Techmeme
January 4, 2018, 2:00 PM

Top News

Meltdown and Spectre:
Official webpage for the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities, which has links to research papers and an FAQ  —  Bugs in modern computers leak passwords and sensitive data.  Meltdown and Spectre exploit critical vulnerabilities in modern processors.  These hardware bugs allow programs …
Spectreattack.com:
Researchers wrote a Spectre attack in JavaScript that violates browser sandboxing and reads data from the address space of the browser process running it  —  Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance.  For example, if the destination …
Google Online Security Blog:
Google's Project Zero says it discovered three variants of CPU attack, affecting AMD, ARM, and Intel; Android devices with latest security update are safe  —  Last year, Google's Project Zero team discovered serious security flaws caused by “speculative execution,” a technique used by most modern processors …
Troy Wolverton / Business Insider:
Thomas Fox-Brewster / Forbes:
Rebecca Savransky / The Hill:
White House says it has banned guests and employees from using personal cell phones in the West Wing, will only allow use of government-issued devices  —  The White House is going to start barring employees from using their personal cellphones at work, press secretary Sarah Sanders said early Thursday.
Vlad Savov / The Verge:
Samsung unveils Exynos 9 Series 9810 processor, likely to be used in Galaxy S9, and teases iPhone X-like features including face tracking and unlocking  —  Starting off the new year by introducing its latest custom smartphone processor, Samsung has revealed some of what we might expect from its next Galaxy S flagship.
Michelle Castillo / CNBC:
Zuckerberg says his personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing Facebook's “important issues” and the company makes “too many errors” enforcing policies  —  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's mission in 2018 is to fix Facebook's mounting issues from last year …
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
AT&T announces plans to start rolling out a true 5G network in 12 cities by the end of 2018  —  AT&T has announced plans to roll out a true 5G network in a dozen markets in accordance with the 3GPP's recently released 5G NR (new radio) guidelines by the end of 2018.
Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed:
Reports suggest India's Aadhaar national ID database was breached, exposing information of ~1.2B Indians and allowing creation of admin accounts by other admins  —  In 2010 India started scanning personal details like names, addresses, dates of birth, mobile numbers, and more …
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Johnson Controls unveils $319 Cortana-powered thermostat called GLAS, which runs Windows 10 IoT Core; available now for preorder, ships in March  —  Beauty comes at a price  —  Microsoft has partnered with Johnson Controls to build a thermostat.  The software giant first unveiled …
Evelyn Cheng / CNBC:
Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen reportedly owns 5.19B XRP tokens and a 17% stake in the company, valued at ~$59.9B after 36,000% increase in XRP value  —  - With Ripple's XRP coin hitting a high of $3.84, the company's co-founder and executive chairman, Chris Larsen, is now worth about $59.9 billion on paper.
New York Times:
How Nvidia researchers generated pictures of faces that appear to be real but aren't by analyzing photos of celebrities and detecting patterns  —  To create the final image in this set, the system generated 10 million revisions over 18 days.  —  The woman in the photo seems familiar.

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Angelique Chrisafis / The Guardian:
Steve Dent / Engadget:

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