a short video messaging service called Qik that Skype bought in January 2011 for $150 million, just months before Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion. The original Qik service was built around capturing video messages and sharing them with others. It was closed down in April 2014, as Skype introduced its own integrated video messaging capability. In that context, the new Skype Qik was a little strange, as it overlapped strongly with both the previously shuttered service, and the newly-added Skype capabilities. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft kills off Qik, the video messaging service you didn’t know it had

Ken May

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