Source: Hacker News
Source: Ars Technica
Enlarge / It's a bit too early for photos of Alder Lake-S CPUs, much less Raptor Lake-S—so here's a gorgeous photo of an alder tree on the shore of Llyn Gwynant, in North Wales' Snowdonia National Park. (credit: R A Kearton via Getty Images)
It looks like big.little CPU design—an architecture that includes both fast, power-hungry cores and slower, more power-efficient cores—is here to stay in the x86_64 world, according to unverified insider information leaked by wccftech and AdoredTV.
At Intel's 2021 Architecture day, the company confirmed that its upcoming Alder Lake (12th generation) processors will use a mixture of performance and efficiency cores. This brings the company's discontinued 2020 Lakefield design concept firmly into the mainstream.
Big.little designs run time-sensitive tasks on bigger, hotter performance cores while running background tasks on slower but much less power-hungry cores. This architecture is near-universal in the ARM world—which now includes Apple M1 Macs as well as Android and iOS phones and tablets—but it's far less common in the x86_64 "traditional computing" world.
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Source: The Verge - All Posts
Video sharing site OnlyFans, best known for its creators’ adult videos and photos, will prohibit sexually explicit content starting October 1st. First reported by Bloomberg, the company says it is making the changes because of pressure from its banking and payment provider partners, though a BBC investigation found that the company had been lenient on creators who had posted illegal content.
“In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform, and to continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines,” OnlyFans said in a statement emailed to The Verge.
Creators on the platform will still be allowed to post nude images as long as they comply with the site’s acceptable use...
Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts
Will plastic barriers help control COVID in classrooms and offices? Research says probably not.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Schneier on Security
Apple’s NeuralHash algorithm — the one it’s using for client-side scanning on the iPhone — has been reverse-engineered.
Turns out it was already in iOS 14.3, and someone noticed:
Early tests show that it can tolerate image resizing and compression, but not cropping or rotations.
We also have the first collision: two images that hash to the same value.
The next step is to generate innocuous images that NeuralHash classifies as prohibited content.
This was a bad idea from the start, and Apple never seemed to consider the adversarial context of the system as a whole, and not just the cryptography.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Kentucky.com -- State
As the state hurtles toward a record number of COVID-19 hospitalizations, Gov. Andy Beshear on Tuesday announced a record rate of Kentuckians testing positive for the virus. The statewide positivity … Click to Continue »
Source: Engadget
Intel is pouring more and more of its energy into its mainstay chip business, and that now means leaving some of its less essential work by the wayside. The company told CRN in a statement that it was "winding down" RealSense and transferring the talent and computer vision tech to efforts that "better support" its core chip businesses. The semiconductor giant will honor existing commitments, but the end is clearly on the horizon.
Questions surfaced about the fate of RealSense after the team's leader, Sagi Ben Moshe, said he was leaving Intel two weeks ago.
RealSense aimed to make computer vision more flexible and accessible. A company or researcher could buy cameras to aid everything from robot navigation through to facial recognition, and there was even a developer-focused phone. It was never a truly mainstream product, though, and ASI VP Kent Tibbils told CRN that there were few customers buying RealSense cameras in any significant quantities. It wasn't really a money-making division, even if the work helped Intel's other teams.
For Intel, there's likely a simpler answer: it wants to cut ballast. CEO Pat Gelsinger wants Intel to reclaim the chipmaking crown, and that means concentrating its resources on design and manufacturing capabilities. No matter how successful RealSense is, it's a potential distraction from Intel's latest strategy.
Source: Slashdot
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from Wired, written by Lauren Goode: Samsung's newest foldables are even more impressive than the folding models that came before them. (The company first started shipping foldable phones in 2019, after years of development.) And yet, folding phones are still the 3D TVs of the smartphone world: birthed with the intention of swiveling your head toward a product at a time when the market for that product has softened. They're technically complicated. They're expensive. And their usability depends a whole lot on the way content is displayed on them, which means manufacturers could nail all the tech specs and still must wait on software makers (or entertainment companies) to create stuff to fill these space-age screens. All this does not bode well for the future of foldable phones, though some analysts are more optimistic. Back in the early 2010's, global TV shipments started slipping, as developed markets became saturated with flat-screen TVs. And as prices for LCD TVs sank, so did profits. So TV manufacturers like Sony, LG, and Samsung began hyping the next expensive upgrade: 3D televisions. We tech journalists marched around the annual CES in 3D glasses, hoping to catch a glimpse of a 3D TV that would change our minds about this gimmicky technology. We grew mildly nauseous. We waited for more content. Five years later, 3D TV was dead. At the end of the last decade, WIRED's Brian Barrett summed up the great 3D TV pitch as "what happens when smart people run out of ideas, the last gasp before aspiration gives way to commoditization." I know: TVs and mobile phones are different beasts. Mobile phones have fundamentally altered the way we live. Billions of handsets have been sold. But about four years ago, global smartphone sales slowed. By 2019, consumers were holding on to their phones for a few extra months before splurging on an upgrade. As smartphones became more secure and reliable, running on desktop-grade chip systems and featuring cameras good enough to decimate the digital camera market, each new iteration of a phone seemed, well, iterative. Enter foldable displays, which are either a desperate gimmick or a genuine leap forward, depending on whom you ask. Or, like 3D TVs, maybe they're both. Foldables were also supposed to be the ultimate on-the-go device, for road warriors and jet-setters and productivity gurus who want to "stay in the flow" at all times. As I've written before, it's not exactly the best time to beta test this concept, while some of our movements are limited. The context for foldables has changed in the short time since they became commercially available. Of course, that context could always change again. Foldables may be the next frontier in phones, or in tablets, or laptops, or all of the above. They could become commonplace, assumed, as boring as a solid inflexible brick. Maybe we'll manage our decentralized bank accounts on a creaky screen as we shoot into sub-orbital space. Or maybe we'll stare into the screens, two parts fused into one, and hope that the future is something more than this. The biggest argument for foldables not being 3D TVs, as mentioned by research manager for IDC, Jitesh Ubrani, is the potential utility of foldables. "Most people in the industry, and even many consumers, believe that ultimately there is just going to be one device you use, you know?" Ubrani says. "And this device will have the ability to function as a phone, as a PC, as a tablet. So where foldables can really drive the technology is by replacing three devices with one."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
