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Wireless local area networks (WLAN) are going to get much, much more safe in the near future. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the new WPA3 standard for Wi-Fi was introduced.

WPA2 has been in use since 2004 and has been found to be less than optimal for the safety needs of modern Wi-Fi users. The largest differences between WPA2 and WPA3 are in open network security. Currently in an open Wi-Fi network the connections between devices are not protected in any way, and thus listening and manipulating traffic is very easy.

WPA3, however, introduces a specification for device specific encyption, which means that even if the network can be accessed without passwords you'll be able to securely transmit data without worrying about interception by other devices.

The new standard also includes a feature which allows network operator to deny access from a device to a network when the password has been guessed wrong multiple times. This protects against the so-called brute force attacks.

Wi-Fi Alliance expects the WPA3 standard to be released later this year.

While Intel has recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons, perhaps excluding the collaboration with a long time rival AMD, to open up Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas they unveiled a technological breakthrough in quantum computing that hopefully shifts the focus.

The new 49-Qubit quantum chip is called Tangle Lake, and promises leaps in superconducting computing. Intel calls the new chip a major breakthrough and according to the company it truly starts quantum computing era. This even though we've seen 128-Qubit systems from a Canadian quantum computing company D-Wave Systems years ago.

The 125-Qubit D-Wave, originally unveiled in 2015, has since been surpassed by D-Wave 2X quantum computer that offers processing powers in the 1000-Qubit range.

Intel's breakthroughs are obviously still a big news in the space, after all, it is the largest CPU manufacturer in the world. Tangle Lake, as well as other quantum computing endeavors by Intel come from their Netherlands unit.

For years manufacturers have tried to bridge the gap between a smartphone and a computer by introducing proprietary docking technologies. You might remember Microsoft's effort with Windows 10 phones and computers or Samsung's DeX with their Android phones.

Obviously there have been others, and there will be more that try to breath life into a fantasy many of us are looking forwards to. The newest addition to the group is the gaming focused manufacturer Razer, who've shown off their concept at CES.

Razer's Project Linda is still, as mentioned, just a concept, but it is a seemingly well built and largely market-ready product. It's a Razer Blade-like laptop shell that needs the company's Android phone to power up.

You dock the Razer Phone in the slot situated at the track pad, and as you might imagine the phone's display serves as one. You also use the phone's fingerprint sensor to authenticate and even the dual front-facing speakers because the laptop has no built-in speakers.

Project Linda laptop includes a 13.3 inch 120Hz QHD display with touch capabilities, 53.6 watt battery, 200 gigabytes of storage, USB-A and USB-C connections, a 720p webcam, as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack that is missing from the phone.

The long standing rivals of the processor space, Intel and AMD, announced late last year that they would be doing a collaborative effort which would end in a new kind of chip that would include Intel's CPU prowess and AMD's graphics chips.

Now the chip medley has been officially announced, and it's called the Intel 8th Generation Core with Radeon RX Vega M Graphics – a mouthful, right?

Technically the CPU is an H series processor in terms of power consumption but Intel has created a new G series for the Vega powered chip. The G series can include processors with a TDP up to 100 watts, so they fit snuggly between desktop and mobile processors.

The 100-watt versions of newly announced G series processors include Core i7-8809G and Core i7-8709G while lower prowered 65-watt ones are called Core i7-8705G and Core i5-8305G.

All the CPUs have four Kaby Lake cores that run at around 3 GHz with a Turbo of approximately 4 GHz. AMD developed GPU features 24 computing units in 100-watt models and the lower-powered models have 20. Only the highest end 8809G is specced for overclocking.

To showcase how the new processors are optimally used, Intel announced a reference product called Hades Canyon (pictured). The NUC (Next Unit of Computing) form factor computer is a mini PC that has the power to run VR applications in addition to fulfilling other home entertainment needs.

HP is recalling batteries for some notebook or mobile workstation products after numerous reports of overheating, property damage and a burn injury.

It estimates that about 50,000 batteries are involved, sold with products between December 2015 and December 2017. HP received eight reports of battery packs overheating, melting, or charring, including three reports of property damage totaling $4,500 with one report of a minor injury involving a first degree burn to the hand.

The batteries were shipped with or sold as accessories for HP ProBooks (64x G2 and G3 series, 65x G2 and G3 series), HPx360 310 G2, HP Envy m6, HP Pavilion x360, HP 11, HP ZBook (17 G3, 17 G4, and Studio G3) Mobile Workstations.

HP is providing battery replacement services by an authorized technician at no cost. Additionally, HP is also providing a BIOS update that places the battery in "Battery Safety Mode" so that the notebook or workstation can be safely used without the battery by connecting to an HP power adaptor.

If the validation process identifies a battery as being eligible for replacement, the BIOS update should be applied and the system should be rebooted. During the reboot process, an option will be presented to enable Battery Safety Mode.

Amazon is reportedly set to bid for a Premier League streaming rights package next month, to bring English Premier League matches to Amazon Prime customers.

It had been expected that a digital player would jump in and compete for streaming rights for Premier League football matches at auction. Sky and BT Sports dominated the previous auction in 2015, which generated more than £5.1 billion ($6.9 billion) in revenue for the Premier League.

Amazon views the acquisition of more sports content as a way to boost subscribers to its Prime service. It tells investors that the service also tends to produce more loyal shoppers overall than non-Prime customers.

One of its more recent exclusive features is a documentary series about Manchester City football club, which is currently leading the Premier League division at just over half way through the season.

Ed Woodward, chief executive officer of Manchester United, had previously hinted to shareholders that he expected to see digital giants come in and compete against the traditional broadcasters to bid on match packages, which will range from 32 matches to 20 matches.

Apple has confirmed that its Mac and iOS devices are affected by CPU flaws disclosed this week, and that it is patching to mitigate the threat.

Apple confirmed on its tech support website that all Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time. The Cupertino giant has already issued fixes to address the threat of Meltdown, specifically iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2.

Apple Watch is not affected by Meltdown.

Spectre is a potential threat for Mac and iOS devices but requires a malicious app (or a benign app acting maliciously) to exploit the flaw successfully. For that reason, Apple stresses that customers should only acquire apps from trusted sources.

There are other ways for Spectre to be exploited in Apple devices however, with the most obvious being a malicious webpage opened in the Safari browser. To address this possibility, Apple has pledged to release mitigations in Safari to help defend against Spectre.

Meltdown and Spectre affect almost all CPUs sold in consumer devices for a couple of decades.

Read More: Meltdown & Spectre: Serious CPU bugs affect Desktops, Servers and Smartphones

More than 70 million users now pay a premium subscription fee for unlimited music streaming from Stockholm-based Spotify.

Spotify is the largest music streaming service in the world, fending off competition from Apple Inc. and from Amazon and others. The Apple Music service counts 30 million subscribers as of September, but its launch in June 2015 did not significantly impact Spotify as had been anticipated. Instead, Spotify has gone from strength to strength, rapidly adding millions of paying subscribers.

If you count Spotify users who stream for free on the ad-supported platform, then Spotify counts around 140 million active users.

Last year, Spotify was valued at around $19 billion and has started 2018 with a confidential filing with a confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an IPO. Spotify is targeting a direct listing at some point in Q1 2018.

Spotify is also the target of a $1.6 billion lawsuit from Wixen Music Publishing, alleging that the music streaming service failed to obtain necessary "mechanical licenses" for many songs in its catalog.

Intel says it will have released patches to address major CPU security flaws for 90 percent of recently-released chips by next week.

The chipmaker is working with rivals AMD, ARM and others in an industry response to the revelation of serious CPU security flaws disclosed recently. Meltdown and Spectre break the isolation between memory used by applications, and even applications and kernel-mode memory, posing a significant security risk if exploited.

Meltdown appears to only affect CPUs released by Intel, whereas Spectre also impacts processors from AMD and ARM-based chips in mobile & entertainment devices.

Intel has already issued updates for all types of Intel-based computer systems, including personal computers and servers, to address the flaws. It is focusing primarily on products released in the past five years, for the time being. By the end of next week, Intel expects to have issued updates for more than 90 percent of processor products introduced within the past five years.

Operating system vendors including Apple, Microsoft and Google are also pushing out fixes to mitigate the flaws, and software developers are working on patches to address the threat posed by Spectre.

Nintendo has revealed that sales of its Nintendo Switch games console have broken the previous record held by its Wii home console in the United States.

In its first 10 months of availability, Nintendo's iconic Wii entertainment system sold more than four million units in the United States. Nintendo's Switch launched on March 3, 2017, and in the ten months since launch it has sold 4.8 million units, easily surpassing the record held by its Wii system.

The Japanese electronics firm nodded to the popularity of the games line-up for the Switch system to explain the unprecedented demand in the United States. In the U.S., more than 60 percent of Nintendo Switch owners have Super Mario Odyssey, and over 55 percent own The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

There are more than 300 third-party games also available for the Switch console.

"Fans across the country have experienced the joy of playing their favorite games at home or on the go," said Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America's President and COO.

"Now that many more people have received Nintendo Switch systems for the holidays, we look forward to bringing them fun new surprises in 2018 and beyond."

The world's leading music streaming service has filed for an initial public offering with U.S. regulators, eyeing a direct listing in Q1 2018.

The Reuters news agency cited sources familiar with the matter in reporting that Spotify made the confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. Last year, Spotify was valued at around $19 billion.

Spotify counts more than 140 million users, 60 million of whom are paying customers, as of mid-2017.

It will proceed with the direct listing despite being the target of a whopping $1.7 billion copyright lawsuit. Wixen Music Publishing Inc filed the lawsuit against the Swedish streaming service last week in a California federal court.

The lawsuit alleges that Spotify failed to negotiate a direct or compulsory license that would allow it to reproduce and distribute songs for which Wixen is an exclusive licensee.

Spotify offers a catalog of more than 30 million songs to subscribers.

AT&T has announced that it will rollout its initial 5G cellular network services in the United States in 2018.

The announcement comes weeks after international wireless standards for the network technology were finalized by 3GPP. With vital elements of the standard now settled, device manufacturers can now begin development of compatible equipment.

AT&T has committed to rollout its initial 5G network services to its customers in a dozen cities in the United States, some time later this year. It will also trial 5G technology with businesses of all sizes across industries.

5G promises significant improvements in speed and in latency for cellular users over the LTE network technology that is now standard in most developed countries.

"5G will change the way we live, work and enjoy entertainment," said Melissa Arnoldi, president, AT&T Technology and Operations.

"We're moving quickly to begin deploying mobile 5G this year and start unlocking the future of connectivity for consumers and businesses. With faster speeds and ultra-low latency, 5G will ultimately deliver and enhance experiences like virtual reality, future driverless cars, immersive 4K video and more."


Img Src: Att.com

Operating system vendors, cloud storage providers and other tech firms are scrambling to mitigate the affects of serious CPU vulnerabilities affecting servers, desktops and even mobile devices.

The hardware bugs have been dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown is named for the metaphorical melting of security boundaries that are taken as a given because they are enforced by hardware itself. Spectre is named based on the root cause of the bug; speculative execution.

Both are very serious and are almost certain to affect you. Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) breaks the isolation between user applications and the operating system. Applications that exploit the hardware bug can access the OS / System memory and the memory of other applications. In essence, this means a malicious (though seemingly benign) application can steal sensitive data from memory. Applied to cloud services, this brings up the possibility of sensitive information being stolen from other customers, though cloud providers have already addressed the issue for the most part.

Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715) breaks the expected isolation between different applications. If exploited, it allows a malicious application to trick error-free programs into leaking sensitive information. What makes it even worse is that the discoverers of Spectre say the safety checks of said best practices actually increase the attack surface and may make applications more susceptible to Spectre.

SpaceX is preparing to finally test its Falcon Heavy rocket later this month, and has released a video showing the powerful vehicle sitting on the pad.

Falcon Heavy is SpaceX' super heavy-lift launch vehicle based on its Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon Heavy features a strengthened Falcon 9 rocket core and two additional Falcon 9 boosters as strap-on stages. It will produce 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, or the equivalent of 18 Boeing 747s on full power.

Max payload to low-Earth orbit reaches 140,700 (63,800kg) maximum. The core and side stages are designed to be reused to bring costs down considerably per launch.

Here it is:

With more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff--equal to approximately eighteen 747 aircraft at full power--Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two.

A post shared by SpaceX (@spacex) on Jan 2, 2018 at 6:03pm PST

The test flight will go ahead this month provided Falcon Heavy passes all pre-flight checks, including a static fire of its 27 Merlin 1D engines. If successful, it will blast off with Elon Musk's own Tesla Roadster electric vehicle, which will be put on course to orbit Mars. However, even Musk himself has warned that there is a very real possibility that the initial launch will fail.

The World Health Organization is set to class gaming addiction as a mental health condition for the first time.

The classification is part of the organization's 11th International Classification of Diseases (ICD) that will be published this year. It refers to gaming habits so severe that they take complete precedence over other life interests.

Abnormal gaming behavior should persist for more than twelve months for a diagnosis to be made, except if symptoms were severe. Associated symptoms would include impaired control over gaming frequency, intensity and duration, as well as escalating gaming habits even as negative consequences mount.

Some countries around the world have already been treating excessive gaming as an addiction problem and responding with public policy, including time limits enforced on online gaming for minors.

In the UK, some private addiction clinics treat patients for digital addiction.