Author: Peter Bright

We liked the Broadwell version of HP's Spectre x360 last year. As it makes its Skylake refresh, HP is also expanding the range.

HP

15 inch HP Spectre x360.

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The 13-inch laptop is picking up a 15.6-inch big brother. It's the same style of machine—a thin-and-light laptop with a 360° hinge, only larger. It includes a 3840×2160 screen option, and to drive all those pixels, Intel Iris graphics are also available. It also includes a hefty 64.5Wh battery while only weighing in at around 4lb. As with other Skylake systems, the 15.6-inch Spectre can have up to 16GB of RAM. Prices will start at $1,149 when it goes on sale in February.

Just as Lenovo announced on Sunday, HP has also revealed an OLED screen variant of the 13-inch Spectre x360. The 2560×1440 system will be available in spring, with no price information yet available. In addition to the typical OLED benefits of deeper blacks and wider color gamut, the OLED screen will also make the laptop slightly thinner and 50 grams lighter.

Lenovo announced in November last year that it was teaming up with Razer to build a range of gaming systems, and its consumer line-up contains the first fruits of that collaboration, with a bunch of Razer-branded variants of its Y-series hardware.

Lenovo

Lenovo ideacentre Y900 RE.

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The Lenovo ideacentre Y900RE ("Razer Edition") is a Skylake desktop system shipping with up to 32GB RAM and dual Nvidia GTX 970 graphics. The Razer tie-in shows in its accessories—it comes with a Razer BlackWidow keyboard and Mamba mouse—and a case with a painted interior and a window in the side. The Razer peripherals support Razer's "Chroma" feature: they can be lit up with a rainbow of different colors. The system will start at $2,299 and go on sale in June.

Lenovo

Lenovo Y27g RE.

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A gaming system needs a gaming monitor, and Lenovo has one of those too: the Y27g RE. This is a curved 27 inch 1920×1080 144Hz screen with Nvidia G-sync support and a 4-port USB 3 hub. The Razer-ness comes from Chroma lighting on the back. It'll be $599 in June. If you don't want the Chroma lighting, the same screen without the RE branding will be $549, also in June.

Windows 10 is now in use on more than 200 million active device after about five months on the market, according to figures released by Microsoft today. This makes it the fastest growing version of Windows: 140 percent faster than Windows 7 at the same stage in its life, and a remarkable 400 percent faster than Windows 8.

Some 22 million of these devices are part of enterprise and education roll-outs, with Microsoft claiming that more than 76 percent of its enterprise customers are piloting the operating system.

Windows 10 of course has an advantage over Windows 7 and 8 when it comes to adoption: it's a free upgrade for existing Windows 7 and 8 users. Traditionally the only way most consumers would get a new Windows version is through buying a new PC with the new version preinstalled. With that no longer the case, wider adoption is to be expected. This is likely to accelerate as the operating system is pushed out as a recommended update later this year.

We've long cried out for laptops with lots of RAM, so that they can handle workloads as varied as hosting development virtual machines or running Chrome, and with Skylakes it looks as if they are arriving in abundance. The updated thin and light X1 range bump RAM up to 16GB, and in the rest of the business laptop range, there are now plenty of options that go even further than that.

Lenovo

Lenovo ThinkPad T460s

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When we reviewed it earlier this year, we felt the T450s was a solid corporate workhorse. Although a little larger than the X1s, it took more memory (up to 12GB), and sported much easier end-user servicing. Its Skylake successor will be available from February with prices starting at $1,059 and it provides more of the same: an Ultrabook built for business. It's still a fairly thin 3lb laptop, but now takes up to 24GB RAM, with optional discrete Nvidia GeForce 930M graphics, up to 512GB PCIe SSD, and a 2560×1440 screen.

At 0.74 inches, it's slightly thicker than the X1 range, but this extra width provides for a full size Ethernet port, full size HDMI, mini-DisplayPort and an optional smartcard reader. Lenovo says that servicing has also been improved: there are 5 captive screws that provide quick access to storage, memory, WWAN and Wi-Fi, and the batteries. Though this means that the machine has shed the VGA port that was included on the T450s, the options and accessibility mean that it packages a lot of power into a small system, without giving up serviceability.

LAS VEGAS—Last year's Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon was a return to form for Lenovo's X1 Ultrabook, with a keyboard to die for, strong performance, and a 14-inch screen in a 13-inch package. This year, Lenovo is taking the X1 branding—light, powerful, high-end machines—and diversifying it. No longer just a laptop, the company is launching a Yoga-brand 360-degree hinge X1 laptop, an X1 tablet, an X1 all-in-one PC, and even an X1 monitor.

Lenovo

2016 ThinkPad X1 Carbon

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Let's start with the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop. It's been bumped to support Intel's latest Skylake processors—and with it, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of NVMe storage—and made a little slimmer with it, down to 0.65 inches. It's shed a little weight, down to 2.6lbs, while still managing to contain a slightly larger 52 Wh battery. It'll be available in February with prices starting at $1,299.

Lenovo's big novelty with the X1 Carbon is an optional docking station using WiGig. This short range, high speed (4.6 gigabits per second) technology uses 60GHz radios to transmit video, USB 3, and Ethernet data. The X1 WiGig docking station ($250, available this month) sports DisplayPort, HDMI, USB 3, USB 2, audio, and gigabit Ethernet ports, and makes docking as simple as putting the laptop near the docking station.

PC gamers were dismayed on Christmas Day to find that Valve's popular (and arguably essential) Steam store had gone haywire before becoming entirely inaccessible. Logged-in users were seeing account data that didn't belong to them, with partial credit card numbers, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, billing addresses, and purchase histories all visible. This happened for a period of about an hour and a half, from 14:50 to 16:20 EST on Christmas Day, after which the service went down entirely.

Valve has published an explanation of what happened and why. Steam routinely suffers from denial of service attacks. On Christmas Day, this traffic exploded. The Steam Store was already busy, due to the Winter Sale, and the denial of service attacks pushed the load to 20 times the normal load.

To handle the load of the attack, Valve's Web caching partner rolled out an updated configuration that resulted in personal, authenticated pages being cached and subsequently served to users they didn't belong to. After about 90 minutes the error was spotted. The Steam Store was taken offline entirely, the cache configuration was repaired, and the erroneously cached data was purged. Normal operation resumed thereafter.

(credit: Linus Bohman)

As happens from time to time, somebody has spotted a feature in Windows 10 that isn't actually new and has largely denounced it as a great privacy violation.

The Intercept has written that if you have bought a Windows PC recently then Microsoft probably has your encryption key. This is a reference to Windows' device encryption feature. We wrote about this feature when it was new, back when Microsoft introduced it in Windows 8.1 in 2013 (and before that, in Windows RT.

Device encryption is a simplified version of the BitLocker drive encryption that made its debut in Windows Vista in 2006. The full BitLocker requires a Pro or Enterprise edition of Windows, and includes options such as integration with Active Directory, support for encrypting removable media, and the use of passwords or USB keys to unlock the encrypted disk. Device encryption is more restricted. It only supports internal system drives, and it requires the use of Secure Boot, Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM), and Connected Standby-capable hardware. This is because Device encryption is designed to be automatic; it uses the TPM to store the password used to decrypt the disk, and it uses Secure Boot to ensure that nothing has tampered with the system to compromise that password.

Credit card users could have their PINs stolen, and merchants could have their bank accounts pillaged, in a set of attacks demonstrated by researchers Karsten Nohl and Fabian Bräunlein at the Chaos Computing Club security conference.

Much research has been done into the chips found on credit cards and the readers and number pads used with these cards, but Nohl decided to take a different approach, looking instead at the communications protocols used by those card readers. There are two that are significant; the first, ZVT, is used between point of sale systems and the card readers. The second, Poseidon, is used between the card reader and the merchant's bank. Nohl found that both had important flaws.

The ZVT protocol was originally designed for serial port connections, but nowadays is used over Ethernet, both wired and wireless. The protocol has no authentication, meaning that if an attacker can put themselves on the same network, they can act as a man-in-the-middle between the point-of-sale system and the card reader. The attacker can then read the magnetic stripe data from the card, and can also request a PIN.

The HoloLens headset. (credit: Microsoft)

Windows 10 was Microsoft's most important product launch of the year. It shored up the desktop platform, it introduced a new approach to delivering and updating the operating system, and it created the opportunity for Windows to be everywhere.

But as important as it was, Windows 10 was not Microsoft's most interesting 2015 product. The most interesting products were the HoloLens augmented reality headset and the Surface Book hybrid laptop. OK, HoloLens isn't out quite yet—$3,000 developer units will be available in the first quarter of 2016—but it was first demonstrated back in January, upstaging Windows 10's consumer preview, which was shown off at the same time.

What was striking about both of these is that their reception was less about what they were and more about what they represented. HoloLens is obviously the grander ambition—a new kind of human-computer interaction depending on the melding of virtual 3D objects with the real world, driven by voice and gestures as well as the more conventional mouse and keyboard.

One way or another, Microsoft has been promising Windows 10 Mobile for years.

References to "Windows Everywhere," the notion that some version of Windows could run on everything from PCs to servers to cars, can be found as far back as 1998, when Redmond was hawking Windows 98, Windows NT 4, and Windows CE. Per Paul Thurrott, the plan was conceived as "NT Everywhere"; the broader ambition of "Windows Everywhere" soon made space for the Windows 9x and Windows CE variants.

How the idea was expressed varied—in 2009, for example, Microsoft called it "Three Screens and a Cloud"—but the notion of having a Windows platform for any device has endured.