Gigarefurb Refurbished Laptops News

Symantec revealed connections between the Longhorn cyberespionage group and tools described in alleged CIA documents published by WikiLeaks. The so-called “Vault 7” trove describes the CIA’s methods for infecting target computers with malware, snooping on end-to-end encrypted messages, and other hacking techniques used by the U.S. intelligence agency. Now, the files also suggest that Longhorn and the CIA are one and the same.

Symantec reached that conclusion by comparing information taken from the Vault 7 documents with everything it’s learned about Longhorn. The group has been active since at least 2011, according to Symantec, which said that it’s known to have targeted 40 devices across 16 countries. The company said only one device in the U.S. has been targeted–and an uninstaller launched “within hours,” which suggests an accidental infection.

Longhorn is said to have targeted members of the “financial, telecoms, energy, aerospace, information technology, education, and natural resources sectors” as well as governments and “internationally operating organizations” with a mix of zero-day vulnerabilities and back door Trojans. Those characteristics are common among nation-state actors that often use hacking in the name of national interests rather than for personal gain.

There were hints that Longhorn was based in North America before the Vault 7 leak. Symantec explained in its blog post:

Prior to the Vault 7 leak, Symantec’s assessment of Longhorn was that it was a well-resourced organization which was involved in intelligence gathering operations. This assessment was based on its global range of targets and access to a range of comprehensively developed malware and zero-day exploits. The group appeared to work a standard Monday to Friday working week, based on timestamps and domain name registration dates, behavior which is consistent with state-sponsored groups.

Symantec’s analysis uncovered a number of indicators that Longhorn was from an English-speaking, North American country. The acronym MTWRFSU (Monday Tuesday Wednesday ThuRsday Friday Saturday SUnday) was used to configure which day of the week malware would communicate with the attackers. This acronym is common in academic calendars in North America. Some of the code words found in the malware, such as SCOOBYSNACK, would be most familiar in North America. In addition to this, the compilation times of tools with reliable timestamps indicate a time zone in the Americas.

The company stated said that documents in the Vault 7 trove match what it knows about Longhorn. References to specific malware, similarities in how various tools work, and cryptographic protocols all point to a connection between the CIA and Longhorn. Symantec also noted that the intelligence agency and cyberespionage both use very similar “tradecraft practices” with their attacks. The evidence is more than circumstantial.

Vault 7 documents have offered a lot of insight into how antivirus products are circumvented or how remote car hacks might (but probably won’t) be used to kill people, among other things, and how companies affected by the leaks respond to what they find. The files have also shown how the CIA repurposes public malware to suit its own needs, and now they strongly suggest that the agency is behind a high-profile hacking group.

Still, it’s worth noting that Symantec didn’t connect the dots between Longhorn and the CIA; rather, it found connections between the group and the Vault 7 documents. The company didn’t outright blame the CIA–perhaps because it didn’t want the kind of scrutiny that would result if it did–and of course there are multiple countries in North America. The general consensus, however, is that the Vault 7 documents were in fact taken from the CIA.

Go to Source

Nvidia Tesla P40Google recently published a paper about the performance of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and how it compared to Nvidia’s Kepler-based K80 GPU working in conjunction with Intel’s Haswell CPU. The TPU’s deep learning results were impressive compared to the GPUs and CPUs, but Nvidia said it can top Google’s TPU with some of its latest inference chips, such as the Tesla P40.

Tesla P40 Vs Google TPU

Google’s TPU went online in 2015, which is why the company compared its performance against other chips that it was using at that time in its data centers, such as the Nvidia Tesla K80 GPU and the Intel Haswell CPU.

Google is only now releasing the results, possibly because it doesn’t want other machine learning competitors (think Microsoft, rather than Nvidia or Intel) to learn about the secrets that make its AI so advanced, at least until it’s too late to matter. Releasing the TPU results now could very well mean Google is already testing or even deploying its next-generation TPU.

Nevertheless, Nvidia took the opportunity to show that its latest inference GPUs, such as the Tesla P40, have evolved significantly since then, too. Some of the increase in inference performance seen by Nvidia GPUs is due to the company jumping from the previous 28nm process node to the 16nm FinFET node. This jump offered its chips about twice as much performance per Watt.

Nvidia also further improved its GPU architecture for deep learning in Maxwell, and then again in Pascal. Yet another reason for why the new GPU is so much faster for inferencing is that Nvidia’s deep learning and inference-optimized software has improved significantly as well.

Finally, perhaps the main reason for why the Tesla P40 can be up to 26x faster than the old Tesla K80, according to Nvidia, is because the Tesla P40 supports INT8 computation, as opposed to the FP32-only support for the K80. Inference doesn’t need too high accuracy when doing calculations and 8-bit integers seem to be enough for most types of neural networks.

According to Nvidia, all of these improvements allow the P40 to be highly competitive to an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) such as Google’s TPU. In the Nvidia-provided chart below, the Tesla P40 even seems to be twice as fast as Google’s TPU for inferencing.

Tesla K80 vs Google TPU vs Tesla P40Nvidia said that the P40 also has ten times as much bandwidth, as well as 12 teraflops 32-bit floating point performance, which would be more useful for training neural networks. Google’s TPU is only an inference chip, so inference performance is all it’s got.

Is It A Fair Comparison?

Comparing an ASIC and a GPU is a little like comparing apples to oranges. However, what matters most to a company like Google is the cost-performance of a given chip, no matter the architecture.

Google is a big enough company that it doesn’t need its chips to do multiple things at once. It can afford to pick GPUs for training neural networks and TPUs for inferencing. If the TPUs have a better cost-performance than GPUs, then the company would likely choose it (as it already has).

We don’t know how much a TPU costs Google, and we know that a P40 can cost over $5,000. The Tesla P40 may have double the inference performance, but if it costs at least twice as much, then Google may still stick to the TPUs.

Another aspect is how much the chips cost to run. The Tesla P40 has a 250W TDP, or three times higher than the TPU’s 75W. Even if the upfront cost for both the TPU and the Tesla P40 is similar, Google would probably still choose the TPU because of the significantly lower run costs.

Nvidia Tesla P4 efficiency compared to CPU and FPGANvidia’s lower-end inference chip, the Tesla P4, may have been a closer competitor in terms of upfront cost as well as cost to run, because it also has a TDP of 75W. However, according to Nvidia, the P4 has a little less than half of P40’s performance. That could mean that the Tesla P4 has slightly less performance than the TPU at the same power consumption level.

Nvidia mentioned that the P40 has 10x higher bandwidth, which is likely the main limiting factor of the TPU and why the P40 can be twice as fast for inference performance. Google also admitted in its recent paper that if it had four times as much bandwidth for its TPU, its inference performance could have been three times higher.

However, this improvement would likely come to a next-generation TPU. Combined with other possible improvements that Google mentioned in its paper, the next-gen TPU could be multiple times faster compared to the current one and the Tesla P40. Whether that TPU can be matched by Nvidia’s future inference GPUs for a similar power draw and cost remains to be seen.

Machine Learning Chips Crave Optimization

What we’re seeing from both Google’s TPU, as well as Nvidia’s latest GPUs is that machine learning needs as much performance as you can throw at it. That means we should see chip makers strive to optimize their chips for machine learning as much as possible over the next few years, as well as narrowing their focus (for training or inferencing) to squeeze even more performance out of each transistor. The machine learning market is a booming one, so there should be plenty of interested customers for more specialized chips, too.

The specialization of machine learning chips should also be a boon for the embedded markets, which should soon see plenty of small but increasingly powerful inference chips. This could allow more embedded devices, such as smartphones, drones, robots, surveillance cameras, and so on, to offer “AI-enhanced” services with impressive capabilities at a low cost and without a need for an internet connection to function.

Go to Source

AMD announced the acquisition of Nitero, a fabless semiconductor company based out of Austin, TX that developed a phased-array beamforming millimeter wave chip for VR headsets.

Although the terms of the acquisition were not made public, we do know that the deal not only includes Nitero’s wireless virtual reality IP, but all its employees as well. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Pat Kelly, will join AMD as Corporate Vice President, Wireless IP.

Demand for wireless VR and AR headsets is on the rise, so it only makes sense that a company as heavily invested in virtual reality as AMD would make a move like this. Mark Papermaster, AMD’s chief technology officer and senior vice president, said in a press release:

Unwieldly headset cables remain a significant barrier to drive widespread adoption of VR. Our newly acquired wireless VR technology is focused on solving this challenge, and is another example of AMD making long-term technology investments to develop high-performance computing and graphics technologies that can create more immersive computing experiences.

The press release went on to state that, by using high-performance 60GHz wireless, Nitero’s phased-array beamforming millimeter wave chip has the potential to enable multi-gigabit transmit performance with low latency in room-scale VR environments without the line-of-sight requirement associated with traditional high-frequency millimeter wave systems.

There is no question that the industry is moving away from traditional tethered VR HMDs. You could look no further than John Carmack’s comments at OC3 paired with Oculus’ wireless Rift protoype, but there’s plenty more happening. Late last year, we reported on a company called Quark VR that is building a wireless system for the Vive, and we also spent some time with the wireless upgrade kit from TPCAST back in November. DisplayLink is working on wireless HMD technology, and so is KwikVR. We recently spent time with Sixa’s wireless Rivvr HMD kit, too. Even MIT is in on the action.

Let us not forget that Intel, one of AMD’s largest rivals, is also experimenting a wireless VR headset system.

Although AMD hasn’t shared its plans for its newly acquired IP, it’s safe to say that it will be interesting to see how the company integrates this technology into future products.

Go to Source

Soon you’ll be able to play The Elder Scrolls Online for free for an entire week. The Free Play Week starts on April 11 at 10 a.m. EDT, and ends at the same time on April 18.

You’ll be restricted to the base game during the Free Play Week–any downloadable content packs that open up other areas of the game will be unavailable. Thanks to last year’s One Tamriel update, however, you’re free to roam around the rest of the world as you please because the game’s many regions are unlocked and enemies will scale to your level.

When you begin play tomorrow, you’ll also receive 500 Crowns, the game’s premium currency. You can use these Crowns at the Crown Store to buy cosmetic items for your character, special consumables, or even a temporary boost in experience points. Speaking of experience boosts, the studio is in the midst of celebrating the game’s three-year anniversary with a special item. By completing the “Ache for Cake” quest from Chef Donolon, you’ll get a digital cake that you can consume with your friends to get a 100% experience boost that lasts for two hours.

This isn’t the first Free Play Week for The Elder Scrolls Online, and if you participated in previous iterations of the event, the content you had will be accessible once again. This includes overall progress within the game, any created characters, and items acquired from the Crown Store. If you decide to purchase the full game, all the content you received or created in the Free Play Week will be accessible to you.

The free week comes two months before the highly anticipated Morrowind expansion, which will add a new location and playable class, among other things. By providing the free weekend now, the studio will allow new players to get accustomed to the base experience before exploring other content aimed at the game’s more devout players.

Go to Source