Month: October 2020

Enlarge / Facebook's "voter information center" as seen in July 2020. (credit: Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

It seems fair to say that, here in the United States, this is an election season unlike any other, with tensions running exceptionally high. Facebook, which through its collection of apps reaches the vast majority of the US population, has again launched a new slew of initiatives to mitigate the harm misinformation on its platforms can cause. Several of these measures are sound ideas, but unfortunately, two of its latest efforts once again amount to waiting until the horse has made it halfway around the world before you shut the barn door.

Facebook explained yesterday in a corporate blog post what its Election Day efforts are going to look like on both Facebook and Instagram. The company has promised for months that it will run real-time fact-checking on and after November 3 to prevent any candidate from declaring victory before a race is actually called, and it showed what that process will look like.

In that post, Facebook also said that although ads are "an important way to express voice," it plans to enact a temporary moratorium on "all social issue, electoral, or political ads in the US" after the polls close on November 3, to "reduce opportunities for confusion or abuse." That stance will put Facebook, at least for the time being, in like with Twitter's position on political ads.

AMD CEO Lisa Su holds up a Zen 3 CPU at today's AMD Gaming event—most likely, a Ryzen 9 5900X or Ryzen 9 5950X. (credit: AMD)

At today's AMD Gaming Event 2020, Team Red announced its next big thing in desktop CPUs—the Zen 3 powered Ryzen 5xxx series. The event was brief—only a half hour from start to finish—with AMD announcing record-breaking internal benchmark results.

AMD CEO Lisa Su, CTO Mark Papermaster, and Director of Technical Marketing Robert Hallock took turns extolling the new gear's features. The trio paints a picture of more unrelenting pressure being laid on competitor Intel. According to AMD testing, raw performance, power efficiency, IPC, and single-threaded performance all increased markedly compared to current leading desktop processors from both AMD and Intel.

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  Ryzen 9 5900X is a 12 core / 24 thread beast with a nearly 5GHz boost clock, but it still fits in a relatively frugal 105W TDP envelope. [credit: Jim Salter ]

According to CTO Mark Papermaster, Zen 3—the architecture next month's Ryzen lineup is based on—has been in development for over five years. Zen 3 features a new, unified 8-core complex that allows each core in the cluster direct access to L3 cache. Papermaster declared that the new architecture sees a 19% instructions per clock cycle (IPC) uplift when compared with Zen 2.

Enlarge / It's-a me, the long arm of the law. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Nintendo / Getty Images)

Anyone who follows the console-hacking scene is by now used to the familiar stories of legal efforts to put a stop to the practice. Companies like Nintendo frequently make use of court orders, cease and desist letters, and civil lawsuits to stop the distribution of game ROMs and/or devices that allow those ROMs (and homebrew software) to run on their hardware.

Still, some members of the console-hacking community expressed surprise at the recent arrests of Gary "GaryOPA" Bowser, Max "MAXiMiLiEN" Louarn, and Yuanning "100+1" Chen, members of the notorious Team Xecuter hacking group (aka TX).

The 38-page indictment, announced Friday by the Department of Justice, runs down a laundry list of Team Xecuter's alleged crimes, chief among them designing and selling a variety of products "designed to be circumvention devices that had the purpose of allowing users to play pirated ROMs."

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Working in IT often means finding creative ways to make the best of a situation you've been handed. Whether it's fixing problems you didn't cause or adapting to changes that leadership failed to account for, it's all about figuring out how to keep repairing the proverbial airplane while it's flying—and 2020 hasn't really made things any easier for anyone.

To provide a bit of a respite for weary IT decision makers—and also because we're geeks who will take any excuse to talk shop!—Ars is organizing a livestreamed roundtable discussion next week starring Ars IT/infosec Editor Emeritus Sean Gallagher, where he'll sit down with our hand-picked panel of experts to discuss the ways in which businesses (and the ITDMs within them) are adapting their processes and strategies around the new reality of remote work, pandemic, and whatever the hell else is happening in the world right now.

Look who’s talking

We've pulled in three panelists to converse with Sean: