Technology

As discussion of the Spectre and Meltdown bugs dominates the tech news cycle, there’s been repeated reference to a specific feature of high-end CPUs: speculative execution. It’s a key capability of higher-end ARM products, Apple’s custom ARM cores, IBM’s POWER family, and the vast majority of the x86 processors produced …

Flash drives used to offer enough space to carry around a few documents or a bit of music, but now you can keep a lot more on a tiny USB stick. In fact, SanDisk is showing off a prototype flash drive at CES 2018 that could store a gigantic media …

Rivet Networks has built a business as a premiere provider of networking tech, but it’s never used Intel’s Wi-Fi and networking solutions before. As of this week, that’s changing. Rivet has been working with Intel to build new solutions, with Intel hardware inside and Rivet Network’s own networking expertise baked …

Messenger Kids, Facebook’s new app designed to allow those under the age of 13 to more safely communicate thanks to parental controls, is today launching on Fire tablets. The service had originally debuted on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch in early December, but today’s launch will also see it arrive …

YouTube is aiming to bring its set of social features, including the in-app messaging system and “Community” tab for creators, to its wider suite of apps. Specifically, the company is interested in porting those features to its YouTube TV app aimed at cord cutters, as well as its Music app. The …

The last few years have been good to Huawei as it grew to surpass Apple, becoming the world’s second largest smartphone vendor behind Samsung. It’s done it all without any substantial presence in the US market. The upcoming (and unannounced) deal with ATT to sell the new Mate 10 series …

When Ryzen launched last year AMD priced its new core very aggressively. It had good reason to do so — chips like the Ryzen 7 1800X and Ryzen 5 1600X were extremely good buys versus the equivalently priced Intel hardware you could buy at the time. Once Coffee Lake launched, …

Spectre and Meltdown are two of the most serious security flaws we’ve seen in years. While it’s not clear how often we’ll see either exploited in the wild, they’re dangerous because they target the fundamental function of the affected chips themselves rather than relying on any software flaw. Meltdown can …

Western Digital’s My Cloud network attached storage (NAS) devices claim to offer an easy, all-in-one solution for storing your data at home. However, they might also be providing an easy, all-in-one solution for hackers to steal your data take control of your device. Western Digital was told about the vulnerabilities last …

Quantum computing has been a major research topic for multiple companies the past few years, with D-Wave, IBM, and Intel all launching their own systems and improving them at a fairly rapid clip. At CES 2018 this week, Intel’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, declared the company’s new 49-qubit quantum computer represented …