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Windows 11’s major new update (known as ‘Moment 2’) has been released as a preview version, but it has a dangerous side-effect for some folks who have customized the interface of the OS – a bug that causes the PC to fail to boot.

That’s a big, big problem, of course, and Microsoft has flagged it as a known issue (spotted by Bleeping Computer) in the support document for the preview cumulative update (KB5022913).

Microsoft observes that some third-party UI customization apps can cause errors with Explorer.exe that could repeat in a loop. That’s File Explorer for the uninitiated and it’s the central pillar of the Windows 11 interface (the very folders and files you work with on the desktop).

The company names ExplorerPatcher and StartAllBack as the known apps that delve into the wonderful world of Windows customization which are affected. Although it does note that StartAllBack users running version 3.5.6 (or newer) may avoid the bug.

Microsoft warns: “These types of apps often use unsupported methods to achieve their customization and as a result can have unintended results on your Windows device.”

Analysis: Not so magic Moments for some

It’s not our fault, in other words, and in this case, we can give Microsoft some leeway. The whole set of gremlins might well be wrapped up in how said customization apps work, and as they are niche cases, they could have slipped through the testing net so far.

We must of course also remember that this cumulative update is still in preview, meaning it’s optional and as with anything still in the testing phase, there may be unexpected problems.

In short, you might be keen to get the Bing AI on your taskbar, or Phone Link for iOS, or any of the other major features that Moment 2 introduces, but be aware that you could run into issues here and there.

We don’t know if any other customization apps might face similar boot-related issues, although there’s no evidence yet that this is the case. That said, Stardock, which makes the popular Start11, has noted on Twitter that KB5022913 can cause some odd behavior with taskbar colors, but only on secondary monitors, so that’s a very minor glitch compared to boot failure. Start11 is getting an update to fix this, too.

For now, the best thing to do for anyone running a third-party custom UI might be to steer clear of the new Windows 11 update until it leaves preview, just to be safe.

Google has tweaked the UI of its calendar app to include new location suggestions, which it hopes will help hybrid workers schedule the right type of meetings more easily.

Where users would typically type a location name, Google Calendar now presents a series of suggestions “based on your recent locations” to make it quicker to schedule an appointment.

This is designed to work alongside previous updates that saw the Google Workspace tool add support for working locations, where an organization may have more than one office or site.

Google Calendar locations

In a blog post announcing the news, Google noted that rapid release domains have already started rollout, with scheduled release domains set to get the update later in March, and that’s only for eligible account holders.

These include Google Workspace Business Standard/Plus, Enterprise Standard/Plus, Education Fundamentals/Plus/Standard, Teaching & Learning Upgrade, Nonprofits, and legacy G Suite Business customers. Entry-level Google Workspace plans and personal customers won’t be part of the upgrade.

A firm favorite among companies looking to invest in online collaboration tools, Google has been busy adding new features to Calendar since the pandemic. Account admins can now request workers to share their working locations company-wide in order to make hybrid working less of a task.

Workers can also choose to share their working hours and out-of-office status with colleagues and clients to help make finding a suitable time easier.

Easier calendar scheduling may come as welcome news to workers in Google’s Cloud division who were recently asked to reduce office days from three to two, and instead start desk-sharing on alternate days.

• These are the best video conferencing suites

Cybercriminals are getting more sophisticated by the day, and in many cases these days – going malware-free in their hacking attacks, new research has claimed. 

The “2023 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report” from cybersecurity experts CrowdStrike, based on “data from trillions of daily events” from the CrowdStrike Falcon platform and CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch products, claims almost three in four (71%) of attacks that were detected in 2022 were malware-free, up from 62% just a year ago.

Interactive intrusions, which require hands-on keyboard activity, also increased by 50% year-on-year, the researchers said, which outlines “how sophisticated human adversaries increasingly look to evade antivirus protection” and outsmart fully automated defense mechanisms.

Increasing sophistication

Also, average breakout time is now 84 minutes (down from 98 minutes a year ago), which means cybercriminals are getting faster. 

Drilling deeper into the state of cybercrime, CrowdStrike discovered that the value and demand for identity and access credentials keeps growing, rising by 112% in 2022, compared to 2021. Cloud exploitation grew by 95%, while the number of cases involving ‘cloud-conscious’ threat actors nearly tripled in the same timeframe. 

“The past 12 months brought a unique combination of threats to the forefront of security. Splintered eCrime groups re-emerged with greater sophistication, relentless threat actors sidestepped patched or mitigated vulnerabilities, and the feared threats of the Russia-Ukraine conflict masked more sinister and successful traction by a growing number of China-nexus adversaries,” said Adam Meyers, head of intelligence at CrowdStrike. 

“Today’s threat actors are smarter, more sophisticated, and more well-resourced than they have ever been in the history of cybersecurity. Only by understanding their rapidly evolving tradecraft, techniques and objectives – and by embracing technology fueled by the latest threat intelligence – can companies remain one step ahead of today’s increasingly relentless adversaries.”

The number of hacking groups is growing at great speeds, the researchers further said, claiming that 33 new adversaries were introduced in 2022. That was, according to the paper, the biggest increase the researchers ever observed in a year. Among these threat actors are SCATTERED SPIDER and SLIPPY SPIDER, two groups behind “many recent high-profile attacks” on telecommunication, BPO, and tech companies. 

Furthermore, hackers are still using known vulnerabilities and older tools. Log4Shell continues to be a huge liability, as well as ProxyNotShell, and Follina.

• Here’s our rundown of the best endpoint protection tools right now

A surprising new report shows Intel is now neck and neck with AMD when it comes to graphics card market share – a seemingly remarkable achievement considering Intel has only recently started producing discrete consumer GPUs.

I say “seemingly” as the report, which comes courtesy of PC market research company JPR, notes that both AMD and Intel are on 9% of the GPU market – while market leader Nvidia is way ahead of both at a huge 82% of the market.

While it’s certainly impressive that Intel has managed to catch up with the much more established (in the discrete GPU space) AMD, there’s no denying that it feels a bit like Intel and AMD are fighting over scraps, while Nvidia continues to dominate sales.

A monopoly is never good

Now, I’m a big fan of Nvidia, and like many PC gamers, Team Green is pretty much my default choice when I upgrade my rig, and it’s also fair to say that Nvidia has earned a lot of its success thanks to producing some of the best graphics cards money can buy.

However, it’s never great when a single company so thoroughly dominates a market. Market leaders with such a huge lead over their competitors can often be seen as complacent – after all, why innovate if you’re making huge amounts of cash anyway?

Many people argue that Nvidia is guilty of that, especially with its RTX 4000 series GPUs, which have so far concentrated on the high-end market, while neglecting gamers who are looking for more affordable graphics cards.

The company has also made some high-profile errors recently, such as the RTX 4080 12GB debacle – which saw Nvidia hastily ‘unlaunch’ one of the RTX 4080 models, only to later relaunch it as the RTX 4070 Ti after a public backlash. It could be argued that with Nvidia enjoying such a comfortable lead, it’s pushing its luck and making errors (and anti-consumer moves) it might not have done if that lead was more narrow.

But, with Intel and AMD languishing on just 9% each, it looks like there’s no chance Nvidia’s dominance is going to be seriously challenged any time soon.

Kudos to Intel

Despite this, we really shouldn’t take away from what Intel has managed here. The company, which is best known for its processors, launched its first Arc discrete gaming GPU in October 2022, so the fact that it is now level with AMD, which has been selling discrete GPUs for decades, is an impressive feat.

This is especially true considering that Intel’s launch of its Arc GPUs wasn’t the smoothest, thanks to rumors of delays and poor performance.

In reality, the Arc GPUs we’ve seen so far offer very good value for money, and rather than trying to compete with Nvidia’s powerful flagship GPUs like the RTX 4080 and 4090, they are battling it out with AMD to win over gamers with tighter budgets.

Splitting the budget market so successfully is bad news for AMD, and while I’m sure Nvidia will be keeping an eye on Intel’s growth, the fact that the company doesn’t seem to care about the budget market means its reign at the top will continue with relative ease. Whether or not that is good for consumers, though, is another story.

Via PC Gamer

Following rumors that Meta has scrapped two planned VR headsets, a new leak suggests that its production slate won’t be as bare as we feared following the Oculus Quest 3’s launch and that it might release its cheapest VR headset yet in 2024.

While Meta has been riding high thanks to its uber-successful Oculus Quest 2 – which has now reportedly sold almost 20 million units – the lukewarm response to the Meta Quest Pro had seemingly dampened its spirits. That’s according to leaks suggesting that two in-development headsets – Cardiff and Hermosa, which were due to have launched in 2024 and 2025 respectively – were recently canned.

It appears that the company’s revised VR plans don’t only involve cancellations, however, with a new leaked roadmap presentation given to Meta’s Reality Labs division employee outlining not only its Quest 3 plans (codenamed Stinson) but also a tease of what’s coming after that headset (via The Verge). 

According to reports, Meta reaffirmed that the Oculus Quest 3 headset is launching this year – and we suspect this will most likely be around October, which is when we expect the company to hold its Meta Connect 2023 showcase. When it does arrive, we should be treated to a headset that’s “two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and [costs] slightly more than the $400 Quest 2,” according to Mark Rabkin, the company’s vice president for VR, who spoke during the leaked presentation. 

That’s music to our ears. The best aspect of the Meta Quest Pro was its upgraded processor, so the announcement that similar upgrades are coming to the Quest 3 – and at a much more budget-friendly price than $1,500 / £1,500 / AU$2,450 no less – is pretty exciting.

Meta also apparently confirmed rumors that the Quest 3 will focus on mixed reality (MR) experiences, with new apps and games taking advantage of its capabilities – and that could be good news for Meta Quest Pro fans too. Meta’s current best VR headset doesn’t yet offer enough software that takes advantage of its features, so this new MR software would not only give Quest Pro users something to enjoy, but should help Meta avoid making the same mistake it made with the Pro with the Quest 3.

The new experiences aren’t just for MR though. All in all the Quest 3 will reportedly offer 41 new VR and MR games and apps at launch, on top of the existing Quest library and best Oculus Quest 2 games.

Are Meta and Apple collaborating on a VR headset? 

The Meta roadmap presentation also came with a surprise, according to the leak. Despite the rumors suggesting that its 2024 plans had been scrapped, it turns out that Meta does, apparently, still want to launch a VR headset next year.

However, it’s not the rumored Project Cardiff, nor Hermosa – those devices weren’t even referred to during the presentation – it’s a new device codenamed Ventura.

Rabkin reportedly described Ventura as a device that will “pack the biggest punch we can at the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market.” In other words, Ventura will likely be the cheapest standalone VR headset out there, and it likely won’t be as capable as the Quest 3 – so expect a less powerful chip, inferior displays, and limited mixed reality capabilities.

That’s all we know so far, although one aspect of Ventura is already intriguing us: its name. While Ventura does follow Meta’s Reality Labs naming convention (like many previous models the name comes from a Californian beach) it shares that name with Apple’s latest macOS Ventura. Apple is rumored to be entering the extended reality (XR which encompasses VR, AR, and MR) space this year with an Apple VR headset, and is believed to be following it up with a much cheaper headset in 2024 – the same year Meta is now expected to launch a super budget-friendly option.

Could Meta and Apple be collaborating on Project Ventura? We don’t know, and there are other options for what Ventura could be; the name could be a reference that Ventura would be competing against Apple’s cheap VR headset, or just a coincidence as there are only so many beaches in the Golden State.

Beyond Ventura, the leaked Meta presentation also outlined a device – La Jolla – that could be the Quest Pro 2. Again, very few details are known about La Jolla, but it would apparently use Meta’s photorealistic codec avatars, as well as boast improved screen resolution, and be more comfortable – which should make working in VR much less annoying than it currently is.

AMD wants to reduce the cost of communication and is on a crusade to bring down the cost of transferring bits between memory and compute significantly by putting RAM on top of the CPU/GPU. 

Company CEO Dr. Lisa Su recently delivered a high level presentation at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2023, speaking extensively about the need to cut down on the amount of energy (expressed in Joules) per computation operations (FLOPS). 

Otherwise(as she puts it) the next Zettaflop-capable supercomputer will need a nuclear power station to keep running – and that’s not something realistic or sustainable.

Distance

Instead, the biggest improvements in performance-per-watt, Su believes, will be achieved by reducing the physical distance between the memory and where computation takes place (either on the CPU or the GPU). She used the example of the MI300 accelerator which uses a next-generation AMD Instinct APU with unified HBM (High bandwidth memory) to deliver some significant power savings.

Concurrently, AMD has already integrated processing-in-memory to reduce the energy required to access data.

Su presentation mentioned, “Key algorithmic kernels can be executed directly in memory, saving precious communication energy” – and for that AMD is collaborating with Samsung Electronics, whose expertise in DRAM is undeniable. 

Closer is better

Memory-on-chip is already mainstream: AMD packs it in its AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and before that on its Ryzen 7 5800X3D (note that this memory is the faster and more expensive SRAM rather than DRAM). HBM is present in AMD’s Instinct MI accelerators and in Nvidia’s popular A100 accelerator, the brains behind ChatGPT. Apple’s M-series uses HBM connected to the processor but on the package rather than on the chip die.

Eventually, HPC will move towards memory-on-chip full scale as this is the most straight-forward low hanging fruit as workloads that demand extremely large amounts of high bandwidth push tackling power requirements (and associated costs) up the priority list.

Fujitsu’s A64FX processor, launched in 2019, is a true trailblazer and pioneer, merging dozens of Arm cores with 32GB of HBM2 memory sitting atop and offering a whopping 1TBps of bandwidth and with HBM3 already available on Nvidia’s Hopper H100 enterprise GPU, things will get even more interesting. Rambus plans to go beyond the HBM3 specs and hinted, last April, at up to 1.05TBps of bandwidth.

Increased interest in HBM, the cloud of the 1-ton gorilla that is Apple and the never-ending quest for bandwidth without needing an exotic power supply (and equally exotic cooling system) means that HBM – in the long run – is likely to supplant DIMM (and GDDR) as the main memory format: Blame it on Apple.

Dr. Su expects the first Zettascale supercomputer to be unveiled before 2035: that leaves us with 12 years to find the perfect solution unless AI gets there first.