MediaTek today announced the world's first live demo of Wi-Fi 7 technology, highlighting the capabilities of its forthcoming Wi-Fi 7 Filogic connectivity portfolio. MediaTek is currently showcasing two Wi-Fi 7 demos to key customers and industry collaborators to demonstrate the technology's super-fast speeds and low latency transmission.

"The rollout of Wi-Fi 7 will mark the first time that Wi-Fi can be a true wireline/Ethernet replacement for super high-bandwidth applications," said Alan Hsu, corporate vice president and general manager of the Intelligent Connectivity business at MediaTek. "MediaTek's Wi-Fi 7 technology will be the backbone of home, office and industrial networks and provide seamless connectivity for everything from multi-player AR/VR applications to cloud gaming and 4K calls to 8K streaming and beyond."

Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has been one of the biggest browsers in the world by market share. However, that was some years ago and the browser technology keeps developing to a point where a 3-month non-updated browser is slow and insecure. The latest version of Internet Explorer is version 11, which you can find still running on your Windows PC. You might wonder why is it still present when Microsoft announced its Chromium-based Edge browser some time ago. Well, many applications have built-int code that needs Internet Explorer to work. If there is no IE browser, the application would display errors and likely not run well.

However, Microsoft today announced that the company will be moving on from IE 11 and that it is finally killing it by June 15th, 2022. The IE browser represents a code that is probably hard to maintain and a potential security hole. That is why the company is deciding to end it in 2022. If you are wondering how the company plans to migrate a plethora of apps from needing IE, Microsoft is preparing Internet Explorer compatibility mode on its Edge browser. That way it ensures that all of the existing applications would run under the Edge browser and that old and insecure piece of code is removed from Windows.

AMD has today updated its Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition version 21.5.1 drivers, bringing many features on board as well as fixing a lot of issues that have appeared in the past. Starting with support for the Resident Evil Village PC game, AMD promises to deliver up to 13% better frame rate at 4K maximum settings, while using the Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card. The comparison was conducted with a reference to the previous driver, 21.4.1, which didn't allow the card to reach as high FPS as it is now possible with the proper support for the game. Another game that is added to the support list is Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition. Some fixes have been implemented, as the incorrect performance metrics that may have incorrectly reported temperatures on Ryzen 5 1600 series processors. For a detailed list of bug fixes, please take a look at the list below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 21.5.1

NETGEAR, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTGR), the worldwide leading provider of award-winning advanced networking products for home and office has today announced, during the historic virtually-hosted CES 2021, the introduction of the world's first all-purpose WiFi 6E router, the Nighthawk RAXE500 Tri-band WiFi router. Promised to elevate the WiFi experience by providing speeds up to 10.8Gbps, this latest addition to the Nighthawk line of performance routers ushers in a new era of fast connectivity on the new 6Ghz band, free of interference and congestion.

Working, learning, and video streaming from home has placed greater demands on home WiFi networks. Devices in these ultra-connected households have been in a constant contest for bandwidth on crowded WiFi networks. WiFi 6E resolves these congestion issues by adding previously unavailable 6GHz WiFi spectrum that can be used to broadcast WiFi signals and connect to more devices with faster speeds and reliability. Up until the introduction of WiFi 6E, WiFi routers have been limited to the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. The new third 6GHz band will dramatically increase the capacity of networks to support more devices.

NETGEAR, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTGR), the worldwide leading provider of advanced networking products for home and office, has announced two new mobile products: the Industry's first WiFi 6 mobile wireless router - the Nighthawk 4G LTE WiFi 6 Router (LAX20) - and the NETGEAR 4G LTE Modem (LM1200). With a continued mission to provide connectivity for households and businesses regardless of where they may be located, these two mobile wireless products provide the capability of connecting home or office networks in the absence of traditional cable, DSL or fiber broadband options.

The Nighthawk LAX20 router supports advanced WiFi 6 networking technology delivering 1.8Gbps of high-performance WiFi and improved network capacity to handle a greater number of connected devices on the home network. Combined with a 4G LTE modem for instances where traditional wired internet options are not available or reliable, the Nighthawk LAX20 router provides an alternate mobile internet connectivity option. The new router also serves as an ideal solution for those who need internet access for limited time frames for instances such as a vacation home or short-term rentals.

Qualcomm Incorporated today announced that its Board of Directors has unanimously selected Cristiano Amon to succeed Steve Mollenkopf as CEO, effective June 30, 2021. Mollenkopf informed the Board of his decision to retire as CEO following 26 years with the Company. Amon, who has worked at Qualcomm since 1995, is currently President of the Company. Mollenkopf will continue his employment with the Company as a strategic advisor for a period of time.

Mollenkopf, 52, became CEO in March of 2014. He began his career as an engineer and, for nearly three decades, has helped define and lead Qualcomm's strategy and technology roadmap. His work helped propel smartphones into the mainstream and made Qualcomm a leader in 3G, 4G and now 5G, and he also oversaw the expansion into new industry segments such as the Internet of Things (IoT), RF Front End and Automotive. He was also instrumental in the Company's rise as a smartphone technology supplier. In addition, Mollenkopf successfully guided the Company through a number of extraordinary circumstances and challenges and begins the CEO transition process with the Company stabilized and well-positioned to continue to grow and drive value.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF ), the world's leading specialty foundry, announced today at its Global Technology Conference the next generation of its FDXTM platform, 22FDX+, to meet the ever-growing need for higher performance and ultra-low power requirements of connected devices. GF's industry-leading 22FDX (22 nm FD-SOI) platform has realized $4.5 billion in design wins, with more than 350 million chips shipped to customers around the world.

GF's new 22FDX+ builds on the company's 22FDX platform, offering a broader set of features that provide high performance, ultra-low power, and specialty features and capabilities for the newest generation of designs. The differentiated offering will further empower customers to create chips that are specifically optimized for Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, automotive, and satellite communications applications.

Today there is a little bit of nostalgia to be brought for your reading pleasure. In the early days of dot com boom, when the internet was taking off, there was a service called Napster which allowed users to download entire music albums in MP3 format for free. Logically you needed an MP3 player to listen to these songs and there came Winamp - the most popular MP3 player at the time with a lot of features like sound equalizer, bitrate adjustment, and more. The users of this piece of software especially liked it because of the one thing - customization. You could have applied all kinds of skins to it, and users distributed a lot of them online. From anime to TV shows, you could find all kinds of skins for it. So to honor the software, there is now an online museum containing over 65.000 skins that you can view in JPG format and download to apply to your Winamp application. You can check out the museum here.

5G has been a trending topic in the recent times because of the big technological breakthrough and all the solutions that its major features will make a reality: Low latency, bigger bandwidth with higher frequency, and overall faster "real-time" connection.

With those features 5G will connect virtually everyone and everything together in a fast and reliable network through the air while protecting privacy and security issues, that will mean the era of real IoT: Smart cities and smart transportations; remote medical care and wirelessly connected Industrial devices, and high-quality video streaming, to say the least.

Cisco today announced its intent to acquire privately held ThousandEyes, Inc. headquartered in San Francisco, CA. ThousandEyes' Internet and Cloud intelligence platform delivers deep visibility and insights into the digital delivery of applications and services over the Internet.

The last few years have seen a rapid acceleration of Cloud adoption, widespread use of SaaS applications, and a reliance on the Internet and networks outside of enterprise control. This increased dependence on the Internet and other third-party infrastructures, compounded over the past several months during the COVID-19 pandemic, substantially reduces the ability for enterprise IT teams to predict, visualize and control operational behavior. The result is often a chaotic and unmanageable IT environment that makes issue resolution a time-consuming ordeal that can potentially have a massive impact on customer experience, brand reputation and revenue.

Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system has historically been rising in market share thanks to the slow depreciation of Windows 7 OS, and Microsoft's efforts to push it as only Windows OS available for desktop users. However, according to the information by NetMarketShare, a company providing statistics about the market share of Internet Technologies (browsers and OSes), Windows 10 has seen a decrease in market share. This news is a surprising discovery, given that the OS is expected to be gaining new market share slowly, given that Windows 7 has reached the end of life in January.

From 57.37% of market share in February, Windows 10 got down to 57.34% in March and 56.08% in April. While this may seem just like a few percentage decrease, given the massive amount of PCs available, it can be counted in thousands. What could be the reason behind this is the current COVID-19 related pandemic and slower demand for office PCs, as everyone is working from home now. This was a big growth sector for Windows 10 as the previous version of Windows, the 7, was very popular in office space before its EoL. Of course, this is just a speculation which you should take with a big grain of salt. Some of the interesting things to point out is that Ubuntu, a Linux kernel based operating system, has massively increased its market share from 0.27% in March to 1.89% in April.

Microsoft's flight simulator, an upcoming game designed to bring real-life scenarios of flying an airplane, just got a list of system requirements needed to run a game. To play with Flight Simulator, you would at least need to have a quad-core CPU like AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or Intel Core i5-4460 equipped system, along with 8 GB of RAM. For graphics, you would need a GPU with at least 2 GB of VRAM, where the requirement is either AMD Radeon RX 570 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 GPU. Another interesting observation is the requirement of 150 GB of drive space, meaning that this game will be pretty big. Internet connection needs to be 5 Mbps at minimum, and as you up the resolution and graphics, you would need a faster connection. You can check out the entire table below.

The need for incrementally faster connection comes out of one reason - adaptive streaming. The game looks stunning, and if you wish to play at the highest quality, parts of the game will be rendered in the cloud. Microsoft is using its Azure infrastructure to help and render parts of the game and stream it down to your PC. This ensures that your PC is capable of playing the game and Microsoft is showing how they can tap the power of cloud for uses like this.

I had to take that sentence from Game of Thrones' Little Finger (if you recognized it, kudos to you), since I believe it to be mostly true, given we have the right mindset about that which surrounds us. While the pandemic will always be a mainly bleak point in humanity's history, and everyday there are reports of people being their worst selves through these difficult times, there is also always opportunity for growth affixed to any great crisis. It falls upon us, our institutions, and on companies, to see really what we can learn from situations such as these.

For one, we've seen, beyond any possible ideological beliefs we may have, that the Internet is a utility, not a commodity. Its capability to bridge the gaps in geography - and in social connection - is just too important in our globalized society to be considered anything other than a fundamental right. Discussions on this point have been ongoing for a while, and debates surrounding things like the net neutrality have already given birth to rivers of both actual and digital ink. However, it is this writer's opinion that the discussion is moot, and nothing more than a speedbump until we achieve the final, inescapable truth that the Internet is a crucial part of the world's infrastructure, and not only that - of what it means to be human in our modern world.

DE-CIX, the operator of the world's largest Internet Exchange in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, is taking stock for the first time since the tightening of public measures in the fight against the spread of the COVID-19 virus. DE-CIX has noted a strong change in data traffic and also in Internet user behavior. The average data traffic at the world's largest Internet Exchange in Frankfurt has increased by 10% since last Wednesday. Compared to the previous few weeks, there has also been a significant increase in video conferencing traffic - such as Skype, Teams, and WebEx - of about 50%, and a rising number of VPN users has also been registered. In addition, since Friday last week there has also been an increase of about 25% in online and cloud gaming, and there has also been a significant increase in traffic from the use of social media platforms. Similar results are expected for the other DE-CIX locations.

"Capacities in our own network are regularly expanded on a long-term basis. We always plan for about twelve months in advance. We continue expanding as soon as 63% of the existing capacities are reached. The remaining 37% free capacity is needed to create redundancy and to ensure that we always have enough free capacity for traffic growth. In addition to our network for the Internet Exchange, customers also need to expand capacity in their own network. These expansions are carried out by the customers themselves, according to their own processes and procedures," comments Dr Thomas King, CTO at DE-CIX, on the increasing data traffic.

Microsoft today announced it was part of a global operation meant to disrupt the world's largest online criminal network. Dubbed Necurs, the network functioned as a botnet - a number of computers infected by malware or otherwise malicious software that are functioning on behalf of a botmaster. The botmaster is basically akin to an administrator - but for nefarious purposes.

Thought to be controlled by criminals based in Russia, Necurs spanned more than nine million computing devices across 35 countries, making it one of the largest spam email threat ecosystems known to authorities - besides being used for pump-and-dump stock scams, fake pharmaceutical spam email and "Russian dating" scams. Necurs was such a well-oiled machine that it was seen sending 3.8 million spam messages to over 40 million targets across a 58-day long time frame in the investigation.

Here's a strange thing: a case for a free, bundled software solution being better (in the metrics concerned and evaluated) than paid, third-party counterparts. We're writing of none other than Microsoft's own Windows Defender suite, which is bundled with Windows and offers a security solution integrated into your OS. While the "paid is always better" philosophy has been proven wrong time and again and isn't that much of a powerhouse behind users' thought process anymore, the fact is that Windows Defender has somewhat been taken for granted as an "undesirability" in users' computers. However, a comparison made by AV-Test, which pits many of the available cybersecurity solutions available on the market, has found Microsoft's Windows Defender to be worthy of a triad of perfect scores.

The results for Windows Defender include perfect (6.0) scores in the "Protection", "Performance" and Usability" categories. The testing period refers to May through June of this year, and only F-Secure SAFE 17, Kaspersky Internet Security 19 and Norton Security 22.17 managed to get the same perfect scores as Windows Defender Version 4.18. Check out the link for the score of your cybersecurity solution of choice. But it's clear that least where this period is concerned, Windows Defender walked circles around some paid solutions.

NETGEAR , Inc. (NASDAQ:NTGR), the leading provider of networking devices that connect smart homes and small businesses to the world, today announced the availability of a new router designed to keep your network secure from online threats, the Nighthawk Cybersecurity AC2300 WiFi Router (RS400). With three years of NETGEAR Armor powered by Bitdefender included, the RS400 is well-matched to provide the best-in-class anti-virus, anti-malware, and data protection for an unlimited number of devices on your network including PCs, laptops, mobile devices, IoT and Smart Home.

Unlike software applications that are installed on laptops or smartphones, the Nighthawk Cybersecurity WiFi Router is designed to provide protection for all the connected devices on your network including vulnerable IoT smart home products. Given that the router directs all incoming and outgoing internet traffic on the network, the router becomes the first line of defense for the connected home. In addition to scanning incoming traffic for security risks, the RS400 also monitors for and can intercept rogue traffic generated from a device, in the event that a device has been hijacked.

So, it goes like this: Microsoft has confirmed they will be killing of their own-developed Edge browser in favor of a Chromium-based alternative. However... The new browser will retain Microsoft's Edge nomenclature, instead of parting ways with the (likely damaged) branding. Microsoft is committing to the open-based Chromium backbone, and will be building upon its database to contribute towards a more open Internet.

The idea is to deliver more frequent updates - and of course, reducing the engineering and coding efforts to keep an in-house browser up to date and secure from all manner of Internet threats. And this will likely be achieved; whether Microsoft's efforts will bring it a higher market share than the current 4%, though, is anyone's guess. It seems to be a usual Microsoft dilemma in that the first search on its browsers is for another web browser... And it might remain especially so without a branding change. Living in Chrome just sounds better than living on Edge.

Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi CERTIFIED WPA3 , the next generation of Wi-Fi security, bringing new capabilities to enhance Wi-Fi protections in personal and enterprise networks. Building on the widespread adoption of WPA2 over more than a decade, WPA3 adds new features to simplify Wi-Fi security, enable more robust authentication, and deliver increased cryptographic strength for highly sensitive data markets. As the Wi-Fi industry transitions to WPA3 security, WPA2 devices will continue to interoperate and provide recognized security.

WPA3 security continues to support the market through two distinct modes of operation: WPA3-Personal and WPA3-Enterprise. All WPA3 networks use the latest security methods, disallow outdated legacy protocols, and require use of Protected Management Frames (PMF) to maintain resiliency of mission critical networks. Key capabilities of WPA3 include:

• WPA3-Personal: more resilient, password-based authentication even when users choose passwords that fall short of typical complexity recommendations. WPA3 leverages Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE), a secure key establishment protocol between devices, to provide stronger protections for users against password guessing attempts by third parties.
• WPA3-Enterprise: offers the equivalent of 192-bit cryptographic strength, providing additional protections for networks transmitting sensitive data, such as government or finance. The 192-bit security suite ensures a consistent combination of cryptographic tools are deployed across WPA3 networks.

Expanding beyond its highly-acclaimed strengths in video capture and playout, Magewell will take the wraps off the company's first standalone, hardware-based streaming encoder in booth SU6324 at the 2018 NAB Show. Making live streaming production remarkably simple even for non-professional users, the new Ultra Stream HDMI enables customers to record or stream high-quality video from a variety of sources with one click using on-device buttons or an intuitive, accompanying smartphone app.

Magewell's capture products are renowned for outstanding ease of use, and the Ultra Stream HDMI continues this tradition. Designed for users who want to stream but may have very little technical knowledge, the encoder is ideal for everyone from church volunteers, teachers and gamers to corporate marketers and live event organizers.

Western Digital has seemingly been shipping their My Cloud personal network attached storage solutions with an integrated backdoor. It's not really that complicated a backdoor either - a malicious user should always be able to use it. That stems from the fact that it's a hard coded backdoor with unchangeable credentials - logging in to someone's My Cloud is as simple as inputing "mydlinkBRionyg" as the Administrator username and "abc12345cba" as the respective password. Once logged in, shell access is unlocked, which allows for easy injection of commands.

The backdoor has been published by James Bercegay, with GulfTech Research and Development, and was disclosed to Western Digital on June 12th 2017. However, since more than 6 months have passed with no patch or solution having been deployed, the researchers disclosed and published the vulnerability, which should (should) finally prompt WD to action on fixing the issue. Making things even worse, no user action is required to enable attackers to take advantage of the exploit - simply visiting malicious websites can leave the drives wide open for exploit - and the outing of a Metasploit module for this very vulnerability means that the code is now out there, and Western Digital has a race in its hands. The thing is, it needn't have.

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.

The Government has confirmed that universal high speed broadband will be delivered by a regulatory Universal Service Obligation (USO), giving everyone in the UK access to speeds of at least 10 Mbps by 2020. This is the speed that Ofcom, the independent regulator, says is needed to meet the requirements of an average family. After careful consideration the government has decided that regulation is the best way of making sure everyone in the UK can get a decent broadband connection of at least 10 Mbps as soon as possible.

Following the creation of new powers when the Government passed the Digital Economy Act 2017, we launched our consultation on the design of the regulatory USO in the summer. The Government will now set out the design for a legal right to high speed broadband in secondary legislation early next year, alongside our detailed response to the consultation.

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.

This here is an issue that this editor has been fearing for a while, and that we here at TPU have called our users' attention to in the past. It's bad enough when websites willingly implement web mining scripts absent of users' consent or simple knowledge. Opt-in mining as a contribution to a website's revenue would be the best way to go around the issue; however, absent that, a simple opt-out capability wouldn't be much worse. But if stealth usage of a site viewers' computing resources is bad, what then can be said when the site managers themselves are unaware of the implementation of a web miner?

This is what happened with Politifact, the US politics fact-checking website, which is but one of hundreds of the world's top traffic websites that have seen the stealth introduction of these web mining scripts - against the will of the site managers. In the meantime, Politifact has brought down the offending code and has vowed to investigate, but this opens up Pandora's box, really. Generally speaking, these JavaScript apps are running code hosted on another server that the end user - and sometimes even the site hosts - can't inspect or don't expect to have to inspect. And this is easier to do than one would imagine; there's a lack of protection against JavaScript routines like this one. And where there's potential for profit, there's abuse; and that's what we're seeing. It also doesn't help that injecting the necessary JavaScript into the front page of a website is much easier than a full blown hack into a website's databases; and once the code has been shoehorned into a website's code, it runs itself, hijacking users' CPU cycles and putting the resulting Monero coins into a designated wallet.