Month: April 2017

Enlarge / Nvidia's Pascal-based GTX 1060. (credit: Mark Walton)

Last week, when Nvidia announced its new top-end Titan Xp GPU, it also said that it would be releasing macOS drivers for the new card and the company's entire Pascal-based GPU lineup. Today, it has released version 378.05.05.05f01 of its Mac driver, a beta that will allow Macs (and sort-of Macs) to support those cards for the first time.

The driver should support all Pascal-based graphics cards under macOS Sierra, including the GTX 1050, 1050 Ti, 1060, 1070, 1080, and 1080 Ti, as well as the Titan X and Titan Xp. It also supports many older GeForce and Quadro GPUs going all the way back to the GeForce 8000 series.

These drivers are good news for Mac users who want to use the newest, best GPUs, but they shouldn't be taken as a sign that Apple is working to put any Pascal-based GPUs in upcoming Macs. Nvidia has maintained macOS drivers for older Maxwell-based GPUs even though Apple never shipped them in any Macs (every new Mac starting from the 2013 Mac Pro has used Intel's and AMD's GPUs exclusively).

Enlarge (credit: Stephen Brashear / Getty Images News)

A zero-day code-execution vulnerability in Microsoft Office is one of three critical flaws under active attack in the wild, Microsoft warned Tuesday as it rolled out a batch of updates that plug the security holes.

As Ars reported Monday night, attackers are exploiting the flaw to infect unsuspecting Word users with bank-fraud malware known as Dridex. Blog posts published Tuesday morning by security firms Netskope and FireEye reported that attackers are exploiting the same bug to install malware with the names Godzilla and Latenbot.

Ryan Hanson, a researcher at security firm Optiv and the person Microsoft credited with reporting the critical bug, said exploits can execute malicious code even when a mitigation known as Protected View isn't disabled. The attacks are able to bypass other exploit mitigations as well. Microsoft's fix for CVE-2017-0199, as the flaw is indexed, is here.

Quantum Break was exclusive to Xbox One, but Remedy's next game won't be.

When we've reported on the PS4's sales lead over the Xbox One in the past, we usually point out that the deficit only really matters insofar as it discourages developers and publishers from sticking with Microsoft's smaller audience. These days, we're seeing more and more signs of this effect coming to pass for console games both large and small.

Today's sign of Microsoft's trouble attracting exclusives comes from Remedy Entertainment. The Finnish company previously known for Xbox exclusives like Quantum Break and the Alan Wake series has announced that its next game, codenamed P7, will "release... on a wider range of platforms," including the PS4. Remedy's last game on a Sony system was 2003's Max Payne 2 for the PlayStation 2.

That's just one company, sure, and Remedy isn't giving up on the Xbox One entirely. But it follows comments from Crytek that the Ryse: Son of Rome developer was disappointed in the sales of the Xbox One launch exclusive (though that comment did come when the system was much younger). It's also indicative of a wider trend we're seeing, where Sony seems to be attracting much more exclusive software for its console than Microsoft.

Enlarge (credit: Scott Olson)

Drug-resistant germs from livestock—born from overuse and misuse of antibiotics—can make their way off farms and into unsuspecting people, where they can cause difficult-to-treat infections. But following their path from farms to people is tricky. After decades of spats with public health and animal rights advocates, farm owners are not eager to share information on their antibiotic practices or the superbugs that may lurk on their farms.

Researchers caught in the middle have been left to find workarounds, collecting bits and pieces of data to try to retrace the steps of superbugs as they migrate off farms. A new study, published in the April issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, offers some new, snotty clues about their path.

In the study, children of pig farm workers were more than twice as likely to have their noses stuffed with drug-resistant germs than other kids, researchers report. Perhaps more surprisingly, the nose-dwelling germs found in kids didn’t tend to match their parents’ snotty superbugs. This suggests that superbugs may travel to kids more readily on clothes and equipment than through person-to-person contact—or at least adult-to-kid contact.

Enlarge / This image shows how the Great Cold Spot (the darker, oval feature) changes dramatically in shape and size on different days. (credit: Tom Stallard)

Astronomers have been characterizing Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a brilliant, swirling storm located just south of the planet's equator, for the better part of three centuries. Now, scientists say they have found another great spot on Jupiter at higher latitudes.

The "Great Cold Spot" is defined by its temperature relative to the surrounding upper atmosphere on the planet. Temperatures in Jupiter's upper atmosphere range from about 700 to 1,000 Kelvin, and the relatively well-defined cold area is about 200 Kelvin cooler. Measuring about 24,000 kilometers in longitude and 12,000 kilometers in latitude, the cold spot is nearly as large as the more famous red spot.

So what has caused it? Planetary scientists aren't yet sure, as much of Jupiter's atmosphere remains a mystery. "The detection of a localized region of cooling within the upper atmosphere is unexpected," the authors of a new study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, reported this week. Previous observations have been limited in their spatial resolution, especially at higher latitudes, and as a result scientists had thought variations in temperature would be more smoothed out.