Month: May 2022

Enlarge / Systems engineer Matt Ezell, the system lead for the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

The US has retaken the top spot in the world supercomputer rankings with the exascale Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee.

The Frontier system's score of 1.102 exaflop/s makes it "the most powerful supercomputer to ever exist" and "the first true exascale machine," the Top 500 project said Monday in the announcement of its latest rankings. Exaflop/s (or exaflops) is short for 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second.

Frontier was more than twice as fast as a Japanese system that placed second in the rankings, which are based on the LINPACK benchmark that measures the "performance of a dedicated system for solving a dense system of linear equations."

Enlarge / These images, taken with the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope, show the surface of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse during its unprecedented dimming. The image on the far left, taken in January 2019, shows the star at its normal brightness. The remaining images, from December 2019, January 2020, and March 2020 were all taken when the star's brightness had noticeably dropped. (credit: ESO/M. Montargès et al.)

Over the last couple of years, Ars has dedicated a fair number of electrons to our local red supergiant, Betelgeuse. The massive star went through an odd uneven dimming, leaving the astronomy community scrambling for explanations and observation time. While a degree of consensus slowly emerged, the lack of some key details left a lot unexplained.

It turns out that some of the answers were accidentally captured by an Earth-facing Japanese weather satellite that had Betelgeuse in-frame across the entire process of its dimming.

In the archives

In the new paper describing the results, Daisuke Taniguchi, Kazuya Yamazaki, and Shinsuke Uno say the astronomy community has settled on two options for explaining why a giant star like Betelgeuse might get dimmer. One is that internal processes could lower the star's effective temperature and thus its light output. The other option is that dust ends up between the star and Earth, absorbing some of the star's light. But both of those explanations are short on details; we don't really know what's happening inside the star or how enough dust could end up between Betelgeuse and Earth.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A critical code execution zero-day in all supported versions of Windows has been under active exploit for seven weeks, giving attackers a reliable means for installing malware without triggering Windows Defender and a roster of other endpoint protection products.

The Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool vulnerability was reported to Microsoft on April 12 as a zero-day that was already being exploited in the wild, researchers from Shadow Chaser Group said on Twitter. A response dated April 21, however, informed the researchers that the Microsoft Security Response Center team didn't consider the reported behavior a security vulnerability because, supposedly, the MSDT diagnostic tool required a password before it would execute payloads.

Uh, nevermind

On Monday, Microsoft reversed course, identifying the behavior with the vulnerability tracker CVE-2022-30190 and warning for the first time that the reported behavior constituted a critical vulnerability after all.

Making critical infrastructure safer at Ars Frontiers. Click here for transcript. (video link)

In the run-up to Ars Frontiers, I had the opportunity to talk with Lesley Carhart, director of Incident Response at Dragos. Known on Twitter as @hacks4pancakes, Carhart is a veteran responder to cyber incidents affecting critical infrastructure and has been dealing with the challenges of securing industrial control systems and operational technology (OT) for years. So it seemed appropriate to get her take on what needs to be done to improve the security of critical infrastructure both in industry and government, particularly in the context of what’s going on in Ukraine.

Much of it is not new territory. “Something that we’ve noticed for years in the industrial cybersecurity space is that people from all different organizations, both military and terrorists around the world, have been pre-positioning to do things like sabotage and espionage via computers for years,” Carhart explained. But these sorts of things rarely get attention because they’re not flashy—and as a result, they don’t get attention from those holding the purse strings for investments that might correct them.

Enlarge / Dan O'Dowd's campaign wants the link to Ralph Nader's safety campaign to be explicit. (credit: Dan O'Dowd)

Single-issue candidates for the US Senate aren't the usual fodder for Ars' car coverage, but it seems like an exception might exist for Dan O'Dowd. O'Dowd, an engineer and CEO of a software company, is running for one of California's Senate seats on a platform to ban Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" feature.

Tesla's stratospheric valuation owes a fair amount to the company's futuristic-sounding FSD feature, which promises a truly autonomous car that could even work the streets while its owner sleeps. But the company's progress has been rocky, switching compute platforms and ditching sensors while trying to match the functionality of older Teslas built with simpler but more robust advanced driving assistance systems.

FSD is an important money-maker for Tesla, however. In January Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors that "full-self-driving will become the most important source of profitability for Tesla." And the company has repeatedly raised the price for the feature—what started as a $6,000 option in 2019 is now a $12,000 option.

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  You really can buy anything on eBay. [credit: archive.org ]

Google shocked us all when it decided to reveal the Pixel 7 live at Google I/O a few weeks ago. The phone, which isn't due out until the fall, was officially confirmed as the "Pixel 7" and "Pixel 7 Pro" with promises of next-gen Google Tensor chips, a polished aluminum camera bar, and a few official pictures of the back. We can learn a bit more about the device now, though, thanks to... an eBay listing?

Over the long weekend, some eBay seller had the bright idea to try to sell a prototype Pixel 7. The $530 listing of what is surely a stolen item has been removed from eBay, but you can still see an archive of the listing here. The seller listed the item saying it "comes with android 13 and pixel apps in development stage. Selling as is. No guarantees of any sort." Hmmm. The seller at least scored what counts as the first in-person pictures of the Pixel 7, showing the device from all angles.

The Pixel 7, complete with that new camera bar and identifying prototype line symbols in the bottom third. (credit: meetveeru)

The Pixel 7 is very close to the Pixel 6, so there's not a ton to look at, but this gives us a good look at that new camera bar. The Pixel 6 camera bar has one big sheet of glass across the entire back, while the Pixel 7's camera bar is a big block of aluminum with a smaller glass cover for the lenses. The Pixel 7's smaller camera glass should make it less susceptible to glare—it was easy for light to bounce around inside of the Pixel 6's huge glass camera cover. The new look is aesthetically a downgrade, though. The Pixel 6 camera bar was a simple, continuous black strip that contrasted against the body color, while this aluminum is trying to match the glass body color, failing, and then has a black blob inside it for the camera lenses.

Enlarge / The original Surface Laptop Go. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go was originally introduced in October of 2020 as a smaller, lighter, and more budget-friendly member of the Surface family, but it hasn't been updated since then. That may change soon, according to a leaked retail ad spotted by The Verge—it said that a spruced-up version of the Surface Laptop Go could be available for preorder as soon as June 2.

Intel's 12th-gen processors have been available for a while now, and in that context, the new Laptop Go's hardware isn't very exciting. The laptop was listed with a Core i5-1135G7, a quad-core CPU originally launched in late 2020 that we've seen in tons of other laptops in the last two years. The new Laptop Go appears to use the same 12.4-inch touchscreen, the same un-backlit keyboard and fingerprint sensor, and the same complement of ports (one USB-C, one USB-A, a headphone jack, and a Surface Connect port). The laptop will also ship with Windows 11—the current model fully supports Windows 11 but still ships with Windows 10 in S Mode out of the box.

Though it's almost as old as the original Surface Laptop Go, the i5-1135G7 would be an interesting upgrade to the current laptop's i5-1035G1. It has the same number of CPU cores, but there are big increases to the base and boost clock speeds. The Iris Xe integrated GPU would also be considerably faster, thanks to a newer GPU architecture, a higher GPU clock speed, and more than twice as many execution units (80, up from 32). A gaming laptop it ain't, but, especially at the screen's native 1536×1024 resolution, it should be fast enough to play older and less-demanding games.