Computers & the Internet News and Discussions

[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.

[weatheriscool]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

'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]

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]

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]

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."

[GTrang]

Support for Internet Explorer on Windows 10 has officially been discontinued as of yesterday, June 15.

[Lorem Ipsum]

Support for Internet Explorer on Windows 10 has officially been discontinued as of yesterday, June 15.

They just renamed it.

[weatheriscool]

A transfer-printing technique to integrate metal electrodes and 2D materials on a wafer-scale
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-06-tra ... es-2d.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Metal-semiconductor junctions, electrical junctions in which a metal is linked to a semiconducting material, are crucial components for numerous electronic and optoelectronic devices. While they are now widely produced and used worldwide, creating good quality junctions that integrate conventional metals and 2D semiconductors can be difficult.

In fact, when applied to 2D materials, conventional metal deposition techniques, which entail a process known as ion bombardment, can cause a chemical disorder. In addition, existing transfer printing techniques, which involve the pre-deposition and transfer of metal electrodes on the surface of 2D materials, have been found to perform poorly due to the creation of chemical bonds on the substrate for the pre-deposition that hinder the electrodes' transfer.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hunan University, City University of Hong Kong and Fudan University have recently developed a new technique that could be used to transfer metal electrodes on 2D materials more effectively, enabling the development of more reliable metal-semiconductor junctions. This technique, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, entails the delamination of metal electrode arrays from a graphene wafer, and their subsequent transfer printing onto different 2D materials.

[weatheriscool]

Samsung Rumored to Begin 3nm Mass Production Next Week
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/3 ... -next-week
By Josh Norem on June 24, 2022 at 9:29 am

A news agency in Korea is reporting Samsung is about to make a major announcement. The world’s second-largest silicon foundry will reportedly enter mass production of its 3nm process next week. In doing so, Samsung becomes the first global foundry to reach this milestone in advanced node production. It notably beats its main rival TSMC to the punch, as the Taiwanese powerhouse isn’t expected to ramp 3nm until later this year. Intel will reach 3nm sometime in 2023 with its Intel 3 process.

The move by Samsung marks its transition from FinFet to Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistors. It’s the first major foundry to make the switch. The company says it will allow for a 45 percent reduction in chip area compared with FinFet. It will also allow for 30 percent more performance and will require 50 percent less power. Samsung has been developing its 3nm process for some time now and even showed it to President Biden recently. However, reports indicated it was suffering from poor yields. This is expected when developing a new process node. Still, it was reported it was only getting between 10 and 20 percent yields at 3nm previously. If it’s moving into mass production, also called high volume manufacturing (HVM), it has probably made strides on this front.

[weatheriscool]

A fast and energy-efficient sparse Ising machine to solve computationally hard problems
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-06-fas ... chine.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

In recent years, engineers have been trying to devise new computers and devices that could help to solve challenging real-world problems faster and more efficiently. Some of the most promising among these are Ising machines (IMs), physics-based systems designed to tackle complex optimization problems.

Researchers at the University of California and the University of Messina have recently developed a sparse Ising machine architecture that can operate on classical and existing computer hardware. This architecture, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was found to be significantly faster than standard optimization methods running on a central processing unit.

"Building domain-specific, quantum-inspired architectures has become an important area of research with the slowing down of Moore's Law," Kerem Camsari, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "The primary objective of this work was to extend our earlier work on probabilistic or p-bits, conceptually in-between bits and qubits."

[weatheriscool]

From transistor to memristor: Switching technologies for the future
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-06-tra ... uture.html
by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

The invention of the transistor by Bell Laboratory in 1947 ushered in an era of electronic devices that were smaller and ran cooler using far less power than their bulky and fragile vacuum tube counterparts. Transistors function as a binary switch to facilitate electrical current from off to on states. Radios, calculators and telephones were among the first wave of instruments to replace vacuum tubes with the new semiconductor technology. As the technology scaled smaller and smaller, subsequent decades saw the steady integration of silicon transistors into devices, and today's computers, cell phones, watches, pacemakers, and virtually every kind of electronic device relies on them for high-speed processing and memory.

Enter the memristor, an electronic device that emulates the binary switch using a two- and also three-dimensional matrix configuration, or cross bar array, to regulate states of conductivity based on current resistance. Dr. Mario Lanza, KAUST associate professor of material science and engineering, asserts that, like the transistor, it's only a matter of time before memristors become the new switching technology standard, surpassing transistors in speed and operational efficiency.

Lanza is the lead author of a recently published review paper, Memristive technologies for data storage, computation, encryption, and radio-frequency communication, as part of Science magazine's coverage of the 75th anniversary of the discovery of the transistor. With contributed findings by co-authors from both industry and academia, the paper is the first to provide a comprehensive summary of data that supports memristor technology readiness level across materials and applications.

"Memristors can primarily be made from four different materials that can be applied to four applications, for a total of 16 combinations, and this paper covers them all," said Lanza. "We statistically show the technical criteria for how memristors function in these various configurations. You see what works, which is very exciting. Our compilation of findings can have an important impact on the field."

[caltrek]

Next-Generation Data Centers Within Reach Thanks to New Energy-Efficient Switches
July 8, 2022

Introduction:

(EurekAlert) Data centers — dedicated spaces for storing, processing and disseminating data — enable everything from cloud computing to video streaming. In the process, they consume a large amount of energy transferring data back and forth inside the center. With demand for data growing exponentially, there is increasing pressure for data centers to become more energy efficient.

Data centers house servers, high-powered computers that talk to each other through interconnects, which are physical connections that allow for the exchange of data. One way to reduce energy consumption in data centers is to use light to communicate information with electrically controlled optical switches controlling the flow of light, and therefore information, between servers. These optical switches need to be multi-functional and energy-efficient to support the continued expansion of data centers.

In a paper published online July 4 in Nature Nanotechnology, a team led by University of Washington scientists reported the design of an energy-efficient, silicon-based non-volatile switch that manipulates light through the use of a phase-change material and graphene heater.

“This platform really pushes the limits of energy efficiency,” said co-corresponding author Arka Majumdar, a UW associate professor of physics and of electrical and computer engineering, as well as a faculty member at the UW Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems and the Institute for Molecular & Engineering Sciences. “Compared with what is currently being used in data centers to control photonic circuits, this technology would greatly reduce the energy needs of data centers, making them more sustainable and environmentally friendly.”

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/958346

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

FCC chair proposes new US broadband standard of 100Mbps down, 20Mbps up

Jon Brodkin - 7/15/2022, 5:59 PM

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel is aiming to increase the agency's broadband speed standard from 25Mbps to 100Mbps on the download side and from 3Mbps to 20Mbps for uploads.

Rosenworcel's "Notice of Inquiry proposes to increase the national broadband standard to 100 megabits per second for download and 20 megabits per second for upload and discusses a range of evidence supporting this standard, including the requirements for new networks funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act," the FCC said in an announcement today. Rosenworcel is also proposing "a separate national goal of 1Gbps/500Mbps for the future."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... 20mbps-up/

[weatheriscool]

Researchers create key technology for quantum cryptography commercialization
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-07-key ... ation.html
by National Research Council of Science & Technology

In modern cryptosystems, users generate public and private keys that guarantee security based on computational complexity and use them to encrypt and decrypt information. Recently however, modern public-key cryptosystems have faced potential security loopholes against quantum computers with great computational power. As a solution, quantum cryptosystems have been highly noticed. They use quantum keys that guarantee security based on quantum physics rather than computational complexity; thus, they are secure even against quantum computers. Therefore, quantum cryptosystems are expected to replace modern cryptosystems.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is the most important technology for realizing quantum cryptosystems. Two main technical issues should be addressed to commercialize QKD. One is the communication distance, and the other is the expansion from one-to-one (1:1) communication to one-to-many (1:N) or many-to-many (N:N) network communication.

Twin-field (TF) QKD, announced in 2018, is a long-distance protocol, which can dramatically increase the communication distance of QKD systems. In TF QKD, two users can distribute a key by transmitting quantum signals to an intermediate third-party that is for measurement. Given the inevitable channel loss, this architecture allows the users to increase the communication distance. However, despite its innovativeness, it has been experimentally demonstrated by only a few global QKD leading groups owing to the significant difficulty of system implementation, and research on the TF QKD network is still insufficient.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, Director Seok-jin Yoon) announced that their research team, the Center for Quantum Information, led by director Sang-Wook Han, succeeded in an experimental demonstration of a practical TF QKD network. This is the second experimental demonstration of the TF QKD network in the world after the University of Toronto in Canada.