Tech Updates for July 2017

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A quick look into Microsoft’s Cortana, the RX Vega, Apple’s new iMac Pro, and the threat of ‘ransomware’

Cortana in Every Machine

THE VOICE OF THE FUTURE?

If you are a smartphone user, chances are high that you are familiar with Apple’s Siri and Android’s Google Now (or, for newer devices, Google Assistant). The arrival of voice-operated digital assistants caused paradigm shifts in the global smartphone scene, and Apple has gone on to integrate Siri in its macOS operating system for computers as well, but not before Microsoft introduced its own digital assistant, Cortana, as an integral part of its Windows 10 operating system and the less-known Windows Phone-based smartphones. Over the years, Cortana has proven to be a formidable voice assistant that is capable of being better than Siri and almost as good as Google’s mighty new Assistant.

However, Cortana’s run is just beginning, judging by Microsoft’s recent announcement, which promises that Cortana will be an integral part of the Windows IoT Core. In layman’s terms, it means that Cortana will be a part of many upcoming smart devices that are compatible with the ‘Internet of Things’, an abstraction layer that would allow said smart devices to communicate with each other and operate in synergy. In other words, the science fiction tropes of people providing verbal instructions to their houses and everything in it, including smart toasters, fridges, AC units etc. is suddenly a lot closer to becoming a reality. With Microsoft’s blessing, manufacturers such as HP are also building standalone ‘smart speaker’ terminals for Cortana, which would be able to hear, recognize and execute voice commands from up to 13 feet away. The first Cortana-powered devices are expected to show up later this year.

Vega Rising

BRINGING MORE POWER TO YOUR SCREENS

Semiconductor giant AMD’s new range of Polaris graphics cards, the RX series, received a great deal of praise from critics and users alike. Compared to their predecessors, the RX graphics cards not only performed solidly across the board under heavy loads, but they also did so very efficiently, exhibiting thermal emissions that were far more modest. The RX 400 series cards even received a slight refresh this year in the form of the RX 500 series, which offered even better performance.

The RX 400 and 500 series cards are competing with low- to mid-range GPUs from AMD’s archrival Nvidia, with the top-of-the-range RX 480 and RX 580 competing with Nvidia’s GTX 1060. However, AMD has been working on a new flagship card — the RX Vega — which is expected to best the much more powerful GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 graphics cards, and maybe even catch up to the mighty GTX 1080 Ti and GTX Titan Xp cards, which are the most powerful consumer-grade GPUs on the market right now. Promising over 12.5 teraFLOPs of raw performance and a massive 16 GB of memory, the RX Vega is targeted to perform fluidly at resolutions as high as 4K, while drawing approximately 250 watts of power at peak load, which is par for the course. However, it has been hinted by Raja Koduri, AMD’s Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, that the first Vega card, due to show up this July, would be targeted more toward enterprise use rather than general consumer markets, which would receive a Vega (or Vegas?) in due time.

iMac Goes Pro

APPLE’S NEW POWERHOUSE

In a rather surprising move, instead of performing a much-needed refresh of their acclaimed Mac Pro line of computers. Apple has launched a new computer called the iMac Pro, which retains the svelte and minimalistic appearance of the iMac range (at the cost of upgradability, of course, but with specs such as these, upgradability would not exactly be at the top of a prospective buyer’s list of priorities), while boasting beefy specs and high performance. The iMac Pro is not going to come cheap, with prices starting at $4,999, but it should be noted that this is hardly comparable to regular iMacs.
The iMac Pro sports a stunning 27” 5K display, a server-grade Intel Xeon CPU (with up to 18 cores), at least 32 GB of RAM, and a new Vega GPU from AMD among its most notable features. Aside from four USB-C Thunderbolt 3.0 ports, the iMac Pro has four regular USB 3.0 ports and even a 3.5 mm headphone jack, ensuring plenty of support for ‘legacy’ devices (at least in Apple terms), which is a surprisingly open-minded decision, considering Apple’s questionable design calls as of late.
However, Mac Pro fans should not feel left out, because Apple has stated that the iMac Pro is not a replacement for the Mac Pro, which will be receiving a refresh at an unspecified time in the future. The upcoming Mac Pro would also feature modular expandability, which used to be a major feature in earlier iterations of the Mac Pro before the unexpandable ‘trashcan’ design of the current-gen Mac Pros.

In The Wake of Digital Destruction

THE DANGEROUS RISE OF RANSOMWARE ON THE INTERNET

As if regular computer viruses and spyware were not bad enough, waves of a specific type of malware called ‘ransomware’ have recently started to appear. These programs, upon infecting a computer, encrypts its entire file system and renders its contents inaccessible. While holding the files hostage in such a manner, the program demands actual monetary payment to be made (usually through some form of cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin) to the creator of the malware, and only releases the files upon confirmation of the payment.
The WanaCry ransomware was the latest ransomware to cause major worldwide damage, infecting more than 230,000 computers in over a hundred nations and locking up their contents. Many of these computers were integral workstations of major companies, the operations of which ground to a halt because of this terrible setback. The ransomware operated by exploiting a security flaw of Windows that was officially patched by Microsoft through updates, but as many users neglect to install operating system updates, the malware got through in many cases. This was one of the biggest instances of mass cyber-attack in recent years.
Luckily, the spread of WanaCry was greatly slowed down by the action of a young computer researcher from Great Britain, who discovered a ‘kill switch’ inside the malware’s code, which had the program periodically attempting to access a particular website, which did not exist, and it seemed that the malware would deactivate itself if a connection was established successfully with the site. To test the hypothesis, the researcher bought the domain name and set it up on a remote server, and it caused the malware to be deactivated right away in infected machines around the world.
However, the researcher warned that later versions of the malware may appear without the website check mechanism in place, and advised everyone to install operating system updates in order to prevent any further damage from occurring.

Photographs from Internet

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