Month: August 2019

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  The best news about Comet Lake is the high-end 6C/12T i7. [credit: Intel Corporation ]

Today, Intel is launching a new series of 14nm notebook CPUs code-named Comet Lake. Going by Intel's numbers, Comet Lake looks like a competent upgrade to its predecessor Whiskey Lake. The interesting question—and one largely left unanswered by Intel—is why the company has decided to launch a new line of 14nm notebook CPUs less than a month after launching Ice Lake, its first 10nm notebook CPUs.

Both the Comet Lake and Ice Lake notebook CPU lines this month consist of a full range of i3, i5, and i7 mobile CPUs in both high-power (U-series) and low-power (Y-series) variants. This adds up to a total of 19 Intel notebook CPU models released in August, and we expect to see a lot of follow-on confusion. During the briefing call, Intel executives did not want to respond to questions about differentiation between the Comet Lake and Ice Lake lines based on either performance or price, but the technical specs lead us to believe that Ice Lake is likely the far more attractive product line for most users.

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  A very broad overview of the differences between Ice Lake and Comet Lake notebook CPUs. [credit: Intel Corporation ]

Intel's U-series CPUs for both Comet Lake and Ice Lake operate at a nominal 15W TDP. Both lines also support a "Config Up" 25W TDP, which can be enabled by OEMs who choose to provide the cooling and battery resources necessary to support it.

Enlarge / In quantum computing, a cat state is a quantum state composed of two diametrically opposed conditions simultaneously. Physicists have succeeded in placing 20 entangled quantum bits in such a state of superposition. (credit: Forschungszentrum Jülich/Annette Stettien)

Schrödinger's cat is quite possibly the most famous paradox in physics, and rudimentary real-world versions have even been built in the laboratory. Now a team of German physicists has set a new record by building a quantum "cat" out of 20 entangled qubits, as described in a recent paper in Science. A second group of Chinese researchers has successfully done the same with 18 qubits. The prior record, set in 2011, was 14 qubits.

Erwin Schrödinger originally proposed his thought experiment to illustrate the innate absurdity of quantum mechanics. He envisioned putting a hypothetical cat in a box containing a radioactive substance, a detector to sense any emitted radiation, and a lethal vial of poison. If the radioactive substance decays, the detector will trigger the release of the poison and the cat dies. If it doesn't, the cat remains alive. But a strict interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that until someone opens the box to see what happened, the cat exists in a superposition of states, both alive and dead.

It really is possible to build a version of Schrödinger's cat in the laboratory. It's more of a quantum "cat state," whereby two or more particles manage to be in two different states at the same time. In 2005, for instance, National Institute of Standards and Technology researchers created a quantum cat state out of six atoms in simultaneous "spin up" and "spin down" states—rather like spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Other groups have done the same with photons.

(credit: Wired UK/Shuttershock)

A rash of supply chain attacks hitting open-source software over the past year shows few signs of abating, following the discovery this week of two separate backdoors slipped into a dozen libraries downloaded by hundreds of thousands of server administrators.

The first backdoor to come to light was in Webmin, a Web-based administration tool with more than 1 million installations. Sometime around April of last year, According to Webmin developer Jamie Cameron, someone compromised the server used to develop new versions of the program. The attacker then used the access to distribute a backdoor that was downloaded more than 900,000 times and may have been actively used by tens of thousands of Internet-facing servers.

The unknown attacker made a subtle change to a Webmin script called password_change.cgi. The change gave attackers the ability to send a command through a special URL that an infected Webmin server would then execute with root privileges. In version 1.890, which had more than 421,000 downloads between June, 2018 and last weekend, the backdoor was turned on by default. On versions 1.90, 1.91, 1.91, and 1.92—which collectively had more than 942,000 downloads—the backdoor was active only when admins changed a default setting that allowed expired passwords to be changed. Backdoored versions were distributed on SourceForge, which is the primary distribution source the Webmin website points to.

Enlarge / A DOS prompt.

Welcome to Ars Gaming Week 2019! As a staff full of gamers and game-lovers, we'll be serving up extra reviews, guides, interviews, and other stories all about gaming from August 19 to August 23.

Everyone who plays games a lot has a favorite era that set their expectations and defined what they find fun for years to come, and it's difficult to talk about classic computer games without dating yourself—either as younger or older. Which era counts as "classic" or formative will depend on the individual.

In my case, the formative glory days were the 1980s and early '90s, and the platform was MS-DOS. And while I did play popular commercial releases from publishers like Apogee and Epic, I mostly played shareware releases. Today, we're going to look at some gems of that lost era.