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Security researchers discovered a severe vulnerability in sensitive networking gear used by most of the top Fortune 50 companies. The flaw, CVE-2022-1388, has a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. It warrants the high ranking because hackers are already exploiting the weakness, which allows them to execute root commands without even entering a password, giving them complete control of the network. The vulnerability resides in F5’s BIG-IP line of networking gear....

“[We] assess that since at least June 2022, cyber criminal actors have sent help desk-themed phishing emails to FCEB federal staff’s personal, and government email addresses,” the alert reads. The scams are a bit more sophisticated than the typical phishing emails most people ignore. Dubbed “callback phishing,” emails are sent out that appear legitimate, like the one above from “Geek Squad.” The emails take the form of a high-priced subscription auto-renewal notice and list a number to call to cancel the automatic charge or a link to a “first-stage malicious domain....

Confirmation of the premiere comes just days after HBO prematurely let the date slip on the show’s page on HBO Max. HBO formally announced the live-action adaptation in early 2020 with Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann at the helm. Carolyn Strauss (Chernobyl and Game of Thrones) will also serve as executive producer, along with Evan Wells from Naughty Dog. It is based on Naughty Dog’s hit video game franchise by the same name, the first entry of which landed in 2013 for the PlayStation 3 before being ported to the PS4 the following year....

“It’s over,” one of my teammates typed a moment after Nova tried to rouse our spirits. “Yup,” another responded. They didn’t want to keep fighting. But we couldn’t surrender, either. So instead we all just wandered idly around the map for a final few minutes, waiting for the enemy team to make one last push into our base. Blizzard, the company that made Heroes of the Storm, defines the game as a “hero brawler....

The cards were sold by a large number of companies. Orchid Technologies was first to market with the $299 Orchid Righteous 3D, a board noted for having mechanical relays that “clicked” when the chipset was in use. Later revisions utilized solid-state relays in line with the rest of the vendors. The card was followed by Diamond Multimedia’s Monster 3D, Colormaster’s Voodoo Mania, the Canopus Pure3D, Quantum3D, Miro Hiscore, Skywell (Magic3D), and the 2theMAX Fantasy FX Power 3D....

You pay $60 for many of the new games you play, but how much does a blockbuster game cost to make? Although it is a seemingly simple question, it is actually incredibly difficult to answer. Of all the opaque video game industry questions, this is perhaps the most opaque. Many in the industry don’t even know the budgets of games. It is not unusual for developer working on a big-budget game to have no idea of the game’s budget....

Given how Windows handles/prioritizes system memory we didn’t think this would have much impact on gaming performance. That said, this time we have run the game tests with Chrome open in the background with 65 active tabs fully loaded, which consumed 2.2GB of memory when 16GB was available. With 16GB of memory available we found that Chrome plus GTA V used 9GB of memory but there was absolutely no difference between the 16GB and 8GB configurations....

Editor’s Note: Guest author Heinrich Long is a writer at Restore Privacy, a blog dedicated to inform about best online privacy practices, secure your electronic devices, unblock restricted content and defeat censorship. As a Windows 10 user, you have numerous options for encrypting information. In this guide we will show you ways to encrypt individual files, file folders, and even entire disk drives. Each approach has its own benefits and drawbacks, so we’ll cover those, too....

HP’s more modest gaming desktop is the simply named Omen Desktop, which is now available with AMD Ryzen processors inside. It’s a more traditional tower-style chassis that’s highly configurable, with prices ranging from just under $1,000 to over $3,200. The idea here is that HP can provide gamers of many budgets with a pre-built system that will satisfy your needs. Here’s a quick look at what HP provides in the Omen Desktop at both the entry level and high end price points, as well as the system I was provided to review....

Once again we’re seeing huge performance increases over Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 801 devices. The Adreno 530 in the Snapdragon 820 is the fastest smartphone GPU going around, even narrowly edging out the iPhone 6s. The throttling performance of the HTC 10 is very similar to the Snapdragon 820-powered LG G5, which isn’t all that surprising. The HTC 10’s long term performance, after around 25 minutes of gaming, is around 16% lower than its peak performance, which is a great result and keeps its sustained performance well above older devices....

With the Vive set up in my living room, I’ve been everywhere from outer space to Aperture Science’s stark white labs to a quiet beach where I just sat on the ground and listened to the waves. Like, I actually sat on the ground. With my own butt. The Basics Valve and HTC’s Vive is the most immediately impressive (and imposing) VR headset on the market. It comes with a price to match: $800....

On the last page I mentioned that on paper we should see the Kirin 960’s GPU provide roughly 2.3x the performance of the Kirin 955’s GPU. Across every test I performed, the actual figure here is 2.35x, which is mighty close. This is an enormous gain in GPU performance, but really it was only possible because the Kirin 955 packed a very weak GPU for a modern high-end SoC. With that said, the performance of the Kirin 960 here doesn’t match Huawei’s marketing claims for the SoC....

A few days ago, an enterprising Lego builder posted a video of his light-up Legos, and I was swept back to my childhood. “If they had only had these when I was a kid,” I thought. The anonymous builder made the unique building bricks, he calls LEDOs, as a submission to Lego for consideration for mass production. Lego rejected the idea. However, as the builder points out, they are not hard to make....

Intel’s 10th-gen lineup is admittedly confusing because of the split in architectures and fabrication. One group of processors use Intel’s long awaited 10nm process, that’s codenamed Ice Lake and it brings two major improvements: a new Sunny Cove CPU core with a boost to IPC, and Gen11 graphics with more execution units and new features. The other group of processors are Comet Lake, these are another refinement of Skylake on 14nm....

The Kaby Lake processors offer a small bump in memory bandwidth compared to the Skylake models. Both were using DDR4-3200 memory, the only difference being that we tested the 7700K and 7600K on a Z270 motherboard while the older 6700K and 6600K were tested on a Z170 board. When it comes to cache performance, the Kaby Lake processors were again better though this was to be expected given their clock speed advantage....

We don’t doubt that Intel had planned to release Skylake-X all along, but did they plan to offer something higher than a 12-core part before catching wind of AMD’s Threadripper? It also seems unlikely that they meant to announce the X299 platform in late May and release it in June, made evident by the rushed motherboard development and the mess that ensued. We received the first Intel Core i9 part – the $1,000 10-core 7900X – in late June along with a few Core i7 models featuring 8, 6 and even 4 cores, but it wasn’t until August that we learned the official specifications for Intel’s new $1,200 12-core, $1,400 14-core, $1,700 16 core and a $2000 18-core processors, the last two of which we’ll be reviewing today....

That didn’t change in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 as the Intel-based system offered 19fps at 1280x800 while AMD’s platforms provided a highly playable 48fps and 62fps. Even Far Cry 2 in DX9 with the lowest possible quality settings were a heavy burden for the DH61AG and Core i3, which averaged just 32fps. Newer games such as Dirt 3 will never be enjoyed on Intel’s integrated graphics while the A6-3650 was able to produce a respectable 49fps....

The patent in question was acquired by VLSI from Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors NV, and according to the patent troll attorney it would cause “millions and millions of infringements per second” within Intel’s CPUs. The jury was convinced, and VLSI got the full amount of damages it requested. Patent US7247552B2 covers a “technique for alleviating the problems of defects caused by stress applied to bond pads.” The patented technology would improve the chip design before the actual manufacturing process, adding dummy metal lines to interconnect layers to increase the metal density of the interconnect layers....

In addition to our featured flash devices, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM hard drive has been included for comparison’s sake. Our testing suite consists of four synthetic benchmark programs and our own file copying and load time tests. As you likely know, while manufacturers claim impressive peak I/O performance out of the box, this performance can diminish over time. Unlike a conventional hard drive, any write operation made to an SSD is a two-step process: a data block must be erased and then written to....

Like most SSDs, the SSDNow V+200 adheres to the 2.5" form factor, measuring 69.85 x 100 x 9.5mm and weighing 115g. They consume up to 3.2 watts in use and only 0.56 watts at idle, which is slightly more than the HyperX 3K. The SSDNow V+200 comes loaded with 25nm Intel 29F64G08ACME3 MLC NAND flash memory. Our review sample has sixteen 16GB NAND ICs for a total capacity of 256GB, but again, this drive is marketed as 240GB because 16GB is reserved for data parity (8GB for RAISE), garbage collection, and block replacement....