Tag: science

Samsung Begins Mass Production of World’s Fastest DRAM

MojoKid writes: Late last year marked the introduction of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) DRAM courtesy of AMD’s Fury family of graphics cards, each of which sports 4GB of HBM. HBM allows these new AMD GPUs to tout an impressive 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth, but it’s also just the first iteration of the new memory technology. Samsung has just announced that it has begun mass production of HBM2. Samsung’s 4GB HBM2 package is built on a 20 nanometer process. Each package contains four 8-gigabit core dies built on top of a buffer die. Each 4GB HMB2 package is capable of delivering 256GB/sec of bandwidth, which is twice that of first generation HBM DRAM. In the example of NVIDIA’s next gen GPU technology, code named Pascal, the new GPU will utilize HBM2 for its frame buffer memory. High-end consumer-grade Pascal boards will ship with 16GB of HBM2 memory (in four, 4GB packages), offering effective memory bandwidth of 1TB/sec (256GB/sec from each HMB2 package). Samsung is also reportedly readying 8GB HBM2 memory packages this year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Begins Mass Production of World’s Fastest DRAM

Cryptsy Bitcoin Trader Robbed, Blames Backdoor In the Code of a Wallet

An anonymous reader writes: Cryptsy, a website for trading Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other smaller crypto-currencies, announced a security incident, accusing the developer of Lucky7Coin of stealing 13, 000 Bitcoin and 300, 000 Litecoin, which at today’s rate stands more than $5.7 million / €5.2 million. Cryptsy says “the developer of Lucky7Coin had placed an IRC backdoor into the code of [a] wallet, which allowed it to act as a sort of a Trojan, or command and control unit.” Coincidentally this also explains why two days after the attack was carried out, exactly 300, 000 Litecoin were dumped on the BTC-e exchange, driving Litecoin price down from $9.5 to $2. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cryptsy Bitcoin Trader Robbed, Blames Backdoor In the Code of a Wallet

Grisly Find Suggests Humans Inhabited Arctic 45,000 Years Ago

sciencehabit points out this story which may rewrite the early history of humans in North America. From the Sciencemag story: “In August of 2012, an 11-year-old boy made a gruesome discovery in a frozen bluff overlooking the Arctic Ocean. While exploring the foggy coast of Yenisei Bay, about 2000 kilometers south of the North Pole, he came upon the leg bones of a woolly mammoth eroding out of frozen sediments. Scientists excavating the well-preserved creature determined that it had been killed by humans: Its eye sockets, ribs, and jaw had been battered, apparently by spears, and one spear-point had left a dent in its cheekbone—perhaps a missed blow aimed at the base of its trunk. When they dated the remains, the researchers got another surprise: The mammoth died 45, 000 years ago. That means that humans lived in the Arctic more than 10, 000 years earlier than scientists believed, according to a new study. The find suggests that even at this early stage, humans were traversing the most frigid parts of the globe and had the adaptive ability to migrate almost everywhere.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Grisly Find Suggests Humans Inhabited Arctic 45,000 Years Ago

US government announces $4 billion self-driving car program

Turns out we’re way closer to our self-driving car future than most of us expected. US Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced at the Detroit Auto Show (pdf) Thursday that the Obama administration will have a national blueprint for autonomous vehicle standards by July. What’s more the administration is earmarking $4 billion of the 2017 budget to create a decade-long program that will support and accelerate development of the technology. “We are on the cusp of a new era in automotive technology with enormous potential to save lives, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and transform mobility for the American people, ” Secretary Foxx said in a statement. Currently, each state has individual laws regarding the burgeoning technology. This forces automakers and early adopters like Google to juggle multiple sets of rules and regulations, depending on where in the country the technology is being built. For example, California recently decided that a human “driver” be present at all times should something go wrong. This program should reduce the number of hoops companies have to jump through by creating an overarching, national-level development framework. Via: Re/Code Source: Department of Transportation (pdf)

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US government announces $4 billion self-driving car program

The first working Hyperloop could arrive by the end of 2016

Rob Lloyd, the recently-minted CEO of Hyperloop Technologies , believes that his firm will have a fully-working test loop ready for the end of the year. The executive is here at CES to oversee the breaking ground on the facility which is being constructed on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The two-mile track is, if all things go to plan, expected to be ready for passengers to try out before the end of the holidays. We sat down with Lloyd to talk about the past, present of future of Hyperloop in this wide-ranging interview with Engadget.

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The first working Hyperloop could arrive by the end of 2016

Verizon Accused of Helping Spammers By Routing Millions of Stolen IP Addresses

An anonymous reader writes: Spamhaus, an international non-profit organization that hunts down spammers, is accusing Verizon of indifference and facilitation of cybercrime because it failed for the past six months to take down stolen IP routes hosted on its network from where spam emails originated. Spamhaus detected over 4 million IP addresses, mainly stolen from China and Korea, and routed on Verizon’s servers with forged paperwork. Spamhaus says, “For a start, it seems very strange that a large US-based ISP can be so easily convinced by abusers to route huge IP address blocks assigned to entities in the Asian-Pacific area. Such blocks are not something that can go unnoticed in the noise of everyday activity. They are very anomalous, and should call for an immediate accurate verification of the customer. Internal vetting processes at large ISPs should easily catch situations so far from normality.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Verizon Accused of Helping Spammers By Routing Millions of Stolen IP Addresses

Trend Micro Flaw Could Have Allowed Attacker To Steal All Passwords

itwbennett writes: Trend Micro has released an automatic update fixing the problems in its antivirus product that Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy discovered could allow “anyone on the internet [to] steal all of your passwords completely silently, as well as execute arbitrary code with zero user interaction.” The password manager in Trend’s antivirus product is written in JavaScript and opens up multiple HTTP remote procedure call ports to handle API requests, Ormandy wrote. Ormandy says it took him 30 seconds to find one that would accept remote code. He also found an API that allowed him to access passwords stored in the manager. This is just the latest in a string of serious vulnerabilities that have been found in antivirus products in the last seven months. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Trend Micro Flaw Could Have Allowed Attacker To Steal All Passwords

Sunken Bronze Age Settlement Is the ‘Pompeii’ of Britain

Archaeologists in Britain have uncovered the charred remains of a 3, 000-year-old stilted wooden structure that plunged into the river after it caught fire. The remarkably well-preserved roundhouse is offering an unprecedented glimpse into what domestic life was like during the Bronze Age. Read more…

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Sunken Bronze Age Settlement Is the ‘Pompeii’ of Britain

BBC Confirms 50% Bitrate Savings For H.265/HEVC Vs H.264/AVC

An anonymous reader writes: A research team from the BBC has done a series of tests to confirm earlier computations showing a ~50% savings in bit rate for H.265/HEVC compared to video using H.264/AVC at comparable quality. “The subjective tests used a carefully selected set of coded video sequences at four different picture sizes: UHD (3840×2160 and 4096×2048), 1080p (1920×1080), 720p (1280×720) and 480p (832×480), at frame rates of 30Hz, 50Hz, or 60Hz. The video content was chosen to represent diverse spatial and temporal characteristics, and then coded using HEVC and AVC standards at a wide span of bit rates producing a variety of quality levels.” Here is the full published analysis. “The tests confirmed the significant compression efficiency improvements achieved in HEVC, verifying the results previously reported using objective quality metrics (PSNR based methods).” The team did not test against VP9, which is shaping up to be an impressive standard as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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BBC Confirms 50% Bitrate Savings For H.265/HEVC Vs H.264/AVC

Questions Linger As Juniper Removes Suspicious Dual_EC Algorithm

msm1267 writes: Juniper Networks has removed the backdoored Dual_EC DRBG algorithm from its ScreenOS operating system, but new developments show Juniper deployed Dual_EC long after it was known to be backdoored. Stephen Checkoway, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that he and a number of crypto experts looked at dozens of versions of Juniper’s NetScreen firewalls and learned that ANSI X9.31 was used exclusively until ScreenOS 6.2 when Juniper added Dual_EC. It also changed the size of the nonce used with ANSI X9.31 from 20 bytes to 32 bytes for Dual_EC, giving an attacker the necessary output to predict the PRNG output. ‘And at the same time, Juniper introduced what was just a bizarre bug that caused the ANSI generator to never be used and instead just use the output of Dual_EC. They made all of these changes in the same version update.’ Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Questions Linger As Juniper Removes Suspicious Dual_EC Algorithm