Month: June 2024

Enlarge / A high-level breakdown of Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which preserve some of Meteor Lake's changes while reverting others. (credit: Intel)

Given its recent manufacturing troubles, a resurgent AMD, an incursion from Qualcomm, and Apple’s shift from customer to competitor, it’s been a rough few years for Intel’s processors. Computer buyers have more viable options than they have in many years, and in many ways the company’s Meteor Lake architecture was more interesting as a technical achievement than it was as an upgrade for previous-generation Raptor Lake processors.

But even given all of that, Intel still provides the vast majority of PC CPUs—nearly four-fifths of all computer CPUs sold are Intel’s, according to recent analyst estimates from Canalys. The company still casts a long shadow, and what it does still helps set the pace for the rest of the industry.

Enter its next-generation CPU architecture, codenamed Lunar Lake. We’ve known about Lunar Lake for a while—Intel reminded everyone it was coming when Qualcomm upstaged it during Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC reveal—but this month at Computex the company is going into more detail ahead of availability sometime in Q3 of 2024.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Cloud storage provider Snowflake said that accounts belonging to multiple customers have been hacked after threat actors obtained credentials through info-stealing malware or by purchasing them on online crime forums.

Ticketmaster parent Live Nation—which disclosed Friday that hackers gained access to data it stored through an unnamed third-party provider—told TechCrunch the provider was Snowflake. The live-event ticket broker said it identified the hack on May 20, and a week later, a “criminal threat actor offered what it alleged to be Company user data for sale via the dark web.”

Ticketmaster is one of six Snowflake customers to be hit in the hacking campaign, said independent security researcher Kevin Beaumont, citing conversations with people inside the affected companies. Australia’s Signal Directorate said Saturday it knew of “successful compromises of several companies utilizing Snowflake environments.” Researchers with security firm Hudson Rock said in a now-deleted post that Santander, Spain’s biggest bank, was also hacked in the campaign. The researchers cited online text conversations with the threat actor. Last month, Santander disclosed a data breach affecting customers in Chile, Spain, and Uruguay.

Enlarge / Children checking their weight. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

Kids and teens with a high body mass index (BMI) were 29 times more likely to have a high fat mass index compared with youths who had lower BMIs, making the controversial metric a "very good screening tool," according to a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

The study adds to the long-standing debate about the use of BMI, which has always been an imperfect proxy for assessing a person's body fat, aka adiposity. Last year, the American Medical Association adopted a strongly worded policy calling out the calculation's "significant limitations" and "historical harms," including "racist exclusion," because its use is largely based on white populations. But other experts have pushed back, arguing that the maligned metric is still a quick, low-cost, tool for assessing the health and risks of patients.

BMI, calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared, has long been used as a shorthand way of assessing a person's adiposity. In children, high BMIs are associated with cardiovascular disease risks later in life. But, the metric can also be misleading. Because it is based solely on weight and height, it does not distinguish between fat and lean mass. As such, athletes with relatively large amounts of lean muscle mass can easily have BMIs that put them in the categories of having overweight or obesity, while those with little lean mass but high fat mass can still have BMIs in a normal range. BMI also does not tell clinicians anything about body fat distribution, which can be important for health risks. And research has found that the relationship between BMI and adiposity can differ by race and ethnicity. For instance, at the same BMI, Black children tend to have less adiposity than white children.