Tag: funny

Cylance Accused of Distributing Fake Malware Samples To Customers To Close Deals

New submitter nyman19 writes: Ars Technica reports how security vendor Cylance has been distributing non-functioning malware samples to prospective customers in order to “close the sale[s] by providing files that other products wouldn’t detect” According to the report: “A systems engineer at a large company was evaluating security software products when he discovered something suspicious. One of the vendors [Cylance] had provided a set of malware samples to test — 48 files in an archive stored in the vendor’s Box cloud storage account. The vendor providing those samples was Cylance, the information security company behind Protect, a ‘next generation’ endpoint protection system built on machine learning. In testing, Protect identified all 48 of the samples as malicious, while competing products flagged most but not all of them. Curious, the engineer took a closer look at the files in question — and found that seven weren’t malware at all.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cylance Accused of Distributing Fake Malware Samples To Customers To Close Deals

‘Breakthrough’ LI-RAM Material Can Store Data With Light

A Vancouver researcher has patented a new material that uses light instead of electricity to store data. An anonymous reader writes: LI-RAM — that’s light induced magnetoresistive random-access memory — promises supercomputer speeds for your cellphones and laptops, according to Natia Frank, the materials scientist at the University of Victoria who developed the new material as part of an international effort to reduce the heat and power consumption of modern processors. She envisions a world of LI-RAM mobile devices which are faster, thinner, and able to hold much more data — all while consuming less power and producing less heat. And best of all, they’d last twice as long on a single charge (while producing almost no heat), according to a report on CTV News, which describes this as “a breakthrough material” that will not only make smartphones faster and more durable, but also more energy-efficient. The University of Victoria calculates that’s 10% of the world’s electricity is consumed by “information communications technology, ” so LI-RAM phones could conceivably cut that figure in half. They also report that the researcher is “working with international electronics manufacturers to optimize and commercialize the technology, and says it could be available on the market in the next 10 years.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Breakthrough’ LI-RAM Material Can Store Data With Light

G.SKILL Hits 4500MHz With All-New Trident Z DDR4-4333MHz 16GB Memory Kit

BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: G.SKILL is a respected RAM maker, and the company is constantly pushing the envelope. Today, it announced a new DDR4-4333MHz 16GB Memory Kit (2x8GB) — the first ever. While that alone is very cool, the company is bragging about what it accomplished with it — an overclock that hit 4500MHz using an Intel Core i5-7600K processor paired with an ASUS ROG Maximus IX Apex motherboard. Pricing and availability for this kit is unknown at this time. With that said, it will probably be quite expensive. What we do know, however, its that the insane overclock to 4500MHz is for real. This was achieved using timings of CL19-19-19-39 in dual channel, which resulted in read/write of 55/65GB/s and copy speed of 52GB/s. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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G.SKILL Hits 4500MHz With All-New Trident Z DDR4-4333MHz 16GB Memory Kit

Former Sysadmin Accused of Planting ‘Time Bomb’ In Company’s Database

An anonymous reader writes: Allegro MicroSystems LLC is suing a former IT employee for sabotaging its database using a “time bomb” that deleted crucial financial data in the first week of the new fiscal year. According to court documents, after resigning from his job, a former sysadmin kept one of two laptops. On January 31, Patel entered the grounds of the Allegro headquarters in Worcester, Massachusetts, just enough to be in range of the factory’s Wi-Fi network. Allegro says that Patel used the second business-use laptop to connect to the company’s network using the credentials of another employee. While connected to the factory’s network on January 31, Allegro claims Patel, who was one of the two people in charge of Oracle programming, uploaded a “time bomb” to the company’s Oracle finance module. The code was designed to execute a few months later, on April 1, 2016, the first week of the new fiscal year, and was meant to “copy certain headers or pointers to data into a separate database table and then to purge those headers from the finance module, thereby rendering the data in the module worthless.” The company says that “defendant Patel knew that his sabotage of the finance module on the first week of the new fiscal year had the maximum potential to cause Allegro to suffer damages because it would prevent Allegro from completing the prior year’s fiscal year-end accounting reconciliation and financial reports.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Former Sysadmin Accused of Planting ‘Time Bomb’ In Company’s Database

Public Crowd-sourcing Finds New Exoplanets

brindafella writes: A participant in a TV program “Stargazing Live” on Australia’s ABC TV channel has found four planets closely orbiting a star, using an online database. Astrophysicist Dr Chris Lintott, the principal investigator of Zooniverse, reported on Thursday’s show that four “Super Earth” planets had been identified in the data. They orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to our Sun. The person responsible for the find, Andrew Grey, is a mechanic by day and amateur astronomer in his spare time, and lives in the city of Darwin, Northern Territory. The data is sourced from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. “Stargazing Live” host Professor Brian Cox said he could not be more excited about the discovery. “In the seven years I’ve been making Stargazing Live this is the most significant scientific discovery we’ve ever made. The results are astonishing.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Public Crowd-sourcing Finds New Exoplanets

JetBlue and Boeing Are Betting Big On Electric Jet Startup ‘Zunem Aero’

A new startup called Zunum Aero is aiming to reinvent how users travel short distances, such as from San Francisco to Los Angeles. “The Kirkland, Washington-based company plans to build a fleet of hybrid electric jets to sell to major carriers for service on densely traveled regional routes like San Francisco to Los Angeles or Boston to Washington, DC, “reports The Verge. Two aviation giants, Boeing and JetBlue, are reportedly backing the startup. From the report: Lower operating costs (i.e., no fueling) will allow carriers to reduce fares by 40 to 80 percent, they predict. And by flying a smaller aircraft that would be subject to fewer TSA regulations, Zunum claims it will take less time to go through security before boarding one of its planes. Zunum aims to build several models of hybrid-electric propulsion jets. At launch, its first class of aircraft will be tiny, in the 10-15 foot range, with a 10-passenger capacity and a range of up to 700 miles on a single charge. (Think San Francisco to Portland or Atlanta to DC.) Those planes can be expected to roll off the assembly line by the early 2020s, the company’s CEO Ashish Kumar told The Verge. By the 2030s, as electric battery technology improves, Zunum hopes to build larger aircraft that can carry up to 50 passengers and travel up to 1, 000 miles on a single charge. (Think Seattle to LA or Boston to Jacksonville, Florida.) Zunum’s aircraft will feature hybrid electric motors with the capacity to accept recharging power from a variety of sources. Because airplanes are typically kept in service for up to 30 years, Kumar says its important for Zunum’s aircraft to be future proof. That means designing them to be compatible with future battery designs and range-extending generators, with an eye toward ultimately switching from hybrid propulsion to fully electric motors once the technology catches up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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JetBlue and Boeing Are Betting Big On Electric Jet Startup ‘Zunem Aero’

‘Arctic World Archive’ Will Keep the World’s Data Safe In an Arctic Mineshaft

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Norway’s famous doomsday seed vault is getting a new neighbor. It’s called the Arctic World Archive, and it aims to do for data what the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has done for crop samples — provide a remote, impregnable home in the Arctic permafrost, safe from threats like natural disaster and global conflicts. But while the Global Seed Vault is (partially) funded by charities who want to preserve global crop diversity, the World Archive is a for-profit business, created by Norwegian tech company Piql and Norway’s state mining company SNSK. The Archive was opened on March 27th this year, with the first customers — the governments of Brazil, Mexico, and Norway — depositing copies of various historical documents in the vault. Data is stored in the World Archive on optical film specially developed for the task by Piql. (And, yes, the company name is a pun on the word pickle, as in preserving-in-vinegar.) The company started life in 2002 making video formats that bridged analog film and digital media, but as the world went fully digital it adapted its technology for the task of long-term storage. As Piql founder Rune Bjerkestrand tells The Verge: “Film is an optical medium, so what we do is, we take files of any kind of data — documents, PDFs, JPGs, TIFFs — and we convert that into big, high-density QR codes. Our QR codes are massive, and very high resolution; we use greyscale to get more data into every code. And in this way we convert a visual storage medium, film, into a digital one.” Once data is imprinted on film, the reels are stored in a converted mineshaft in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. The mineshaft (different to the one used by the Global Seed Vault) was originally operated by SNSK for the mining of coal, but was abandoned in 1995. The vault is 300 meters below the ground and impervious to both nuclear attacks and EMPs. Piql claims its proprietary film format will store data safely for at least 500 years, and maybe as long as 1, 000 years, with the assistance of the mine’s climate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Arctic World Archive’ Will Keep the World’s Data Safe In an Arctic Mineshaft

Why Intel Insists Rumors Of The Demise Of Moore’s Law Are Greatly Exaggerated

From an article on FastCompany: Intel hasn’t lost its zeal for big leaps in computing, even as it changes the way it introduces new chips, and branches beyond the PC processor into other areas like computer vision and the internet of things. “Number one, too many people have been writing about the end of Moore’s law, and we have to correct that misimpression, ” Mark Bohr, Intel’s technology and manufacturing group senior fellow and director of process architecture and integration, says in an interview. “And number two, Intel has developed some pretty compelling technologies … that not only prove that Moore’s law is still alive, but that it’s going to continue to provide the best benefits of density, cost performance, and power.” But while Moore’s law soldiers on, it’s no longer associated with the types of performance gains Intel was making 10 to 20 years ago. The practical benefits of Moore’s law are not what they used to be. For each new generation of microprocessor, Intel used to adhere to a two-step cycle, called the “tick-tock.” The “tick” is where Moore’s law takes effect, using a new manufacturing process to shrink the size of each transistor and pack more of them onto a chip. The subsequent “tock” introduces a new microarchitecture, which yields further performance improvements by optimizing how the chip carries out instructions. Intel would typically go through this cycle once every two years. But in recent years, shrinking the size of transistors has become more challenging, and in 2016, Intel made a major change. The latest 14 nm process added a third “optimization” step after the architectural change, with modest performance improvements and new features such as 4K HDR video support. And in January, Intel said it would add a fourth optimization step, stretching the cycle out even further. The move to a 10 nm process won’t happen until the second half of 2017, three years after the last “tick, ” and Intel expects the new four-step process to repeat itself. This “hyper scaling” allows computing power to continue to increase while needing fewer changes in the manufacturing process. If you divide the number of transistors in Intel’s current tick by the surface area of two common logic cells, the rate of improvement still equals out to more than double every two years, keeping Moore’s law on track. “Yes, they’ve taken longer, but we’ve taken bigger steps, ” Bohr said during his three-hour presentation. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Why Intel Insists Rumors Of The Demise Of Moore’s Law Are Greatly Exaggerated

Companies Start Implanting Microchips Into Workers’ Bodies

A Swedish start-up called Epicenter is offering to implant its employees and start-up members with microchips that function as swipe cards, allowing them to open doors, operate equipment or buy food and drinks with a wave of the hand. While these microchips have been available for decades, the technology has never been implanted in humans on such a broad scale. “Epicenter and a handful of other companies are the first to make chip implants broadly available, ” reports Associated Press. From the report: [A]s with most new technologies, it raises security and privacy issues. Although the chips are biologically safe, the data they generate can show how often employees come to work or what they buy. Unlike company swipe cards or smartphones, which can generate the same data, people cannot easily separate themselves from the chips. Epicenter, which is home to more than 100 companies and roughly 2, 000 workers, began implanting workers in January 2015. Now, about 150 workers have the chips. A company based in Belgium also offers its employees such implants, and there are isolated cases around the world in which tech enthusiasts have tried them out in recent years. The small implants use near-field communication technology, or NFC, the same as in contactless credit cards or mobile payments. When activated by a reader a few inches away, a small amount of data flows between the two devices via electromagnetic waves. The implants are “passive, ” meaning they contain information that other devices can read, but cannot read information themselves. Ben Libberton, a microbiologist at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, says hackers could conceivably gain huge swaths of information from embedded microchips. The ethical dilemmas will become bigger the more sophisticated the microchips become. Epicenter workers stage monthly events where attendees can receive the implant. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Companies Start Implanting Microchips Into Workers’ Bodies

Amazon Bans Sales of Media Player Boxes That Promote Piracy

Amazon is taking a tough stance against vendors who sell fully-loaded Kodi boxes and other “pirate” media players through its platform. From a report: The store now explicitly bans media players that “promote” or “suggest” the facilitation of piracy. Sellers who violate this policy, of which there are still a few around, risk having their inventory destroyed. While Kodi itself is a neutral platform, millions of people use third-party add-ons to turn it into the ultimate pirate machine. In some cases, the pirate add-ons are put onto the devices by vendors, who sell these “fully-loaded” boxes through their own stores or marketplaces such as Amazon. The ecommerce giant appears to be well aware of the controversy, as it recently published an updated policy clarifying that pirate media players are not permitted on the platform. Merely ‘suggesting’ that devices can be used for infringing purposes is enough to have them delisted. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amazon Bans Sales of Media Player Boxes That Promote Piracy