Month: December 2021

Enlarge / Dell’s Concept Luna laptop.

What do you do when your laptop screen breaks or the keyboard gives out? After some troubleshooting, you probably toss out the machine and upgrade. But what if some of your laptop’s components could be harvested and put in another computer, like some Frankenstein creation? That’s what Dell has in mind with its Concept Luna laptop project.

Concept Luna

According to the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor 2020, only 17.4 percent of the 53.6 million metric tons of electronic waste created in 2019 was recycled. One of the sustainability goals Dell wants to achieve by 2030 is to reuse or recycle an equivalent product for every product a customer buys, with over 50 percent of product content being composed of recycled or renewable materials. And how will it get all those recyclable materials? Partially from Dell customers.

Last week, I was able to check out Concept Luna. Announced today, it’s a laptop aimed at helping Dell achieve its environmental goals by offering parts that are easier to repair, reuse, and recycle. The machine is built to open up easily, so you can harvest its motherboard or other parts to use in future systems. Through this process, Dell hopes that a motherboard will be able to be used in up to three machines.

Enlarge (credit: Matejmo | Getty Images)

Hackers including Chinese state-backed groups have launched more than 840,000 attacks on companies globally since last Friday, according to researchers, through a previously unnoticed vulnerability in a widely used piece of open-source software called Log4J.

Cyber security group Check Point said the attacks relating to the vulnerability had accelerated in the 72 hours since Friday, and that at some points its researchers were seeing more than 100 attacks a minute.

Perpetrators include “Chinese government attackers,” according to Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer of cyber company Mandiant.