Technology

Intel has announced a new set of updates for the Spectre attacks we’ve been talking about for the past six weeks or so. Spectre has two variants (Variant 1 and Variant 2). Meltdown, another critical security flaw, is considered to be Variant 3 and, in the x86 space, affects only …

Since November of 2017 we’ve been watching a fight play out between Broadcom and Qualcomm. It began when Broadcom offered to buy out Qualcomm and Qualcomm wasn’t interested. Broadcom then launched a hostile takeover by nominating 11 individuals to Qualcomm’s board of directors. That proposal won’t be voted on until …

Google’s mobile payment platform has gone through almost as many revamps as its messaging apps, but maybe today will be the last one for a long time. Google is completing its transition to the “Google Pay” platform, which will absorb both Android Pay and Google Wallet. There’s even a shiny …

If you’re invited to tour MIT’s Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass. when they’re having a Lab Lunch, you’ll witness a mob of students, staff, and faculty sitting together over a meal, in pursuit of the social aspects of the lab’s free-wheeling “anti-disciplinary” culture that encourages researchers to break out of …

Samsung announced today that it has begun production of a new, mind-blowing 30TB SSD. This is a marked departure from previous eras, when the steady advance of storage capacity was driven exclusively by magnetic media and spinning disks. Companies have demonstrated high-capacity NAND flash storage for years, but nobody else …

Earlier this week, we covered a familiar problem when pairing new processors with older motherboards. Older boards often need firmware updates to properly support new processors, but not every board on the market has been flashed to support new APUs. This means it’s possible for a customer to purchase a …

Wireless spectrum in the US is carefully regulated to avoid interference, which is why mobile carriers pay out the nose to license slices of the airwaves. Naturally, T-Mobile was quite perturbed recently when it detected heavy interference with its network in Brooklyn. The FCC has investigated, and it turns out …

For most users of cryptocurrency, it’s not a way of life. They have “real” money stored in bank accounts that are used for life’s little necessities like food and housing. However, a bug in Coinbase is causing small, speculative purchases of cryptocurrency to drain users’ bank accounts completely. Offering to …

Over the last year, Microsoft has been busy adding new SKUs to Windows 10. Windows 10 S debuted as a separate edition only to be retconned into an operating mode, Windows 10 Business (as part of Microsoft 365), and Windows 10 Pro for Workstations all launched in an attempt to …

Silicon has been an integral part of computing for decades. While it’s not always the best solution by every metric, it’s captured a key set of capabilities that make it well suited for general (or classical) computing. When it comes to quantum computing, however, silicon-based solutions haven’t really been adopted. …