Techmeme
January 4, 2018, 11:10 AM

Top News

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 …
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 …
New York Times:
Researchers say there is no known fix for Spectre CPU flaw; Meltdown flaw affects almost all Intel CPUs, requires software patch that could cause slowness  —  SAN FRANCISCO — Computer security experts have discovered two major security flaws in the microprocessors inside nearly all of the world's computers.
Troy Wolverton / Business Insider:
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold ~$24M of stock in Nov. and now owns 250K shares, the minimum he's required to hold; Intel was informed about chip flaws in June  —  - Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold off $24 million worth of stock and options in the company in late November.
Zack Whittaker / ZDNet:
Researchers discover vulnerabilities, dubbed Meltdown and Spectre, that let hackers steal data from running apps on most Intel chips, some ARM and AMD chips  —  Most Intel processors and some ARM chips are confirmed to be vulnerable, putting billions of devices at risk of attacks.
Ina Fried / Axios:
Ina Fried / Axios:
Thomas Fox-Brewster / Forbes:
Rebecca Savransky / The Hill:
White House says it has banned guests and employees from using personal cell phones at work, 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 upcoming Galaxy S9, and teases iPhone X-like features including face detection using AI  —  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.
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  —  A local Indian newspaper was able to access the private data of more than a billion Indians for just $8.
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.
Reuters:
Sources: Google exploring sale of US restaurant review guide Zagat which it bought for $151M in 2011  —  (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's Google is exploring a potential sale of Zagat, the U.S. restaurant review guide which the search giant bought for $151 million in 2011, people familiar with the matter said.
Joe Shields / AnandTech:

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