Month: November 2018

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Getty)

WALDORF, Md.—To a casual observer, Regency Furniture Stadium, home of the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs baseball team, probably looked like it was playing host to a weekend autocross. There were cones set up in the empty lot as I pulled in and some interesting cars to park alongside, many displaying the subtle tells of trackday service. But on this unseasonably cold and windswept Sunday morning, something else was afoot. The cones were not arranged in the sinuous, continuous course you might expect if time trials were the order of the day.

A closer look revealed that more was going on here. To one side of the stadium's parking lot, a cone sat alone in the middle of a wide expanse of tarmac. Elsewhere, others were clustered together to delineate other obstacles to negotiate—a slalom course and so on. And while a handful of the cars up front obviously belonged to enthusiasts, the vast majority were much more… suburban. That's because I was actually here to visit a local event being held by the Tire Rack Street Survival school. It's just one of a number of events that take place across the country with the goal of instilling good driving habits in impressionable young minds.

You don't have to squint to see the need for programs like these. More than 37,000 people die on US roads each year, and drivers under the age of 25 are well represented in the annual tabulations. But the data is more complicated than that, and road deaths among young drivers have actually been on the decrease compared to a 29-percent year-on-year increase in fatal crashes involving drivers over the age of 65. Getting our elderly drivers to go to a car-control clinic would probably be a brilliant idea, too, but it's easier to get 'em while they're young, particularly if you're the responsible adult who provides the vehicle, insurance, and gas money. Hence the collection of parents giving up their Sunday mornings (and paying $95) to spend time with their teen drivers and some cones.

Enlarge / AMD Radeon Instinct MI60 (credit: AMD)

AMD today charted out its plans for the next few years of product development, with an array of new CPUs and GPUs in the development pipeline.

On the GPU front are two new datacenter-oriented GPUs: the Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI50. Based on the Vega architecture and built on TSMC's 7nm process, the cards are aimed not primarily at graphics (despite what one might think given that they're called GPUs) but rather at machine learning, high-performance computing, and rendering applications.

MI60 will come with 32GB of ECC HBM2 (second-generation High-Bandwidth Memory) while the MI50 gets 16GB, and both have a memory bandwidth up to 1TB/s. ECC is also used to protect all internal memory within the GPUs themselves. The cards will also support PCIe 4.0 (which doubles the transfer rate of PCIe 3.0) and direct GPU-to-GPU links using AMD's Infinity Fabric. This will offer up to 200GB/s of bandwidth (three times more than PCIe 4) between up to 4 GPUs.

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is highlighted by a one-day Amazon gold box sale dedicated to Logitech accessories, including a handful of mice, speakers, and keyboards.

Amazon has run a number of Logitech-specific promotions in the past, but today's is notable for discounting a few gadgets that are actually, you know, worth it. The Logitech MX Master 2S, for instance, is a comfortable, smooth-performing, and generally premium mouse—it's down to $56 here, about $20 off its usual going rate. (Amazon lists a few items here as being as much as 63 percent off, but it's using a bit of MSRP trickery; most of what's here is closer to 20-30 percent off its street price.) The G502 Proteus Spectrum, meanwhile, is a good basic gaming mouse, while the K810 is a backlit, wireless, and perfectly functional multi-device keyboard.

If you don't need anything along those lines, though, we also have deals on the Nokia 6.1, Amazon Echo Spot, OnePlus 6T, Roku Streaming Stick+, and more. Have a look for yourself below.

Enlarge / ATLANTA, GA - NOVEMBER 06: Sloane (no last name given), 2, waits between her father's legs as he and other voters cast their ballots at a polling station set up at Grady High School for the mid-term elections on November 6, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia. Georgia has a tight race to elect the state's next governor and a lot of worries over voting security. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images) (credit: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

As those of you reading this from the US (hopefully) vote today, in all likelihood your vote will be counted correctly and you won't be turned away from the polls because someone hacked the voter registration data. Yet for a small but non-zero minority, something will go wrong that will stand in the way of their ability to cast a vote for the candidate of their choice. It could be a glitch in a voting machine interface that wasn't caught before they commit their ballot, voter registration data that has been flagged as incorrect or has been purged, or maybe a targeted robo-call that gives them bad information about the election.

There are lots of ways to manipulate the vote tally that go beyond exploiting a hiccup in an electronic voting machine. Denial of service attacks—on state or county servers, on the networks that connect precincts to election commissions, and on other vulnerable points in the network architecture—could disrupt voting itself or prevent votes from being properly counted. Tampering with voter registration data in advance of the election could cause voters to be forced to cast provisional ballots or exclude them from voting entirely. And then there's simply shoddy software implementation and aging hardware, which can cause an unintended denial of service.

In six Texas counties during early voting, it was reported that voters casting a straight party ticket had their vote for US senator checked for the wrong candidate: Democrats found that their vote was being cast for Sen. Ted Cruz, while some Republicans found their vote was being cast for Beto O'Rourke. The problem, according to state election officials, was caused by an interface issue on the Hart eSlate voting system—specifically, voters were turning a selection dial and pressing an “enter” button at the same time, according to a spokesperson for the secretary of state's office in Texas. State election officials sent out an advisory to county election workers about the problem, which first surfaced during the 2016 presidential election. But it was described as "user error" and not a technical issue. The Hart eSlate is used by 82 out of Texas' 254 counties.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on December 14, 2017 in Washington, DC, the day of the FCC's vote to repeal net neutrality rules. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong )

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai yesterday criticized Sprint, Charter, CenturyLink, and four other phone providers for not committing to adopt a new system for blocking robocalls.

Pai issued a press release and sent letters to wireless carriers and other phone providers, saying that certain companies "have not yet established concrete plans to protect their customers" using the new "SHAKEN" and "STIR" robocall-blocking protocols.

SHAKEN stands for Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs, while STIR stands for Secure Telephone Identity Revisited. The new industry standard isn't expected to completely eliminate robocalls, but it may make a sizable difference and is expected to be implemented by carriers starting in 2019.