Technology

Last month, news broke of a new GeForce Partner Program, put in place by Nvidia to corner the market on high-end GPUs by requiring GPU manufacturers to “align” their brands with Nvidia if they wanted to receive GPU allocations or be considered for various marketing funds. GPUs manufactured by AMD …

Ever since Spectre and Meltdown were unveiled, there’s been the risk that future attacks might surface as well. One of the things that sets the Spectre attacks apart from Meltdown is that Meltdown targeted a specific vulnerability. The Spectre variants (Variant 1 and Variant 2) described already are two examples …

If you’re a PC enthusiast, chances are you’ve already heard of Noctua — the company builds some of the best PC coolers you can buy, backed up by lifetime guarantees, full-color manuals, and upgrade offers that often extend the lifespan of coolers past their technical socket compatibility limits. Noctua (See …

The United States Department of Defense has halted the sale of all smartphones, routers, modems, and other hardware that contains any equipment manufactured by Huawei or ZTE. The order affects all of the stores on various Pentagon military bases and covers both the initial hardware and “adjacent products.” “These devices …

After leaking some of the details itself, LG has finally taken the wraps off its newest smartphone. The LG G7 ThinQ (yes, that’s actually the name) matches all the leaks from unofficial sources. It has some things we expect out of the G-series, including a dual camera and high-resolution LCD …

CPU utilization is wrong. That’s the argument Brandon Gregg, Netflix’s senior performance architect, has leveled against one of the most fundamental performance measurement tools we use when evaluating a system. According to Gregg, CPU utilization as reported by Windows isn’t just wrong — it’s actively getting worse over time. If …

The recent dust-up with Facebook has made secure communication more popular than ever, but many law enforcement agencies aren’t happy with that prospect. In the US, federal authorities have made their dislike of encrypted communication widely known. In some countries, private messaging services are effectively banned. Signal is one of …

Last year, Intel launched an unusual desktop CPU family. The Kaby Lake-X series of processors was an attempt to goose demand for Intel’s HEDT (High End DeskTop) platform by offering cheaper CPUs based on Kaby Lake, rather than the Skylake-X cores that Intel introduced at the same time. The Core …

Those “warranty void if removed” stickers have plagued many a tinkerer over the years, but the FTC said last month that those warnings are illegal. It told six companies, including Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, to knock that off. The full text of the notices has been revealed, and the FTC …

A new lawsuit alleges that Samsung, Hynix, and Micron — which together control 96 percent of the DRAM market — have unjustly colluded to raise the price of DRAM from January 1, 2016 through February 1, 2018. The suit notes that RAM prices fell from 2014-2015, when the three companies …