(Photo: Dylan Ferreira/Unsplash)The tech industry has been rife with recruiting issues in recent years, from post-interview ghosting to bait-and-switch tactics affecting both sides of a job offer. But now the FBI is warning tech companies to look out for an unexpected challenge: deepfake interviewees. Bad actors are impersonating other people via deepfakes to weasel their way into remote work positions, according to the agency’s latest public service . The wrongdoer starts by gathering enough of their target’s personal information to convincingly apply to jobs as that person. Then they acquire a few high-quality photos of the person, either through theft or a bit of casual online sleuthing.
Just a few years ago, foldables were a rarity in the smartphone ecosystem, but they’ve quickly become an annual component of Samsung’s release cycle. They’re still fantastically expensive devices, though. As we wait on the Galaxy Z Fold4 and Flip4, a new report points to a more reasonably priced future for Samsung’s foldables. The company is allegedly working on mid-range foldables that will be part of its A-series lineup, which could push foldable sales to new heights. If you wanted to pick up a foldable right now, you’d have to spend at least a thousand dollars, ignoring any short-term sales.
Kevin Glynn, aka Uncle Webb at TechSpot, has developed several useful freeware utilities like ThrottleStop and RealTemp over the years. In the course of developing those programs he discovered a curious behavior in Windows Defender with Intel CPUs. Windows Defender is the software included with Windows to protect your PC from malware and viruses. Webb discovered that at random intervals Defender would suddenly begin using excessive CPU resources. In some cases it can result in up to six percent lower performance. Thankfully Webb has created a free utility to resolve the issue, and it’s called . Note this behavior has been reported so far with Intel 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th gen CPUs on Windows 10 and 11.
Apple announced its upgraded M2 SoC at WWDC recently, and the first laptop to use it is the 13″ MacBook Pro. The laptop became available to testers a few days ago, allowing content creators to put it through its paces. This week YouTuber MaxTech compared the new 13″ M2 Pro to the older M1-based Pro with the M1 Pro SoC. In the tests, the newer M2-based Pro’s cooling performance, or lack thereof, is shockingly bad. He found when exporting 8K Canon RAW footage the M2 model hit 108C and experienced severe thermal throttling. This stands in stark contrast to the 14″ M1 MacBook Pro, which never throttled in the same test.
After a successful attempt to boost the International Space Station into a higher orbit earlier this week, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus NG-17 spacecraft has burned up in a controlled destructive descent. The Cygnus spacecraft — whose official name is the S.S. Piers Sellers, after the late NASA astronaut and climatologist — made berth at the International Space Station (ISS) on February 21. At the time, it was carrying more than 8,300 lb (3,760 kg) of provisions, cargo, scientific experiments, and other sundry supplies. The S.S. Piers Sellers even brought a secondary lithium-ion battery to demo for the ISS, and a new system designed to test a suite of hydroponic and aeroponic techniques in microgravity.
There’s an old adage in tech about never buying the first generation of any product. As far as Apple Silicon is concerned, however, you might be better off if you did. Reviewers keep finding new ways that the new, M2-equipped MacBook Pro base system is a weaker product than its predecessor. Now, there’s evidence from real-world tests that the M2-equipped base model MacBook takes a hefty penalty when put under a heavy DRAM load. For now, only the baseline M2 with 256GB of SSD storage and 8GB of unified memory is known to be affected. In the past few days, we’ve seen that the entry-level MacBook Pro offers just half the SSD controller channels of the M1 and that this impacts its theoretical storage performance.
by Eric Kilby, CC BY-SA 2.0This week, the PCI-SIG working group that controls the PCI Express standard announced that it was on track to finalize and release the PCIe 7.0 standard by 2025. The amount of time between finalization and commercialization varies, but is typically 12-18 months. We might reasonably expect PCIe 7.0 devices in-market by 2026, with support for up to 512GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth. At present, the PCIe 4.0-compliant platforms that are available today support transfer rates of up to 64GB/s in bidirectional mode. PCIe 5.0 is technically available, but GPUs and SSDs don’t widely support the standard yet, so PCIe 7.0 represents an effective 8x increase in bandwidth compared to what’s actually available today.
Earlier this year Nvidia was the victim of a hack on its network. The fallout was not trivial, as the group released a lot of proprietary information. It dumped the DLSS source code, information about upcoming GPUs, and also created workarounds for its anti-mining LHR technology. Now it’s AMD’s turn in the barrel, according to a new report. AMD has allegedly been hacked, with the perpetrators exfiltrating over 50GB of data. At this time it’s not clear if the data was taken directly from AMD or one of its partners. The actual hack happened back in January of this year, but we’re just now learning about it.
We’ll have to wait a little longer to find out what’s up with one of the most interesting in the solar system. NASA has confirmed that a minor software glitch will cause a delay for its upcoming Psyche mission, which was set to launch in September 2022. The motion of the planets is working against NASA here, so even a small delay means Psyche won’t be able to launch in 2022 at all, and that puts the science phase of the mission toward the end of the decade. Psyche (the spacecraft) is named after the asteroid it will eventually visit.
