AMD announced new products that will utilize its new 7nm architecture, ranging from its Ryzen 3 processors to powerful new Radeon VII graphics cards during its CES keynote. All these products will be available during this year.
The post Everything to know about AMD’s CES 2019 announcements: Ryzen 3, Radeon VII, and more appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
The long-held notion that the processing power of computers increases exponentially every couple of years has hit its limit, Jensen Huang says.
Source: CNET
65-inch roll-up OLED, 98-inch 8K QLED, 120-inch 4K short-throw laser projection, 216-inch MicroLED. See every inch of tomorrow’s screens right now.
Source: CNET
Opinion: As Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube crack down on extremist propaganda, ISIS recruiters are exploiting lesser-known messenger apps.
Source: Wired
An analog recreation of the first commercial video game hit expands with new cocktail table and arcade-ready versions.
Source: CNET
Just because it’s winter doesn’t mean there’s not plenty of new stuff on the way. Gather ’round the glowing magic box.
Source: Wired
Taking on both Intel and Nvidia, the new AMD Radeon Vega VII is the next generation of high-performance gaming GPUs, and is also leading the chipmaking industry as the world’s first 7nm gaming GPU.
The post It’s official! AMD’s next-generation 7nm GPU is the Radeon Vega VII appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
It’s now 18 days since the U.S. government unceremoniously shut down because Congress couldn’t agree on a bill to fund a quarter of all federal departments — including paying their employees.
But federal workers are starting to feel the pinch after not getting paid for two weeks, and this will have a knock-on effect to U.S. national security. The longer the shutdown goes on, the greater the damage will be.
The “too long, didn’t read” version is that before Christmas, President Trump wanted $5 billion for a wall on the southern border with Mexico to fulfill a campaign promise. Despite the Republicans having a majority in both houses of Congress, they didn’t have the votes to pass the spending bill in the Senate, which would’ve kept the government going when existing funding expired on midnight on December 22. No vote was held, even after a successful vote in the House, and the government shut down. When the Democrats took the majority in the House last week following their midterm wins, they were ready to pass a funding bill — without the $5 billion (because they think it’s a gigantic waste of money) — and get the government going again. But Trump has said he won’t sign any bill that doesn’t have the border wall funding.
More than two weeks later, some 800,000 federal workers are still at home — yet, about half were told to stay and work without pay. Worse, there’s no guarantee that federal workers will get paid for the time the government was shut down unless lawmakers intervene.
Unless the Democrats get a veto-proof majority, the impasse looks set to continue.
A crew works replacing the old border fence along a section of the U.S.-Mexico border, as seen from Tijuana, in Baja California state, Mexico, on January 8, 2019. (Photo by GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP/Getty Images)
Government shutdowns don’t happen very often — usually — or really at all outside the U.S., and yet this is the first time in four decades that the government has been closed three times in one year. That doesn’t mean cyber or national security threats conveniently stop. Granted, most of the government is functioning and ticking over. There are still boots on the ground, cops on the street, NSA analysts fighting hackers in cyberspace and criminals still facing justice.
But while most of the core government departments — State, Treasury, Justice and Defense — are still operational, others — like Homeland Security, which takes the bulk of the government’s cybersecurity responsibility — are suffering the most.
And the longer the shutdown goes on, the greater chance of tighter budgets and that more staff could be furloughed.
Here’s a breakdown:
Homeland Security’s new cybersecurity unit got off to a rough start: The newly established Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of Homeland Security, has only been operational since November 16, but about more than half of its staff have been furloughed, according to Homeland Security. The division is designed to lead the national effort to defend critical national infrastructure from current, ongoing threats. By our count at the time of writing, the CISA has been shut down for one in 10 days of its two-month tenure.
Threat intelligence sharing will take a hit: A little-known program inside Homeland Security, known as the Automated Indicator Sharing, has also sent home more than 80 percent of it staff, according to Duo Security. AIS allows private industry and government agencies to share threat intelligence, which is shared with Homeland Security’s government partners, to ensure that any detected attack can only ever be used once. The shutdown is going to heavily impact the data exchange program.
New NIST standards to face delays: More than 85 percent of National Institute of Standards and Technology employees have been sent home without pay, leaving just a handful of essential staff to keep NIST’s new advice and guidance work going. NIST is responsible for giving all government departments necessary and up-to-date security advice. It also means that FIPS testing, used to grant devices and new technologies security certifications to run on government networks, has completely stopped during the shutdown.
Underpaid TSA agents are now entirely unpaid: The TSA, found at every U.S. airport security screening area, is still working despite the shutdown. More than 90 percent of the TSA’s workforce of 60,078 employees will go unpaid — on top of already low pay, which has resulted in a high turnover rate. Despite Trump’s remarks to the contrary, several news agencies say TSA workers are calling out sick in droves. And that’s going to harm airport security. Many worry that the already low morale could put airline security at risk. One traveler/passenger at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport tweeted this week: “I asked TSA agent if I should take out my laptop out of its case and she said, ‘I don’t care, I’m not getting paid’.”
Secret Service staff are working unpaid: And, whether you like them or not, keeping the president and senior lawmakers and politicians alive is a paramount national security concern, yet the vast majority of front-line and back office Secret Service agents currently protecting senior administration staff are going unpaid during the shutdown.
And that’s just some of the larger departments.
The shutdown isn’t only hampering short-term efforts, but could result in long-lasting damage.
“Cyber threats don’t operate on Washington’s political timetable, and they don’t stop because of a shutdown,” Lisa Monaco, former homeland security advisor to the president, told Axios on Wednesday. And security firm Duo said that trying to keep all of the cyber-plates spinning at once while not at full-strength is “risky,” especially given nobody knows how long the shutdown will last.
All this for a border wall that Trump says will prevent terrorists from pouring into the U.S.
Critics say that the cost-benefit to building the wall vis-à-vis the shutdown doesn’t add up. Experts say that there hasn’t been a single case of a known terrorist to have crossed illegally into the U.S. from the Mexican border. In fact, since the September 11 attacks, more than three-quarters of all designated acts of terror were carried out by far-right extremists and not Islamic violent extremists, according to a government watchdog. The vast majority of terrorist incidents were U.S. citizens or green card holders.
A border wall might keep some terrorists out, but it’s not going to stop the terrorists who are already in the U.S. Yet, right now it seems the White House wants the appearance of security rather than the security from a quarter of what the government already has at its disposal.
Source: TechCrunch
Instagram is swaying the balance towards simplicity but away from originality. It’s adding the ability to publish feed posts to different accounts you control at the same time by toggling them on within the composer screen. An Instagram spokesperson confirms this option is becoming available to all iOS users, telling TechCrunch “We are rolling out this feature to provide a better experience for people who often post to multiple accounts.”
This “self regram” could make it easier for businesses, influencers, and regular folks with Instas and Finstas to publish the same meme, promotional image, or other content across their profiles simultaneously instead of having to post on one at a time. But it could also make Instagram’s feed a bit more cookie-cutter, with different audiences of different accounts seeing the same shots and captions. The desire to keep the feed original and personal has been a driving force behind Instagram refusing to add a native regram feature for sharing other people’s feed posts to your audience.
Instagram gives all iOS users the ability to publish a post to several of their own accounts at once
Recontextualizing posts uniquely for different accounts or networks is some of the most common social media guru advice. A personal account might want to publish with a more informal, colloquial and intimate style. A business account might be better off acting generally accessible and adding a call to action. A Finsta, or fake Instagram account people keep on the side for posting more raw content, is free to get a little crazy. An identical one-size-fits-all post might actually be one-size-fits-none. That’s why we’d suggest only using this feature if your different accounts have similar themes and fan bases.
TechCrunch first discovered the feature thanks to a tip from SocialThings founder Zachary Shakked, who says “it could save a tiny bit of time”. Other users including Jay Elaine’s Get Branded also showed off the new feature, as seen above. Once users select a photo or video to post, the Instagram for iOS composer screen for adding captions and tags now includes toggle switches for syndicating the post to your other accounts to which you’re logged in. We’ve asked whether the feature will come to Android (I’d assume so in the future), and Stories (anyone’s guess), but Instagram hasn’t responded. You still can’t regram posts by other people, or your own after you publish.
Instagram is now testing a much more prominent way to import photos from Google Photos on Android
As Instagram grows beyond the 1 billion monthly user mark, it’s working to eliminate friction from content creation wherever it can. Instagram recently began testing a much more prominent shortcut of importing photos from Google Photos on Android. First spotted by mobile researcher and all-star TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong, the Photos shortcut is now right on the image selection screen for some users instead of being buried within the Other folder of your albums. An Instagram spokesperson confirmed that “We are only testing this on Android. You have been able to share to feed from Google photos on Android before but the ability to do so was hidden behind a couple of different steps so we’re up-leveling that ability to make it easier.”
Simplifying publishing sounds obviously better, but it could also dilute the quality of Instagram. Luckily, the feed’s algorithm can simply demote generic content that doesn’t resonate with people. But if the feed becomes full of stale cross-posted promotional spam, it could send younger users fleeing towards the next generation of social apps trying to spice it up.
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Source: TechCrunch
As Twitter continues to look for ways to monetise its platform beyond basic advertising, it is building more tools for businesses that turn Twitter into more of a utility that helps them do their jobs.
Today at CES, Twitter said it’s going to make it easier for publishers to better understand what sort of content is resonating with its readers on the social network though a new kind of analytics dashboard, and, in a separate dashboard, to better track real-time information around events and especially to track events that are coming up.
Together, the two tools underscore how Twitter continues to plug away at building out a richer experience for organizations that use Twitter not just as part of their marketing but for wider business activities, and simply for getting work done. That directly feeds back into Twitter’s advertising business, of course: the more essential the platform feels to an organization, the more likely they are to spend money on using it.
That advertising business has been slowly but surely continuing to grow: today Kay Madati, Twitter’s VP of content partnerships, said that premium video ads account for half of the company’s ad revenue now. He also noted that the company’s had eight consecutive quarters of growth in daily active usage, although that statistic doesn’t tell the whole story, with recent quarters indicating that the company continues to struggle with overall user growth.
The concept for a new Twitter publisher dashboard would offer insights and analytics that can better inform organizations’ content strategies.
Keith Coleman, Twitter’s VP of Product (pictured right), clarified the dashboard is still very much an “early concept.”
However, the idea is to offer publishers an easy way to see who on Twitter is reading and engaging with their content, when they’re viewing it, and what content is working best.
The goal is to allow publishers to better optimize what they produce to make it effective, the company said.
Events, meanwhile, is also going to be getting a boost of attention. Twitter is working a dashboard that will show what events are coming up, including breaking news events.
For example, an event like the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas would be the type of the event that would appear on this dashboard.
This, in turn, can link up with a new kind of conversation format that the company is preparing to roll out: when users now write Tweets, Twitter will provide some more context to them around the Tweet by including, for example, a location underneath their Twitter handle that could better explain what is going on so that a single statement makes more sense to casual readers who haven’t been following all of the person’s previous Tweets:
Twitter’s wider focus on events is not new, of course: the company has long described itself as the town hall and town square for the world, providing real-time conversations about what is going on. Twitter’s long been trying to harness that in a more actionable way for ordinary users by way of hashtags, and in a more organised way for organizations. Efforts at events calendars stretch back to as far as 2017.
The thinking behind the events dashboard will allow the publishers to figure out – in advance – how they want to participate in that conversation on Twitter — either in terms of the content that they publish, or (more hopefully, perhaps) through advertising and promoting content.
Twitter, also discussed how the events would appear on Twitter, explaining that it’s trying to making it easier for newcomers to the network to follow events, without the need of a knowing the hashtag.
“We know people want to come to see what’s happening. And particularly, they want to come to Twitter to see what’s happening when events are unfolding in the real world,” said Coleman, speaking on stage at CES this morning.
“If you think about the experience of actually following that – it’s hard. You have to follow the publications, you have to follow the journalists, you have to follow the attendees whose names you don’t even know. You don’t have all the hashtags,” he said.
The events section will organize this information for you, so you can “tune in” to the live events, without having to know who or what to follow.
While the analytics dashboard is likely to be something that would be accessed through media.twitter.com and aimed at publishers and others using Twitter in a business context, events will have a wider remit: it will be pinned to the top of the timeline, in Explore and accessible through Search, Coleman said.
Source: TechCrunch