Author Archives: pappp

Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts

President Trump fired Christopher Krebs, the well-regarded director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), via tweet on Tuesday, citing Krebs' public assurances that the 2020 election was historically secure and free of fraud or serious error.

Krebs was the rare Trump administration official almost universally regarded as competent, apolitical, and effective in a crucial area that needed such leadership. And he apparently found a way to make sure his agency continued without too much political inference in the event he was fired. "Late Tuesday," The Washington Post said, "acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf called Krebs' deputy, Matthew Travis, to inform him that the White House had overruled CISA's succession plan that named him acting director, essentially forcing him to resign, Travis said." A DHS spokesman said the White House did not directly ask Travis to step down.

With Travis out, CISA leadership goes to Brandon Wales, "a career employee whom Trump cannot fire," Politico says. "Mr. Krebs specifically created Mr. Wales' position as executive director to make it more difficult for the White House to install partisan replacements atop the agency," The Wall Street Journal reports, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Before joining the Trump administration in 2017, Krebs worked in the George W. Bush DHS then served as a lobbyist for Microsoft. In 2018 he was promoted to DHS undersecretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate, which became CISA with legislation signed in November 2018. Krebs became the de facto "cyber czar" when the White House eliminated the cybersecurity coordinator position at the National Security Council. During his tenure, he worked not just on shoring up America's creaky election security but also on cybersecurity and ransomware threats at hospitals, utilities, and other critical infrastructure.

Krebs won widespread praise for increasing trust and cooperation with disparate federal agencies, hackers, and state and local election officials. He survived several shakeups at Trump's DHS, but his "Rumor Control" initiative to swat down election misinformation was evidently a bridge too far for Trump, whose misinformation Krebs repeatedly, if indirectly, debunked. "Honored to serve," Krebs tweeted after his firing. "We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow."

Source: Hacker News

Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge / Apple's new octa-core ARM big/little CPU is putting its high performance x86 competition on notice. (credit: Apple)

Original story 9:00am EST: There's a lot of understandable excitement around Apple's ARM-powered devices right now. And we've got traditional reviews of those devices and their ecosystems, for Apple fans and the Apple-curious. This is not one of those reviews—though reviews are coming imminently for some of the new Macs. Instead, we're going to take a closer look at the raw performance of the new M1 in comparison to more traditional x86 systems.

The M1's CPU is a 5nm octa-core big/little design, with four performance cores and four efficiency cores. The idea is that user-focused foreground tasks, which demand low latency, will be run on the performance cores—but less latency-sensitive background tasks can run slower and lower on the four less-powerful but less power-consumptive efficiency cores.

In addition to the eight CPU cores, the version of the M1 in the Mac mini has eight GPU cores, with a total of 128 Execution Units. Although it's extremely difficult to get accurate Apples-to-non-Apples benchmarks on this new architecture, I feel confident in saying that this truly is a world-leading design—you can get faster raw CPU performance, but only on power-is-no-object desktop or server CPUs. Similarly, you can beat the M1's GPU with high-end Nvidia or Radeon desktop cards—but only at a massive disparity in power, physical size, and heat.

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Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge / Spoiler: When it comes to performance over the years, Intel is the slow and steady tortoise to AMD's speedy-but-intermittent hare. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

The comment wars between Intel and AMD fans have been hot for the last few release cycles, with a lot of digital ink spilled about which company has—or has not—improved significantly over the years. There's been no shortage of opinions about the current raw performance of each company's fastest processors, either. We thought it would be interesting to dive into archived performance benchmarks of the fastest desktop/enthusiast CPUs for each company to get a good overview of how each has really done over the years—and perhaps to even see if there are patterns to be gleaned or to make some bets about the future.

Before we dive into charts, let's start out with some tables—that way, you can see which CPUs we're using as milestones for each year. While we're at it, there are a couple of irregularities in the data; we'll discuss those also and talk about the things that a simple chart won't show you.

Twenty years of enthusiast computing

Year	Intel Model	AMD Model	Notes
2001	Pentium 4 2.0GHz (1c/1t)	Athlon XP 1900+ (1c/1t)
2002	Pentium 4 2.8GHz (1c/2t)	Athlon XP 2800+ (1c/1t)	Intel introduces hyperthreading
2003	Pentium 4 Extreme 3.2GHz (1c/2t)	Athlon XP 3200+ (1c/1t)
2004	Pentium 4 3.4GHz (1c/2t)	Athlon 64 FX-55 (1c/1t)
2005	Pentium 4 3.8GHz (1c/2t)	Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2c/2t)
2006	Pentium Extreme 965 (2c/4t)	Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2c/2t)	Intel takes the undisputed performance lead here—and keeps it for a decade straight.
2007	Core 2 Extreme QX6800 (4c/4t)	Phenom X4 9600 (4c/4t)	Intel and AMD both launch the first true quad-core desktop CPUs
2008	Core 2 Extreme X9650 (4c/4t)	Phenom X4 9950 (4c/4t)
2009	Core i7-960 (4c/8t)	Phenom II X4 965 (4c/4t)
2010	Core i7-980X (6c/12t)	Phenom II X6 1100T (6c/6t)	Intel and AMD both introduce hex-core desktop CPUs
2011	Core i7-990X (6c/12t)	FX-8150 (8c/8t)
2012	Core i7-3770K (4c/8t)	FX-8350 (8c/8t)	Intel abandons hex-core desktop CPUs—but few miss them, due to large single-threaded gains
2013	Core i7-4770K (4c/8t)	FX-9590 (8c/8t)	AMD's underwhelming FX-9590 launches—and it's Team Red's last enthusiast CPU for four long years
2014	Core i7-4790K (4c/8t)	FX-9590 (8c/8t)	Intel's 5th generation Core dies stillborn. AMD releases low-power APUs, but no successor to FX-9590
2015	Core i7-6700K (4c/8t)	FX-9590 (8c/8t)
2016	Core i7-7700K (4c/8t)	FX-9590 (8c/8t)	Strictly speaking, 2016 was an Intel whiff—Kaby Lake didn't actually launch until January 2017
2017	Core i7-8700K (6c/12t)	Ryzen 7 1800X (8c/16t)	Launch of AMD's Zen architecture, return of the Intel hex-core desktop CPU
2018	Core i9-9900K (8c/16t)	Ryzen 7 2700X (8c/16t)
2019	Core i9-9900KS (8c/16t)	Ryzen 9 3950X (16c/32t)	AMD's Zen 2 architecture launches, Intel whiffs hard in the performance segment
2020	Core i9-10900K (10c/20t)	Ryzen 9 5950X (16c/32t)	AMD's Zen 3 finally crushes Intel's long-held single-threaded performance record

Although both Intel and AMD obviously launch a wide array of processors for different price points and target markets each year, we're limiting ourselves to the fastest desktop or "enthusiast" processor from each year. That means no server processors and no High-End Desktop (HEDT) processors either—so we won't be looking at either Threadrippers or the late model XE series Intel parts.

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Source: Hack a Day

[DIY3DTech] likes using his Ortur laser cutter for balsa wood and decided to add an air assist system to it. Some people told him it wasn’t worth the trouble, so in the video below, he compares the results of cutting both with and without the air assist.

The air assist helped clear the cut parts and reduced charring in the wood. The air system clears residue and fumes that can reduce the effectiveness of the laser. It can also reduce the risk of the workpiece catching on fire.

In addition, the video shows the results of cutting wood using different speeds and number of passes. So the holes marked 5/10, for example, are cut at 5mm/second and ten passes.

Although air assist might help if you are engraving, the real benefit, according to the video, is when you are trying to do cuts. However, removing the fumes is probably a good idea even when engraving.

The video doesn’t go into much detail about the air system, but there are links in the video description to pages that have more information about how to add something like this to your laser cutting setup. There’s also a more recent video specifically about how the air assist system works.

If you need more on laser cutter basics, we read a great post about it last year. Like 3D printers, it used to be fashionable to build your own cutter, but now it is cheap enough to buy one if you’d rather not mess with it.

Source: Hacker News

Source: NYT > World

Despite hundreds of thousands protesting against him for months, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko has been able to cling to power thanks to an all-pervasive security system.

Source: Kentucky.com -- Education

A University of Kentucky employee spent $256,000 on the unauthorized purchase of more than 80 iPhones, other high-tech equipment, travel expenses and other personal items over the course of three … Click to Continue »

Source: TorrentFreak

With more ways to stream online video than ever before, protecting video continues to be a key issue for copyright holders.

This is often achieved through Digital Rights Management, which is often referred to by the initials DRM. In a nutshell, DRM is an anti-piracy tool that dictates when and where digital content can be accessed.

Google is an important player in this area. The company owns the Widevine DRM technology which is used by many of the largest streaming services including Amazon, Netflix and Disney+. As such, keeping it secure is vital.

Widevine DRM

Widevine DRM comes in different levels. The L1 variant is the most secure, followed by L2 and L3. While the latter still protects content from being easily downloaded, it’s certainly not impossible to bypass, as pirates have repeatedly shown.

Despite its vulnerabilities, Google doesn’t want to make it too easy for the public at large. This became apparent a few hours ago when the company asked the developer platform GitHub to remove dozens of “Widevine L3 Decryptor” repositories.

The code, originally published by security researcher Tomer Hadad, is a proof-of-concept code Chrome extension that shows how easy it is to bypass the low-security DRM. Google was aware of this vulnerability and previously informed Krebs Security that it would address the issue.

Google Targets Widevine L3 Decryptor Code

One option would be to patch the security flaw but, for now, Google appears to be focusing on the takedown route. In a DMCA notice sent to GitHub, the company requests the immediate takedown of dozens of “Widevine L3 Decryptor” copies.

“The following git repository [sic] contain circumvention technology that enables users to illegally access video and audio works protected by copyright,” Google writes.

“This Chrome extension demonstrates how it’s possible to bypass Widevine DRM by hijacking calls to the browser’s Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) and decrypting all Widevine content keys transferred – effectively turning it into a clearkey DRM,” Google adds.

Google sees the code, which was explicitly published for educational purposes only, as a circumvention tool. As such, it allegedly violates section 1201 of the DMCA, an allegation that was also made against the youtube-dl code last month.

The takedown notice includes a long list of repositories that were all made unavailable by GitHub. This doesn’t cover the original code from Tomer Hadad, who already removed his version in late October, citing “legal reasons.”

Google views this vulnerability as a serious matter and the company says that it has also filed a Sensitive Data takedown request to prevent the Widevine’s ‘secret’ private key from being publicly shared.

Sensitive Data Request

“In addition to this request, we have filed a separate Sensitive Data takedown request of this file: /widevine-l3-decryptor as it contains the secret Widevine RSA private key, which was extracted from the Widevine CDM and can be used in other circumvention technologies.”

That last mention is interesting as private keys, which are simply a string of characters, are not seen as copyrighted or private content by everyone.

“If you distribute your key with the software, then whatever form it is in, I would not consider it “private” at all,” a commenter on Hacker News points out.

Googling the AACS Key

This ‘key controversy’ is reminiscent of an issue that was widely debated thirteen years ago. At the time, a hacker leaked the AACS cryptographic key “09 F9” online which prompted the MPAA and AACS LA to issue DMCA takedown requests to sites where it surfaced.

This escalated into a censorship debate when sites started removing articles that referenced the leak, triggering a massive backlash.

At the time, the controversial AACS key was still readily available through Google’s search engine. In that regard very little has changed. Despite Google’s sensitive data takedown request, the Widevine RSA key is easy to find through its own search engine.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.