Month: December 2016

(credit: samazgor)

Facebook has been accused of misleading the European Commission over its $22 billion takeover of WhatsApp in 2014—when the Mark Zuckerberg-run company claimed that it wouldn't be able to knit together user IDs, thereby combining the data of the two services.

Brussels' competition officials issued a charge sheet against Facebook on Tuesday, in which it is alleged that the free content ad network failed to disclose that "the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook users' IDs with WhatsApp users' IDs already existed" at the time of the merger.

Antitrust chief Margerthe Vestager said that companies must provide "accurate information" during routine competition probes into planned acquisitions.

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The Nintendo Switch—the hybrid portable games console/tablet due for release in March 2017—will be powered by Nvidia's older Tegra X1 SoC and not its upcoming Tegra X2 "Parker" SoC as initially rumoured.

The use of Tegra X1, which also powers the Nvidia Shield Android TV, means the graphics hardware inside the Switch is based on Nvidia's older second-generation Maxwell architecture, rather than the latest Pascal architecture. While the two architectures share a very similar design, the Switch will miss out on some of the smaller performance improvements made in Pascal. It's not yet known whether the hardware in the Switch will be manufactured on the more power efficient 16nm process (as used by Pascal), or whether it will remain at 20nm.

That the Switch uses an older architecture may come as a disappointment to those hoping for Xbox One or PlayStation 4 power in a portable. But more telling than than the SoC itself is the clock speed it runs at. Multiple sources have confirmed to Digital Foundry that the Switch will run its GPU at two different clock speeds, depending on whether it's docked or whether it's being used as a portable—and the difference between the two is huge.

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

Neal H. Walfield is a hacker at g10code working on GnuPG. This op-ed was written for Ars Technica by Walfield, in response to Filippo Valsorda's "I'm giving up on PGP" story that was published on Ars last week.

Every once in a while, a prominent member of the security community publishes an article about how horrible OpenPGP is. Matthew Green wrote one in 2014 and Moxie Marlinspike wrote one in 2015. The most recent was written by Filippo Valsorda, here on the pages of Ars Technica, which Matthew Green says "sums up the main reason I think PGP is so bad and dangerous."

In this article I want to respond to the points that Filippo raises. In short, Filippo is right about some of the details, but wrong about the big picture. For the record, I work on GnuPG, the most popular OpenPGP implementation.