Over the past 11 months, the processors running our computers, and in some cases phones, have succumbed to a host of attacks. Bearing names such as Meltdown and Spectre, BranchScope, TLBleed, and Foreshadow, the exploits threaten to siphon some of our most sensitive secrets—say passwords or cryptographic keys—out of the silicon microarchitecture in ways that can’t be detected or stopped by traditi

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen die. Threadripper has two of these in a multi-chip module. Epyc has four of them. Microsoft will soon be offering virtual machines in its Azure cloud service based on AMD's Epyc processors. The growth of the cloud computing market has, until now, been a success story for Intel's Xeon server processors, as the rise of cloud computing came at the same time as Intel was particul

Windows 8 and Windows 10 contain a surprising feature that many users will find unwelcome: PC OEMs can embed a Windows executable in their system firmware. Windows 8 and 10 will then extract this executable during boot time and run it automatically. In this way, the OEM can inject software onto a Windows machine even if the operating system was cleanly installed. The good news is that most OEMs fo

SourceForge, the code repository site owned by Slashdot Media, has apparently seized control of the account hosting GIMP for Windows on the service, according to e-mails and discussions amongst members of the GIMP community—locking out GIMP's lead Windows developer. And now anyone downloading the Windows version of the open source image editing tool from SourceForge gets the software wrapped in an

I've written about my struggles to find a good PC laptop before. After literally years of searching, it looks like Lenovo has stepped up to the plate and finally created the machine I crave. The new ThinkPad X1 Carbon, a high-resolution, Haswell-equipped update to 2012's Ivy Bridge-based model looked just about perfect. The machine looks glorious in just about every regard. Fully decked out, it ha

Two and a half years ago, I fell in love with a mechanical keyboard. It was comfortable to use but profoundly loud, to the point of being obnoxious. It was audible across rooms and through walls and into the night—not to me, with my headphones on, but to most living, breathing souls within a 50-yard radius. Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror appears to know the dilemma of perpetual typists like myself.