Month: February 2018

Jonathan Gitlin

The renaissance at Volvo is in full swing. Flush with funds and a supportive owner, its products over the past few years have proven you don't need to look to Germany to see a luxury car maker at the top of its game. This corner of the market is now all about the swanky SUV, and the 2018 XC60—tested here in its 400hp T8 plug-in hybrid version—makes a strong case that Sweden is leading the pack.

The new era started when Ford sold Volvo in 2010. Freed from American corporate micromanagement, new owner Geely took a hands-off approach, giving Volvo the resources it needed to develop all-new engines and vehicle architectures. It came up with what it calls the Scalable Product Architecture, a highly flexible starting base for all of its medium and large vehicles. The first SPA vehicles were all big ones: the XC90, a three-row SUV that arrived in 2014; then more recently the S90 sedan and V90 station wagons. All are fine vehicles, but with the XC60, the stakes are higher—it's far and away the company's best-selling model.

Enlarge / What a beautiful place to stay alive. (credit: Unknown Worlds)

Pretty major spoiler warning for Subnautica ahead.

It’s strange to consider now, but there was a time when Minecraft was something you had to hear about through word of mouth. Long before Microsoft hoovered the game up in a multibillion-dollar deal and even before the game’s relatively popular beta version, Minecraft came to my attention through an innocuous post on Facebook.

A message along the lines of “This thing is wild! You have to try it” was all it took to pique my interest. Indeed it was, and indeed it did. I lost at least a couple of weekends in my college dorm to harvesting glass blocks for windows and puzzling out blueprints in what would eventually become one of the biggest things in pop culture history.

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

According to a new report, three new iPhones will launch in 2018, all derived from the design and features of the iPhone X. One would be a direct successor to the iPhone X, another would be a significantly larger cousin with the biggest smartphone screen Apple has yet produced, and the third would be a cheaper version that makes some concessions for cost.

The source, Bloomberg, cites "people familiar with the products." This report follows several rumors from various points in Apple's supply chain that have described a similar lineup. The launches are still months away (they will likely come during September, October, or November, given Apple's past releases), so plans are still subject to change.

According to the report, every model will come with a TrueDepth sensor array for Face ID instead of the Touch ID fingerprint reader. Each would also have an edge-to-edge screen. In other words, the iPhone X is the model for the next wave of Apple smartphones, not the iPhone 8 design whose basic elements can be traced back to 2014's iPhone 6.

Enlarge (credit: Santi / Flickr)

Chips built with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light are plagued with random defects with no obvious solution, according to research presented at a chipmakers' conference reported in EETimes. The EUV hardware seems to work acceptably for 20nm or larger processes, but below this scale, small defects are cropping up that ruin the chip and prove hard to detect.

Photolithography is the process used to etch the patterns that make up chips into a silicon wafer. The wafer is coated with a light-sensitive material called photoresist. This wafer is then exposed to bright light that's shone through a mask. Areas hidden by the mask will retain their photoresist layer; those exposed directly to the UV will lose it. The wafer is then etched using plasma or acid. Parts of the wafer that are still covered in photoresist are protected during the etching, retaining their silicon oxide; those whose photoresist has been removed are etched away.

Smaller wavelengths of light enable finer detail in the mask and hence finer detail in the etching. Processors today, built on a 14nm process, already use features that are far smaller than the wavelength of regular UV light; they apply techniques such as multi-patterning (in which multiple masks and light exposure stages are used) to reach ever smaller sizes. These additional steps increase manufacturing time and error rates, hence the interest in shorter wavelengths. With EUV, smaller chip features could be produced without needing such techniques.

Enlarge / Democrats vs. Republicans. (credit: Getty Images | Linda Braucht)

Congressional Democrats today introduced legislation that would prevent the repeal of neutrality rules, but they still need more support from Republicans in order to pass the measure.

Democrats have been promising to introduce a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution ever since the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal its net neutrality rules in December. But lawmakers had to wait for the FCC's repeal order to be published in the Federal Register, which only happened last week.

The CRA resolution would nullify the FCC's repeal order, allowing net neutrality rules that were passed in 2015 to remain in place. The resolution has public support from 50 out of 100 senators (all Democrats, all Independents, and one Republican), putting it one vote shy of passage in the Senate.

Enlarge / Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer of Microsoft Corp., right, speaks to the media while his attorney, Joshua Rosenkranz, listens outside the US Supreme Court on Feb. 27, 2018. (credit: Aaron P. Bernstein/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Tuesday morning, the nine justices of the Supreme Court put a legal theory from Microsoft to the test—that the company should not be forced to hand over data held abroad to the American government, even when served with a valid court order.

During oral arguments, the Department of Justice, by contrast, urged the court to compel Microsoft to hand over the data. The DOJ said that allowing Microsoft to refuse the order is tantamount to encouraging companies to keep particularly sensitive data overseas as a way to evade authorities.

Two liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who have recently ruled on the side of privacy in the past, questioned whether the court should be stepping in. They said that the onus should be on Congress to regulate appropriately.

(credit: Wikipedia)

Hackers have found a way to amplify distributed denial-of-service attacks by an unprecedented 51,000 times their original strength in a development that whitehats say could lead to new record-setting assaults that take out websites and Internet infrastructure.

DDoS vandals have long intensified their attacks by sending a small number of specially designed data packets to publicly available services. The services then unwittingly respond by sending a much larger number of unwanted packets to a target. The best known vectors for these DDoS amplification attacks are poorly secured domain name system resolution servers, which magnify volumes by as much as 50 fold, and network time protocol, which increases volumes by about 58 times.

On Tuesday, researchers reported attackers are abusing a previously obscure method that delivers attacks 51,000 times their original size, making it by far the biggest amplification method ever used in the wild. The vector this time is memcached, a database caching system for speeding up websites and networks. Over the past week, attackers have started abusing it to deliver DDoSes with volumes of 500 gigabits per second and bigger, DDoS mitigation service Arbor Networks reported in a blog post.