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Is this chip going to be the one to make ARM a serious force in the datacenter? (credit: AMD)

AMD has started volume shipments of its "Seattle" Opteron A1100 ARM processors, designed for high density server systems.

First announced in 2014, the processors have four or eight 64-bit A57 ARM cores running at 1.7 or 2GHz. The chips have up to 4MB of level 2 cache (organized as 1MB per core pair), 8MB of level 3 cache, and two memory channels supporting both DDR3 and DDR4. With 32GB registered DDR4 DIMMs, the chips support a total of 128GB RAM. The chips also include a secondary A5 processor for system control and a coprocessor with accelerated encryption and compression capabilities. The processor cores are paired with a ton of I/O. There are 8 PCIe 3 lanes, 14 SATA3 ports, and two 10GbE ports.

There are three models in total. Two are 8-core parts, both with a 32W TDP, running at 2 or 1.7GHz. The third is a 4-core, 1.7GHz part, with a 25W TDP.

Steam's most recent usage data. (credit: Valve)

Valve is upgrading its network infrastructure with 100Gbps Internet ports to keep pace with big traffic growth. The news came in an announcement yesterday from Valve's network operator, Level 3 Communications. The press release exists mainly to promote Level 3's network, but it provides some details about Valve's massive bandwidth needs.

Steam's traffic levels are growing about 75 percent year-over-year, currently totaling 450 to 500 petabytes per month or four to five exabytes a year, the announcement said. Standard game downloads are 10 to 40 gigabytes, and the Steam platform "has over 100 million users, averaging more than 10 million concurrent players and over two billion minutes played logged per day."

Steam recently set a new record with more than 12.3 million concurrent users.

(credit: thierry ehrmann)

Swedish prosecutors said (Google Translate) Wednesday that they have sent a formal request to question Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. "It is not possible to judge when a reply is expected," the Swedish Prosecution Authority wrote.

The two countries signed an agreement last month in Quito to clarify the conditions of the questioning. The questioning has been delayed for nearly a year after Ecuador required such an agreement once Swedish authorities finally agreed to question the WikiLeaks founder at the embassy.

Assange remains wanted in Sweden for questioning relating to alleged sex offenses dating back to 2010. In Assange’s September 2013 affidavit, he stated that the women he slept with specifically said they were not accusing him of rape and that police "made up the charges." The statute of limitations on other alleged sex crimes expired in August 2015, but the rape accusation can stand until 2020. He has yet to be formally charged with a crime in Sweden.

You too could make up to $300 a year by coughing up this much data via an installed app on your phone—which Symphony Advanced Media used on Wednesday to help NBCUniversal estimate how much Netflix content Americans watch. (credit: Symphony Advanced Media)

The Television Critics Association's latest press tour in Pasadena, California included a long talk with an NBCUniversal executive about the changing nature of online video streaming. According to a Variety report, the executive unveiled a boatload of data that it sourced from a media tracking firm, much of which estimated how many people were watching the most popular series on platforms like Netflix and Amazon Video.

Alan Wurtzel, NBCU's president of research and media development, attributed its ratings estimates (the likes of which Netflix has never announced) to Symphony Advanced Media, whose free "Media Insiders" app tracked the viewing habits of "about 15,000" participating users between September and December 2015. The app does so, according to Symphony, by turning your smartphone into an unabashed tracking beacon—meaning that it turns your microphone on, keeps tabs on your location via GPS, and studies your browsing, app, SMS, and phone call history—in exchange for paid rewards.

In NBCU's case, the most interesting data was anything that tracked what programming viewers watched. The tracking app's combination of microphone and app surveillance allowed Symphony to hear when certain shows were broadcast around the house using platforms other than a standard TV signal, such as a smart TV, tablet, or game console—which presumably gathers more data than a standard Nielsen tracking box. Both Symphony and Nielsen base their national-viewing estimates on smaller sample sizes.

(credit: Guilherme Tavares)

A critical bug that can leak secret cryptographic keys has just just been fixed in OpenSSH, one of the more widely used implementations of the secure shell (SSH) protocol.

The vulnerability resides only in the version end users use to connect to servers and not in versions used by servers. A maliciously configured server could exploit it to obtain the contents of the connecting computer's memory, including the private encryption key used for SSH connections. The bug is the result of code that enables an experimental roaming feature in OpenSSH versions 5.4 to 7.1

"The matching server code has never been shipped, but the client code was enabled by default and could be tricked by a malicious server into leaking client memory to the server, including private client user keys," OpenSSH officials wrote in an advisory published Thursday. "The authentication of the server host key prevents exploitation by a man-in-the-middle, so this information leak is restricted to connections to malicious or compromised servers."

(credit: Trisha Fawver)

Children’s heart doctors in Florida are reeling from a recent decision by the state to drop surgical standards for pediatric open heart surgery, CNN reports. To add insult to injury, doctors and medical experts suspect that the decision was purely political.

The decision follows a 2014 medical review and a June 2015 report by CNN, which found that one particular medical facility, St. Mary’s Medical Center and Palm Beach Children’s Hospital, had an abysmal track record for pediatric open-heart surgery—a death rate more than three times the national average. And the two reports found that the facility was failing to meet the now-repealed standards, which include proficiency in performing the surgeries themselves.

The St. Mary’s facility is run by Tenet Healthcare, which coincidentally donated $200,000 to the state’s republicans between 2013 and 2014, including $100,000 to Republican Governor Rick Scott’s political action committee. Those donations were the highest of any Tenet gave to political groups in other states.

(credit: CableLabs)

Next-generation cable modems that can deliver multi-gigabit speeds have been certified by CableLabs, the cable industry's research and development lab.

The new modems use version 3.1 of DOCSIS (the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification), cable's answer to fiber Internet speeds. The first DOCSIS 3.1 certifications were earned by Askey, Castlenet, Netgear, Technicolor, and Ubee Interactive, according to the announcement by CableLabs. The group's testing confirms that the modems comply with the new DOCSIS spec.

DOCSIS 3.1 reduces network latency and will enable "high-speed applications including Virtual and Augmented Reality, advanced video technologies such as Ultra High Definition 4K television, tele-existence and medical imaging, and gaming," CableLabs said.