Month: June 2022

Enlarge / The regional headquarters of technology company Samsung in Mountain View, California (credit: Getty Images/Smith Collection)

Samsung will stop producing LCD panels as soon as next month, according to industry insiders cited by The Korea Times.

In 1991, a business unit called Samsung Display was formed to produce the panels used in products made by its parent company, Samsung Electronics. Afterward, it was a leading supplier of LCD panels not just for Samsung Electronics but for other companies in the industry as well.

But fierce competition from other suppliers like China’s BOE heavily impacted Samsung Display’s business. Once the world’s leading LCD panel manufacturer, Samsung Display’s market share has dropped to just 2 percent.

Enlarge / Systems engineer Matt Ezell, the system lead for the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

The US has retaken the top spot in the world supercomputer rankings with the exascale Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee.

The Frontier system’s score of 1.102 exaflop/s makes it “the most powerful supercomputer to ever exist” and “the first true exascale machine,” the Top 500 project said Monday in the announcement of its latest rankings. Exaflop/s (or exaflops) is short for 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second.

Frontier was more than twice as fast as a Japanese system that placed second in the rankings, which are based on the LINPACK benchmark that measures the “performance of a dedicated system for solving a dense system of linear equations.”

Enlarge / These images, taken with the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, show the surface of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse during its unprecedented dimming. The image on the far left, taken in January 2019, shows the star at its normal brightness. The remaining images, from December 2019, January 2020, and March 2020 were all taken when the star’s brightness had noticeably dropped. (credit: ESO/M. Montargès et al.)

Over the last couple of years, Ars has dedicated a fair number of electrons to our local red supergiant, Betelgeuse. The massive star went through an odd uneven dimming, leaving the astronomy community scrambling for explanations and observation time. While a degree of consensus slowly emerged, the lack of some key details left a lot unexplained.

It turns out that some of the answers were accidentally captured by an Earth-facing Japanese weather satellite that had Betelgeuse in-frame across the entire process of its dimming.

In the archives

In the new paper describing the results, Daisuke Taniguchi, Kazuya Yamazaki, and Shinsuke Uno say the astronomy community has settled on two options for explaining why a giant star like Betelgeuse might get dimmer. One is that internal processes could lower the star’s effective temperature and thus its light output. The other option is that dust ends up between the star and Earth, absorbing some of the star’s light. But both of those explanations are short on details; we don’t really know what’s happening inside the star or how enough dust could end up between Betelgeuse and Earth.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A critical code execution zero-day in all supported versions of Windows has been under active exploit for seven weeks, giving attackers a reliable means for installing malware without triggering Windows Defender and a roster of other endpoint protection products.

The Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool vulnerability was reported to Microsoft on April 12 as a zero-day that was already being exploited in the wild, researchers from Shadow Chaser Group said on Twitter. A response dated April 21, however, informed the researchers that the Microsoft Security Response Center team didn’t consider the reported behavior a security vulnerability because, supposedly, the MSDT diagnostic tool required a password before it would execute payloads.

Uh, nevermind

On Monday, Microsoft reversed course, identifying the behavior with the vulnerability tracker CVE-2022-30190 and warning for the first time that the reported behavior constituted a critical vulnerability after all.