(Photo: Shahadat Rahman/Unsplash)Hackers have exploited a security loophole within one of the FBI’s databases, resulting in tens of thousands of “high profile” individuals’ contact details being listed for sale on the dark web. The breach was discovered Wednesday after the infiltrators had already placed a $50,000 price tag on the stolen information. KrebsOnSecurity, a security-focused news outlet, first the misdeed when it encountered a post on the cybercrime forum Breached. The post claims to offer the entirety of the FBI’s InfraGard for a “starting” price of $50,000 USD. “This will be sold one time only,” mysteriously writes the original poster, who goes by USDoD.
AMD’s long-awaited RDNA3 GPUs launched on Dec. 13, and although they didn’t score a knockout victory over their rivals in early tests, they’re clearly worthy competitors. Their main flaw, reviewers noted, was lackluster ray tracing performance, to the surprise of exactly nobody. But now that the dust has settled and cards are in gamers’ hands, reports have surfaced online showing a variety of bizarre issues. The most troubling accuses AMD of shipping the Radeon RX 790 XTX with very early silicon with disabled shader prefetch hardware. The above is still unverified at the time of this writing, but here’s what we know.
NASA’s Juno probe reached Jupiter in 2016, spending several years studying our solar system’s largest planet. The spacecraft is now in the second year of its extended mission as it focuses on the planet’s expansive system of moons. NASA has just released a new image of the volcanic moon Io, and you can consider this a teaser — the agency acquired a new image of the moon this week from an even closer vantage, and it’ll release that one soon. Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanic place in the solar system, . The image above was captured by the spacecraft’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) infrared camera from a distance of 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers).
(Credit: The Tech Outlook)Lenovo has dabbled in phones over the years, but most of its mobile efforts are concentrated in its Motorola subsidiary. A from The Tech Outlook claims that is preparing to launch a Lenovo-branded smartphone called the ThinkPhone. The physical style is akin to the ThinkPad laptops, and it looks like it’ll have some high-end specs. If you’re getting tired of the glass backs on most phones, the ThinkPhone might be a refreshing change for you. It has an Aramid fiber body similar to Lenovo’s ThinkPad laptops. There’s an additional button on the left edge, possibly a configurable shortcut key, adding a pop of color reminiscent of the Trackpoint nub on ThinkPad laptops.
(Credit: peterschreiber.media/iStock/Getty Images)Depression can be a tricky mental illness to pin down. While therapy and pharmaceuticals help to tame some people’s symptoms, others’ tendencies toward depressive episodes remain resistant to conventional treatment. For the latter group, a depression-free life can seem elusive—which doesn’t exactly help the sense of hopelessness that depression can cause. Without alternative intervention, the resulting cycle of cynicism and desperation can be dangerous. Neuroscientists and surgeons at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas say they’ve developed a “mood decoder” that uses electrodes to measure depression in real time. Not only does their system reportedly help researchers understand where depression originates or “occurs,” but it might also help guide alternative treatments such as deep brain stimulation (DBS).
Now that Intel has finally launched its Arc Alchemist line of GPUs in the US, it appears to be doing most of the heavy lifting itself. So far the only cards we’ve seen for sale are Intel-branded. ASRock and Acer have partnered with Intel, but the usual suspects haven’t: Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte. However, now it appears Gigabyte has begun selling Arc cards too, but it’s not crowing about it. Before you get your hopes up, it’s only selling them abroad, and it’s just the low-end models for now. Gigabyte appears to be selling the two low-end Arc models at select stores in Russia and Kazakhstan.
The Apollo 17 lunar rover. (Credit: NASA/Gene Cernan, via NASA HQ)Hello, readers, and welcome back. This week in space, there’s trouble, from here to there and back again. NASA and Roscosmos are scrambling to stabilize a coolant leak from the Soyuz capsule docked at the International Space Station. But it’s not all bad news; Orion splashed down safely over the weekend. This week we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 17, humanity’s last crewed mission to the moon — at least, for a while yet. Astronomers working with the Hubble telescope found two gigantic “water worlds.” And this week’s astronomy image from the JWST shows a sky strewn with cosmic PEARLS.
It was a year ago when we first got a glimpse of Dell’s Project Luna. It was designed as a modular laptop with easy-to-swap parts that could be upgraded, upcycled, or recycled, both to make repairs easier and to reduce e-waste. It was envisioned as an environmentally friendly laptop, distinctly easier to repair over its life cycle compared with today’s intricate notebooks. We said at the time it was a great concept, but we just didn’t have faith that It turns out we might have spoken too soon, as the company is still plugging away at it. At a recent press event in NYC, our sister site got another look at it, and it’s now so easy to replace parts that even a robot can do it.
The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) was forced to abort a planned spacewalk late on Wednesday when a Soyuz spacecraft docked at the station sprang a leak. The Soyuz leaked coolant for several hours while ground control in Moscow and the ISS crew attempted to get it under control. Teams are still assessing the spacecraft, which is scheduled to transport three of the crew back to Earth in the coming weeks. Potentially more troubling, the Soyuz is the only way to evacuate all seven crewmembers in the event of an emergency. Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin were suited up and waiting in a depressurized airlock on Wednesday evening when flight control delayed the start of their space walk.
