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Meltdown, Spectre, Foreshadow, and ZombieLoad are critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. I need a new computer. How long do I have to wait until a new processor will be available that is designed without those problems? Or am I going to have to go ahead and buy and live with the patches that reportedly cripple performance?

Pornography online attracts millions of erotica-hungry people ready to see sex on-demand. You can simply ask your phone to show you anything you desire and there it is: any time, any place. With the advent of deepfake porn, the possibilities have expanded even further, with people who have never starred in adult films looking as though they’re doing sexual acts on camera. Experts have warned that these videos enable all sorts of bad things to happen, from paedophilia to fabricated revenge porn. What are deepfakes? Deepfakes are videos and images that use deep learning AI to forge something not actually...

FULL TITLE: An NSA cyber weapon is reportedly being used against American cities by the very adversaries it was meant to target In less than three years after the National Security Agency found itself subject to an unprecedentedly catastrophic hacking episode, one of the agency's most powerful cyber weapons is reportedly being turned against American cities with alarming frequency by the very foreign hackers it was once intended to counter. An explosive New York Times story published Saturday detailing how the NSA's Tailored Access Operations lost control of its so-called 'EternalBlue' malware tool to a cadre of hackers known as...

“IT’S CHEATING.” That’s the response you’ll hear from self-proclaimed music purists talking about technological innovation in song creation. Sampling, synthesizers, drum machines, Auto-Tune—all have been derided as lazy ways to make chart-topping hits because they take away the human element. (With apologies to Vanilla Ice, Gary Numan, Prince, and T-Pain.) The new argument among fans and musicians will be about the use of artificial intelligence in songwriting. According to several estimates, in the next decade, between 20% and 30% of the top 40 singles will be written partially or totally with machine-learning software. Today, recording pros can use A.I.-powered programs...

he team moves through a dark, narrow hallway, emerging into a room crammed with an odd sort of contraband: toner and ink cartridges stacked almost to the ceiling. Authorities question a woman who deflects at first before finally admitting that all of them are counterfeits. The video, shot in India and shared with me by Hewlett-Packard (HP Inc), illustrates the raids local authorities have conducted hundreds of times around the world to try and stem the flow of counterfeit ink and toner cartridges. It’s reminiscent of a drug bust, and the economic stakes are nearly as high. According to the...

A decades-old classic that joins the likes of Doom, Tetris, Pokémon, and The Legend of Zelda When selecting new entires for the World Video Game Hall of Fame, judges consider a number of criteria. Is the game widely known and remembered? Has its popularity endured over the years? And did it influence not only other video games, but society in general? Microsoft Solitaire, bundled with the Windows operating system since 1990, might seem like a modest example of video gaming culture, but it easily meets the above benchmarks. And so, as of this month, it’s now an official member of...

[A] bit of heat production from resistance is a desirable characteristic in metallic thin films for spintronic applications such as solid-state computer memory. Similarly, while defects are often undesirable in materials science, they can be used to control creation of magnetic quasi-particles known as skyrmions. In separate papers published this month in the journals Nature Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, researchers in the group of MIT Professor Geoffrey S.D. Beach and colleagues in California, Germany, Switzerland, and Korea, showed that they can generate stable and fast moving skyrmions in specially formulated layered materials at room temperature, setting world records for size...

"From the data, we can conclude that the Google search results were favoring liberal website. It is also possible to conclude that DuckDuckGo results have a greater political variety compared to Google."

A discrepancy of slightly more than 60,000 votes between the summaries of the valid votes of all parties in the elections and the number appearing on the committee's website may decide the fate of the New Right Party. According to data appearing on the Election Committee's website from early morning, the New Right Party received 3.26 percent of the vote, while the electoral threshold stands at 3.25 percent of the vote, meaning that it exceeded the threshold. However, an examination of total valid votes granted to all parties running in the Knesset elections shows the number at 4,291,707, while the...

A Look at the Short-Lived 3-Inch Compact Floppy Disk Posted on February 25, 2019 by Blake Patterson I was recently listening to the latest episode of Retro Computing Roundtable podcast during which there was mention of a 3-inch floppy disk. No, not 3.5-inch, but 3-inch. These disks are known as Compact Floppy Disks (also “CF2”) and were used in a number of systems outside the US, including some models of Amstrad, Tatung, and MSX machines. And, while the Sony-engineered 3.5-inch disks that those of us who don’t think that they are 3D-printed takes on the “save icon” know well are...

Not sure where to put this one, it could go in so many different sub-forums, so I'll just put it here in 'General'. The other day my laptop crashed and burned. Not sure what happened, but I think the motherboard fried. I managed to get it working enough to attach an external hard drive and mirror off all the data files. Most of it I already had backed up, but I just wanted to get the most recent data. Because many of my keyboard keys were not working I had to use some more global commands to get all the...

I started using Bing over Google as I was sick and tired of Google working with China's military, but not working with ours. They ban gun videos on Youtube. They help authoritarian countries institute censorship in search results. All the while we use them and they make money off of us. Google is Evil. Bing rewards you for your searches no different than the credit card companies do with their rewards. Using Google with no rewards is akin to using a credit card with no rewards. And Microsoft actually is a patriotic company and does not kow tow to the...

Tesla is the first automaker to participate in a Pwn2Own hacking event, which is run by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). The event happened in Vancouver this week and a team of two hackers managed to find an exploit on the last day of competition. Over the past 4 years, Tesla has been running a bug bounty program and according to sources familiar with the effort, the company has given away hundreds of thousands in rewards to hackers who exposed vulnerabilities in its system

Reuters reporter Joseph Menn exclusively revealed on Friday that Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke belonged to one of the best-known groups of computer hackers as a teenager. Within minutes, his special report was the most popular story on Reuters.com here and was picked up by other news outlets. But the origin of the story goes back more than two years. Members of the group, which calls itself Cult of the Dead Cow, protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise the former Texas Congressman’s political career. After more than a year of reporting, Menn persuaded O’Rourke to talk on the...

A function of Intel's processors dealing with speculative execution has another vulnerability that affects all Intel-based computers including Apple's Mac, researchers have revealed, with "Spoiler" potentially allowing an attacker the ability to view the layout of memory, and in turn potentially access sensitive data stored in those locations. The speculative execution function of Intel's processors, used to increase the performance of a CPU by predicting paths an instruction will go through before the branch is completed, is a useful function but one that has caused Intel issues in the past. A new report from security researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute...

But the money was already gone........ Millions of dollars were missing when the CEO of a crypto exchange died without sharing the passwords to his accounts. Investigators recently cracked his laptop — only to find the money was gone. Gerald Cotten, the founder of QuadrigaCX, was thought to have had sole access to the funds and coins exchanged on it. After his death in December, his colleagues said that about $137 million in cryptocurrency belonging to about 115,000 customers was held offline in "cold storage" and inaccessible. The case has sparked numerous theories, including that Cotten faked his own death...

What VPN do lots of freepers recommend? I want to use it at places like Starbucks. Will use of a VPN slow me down..? I don't simply want to get the one Rush advertizes, though I love Rush.

I have just reprogrammed a laptop for a friend. When I did, of course Windows 10 was reinstalled on it, and of course Windows Defender was also reinstalled as well. With all the news coming out lately about Windows Defender interfering with Windows Updates, and of course most of us know just how reliable (I'm trying really hard not to throw up on my keyboard right now) Windows Defender is, I'm trying to find a newer, better, SIMPLER Internet Security program. I've used AVG myself for many years but it's getting to the point where I hate to use it...

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. - The toll bills haven't stopped coming for some drivers in Central Florida after SunPass’ software meltdown last summer. In fact, state senators were told more than 4 million outstanding bills are still heading to mailboxes, adding up to an outstanding balance of $100 million. Related Headlines Last June, SunPass took its online payment system offline for a week of scheduled maintenance. At the end of the week, the system wouldn’t come back online. Almost 250 days later, people are still getting bills in the mail for the weeks of tolls that SunPass couldn’t process. Some drivers...

Cindi Eckis doesn’t have a smartphone, and she doesn’t want one. “It makes my life simpler,” the Cheektowaga retiree said. But sticking with her flip phone will make it tougher for her and other low-tech motorists to find a place to park along some streets of downtown Buffalo. A new parking policy being rolled out by city officials adds parking zones where the only way to pay to park is through the Buffalo Roam parking app. Blue "Pay by app only" signs went up earlier this week on Cobblestone District streets. "Pay from your phone," the signs read. "Download Buffalo...