Can ARM chips compete neck-and-neck with Intel and AMD on benchmarks? That could be happening sooner than you think. Starting next year, ARM processors will get significantly faster thanks to big changes in the company’s Cortex-A chip designs. ARM is taking a page from rivals like AMD that have focused on raising the performance threshold in…
Mozilla last week patched a Firefox vulnerability just a day after it was revealed during Pwn2Own, the first vendor to fix a flaw disclosed at the hacking contest. “Congrats to #Mozilla for being the first vendor to patch vuln[erability] disclosed during #Pwn2Own,” tweeted the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) Monday. ZDI, the bug brokerage run by…
Wearable devices that double as clothing or get worn on the ear will grow the fastest of all wearables in the next five years, market research firm IDC said Monday. Earworn devices, sometimes called “hearables,” will grow by 43% every year over that period, IDC said. They started from a small base: just 700,000 devices…
Samsung revealed Monday that Bixby, an intelligent voice assistant, will run on the Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphone slated to be announced March 29 in New York. Bixby will be activated using a special physical button on the side of the phone, differentiating it from some other assistants that rely on a trigger word, like “Alexa”…
Future U.S. elections may very well face more Russian attempts to interfere with the outcome, the FBI and the National Security Agency warned on Monday. “They’ll be back,” said FBI director James Comey. “They’ll be back in 2020. They may be back in 2018.” Comey made the comment during a congressional hearing on Russia’s suspected…
Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, was the world’s richest person in 2016, the fourth year in a row he has headed the list, Forbes said today. But Gates’ fortune did not rely on the Microsoft shares he held, filings with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) showed. Forbes pegged Gates’ total…
Two teams of researchers managed to win the biggest bounties at this year’s Pwn2Own hacking contest by escaping from the VMware Workstation virtual machine and executing code on the host operating system. Virtual machines are in used in many scenarios to create throw-away environments that pose no threat to the main operating system in case…
Swift, Apple’s successor language to Objective-C, has made great strides in the latest biannual RedMonk Programming Language Rankings, moving up to a tie for 11th spot, after placing 17th in the mid-year 2016 rankings. Released last Friday, the rankings also show Microsoft’s TypeScript, Google’s Go, and Mozilla Rust making progress. The rankings are based on…
There was a time when routers were boring gray boxes that delivered the Internet. These days, the more expensive ones look like spaceships bristling for war with an impressive feature set to boot. That’s exactly the look of the Netgear Nighthawk X10, a cutting-edge 802.11ad router on sale at Amazon today for $350. Originally priced…
At its InterConnect conference in Las Vegas this week, IBM is announcing new features for its open source cloud-hosted blockchain service in an attempt to bring this distributed database technology from its initial use of powering Bitcoin to a broader market, including the financial services industry. Blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a continually…