Find out where to watch Dick Clark's New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest 2022.
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Cryptocurrency trading platform 3Commas has confirmed it suffered a data breach that saw API data stolen.
As per the announcement, an unknown threat actor posted 3Commas’ API database to Pastebin, on December 28.
After analyzing the database, the company confirmed its authenticity, saying “at this point, 3Commas can unfortunately confirm that some of 3Commas’ users’ API data (API keys, secrets and passphrases) have been disclosed by a third party”.
While the leaks revolve around API data at the moment, 3Commas’ does not exclude the possibility of other data being taken, as well: “Currently and to the best of our knowledge only API data have been disclosed as part of this incident. As a likely consequence the hacker(s) may use or may have used the API data to connect your exchange accounts to his/their account and/or initiate unauthorized trades,” it says.
In a notice sent to its users via email and a blog post, the company says it has made strides to protect its users and their funds, and reported the issue to relevant law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.
As per a BleepingComputer report, a set of 10,000 API keys were leaked, which is just 10% of the 100,000-big database. These keys are usually used by 3Commas bots to automatically interact with crypto exchange platforms, make trades and generate profit, without user interaction.
Reacting to the news, 3Commas urged all supported exchanges (including some of the biggest ones - Binance, Coinbase, and Kucoin) to revoke all API keys connected to the platform. The company also urged all users to reissue their keys on all linked endpoints personally.
Investigating the leak further, the company eliminated the possibility of this being an inside job: “Only a small number of technical employees had access to the infrastructure, and we have taken steps since November 19 to remove their access,” the company said in a Twitter post.
“Since then, we have implemented new security measures, and we will not stop there; we are launching a full investigation in which law enforcement will be involved,” the company added.
But the damage has already been done. Apparently, threat actors have been abusing leaked API keys since November, and have managed to steal some $6 million worth of cryptocurrencies so far.
Via: BleepingComputer
Data breaches could be even more expensive next year, a new report from Acronis has claimed.
Based on data collected from more than 750,000 unique endpoints, distributed around the world, the company's report claims the average cost of a data breach is expected to hit $5 million by next year.
To make matters even worse - the researchers expect the number of breaches to increase significantly, as well. The threats from malicious and phishing emails rose by 60% year-on-year, they said.
Furthermore, social engineering attacks rose in the last four months of the year as well, and now account for roughly 3% of all attacks. Leaked or stolen passwords and other credentials were the triggers for almost half of all reported cybersecurity incidents in H1 2022.
“The last few months have proven to be as complex as ever – with new threats constantly emerging and malicious actors continuing to use the same proven playbook for big payouts,” said Candid Wüest, Acronis VP of Cyber Protection Research.
“Organisations must prioritize all-encompassing solutions when looking to mitigate phishing and other hacking attempts in the new year. Attackers are constantly evolving their methods, now using common security tools against us – like MFA that many companies rely on to protect their employees and businesses.”
In the third quarter of the year, the proportion of phishing attacks against malware attacks increased by 1.3 times, and now make up more than three-quarters (76%) of all email attacks (up from 58% in the first half of the year).
The majority of the victims were located in the United States, but businesses in Germany and Brazil were also heavily targeted. Endpoints in South Korea, Jordan, and China, were the biggest malware targets, too.
Drilling deeper into the different industries that threat actors targeted with phishing and malicious emails, the researchers discovered construction, retail, real estate, professional services, and finance, as the verticals most frequently attacked.
Many Citrix ADC and Gateway servers remain vulnerable to high-severity flaws that were reportedly patched by the company weeks ago, experts have claimed.
In early November 2022, Citrix uncovered and patched an “Unauthorized access to Gateway user capabilities” flaw, since tracked as CVE-2022-27510. Affecting both products, it allows an attacker to gain authorized access to target endpoints, take over the devices remotely, and bypass the device’s brute force login protection.
Roughly a month later, in mid-December, the company fixed an “Unauthenticated remote arbitrary code execution” flaw, since tracked as CVE-2022-27518. This one allows threat actors to execute malicious code on the target endpoint, remotely.
Both have a 9.8/10 severity score, and at least one of them was abused in the wild as a zero-day, researchers from NCC Group’s Fox IT team claim.
In fact, the US National Security Agency (NSA) warned in early December, that a hacking collective backed by the Chinese state was exploiting the latter vulnerability as a zero-day security flaw.
Back then, in an official blog post, chief security and trust officer at Citrix Peter Lefkowitz claimed that “limited exploits of this vulnerability have been reported,” but did not elaborate on the number of attacks or the industries involved.
Sometimes referred to as Manganese, this group of threat actors has apparently explicitly targeted networks running these Citrix applications to break through organizational security without first having to steal credentials via social engineering and phishing attacks.
The researchers have also said that while the majority of endpoints had been patched since the release of the fixes, there are “thousands” of vulnerable servers out there. As of November 11 2022, at least 28,000 Citrix servers were found to have been at risk.
“We hope this blog creates extra awareness for these two Citrix CVEs and that our research on version identification contributes to future studies,” the researchers concluded.
Via: BleepingComputer
A new malware variant has been detected that is capable of listening to a users’ calls, recognizing a callers’ gender and identity, and even recognizing, to some degree, what’s being said.
Fortunately, the good news is that the malware is part of a research experiment done by white hats and poses no risk to smartphone users (at the time).
Researchers from five universities in the United States - Texas A&M University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Temple University, University of Dayton, and Rutgers University - teamed up and built EarSpy.
EarSpy is a side-channel attack that abuses the fact that smartphone speakers, motion sensors, and gyroscopes, had gotten better over the years.
The malware tries to read the data captured by motion sensors, as the endpoint’s ear speakers reverberate during a conversation. In earlier years, this wasn’t a viable attack vector as the speakers and sensors weren’t that powerful.
To prove their point, the researchers used two smartphones - one from 2016, and one from 2019. The difference in the amount of data gathered was quite obvious.
To test if the data could be used to identify the caller’s gender and recognize the speech, the researchers used a OnePlus 7T device, and a OnePlus 9 device.
Caller gender identification on the former was between 77.7% and 98.7%, while the caller’s identification between 63.0% and 91.2%. Speech recognition danced between 51.8% and 56.4%.
“As there are ten different classes here, the accuracy still exhibits five times greater accuracy than a random guess, which implies that vibration due to the ear speaker induced a reasonable amount of distinguishable impact on accelerometer data,” the researchers explained in the whitepaper.
The researchers were also able to guess the caller’s gender quite well on the OnePlus 9 smartphone (88.7% on average), but identification fell to an average of 73.6%. Speech recognition fell between 33.3% and 41.6%.
Via: BleepingComputer
The longer you work in the tech space, the more you get a feel for the way things might go. It’s like you always have your head on the rails, listening for the on-coming train. No one can see it and, even if they too put their heads on the cold, hard metal, they can’t even detect a tremor. But 36 years of listening has fine-tuned your senses and now you can hear and feel things others can’t. So, you stand up, squinting into the distance, and tell a tale of possible tech futures.
These are nine predictions that range from near certainty to almost fanciful. It’s also just a glimpse. Use this set of predictions as a spark for your own prognostications.
Before the end of next year, consumers will be seriously considering a range of streaming bundles, which will increasingly resemble the cable deals they all tried to discard. With dozens of streaming services available and the uncertain economic landscape for both the services (subscriber churn and drain) and the industry that feeds them (entertainment), smaller streaming services may look for the safe harbor of bundles or even consolidation.
Could Apple buy Netflix in 2023? It could probably afford it, but Disney, which already owns Hulu and Disney+ is a more likely candidate. Netflix’s interest in a sale may rely, in part, on the success of its ad-supported option. Thus far, it’s been a bit of a dud, but that could change next year. If it doesn’t and Netflix goes through another cycle of subscriber base instability, it could look to make a deal.
At the very least, we’ll see more cable and internet companies offer even more packages that include all your favorite streamers, just as they’ve done with cable bundles for decades. Everything old is new again.
The entire auto industry is trying to shift from combustible engines to electric motors and in 2023 we should see new sedans and cars from all the major manufacturers. EV growth in the US has lagged well behind Europe and China but the introduction of EV pickups from GM and Ford could change that.
In an ironic twist, the EVs that are supposed to help us beat back climate change by producing zero atmosphere-harming emissions may be more vulnerable to climate-change-produced weather events. Hurricane Ian produced salt-water floods that damaged electric vehicles’ giant lithium-ion batteries (that usually run the entire base of the car) and made them prone to busting into flames.
It’s something that Tesla, probably the world's leading EV car maker, may want to address in 2023. But that once stalwart leader is now teetering with massive stock losses and a CEO who seems more interested in social media than the EV brand he built. Elon Musk will have to refocus on Tesla in 2023 to save it and help the entire EV market move forward.
It’s a fair bet that we'll see the first sets of port-free and wireless smartphones in 2023. Apple already removed the physical SIM slot for iPhone 14 phones (in the US), and many believe it may move quickly from Lightning port to USB-C port to no charging port at all. It’s possible that one variant of the iPhone 15, maybe the rumored Ultra, could ship in some markets without a charging port and charge through an included MagSafe charger, instead.
Apple, though, may not be ready to take the leap. Surely one or two smaller Android manufacturers might try a port-free phone before the end of 2023, if for no other reason than to test the waters.
For that wireless future to happen, we need faster wireless charging capabilities. The current best wireless chargers offer 15W and can charge a phone in under two hours. 2023 might see higher wattage and 45 minutes to a full charge.
The biggest story in the smart home space will undoubtedly be Matter. Unfortunately, consumers will spend most of 2023 not understanding it or even caring about it. However, if Matter does its job, many people may benefit form it all the same.
As more and more smart home gadgets bought throughout the year support Matter, consumers may find that the setup and interoperability between their disparate digital assistants just works. This, obviously, will be a triumph for Matter and all its partners even if Matter doesn’t matter to consumers at all.
The only thing that might slow down Matter’s adoption and utility is if not enough companies also support Thread, the low-power mesh network technology that’s been married to Matter for faster and easier smart home connections. I have seen far too many products supporting one (Matter) but not yet the other (Thread).
The social media reset will continue apace in 2023 with Twitter either dead or under different control, Facebook taking a Metaverse breather, Instagram trying to find itself, and TikTok battling a US government that doesn’t trust it.
This will leave the field wide open for the rise of some new platforms. Despite its inscrutability, Mastodon has an early lead as a Twitter replacement, though it’s not much of a news platform. I think there may be something new on the horizon that combines the best of what Twitter was, Instagram’s classic photo prowess, and the safety and community of early Facebook. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
The question is, will our love affair with social media even survive 2023? My money is on nope.
I’m almost certain we will see some kind of folding iPhone or iPad but I’m not sure it’ll launch this year. What I mean is that we may be seeing a glimpse of Apple’s planned device at WWDC 2023.
By demonstrating this next-gen iOS or iPadOS device early, Apple could give developers 18 months to design new apps for folding, and possibly dual-screen iPhone and iPads.
It’s not an unprecedented move. I still remember Apple unveiling the cylindrical Mac Pro at WWDC 2013 and not shipping for six months. Perhaps this more radical product move will need even more time in the development oven.
One of the biggest stories at CES 2023 won't involve new gadgets that rejuvenate your face, fold your clothes, or put you in the Metaverse. It’ll be sustainability, and it’s a narrative that will carry on throughout 2023.
It’s a way for companies to talk about climate change without fully addressing it. Instead, they’ll all use terms like “carbon neutral,” “net zero,” and “sustainability.” At least the last one seems to refer to a more life-sustaining planet.
For the first time, we’ll be talking about our own at-home carbon footprint and asking how the products and technologies we bring into it can help us lower our own emissions. For many, their efforts may stop outside the front door as they consider their first EV (see above). But considerations of smart home technology may finally be married with not just cost-savings through more efficient technologies, but Matter-based systems that can communicate and craft a better and more neutral home energy profile.
On the one hand, I’m excited by the VR and AR advancements I’ve experienced through Meta’s latest Quest headgear. The Quest Pro shows how far we’ve come in advancing mixed reality. But as many pointed out to me, a system that still can’t have virtual objects interact seamlessly with the real world is far from ideal.
The good news (and bad news) for Meta is that no one is interested in the Metaverse. In other words, there’s no rush to build that immersive, do-everything world for everyone at home, work, and play. Instead, Meta will spend 2023 refining its mixed reality hardware and world-building software while most people still use their VR headsets primarily for gaming and exercise.
2023 will not be the year of the Metaverse and it might even skip 2024. I think 2025 is, with much smaller, lighter hardware and 10X better optics and graphics, when things finally start to get interesting.
Someone is going to hire the first AI reporter to not just cook up ideas based on prompts, but to send out queries, get answers, and compose original stories. An AI will break news. 2023 will also see the first stage production of a play written by an AI. A song written, composed, and performed by an AI will hit the Billboard Top 100.
Major art museums will host AI art shows, and some will hang the computer-generated art right alongside the masters. At some point, no one will be able to tell the difference.
As I said, this is all no more than a narrow view of what is going to be a very wide and busy technology future. I may be wrong about some or all these things, but I bet I’ll be more right than the ChatGPT AI. When I asked it about the major tech trends of 2023, it told me about technologies, like 5G for smartphones, that had already happened. Maybe I should rethink that whole AI bit.
Cybersquatting, a method of tricking victims into visiting malicious websites, has reached record highs in 2022, new reports have claimed.
Data from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) analyzed by Atlas VPN found 5,616 cybersquatting disputes filed with the organization this year, representing almost a 10% increase compared to 2021.
Cybersquatting is a method in which crooks try to leverage typos (or recklessness) to have people visit their malicious websites. There are various formats of cybersquatting, including typosquatting, combosquatting, and others.
Typosquatting, arguably the most popular among the methods, has threat actors registering domain names seemingly identical to the ones belonging to legitimate businesses. So, for example, Amazon might be Anazon, Amazom, while Netflix could be NetfIix (there is a capital i instead of the letter L).
Combosquatting is also a popular technique and revolves around combining the domain name with an extra word such as “payment”, “support”, or similar. So, for example, Amazon might be amazon-support.com, while Netflix could be netflix-payment.com.
With cybersquatting, threat actors are banking on two things: either people will mistype the address on their own, or the crooks share the link via email, or social channels, and hope no one notices the typo or the obvious fake domain name. The malicious websites are designed to look identical to their legitimate counterparts, and are built to steal identity and login data.
The number of cybersquatting complaints has been steadily rising over the years, Atlas VPN further claims. Compared to the year 2000, there’s been an increase of 202% in cybersquatting disputes. The total number of complaints has exceeded 61,000, in that time period.
One of the bigger, and more recent campaigns, included an unknown threat actor that set up more than 200 malicious domains and impersonated more than two dozen global brands to distribute all kinds of malware for both Android and Windows operating systems. Some of the brands impersonated in the attack included PayPal, SnapChat, TikTok, and others.
Over the past year, Nvidia has certainly experienced its fair share of problems and controversies, as you’re unlikely to have missed. Good things happened in 2022, certainly, but there were a fair number of bad occurrences, and even some ugly ones (melting adapters on top-end GPUs springs to mind in that category). Without further ado, let’s get cracking on summarizing Nvidia’s progress – or lack of it in some cases – during 2022.
Nvidia’s Lovelace GPUs succeeded Ampere, with the first next-gen model coming out in mid-October, the flagship RTX 4090. That was followed by the RTX 4080 a month later, and while both desktop graphics cards were undeniably fast – particularly that flagship – they were both equally undeniably dogged with some thorny problems.
Let’s start with the RTX 4090 and the case of the melting adapters. Even before the RTX 4090 came out, we knew it would be a powerful but power-hungry beast, and so it came to pass, with the flagship sporting a TGP of 450W. So, any buyers had to take care that their power supply could handle that, and that their case design could cope with the heat produced by the RTX 4090 (and that the GPU would fit inside the case in the first place, of course).
However, not long after the RTX 4090 emerged, worrying reports of melting adapter cables reached our ears. These were few in number to start with, and Nvidia was quick to say it was investigating, but gradually these complaints multiplied.
The problem was being encountered by those who used the adapter supplied with the RTX 4090 so it could be connected to an ATX 2.0 power supply. (Those PSUs are what most PC owners have, with not many folks having upgraded to the very new ATX 3.0 models. But the 4090 comes with a 16-pin power connector that works directly with ATX 3.0 PSUs, and doesn’t fit ATX 2.0 models – so with the latter, the adapter has to be used).
Unfortunately, that adapter was melting in some cases, and damaging the graphics card, too, in some of those instances. Which is obviously a terrible situation (not to mention the fire risk element, if you’re not around when the smoking begins).
Now, we should note very clearly that according to the Nvidia investigation, as of mid-November, there were only 50 cases globally. That’s 50 cards in purported sales of something like 125,000 boards, which if correct, would mean the chance of a melting adapter is very unlikely. As the big Reddit mega-thread on this issue points out, the chance of a melt being experienced is 0.04% – but still, it can happen.
There was lots of theorizing about why the adapters were melting, and the most prominent theory – that the adapter wasn’t seated properly in its socket in the GPU – was confirmed by Nvidia to be the most likely culprit. As Nvidia told us: “Our findings to date suggest that a common issue is that connectors are not fully plugged into the graphics card.”
Part of the problem here, though , is that to fit this gargantuan graphics card in your PC, you have to bend the power cable round quite tightly (maybe with it pressed up against the side panel of the case), and this could put strain on the adapter and perhaps begin to pull it out of the socket slightly.
What’ll be Nvidia’s final conclusion on this affair? We still don’t know that at the time of writing, but this has left a somewhat sour taste in the mouths of some buyers who paid a lot of money – a small fortune, in fact – for the Lovelace flagship.
However, we should make it clear that the RTX 4090 itself is a jaw-droppingly speedy high-end GPU, and an incredible performance high point, make no mistake on that (for gamers and creatives alike). But a design flaw like this, no matter how very uncommon it might be, is really quite a serious drop of the ball from Nvidia (even if the company is offering expedited returns for affected graphics cards, as you might expect). No matter how great the RTX 4090 might be in raw performance terms, this episode has still tarnished Nvidia’s reputation to an extent.
Let’s move on to the RTX 4080, which may not have suffered from melting controversies, but actually caused more of a stir than the RTX 4090 in the end – thanks to pricing, and the fact that it turned up as two variants, one of which was quickly canceled.
When Nvidia revealed the RTX 4080, two models were shown off – one with 16GB of VRAM, and the other with 12GB (and a lesser spec GPU chip). Immediately there was an outcry about the latter lower-tier model, and how relatively pants it was – for its price – and the undoubted confusion caused by having two such very different flavors of RTX 4080. Especially when one of those flavors looked suspiciously like an RTX 4070 in RTX 4080 clothing (with that theory very much underlined by RTX 4070 Ti rumors later in the year).
Following all this controversy, Nvidia famously ‘unlaunched’ the graphics card and consigned it to the dustbin. (That said, its resurrection is rumored to be imminent as the aforementioned RTX 4070 Ti, but that story will be for next year).
Price-wise, like the scrapped lower-tier model, the RTX 4080 16GB that went on sale was still a price/performance nightmare. Particularly when custom third-party boards pushed up the already exorbitant MSRP ($1,199 in the US) to dizzying heights that made them almost as costly as the RTX 4090 – which is very much a faster GPU.
So why on earth would you buy the RTX 4080, and not the flagship? That was the thinking of quite a few folks, and the value proposition of the RTX 4080 prompted us to call it the GPU that Nvidia should have canceled (referencing the aforementioned canned 4080 12GB, of course).
And going by sales estimates floating around via the rumor mill – with some pretty consistent approximations – it seems GPU buyers agreed, and RTX 4080 sales flagged, trailing the RTX 4090 by a long, long way.
All in all, the Lovelace graphics card launches for 2022 were seriously problematic in some respects, then. But this shouldn’t draw away from the fact that the RTX 4090 offered an astonishing level of frame rate shifting power – plus don’t forget DLSS 3 was added into the mix with all Lovelace cards, too (we’ll talk more about that later) – and even the RTX 4080 is a powerful GPU, make no mistake.
It’s just that the price of the RTX 4080 is way more off base than the Lovelace flagship, value-wise – which is really saying something – although Nvidia may well be about to correct that pricing according to the rumor mill. (Particularly in light of how that value proposition looks even worse compared to the freshly launched AMD RX 7900 XTX). Indeed, by the time you read this, maybe that RTX 4080 price correction could’ve already happened…
As a final note on Lovelace, another blow to Nvidia was delivered by EVGA, one of its larger graphics card manufacturing partners, which announced just before the launch of RTX 4000 GPUs that it wouldn’t be making or selling these products (amidst controversial rumors – such as “disrespectful treatment” – about why). Effectively that wound up EVGA’s operations on the graphics card front, although the firm still supports RTX 3000 boards, of which some are still on sale – which brings us onto our next point…
Another issue that Nvidia faced late in 2022 was the amount of RTX 3000 graphics cards that were still on shelves or in warehouses with the RTX 4000 launch looming. That represented a problem because once Lovelace GPUs were released (or even revealed), it’d mean gamers were looking to buy (or wait for) those next-gen graphics cards – and Nvidia, or more precisely its partners, still had all that RTX 3000 stock to shift, and that’d be interfered with.
So, this meant Nvidia employed a strategy in which RTX 3000 GPUs were ‘layered on top’ of next-gen GPUs, as the company put it. In practice, this meant we got the new RTX 4090 and 4080, the weighty high-end offerings we’ve just been discussing, whereas the rest of the market remained Ampere (RTX 3070, 3060, 3050 – and the older budget offerings below that).
In short, this meant all we got from Lovelace was super-expensive GPUs, allowing breathing room for that whole range of RTX 3000 stock below to sell through. And while throughout 2022, and particularly as the year rolled on, graphics card pricing had been dropping – well, normalizing from inflated levels, and finally dropping just below MSRP eventually – that trend stopped dead in November with Nvidia cards. Sadly, RTX 3000 pricing actually rose during that month for many GeForce models, as our sister site Tom’s Hardware, which tracks GPU price tags on a monthly basis, observed, with chunky price rises (urgh) on the Nvidia front for the RTX 3090, 3080 and 3070.
Perhaps because people realized they weren’t getting an RTX 4060 anytime soon, at least not going by the grapevine – and leakage being thin on the ground – so mid-range options, or certainly mid-to-lower range, are pretty much to look at Ampere for the foreseeable.
This is what Nvidia wanted, obviously enough – to be able to clear that stock – but a pair of exorbitantly priced next-gen cards, and rising price tags on Ampere GPUs when previously the RTX 3000 series had been dropping in cost significantly, is very much not what gamers wanted. And the way this is working as intended, we presume, is likely another reason as to why we shouldn’t expect an RTX 4060 any time in the near or even medium-term future.
2022 was another year in which Nvidia neglected the budget end of the GPU market, which is an ongoing theme in the contemporary world of graphics cards, it seems.
Last year, we bemoaned the lack of an RTX 3050 at the more wallet-friendly end of the spectrum, and this year, we finally got this graphics card. Shame, then, that it turned out to be, well, not exactly a budget card, with an MSRP of $249 in the US – which might sound okay, but it’s a good chunk more than xx50 model GPUs that went before it – and you couldn’t buy the RTX 3050 at that price anyway. It’s still a fair chunk above that recommended price at the time of writing, and it was not far off double upon launch early in the year (and thin on the ground, stock-wise).
Nvidia also deployed the GTX 1630 in June, a model actually targeted squarely at the budget arena, but it was so weak sauce (plus it was well overpriced at launch, and still pricey today, for what it is) that the less said about this GPU, the better.
Those new offerings for 2022 were not a solution, then, and to heap more misery on the situation, Nvidia could be in the process of making things worse on the cheap GPU front. If the rumor mill is right – and there’s been some fairly consistent chatter on this – the RTX 2060 is being discontinued, and the same might be the case for the GTX 1660. While we must take word from the grapevine with a great deal of seasoning, if true, this would leave Nvidia’s line-up at the very cheapest end of the market looking extremely thin. And things are already shaky as it is, as mentioned.
Okay, so don’t get us wrong, the budget situation throughout 2022, particularly later on, was better than last year. Mainly because 2021 was an absolute farce, really, with gamers paying seriously silly money for the likes of a GTX 1650 Super at the budget end of the spectrum. But still, even with GPU pricing normalizing to more reasonable levels (finally), and the RTX 3050 being added to Nvidia’s roster, Team Green simply didn’t do enough here, and budget buyers remained restricted in choice, to put it mildly.
Plus, don’t forget that as we’ve already touched on, the RTX 4060 looks to be a long way off still, although how ‘wallet-friendly’ this GPU might be is entirely debatable anyway (the RTX 4050 isn’t in sight either, for that matter; laptop GPUs aside). Apparently what we’ve got for now in the somewhat-more-affordable-department is a refreshed RTX 3060 Ti (with faster VRAM) which was brought into play late in the year – and that’s not nearly enough. (Plus it’s another sign not to expect the RTX 4060 anytime soon, arguably).
Ah, well. Maybe next year will be different for budget desktop GPUs. Here’s hoping.
Nvidia DLSS, the company’s well-established upscaling tech, got a third-gen incarnation this year which was revealed in September. DLSS 3 recruited a bunch of new features (Optical Multi Frame Generation, Optical Flow Accelerator; read up more here) to further accelerate frame rates and ensure a smoother gaming experience.
There’s been some controversy around DLSS 3 and its exact use cases, along with concerns about increased latency as Techspot reported, which can impact certain games, like twitch shooters as opposed to, say, Microsoft Flight Simulator. But where it works well – with supported games, and Flight Simulator is very much a highlight here – it’s a great new tech, and another step up in terms of getting a seriously smooth frame rate.
The obvious caveats, though, are that support is thin on the ground thus far, and only RTX 4000 graphics cards need apply. Which makes DLSS 3 feel a bit like a tool that’s being used to help improve the value proposition of the super-pricey Lovelace GPUs which are out there, the cynical might suggest – although Nvidia has told us there are reasons for the tech being RTX 4000-only. (Namely that it’ll require additional research and engineering to be applied to older Nvidia GPUs, and any benefits wouldn’t be as pronounced).
You know the saying: in with the old, and… wait a minute, that’s not right. But this was one of the bright ideas Nvidia had on the ray tracing front this year, with RTX Remix. This new tech (built on the Nvidia Omniverse platform) was revealed at GTC 2022 alongside Lovelace graphics cards, and it truly is a modder’s dream, allowing for old games to easily be given a fresh coat of RTX paint with ray tracing and DLSS.
Nvidia showed off Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind in its remastered glory at GTC, which looked very impressive indeed. The theory is that when it’s released next year, RTX Remix will allow the modding community to spruce up a whole bunch of older games, giving them a new lease of life. An exciting prospect indeed.
If you couldn’t afford a new GPU, then maybe you signed up for Nvidia’s game streaming service in 2022. Those who did benefited from some solid improvements to GeForce Now, one of which was the ability to stream in 4K for those on Windows PCs and Macs. That was for those gamers on the higher-tier RTX 3080 membership, and there was another useful change with that plan – namely the ability to sign up for just a month, allowing folks to try it out for a short time and see how smoothly the fastest GeForce Now offering runs for them.
Nvidia is building a more attractive streaming option, slowly but surely, and the demise of Google Stadia this year (well, it officially closes down mid-January 2023) has helped make more breathing space in the game streaming arena, something Team Green has been trying to take advantage of, naturally.
Nvidia’s attempted acquisition of ARM, a huge $40 billion move, was dogged with problems from the outset. Initiated way back in 2020, the buyout ran into nothing but trouble throughout 2021, culminating in a lawsuit from the FTC to stop the deal proceeding on the grounds that it was anti-competitive. This year, in February, Nvidia finally gave up this ambition and officially terminated its bid for ARM. In the end, given all the opposition and the vehemence of those naysayers, this was hardly a surprise.
As you made your way through this article, you may have found yourself feeling a bit depressed. A lot of what we’ve discussed here is Nvidia’s woes and missteps, and that’s inevitable, because, well, 2022 contained a fair few of them. Most obviously, sky-high pricing for new GPUs, issues around both the RTX 4090 (adapters melting) and RTX 4080 (that canceled version, plus value proposition), and more drawn-out budget graphics card misery.
And yet, to be fair to Nvidia, those Lovelace graphics cards represent some seriously impressive pieces of engineering (adapter cables aside), with the RTX 4090 being ridiculously fast, frankly (and a long way ahead of AMD’s rival RDNA 3 flagship, albeit with outliers). DLSS 3 also looks very promising (with the caveats that we mentioned) early doors, and RTX Remix is a seriously nifty idea, too.
It’s not like there weren’t positives, then, but too many clouds of negativity were blotted across the sky for Nvidia this year. But even so, guess what – Team Green is still by far the most dominant desktop GPU power. Indeed, the latest stats we have at the time of writing (for Q3 2022, from Jon Peddie Research) show Nvidia with an 88% market share of discrete graphics cards. 88%! Or what we’d call a Google level of dominance.
Is Nvidia untouchable in the desktop GPU space? Could this level of domination be the reason why the company feels confident in pricing new GPUs the way it did with Lovelace? Well, whatever the case, Nvidia better not get too confident, or comfortable on its GPU laurels, as AMD has produced a compelling offering with its RX 7900 XTX flagship – one very much capable of taking on the RTX 4080, at a lower price point (as we write this) – and there’s more to come in the RDNA 3 range, of course.
Things could start to change quite quickly if Nvidia doesn’t relent in the practice of pushing ever-dizzying premium pricing on its new GPUs, because extracting every last dollar from gamers amidst a cost-of-living crisis could leave Team Green looking at a dwindling reservoir of goodwill in terms of its public perception. Which could lead to more people turning to AMD, or maybe even Intel at the budget end of the GPU spectrum, which Nvidia still seems unwilling to address in a meaningful way.
Let’s see how 2023 starts, with the rumored RTX 4070 Ti launch supposed to be happening at CES, and if that goes ahead as predicted, then come on Nvidia: let’s have a pleasant surprise on the pricing front, for once.
With most of us amassing digital accounts all the time, password managers are a useful tool to help take the hassle out of keeping track of every single login and password we have.
In an exclusive survey of a thousand people, TechRadar Pro found that three-quarters of users have at least one password manager to store our credentials, yet most do not seem overly confident in their abilities to keep these details safe.
A third of those surveyed used a combination of a dedicated manager and one integrated with their browser, while another third used just one of the two. A little over a tenth used two dedicated password managers, and a quarter didn't use any manager at all.
When asked to score their trust in the security of password managers, the results were less than impressive. Six out of ten was the most common score, chosen by 144 people, closely followed by five and seven, chosen by 140 and 136 people respectively.
Perhaps these middling figures can be explained by the recent stories of prominent password managers being hacked, or maybe people are worried about the various privacy issues surrounding behemoths like Apple and Google, both of whom make it hard to resist using their respective proprietary mangers, if you happen to use any of their devices and/ or browsers.
The results may also reflect the conflicted attitudes people have towards such companies. On the one hand, people may believe that tech giants must be keeping our passwords safe - aside from having the resources to maintain a strong security posture, it would be catastrophic PR for them to have some kind of major breach, given how much they have to lose.
But on the other, there is plenty of mistrust around how such corporations do business, with the aforementioned privacy issues a real cause for concern for many.
However, analyzing the rest of the scores, more people did pick a rating between eight and ten than one and three - 284 to 215. Also, 110 gave these utilities a perfect ten, and 97 one out of ten.
Splitting the results down the middle, just under half of all respondents (43.6%) rated the trustworthiness of password managers between one and five, and just over half (54.6%) between six and ten.
The results also contradict a previous survey we conducted, where most respondents said they didn't use a password manager. Another survey we conducted also found that most people don't use password generators either - which are integrated with virtually all password managers, but there are standalone versions too.
These two facts combined perhaps explain why so many people form bad password habits. In fact, there have been various reports on the state of passwords globally, and pretty much all of them arrive at the same conclusion - we need to do better with them.
However, this may be a moot point, given that passwordless systems are increasing in prominence, set to be the new technology securing our digital world. These include biometric systems - such as facial recognition and fingerprint scanners - passkeys and single sign on (SSO) technologies, which are available in many identity management software.
Social media users are becoming ever more adept at spotting scams, but many still need to remain alert, an exclusive TechRadar Pro study has found.
Firstly, respondents were asked what social media platforms they used. Facebook came out on top with just under 80% being active on the networking site. Instagram was next with 68.1%, and Tiktok and Twitter were closely contested for third place with just under 50% apiece using them (49.8% and 47.5% respectively).
LinkedIn and WhatsApp rounded out the last two of the mainstream platforms, with 35.8% and 33.4% respectively. 6.6% said they used other social media platforms to these, with 3.7% using none at all.
The results for how often scams were encountered on social media platforms were pretty evenly split. Just over a third came across them once a day, and just over a quarter said once a week. Only 15% said once a month, and under a third said less than a month.
Scams on social media platforms have been on the rise since the pandemic, reaching a peak in 2021, and remaining prominent this year as well. Unsurprisingly, prime sales periods, such as Black Friday and the festive season, often see an increase in the perpetration of scams.
Thankfully, most felt confident or very confident - 30.9% and 34.4% respectively - that they could identify them. A quarter said they were a little bit, and only 10% said they were not very.
That confidence may be misplaced, however, given that other reports have shown a fair amount of users fall for popular scams on social media, such as phishing campaigns and fake gift card offers.
Cryptocurrency scams have also been growing in popularity in recent years on social media. Ads for fake exchanges will promote 'investment opportunities', with the promise of increasing a victim's wallet substantially. Some have even used videos of Elon Musk discussing crypto to lure people in.
There are numerous ways to spot social media scams, though. One telltale sign is that if a deal looks too good to be true, then it probably is. Another is to check the address of any links before clicking them, to make sure they actually take you to the official site of the company in question.
Checking that a website looks professional and is free from any glaring spelling mistakes and grammatical errors is also key to spotting fake websites.
Someone found a way to bypass the two-factor authentication (2FA) security measure at Comcast Xfinity and compromise countless accounts, reports have claimed.
Following the bypass, the attackers are able to use the compromised accounts to try and take over cryptocurrency exchange accounts and cloud storage services.
On December 19 Xfinity email users started getting notified of changes to their account information, but their passwords were already changed so they couldn’t enter. Those that managed to get back into the account found that a secondary email address was added to the account, from a disposable domain yopmail.com.
The secondary email address is a security measure used by some email providers that help with password resets, account notifications, and similar.
Many of the victims took to Twitter, Reddit, and Xfinity forums to discuss what had happened, and said that they had 2FA enabled. So, whoever was behind the attack, managed to guess the password with credential stuffing, and then managed to bypass the two-factor authentication security measure. BleepingComputer’s report states the attackers used a “privately circulated OTP (one-time password) bypass” which allowed them to generate working 2FA verification codes.
That gave them access to the account, and adding the secondary, disposable email account, allowed them to perform the password reset process.
After gaining complete control over the compromised email accounts, the threat actors then proceeded to breach further online services, assuming people's identities to request email resets. Dropbox, Evernote, Coinbase, and Gemini, are just some of the services that the threat actors tried to breach.
Xfinity is keeping silent on the matter for the time being, but a customer said on Reddit that the firm is aware of the incident and is currently investigating. The same source also said that according to a customer support employee they spoke to, the issue seems to be quite widespread.
Via: BleepingComputer
Quora has announced plans to launch a platform destined to communicate with AI chatbots, which is set to allow humans to ask questions and have a dialogue with the system.
Poe - short for Platform for Open Exploration - will be run by the Q&A website, which relies heavily on user input to generate its content.
The company was founded by Adam D’Angelo, who also sits on the board of directors for the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT.
In a message to TechCrunch, a Quora spokesperson explained that the company’s 12 years of experience lends it well to serving people who are looking for knowledge, and that “...much of what [Quora has] learned can be applied to this new domain where people are interfacing with large language models.”
There’s a growing number of concerns surrounding the technology, though, with many claiming that the AI’s answers can sound so realistic and promising that they can be taken as fact, when actually that may not be the case.
Others are worried about the source of the data, which is largely crowdsourced. Microsoft was recently sued for up to $9 billion for failing to correctly attribute code that was sourced and used for GitHub Copilot.
For now, Poe, which is invite-only and iOS-only, remains disconnected from Quora according to TechCrunch’s contact. Besides a description that reads "Poe lets you ask questions, get instant answers, and have back-and-forth dialogue with AI", there's very little else to take from the App Store listing.
But it’s clear that the value of such artificial intelligence is recognized more widely. Google is reportedly at ‘code red’ in response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT (via 9To5Google), to the tune that the company is reportedly reassigning departments and even upending projects to shift its focus towards developing AI prototypes and products.
Whichever way you look at it, it seems that all companies recognize the lies and bias that AI can create, each with its own solution. OpenAI claims that ChatGPT can “admit its mistakes”, while other companies are said to be considering limiting the number of users or pushing for contributor moderation.
On-the-go video editors can breathe a sigh of relief - DaVinci Resolve for iPad has finally hit the App Store.
Announcing the release on Twitter, Blackmagic Design, the developers behind the video editing software, said: “DaVinci Resolve for iPad now available! Get the same color correction and editing tools used on Hollywood films on iPad, plus Blackmagic Cloud multi user collaboration, AI based magic mask, voice isolation, dialogue leveler and more.”
“Its elegant, modern interface is fast to learn and easy for new users, yet powerful for professionals,” the breathless App Store write-up claimed. Like it's desktop counterpart, the iPad edition is available free with next to no restrictions. The one-time premium upgrade clocks in at just under $100 / £100.
Long considered some of the best free video editing software, the iPad version mirrors the professional desktop editor almost 1:1. That’s a feat not matched even by Apple FInal Cut Pro (although users can try Apple iMovie on iPad for an excessively streamlined experience).
With the video editing software hitting dropping on iPad, what’s likely to attract many content creators - beyond the non-existent price-tag - is the ability to craft Hollywood-grade productions without a powerful video editing computer or video editing laptop.
Blackmagic Design’s app-based editor works on iPad Pros running iPadOS 16 or above on an A12 Bionic chip or later. But, to really squeeze the best out of the tool, an M1 or M2 chip is advisable. The developers also note that earlier iPad models may be restricted to HD, with memory limitations potentially restricting certain features.
In our recent preview of DaVinci Resolve for iPad, we were impressed with the real-time color grading, multi-track audio, AI tools, and timeline editing tools. However, we did stumble across a few bugs and glitches while in beta. Hopefully, have been ironed out now the video editing app is on general release.
You can download DaVinci Resolve for iPad here.
Artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI has announced details on its latest technology that will see huge improvements to 3D rendering.
OpenAI is the company behind text-to-image generator, DALL-E, which has now turned its attention to translate text prompts into 3D point clouds, which it will call POINT-E.
According to a paper published by OpenAI, POINT-E “produces 3D models in only 1-2 minutes on a single GPU”, compared with other current solutions which can take hours and require multiple GPUs.
An extract from the paper details POINT-E’s current place in the world of 3D model building:
“While our method still falls short of the state-of-the-art in terms of sample quality, it is one to two orders of magnitude faster to sample from, offering a practical trade-off for some use cases.”
It works by generating a single synthetic view with a text-to-image diffusion model. Then, a 3D point cloud is generated, which is easier to synthesize hence the reduced load on GPUs, though it doesn’t capture smaller details hence the trade-off mentioned in the paper.
A secondary AI has been trained to alleviate some of this, but the work explains that this can “sometimes miss thin/sparse parts of objects”, such as the stalks of a plant, giving the illusion of floating flowers.
OpenAI promises to have trained the artificial intelligence on several million 3D models and their metadata, though its use cases for now remain fairly limited.
One such example includes rendering real-world objects for 3D printing, though as the technology develops and becomes more refined, it’s likely that we’ll see it being used in more advanced cases such as gaming and even television.
The project’s open-source code is available on GitHub,
With Christmas just a stone's throw away, it has been estimated that over 113 million travelers are getting ready to set out for their holiday destination – and that's just in the US! Even more are expected to be on the move around the rest of the world.
Traveling often means passing long hours waiting around an airport or station, in a car, or on a plane, ferry or train. People are then more likely to connect to public Wi-Fi to stream media, watch YouTube videos or scroll on their social media feed without eating up all their data. That's where one of the best VPN services comes handy and is a must this holiday season.
A VPN is software that spoofs your real IP address, while encrypting all the data leaving your device. This means that hackers looking to exploit a public connection to intrude into your smartphone, tablet or laptop will be hindered to do so.
Sadly, a recent survey shows that most people are still not using such a security software when connecting on a risky Wi-Fi. Keep reading as we explain everything you need to know in more detail.
Ask any IT or cybersecurity expert, and you are likely to get the same answer: the era when just business VPNs were a necessity is long gone. Under the current digital landscape, every user needs to use a secure VPN to protect their online life. And, that's especially true for those regularly connecting to open internet hotspots.
Unfortunately, it turns out that most of us are still not following this important privacy-friendly practice.
In a recent survey conducted on 1,000 American users aged 18 or older, more than half respondents (56%) said that they are not using a VPN when accessing public Wi-Fi. Even worse, 41% don't use such security software at all.
While the danger is looming all year round, the risks get even higher during the holiday season as people are more likely to access the internet from different countries and/or public networks.
That's why cybersecurity firm Lookout behind security, privacy, and identity theft protection solutions like its antivirus software Lookout Security, put together a list of the most common risks for travelers to keep in mind if you're on the move this festive season.
Here are the main takeaways:
Short for virtual private network, a VPN is a security software that hides your IP address location while securing your data inside an encrypted VPN tunnel.
As we mentioned above, public Wi-Fi can easily be exploited by malicious actors looking to steal your data. By simply downloading and switching on your VPN, you'll create a layer of protection around your most sensitive information. Then you can just relax during your vacation time without being worried about your privacy.
Reliable VPN services are also essential for browsing the web anonymously in any circumstances and preventing nosy governments and malicious actors from accessing your data. That's something to keep in mind if you're heading on holiday to a country with invasive surveillance practices in place.
You should then look out for features like a strict no-logs policy, strong encryption protocols and additional security options like kill switch and split tunneling.
As for how it works, a VPN is the perfect tool for accessing blocked social media platforms, apps and websites. That's also really handy to keep up with your favorite TV shows when abroad or, again, to bypass the strict online censorship that some countries enforced within their borders.
It's worth noting that authoritarian governments might block VPN usage. This makes it vital, even for travelers visiting such nations, to opt for a service integrated with obfuscation technology to evade these blocks.
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