Locked Intel Skylake CPUs Can Be Overclocked After BIOS Update

jjslash writes: For a few years now, Intel CPU overclocking has been limited to more expensive Core i5 and Core i7 ‘K’ processors. Skylake launched this year with the rumor of strong non-K processor overclocking through an adjustable base clock, but that never eventuated… until now. In overclocking circles it was rumored that BCLK (base clock) overclocking might become a possibility in Skylake processors, but it would be up to motherboard manufacturers to circumvent Intel’s restrictions. Asrock, Asus and a few other motherboard manufacturers are said to be issuing a BIOS update soon that will unlock base clock overclocking on Z170 motherboards. TechSpot has got an early look, overclocking a locked Core i3-6100 to 4.7GHz on air cooling. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Locked Intel Skylake CPUs Can Be Overclocked After BIOS Update

Faraday Future Selects Las Vegas As Home For $1B Electric Car Factory

An anonymous reader writes: Faraday Future, the newest and most unknown player in the electric car game, has selected North Las Vegas as the home for their billion dollar factory. The 3 million square foot factory will be built on 900 acres and create 4, 500 jobs. Faraday Future will release more information on their Tesla fighter, a 100% electric car, at CES in January. Autoblog reports: “Nevada topped finalists California, Georgia and Louisiana in the race to land the 2.5 million square foot plant. It’s expected to sit on 600 acres in North Las Vegas’s Apex Industrial Park and bring 4, 500 jobs to Nevada. Mayor John Lee called the site choice ‘a transformational opportunity’ for his city of about 220, 000 residents. North Las Vegas boomed as the nation’s fastest-growing city in the early 2000s and nearly busted when the recession hit and pushed it close to insolvency.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Faraday Future Selects Las Vegas As Home For $1B Electric Car Factory

AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug

An anonymous reader writes: Basic ASLR was not implemented in 3 major antivirus makers, allowing attackers to use the antivirus itself towards attacking Windows PCs. The bug, in layman terms, is: the antivirus would select the same memory address space every time it would run. If attackers found out the memory space’s address, they could tell their malicious code to execute in the same space, at the same time, and have it execute with root privileges, which most antivirus have on Windows PCs. It’s a basic requirement these days for software programmers to use ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to prevent their code from executing in predictable locations. Affected products: AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky. All “quietly” issued fixes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug

Germany Fires Up Bizarre New Fusion Reactor

New submitter insitus writes: On 10 December, Germany’s new Wendelstein 7-X stellarator was fired up for the first time, rounding off a construction effort that took nearly 2 decades and cost €1 billion. Initially and for the first couple of months, the reactor will be filled with helium—an unreactive gas—so that operators can make sure that they can control and heat the gas effectively. At the end of January, experiments will begin with hydrogen in an effort to show that fusing hydrogen isotopes can be a viable source of clean and virtually limitless energy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Germany Fires Up Bizarre New Fusion Reactor

Microsoft Open Sources and Forks Windows Live Writer Into Open Live Writer

SmartAboutThings writes: Windows Live Writer is a blogging tool that Microsoft originally released back in 2006, and it still remains popular today, which has prompted Microsoft to promise that it will make it open source earlier this year. Now the company has officially open-sourced and forked Windows Live Writer into Open Live Writer, having put its repositories on GitHub already. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Open Sources and Forks Windows Live Writer Into Open Live Writer

WordPress 4.4 Arrives

An anonymous reader with news of the newest release of open source WordPress, which adds a slew of new features to the blog management tool that will “make your site more connected and responsive.” You can download the new release now from WordPress.org/Download (7.3MB). WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that powers 25 percent of the Web. The latest version is dubbed “Clifford” in honor of jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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WordPress 4.4 Arrives

Google Finds D-Wave Machine To Be 10^8 Times Faster Than Simulated Annealing

An anonymous reader sends this report form the Google Research blog on the effectiveness of D-Wave’s 2X quantum computer: We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10^8 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 10^8. A more detailed paper is available at the arXiv. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Finds D-Wave Machine To Be 10^8 Times Faster Than Simulated Annealing

Apple increases iCloud Music Library limit to 100,000 tracks

Apple has made good on its promise to increase the iCloud Music Library limit to 100, 000 tracks. This was previously set at 25, 000, so the change increases the cap threefold. The move was first teased in June , with Eddy Cue, the company’s SVP of Internet Software and Services, promising it would arrive before the year’s end. Via: The Verge Source: MacRumors

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Apple increases iCloud Music Library limit to 100,000 tracks

French Legislation Would Block Tor and Restrict Free Wi-Fi

Several readers sent word that French newspaper Le Monde got its hands on documents showing the French government is debating two new pieces of legislation that are unfriendly to internet users. The first would ban people from sharing Wi-Fi connections during a state of emergency. “This comes from a police opinion included in the document: the reason being that it is apparently difficult to track individuals who use public Wi-Fi networks.” The second would forbid the use of Tor within France’s borders. “The main problem with such a ban on Tor is that it wouldn’t achieve a whole lot. Would-be terrorists could still access Tor from outside the country, and if they did manage to access Tor from within France I doubt they’re concerned about being arrested for illegal use of the network.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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French Legislation Would Block Tor and Restrict Free Wi-Fi

USPS will email you images of what’s in your mailbox

We’ve all done it. Take a few minutes to walk to the mailbox only to discover it’s either empty or filled with junk that immediately goes in the trash. The US Postal Service is testing a new tool that will save you a trip if there’s nothing interesting to be found. The feature is called Informed Delivery and it sends up to 10 images a day of what’s in your physical mailbox to your email inbox. Via: The Next Web Source: USPS

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USPS will email you images of what’s in your mailbox