Computers & the Internet News and Discussions

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Yuli Ban
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Post by Yuli Ban »

With its legacy browser set to be officially retired on June 15, Microsoft is now encouraging organizations to avoid waiting until the last moment to stop using Internet Explorer.

In a recent blog post on the software giant’s Tech Community page, senior product manager for hardware Eric Van Aelstyn recommended that businesses still using IE should set their own retirement date instead.

Consumers and most businesses have now moved on to Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome or other modern browsers but some organizations still rely on IE to access certain sites. While Microsoft has repeatedly warned businesses that IE will be officially retired this year, not all companies were proactive enough to come up with a plan to transition to another browser yet.

Thankfully though, there’s still time and organizations don’t have to wait until June 15 to migrate away from IE.




And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
weatheriscool
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Re: Computers & the Internet News and Discussions

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White House says internet providers to discount fee for poor
Source: AP

By AAMER MADHANI

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — The Biden administration announced on Monday that 20 internet companies have agreed to provide discounted service to low-income Americans, a program that could effectively make tens of millions of households eligible for free service through an already existing federal subsidy.

The $1 trillion infrastructure package passed by Congress last year included $14.2 billion funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides $30 monthly subsidies ($75 in tribal areas) on internet service for millions of lower-income households.

With the new commitment from the internet providers, some 48 million households will be eligible for $30 monthly plans for 100 megabits per second, or higher speed, service — making internet service fully paid for with the government subsidy if they sign up with one of the providers participating in the program.

Biden, during his White House run and the push for the infrastructure bill, made expanding high-speed internet access in rural and low-income areas a priority. He has repeatedly spoken out about low-income families that struggled finding reliable wi-fi, so their children could take part in remote schooling and complete homework assignments early in the coronavirus pandemic.


Read more: https://apnews.com/article/technology-b ... 0273b672af
weatheriscool
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Laser bursts drive fastest-ever logic gates
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-laser-fas ... gates.html
by University of Rochester
A long-standing quest for science and technology has been to develop electronics and information processing that operate near the fastest timescales allowed by the laws of nature.

A promising way to achieve this goal involves using laser light to guide the motion of electrons in matter, and then using this control to develop electronic circuit elements—a concept known as lightwave electronics.

Remarkably, lasers currently allow us to generate bursts of electricity on femtosecond timescales—that is, in a millionth of a billionth of a second. Yet our ability to process information in these ultrafast timescales has remained elusive.

Now, researchers at the University of Rochester and the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have made a decisive step in this direction by demonstrating a logic gate—the building block of computation and information processing—that operates at femtosecond timescales. The feat, reported in the journal Nature, was accomplished by harnessing and independently controlling, for the first time, the real and virtual charge carriers that compose these ultrafast bursts of electricity.
weatheriscool
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Researchers create photonic materials for powerful, efficient light-based computing
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-photonic- ... based.html
by Robert Wells, University of Central Florida
University of Central Florida researchers are developing new photonic materials that could one day help enable low power, ultra-fast, light-based computing.

The unique materials, known as topological insulators, are like wires that have been turned inside out, where the current runs along the outside and the interior is insulated.

Topological insulators are important because they could be used in circuit designs that allow for more processing power to be crammed into a small space without generating heat, thus avoiding the overheating problem today's smaller and smaller circuits face.
weatheriscool
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New method to kill cyberattacks in less than a second
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-05-met ... tacks.html
by Cardiff University
A new method that could automatically detect and kill cyberattacks on our laptops, computers and smart devices in under a second has been created by researchers at Cardiff University.

Using artificial intelligence in a completely novel way, the method has been shown to successfully prevent up to 92 percent of files on a computer from being corrupted, with it taking just 0.3 seconds on average for a piece of malware to be wiped out.
weatheriscool
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Microsoft Begins Testing Web Search Box on Windows 11 Desktop
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/3 ... 11-desktop
By Josh Norem on May 23, 2022 at 11:17 am
We’ve all been there: you’re at your computer, and you need to search for something right now. You don’t want to use the web browser that’s already open right in front of you though. No, you need search on the desktop. Good news: Microsoft is currently testing this out in a Windows 11 preview build. All snark aside, the big news here isn’t so much the search box, but the fact that Microsoft is toying with desktop widgets once again.

The new search box appears in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25120 and it allows you to search the web directly from the desktop. Microsoft doesn’t specify which search engine it uses, but we all know the answer to that question; it’s own. It also doesn’t say where the results will appear, but like searching via the Start menu we can assume it’s in the Edge browser. This would likely occur even if Edge isn’t your default browser. After all, late last year Microsoft updated Windows 11 to prevent certain links from opening in non-Edge browsers. Microsoft says if you’re using this preview build and don’t like the search box, you can easily remove it. Just right-click the desktop to click “show more options,” then toggle “show search.” Also, not all Insiders will see this feature in the build as it’s only being pushed to some users according to Microsoft.
weatheriscool
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'Beam-steering' technology takes mobile communications beyond 5G
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-06-bea ... le-5g.html
by University of Birmingham
Birmingham scientists have revealed a new beam-steering antenna that increases the efficiency of data transmission for 'beyond 5G'—and opens up a range of frequencies for mobile communications that are inaccessible to currently used technologies.

Experimental results, presented today for the first time at the 3rd International Union of Radio Science Atlantic / Asia-Pacific Radio Science Meeting, show the device can provide continuous 'wide-angle' beam steering, allowing it to track a moving mobile phone user in the same way that a satellite dish turns to track a moving object, but with significantly enhanced speeds.

Devised by researchers from the University of Birmingham's School of Engineering, the technology has demonstrated vast improvements in data transmissoin efficiency at frequencies ranging across the millimeter wave spectrum, specifically those identified for 5G (mmWave) and 6G, where high efficiency is currently only achievable using slow, mechanically steered antenna solutions.

For 5G mmWave applications, prototypes of the beam-steering antenna at 26 GHz have shown unprecedented data transmission efficiency.

The device is fully compatible with existing 5G specifications that are currently used by mobile communications networks. Moreover, the new technology does not require the complex and inefficient feeding networks required for commonly deployed antenna systems, instead using a low complexity system which improves performance and is simple to fabricate.

The beam-steering antenna was developed by Dr. James Churm, Dr. Muhammad Rabbani, and Professor Alexandros Feresidis, Head of the Metamaterials Engineering Laboratory, as a solution for fixed, base station antenna, for which current technology shows reduced efficiency at higher frequencies, limiting the use of these frequencies for long-distance transmission.

Around the size of an iPhone, the technology uses a metamaterial*, made from a metal sheet with an array of regularly spaced holes that are micrometers in diameter. An actuator controls the height of a cavity within the metamaterial, delivery micrometer movements, and, according to its position, the antenna will control the deflection of the team of a radio wave—effectively 'concentrating' the beam into a highly directive signal, and then 'redirecting this energy as desired'—whilst also increasing the efficiency of transmission.
weatheriscool
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Electricity and data over-the-air: The simultaneous transmission of 5G and power
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-06-ele ... on-5g.html
by Tokyo Institute of Technology
The potential of millimeter-wave wireless power transfer as a solution for the Internet of Things has finally been harnessed by researchers from Tokyo Tech, who have created a device for simultaneous transmission of power and 5G signal. This transceiver for 5G network signal is fully wirelessly powered and has high power conversion efficiency at large distances and angles.

Ever since Nikola Tesla first proposed the idea of wireless transfer of power, there have been multiple efforts to exploit this concept for different applications. A new way to do this is with 5G networks. As 5G networks start coming online, there is an expected associated increase in the scale of the Internet of Things network. With so many devices on the network, there is a growing need to make wirelessly powered devices that can work with 5G signals. The production of such devices has faced the same hurdles that a lot of wirelessly powered devices face—short transmission distances and a fixed direction from which power can be received.

Now, a team of scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), led by Associate Professor , have reported the production of a wirelessly powered transmitter-receiver for 5G networks that overcomes both of these problems. Their findings were presented during the 2022 IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology & Circuits.
weatheriscool
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Researchers demonstrate two security methods that efficiently protect analog-to-digital converters from powerful attacks
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-06-met ... erful.html
by Adam Zewe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Researchers are pushing to outpace hackers and develop stronger protections that keep data safe from malicious agents who would steal information by eavesdropping on smart devices.

Much of the work done to prevent these "side-channel attacks" has focused on the vulnerability of digital processors. For instance, hackers can measure the electric current drawn by a smartwatch's processor and use it to reconstruct secret data being processed, such as a password.

Recently, MIT researchers published a paper in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, which demonstrated that analog-to-digital converters in smart devices, which encode real-world signals from sensors into digital values that can be processed computationally, are susceptible to power side-channel attacks. A hacker could measure the power supply current of the analog-to-digital converter and use machine learning to accurately reconstruct output data.

Now, in two new papers, researchers show that analog-to-digital converters are also susceptible to a stealthier form of side-channel attack, and describe techniques that effectively block both attacks. Their techniques are more efficient and less expensive than other security methods.

Minimizing power consumption and cost are critical factors for portable smart devices, says Hae-Seung Lee, the Advanced Television and Signal Processing Professor of Electrical Engineering, director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and senior author of the most recent research paper.
weatheriscool
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A neuromorphic computing architecture that can run some deep neural networks more efficiently
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-06-neu ... works.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore
As artificial intelligence and deep learning techniques become increasingly advanced, engineers will need to create hardware that can run their computations both reliably and efficiently. Neuromorphic computing hardware, which is inspired by the structure and biology of the human brain, could be particularly promising for supporting the operation of sophisticated deep neural networks (DNNs).

Researchers at Graz University of Technology and Intel have recently demonstrated the huge potential of neuromorphic computing hardware for running DNNs in an experimental setting. Their paper, published in Nature Machine Intelligence and funded by the Human Brain Project (HBP), shows that neuromorphic computing hardware could run large DNNs 4 to 16 times more efficiently than conventional (i.e., non-brain inspired) computing hardware.

"We have shown that a large class of DNNs, those that process temporally extended inputs such as for example sentences, can be implemented substantially more energy-efficiently if one solves the same problems on neuromorphic hardware with brain-inspired neurons and neural network architectures," Wolfgang Maass, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "Furthermore, the DNNs that we considered are critical for higher level cognitive function, such as finding relations between sentences in a story and answering questions about its content."
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