Skandalfo

Mozilla Firefox 128.0 is now available for download ahead of the official release announcement due out in the coming hours...

Brave Browser had a privacy issue that leaked the Tor onion URL addresses you visited to your locally configured DNS server, "exposing the dark web websites you visit...", writes Bleeping Computer. Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes their report: To access Tor onion URLs, Brave added a "Private Window with Tor" mode that acts as a proxy to the Tor network. When you attempt to connect to an onion URL, your request is proxied through volunteer-run Tor nodes who make the request for you and send back the returned HTML. Due to this proxy implementation, Brave's Tor mode does not directly provide the same level of privacy as using the Tor Browser. When using Brave's Tor mode, it should forward all requests to the Tor proxies and not send any information to any non-Tor Internet devices to increase privacy. However, a bug in Brave's "Private window with Tor" mode is causing the onion URL for any Tor address you visit to also be sent as a standard DNS query to your machine's configured DNS server. This bug was first reported in a Reddit post and later confirmed by James Kettle, the Director of Research at PortSwigger. BleepingComputer has also verified the claims by using Wireshark to view DNS traffic while using Brave's Tor mode. Brave has since released an update which fixes the bug.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Si esta mañana hablábamos de la llegada de las APUs Ryzen 4000G, que finalmente son exclusivas para equipos preensamblados, así que poco nos importan ya, mejor toca centrarse en tres procesadores de gama baja que también se dieron a conocer, los AMD Athlon Gold 3150G, AMD Athlon Gold 3150GE y AMD Athlon Silver 3050GE.

Como el propio nombre nos indica, los Athlon Gold llegan para desbancar a los Pentium Gold, mientras que el Athlon Silver llega para hacer lo mismo con unas CPUs Intel Celeron que a día de hoy ni sabemos por qué se siguen vendiendo.

El AMD Athlon Gold 3150G es un procesador de 4 núcleos y 4 hilos de procesamiento (Zen+ @ 12nm) a una frecuencia Base/Turbo de 3.50/3.90 GHz con 6 MB de caché L3, gráficos Radeon Vega 3 (192 SPs) y un TDP de 65W, mientras que el Athlon Gold 3150GE es un modelo de bajo consumo que llega a 3.30/380 GHz con un TDP de 35W, y ambos soportan memoria DDR4 @ 2933 MHz.

Sus rivales directos son los Pentium Gold G5600 y Pentium Gold G5400 de forma respectiva. Estas CPUs ofrecen 2 núcleos + 4 hilos @ 3.90 GHz / 3.30 GHz con 4 MB de caché y comparten un TDP de 54W. Por desgracia, la compañía no ofreció ninguna comparativa de rendimiento.

El AMD Athlon Silver 3050GE ofrece 2 núcleos + 4 hilos (Zen @ 14nm) @ 3.40 GHz con 5 MB de caché, 192 SPs, un TDP de 35W y con soporte de memoria DDR4 @ 2667 MHz. Este se compara con un Intel Celeron G4930 con 2 núcleos + 2 hilos @ 3.20 GHz con 2 MB de caché y un TDP de 54W.

Si estos son los rivales directos, a la hora de hablar de precios, pues deberían costar lo mismo o muy similar, por lo que el Athlon Gold 3150G debería rondar los 70 euros, el Athlon Gold 3150GE los 57 euros y Athlon Silver 3050GE los 35 euros.

La entrada AMD anuncia sus nuevos Athlon Gold 3150G, Gold 3150GE y Silver 3050GE aparece primero en El Chapuzas Informático.

AMD's open-source "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards and newer now has early compute/GPGPU support...

Reflections: After the attempted tolls on bank savings in Cyprus for saving the Euro, a new kind of tolls can be heard in the distance for the currency. The fundamental trust in the currency as a store of value has been broken, according to multiple signs across Europe. Even with the Cypriot parliament backpedaling frantically, the situation appears snowballing – there could be a bank run in two weeks.

When I was speaking at the first European Bitcoin conference in Prague, another speaker was a seasoned economist whose name I forget. He described how today’s bank system with so-called fractional reserve banking is essentially a crumbling Ponzi scheme. In summary, banks have the right to conjure up money out of thin air and lend that money to you against interest that they get to keep. (Yes, really, that’s actually how it works today, although it is admittedly a very simplified description.) As part of the Q&A, I asked him what the first sign of a collapse scenario materializing would be.

He responded that a first sign of collapse would be that people didn’t trust their holdings in the currency to retain their value, so they would actively seek to trade it off for other stores of value – other currencies or just about anything else. This was an answer that made sense in the light of the history of known hyperinflations and currency collapses.

In the past days with the Cypriot bailout measure, these first signs of a currency collapse scenario have materialized. People are now actively seeking to trade off their Euros, no longer trusting them as a store of value. When this has happened in the past to currencies, they have not survived.

This was visible on first on Cyprus, where people made a so-called run on the bank to get their money in cash to save it from the negotiated 6-10% “save-the-Euro” toll from all bank accounts, except the banks were closed, so it became a run on ATMs which predictably drained of cash in a heartbeat (and deliberately were not refilled).

A “run on the bank” means that people no longer trust the banks to hold their savings, so everybody tries to withdraw their money at the same time – something that no current bank survives, as the customers’ money isn’t in the bank vaults. This is a scenario that can develop in hours in any economy, when some people start withdrawing in a sign of distrust and more people follow suit to not be the one left standing when the music stops.

The tremors of the bank run – or the attempted bank run, thwarted only by a bank holiday – were felt far and wide across the entire Eurozone. People in several countries got the message loud and clear: it’s their savings, their retirement money, that may be next up for a shave.

One obvious alternative store of value is Bitcoin, which is gaining in popularity. Over the weekend, Bitcoin apps soared in popularity in Spain. That is no coincidence; Spain is one of the plummeting countries badly in need of a parachute.

Unsurprisingly, Bitcoin has not just soared in interest, but also in value the past days to meet increasing demand as people flee the Euro – it has climbed almost 50% in value since news broke of the Cypriot bank account toll a few days ago, topping 65 USD per bitcoin today, up from the 40s a week ago. (Those who hold their savings in bitcoin, which is unseizable, would not be affected by a bank account toll.)

Another such country is Italy, a country in a thorough financial mess. A few days ago, one German banking chief suggested that all Italian savings need a 15% one-time toll per the Cypriot model to save Italy’s economy. Guess what happens next.

So what brought us to this situation? Two things.

The first thing was the process of introducing the Euro, the common currency, which was an ivory tower project from the get-go. Europe’s political leaders had simply decided to create a prestige project of a common currency of the world’s largest economy, the European Union. In making this happen, any criticism that could suggest weaknesses in the idea were simply not allowed to percolate up to the decision-makers.

The second thing is the insane idea that bank profits are privatized and bank losses are socialized – meaning that bank owners get to pocket any profits, and taxpayers get to cover any losses that banks make. This is a recipe for disaster that needs to stop yesterday. There is simply no reason at all to treat banks differently from any other company. Yes, they keep the economy going – which is all the more reason to subject them to the rules of the economy, namely that when you risk money, you risk your own money and not the taxpayers’ money.

When banks started failing, governments unwisely stepped in and covered their losses. In this move, insolvent banks became insolvent governments while bank owners walked away. Tax payers have been footing the bill – and now, it appears to be the turn of the small savers.

The Euro is gone; bells are tolling its demise in the distant background. When the highest politicians in a Eurozone country told its people that the Euro is not trustable as a store of value, that was the point of no return. It won’t be here in a couple of years, at least not in its current form. The only conceivable way out I see that would allow the Eurocrats to keep some form of professional honor is to divide the Euro into two or more subcurrencies while it can still be done in some kind of order.

But such a move would require Eurocrats to admit that a failed policy could be caused by bad fundamentals, rather than insufficient effort (aka the “if it’s not working, you’re just not trying hard enough” mentality). Don’t hold your breath.

(End note: it could be argued that the problem isn’t with the Euro as such but with bank solvency, as the currency as such doesn’t look threatened on the surface – after all, people who manage to withdraw their savings into cash, still denominated in Euro, aren’t threatened; it’s having money in a bank that’s bad. However, in reality, that isn’t really an option, and the reason we’re in this situation in the first place is because the economies have been locked together in a common currency in a most unhealthy way.)