Tag: entertainment

Intel Unveils One-Petabyte Storage Servers For Data Centers

Slashdot reader #9, 219 Guy Smiley shared this report on a new breed of high-density flash storage. The Inquirer reports: Intel has unveiled a brand new form factor for solid state disc drives (SSDs)… Intel Optane’s new “ruler” format will allow up to a petabyte of storage on a single 1U server rack… By using 3D-NAND, the ruler crams in even more data and will provide more stability with less chance of catastrophic failure with data loss. The company has promised that the Ruler will have more bandwidth, input/output operations per second and lower latency than SAS… As part of the announcement, Intel also announced a range of “hard drive replacement” SSDs — the S4500 and S4600 0 which are said to have the highest density 32-layer 3D NAND on the market, and are specifically aimed at data centres that want to move to solid state simply and if necessary, in stages. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Unveils One-Petabyte Storage Servers For Data Centers

A New Amiga Will Go On Sale In Late 2017

An anonymous reader quote the Register: The world’s getting a new Amiga for Christmas. Yes, that Amiga — the seminal Commodore microcomputers that brought mouse-driven GUIs plus slick and speedy graphics to the masses from 1985 to 1996… The platform died when Commodore went bankrupt, but enthusiasm for the Amiga persisted and various clones and efforts to preserve AmigaOS continue to this day. One such effort, from Apollo Accelerators, emerged last week: the company’s forthcoming “Vampire V4” can work as a standalone Amiga or an accelerator for older Amigas… There’s also 512MB of RAM, 40-and-44-pin FastIDE connectors, Ethernet, a pair of USB ports and MicroSD for storage [PDF]. Micro USB gets power to the board. A school in Michigan used the same Amiga for 30 years. Whenever it broke, they actually phoned up the high school student who original set it up in 1987 and had him come over to fix it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A New Amiga Will Go On Sale In Late 2017

AMD Ryzen Threadripper Launched: Performance Benchmarks Vs Intel Skylake-X

Reader MojoKid writes: AMD continues its attack on the desktop CPU market versus Intel today, with the official launch of the company’s Ryzen Threadripper processors. Threadripper is AMD’s high-end, many-core desktop processor, that leverages the same Zen microarchitecture that debuted with Ryzen 7. The top-end Ryzen Threadripper 1950X is a multi-chip module featuring 16 processor cores (two discrete die), with support for 32 threads. The base frequency for the 1950X is 3.4GHz, with all-core boost clocks of up to 3.7GHz. Four of the cores will regularly boost up to 4GHz, however, and power and temperature permitting, those four cores will reach 4.2GHz when XFR kicks in. The 12-core Threadripper 1920X has very similar clocks and its boost and XFR frequencies are exactly the same. The Threadripper 1920X’s base-clock, however, is 100MHz higher than its big brother, at 3.5GHz. In a litany of benchmarks with multi-threaded workloads, Threadripper 1950X and 1920X high core-counts, in addition to strong SMT scaling, result in the best multi-threaded scores seen from any single CPU to date. Threadripper also offers massive amounts of memory bandwidth and more IO than other Intel processors. Though absolute power consumption is somewhat high, Threadrippers are significantly more efficient than AMD’s previous-generation processors. In lightly-threaded workloads, Threadripper trails Intel’s latest Skylake-X CPUs, however, which translates to lower performance in applications and games that can’t leverage all of Threadripper’s additional compute resources. Threadripper 1950X and 1920X processors are available starting today at $999 and $799, respectively. On a per-core basis, they’re less expensive than Intel Skylake-X and very competitively priced. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD Ryzen Threadripper Launched: Performance Benchmarks Vs Intel Skylake-X

Cisco Meraki Loses Customer Data in Engineering Gaffe

Cisco has admitted to losing customer data during a configuration change its enginners applied to its Meraki cloud managed IT service. From a report: Specific data uploaded to Cisco Meraki before 11:20 am PT last Thursday was deleted after engineers created an erroneous policy in a configuration change to its US object storage service, Cisco admitted on Friday. The company did say that the issue has been fixed, and while the error will not affect network operations in most cases, it admitted the faulty policy “but will be an inconvenience as some of your data may have been lost.” Cisco hasn’t said how many of its 140, 000+ Meraki customers have been affected. The deleted data includes custom floor plans, logos, enterprise apps and voicemail greetings found on users’ dashboard, systems manager and phones. The engineering team was working over the weekend to find out whether the data can be recovered and potentially build tools so that customers can find out what data has been lost. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cisco Meraki Loses Customer Data in Engineering Gaffe

Startup Unveils Revolutionary New Rechargeable Alkaline Batteries

Slashdot reader cdreimer quotes the New York Times: Alkaline batteries can be made far more cheaply and safely than today’s lithium-ion batteries, but they are not rechargeable… Ionic Materials could change that equation with an alkaline battery the company said could be recharged hundreds of times. One additional benefit of the company’s breakthrough: An alkaline battery would not be as prone to the combustion issues that have plagued lithium-ion batteries in a range of products, most notably some Samsung smartphones. Cheaper and more powerful batteries are also considered by many to be the driver needed to make the cost of renewable energy technologies like wind and solar competitive with the coal, gas and nuclear power that support the national energy grid. The company “has demonstrated up to 400 recharge cycles for its prototypes, ” and it’s now even investigating aluminum-based alkaline batteries which would also be lighter than lithium-ion batteries. The company is backed by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who also envisions the batteries being used in electric cars. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Startup Unveils Revolutionary New Rechargeable Alkaline Batteries

‘World of Warcraft’ Game Currency Now Worth More Than Venezuelan Money

schwit1 quotes TheBlaze: Digital gold from Blizzard’s massive multiplayer online game “World of Warcraft” is worth more than actual Venezuelan currency, the bolivar, according to new data. Venezuelan resident and Twitter user @KalebPrime first made the discovery July 14 and tweeted at the time that on the Venezuela’s black market — now the most-used method of currency exchange within Venezuela according to NPR — you can get $1 for 8493.97 bolivars. Meanwhile, a “WoW” token, which can be bought for $20 from the in-game auction house, is worth 8385 gold per dollar. According to sites that track the value of both currencies, KalebPrime’s math is outdated, and WoW gold is now worth even more than the bolivar. That tweet has since gone viral, prompting @KalebPrime to joke that “At this rate when I publish my novel the quotes will read ‘FROM THE GUY THAT MADE THE WOW GOLD > VENEZUELAN BOLIVAR TWEET.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘World of Warcraft’ Game Currency Now Worth More Than Venezuelan Money

CNET Pranked By Web Site’s Fake ‘All Out War’ Hack During DEFCON

In a piece describing the paranoid vibe in Las Vegas during the DEFCON convention, CNET reported Friday that the Wet Republic web site “had two images vandalized” with digital graffiti. But their reporter now writes that “my paranoia finally got the best of me, and it turned out to be an ad campaign.” The images included a scribbled beard and eye patch on a photo of bikini model, along with the handwritten message “It’s all out war.” CNET’s updated story now reports that “It looked like a prank you’d see from a mischievous hacker…” When I spotted the vandalism on the Wet Republic site Friday morning, it looked like other attacks I’d seen throughout the week, such as a Blue Screen of Death on a bus ticket machine… Hakkasan, which hosts the event at MGM Grand, said the “vandalism” was part of the cheeky advertisements for a seasonal bikini contest it’s been running since 2015. The “all-out war” is between the models in the competition, not between hackers and clubs. Hakkasan’s spokeswoman said nothing on its network has been compromised. So maybe not everything online in Las Vegas is getting hacked this week, and this n00b learned to calm down the hard way. For that matter, maybe that blue screen of death was also just another random Windows machine crashing. CNET’s reporter made one other change to his article. He removed the phrase “when hackers are in town for Defcon, everything seems to be fair game.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CNET Pranked By Web Site’s Fake ‘All Out War’ Hack During DEFCON

Hackers Vandalize Vegas Pool Party Club in ‘All Out War’

From a CNET report: Next to DJ Tiesto’s loud image on Wet Republic’s website sits a photo of a bikini model with a beard and an eye patch, with a simple message: “It’s all out war.” Not exactly the type of message you’d expect from a spot that advertises itself as a dance club that doubles as a pool party, but when hackers are in town for Defcon, everything seems to be fair game. The hacker convention, which is in its 25th year in Las Vegas, typically has hotels on alert for its three days of Sin City talk, demos and mischief. Guests are encouraged not to pick up any flash drives lying around, and employees are trained to be wary of social engineering — that is, bad guys pretending to be someone innocent and in need of just a little help. Small acts of vandalism pop up around town. At Caesars Palace, where Defcon is happening, the casino’s UPS store told guests it was not accepting any print requests from USB drives or links, and only printing from email attachments. Hackers who saw this laughed, considering that emails are hardly immune from malware. But the message is clear: During these next few days, hackers are going to have their fun, whether it’s through a compromised Wi-Fi network or an open-to-mischief website. Wet Republic’s site had two images vandalized, both for the “Hot 100” party with DJ Shift. The digital graffiti popped up early Friday morning, less than 24 hours after Defcon kicked off. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hackers Vandalize Vegas Pool Party Club in ‘All Out War’

AT&T Loses Record Number of Traditional TV Subscribers In Q2, Drops 156,000 DirecTV Satellite Customers

According to Variety, AT&T’s pay-TV business has lost a record 351, 000 traditional video customers in the second quarter, with the internet-delivered DirecTV Now service failing to fully offset the losses. From the report: In Q2, historically a seasonally weak period for the pay-TV business, DirecTV’s U.S. satellite division lost 156, 000 customers sequentially, dropping to 20.86 million, compared with a gain of 342, 000 in the year-earlier quarter. AT&T’s U-verse lost 195, 000 subs in the quarter, which was actually an improvement over the 391, 000 it lost in Q2 of 2016. AT&T touted that it gained 152, 000 DirecTV Now customers in Q2, after adding just 72, 000 in the first quarter of 2017. Overall, it had signed up 491, 000 DirecTV Now subs as of the end of June, after the OTT service launched seven months ago. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AT&T Loses Record Number of Traditional TV Subscribers In Q2, Drops 156,000 DirecTV Satellite Customers

Sweden Accidentally Leaks Personal Details of Nearly All Citizens

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hacker News: Swedish media is reporting of a massive data breach in the Swedish Transport Agency (Transportstyrelsen) after the agency mishandled an outsourcing deal with IBM, which led to the leak of the private data about every vehicle in the country, including those used by both police and military. The data breach exposed the names, photos and home addresses of millions of Swedish citizen, including fighter pilots of Swedish air force, members of the military’s most secretive units, police suspects, people under the witness relocation program, the weight capacity of all roads and bridges, and much more. The incident is believed to be one of the worst government information security disasters ever. In 2015, the Swedish Transport Agency hand over IBM an IT maintenance contract to manage its databases and networks. However, the Swedish Transport Agency uploaded IBM’s entire database onto cloud servers, which covered details on every vehicle in the country, including police and military registrations, and individuals on witness protection programs. The transport agency then emailed the entire database in messages to marketers that subscribe to it. And what’s terrible is that the messages were sent in clear text. When the error was discovered, the transport agency merely thought of sending a new list in another email, asking the subscribers to delete the old list themselves. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sweden Accidentally Leaks Personal Details of Nearly All Citizens