Personal Tech

• Intel claims first Alder Lake chip is the fastest desktop gaming silicon in the world

  Venerable semi biz having to move faster to stop others eating its lunch
  Agam Shah Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 16:00 UTC 3

  Intel has had to significantly change its approach to chip design with Apple, Arm and AMD slowly undoing its decades-long dominance.

  The new 12th-generation Core processors, code-named Alder Lake and introduced today, are a further step in that direction. The first chip off the bat is gaming desktop silicon, including the unlocked Core i9-12900K processor, which Intel claims is the fastest gaming processor in the world.

  The chip behemoth will also announce more desktop and laptop chips in the first quarter of next year, said Marcus Kennedy, Intel's general manager for the gaming creator and Esports segment.

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• It's that time of the year again when GitHub does its show'n'tell of features – some new and others kinda new

  Universe event reveals iterative improvements but no big bang
  Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 15:30 UTC

  Microsoft's GitHub social code motel begins its two-day Universe happening on Wednesday, bringing with it assorted enhancements to its developer-oriented products and services.

  The renovation and refurbishment at GitHub is a constant state of affairs. Since last year's Universe show, said chief product officer Thomas Dohmke in a post provided to The Register earlier this week, there have been more than 20,000 enhancements to GitHub. Despite this constant drizzle of change, the company likes to hold periodic events to mark its introductions, fixes, and changes.

  There are no new major announcements along the lines of 2018's GitHub Actions or Copilot from earlier this year. Rather, GitHub has made previously teased services available and has expanded the scope of existing ones.

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• Googlebusters: Cloud biz jumps 45% in Q3 but misses Wall St consensus, operating losses almost halved

  Advertising engine still revving amid pandemic
  Paul Kunert Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 14:25 UTC

  Google Cloud – a relative blip on parent Alphabet's balance sheet – booked in a 45 per cent year-on-year bounce in turnover for calendar Q3 but still missed the consensus estimate by Wall Street analysts.

  For the quarter ended 30 September [PDF], the division reported turnover of $4.99bn, falling short of forecasts by $200m, and rising 7.8 per cent on the prior three-month period, which marked a slowdown in sales momentum.

  AI and data warehousing services on Google's cloud are convincing customers to sign off purchase orders, said Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, describing it as a "source of strength." He added that Google is "sharpening our solutions by verticals." These include retail, healthcare, financial services, and entertainment and media.

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• Teen bought Google ad for his scam website and made 48 Bitcoins duping UK online shoppers

  'If he was an adult he would be going inside' – judge
  Gareth Corfield Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 13:27 UTC 19

  A "sophisticated" teenager has had £2.1m ($2.88m) in cryptocurrency confiscated after he set up a phishing site and advertised it on Google, duping consumers into handing over gift voucher redemption codes.

  The schoolboy set up a website impersonating gift voucher site Love2Shop. Having done that he then bought Google ads which resulted in his fake site appearing above the real one in search results, Lincoln Crown Court was told.

  Crown prosecutor Sam Skinner told Her Honour Judge Catarina Sjölin Knight that the boy, whose identity is protected by a court order, harvested £6,500 worth of vouchers in the week his site was active. Love2shop began investigating in April 2020 after a customer complained, at which point the boy took down his fake site.

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• Microsoft: Cloud and Windows OEM sales up, but Surface? No, not even during WFH boom

  Water's wet, sky's blue, and Redmond's revenues grew in Q1 2022
  Richard Speed Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 12:30 UTC 5

  Even a "stronger than expected" PC market with unprecedented demand from homebound workers couldn't lift Surface revenues in Microsoft's first quarter for fiscal 2022 - in an otherwise stellar quarter for the firm.

  Windows OEM revenue increased by 10 per cent – driven, as CFO Amy Hood said in an analysts' call, "by a stronger than expected PC market."

  However, Surface revenue dropped by 19 per cent in constant currency (although Hood pointed to a strong prior year) for the quarter, which ended September 30, 2021. Supply constraints will certainly have played a part in this, as well as a line-up due for a refresh. The recent product launch will make next quarter's results interesting reading. Hood reckoned the decline would likely run on, but only in single digits "as we continue to work through supply chain uncertainty, particularly in our premium devices."

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• Product release cycles are killing the environment, techies tell British Computer Society

  Running Linux on a vintage box is one answer, but someone has to hold big tech's feet to fire
  Paul Kunert Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 11:26 UTC 26

  Bringing an end to the relentless nature of annual product release cycles is something that should be top of the agenda for the soon-to-run 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26.

  Or so says the BCS, formerly known as the British Computer Society, which reckons cutting electronic waste is the most pressing concern for 30 per cent of the 1,100 plus members it surveyed recently.

  Alex Bardell, chair of the BCS Green IT Specialist Group, said reducing e-waste was already on the radar thanks to the chip shortage.

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• UK science suffers as lawmakers continue to dither over Brexit negotiations

  Horizons Europe carrot dangled amid protocol wrangling
  Richard Speed Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 10:30 UTC 52

  A report from the UK House of Commons' European Scrutiny Committee has blamed delays in Brussels for choking off revenue streams to British institutions and businesses.

  The UK departed the European Union following a 2016 referendum. One of the results was that UK businesses were no longer able to tender for lucrative contracts within the bloc.

  The Brexit Divorce Bill uncomfortably laid out the facts back in 2018. The satellite navigation system Galileo was one victim despite substantial involvement from the UK in its development. Another was the Copernicus Earth monitoring programme; the UK was infamously snubbed when the European Space Agency (ESA) handed out six juicy contracts to institutions from the Continent.

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• Warehouse belonging to Chinese payment terminal manufacturer raided by FBI

  PAX Technology devices allegedly infected with malware
  Laura Dobberstein Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 09:41 UTC 10

  US feds were spotted raiding a warehouse belonging to Chinese payment terminal manufacturer PAX Technology in Jacksonville, Florida, on Tuesday, with speculation abounding that the machines contained preinstalled malware.

  PAX Technology is headquartered in Shenzhen, China, and is one of the largest electronic payment providers in the world. It operates around 60 million point-of-sale (PoS) payment terminals in more than 120 countries.

  Local Jacksonville news anchor Courtney Cole tweeted photos of the scene.

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• Everything you wanted to know about modern network congestion control but were perhaps too afraid to ask

  In which a little unfairness can be quite beneficial
  Larry Peterson Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 08:28 UTC 3

  Systems Approach It’s hard not to be amazed by the amount of active research on congestion control over the past 30-plus years. From theory to practice, and with more than its fair share of flame wars, the question of how to manage congestion in the network is a technical challenge that resists an optimal solution while offering countless options for incremental improvement.

  This seems like a good time to take stock of where we are, and ask ourselves what might happen next.

  Congestion control is fundamentally an issue of resource allocation — trying to meet the competing demands that applications have for resources (in a network, these are primarily link bandwidth and router buffers), which ultimately reduces to deciding when to say no and to whom. The best framing of the problem I know traces back to a paper [PDF] by Frank Kelly in 1997, when he characterized congestion control as “a distributed algorithm to share network resources among competing sources, where the goal is to choose source rate so as to maximize aggregate source utility subject to capacity constraints.”

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• How business makes streaming faster and cheaper with CDN and HESP support

  Ensure a high video streaming transmission rate
  Alex Peterson, Head of G-Core Labs Streaming platform Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 07:30 UTC

  Advertorial Here is everything about how the HESP integration helps CDN and the streaming platform by G-Core Labs ensure a high video streaming transmission rate for e-sports and gaming, efficient scalability for e-learning and telemedicine and high quality and minimum latencies for online streams, media and TV broadcasters.

  HESP (High Efficiency Stream Protocol) is a brand new adaptive video streaming protocol. It allows delivery of content with latencies of up to 2 seconds without compromising video quality and broadcasting stability. Unlike comparable solutions, this protocol requires less bandwidth for streaming, which allows businesses to save a lot of money on delivery of content to a large audience.

  Since HESP is based on HTTP, it is suitable for video transmission over CDNs. G-Core Labs was among the world’s first companies to have embedded this protocol in its CDN. With 120 points of presence across 5 continents and over 6,000 peer-to-peer partners, this allows a service provider to deliver videos to millions of viewers, to any devices, anywhere in the world without compromising even 8K video quality. And all this comes at a minimum streaming cost.

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• Cisco deprecates Microsoft management integrations for UCS servers

  Working on Azure integration – but not there yet
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 27 Oct 2021 // 07:08 UTC

  Cisco has deprecated support for some third-party management integrations for its UCS servers, and emerged unable to play nice with Microsoft's most recent offerings.

  Late last week the server contender slipped out an end-of-life notice [PDF] for integrations with Microsoft System Center's Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, and Virtual Machine Manager. Support for plugins to VMware vCenter Orchestrator and vRealize Orchestrator have also been taken out behind an empty rack with a shotgun.

  The Register inquired about the deprecations, and has good news and bad news.

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