Month: February 2018

I imagine that they will still sell to crypto-miners, though!

Nvidia Will Focus on Gaming Because Cryptocurrencies Are ‘Volatile’

SlashDot – “Graphics card manufacturer Nvidia made almost $10 billion dollars in the last fiscal year, that’s up 41 percent from the previous period. The GPU company broke the news to its investors in a conference call on Thursday, and said that video games such as Star Wars: Battlefront II and Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds as well as the unprecedented success of the Nintendo Switch led to the record profits. That and cryptocurrency. From a report:

Graphics cards are the preferred engine of today’s cryptocurrency miners. It’s led to a shortage of the GPUs, a spike in their prices, and record profits for the company that manufactures them. ‘Strong demand in the cryptocurrency market exceeded our expectations,’ Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress told investors during its earnings call yesterday. ‘We met some of this demand with a dedicated board in our OEM business and some was met with our gaming GPUs.’ But Nvidia is having trouble keeping up with the demand and it’s recommended retailers put gamers ahead of cryptocurrency miners while supply is limited. Kress acknowledged the shortage on the call and reaffirmed Nvidia’s commitment to gamers. ‘While the overall contribution of cryptocurrency to our business remains hard to quantify, we believe it was a higher percentage of revenue than the prior quarter,’ she said. ‘That said, our main focus remains on our core gaming market as cryptocurrency trends will likely remain volatile.’ When Kress finished her statement and opened up the line to questions, the first question was about cryptocurrency. ‘Is crypto being modeled more conservatively?’ An investor from Evercore asked. ‘We model crypto approximately flat,’ said Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive officer.”

CrossOver is the commercial version of Wine, which will allow you to run Windows software on your Chromebook! A game-changer for sure!

Also, CrossOver 17.1 is out, and they even have a “Lifetime License” option available for a limited time! But, it will set you back almost $500.00 bucks!

In this video from “The Verge” you can check out Intel’s prototype “Smartglasses.”

A laser beams directly into your eye… ah, OK!

Someone has hacked the Switch, but it is not all goof news.

Nintendo Switch Linux hack offers good news for homebrew

SlashGear – By: Eric Abent – “For as long as consoles have been around, people have been hacking them. Nintendo in particular has a long and storied history with hackers, especially with its more modern consoles. Healthy homebrew scenes popped up around the Wii, DS, and 3DS, and now that the Switch is on the scene, hackers have turned their attention to it.

Toward the end of last year, a team of hackers created an exploit tool that allowed for homebrew on the Switch, but there was one major drawback. As the exploit ran on Switch firmware version 3.0.0, it meant that those who applied it (and wanted to keep it) weren’t able to play Super Mario Odyssey, one of the console’s must-own games. The fact that there isn’t a significant amount of homebrew applications for the Switch just yet is also a problem, but it’s one that will fix itself as time goes on.

Now, however, we’re hearing of new progress on the homebrew front. A group called fail0verflow (which some of you will already be familiar with) posted a very intriguing image to Twitter a few days back, showing the Switch running Linux. The folks over at Nintendo Life got in touch with fail0verflow today, and the group makes some pretty big claims about the potential longevity of this exploit.

According to fail0verflow, this exploit can’t be fixed by a future firmware update by Nintendo. That’s big talk, but if it’s true, it means good things for a homebrew community that has been trying to gain a foothold when it comes to hacking the Switch.

Of course, the flip side of that benefit for the homebrew community is that an exploit that can’t be patched is bad news for Nintendo, as it opens the platform up to piracy. Indeed, whatever advances the homebrew community makes always seem to go hand-in-hand with an increase in piracy, so you can bet that Nintendo will be looking for a way to fix this exploit regardless of fail0verflow’s claims. Stay tuned.”

I include this news item for personal nostalgia reasons! I started my computer career working with OpenVMS and the DCL Command language. In fact, my first professionally published article was in DEC Professional magazine on a menu system I wrote in DCL! Amazing that people are still using OpenVMS!

Mission-critical system alert: 40-year-old OpenVMS hit by exploitable bug
ZDNet – By Liam Tung – “A patch is available for a privilege-escalation flaw affecting the 40-year-old OpenVMS operating system on hardware powered by ancient VAX and Alpha processors from Digital Equipment Corporation.

The OS, which has been supported by HP, is known for its reliability and has historically been used for core business systems that require high availability, including nuclear power plants and process-control systems.

The Register reports that a patch for the privilege-escalation flaw, CVE-2017-17842, has been made available ahead of a detailed description of the issue due in March. The delay is to give admins time to patch affected systems.

VMS Software Inc (VSI), the company to which HP licensed OpenVMS in 2014, said a ‘malformed DCL command table may result in a buffer overflow allowing a local privilege escalation in non-privileged accounts’. DCL is the VMS shell.

The vulnerability affects all versions of VMS and OpenVMS dating back to version 4.0, when it was just called VMS.

While this vulnerability is exploitable on VAX and Alpha hardware, it only causes a crash on Intel Itanium-based hardware and isn’t directly exploitable.

However, according to Simon Clubley, the researcher who found the flaw, a different version of the same vulnerability could make Itanium systems exploitable.

‘The only reason Itanium is not compromisable with this specific version of the exploit is because the return address is handled very differently on Itanium,’ he wrote.

‘It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that someone could find a different variant that could be used to compromise an Itanium system. For example, if you can overwrite a pointer to a data structure, then you can force code within DCL to process memory that you control.’

Additionally, Itanium systems can be indirectly compromised using the exploit he has if they’re part of a cluster with affected VAX or Alpha processors.

‘If your Itanium systems are part of a mixed-architecture cluster, then you can use the vulnerability to compromise a vulnerable cluster member and then use that cluster member to compromise your Itanium systems,’ he noted.

Clubley told The Register that anyone with shell access can compromise any version of OpenVMS released for VAX or Alpha architecture in the past 30 years.

There are different courses of action to remedy the issue for different customers, according to VMS Software’s VP of software engineering, Eddie Orcutt.

Alpha customers running VSI OpenVMS V8.4-2L1 or VSI OpenVMS V8.4-2L2 for Alpha need to contact VSI support.

Customers with Itanium running VSI OpenVMS V8.4-1H1, VSI OpenVMS V8.4-2, or VSI OpenVMS V8.4-2L1 can contact HPE if they have a HPE support contract for their version. Otherwise customers need to contact VMS Software VSI support.

Customers running HPE OpenVMS versions prior to and including V8.4 must contact HPE customer support.”