Month: September 2024

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Intel has formally announced its first batch of next-generation Core Ultra processors, codenamed "Lunar Lake." The CPUs will be available in PCs beginning on September 24.

Formally dubbed "Intel Core Ultra (Series 2)," these CPUs follow up the Meteor Lake Core Ultra CPUs that Intel has been shipping all year. They promise modest CPU performance increases alongside big power efficiency and battery life improvements, much faster graphics performance, and a new neural processing engine (NPU) that will meet Microsoft's requirements for Copilot+ PCs that use local rather than cloud processing for generative AI and machine-learning features.

Intel Core Ultra 200V

The high-level enhancements coming to the Lunar Lake Core Ultra chips. (credit: Intel)

The most significant numbers in today's update are actually about battery life: Intel compared a Lunar Lake system and a Snapdragon X Elite system from the "same OEM" using the "same chassis" and the same-sized 55 WHr battery. In the Procyon Office Productivity test, the Intel system lasted longer, though the Qualcomm system lasted longer on a Microsoft Teams call.

Enlarge / A lot of gold deposits are found embedded in quartz crystals. (credit: Pierre Longnus)

One of the reasons gold is so valuable is because it is highly unreactive—if you make something out of gold, it keeps its lustrous radiance. Even when you can react it with another material, it's also barely soluble, a combination that makes it difficult to purify away from other materials. Which is part of why a large majority of the gold we've obtained comes from deposits where it is present in large chunks, some of them reaching hundreds of kilograms.

Those of you paying careful attention to the previous paragraph may have noticed a problem here: If gold is so difficult to get into its pure form, how do natural processes create enormous chunks of it? On Monday, a group of Australian researchers published a hypothesis, and a bit of evidence supporting it. They propose that an earthquake-triggered piezoelectric effect essentially electroplates gold onto quartz crystals.

The hypothesis

Approximately 75 percent of the gold humanity has obtained has come from what are called orogenic gold deposits. Orogeny is a term for the tectonic processes that build mountains, and orogenic gold deposits form in the seams where two bodies of rock are moving past each other. These areas are often filled with hot hydrothermal fluids, and the heat can increase the solubility of gold from "barely there" to "extremely low," meaning generally less than a single milligram in a liter of water.

Enlarge / This team-based FPS combat scene was apparently too familiar to attract all that many players to Concord. (credit: Sony)

Sony's team-based online shooter Concord has been removed from sale and will be taken offline on Friday, September 6, just two weeks after its August 23 launch. Firewalk Studios Game Director Ryan Ellis said in an announcement Tuesday that publisher Sony will offer refunds to all players who purchased the game on PC or PlayStation 5.

Sony may not need to pay out that many refunds. GameDiscoverCo analyst Simon Carless told IGN last week that he estimated an underwhelming 25,000 total sales for the game across PS5 and PC. Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, meanwhile, said that just 0.2 percent of all active PS5 players were playing the game last Monday, making it the 147th most-played title for that day.

The Steam version of the game peaked at well under 700 players just after launch, just over 1,300 players who owned Concord, a relatively small showing compared to popular recent releases like Star Wars Outlaws (4,300 PSNProfiles owners) and Black Myth: Wukong (16,000 PSNProfiles-tracked owners).

Enlarge (credit: EyeEm Mobile GmbH | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

A controversial facial recognition tech company behind a vast face image search engine widely used by cops has been fined approximately $33 million in the Netherlands for serious data privacy violations.

According to the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA), Clearview AI "built an illegal database with billions of photos of faces" by crawling the web and without gaining consent, including from people in the Netherlands.

Clearview AI's technology—which has been banned in some US cities over concerns that it gives law enforcement unlimited power to track people in their daily lives—works by pulling in more than 40 billion face images from the web without setting "any limitations in terms of geographical location or nationality," the Dutch DPA found. Perhaps most concerning, the Dutch DPA said, Clearview AI also provides "facial recognition software for identifying children," therefore indiscriminately processing personal data of minors.

Enlarge (credit: Yubico)

The YubiKey 5, the most widely used hardware token for two-factor authentication based on the FIDO standard, contains a cryptographic flaw that makes the finger-size device vulnerable to cloning when an attacker gains brief physical access to it, researchers said Tuesday.

The cryptographic flaw, known as a side channel, resides in a small microcontroller that’s used in a vast number of other authentication devices, including smartcards used in banking, electronic passports, and the accessing of secure areas. While the researchers have confirmed all YubiKey 5 series models can be cloned, they haven’t tested other devices using the microcontroller, which is SLE78 made by Infineon and successor microcontrollers known as the Infineon Optiga Trust M and the Infineon Optiga TPM. The researchers suspect that any device using any of these three microcontrollers and the Infineon cryptographic library contain the same vulnerability.

Patching not possible

YubiKey-maker Yubico issued an advisory in coordination with a detailed disclosure report from NinjaLab, the security firm that reverse-engineered the YubiKey 5 series and devised the cloning attack. All YubiKeys running firmware prior to version 5.7—which was released in May and replaces the Infineon cryptolibrary with a custom one—are vulnerable. Updating key firmware on the YubiKey isn’t possible. That leaves all affected YubiKeys permanently vulnerable.

Enlarge / The lifted, rugged, off-road version-of-normal trend has come to the Ioniq 5 with the new XLT. (credit: Hyundai)

The Hyundai Ioniq 5 is one of our favorite electric vehicles. It offers excellent efficiency and really rapid charging, all wrapped up in a shape that exudes late-'80s hatchback vibes. Today, Hyundai revealed details about the Ioniq 5's update for model year 2025 (MY25), and it's noteworthy for a number of reasons.

For starters, when MY25 Ioniq 5s start appearing on dealer lots in Q4, they'll arrive with J3400 ports concealed underneath their charger port flaps. Once known as the North American Charging Standard (NACS), this is the Tesla-style charger plug, which means MY25 Ioniq 5s should be able to fast charge at more than 17,000 Tesla Superchargers throughout the US and Canada.

The flip side is that a MY25 Ioniq 5 will require an adapter if the driver wants to charge it with a CCS1 charger, although Hyundai will include that dongle with a new car. The automaker says that as it refreshes other EVs in Q4, they will also only come with J3400 ports. For existing Hyundai EVs with CCS1 ports, J3400 adapters are supposed to be available in Q1 2025.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

Elon Musk's Starlink broadband service said it would defy an order to block Musk's X platform in Brazil after the country's top court required Internet providers to block the site. SpaceX's Starlink division, which says it has 250,000 customers in Brazil, reportedly told the country's telecom agency on Sunday that it will not comply with orders to block X.

Starlink said last week that a Brazilian court order "freezes Starlink's finances and prevents Starlink from conducting financial transactions in that country... based on an unfounded determination that Starlink should be responsible for the fines levied—unconstitutionally—against X. It was issued in secret and without affording Starlink any of the due process of law guaranteed by the Constitution of Brazil."

Starlink said it would "address the matter legally," and its refusal to block X appears to be part of an attempt to get its assets unfrozen. "On Sunday, Starlink informed Brazil's telecom agency, Anatel, that it would not block X until Brazilian officials released Starlink's frozen assets, Anatel's president, Carlos Baigorri, said in an interview broadcast by the Brazilian outlet Globo News," according to The New York Times.