Techmeme
January 4, 2018, 2:50 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 …
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.
Google Online Security Blog:
Thomas Fox-Brewster / Forbes:
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 …
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.
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.
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.
Steve Dent / Engadget:
Nintendo says Switch is the fastest selling game console ever in the US, selling 4.8M units in 10 months, breaking the Wii's record of 4M units in the same time  —  The Switch has broken the US record for the fastest selling console ever, with 4.8 million units sold in just 10 months, Nintendo says.

Sponsor Posts

Meta:
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Tribe AI:
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Zoho:
5 common accounting mistakes  —  This is a guest post by Yaali Bizappln Solutions.  A lot of businesses manage their customers and finances on separate platforms.  This disconnect often leads to missed invoices …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
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More News

Angelique Chrisafis / The Guardian:

Earlier Picks

Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge: