Month: June 2020

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  Intel's focus on AI architecture is so deep that the actual SKU table seemed like little more than an afterthought. Also notice no prices are available. [credit: Intel ]

Intel today announced its third-generation Xeon Scalable (meaning Gold and Platinum) processors, along with new generations of its Optane persistent memory (read: extremely low-latency, high-endurance SSD) and Stratix AI FPGA products.

The fact that AMD is currently beating Intel on just about every conceivable performance metric except hardware-accelerated AI isn't news at this point. It's clearly not news to Intel, either, since the company made no claims whatsoever about Xeon Scalable's performance versus competing Epyc Rome processors. More interestingly, Intel hardly mentioned general-purpose computing workloads at all.

Finding an explanation of the only non-AI generation-on-generation improvement shown needed jumping through multiple footnotes. With sufficient determination, we eventually discovered that the "1.9X average performance gain" mentioned on the overview slide refers to "estimated or simulated" SPECrate 2017 benchmarks comparing a four-socket Platinum 8380H system to a five-year-old, four-socket E7-8890 v3.

Enlarge (credit: Kate Ter Haar)

Browser extensions downloaded almost 33 million times from Google’s Chrome Web Store covertly downloaded highly sensitive user information, a security firm said on Thursday in a report that underscores lax security measures that continue to put Internet users at risk.

The extensions, which Google removed only after being privately notified of them, actively siphoned data such as screenshots, contents in device clipboards, browser cookies used to log in to websites, and keystrokes such as passwords, researchers from security firm Awake told me. Many of the extensions were modular, meaning once installed, they updated themselves with executable files, which in many cases were specific to the operating system they ran on. Awake provided additional details in this report.

Company researchers found that all 111 of the extensions it identified as malicious connected to Internet domains registered through Israel-based GalComm. The researchers eventually found more than 15,000 registered through GalComm hosting malicious or suspicious behavior. The malicious domains used a variety of evasion techniques to avoid being labeled as malicious by security products.

Enlarge / Thumbs down. (credit: Getty Images | Ted Soqui )

Facebook this afternoon removed from its platform a series of campaign ads for President Donald Trump, citing policy against hate speech—a takedown that landed right in the middle of a hearing where a Facebook official was being grilled by Congress about the site's failures to act on hate speech originating from the White House.

The ad campaign, paid for by Trump's reelection committee, ran on the official Facebook pages for Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and the "Team Trump" campaign. The text of the advertisements reads, "Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem," and it encourages viewers to sign up for communications with, "Please add your name IMMEDIATELY to stand with your President and his decision to declare ANTIFA a Terrorist Organization."

The ad campaign began running since June 3, according to left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters. As of yesterday, however, a new version of the ad started running on Facebook, featuring an inverted red triangle with a black outline. As immediately pointed out by several anti-defamation groups and media outlets, that symbol was used by the Nazi party to identify political prisoners in concentration camps. That category first included communists, then also social democrats, socialists, anarchists, trade unionists, Freemasons, and other perceived threats.

Enlarge (credit: New Mexico Department of Health / Aurich Lawson)

Since May, the Trump administration has paid a fledgling Texas company $7.3 million for test tubes needed in tracking the spread of the coronavirus nationwide. But, instead of the standard vials, Fillakit LLC has supplied plastic tubes made for bottling soda, which state health officials say are unusable.

The state officials say that these “preforms,” which are designed to be expanded with heat and pressure into 2-liter soda bottles, don’t fit the racks used in laboratory analysis of test samples. Even if the bottles were the right size, experts say, the company’s process likely contaminated the tubes and could yield false test results. Fillakit employees, some not wearing masks, gathered the miniature soda bottles with snow shovels and dumped them into plastic bins before squirting saline into them, all in the open air, according to former employees and ProPublica’s observation of the company’s operations.

“It wasn’t even clean, let alone sterile,” said Teresa Green, a retired science teacher who worked at Fillakit’s makeshift warehouse outside of Houston for two weeks before leaving out of frustration.