Hardware

History seems to be repeating itself.

Back in May, security researchers discovered that several HP laptops contained an audio driver with a keylogger-type feature. Now, it appears there's yet another keylogger embedded in a piece of HP software.

Although it wasn't widely reported until today, a Nov. 7 HP security bulletin revealed that a Synaptics touchpad driver has the potential to be used as a keylogger, leading to a "local loss of confidentiality."

Although Nvidia launched its 21 billion transistor Volta GPU architecture back in May, until now the chip has been used exclusively in compute cards—specifically, the Tesla V100 cards, which cost about $10,000 for the PCIe version. But now Volta GPU is available in a graphics card: at the 2017 Neural Information Processing Systems conference, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced the Titan V, a $3,000 golden video card making the same GPU—the Volta architecture GV100—available to regular end users.

Central to the promise of a new generation of Windows 10 on ARM PCs (the first two of which were announced yesterday) is the idea of being "Always Connected:" that your mobile PC, like your smartphone, is almost always online, using Wi-Fi where it's available or LTE where it isn't.

The China trip was only supposed to last 10 days. For Konstantinos Karatsevidis, the 23-year-old CEO of a new gadget maker called Eve, it was just a quick check-in to make sure production was rolling smoothly on his latest product. Karatsevidis and the rest of the nine-person Eve team have spent the last few years building the V, a laptop-tablet hybrid in the mold of the Microsoft Surface, working in remarkable concert with a teeming community of users and fans to create the exact product they wanted. All that was left to do was make it, perfectly, tens of thousands of times in a row.

Cryptocurrencies have an energy problem. The entire Bitcoin network now uses more energy than all of Ireland, and a single Bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy your house uses in a week. Ethereum, the second most popular cryptocurrency, isn’t much better. This is bad news for the environment, but also for the miners who generate cryptocurrencies with massive amounts of computing power, which can rack up a huge electricity bill.

Apple's $1,000 iPhone X may have trouble operating in the winter weather.

This is according to multiple complaints from owners and an admission from the Cupertino idiot-tax operation itself that, in cold temperatures, the OLED touchscreen on the shiny new handsets can become temporarily unresponsive.

We're told that, when taking an iPhone X outside in chilly weather, folks found the expensive mobe struggled to notice finger swipes and gestures. One might say, you're colding it wrong.

Nearly a year after Razer bought Nextbit, we now know what the startup smartphone company has been working on while under the gaming company's leadership. Razer debuted its first smartphone today, the Razer Phone, and it's clearly born from the ashes of the Nextbit Robin. Mobile gaming continues to be important to all types of smartphone users, and gaming companies are now focusing on making mobile games or translating big titles for mobile.

Mihai Moldovanu grabs the cardboard box with the enthusiasm of a man from the future who’s opening a time capsule. “Maybe it could still work,” he tells me.

He dusts it off with his hands. Inside the box rests the computer he built for himself in high school. He hasn’t switched it on in 10, maybe 20 years. This summer, when moving from one apartment to another, he stumbled upon the box. “I need to find a charger and an old TV set. It’s going to be tricky to revive it.”

During the weekend, Microsoft's Joe Belfiore tweeted confirmation of something that has been suspected for many months: Microsoft is no longer developing new features or new hardware for Windows Mobile. Existing supported phones will receive bug fixes and security updates, but the platform is essentially now in maintenance mode.