AMD has largely ceded the performance processor space to Intel in recent years. You typically get one of its chips inside a budget PC, not an all-out gaming rig. At last, though, you might have reason to get excited: AMD is launching Ryzen 7, a desktop CPU line based on its much-ballyhooed Zen architecture. The key is a dramatic improvement in the number of instructions the chip can handle at once. A Ryzen 7 CPU can do 52 percent more work every cycle than a similarly-clocked predecessor thanks to a newer 14-nanometer manufacturing process, five times the bandwidth and some overdue architectural upgrades. This is AMD’s first processor with simultaneous multithreading (Hyper-Threading in Intel speak), so each core can execute two code paths at the same time.
Depending on what you get, you might even get a relatively quiet, efficient system. AMD claims the 3GHz Ryzen 7 1700 is the lowest-power 8-core desktop chip you can buy, with a 65W thermal design target. And if you snag the new Wraith Spire cooler (included with the 1700), you’ll have a relatively silent system with a 32dB noise level.
The initial range arrives both by itself (including compatible motherboards) and in pre-assembled systems on March 2nd, and it unsurprisingly focuses on higher-end systems. AMD is still promising a lot of value for your money. though. Your selection starts off with the Ryzen 7 1700, which at $329 is supposed to beat Intel’s slightly pricier Core i7 7700K in multithreaded chip tests. The 3.4GHz 1700X reportedly outperforms the Core i7 6800K at a lower $399 price tag, and the 3.6GHz 1800X can just edge out a not-quite-top-tier Core i7 6900K while costing less than half as much, at $499.
These are lofty claims, and there’s good reason to be skeptical. AMD’s performance claims largely revolve around one benchmark (Cinebench R15), and it’s so far saying only that you can get a "comparable" 4K gaming experience. You’ll likely have to wait until Ryzen 7 ships to see how it fares in real-world tests, which could easily be less flattering. Still, the fact that AMD is even in the same ballpark as Intel is a huge deal — this promises real competition that gives you better choices, and could force Intel to lower prices.
Verizon announced this morning that it will deliver 5G broadband connectivity to select customers later this year on their “newly built 5G network.†In total, 11 markets will gain access as a part of this pre-commercial pilot.Â
Verizon’s initial goal will be to offer 5G to pilot customers in Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Bernardsville (NJ), Brockton (MA), Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami, Sacramento, Seattle, and Washington, DC. They are calling this pre-commercial 5G, as they work to fully commercialize broadband (or fixed) wireless 5G connections to both homes and businesses.
While not wireless in terms of being a 5G connection directly to your phone like you have through LTE today, this implementation of 5G should help take us steps closer to that reality.
On Friday afternoon, Reuters reported that two sources familiar with GM’s plans said the automaker would deploy thousands of Chevrolet Bolts equipped with self-driving equipment in 2018. The move would be in partnership with ride-hailing service Lyft.
GM has said it won’t sell autonomous vehicles to individuals. Instead, the automotive giant is targeting fleets for private companies and ride-hailing companies. The American automaker partnered with Lyft a year ago to work on driverless autos, and it even purchased a Lyft and Uber rival called Sidecar after that startup closed down.
GM announced yesterday that its in-house car-sharing service, called Maven, would launch 100 Bolts for rental in the city of Los Angeles. Those electric vehicles won’t be autonomous, but Lyft drivers will be able to take advantage of the Maven cars and use them as their work vehicle for a fee.
According to Reuters’ sources, the autonomous Bolts to be used by Lyft will be primarily located in San Francisco. Uber tried a similar thing this winter—the ride hailing service deployed a handful of autonomous Ubers in the Northern California city in December. The test program picked up Uber passengers after informing them that the car coming to get them would be a self-driving car supervised by an Uber engineer. The state of California requested that Uber end its test after regulators realized Uber hadn’t applied for a permit under DMV rules.
Uber defied the state’s DMV and argued that its autonomous system is indistinguishable from an Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), which does not need a special permit to be on California roads. When California ordered Uber to cease its operations, Uber took its test program to Arizona rather than apply for the DMV permitting.
GM has already applied for a permit to operate on California roads, and it has posted videos of autonomous Bolts on the streets of San Francisco, created in partnership with Cruise Automation.
GM told Reuters on Friday afternoon that it doesn’t provide specific details on future products.
U.S. President Donald Trump met with a group of government cyber security at the White House January 31, 2017 in Washington, DC, and said the government must do more to protect against cyber attacks. But he doesn’t seem to be taking that advice himself, some members of Congress fear.
Representative Ted Lieu, a congressman from Los Angeles County, California, led fourteen other House Democrats on Friday in urging the House Government Oversight Committee to investigate “troubling reports” of President Donald Trump’s apparently poor security practices and the potential danger to national security posed by them—including his continued use of an unsecured Android device to post to Twitter, discussion of sensitive information (including nuclear strategy) in the restaurant at his Mar-A-Lago resort, and leaving classified material unlocked while visitors were in the Oval Office.
Referring to the complex problem of cybersecurity, President Trump recently said in an interview, “I’m not sure you have the kind of security that you need.” We fully agree—which is why we are writing to request that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committedly hold a hearing into troubling reports that the President is jeopardizing national security by egregiously failing to implement commonsense security measures across the board, from using an insecure, consumer-grade Android smartphone to discussing nuclear strategy openly in a dining room at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida. Cybersecurity experts universally agree that an ordinary Android smartphone, which the President is reportedly using despite repeated warnings from the Secret Service, can be easily hacked.
Lieu and the other signatories of the letter expressed concern that Trump’s Android device, “most likely the Samsung Galaxy S3,” is particularly vulnerable to attack, and that someone could alter the information the President viewed on it—which could “have a huge impact on his beliefs and actions.” They also feared that someone could gain control of his Twitter account, “causing disastrous consequences for global stability,” or use it as a listening device to pick up sensitive conversations.
Also sited by the letter were photos from a recent White House visit by Intel CEO Brian Krzanich that showed a key still in the lock of a bag for classified material on Trump’s desk. The photo was called out by Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico in this Twitter post:
Additionally, Lieu and the other representatives expressed concern over the continued use of outside e-mail accounts hosted by the Republican National Committee, and compliance with federal records law. “Reports indicate that a political e-mail system used by senior White House staff was hacked in December by a Russian intelligence agency, yet again raising the prospect of the White House being monitored or influenced by unfriendly powers,” Lieu and the others wrote. Federal law requires that all e-mails for official business on an outside e-mail system be forwarded or copied into a government e-mail system within 20 days.
The letter calls for the Oversight Committee to look into whether the President is using an unsecured device, whether Trump and the White House staff have been properly briefed and trained on both information security and operational security, and if “the President and the Office of the President [can] ensure that there are no missing e-mails, communications, and technological exchanges—in other words, can they confirm they are not actively being monitored?”
DevBots 1 and 2 in close formation on the streets of Buenos Aires. The DevBots are built using Le Mans Prototype (LMP) style chassis; despite the cockpits there were no human drivers onboard.
Roborace
The DevBots before the race.
Roborace
Here’s a better look at DevBot 1, revealed last year.
Roborace
Before the DevBots went to Argentina there was testing in the UK.
Roborace
This is what the actual Robocars will look like when they take to the track.
Roborace
In just its third season, Formula E deserves credit for trying out new ideas in motorsport. Not everything has been a success, but the risk of trying to innovate in broad daylight is that people will see your mistakes as they happen. Take Roborace for example. The idea is to create a series of support races for Formula E where each team uses an identical driverless car, competing to write the best-racing AI. That driverless race car isn’t quite ready yet, but Roborace took a pair of DevBots to Argentina this weekend for a demonstration at the Buenos Aires ePrix.
It may not have been the demonstration that Roborace hoped for. One of the DevBots—the yellow one—ran out of talent and clipped a wall. But that happens to rookie human drivers, too, and at least in this case there was no chance of a rookie seriously hurting themselves. Some argue that this is bad news for Roborace and self-driving cars, but this is racing. If it were easy to get right, it wouldn’t be any fun.
Roborace revealed on Twitter that DevBot 1—the red one—reached a top speed of 115mph (185km/h) on the 1.5-mile (2.4km), 12-turn track:
Unfortunately, it’s a little hard to put that into context. We know the average speed of each Formula E lap, with Jean-Eric Verne’s 2017 qualifying lap at 80.7mph (129.9km/h) being the fastest recorded time we can find for the temporary circuit. But Formula E doesn’t publish peak lap speeds in the official results, so we can’t say if hitting 115mph is good or bad.
Roborace says that video from the Buenos Aires test should be online later this week, so until then we’re left with Argentinian journalist Diego Zorrero‘s short clip as the best look yet at how the DevBots cope on concrete-lined street circuits:
Researchers have uncovered an advanced malware-based operation that siphoned more than 600 gigabytes from about 70 targets in a broad range of industries, including critical infrastructure, news media, and scientific research.
The operation uses malware to capture audio recordings of conversations, screen shots, documents, and passwords, according to a blog post published last week by security firm CyberX. Targets are initially infected using malicious Microsoft Word documents sent in phishing e-mails. Once compromised, infected machines upload the pilfered audio and data to Dropbox, where it’s retrieved by the attackers. The researchers have dubbed the campaign Operation BugDrop because of its use of PC microphones to bug targets and send the audio and other data to Dropbox.
“Operation BugDrop is a well-organized operation that employs sophisticated malware and appears to be backed by an organization with substantial resources,” the CyberX researchers wrote. “In particular, the operation requires a massive back-end infrastructure to store, decrypt, and analyze several GB per day of unstructured data that is being captured from its targets. A large team of human analysts is also required to manually sort through captured data and process it manually and/or with Big Data-like analytics.”
Examples of targets infected in the campaign include:
A company that designs remote monitoring systems for oil and gas pipelines
An international organization that monitors human rights, counter-terrorism, and computer attacks on Ukrainian critical infrastructure
An engineering company that designs electrical substations, gas distribution pipelines, and water supply plants
A scientific research institute
Editors of Ukrainian newspapers
Most of the 70 organizations known to have been infected in Operation BugDrop are located in Ukraine, a country that in December suffered a hacker-caused power outage. It came almost exactly a year after a 2015 attack on Ukraine’s power grid that caused 225,000 residents to lost electricity. In both cases, the power facilities had been hacked weeks or months before the outages so that attackers could gather passwords for targeted servers and workstations and create custom malware for them. CyberX CTO and cofounder Nir Giller told Ars that the campaign siphoned at least 600 gigabytes of data from its targets. Other countries affected included Saudi Arabia and Australia.
There’s no evidence that the same attackers are responsible for both Operation BugDrop and the Ukrainian power outages. Still, similarities abound. Both targeted a broad range of industries in the same geographic region. And both relied on e-mails that tricked targets into enabling malicious macros included in Microsoft word documents. CyberX researchers said Operation BugDrop also bears similarities to a surveillance campaign known as Operation Groundbait that was uncovered last May. Operation BugDrop, however, is noticeably more advanced than Operation Groundbait, and CyberX researchers said they don’t know if the two are unrelated or if Operation BugDrop was created after Operation Groundbait became public.
Some examples of the way Operation BugDrop is more sophisticated include:
Dropbox for data exfiltration. Organizations typically don’t prevent end users from accessing Dropbox and often don’t monitor connections. That helped the surveillance operation to remain stealthy.
Encrypted DLLs that avoid detection by common anti-virus and sandboxing systems.
The use of legitimate free web hosting sites for command-and-control infrastructure. The hosting sites required little or no registration information, making it hard for researchers to learn much about the attackers.
To become infected, targets had to open the malicious Word document attached to the phishing e-mail and enable macros. To increase the chance targets would change this default setting, the Word document included a graphic that looked like an official Microsoft notification. It read: “Attention! The file was created in a newer version of Microsoft Office programs. You must enable macros to correctly display the contents of a document.”
CyberX researchers stopped short of identifying a specific country involved but said Operation BugDrop was almost surely the work of government with nearly limitless resources.
“Skilled hackers with substantial financial resources carried out Operation BugDrop,” they wrote. “Given the amount of data analysis that needed to be done on [a] daily basis, we believe BugDrop was heavily staffed. Given the sophistication of the code and how well the operation was executed, we have concluded that those carrying it out have previous field experience.”
Franklin Chang-DÃaz peers into the vacuum chamber during a test firing.
Ad Astra Rocket Company
A view of the plasma plume during a test firing.
Ad Astra Rocket Company
Franklin Chang-DÃaz.
Ad Astra Rocket Company
Loading the Vasimr engine into the vacuum chamber.
Ad Astra Rocket Company
Where the plasma comes out of the rocket engine.
Ad Astra Rocket Company
The Vasimr engine and the exterior of the vacuum chamber.
Ad Astra Rocket Company
Exterior view of the vacuum chamber.
Ad Astra Rocket Company
Installing cryopumps inside the vacuum chamber.
Ad Astra Rocket Company
Setup of the Vasimr engine (VX 200SS) inside the vacuum chamber during tests. The rocket is at left, and the area of the plume is shown by the purple outline.
Ad Astra Rocket Company
HOUSTON—Franklin Chang-DÃaz bounds up a handful of stairs and peers through a porthole cut into the side of a silver, tanker-truck-sized vacuum chamber. Inside, a blueish-purple light shines, unchanging and constant, like a bright flashlight. “It looks kind of boring,†Chang-DÃaz admits. “But that plume is 3.5 million degrees. If you stuck your hand in that, it would be very bad.â€
Truth be told, the plume does not look impressive at all. And yet the engine firing within the vacuum chamber is potentially revolutionary for two simple reasons: first, unlike gas-guzzling conventional rocket engines, it requires little fuel. And second, this engine might one day push spacecraft to velocities sufficient enough to open the Solar System to human exploration.
This has long been the promise of Chang-DÃaz’s plasma-based rocket engine, Vasimr. From a theoretical physics standpoint, Vasimr has always seemed a reasonable proposition: generate a plasma, excite it, and then push it out a nozzle at high speed. But what about the real-world engineering of actually building such an engine—managing the plasma and its thermal properties, then successfully firing it for a long period of time? That has proven challenging, and it has led many to doubt Vasimr’s practicality.
Sure, the naysayers say, Chang-DÃaz is a wonderful fellow. Hard worker. Brilliant guy. And at a time when the national discourse assails the value of Spanish-speaking immigrants, his story offers a powerful counter to that narrative. Speaking almost no English at the time, he immigrated to the United States from Costa Rica in 1969 to finish high school. Chang-DÃaz then earned a doctoral degree in plasma physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Later, as an astronaut, Chang-DÃaz flew seven Space Shuttle missions, tying Jerry Ross’ record for most spaceflights by anyone, ever.
All the while, from his first days at Johnson Space Center when he installed an early Internet connection to work with data from his Boston-based plasma physics lab, Chang-DÃaz nurtured dreams of linking his science background with his career as a flier. Slowly, he developed the theory of a plasma rocket and began to build prototypes. All along, the critics whispered it just wasn’t feasible.
Chang-Diaz during a spacewalk in 2002, helping to construct the International Space Station.
NASA
Only, now it just might be. As part of a program to develop the next generation of in-space propulsion systems, NASA awarded Chang-DÃaz’s company, Ad Astra, a three-year, $9 million contract in 2015. This unlocked an opportunity long awaited—a chance to prove the doubters wrong. Naturally, it won’t be easy. Ad Astra must fire its plasma rocket for 100 hours, at a power level of 100 kilowatts, next year.
This February, the company has worked about halfway through that contract, and Ars has been keeping tabs on progress in the lab. So far, the immigrant from Costa Rica seems to be holding up his end of the bargain. NASA gave the company a sterling review after the first year of the agreement. Still, there is a ways to go. During a visit this month, the Vasimr engine fired at 100kW for 10 seconds and 50kW for one minute.
The rocket
The rocket engine starts with a neutral gas as a feedstock for plasma, in this case argon. The first stage of the rocket ionizes the argon and turns it into a relatively “cold†plasma. The engine then injects the plasma into the second stage, the “booster,†where it is subjected to a physics phenomenon known as ion cyclotron resonance heating. Essentially, the booster uses a radio frequency that excites the ions, swinging them back and forth.
As the ions resonate and gain more energy, they are spun up into a stream of superheated plasma. This stream then passes through a corkscrew-shaped nozzle and is accelerated out of the back of the rocket, producing a thrust.
Such an engine design offers a couple of key benefits over most existing propulsion technology. Perhaps most notably, unlike chemical rockets, Vasimr operates on electricity. As it flies through space, therefore, it does not need massive fuel tanks or a huge reservoir of liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel. Instead, the rocket just needs some solar panels.
The Sun powers both the production of plasma and the booster exciting the plasma, and the extent to which it does either can be shifted. When a spacecraft needs more thrust, more power can be put into making plasma. This process uses more propellant, but it provides the thrust needed to move out of a gravity well, such as Earth orbit. Later, when the vehicle is moving quickly, more power can be shifted to the booster, providing a higher specific impulse and greater fuel economy.
“It’s like shifting gears in a car,†Chang-DÃaz explained. “The engine doesn’t change. But if you want to climb a hill, you put more of your engine power into torque and less into rpm, so you climb the hill, slowly, but you’re able to climb. And when you’re going on a freeway, flat and straight, you upshift. You’re not going to go to Mars in first gear. That’s the problem. It’s why we run out of gas going to Mars with a chemical engine.â€
Another benefit of Vasimr’s design is that the plasma remains confined within a magnetic field, inside the engine, throughout the burn. In practical terms, this should greatly reduce the wear and tear on the engine—which is useful if you’re designing a spacecraft to eventually fly people around the entire Solar System.
