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Showing posts from October, 2023

Move over Sonos Roam, Klipsch’s new portable Bluetooth speakers can rock outdoors

Klipsch is a company known for making big – refrigerator-sized, in some instances – speakers, all of them with a version of the horn-loaded driver design the company has used since producing its first models back in the 1940s. But the long-running American brand has also kept up with the audio times, producing compact wireless speakers, wireless earbuds like the Klipsch T5 True Wireless Earphones , and Dolby Atmos soundbars . Klipsch’s latest effort addresses the best Bluetooth speakers category, with a three-model lineup offering a range of size and performance options for music fans on the move. The new portable speakers are named after cities known for their contributions to American music, and they all share extended battery life, an 1P67 dust and waterproof rating, a built-in microphone for calls, and a rugged black-clad exterior. Other features found on the new portables include Bluetooth 5.3 for wireless connections at up to a 40-foot distance and support for the Klipsch Con

Instagram and Facebook get ad-free subscriptions in the EU, but they're pricey

Starting in November, Meta will offer Facebook and Instagram users in the EU, EEA, (European Economic Area,) and Switzerland the opportunity to remove all advertisements from the platforms via a new subscription plan. There will be two different prices available at launch depending on where you purchase a plan. People will be charged €9.99 a month on desktop, while on mobile, the price tag is bumped up to €12.99 a month. The higher cost on smartphones supposedly takes into account all “the fees that Apple and Google charge” developers through their respective app stores, according to the announcement . The company goes on to say it will not collect or use information from a subscribed account for targeted ads. There is one small catch: users must be at least 18 years old. Otherwise, they can't pay for a plan. One subscription will cover all linked profiles in a person’s Account Center until March 1, 2024. After that date, Meta will begin charging “for each additional account”

Watch out - sharing a Wikipedia link on Slack could be a serious security no-no

Cybersecurity researchers from eSentire have discovered a glitch in how Slack renders Wikipedia articles that could be abused to trick users into opening malware -laden websites. In popular messaging apps, including Slack, when a user forgets to add a space between a full stop and the first letter of the next sentence, the app will perceive it as a domain, and render the link accordingly. Typing “face.book me for…,” for instance, will become http://face.book .  Now, if a malicious user edits a Wikipedia article at the right place and adds a reference footnote, they can trick Slack into rendering a link that doesn’t exist in the article. That link can later be edited to redirect the victim to a malicious website. A lot of due diligence required From that point on, all it takes is a little creativity to get the victim to click on the link in the preview of the otherwise benign Wikipedia link to be served malware . This isn’t that uncommon on Wikipedia, either. The researchers have

Seagate confirms that 30TB hard drives are coming in early 2024 — but you probably won’t be able to use it in your PC

Hyperscalers and enterprises will finally be able to buy 30TB hard drives in “early 2024”, Dave Mosley, the CEO of Seagate has confirmed in its first quarter fiscal 2024 earnings report. If confirmed, it would be the largest hard drive ever but would still lag the largest SSD in terms of capacity; the Solidigm D5-P5336 has a 61.44TB capacity. In a transcript obtained by the Motley Fool , Mosley confirmed that Seagate is likely to begin aggressively ramping 3TB per disk products based on HAMR technology in early calendar 2024. 3TB refers to the platter capacity and Seagate packs ten of these in a hard drive.  Furthermore, he added that these drives will delivery storage capacity beyond 30TB - meaning that Seagate plans to pack more platters per drive or use higher density platters - and will come in either CMR or SMR configurations. Mosley hinted at a 32TB drive further down during a Q&A session and that was the expected capacity Seagate announced back in June 2023 during ano

Cyber insurance: why it pays to be responsible

When you buy car insurance, you do so on the promise that you will demonstrate good behavior. You would not expect your car insurer to pay out if you broke the speed limit, never had your brakes or tyres checked, or left your pride and joy unlocked overnight. There is a mutual pact between you and your insurer. You take responsibility for your car’s safety and your own actions, and they pay out when bad things happen that you could not have foreseen, prevented, or mitigated against. The same principle applies with cyber insurance. As an organization, you are 100% responsible for your own cybersecurity , and the insurance providers are there in the event of the unthinkable and unpreventable. For some businesses, especially small and medium-sized, having cyber insurance could mean the difference between staying open and going bust. That is reflected in the market’s growth, with Munich Re estimating cyber premiums will reach a value of $22bn by 2025. However, as the volume of cyberatta

Quordle today - hints and answers for Monday, October 30 (game #644)

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It's time for your daily dose of Quordle hints, plus the answers for both the main game and the Daily Sequence spin off.  Quordle is the only one of the many Wordle clones that I'm still playing now, around 18 months after the daily-word-game craze hit the internet, and with good reason: it's fun, but also difficult. What's more, its makers (now the online dictionary Merriam-Webster) are also keeping it fresh in the form of a variant called the Daily Sequence, which sees you complete four puzzles consecutively, rather than concurrently.  But Quordle is tough, so if you already find yourself searching for Wordle hints , you'll probably need some for this game too.  I'm a Quordle and Wordle fanatic who's been playing since December 2021, so I can definitely help you solve Quordle today and improve your game for tomorrow. Read on for my Quordle hints to game #644 and the answers to the main game and Daily Sequence.  SPOILER WARNING: Information about Quo

Forget Black Friday - Amazon is having a massive sale on its own devices right now

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It's almost November, and while the official Black Friday deals event is slated for the 24, Amazon is treating us with a massive sale on its own devices that you can shop for now. Amazon's early Black Friday deals include up to 50% off Fire tablets, TVs, the Echo Show, and the best-selling Fire TV Stick. • Shop more early Amazon Black Friday deals While retailers typically hold on to their best deals for the official Black Friday sale, today's early device deals at Amazon are very good. The retailer has record-low prices on some of Amazon's best-selling devices, allowing you to score an early bargain right now and avoid the madness of Black Friday proper. Some of today's best early Black Friday deals include the Fire TV Stick on sale for just $19.99 (was $39.99), a massive 50% discount on the Fire HD 10 tablet, bringing the price down to $74.99 (was $149.99), Amazon's top-rated 55-inch 4K smart TV on sale for $269.99 (was $519.99). See more of Amaz

Yes, AMD has a secret weapon to fight off Nvidia AI armada — no, it has absolutely nothing to do with GPUs and everything to do with HBM

AMD will rely on advancements in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) in its bid to unseat Nvidia as the industry leader for making the components that power generative AI systems. Building on the theme of processor-in-memory (PIM), Xilinx, which is owned by AMD, showcased its Virtex XCVU7P card, in which each FPGA had eight accelerator-in-memory (AiM) modules. The firm showcased this at OCP Summit 2023, alongside SK Hynix’s HBM3E memory unit, according to Serve the Home . Essentially, by performing compute operations directly in memory, data won’t need to move between components on systems, meaning performance increases and the overall system becomes more energy efficient. Using PIM, with SK Hynix’s AiM, led to ten times shorter server latency, five times lower energy consumption, and half the costs in AI inference workloads.   The latest twist in the ongoing AI arms race Nvidia and AMD make most of the best GPUs between them, and one may assume that efforts to improve the quality of the

The Samsung Galaxy S24 looks likely to launch in January

The Samsung Galaxy S23 phones were unveiled on February 1, 2023, but it looks increasingly likely that the Samsung Galaxy S24 series is going to show up earlier in 2024 – probably before the end of January. As per seasoned tipster @UniverseIce on Chinese social media site Weibo (via @Tech_Reve and Google Translate), the Galaxy S24 has now entered mass production, which puts it on course for a "mid-to-late January" launch. That said, sources speaking to SamMobile suggest an "early-to-mid January" launch is still a possibility, though "things could go either way". Everyone seems to be agreed that January is the month, though the exact date is yet to be fixed. It's certainly plausible that there's still some uncertainty even inside Samsung, and that a specific date for the launch has yet to be decided on. No doubt there will be another Samsung Unpacked event attached, and we will of course cover it all live. The Galaxy S24 has entered pro

'SSD Performance levels': New generation of microSD cards could help transfer an entire Blu-ray movie in less than 15 seconds, paving the way for mainstream 8K recording

The SD 9.1 standard will double the speeds of the best microSD cards out there today, with the next generation of SD cards hitting speeds of up to 2GB/s. With SD 9.1, unveiled by the SD Assocation (SDA), the next cohort of SD Express memory cards uses PCIe Gen4 that can deliver 1,969MB/s – more than double the maximum speeds introduced with the first microSD protocol in the SD 7.1 spec. SD Express memory cards come in four varieties, including SD Express Seed Class 150, 300, 450 and 600 – with these numbers corresponding with minimum read and write speeds measured in Mb/s. This means these microSD cards can range anywhere from 0.6GB/s to 2GB/s. By contrast, the best portable SSDs usually land at roughly 1GB/s. The fastest microSD cards ever What that means, in real terms, is the ability to transfer a Blu-ray movie , which is roughly 25GB, in 12.5 seconds. Speeds like this will also be fast enough to handle transferring 8K video files, which are relatively massive, with ease. T

Quordle today - hints and answers for Sunday, October 29 (game #643)

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It's time for your daily dose of Quordle hints, plus the answers for both the main game and the Daily Sequence spin off.  Quordle is the only one of the many Wordle clones that I'm still playing now, around 18 months after the daily-word-game craze hit the internet, and with good reason: it's fun, but also difficult. What's more, its makers (now the online dictionary Merriam-Webster) are also keeping it fresh in the form of a variant called the Daily Sequence, which sees you complete four puzzles consecutively, rather than concurrently.  But Quordle is tough, so if you already find yourself searching for Wordle hints , you'll probably need some for this game too.  I'm a Quordle and Wordle fanatic who's been playing since December 2021, so I can definitely help you solve Quordle today and improve your game for tomorrow. Read on for my Quordle hints to game #643 and the answers to the main game and Daily Sequence.  SPOILER WARNING: Information about Quo