Monthly Archives: August 2017

FCC “apology” shows anything can be posted to agency site using insecure API

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(credit: Wired UK/Shuttershock)

The Federal Communications Commission’s website already gets a lot of traffic—sometimes more than it can handle. But thanks to a weakness in the interface that the FCC published for citizens to file comments on proposed rule changes, there’s a lot more interesting—and potentially malicious—content now flowing onto one FCC domain. The system allows just about any file to be hosted on the FCC’s site—potentially including malware.

The application programming interface for the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System that enables public comment on proposed rule changes—such as the dropping of net neutrality regulations currently being pushed by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai—has been the source of some controversy already. It exposed the e-mail addresses of public commenters on network neutrality—intentionally, according to the FCC, to ensure the process’ openness—and was the target of what the FCC claimed was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. But as a security researcher has found, the API could be used to push just about any document to the FCC’s website, where it would be instantly published without screening. That was demonstrated by a PDF published with Microsoft Word that was uploaded to the site, now publicly accessible.

Other researchers reproduced the vulnerability on August 30, posting about their findings to Twitter. Because of the open nature of the API, an application key can be obtained with any e-mail address.

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Source: Ars Technica – FCC “apology” shows anything can be posted to agency site using insecure API

The IRS is Probably Looking at Your Dumb Tax Tweets

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The next time you want to tweet something about how much you hate paying taxes, or what you did with your huge tax refund, you might want to rethink it. An article from Washington State University professors took a look at the IRS’ data mining and analytics programs, and suggested the government agency is…

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Source: LifeHacker – The IRS is Probably Looking at Your Dumb Tax Tweets

Make Your Walls Pop With This Sitewide Discount From Pop Chart Lab [Exclusive]

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If your spring cleaning doesn’t involve revamping your home goods, what are you even doing? Add some awesome infographics to your walls with 25% off sitewide at Pop Chart Lab. Get everything from the Connected Characters of Seinfeld to every single bird in North America. Enter the code GIZMO25 at checkout to see your…

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Source: Gizmodo – Make Your Walls Pop With This Sitewide Discount From Pop Chart Lab [Exclusive]

Astronomers Have Found the Stars Responsible For an Explosion Recorded By Korean Astronomers in 1437 AD

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An anonymous reader shares a report: On the night of March 11, 1437 A.D., in what is now modern-day Seoul, a new star appeared in the sky, seemingly out of nowhere. The newcomer shone for 14 days before fading into the darkness. Korean astronomers noted the mysterious star and its brief stint in the sky in their records. Centuries later, modern astronomers studying these records determined that what the Koreans had seen was a cosmic explosion called a nova. Novae occur in two-star systems, when a dead star, known as a white dwarf, starts eating away at its companion, a star like our sun. The white dwarf slowly builds a layer of hydrogen stolen from the other star over tens of thousands of years, and then ejects it all at once, producing an eruption of light 300,000 times brighter than the sun that can last for weeks. Michael Shara and his researcher colleagues have spent the last nearly 30 years looking for the star responsible for this nova. In a new paper published Wednesday in Nature, they say they’ve finally found it. “It’s been like searching for a needle in a billion haystacks,” Shara said. For most of their search, Shara, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History’s department of astrophysics; Richard Stephenson, a historian of ancient astronomical records at Durham University; and Mike Bode, an astrophysicist at Liverpool John Moores University, focused on a part of the sky where they suspected the mystery star must lurk. The investigation was an on-again, off-again effort of “failure after failure after failure,” one that they returned to when they had the time or a lead. Last year, Shara found some relevant files in his office that he hadn’t looked at in nearly a decade, and decided to expand the search area in the sky. He started combing through digital databases of stars, looking for any interesting targets. In one astronomical catalog, he saw a well-known planetary nebula, a glowing shell of gas and dust. In a different catalog, he found an image of a binary star taken in 2016 in the same area. Then it hit him: That wasn’t a planetary nebula. It was the leftover shell of a nova explosion, floating near the star system that produced it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Astronomers Have Found the Stars Responsible For an Explosion Recorded By Korean Astronomers in 1437 AD

Now Shipping: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900X & Ryzen Pro CPUs

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Back when AMD announced their leading-edge Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X, the company also tucked in an announcement that there would be a third, cheaper Threadripper: the 1900X. Now after about a month’s wait since the first two chips launched, the 1900X is finally hitting the streets.









AMD High-End Ryzen SKUs
  Cores/

Threads		 Base/

Turbo		 XFR L3 DRAM

1DPC		 PCIe TDP SRP
TR 1950X 16/32 3.4/4.0 +200 32 MB 4×2666 60 180W $999
TR 1920X 12/24 3.5/4.0 +200 32 MB 4×2666 60 180W $799
TR 1900X 8/16 3.8/4.0 +200 16 MB 4×2666 60 180W $549
Ryzen 7 1800X 8/16 3.6/4.0 +100 16 MB 2×2666 16 95 W $499
Ryzen 7 1700X 8/16 3.4/3.8 +100 16 MB 2×2666 16 95 W $399

Of AMD’s Threadripper product stack, the 1900X is easily the most unusual of the chips. Whereas the 1950X and 1920X were the full-fledged version and the cheaper-but-still-thread-heavy-alterative respectively, the 1900X doesn’t really fit into either of those buckets. In fact with just 8 cores active, it has more in common with the Ryzen 7 1800X than it does the rest of the Threadripper family.


So why is AMD releasing an 8 core version of Threadripper when one Zeppelin die can accomplish the same thing at $100 less and almost half the TDP? Because while the 1900X may be a few cores short of a full Threadripper, it retains the platform’s immense I/O and memory bandwidth capabilities. In other words, 4 DDR4 memory channels and 60 + 4 PCIe lanes, offering twice the cumulative memory bandwidth and three times as many freely available PCIe lanes as AMD’s standard Ryzen processors. In fact other than cores, the only other thing it loses out on from the 1950X is L3 cache, with 16MB rather than the 32MB of its higher core counterparts. Conversely, its 3.8GHz base clockspeed makes it the highest base clockspeed of all of AMD’s Ryzen CPUs, standard and Threadripper.


Buy AMD Threadripper 1900X on Amazon.com


It does bear mentioning that Threadripper’s multi-die layout does comes with the same potential caveats as the other SKUs, which is why the 1900X isn’t going to be equal to or better than the 1800X in all scenarios. However with a MSRP of $549, the 1900X is now the cheapest way to get a high-I/O x86 processor. So for tasks that require a more limited number of threads and a lot of I/O and memory bandwidth, the 1900X should fit comfortably in its niche.


As for reviews of the new processor, unfortunately AMD did not sample the 1900X in advance. We’re angling to get one in soon, so please stay tuned for that.



Meanwhile also shipping out the door from AMD today is their Ryzen PRO processors. Announced back at the end of July, these are enterprise IT -focused versions of AMD’s standard Ryzen processors, offering longer support periods along with features such as enhanced security and added manageability features. Accordingly, AMD’s partners have started showing off their latest enterprise-systems, with Dell, HP, and Lenovo all set to begin shipping Ryzen PRO-equipped systems in the following weeks.











AMD Ryzen PRO Specifications
  Cores/Threads Frequency Cache TDP
Base Boost L2 L3
Ryzen 7 PRO 1700X 8/16 3.5 GHz 3.7 GHz 4 MB 16 MB 95 W
Ryzen 7 PRO 1700 3 GHz 3.7 GHz 65 W
Ryzen 5 PRO 1600 6/12 3.2 GHz 3.6 GHz 3 MB
Ryzen 5 PRO 1500 4/8 3.5 GHz 3.7 GHz 2 MB
Ryzen 3 PRO 1300 4/4 3.5 GHz 3.7 GHz 8 MB
Ryzen 3 PRO 1200 4/4 3.1 GHz 3.4 GHz



Source: AnandTech – Now Shipping: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900X & Ryzen Pro CPUs

US dads of newborns are greying—percentage over 40 doubled since the 70s

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(credit: Donnie Ray Jones)

Just like moms, American dads are getting older, according to a new study. Sadly, there’s no data suggesting their jokes are getting funnier, though.

Between 1972 and 2015, the mean age of US fathers crept up 3.5 years, from 27.4 to 30.9. The percentage of dads in their 40s more than doubled, from 4.1 to 8.9 percent. Likewise, fathers 50 and above jumped from 0.5 to 0.9 percent. And the uptick in graying pops appeared across all races, education levels, and regions.

The study, led by Stanford researchers and published this week in Human Reproduction, offers the most extensive look at paternal data yet, harvesting dad data from nearly 169 million birth records over the four decades. And the researcher’s finding of across-the-board aging papas is a mixed bag, they write.

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Source: Ars Technica – US dads of newborns are greying—percentage over 40 doubled since the 70s

Snapdragon 670 Rumored to Be 10nm Chip with Next-Gen Kryo Cores

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Tipped for release in early 2018 for mid-range smartphones, Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 670 chipset may be built on a 10nm fab process: the SoC will come with an octa-core Kryo CPU with a different cluster setup than its predecessors. While the Snapdragon 660 and 652/653 came with 4 high-power cores and 4 low-power cores, the 670 will feature two high-power Kryo 360 cores and 6 low-power cores.



This new processor will use ARM’s DynamIQ tech, which features on the Cortex-A75 and A55. This is the successor to big.LITTLE and is much more flexible. Likewise, the GPU moves on to the next generation of Adreno — the 6-series — while the current Snapdragons use Adreno 5-series. It seems that the Snapdragon 670 will be build by Samsung on its 10nm LPP tech – a refinement of the 10nm LPE used in the current Snapdragon 835 and Exynos 8895 chips. Note: LPE and LPP refers to Low Power Early and Plus respectively.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Snapdragon 670 Rumored to Be 10nm Chip with Next-Gen Kryo Cores

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900X Announced

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Today AMD rolls out what is not a very well kept secret, the Ryzen Threadripper model 1900X CPU. There is no doubt that Threadripper has already been a success for AMD, but how exactly does does an 8-core Threadripper fit into High End Desktop (HEDT) world of processors and platforms? The user profile is fairly skinny.



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Source: [H]ardOCP – AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900X Announced

Don't Use Windows 10 to Move Data on Your Android Phone

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Windows 10 reportedly has an MTP problem with Android devices: if you use the OS to move data on a USB-attached Android phone or tablet, you may lose your files. According to this author, users cannot move files between folders in Android memory, as it will cause data loss, and copied files do not arrive in the destination folder.



I ran a short test under Windows 7 SP1 with a Motorola Moto G5. The files could be copied or moved there without any problems. The test under Windows 10 version 1703 produced exactly the expected result — it doesn’t work. I couldn’t test whether earlier versions of Windows 10 or individual builds were affected. At heise. de there is a reference to reader comments that Linux systems (openSUSE, Ubuntu) are also affected.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Don’t Use Windows 10 to Move Data on Your Android Phone

Capcom Is Re-Releasing Street Fighter II on SNES Cartridges

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To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Street Fighter, Capcom is re-releasing Street Fighter II in cartridge form: the only problem is that it costs $100 and can cause your SNES to catch on fire. According to a warning on retailer iam8bit’s site, the reproduction may cause consoles to overheat, and gamers are encouraged to have fire extinguishment equipment nearby.



Featuring one of two colored cartridges, each houses the original game code and fully playable on NTSC consoles – but that’s just the beginning! The “Legacy Cartridge Collection” embodies retro-inspired luxury, amplifying the core SNES box design with a glistening foil sheen, delicately embossed texture, chic spot varnish and an innovative tri-fold cover that opens to reveal bonus vintage art. Inside, we’re keeping it old-school by restoring the contents of the original instruction booklet, complete with a new archival cover print + secret pack-ins (to be revealed when you crack that shrink-wrap seal).

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Capcom Is Re-Releasing Street Fighter II on SNES Cartridges

Apple Confirms September 12th Keynote For iPhone 8 Flagship At Steve Jobs Theater

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Apple Confirms September 12th Keynote For iPhone 8 Flagship At Steve Jobs Theater
Confirming reports from earlier this month, Apple sent out invites this afternoon to the press confirming that its next keynote address will take place on September 12th. The event will take place at the Steve Jobs Theater, which is situated on the brand-new Apple Park campus.

This is expected to be a packed event, as Apple will not only

Source: Hot Hardware – Apple Confirms September 12th Keynote For iPhone 8 Flagship At Steve Jobs Theater

Updates on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Wonder Woman 2, Hellboy, and More

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Willem Dafoe compares his time on Aquaman to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies. Patty Jenkins teases a “full-blown” Diana for Wonder Woman 2. Get a new look at Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Plus, new footage from Mr. Robot’s next season, and teases for the returning DC/CW-verse shows. To me, my spoilers!

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Source: Gizmodo – Updates on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Wonder Woman 2, Hellboy, and More

New Experiment Reveals Secret Behind 200,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Glue

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Over a hundred thousand years ago, Neanderthals used tar to bind objects together, yet scientists have struggled to understand how these ancient humans, with their limited knowledge and resources, were able to produce this sticky substance. A new experiment reveals the likely technique used by Neanderthals, and how…

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Source: Gizmodo – New Experiment Reveals Secret Behind 200,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Glue