There are ominous signs that Intel may be secretly fixing a major security vulnerability affecting its processors, which threatens to severely damage its brand equity among datacenter and cloud-computing customers. The vulnerability lets users of a virtual machine (VM) access data of another VM on the same physical machine (a memory leak). Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are among the big three cloud providers affected by this vulnerability, and Intel is reportedly in embargoed communications with engineers from the three, to release a software patch that fixes the bug. Trouble is, the patch inflicts an unavoidable performance penalty ranging between 30-35%, impacting the economics of using Intel processors versus AMD ones.

Signs of Intel secretly fixing the bug surfaced with rapid changes to the Linux kernel without proper public-visibility of the documentation. The bulk of the changes involve "kernel page table isolation," a feature that prevents VMs from reading each other's data, but at performance costs. Developers note that these changes are being introduced "very fast" by Linux kernel update standards, and even being backported to older kernel versions (something that's extremely rare). Since this is a hardware vulnerability, Linux isn't the only vulnerable software platform. Microsoft has been working on a Windows kernel patch for this issue since November 2017. AMD x86 processors (such as Opteron, Ryzen, EPYC, etc.,) are immune to this vulnerability.

SolidRun, a leading developer and manufacturer of high-performance embedded solutions, and edge computing platforms, today announced support for the public beta of Google Cloud IoT Core, a fully managed service on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to securely connect and manage IoT devices at scale. Cloud IoT Core is now publicly available to all users in beta, including new features and pricing plan. With Cloud IoT Core, businesses can easily connect and centrally manage millions of globally dispersed IoT devices. When used as part of the broader Google Cloud IoT solution, it can ingest all IoT data and connect to Google Cloud's state of the art analytics services including Cloud Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Bigtable, BigQuery, and Machine Learning.

The MACCHIATObin ClearCloud 8K, is based on a Marvell ARMADA A8040 SoC, and features a quad core Arm Cortex A-72 1.6GHz processor, including 4GB DDR4 DIMM memory (16GB optional), dual 10GbE, microSD connectors, 3 x SATA 3.0, USB 3.0 and PCIe x4 3.0 slot. SolidRun's MACCHIATObin ClearCloud 8K with Google's Cloud IoT Core allows users to easily and securely connect to GCP. The solution has been developed in collaboration with Sartura Ltd., a leading specialized open source developer and integrator for embedded applications, in conjunction with Marvell.

Eric Schmidt late Thursday surprised the tech industry with an announcement to step down as executive chairman of Alphabet, the all-encompassing conglomerate that owns Google's various divisions, including Google Inc., which handles Google's search, web, and online advertising businesses, led by Sundar Pichai. Schmidt did not name a successor.

Eric Schmidt, who served the Internet giant from 2001, is credited with overseeing its 2015 reorganization from the monolithic Google with its various brands, divisions, and subsidiaries, to Alphabet, a conglomerate that owns its various businesses transcending Internet-based services. We are awaiting more details on Schmidt's future plans, and what his exit means for Alphabet.

In what is certainly a major step forward for Internet advertising and the way these are delivered to users, Google has announced that their in-Chrome AdBlocker, which will ship embedded on the Chrome web browser, should be up, running, and being distributed in installation packages by February 15th. This move by google comes after the company joined a voluntary association in the form of the Coalition for Better Ads Experience Program, which aims to better the Internet - and its ads - on both consumers and publishers. This coalition's aim is to define standards for advertising, marking ads as either acceptable or not under the standard's rules, and will "certify web publishers that agree not to use the most disruptive ads identified in the Standards and will accredit browsers and advertising technology companies that will assess publishers' compliance with the Standards and filter digital ads based on the Standards."

Following its integration in the Better Ads Coalition, google will officially activate its AdBlocker on February 15th, whose criteria for blocking ads will be based off of the Coalition's white and black listing of websites and ads according to whether or not they conform to the body's advertising Standards. Google wrote on a developers blog post that "Starting on February 15, in line with the Coalition's guidelines, Chrome will remove all ads from sites that have a "failing" status in the Ad Experience Report for more than 30 days."

Google Tuesday announced that it is discontinuing YouTube on Amazon's home entertainment platforms Fire TV and Echo Show. YouTube is the world's most popular on-demand video service, and continues to be the largest video sharing site. In a statement, Google said that the decision to pull YouTube from Amazon platforms was in reciprocity to Amazon continuing to hamper sales of Google devices, and preventing Amazon Prime Video from working on Google Chromecast. "Amazon doesn't carry Google products like Chromecast and Google Home, doesn't make (its) Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and last month stopped selling some of (our sister company) Nest's latest products. Given this lack of reciprocity, we are no longer supporting YouTube on Echo Show and Fire TV," Google said.

As if preventing Prime Video from working on Chromecast doesn't amount to "selectively blocking customer access to an open website," a hypocritical Amazon retorted "Google is setting a disappointing precedent by selectively blocking customer access to an open website." Google has, in its statement, left the door open for a possible agreement between the two. "We hope we can reach an agreement to resolve these issues soon," Google stated. This could likely see Google devices such as Chromecast and Google Home return to Amazon, and the availability of Prime Video on Chromecast and other Google Cast platforms. If it gets any worse from here on, Google has another, more destructive weapon in its arsenal against Amazon - Search results.

The singularity concept isn't a simple one. It has attached to it not only the idea of Artificial Intelligence that is capable of constant self-improvement, but also that the invention and deployment of this kind of AI will trigger ever accelerating technological growth - so much so that humanity will see itself changed forever. Now, really, there are some pieces of technology already that have effectively changed the fabric of society. We've seen this happen with the Internet, bridging gaps in time and space and ushering humanity towards frankly inspiring times of growth and development. Even smartphones, due to their adoption rates and capabilities, have seen the metamorphosis of human interaction and ways to connect with each other, even sparking some smartphone-related psychological conditions. But all of those will definitely, definitely, pale in comparison to what changes might ensue following the singularity.

The thing is, up to now, we've been shackled in our (still tremendous growth) by our own capabilities as a species: our world is built on layers upon layers of brilliant minds that have developed the framework of technologies our society is now interspersed with. But this means that as fast as development has been, it has still been somewhat slowed down by humanity's ability to evolve, and to develop. Each development has come with almost perfect understanding of what came before it: it's a cohesive whole, with each step being provable and verifiable through the scientific method, a veritable "standing atop the shoulders of giants". What happens, then, when we lose sight of the thought process behind developments: when the train of thought behind them is so exquisite that we can't really understand it? When we deploy technologies and programs that we don't really understand? Enter the singularity, an event to which we've stopped walking towards: it's more of a hurdle race now, and perhaps more worryingly, it's no longer fully controlled by humans.

Microsoft released one of its key software products, Microsoft Office, to all Chromebooks. Office for Android is now available on all Google Play-enabled Chromebooks. Chrome OS is derived from Android, which itself is a Linux-based operating system. Like the rest of the Android software ecosystem, Office for Android eludes other desktop Linux distributions, due to lack of the required APIs and other quasi-proprietary dependencies exclusively found on Android and Chrome OS.

Microsoft Office is one of the "killer apps" that keep Windows popular. It's been available on the Apple Mac platform for over a decade, and made its long march to the Android platform with the decline of Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform. It should finally make premium chromebooks, such as the Google Pixelbook (pictured below), worth the buy to business professionals on the move.

Cryptojacking is a new phenomenon, which was popularized by ThePirateBay embedding its website with a Javascript-based crypto-currency miner. It quickly sprung up the debate on whether crypto-currency miners hidden into web-pages could become the revenue model of the future, replacing online advertising or paid subscriptions. Some commentators argue that it's fine as long as users are made sufficiently aware that a website is embedding a miner, and is presented with a choice between ads and the miner. Others were steadfast against the idea as heavy Internet browsing (across multiple tabs), could bring down computers to a crawl, and have a more than tangible impact on electricity bills.

According to an ArsTechnica report, there could be at least 2,500 websites out there, with embedded crypto-currency miners that are hidden from the users. Willem de Groot, an independent cybersecurity researcher told the publication that he estimates JS miners may have proliferated to 2,496 websites, and its adoption is on the rise. Some dishonest websites embed miners as a revenue source in addition to ads and sponsored content. At the heart of the controversy is Coinhive. This company sells easy-to-integrate crypto-currency miners that can be embedded into websites as a revenue source. The company is on a marketing overdrive, writing to siteops and bloggers to spread their miners.

Razer today unveiled the Razer Phone, an Android smartphone with groundbreaking audiovisual technologies and processing muscle that takes personal entertainment to the next level. The first device from Razer's mobile division, the Razer Phone comes with a phenomenal display, cinematic audio and enough power to last a user all day, all in the palm of his or her hand.

The Razer Phone is equipped with the world's first 120 Hz UltraMotion display that delivers the fastest refresh rates and smoothest graphics among today's smartphones. UltraMotion's adaptive refresh technology synchronizes the GPU and display to remove image tearing or lag while driving efficient power usage. The 5.72-inch display - a Quad HD IGZO LCD - delivers vibrant and sharp images with a wide color gamut.

So, you work for Google. Awesome, right? Yeah. You know what else is awesome? Your 24-Core, 48-thread Intel build system with 64 GBs of ram and a nice SSD. Life is good man. So, you've done your code work for the day on Chrome, because that's what you do, remember? (Yeah, that's right, it's awesome). Before you go off to collect your google-check, you click "compile" and expect a speedy result from your wicked fast system.

Only you don't get it... Instead, your system comes grinding to a lurching halt, and mouse movement becomes difficult. Fighting against what appears to be an impending system crash, you hit your trusty "CTRL-ALT-DELETE" and bring up task manager... to find only 50% CPU/RAM utilization. Why then, was everything stopping?

If you would throw up your arms and walk out of the office, this is why you don't work for Google. For Google programmer Bruce Dawson, there was only one logical way to handle this: "So I did what I always do - I grabbed an ETW trace and analyzed it. The result was the discovery of a serious process-destruction performance bug in Windows 10."

Another year, another European Commission fine for an antitrust violation. This time, the target of the fine is none other than Google. In what could be the most important antitrust ruling in recent years (which overshadows even Microsoft's 2004 browser fine), the EC has found that Google has systematically worked towards increasing prominence in search results to those displayed by the company's own comparison shopping service, dubbed "Google Shopping". "Google Shopping" started in 2004, when Google entered the comparison shopping market in Europe, with a product that was initially called "Froogle", renamed "Google Product Search" in 2008 and since 2013 has been called "Google Shopping".

However, it would seem that Froogle wasn't all that successful. When Google entered the comparison shopping markets with Froogle, there were already a number of established players, which dampened the company's market foray. The EC states that Google was aware that Froogle's market performance was relatively poor, pointing to one internal document from 2006 that stated, quite plainly, that "Froogle simply doesn't work".

SoftBank has to be the most high-level investor in the tech world today, with multiple headline-grabbing purchases in the last year alone. First, it was ARM's multi-billion dollar purchase, which shook the tech industry almost to its knees. Then, the acquisition of a $4 billion dollar stake on NVIDIA, which is increasingly looking like a great move (and is partially responsible for NVIDIA's soaring market cap.)

Now, SoftBank has moved to acquire Google parent company Alphabet Inc's Boston Dynamics, the engineering and robotics design firm best known for being compared to the manufacturing arm of Skynet. Masayoshi Son, Chairman & CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., said that "Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the Information Revolution," and that he and the full might of SoftBank are looking forward to "supporting them as they continue to advance the field of robotics and explore applications that can help make life easier, safer and more fulfilling." Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but as part of it, SoftBank has also agreed to acquire Japanese bipedal robotics company Schaft. SoftBank is the octopus of the tech world, with tendrils extending towards the technologies that look to be most important in our collective future. The company already has the high efficiency processing, deep learning and AI chops for a robotic future with their acquisition of ARM and investment in NVIDIA - now, they're adding a manufacturing arm. Is this Skynet's inception?

Improbable, which was founded five years ago by Herman Narula and Rob Whitehead, has achieved a Softbank (the company that purchased ARM backing in a funding round that values the business at more than $1bn. >Despite this cash injection, it looks like Improbable will stay independent to work on their purported aim: to build large-scale virtual worlds and simulations. These could be leveraged by games developers, or some other, non-gaming investments and applications, such as transport systems modelling, virtual couch-travelling, and military applications.

Founder Herman Narula said that Improbable's vision "is to create completely new realities, massive virtual worlds that can change the way we live and work and can impact the way we understand some of the hardest problems." The company believes it has developed revolutionary technology with its Spatial OS operating system, which it has recently opened up to other developers. A Google partnership to put its system on the search giant's cloud, thus allowing small developers to create massive simulations without much infrastructure of their own, means real business for this company, and the backing of one of tech's giants lends credence to their ambitions. Let's see where this leads, but it seems that tales of VR's death were greatly exaggerated. You can discuss these finding here, on our very own TPU Virtual Reality Club.

As part of Google's push towards a safer, HTTPS-encrypted web, the Chrome browser will begin marking any HTTP site as non-secure when a user browses in incognito mode. Incognito is the Chrome browser's enhanced privacy mode, which goes a long way in explaining why Google sees non-HTTPS sites as a non-secure place to visit. Save some network metadata, encrypted HTTPS connections keep the contents of the communications between the user and a web server hidden from outside parties - in normal circumstances, that is. The company is already marking HTTP web-pages that accept credit card details as not-secure, and starting October this year, the browser will do the same on every HTTP site in which the user has to input data, and for every HTTP page browsed in Incognito mode.

Interestingly, Google has advanced that traffic to pages it has marked "Not Secure" has dropped by 23%, which goes to show that such policies do impact a user's decision on whether or not to establish such a connection. In addition, Google started scrambling its search engine algorithm so as to feature HTTPS sites more prominently than sites that don't. This means that websites that see diminishing visitors should be more inclined towards a adopting the more secure, encrypted HTTPS. And in an era where every scrap of our information is deemed worthy of at least being stored and resold, I find it commendable that Google thinks every piece of information should be secured, instead of just our payment information - which even that isn't always secure.

One of the things keeping OSVR from becoming a de facto platform for VR is that its software stack, being open source, still hasn't received as much development as Facebook's Oculus or HTC's Vive platforms. However, Sensics, one of the players which has put its stock on the OSVR ecosystem from the beginning, is aiming to gradually change that. Its recent introduction of the Sensics Home Suite brings, in itself, some much-needed quality of life improvements for any VR platform.

Many research firms' numbers have shown that VR product sales in 2016 have been weaker than originally expected due to both high product costs and lack of content. No-one has yet seen VR's killer app, after all, and I know I'd love to see another Halo-like product to drive awareness on the VR platforms like it did on the original Xbox.

All of the above lead towards Google's Daydream View, HTC's Vive, Oculus Rift and Samsung Electronics' Gear VR having all achieved sales that are not even close to previously-set market expectations, with even the current mainstream poster-boy for VR, Sony's PSVR, showing adoption numbers that are as lowly as low can be. Even in their home-field, Japan, a country known for being filled with tech-savvy and tech-crazed customers, only 0.7% of the existing PS4 and PS4 Pro user-base has made the jump for a VR headset.

The one phrase from television that makes IT people and creative professionals cringe the most is "zoom and enhance" - the notion that you zoom into a digital image and, at the push of a button, it converts a pixellated image into something with details - which lets CSI catch the bad guys. Up until now, this has been laughably impossible. Images are made up of dots called pixels, and the more pixels you have, the more details you can have in your image (resolution). Zooming into images eventually shows you a colorful checkerboard that's proud of its identity.

Google is tapping into machine-learning, in an attempt to change this. The company has reportedly come up with a machine-learning technique that attempts to reconstruct details in low-resolution images. Google is calling this RAISR (rapid and accurate image super-resolution). The technology works with the software learning "edges" of a picture (portions of the image with drastic changes in color and brightness gradients), and attempts to reconstruct them. What makes this different from conventional super-sampling methods is its machine-learning component. A low-resolution image is studied by the machine to invent an upscaling method most effective for the image, in-situ. While its application in law-enforcement is tricky, and will only become a reality when a reasonably high court of law sets a spectacular precedent; this technology could have commercial applications in up-scaling low-resolution movies to new formats such as 4K Ultra HD, and perhaps even 8K.

Intel Corporation today announced a range of new products, technologies and investments from the edge to the data center to help expand and accelerate the growth of artificial intelligence (AI). Intel sees AI transforming the way businesses operate and how people engage with the world. Intel is assembling the broadest set of technology options to drive AI capabilities in everything from smart factories and drones to sports, fraud detection and autonomous cars.

At an industry gathering led by Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, Intel shared how both the promise and complexities of AI require an extensive set of leading technologies to choose from and an ecosystem that can scale beyond early adopters. As algorithms become complex and required data sets grow, Krzanich said Intel has the assets and know-how required to drive this computing transformation. In a blog Krzanich said: "Intel is uniquely capable of enabling and accelerating the promise of AI. Intel is committed to AI and is making major investments in technology and developer resources to advance AI for business and society."

NVIDIA announced that its flagship GPGPU accelerator, the Tesla P100, will be available through Google Cloud Platform. The company's Tesla K80 accelerator will also be offered. The Google Cloud Platform allows customers to perform specific computing tasks at an infinitesimally lower cost than having to rent hardware in-situ or having to buy it; by offloading your computing tasks to offsite data-centers. IT professionals can build and deploy servers, HPC farms, or even supercomputers, of all shapes and sizes within hours of placing an order online with Google.

The Tesla P100 is a GPGPU with the most powerful GPU in existence - the NVIDIA GP100 "Pascal," featuring 3,584 CUDA cores, up to 16 GB of HBM2 memory, and NVLink high-bandwidth interconnect support. The other high-end GPU accelerators on offer by Google are the Tesla K80, based on a pair of GK210 "Kepler" GPUs, and the AMD FirePro S9300 X2, based on a pair of "Fiji" GPUs.

At SC16, AMD announced that Radeon GPU technology will be available to Google Cloud Platform users worldwide. Starting in 2017, Google will use AMD's fastest available single-precision dual GPU compute accelerators, Radeon-based AMD FirePro S9300 x2 Server GPUs, to help accelerate Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Machine Learning services. AMD FirePro S9300 x2 GPUs can handle highly parallel calculations, including complex medical and financial simulations, seismic and subsurface exploration, machine learning, video rendering and transcoding, and scientific analysis. Google Cloud Platform will make the AMD GPU resources available for all their users around the world.

"Graphics processors represent the best combination of performance and programmability for existing and emerging big data applications," said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. "The adoption of AMD GPU technology in Google Cloud Platform is a validation of the progress AMD has made in GPU hardware and our Radeon Open Compute Platform, which is the only fully open source hyperscale GPU compute platform in the world today. We expect that our momentum in GPU computing will continue to accelerate with future hardware and software releases and advances in the ecosystem of middleware and libraries."

Vulkan, the new-generation cross-platform 3D graphics API governed by the people behind OpenGL, the Khronos Group, is gaining in relevance, with Google making it the primary 3D graphics API for Android. AMD said that it's actively promoting the API. Responding to a question by TechPowerUp in its recent Radeon Technology Group (RTG) first anniversary presser, its chief Raja Koduri agreed that the company is actively working with developers to add Vulkan to their productions, and optimize them for Radeon GPUs. This, we believe, could be due to one of many strategic reasons.

First, Vulkan works inherently better on AMD Graphics CoreNext GPU architecture because it's been largely derived from Mantle, a now defunct 3D graphics API by AMD that brings a lot of "close-to-metal" API features that make game consoles more performance-efficient, over to the PC ecosystem. The proof of this pudding is the AAA title and 2016 reboot of the iconic first-person shooter "Doom," in which Radeon GPUs get significant performance boosts switching from the default OpenGL renderer to Vulkan. These boosts aren't as pronounced on NVIDIA GPUs.

Game developer CryTek is planning to implement Vulkan API support for its in-house game-engine, CryEngine. To be released in November 2016 as CryEngine 5.3, CryTek will implement Vulkan across platforms, including PC (Windows desktop/notebook), and mobile (smartphones, tablets). The decision to implement Vulkan could have been fueled by Google's decision to make Vulkan the primary 3D graphics API of Android.

CryTek will also expand its support for DirectX 12, which it implemented in March 2016. With CryEngine 5.4, scheduled to be released in February 2017, along the sidelines of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), CryTek is introducing support for DirectX 12 native multi-GPU; deferred shading in sandboxed viewports, and multi-threaded rendering in sandbox.

Google is reportedly working on a new operating system it codenamed "Fuchsia" on the project's Git repository. Some of the oldest comments read "pink + purple = fuchsia (a new operating system)." The Verge speculates that looking at the focus on lightweight code, Fuchsia could be a cross-platform operating system that unifies the Android and ChromeOS ecosystems. Another theory holds that the OS could drive the company's routers and IoT devices. The OS is based on Magenta, a heavily stripped down micro-kernel based on Linux. Magenta's lightweight design favors embedded applications.

DisplayLink, the leading provider of USB graphics technology, today announced its docking stations and adapters work with Chrome OS Release 51 onwards. A demonstration of the native plug-and-display capability will be shown at Interop 2016, Las Vegas showcasing the latest Chromebooks from industry leaders such as Dell and HP. For a demo, visit the DisplayLink booth at Interop Las Vegas Expo, between May 4th and May 5th.

"DisplayLink is truly excited to announce native OS support in Google's Chrome OS from today onwards," said John Cummins, Senior Vice President Sales and Marketing. "No driver is required, just plug in any DisplayLink device and it just works. As Chromebooks have expanded across education and corporate markets, we've experienced strong demand to enable Chromebooks with the DisplayLink installed base of millions of devices. A Chromebook and DisplayLink multi-head docking station enables multiple monitors for a true productivity desktop experience. We are proud to have worked closely with Google to deliver this new functionality to customers worldwide."

A FAST '16 paper titled "Flash Reliability in Production: The Expected and the Unexpected," by Professor Bianca Schroeder of the University of Toronto, and Raghav Lagisetty and Arif Merchant of Google, studied the reliability data from millions of SSD drive-days over a period of 6 years, to come up with some very interesting conclusions on SSD reliability. One of the study's biggest findings is that high-end (read: enterprise) SSDs with single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory are no more reliable than cheaper multi-level cell (MLC) drives. Besides millions of drive-hours, the group also studied 10 different models of enterprise and consumer SSDs, from three different memory types - MLC NAND, SLC NAND, and eMLC NAND.

The study also shows that RBER (raw bit error rate) is a more dependable measure of reliability than UBER (uncorrectable bit error rate) mentioned in drive specs or datasheets. RBER increases slower than expected from wearout, and isn't correlated with UBER. However, the measured/real-world UBER is higher for SSDs than HDDs. This means that while SSDs are less likely to "fail" than HDDs, they're more likely to lose portions of their data. Keep your SSDs regularly imaged. Age, rather than usage, affects reliability of SSDs. A disturbing 30-80% of SSDs in the study developed at least one bad-block, and 2-7% of the SSDs developed at least one bad chip, within the first 4 years of deployment.