However, soon after the launch of the reference RX 7900 XTX, users began reporting very high hotspot temperatures reaching 110°C. These reference cards are called "MBA" or "Made By AMD" and aftermarket partner models from AIBs like Sapphire, Powercolour, are unaffected. However, any MBA card sold by such partners will be affected.

AMD adds, however, that not all users will be seeing this problem as it is limited. AMD recently issued a statement to Tom's Hardware saying it was aware of the thermal throttling issues:

We are aware that a limited number of users are experiencing unexpected thermal throttling on AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards (reference models made by AMD). Users experiencing unexpected thermal throttling of an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX should contact AMD Support.

Following this and some more testing by overclocking guru and popular YouTuber der8auer, AMD has confirmed that the issue is indeed associated with its cooler design, possibly with the vapor chamber. In a statement to Hardwareluxx's Andreas Schilling, AMD said:

We are working to determine the cause of the unexpected performance limitation of AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards. Based on our observations to date we believe the issue is related to the thermal solution used in AMD's reference design and is occurring in a limited number of cards sold. We are working to resolve this issue for the affected cards. Customers experiencing this unexpected limitation should contact AMD support.

AMD has once again stated that the issue is limited and that not all RX 7900 XTX cards should be affected. Still, it is good to keep an eye on your hotspot temperatures while gaming using utilities like MSI Afterburner. In case you are seeing high temperatures reaching close to 110°C or thermal throttling issues, AMD is encouraging users to contact its support team. You can find such information on this page on AMD's official website.

While Nvidia's 12-pin issue was partly due to user fault and a new inconvenient design, the 7900 XTX hotspot heating issue is entirely on AMD as it is the reference card that is affected. Overall, the latest generation of cards from both AMD and Nvidia has underwhelmed in terms of both pricing as well as quality.

Source: Andreas Schilling (Twitter)

AMD confirms its RX 7900 XTX coolers cause 110°C hotspots in a new statement

Today, Alienware has announced a couple of new products as a part of CES 2023, with the Aurora R15 desktop getting a spec update and a new display, the AW2524H, which boasts refresh rates up to 500Hz, reported to be the world's fastest.

The updates to the Aurora R15 are primarily based around the processor architecture, now offering the AMD Ryzen 7000 series of chips alongside a range of 13th Gen Intel 65W desktop processors. Later in the winter, options to configure with the Radeon RX 7000 GPUs will also be included.

These upgraded desktops will start at $1,599 US and be available to order from 5th January in both AMD and Intel configurations. Pricing with the AMD Radeon RX 7000 graphics is yet to be confirmed but will be announced later this winter.

However, the standout announcement from the show comes with the new AW2524H display. This monitor has a Fast IPS panel which boasts up to 500Hz refresh rates once overclocked in a 24.5 inch screen at FHD resolution.

The display also includes G-Sync compatibility, 0.5ms gray-to-gray (GtG) response time, and VESA DisplayHDR 400 certification, helping to eliminate ghosting, blurring, tearing, stuttering and providing vibrant colour throughout.

The AW2524H will be available from the 8th Feb in China, and the 21st March in North America, with pricing yet to be confirmed but stated that it will be announced closer to the shipping date.

Source: Dell Technologies via PRNewswire

CES 2023: Alienware announces updated desktops and a blistering Fast IPS 500Hz monitor

There are a number of 14-inch gaming laptops floating around, but the most notable one by far is Asus’s ROG Zephyrus G14. It’s a powerhouse and an easy recommendation to anyone seeking a portable device that can really game.

 

But this year, MSI has decided to throw its hat in the ring. It’s just announced the new Stealth 14 Studio, which it’s boldly claiming is “the most powerful 14-inch gaming laptop.” That is a tough title to live up to, considering that the G14... exists (not to mention Razer’s Blade 14, which is also a strong, and sometimes even stronger, performer).

 

The main reason I’m skeptical of this claim is that the Stealth 14 Studio appears to max out at an RTX 4070, while the Zephyrus G14 goes all the way up to the RTX 4090. Its CPU is Intel’s Core i7-13700H, which is quite powerful, but we can’t yet definitively speak to whether it will beat AMD’s Ryzen 9 (which powers the G14). I don’t mean to confidently predict that the Stealth 14 Studio or the Zephyrus G14 will show better framerates or be a better value buy. There’s just, well, some uncertainty on the “most powerful 14-inch gaming laptop” claim.

 

It’s thin.

Image: MSI

 

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t other potential advantages this device could have over the G14. For one, it’s got an RGB keyboard that looks quite nice in the photos we have so far. The chassis looks fairly subdued (more Razer Blade-y than Zephyrus-y) and might be more appealing to users looking for a gaming laptop that can double as a respectable-looking work or school driver.

 

There’s also a physical shutter over the webcam (which I enjoy having just for peace of mind) — something the Zephyrus doesn’t have. And the Studio’s top display option is a QHD Plus 240Hz display, while the G14 maxes out at 165Hz. That could lead to a substantial difference in gameplay experience depending on the title.

 

 

There are white and black versions.

Image: MSI

 

And then there’s the price comparison. It looks like the Stealth 14 Studio will cost $1,599 for a Core i7 and an RTX 4060, while an RTX 3060 Zephyrus could be purchased for $1,399.99 last year.

 

We’ll have to see how exactly this stacks up to the G14’s performance when I get a model in my hands. But at the moment, I’m reading the Studio as a more versatile, slightly pricier alternative to the G14, rather than something that’s going to knock its socks off power-wise.

 

Don’t worry, the RGB is there.

Image: MSI

 

MSI added a number of other Stealth products to its line, including a new Stealth 16 Studio with a six-speaker sound system. A new Stealth 15 will also bring a 240Hz OLED display with less than 0.2ms response time. All are currently expected to release in late February.

 

 

MSI’s Stealth Studio takes aim at the Zephyrus G14

Image: MSI

There’s something wrong with the seemingly hundreds of laptops that have been birthed so far during CES 2023: almost none of them are translucent. Using a see-through design is proven [no citations found] to make more people want to buy a product because, for one, it looks cool, and two, the company must be pretty confident in its engineering handiwork to want to show it off like that.

 

The thing is, if a company uses translucent plastic on your gadget, it’s got to go for it 100 percent or go home. And that’s where MSI goes wrong.

 

At CES 2023, the company is announcing the Cyborg 15, a gaming laptop that uses see-through plastic to show off its internals. Sadly, only the bottom of the laptop (and the trim around its top lid) is translucent, and you don’t actually get to see anything of note inside. When viewed straight-on, you’d be forgiven for simply not noticing its half-translucent design. It’s just your standard gaming machine with an all-black design and RGB LED-backlit keys from the front. Pretty boring stuff. Last year’s Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 showed more guts.

 

The front of the Cyborg 15 is too normal. I’ll wait for the sequel.

Image: MSI

 

The ports and the plastic surrounding the top lid are see-through.

Image: MSI

 

The hinge and the bottom shell that crawls up the laptop’s sides, ensconcing its ports, are clad in a nice gun metal plastic that has some regrettable design work on it. It says “15 MSI TRUE GAMING,” and the second “G” is practically cut off. To each their own, but when I get see-through tech, I want the most plain design imaginable, with nothing between me and the core of that treasured device except some translucent (coloured, preferably) plastic.

 

As it turns out, MSI devised a backstory for the Cyborg 15’s design ethos. It hired a concept artist to whip up a part-human, part-machine character to base it on, something that’s not unusual at all for this industry. Here’s some of the copy:

 

A young man codenamed “C15”, who works for a human authority’s special force against robots, undertook cybernetic augmentations and become a cyborg. As augmentations gets heavier, he started to feel the central commander and leader of AI robots, seems to be summoning him, and oddly it feels no stranger to him...

 

Man or machine? C15 chose to leave the special force, and took on a path to find out....

 

Cyber up!

Image: MSI

 

Alrighty then.

 

Despite not totally aligning with my taste, the Cyborg 15’s design traits help it stand out a bit from MSI’s many other models, like the more serious Stealth model that rivals the Razer Blade in terms of impressive build quality. But since MSI is, so far, the only company we’ve found to be debuting a semi-transparent laptop at CES, perhaps it’ll hear our feedback that it should go fully transparent next year. I’ll even write the marketing material for C15’s eventual transformation in 2024:

 

C15, once a very cool and relatable dude, surrendered fully to the leader of the AI robots. Strangely, the ultimate upgrade wasn’t to trade his heart or brain for a CPU, but rather to be released from his tired, aging skin. He’s going full cyborg mode, adopting the latest in see-through skin-like sci-fi materials. With the transformation complete, the world can see C15 for who he really is: a badass cyborg with nothing to hide.

 

You deserve a treat for getting to the bottom of this post, so I’ll give you some specs. It has a 15.6-inch 1080p display with a 144Hz refresh rate, and it’s not gunning for top performance in the CPU or GPU areas. It has a 12th Generation Intel Core i7 12650H processor with up to Nvidia’s RTX 4060 graphics. The top-end model will cost just $1,099, so it’s a midrange price for midrange components and a design that, with a little more tuning, could be memorable.

 

MSI’s new laptop is see-through but not see-through enough

By combining digital cockpit, ADAS and autonomous vehicle (AV) functions onto a single system-on-chip (SoC), automakers will be able to seamlessly integrate cockpit displays with high-quality graphics, infotainment gaming displays, and rear-seat entertainment screens, all while maintaining a latency-critical premium audio experience, according to Qualcomm.

Qualcomm's dual-purpose chip addresses the differing approaches currently being taken by the automotive industry, where some automakers are transitioning to entirely new electronics architectures for self-driving vehicles (SDVs) while others are seeking cost savings through design efficiency.

Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm's Senior Vice President and General Manager said in an interview (via WardsAuto) at CES 2023:

"We are now working with a number of different automakers who are designing their next-generation architectures (where) software is its own independent product and the hardware being a foundation that just has to work. And then there are other automakers that simply have economics in mind.

The thought process is, ‘If I can actually bring the same capability at a reduced cost to a much larger number of vehicles, why would I not want to go to that?’

So, what you see with Flex is a combination (that meets) the two (OEM requirements).”

With the release of this advanced system-on-chip, Qualcomm may be positioning itself as part of a newly emerging tier 1 network, one that focuses on providing comprehensive solutions rather than just hardware. This marks a potential shift in Qualcomm's role within the industry.

The processor is now available for testing for automakers and is expected to be ready for production vehicles by 2025.

Source

A Chinese retail store has spilled the beans on the new flagship CPU from Intel. The Core i9-13900KS will bring 6GHz clocks, more efficient cores, and improved memory support compared to the previous-gen Intel Core i9-12900KS. Here is how the upcoming model compares to other CPUs:

Unconfirmed rumors claim (via Videocardz) Intel plans to launch the Core i9-13900KS on January 12, 2023. Price-wise, expect the faster model to cost more. The processor briefly appeared in one French store for €949 ($1,007), which is €180 ($191) more than the standard Intel Core i9-13900K ($599 in the US).

Our stories may contain affiliate links for products/apps where Neowin is paid an affiliate fee if you complete a purchase via those links.

Intel Core i9-13900KS spotted with 6GHz out of the box

Aspire Aspire S AiOs

The Acer Aspire S 27-inch model features 12th Gen Intel Core i5 and i7 processors and Intel Iris Xe graphics. The 32-inch model, on the other hand, comes with up to 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700 desktop processors and Intel Arc A-Series graphics.

Both models support Wi-Fi 6E, sport an aluminum chassis and a near-borderless WQHD tiltable display. Its dual speakers feature DTS audio. Users can also conduct video calls through the magnetically mounted 1080p webcam or an optional 1440p QHD webcam. What's more, the AiOs include Acer EyeSense facial recognition software and a Windows Hello fingerprint reader for passwordless logins.

The 27-inch Aspire S will be available in North America in the first quarter of 2022 starting at $1,199.99, and in Europe in January starting at €1199. Meanwhile, the 32-inch model will be available in North America in the first quarter of this year starting at $1,699.99 and in Europe in June starting at €1,799.

Aspire 5 laptops

Acer's new Aspire 5 laptops feature the latest 13th Gen Intel Core processors and come with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2050 GPUs, ideal for those doing heavy workloads. The Aspire 5 laptops also come with up to 32GB of DDR4 memory and up to a 1TB SSD.

The 15-inch variant sports a QHD display and a 16:9 aspect ratio, while the 14-inch version has a 1080p IPS display with a 16:10 aspect ratio. What's more, the laptops are equipped with a 1080p webcam and digital microphones that utilize Acer's Temporal Noise Reduction technology for clear video calls. Lastly, the Aspire 5 laptops have a "TwinAir" cooling system and an air inlet keyboard to keep the laptop cool.

The 14-inch Aspire 5 laptop will be available in North America in March starting at $549.99. Those in Europe and China will get it in March starting at €799 and RMB4,099, respectively. The 15-inch variant will be available in North America in April starting at $599.99, in Europe in March starting at €799, and in China in March starting at RMB4,099. There will also be a 17-inch model, which will be only available in North America in April starting at $699.99.

Aspire 3 laptops

Marketed as budget-friendly devices, the Acer Aspire 3 laptops feature Intel Core i3-N series processors. They have a 1080p display and a metal casing, and are equipped with a USB Type-C port, HDMI 2.1 ports and Wi-Fi 6E. Acer claims that the laptops' thermal systems boast a 40% increase in fan surface area and an additional 17% thermal capacity for optimized airflow and cooler internals.

The Aspire 3's 14-inch model will be available in North America in March starting at $499 and in Europe this month starting at €549. Its 15-inch sibling is also expected in North America this March starting at $349 and in Europe this month starting at €499. A 17-inch model will also be available in North America in March starting at $379.99 and in Europe next month for €599.

Acer Halo Swing Portable Smart Speaker

Aside from its AiOs and laptops, Acer also unveiled the Halo Swing, a smart speaker with an RGB-lit base that responds to the beat of the music being played. The base also changes colours when you are interacting with Google Assistant. The speaker even has an LED dot display panel, which shows you important updates, such as mail, calendars, reminders, and messages. Finally, the Acer Halo Swing is IPX5 water-resistant and comes with a detachable leather strap.

Acer has yet to reveal the availability of the speaker. As for its price, the device will cost $229 or €199 in Central Europe.

CES 2023: Acer unveils new Aspire All-in-one desktops and notebooks, plus a smart speaker

Intel's 13th Gen Core H series aims at workstations and gaming laptops with frequencies up to 5.6GHz and up to 24 cores (8 performance and 16 efficiency cores). According to Intel, the 13th generation offers about an 11% uplift in single-thread performance and up to 49% in multi-core tasks. Like its predecessor, the Intel Core 13th Gen supports up to 128GB of DDR5-5600 or DDR4-3200 memory. There is also Bluetooth 5.2, Thunderbolt 4, and Wi-Fi 6E support.

13th Gen Intel Core HX lineup with overclocking support

The Core U series trades raw horsepower for better battery life and energy efficiency, enabling long-standing, thin, and sleek laptops and tablets. Still, the 13th Gen U chips have up to 14 cores (6 performance and 8 efficiency cores), improved Intel Xe graphics, DDR5 and DDR4 memory support, up to four Thunderbolt 4 ports, and Wi-Fi 6E support.

Another notable change is the Intel Movidius vision processing unit (VPU) co-engineered with Microsoft to enable the new Windows Studio Effects, a feature previously exclusive to Surface devices. If you want an ultrabook with a 13th Gen Intel processor, expect to have a hard time picking among more than 300 unique models from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, and others.

As for those who cannot afford a computer with more expensive Intel Core H or U chips, Intel has a bunch of new CPUs under the N series, which replaced the Intel Pentium and Celeron brands. The N series focuses on the education segment, entry-level computing, and IoT. It features models with four or eight efficient cores built upon the new Gracemont architecture and the Intel 7 process technology.

The company claims new chips deliver 28% "application" and 64% graphics improvements compared to the previous generation. Besides, the series now features the Intel Core i3 N series with an extra 42% application performance and 56% graphics boosts.

According to Intel, its entry-level processors can deliver up to 10 hours of HD video playback on a single charge. The processors also support AV1 decode, 4K HDR display output, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, and LPDDR5, DDR5, and DDR4 memory coupled with UFS, SSD, or eMMC storage. Customers can expect up to 50 different designs from mainstream manufacturers in 2023.

Intel's 13th Gen chips bring 24-core processors to laptops

The new chips deliver faster performance cores with frequencies up to 5.6GHz out of the box (all new models do not support overclocking) and two times more efficiency cores, bringing the total core/thread count to 24 cores and 32 threads. Also, Intel has increased the L2 cache to 2MB per P-core and 4MB per E-core cluster. These improvements enable up to 11% single-threaded and 34% multi-threaded performance compared with the previous generation (Intel Core i9-13900 against Intel Core i9-12900).

The lineup includes four F models without integrated graphics and six T models with 35W TDP and lower frequencies for reduced power consumption.

Here are the highlights of the new 13th Gen Intel Core i9, i7, and i5 models:

• Intel Core i9: up to 11% faster performance in mainstream applications; 8 more E-cores and up to 18MB more L2 cache.
• Intel Core i7: max turbo frequencies are now at 5.2GHz out of the box; 4 more E-cores with up to 12MB more L2 cache.
• Intel Core i5: up to 39% performance improvements in multi-tasking performance; 8 more E-cores and up to 4MB more L2 cache.

If you wonder what happened to the Intel Core i3 chips, these models are currently available in the entry-level Intel Processor N-series. You can find more information about the new 13th Gen Intel Core i3 CPUs in our dedicated coverage.

Intel announces new 65W desktop 13th Gen processors

Predator Helios 16 and Predator Helios 18 gaming laptops

The Predator Helios 18

Acer has unveiled two top-notch gaming laptops at this CES, the Predator Helios 16 and Predator Helios 18. They both include 13th Gen Intel Core i9 or i7 HX processors that are paired with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop GPU. These specs allow you to play your favourite games without interruptions and seamlessly multitask between your programs.

In terms of memory and storage, users have some room for customization. You’re able to select up to 32 GB DDR5-4800 MHz RAM and up to 2 TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD in Raid 0. By maxing out these laptops, you should have enough storage for most of your games and be able to play them on the best settings. With so much RAM, these devices would be good at other resource-intensive tasks such as media processing and software development.

The Predator Helios 16

These laptops differ in their displays, the Predator Helios 16 comes with a 16-inch (16:10) WQXGA (2560x1600) display while the Predator Helios 18 includes an 18-inch (16:10) display. The latter’s display is available in two options, WUXGA (1920x1200) or WQXGA (2560x1600). According to Acer, the Predator Helios 18 display is better suited for multi-monitor setups.

The Predator Helios 16 will be available from February or March depending on your location. In the US prices start at $1,650, in Europe, it’ll cost €2,400, and in China, it costs RMB 18,000. The Predator Helios 18 will be available in February, March, or April depending on location and will cost $1,700 in the US, €2,500 in Europe, and RMB 21,000 in China.

Predator X45 and Predator X27U gaming monitors

The Predator X45

Aside from the laptops, Acer is releasing two new gaming monitors for people who already have the computing power they need or want a multi-monitor setup with the previously mentioned laptops. The Predator X45 features a 34-inch UQWHD (3440x1440) OLED display. It’s also 800R curved and ultra-wide with a narrow frame to make your gaming more immersive. The display is HDR10 compliant and has a peak brightness of 1000 nits for good contrast.

The Predator X27U

On the other hand, the Predator X27U has a flat 27-inch WQHD (2560x1440) display that also meets HDR10 requirements and can reach a peak brightness of 1000 nits. Like the Predator X45, the X27U has a 240 Hz refresh rate and 0.01 ms pixel response time through AMD FreeSync Premium. They also feature KVM switches to jump between desktops and laptops without having to change the keyboard and mouse.

The Predator X45 will be available in Q1 or Q2 depending on your location, in the US it’ll cost $1,700, in Europe it’ll cost €1,800, and in China, it will be RMB 13,000. As for the X27U, it will be available in Q1 or Q2 based on location and will cost $1,100 in the US, €1,100 in Europe, and RMB 8,000 in China.

3D Ultra mode in SpatialLabs TrueGame

Finally, Acer announced a new update for SpatialLabs TrueGame, a 3D gaming application that doesn’t require glasses. With this update, it adds Ultra mode that adds enhanced stereo rendering to make the 3D experience more immersive. The update also includes 3D Sense which consists of stereo effects that match players’ preferences.

Gamers with supported hardware can launch their favourite games through TrueGame and SpatialLabs and 3D gameplay is automatically applied. It uses eye-tracking tech, a stereoscopic 3D display, and real-time scene rendering to deliver the 3D effects without glasses.

CES 2023: Acer unveils new gaming laptops and monitors as well as 3D gaming improvements

Samsung’s recall fix for overheating washers is a software update — and a dongle

There will apparently be several new Intel CPU options spanning from the top-end 24 core 33 thread (24C/32T) Core i9-13900 model all the way down to the 4 core 8 threaded (4C/8T) i3-13100F. The prices start at $109 for the i3-13100F and go up to $549 for the i9-13900. An interesting thing to note here is the default DDR4 and DDR5 memory speed support. The i5 and the i3 SKUs are seemingly specced at DDR5-4800 while the higher-end i7 and i9 models are rated for faster DDR5-5600 speeds.

You can view the full purported lineup, their specifications, and prices, in the image below:

While AMD will have an answer to the new i9s, i7s with its own non-X models, there will be nothing to counter the i5s and even the lower-lying i3 models, at least price-wise. Hence, if Intel has sufficient stock for these chips and if prices are kept reasonable, Team Blue could take away a significant chunk of the entry-level AMD market share.

Meanwhile, on the other side, AMD does have its own Ryzen 7000X3D lineup purportedly ready for CES as well. These chips with 3D-stacked V-cache are once again expected to perform really well at gaming and any such workloads that are sensitive to memory latency and speeds. Last year, AMD unveiled the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and it trumped the best competing Intel chips in gaming. Something similar is expected to happen this time too and AMD could re-claim the gaming crown by beating Intel's flagship i9-13900K model. Perhaps only the rumored 13900KS could compete though it is not confirmed as of now.

Therefore it seems both AMD and Intel have a trump card this time around as the two companies are going to attack their rival in a segment where the other is ill-prepared for the moment at least.

Source and image: VideoCardz

CES 23: Intel & AMD could completely wipe the floor with one another in very different ways

At CES 2023, Acer unveiled its new Acer Chromebook CXI5 and Enterprise CXI5 Chromeboxes alongside the Add-In-One 24 display to transform the Chromeboxes into all-in-one desktops. While ChromeOS devices have typically done well in schools, Acer is pitching these products for business and commercial institutions, Acer explains these devices can save space and simplify maintenance which should cause less downtime and lead to long-term cost savings.

"These new ChromeOS-based Acer systems are excellent choices for businesses and institutions that require reliable computers that are easy to setup, use, and manage while making the most of limited space environments," said Jeff Lee, General Manager, Stationary Computing, IT Products Business, Acer Inc. "Outfitted with the latest technology, including Intel vPro and integrated malware protection, these powerful devices are able to support the multitasking capabilities and tight security required in organizations today."

One of the notable aspects of the Acer Chromebox CXI5 is that it comes with a powerful 12th Gen Intel Core i7 processor. This should give great performance when doing everyday tasks and it even offers a 20% improvement over older generations of the processor. The CXI5 also includes the Intel vPro platform for additional hardware-based security.

The Enterprise CXI5 is similar to the CXI5 but also includes 24/7 IT admin support and allows businesses to set Google Admin console policies. Acer said that the automatic security updates that run in the background also help to minimize interruptions.

If you buy the Add-In-One 24, you’ll get an Acer Chromebox CXI5 (or the enterprise variant) which fits into a dock at the back of the monitor. The monitor is 24 inches and supports FHD 1080p. While that’s certainly not the best by today’s standards, it’s still pretty decent. The display comes with a 115-degree wide-angle 5 MP webcam, dual microphones, and dual 4-watt speakers to enable high-quality video conferences. It also has artificial intelligence working in the background to help suppress background noise for clearer audio. For those of you who like to put sticky tape over the webcam, this monitor includes a camera shutter.

The Acer Chromebox CXI5 will be available for $290 in North America in the first quarter and in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa it’ll be available in March for €349. The Add-In-One 24 will be available in North America in the first quarter for $610 and in the EMEA region from March at €799.

CES 2023: Acer unveils Chromebox CXI5 and Add-In-One 24

At its CES 2023 keynote today, Nvidia unveiled a new video upscaling technology called "RTX Video Super Resolution". The new technology will work in a way similar to how Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) works in games, and hence, a video will be upscaled from say, 1080p to 2160p or 4K, using the power of artificial intelligence (AI) via the on-board Nvidia Tensor cores.

Nvidia provided a demo of the technology in action which shows the two images, the original 1080p video that has been upscaled to run on a 4K screen, and the other, the same video AI upscaled to 4K using its new RTX Video Super Resolution.

A zoomed in version of the AI upscaled video was also provided and it shows a much more well preserved image compared to a rather blurry one on the non-AI upscaled side.

However, for now at least, the technology is only available on Nvidia RTX 40-series and Nvidia RTX 30-series cards only. This means, Nvidia RTX 2000 series owners are left out and it is possible that the 1st gen Tensor cores are lacking certain features required for the task. In terms of browser support, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome will be supported starting February 2023.

Nvidia also unveiled the new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, which is basically what the "unlaunched" RTX 4080 12GB was. That is, in terms of specifications it is still the same, something which was already confirmed earlier via leaks. However, the silver lining is that the card has been relaunched as the RTX 4070 Ti but with an MSRP that is $100 lower than the $899 4080 12GB, making it potentially more attractive to gamers. It will be available in two days time from January 5th.

CES 23: Nvidia outs RTX 4070 Ti, new RTX Video Super Resolution for Microsoft Edge & Chrome

Electronic devices of the future may have improved security measures integrated into their circuitry to help defend against malicious attacks. Researchers from King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) have shown how protective “logic locks” based on the cutting-edge field of spintronics could be inserted into the integrated circuits of electronic chips to protect chip security.

“The need for hardware-based security features reflects the globalized nature of modern electronics manufacture,” explains Yehia Massoud from KAUST. Electronics companies usually employ large specialized, external foundries to produce their chips, which minimizes costs but introduces potential vulnerabilities to the supply chain. The circuit design could simply be illegally copied by an untrusted foundry for counterfeit chip production or could be maliciously modified by the incorporation of “hardware Trojans” into the circuitry that detrimentally affects its behavior in some way.

“To increase confidence in the globalized integrated circuit manufacturing chain, security approaches such as logic locking are now widely used,” says Divyanshu Divyanshu, a Ph.D. student in Massoud’s labs. To defend chip security, the ITL team designed an integrated circuit logic lock based on a component called a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ).

Logic locking works like a combination lock, Divyanshu explains. Unless the correct “key” combination signal is supplied to the lock, the circuit’s operation is scrambled. “The keys to the lock are stored in tamper-proof memory, ensuring hardware security against several threat models,” Divyanshu says.

The logic-locking behavior of the MTJ is based on spintronics, an emerging form of advanced electronics. “Spintronics is a field of study in which a physical property of electrons called spin is exploited, in addition to their charge,” Massoud explains. The MTJ’s electronic output depends on the spin alignment of the electrons within it. Only when the MTJ receives the correct key signal input, however, does it produce the correct output for the protected circuit to function.

Spin-based devices have several advantages compared to conventional silicon components, Massoud notes, including low operational voltage and no power consumption during standby. “With the advancement in fabrication methods, the possibility of using emerging spintronic device structures in the chip design has increased,” he adds. “These properties make spintronic devices a potential choice for exploring hardware security.”

Spintronics could be ideal for the logic-locking task, the team’s work has shown. “Our next steps include the investigation of other spin-based devices to develop logic-locking blocks, with the help of state-of-the-art fabrication facilities available at KAUST,” Massoud says.

Source

The international Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission will provide high-definition data on the salt- and fresh water on Earth’s surface.

On December 16, NASA successfully launched the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite into Earth orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is a collaborative effort between NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) – with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the UK Space Agency – that will survey water on more than 90% of the planet’s surface.

The satellite will measure the height of water in Earth’s freshwater bodies and the ocean, providing insights into how the ocean influences climate change; how a warming world affects lakes, rivers, and reservoirs; and how communities can better prepare for disasters, like floods.

Here are five ways that SWOT will change what we know about water on Earth:

1. SWOT will survey nearly all water on Earth’s surface for the first time.

Water is essential for life on this planet. But it also plays a critical role in storing and moving much of the excess heat and carbon trapped in Earth’s atmosphere by greenhouse gas emissions. It influences our weather and climate as well. SWOT will help researchers track Earth’s water budget – where the water is today, where it’s coming from, and where it’s going to be tomorrow. This is key to understanding how water resources are changing, what impact those changes will have on local environments, and how the ocean reacts to and influences climate change.

Set for a December launch, the SWOT satellite will help researchers study such ocean features as currents and eddies in places like the Black Sea closer to the coast than previous ocean-observing satellites. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

2. SWOT will see Earth’s water in higher definition than ever before.

The spacecraft’s science instruments will view the planet’s freshwater bodies and the ocean with unprecedented clarity. SWOT will be able to collect data on ocean features less than 60 miles (100 kilometers) across, helping to improve researchers’ understanding of the ocean’s role in climate change. Earth’s seas have absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers think that short-lived ocean features, such as fronts and eddies, absorb a lot of that heat – and the extra carbon that produced it.

By providing a high-definition view of freshwater bodies, SWOT will help generate a much more complete picture of Earth’s water budget. Many big rivers remain a mystery to researchers, who can’t outfit them with monitoring instruments for various reasons, including inaccessibility. The spacecraft’s instruments will observe the entire length of nearly all rivers wider than 330 feet (100 meters), viewing them in three dimensions for the first time. Likewise, where ground and satellite technologies currently provide data on only a few thousand of the world’s largest lakes, SWOT will expand that number to over a million lakes larger than 15 acres (62,500 square meters).

The SWOT mission will collect information on the height of water in Earth’s lakes, rivers, reservoirs, and oceans. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CNES/Thales Alenia Space

3. The satellite will address some of the most pressing climate change questions of our time.

An important part of predicting our future climate is determining at what point the ocean slows down the absorption of excess heat trapped in the atmosphere and starts releasing it back into the air, where it could accelerate global warming. SWOT will provide crucial information about this global ocean-atmosphere heat exchange, enabling researchers to test and improve climate forecasts. In addition, the satellite will help fill gaps in researchers’ picture of how sea level is changing along coastlines, offering insights that can then be used to improve computer models for sea level rise projections and the forecasting of coastal floods.

4. SWOT data will be used to inform decisions about our daily lives.

Climate change is also accelerating Earth’s water cycle, leading to more volatile precipitation patterns, including torrential downpours and extreme droughts. Some communities around the world will thus experience floods while others suffer droughts. SWOT data will be used to monitor drought conditions in lakes and improve flood forecasts for rivers, providing essential information to water management agencies, disaster preparedness agencies, universities, civil engineers, and others who need to track water in their local areas.

5. This mission is paving the way for future NASA Earth missions while also building on a long-standing international partnership.

With its innovative technology and commitment to engaging a diverse community of people who plan to use the mission’s data, SWOT is laying a path for future Earth-observing missions. Measurements from SWOT – and the tools to support researchers in analyzing the information – will be free and accessible. This will help to foster research and applications activities by a wide range of users, including those who may not usually have the opportunity to access this knowledge.

Such an ambitious mission is possible because of a decades-long collaboration between NASA and CNES that started in the 1980s to monitor Earth’s ocean. This partnership pioneered the use of a space-based instrument called an altimeter to study sea level with the launch of the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite in 1992. The NASA-CNES partnership has continued uninterrupted for three decades and has expanded to encompass work with other agencies, including the CSA and the UK Space Agency for SWOT, as well as ESA (European Space Agency), the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, and the European Commission for the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, which launched in November 2020.

More About the Mission

SWOT is being jointly developed by NASA and CNES, with contributions from the CSA and the UK Space Agency. JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, leads the U.S. component of the project. For the flight system payload,

NASA is providing the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) instrument, a GPS science receiver, a laser retroreflector, a two-beam microwave radiometer, and NASA instrument operations. CNES is providing the Doppler Orbitography and Radioposition Integrated by Satellite (DORIS) system, the dual frequency Poseidon altimeter (developed by Thales Alenia Space), the KaRIn radio-frequency subsystem (together with Thales Alenia Space and with support from the UK Space Agency), the satellite platform, and ground control segment. CSA is providing the KaRIn high-power transmitter assembly. NASA is providing the launch vehicle and associated launch services.

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This move will greatly impact Apple, which uses Lightning cables to charge most of its devices, including iPhones. However, it seems that not all electronic devices will sport the standard. According to a report by Mint, feature phones, wearables, and hearables will not be required to have a USB-C port as doing so would make the devices more expensive.

India is a large market for feature phones and other devices that don't use USB-C charging ports, according to a senior official of the Indian government quoted by Mint. They say that this is different compared to the situation in Europe, where many people use smartphones. As such, the Indian government has created another committee to discuss a common charger for wearables and hearables.

Aside from smartphones, laptops will also be required to have USB-C charging ports. However, unlike smartphone manufacturers, laptop manufacturers will have until 2026 to comply, similar to the EU's timeline.

Source: Sammobile, Mint

India to require USB-C port for smartphones and other electronics by 2025

Some stories were more popular with our readers than others, especially stories about Windows updates that broke numerous features.

Below we list the ten most popular stories at BleepingComputer in 2022.

10. Microsoft Exchange year 2022 bug in FIP-FS breaks email delivery

A bug in Microsoft Exchange caused on-premise servers to stop delivering emails on January 1st, 2022.

This "Year 2022" bug was caused by the FIP-FS anti-malware scanning engine using a signed int32 variable to store the value of a date, which has a maximum value of 2,147,483,647.

However, dates in 2022 had a minimum value of 2,201,010,001, which is greater than the maximum value stored in the signed int32 variable, causing the scanning engine to fail and not release mail for delivery.

9. Finnish govt agency warns of unusual aircraft GPS interference

Finland's Transport and Communications Agency warned of an unusual spike in GPS interference near the country's eastern border. The origin of the interference was not known, but numerous reports stated that the interference started during the previous weekend.

This interference resulted in NOTAMs (notices to airmen) raising pilot awareness and helping them take additional measures to keep flights safe.

8. Dad takes down town's internet by mistake to get his kids offline

A French dad faced jail time and a hefty fine for using a signal jammer to prevent his kids from going online at night.

Unfortunately, this signal jammer also took down his town's Internet accidentally.

7. Z-Library eBook site domains seized by U.S. Dept of Justice

The U.S. Department of Justice seized the numerous websites for the popular Z-Library online eBook repository, preventing easy access to the stored books.

Almost two weeks later, the DOJ announced the arrest of two Russian nationals in Argentina on November 3rd for operating the Z-Library e-Book site.

"The defendants are alleged to have operated a website for over a decade whose central purpose was providing stolen intellectual property, in violation of copyright laws," said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Driscoll.

6. Microsoft releases emergency fixes for Windows Server, VPN bugs

Microsoft released emergency out-of-band (OOB) updates to address numerous critical issues in Windows and Windows servers that were introduced in the January 2022 Patch Tuesday.

These issues include VPN connectivity, Windows Server Domain Controllers restarting, Virtual Machines start failures, and ReFS-formatted removable media failing to mount.

5. Windows Kerberos authentication breaks after November updates

Microsoft warned that Windows Kerberos authentication was broken for many domain controllers after installing the November 2022 Patch Tuesday updates.

This issue affected Windows Servers acting as Domain Controllers after the installation of the update.

Unfortunately, this bug affected almost all actively supported Windows and Windows Servers releases.

4. New Windows KB5009543, KB5009566 updates break L2TP VPN connections

Microsoft's January 2022 Patch Tuesday updates broke LL2TP VPN connections for many users using Windows' built-in VPN client.

Other Windows users reported that the bug also affected connections to SonicWall, Cisco Meraki, and WatchGuard Firewalls, with the latter's client also affected by the bug.

3. Russia faces IT crisis with just two months of data storage left

Russian media reported that the country was facing a critical IT storage crisis after Western cloud providers pulled out of the country due to sanctions.

These sanctions left Russia with only two more months of data storage for mobile carriers, online entertainment providers, and streaming services.

Russia was exploring various solutions to resolve this IT storage problem, ranging from leasing all available domestic data storage to seizing IT resources left behind by businesses that pulled out of the country.

2. New Windows Server updates cause DC boot loops, break Hyper-V

This story is about the January 2022 updates breaking a wide range of enterprise features and causing significant issues, including Hyper-V not starting, domain controllers spontaneously rebooting, and inaccessible ReFS volumes.

Microsoft resolved these issues by releasing emergency out-of-band (OOB) updates later in the month.

1. Microsoft is testing ads in the Windows 11 File Explorer

Finally, Microsoft began using the Windows 11 File Explorer app in Insider builds to promote other services, such as OneDrive and Microsoft Editor.

While most of these "ads" are innocuous and for other Windows/Microsoft features or services, many are frustrated that they are being shown without a way to disable them.

Windows Senior Product Manager Brandon LeBlanc told BleepingComputer that "this was an experimental banner that was not intended to be published externally and was turned off."

BleepingComputer's most popular technology stories of 2022

A computer model of a potential drug within the active site of a protein.

Polarisqb

 

Given all these constraints, there will likely not be one single molecule that fulfills them all; instead, research will get one or more populations of related molecules that are relatively good fits for most applications. Identifying these potential drugs from a sea of molecules is an optimization problem—one that gets more computationally intense as you expand the size of the sea. And optimization problems are precisely the sort of thing that D-Wave's computers are designed to handle.

 

POLARISqb started off working with Fujitsu, which offers customized hardware that can simulate quantum annealing using traditional silicon chips. But when the team moved to D-Wave, it used the opportunity to rethink how it organizes its work. "It makes sense to design the library in a way that will fit that architecture so that things that are close in the internal architecture of D-Wave are also close in the internal architecture of the library itself," Keinan said. That's partly because when errors occur in the D-Wave hardware, the output is often very close to the intended result, so it would point to a closely related molecule.

 

"We're not expecting it to give us the same answer every time," Keinan told Ars. "We run it several times to find different pockets of activity, if you will. We think of those as attractors—areas of chemical space where you have a concentration of molecules that are good."

 

When the team at POLARISqb started, the D-Wave hardware couldn't fit the libraries of chemicals the company wanted to check. So the team relied on D-Wave's developer platform, which helped break up the library into smaller chunks that could be evaluated separately, with the results combined on classical computers. Since then, a newer generation of processors has allowed for evaluating libraries containing billions of molecules.

 

Polarisqb

 

Keinan said the transition to a quantum annealer wasn't necessarily easy. The team had to "translate chemistry and biology" into commands on unfamiliar computer architecture. And it had to figure out how to value different goals, like solubility and protein interactions, that may be partly incompatible. But like most software development projects, the team started with small chemical libraries to show that the code worked and then scaled up to the billions. "We are a 2-year-old company, and we're still improving our code," Keinan said.

 

The analysis run on the D-Wave hardware is integrated into a pipeline that includes the more detailed modeling of protein-drug interactions done on classical computers. In effect, it screens a library of billions of molecules and identifies a few tens of thousands that are worth performing the detailed analysis on.

 

Keinan doesn't doubt that the same thing could be done on classical computer hardware. Her company just estimates that it would be more expensive. "We've done some calculation to see what's the time difference, and our brute force on distributed Google Cloud will take us two orders of magnitude, maybe sometimes three orders of magnitude longer than to run it on a quantum computer," she told Ars. "This is OK if you have a billion molecules; when you reach 2 billion molecules, you are really beginning to pay, and when you reach 10 billion molecules, that's something that is going to be completely not cost-effective."

 

"This year, we're going to do 20 projects," she said. "We have customers—paying customers—which is unique for some of the quantum computing companies."

The cargo must flow

Identifying drugs may seem like the sort of thing that quantum computers should be good at. But the sorts of optimization problems that it represents also show up in many more down-to-earth contexts. We talked to people from a company called SavantX, which used a D-Wave machine to help keep goods flowing smoothly through a port facility.

 

Peter Lindeback, who served as the director of strategic initiatives for the company that owned the port, described the challenges of managing the facility, located in Los Angeles. Combined with the neighboring Port of Long Beach, the San Pedro Bay port complex forms the largest shipping complex in the Western Hemisphere, and the facility Lindeback's company was responsible for was one of the largest ones there, covering 300 acres and handling well over 1.2 million containers per year. Each of those containers had to be lifted off a ship, placed on the ground, and then placed on a truck that took it out of the facility.

That container choreography creates a challenging optimization problem. Lindeback said that any time the cranes spend waiting for a truck is lost productivity. Any time the cranes spend moving to where a truck is waiting increases fuel use, carbon emissions, and maintenance costs. So the optimization involves making sure that trucks flow through the facility in a way that sends them to pick up containers as close as possible to where a crane is already located. "The distance traveled is not only important for time but also for maintenance," SavantX's David Ostby told Ars. "Because if you cut the number of miles that you drive a crane in half every day, you're also cutting your likelihood of a failure."

 

A steady flow of container ships means many individual containers that need to be processed.

Cameron Venti / EyeEm

 

When SavantX was brought on, the trucks were organized using a cloud-based classical algorithm, which gets answers quickly enough to keep the system working in real time but isn't likely to find a highly optimized solution once problems start to become complex. While it might be possible to code a more effective algorithm on a traditional computer, SavantX decided to try using D-Wave's hardware. "It's not like we probably couldn't develop a classical algorithm that would compete with the quantum algorithm," Ostby said. "But it may not get done in time, [and] it would be kind of expensive to write."

 

Several factors went into this decision. One was the value of getting experience developing the hardware. And because of the way quantum annealers work, one is more or less guaranteed to produce a usable answer quickly—or fail with enough time to fall back to the existing algorithm. And even when errors occur, the D-Wave machine produces an answer that is likely to be very close to an optimal solution.

 

Rather than use the software development environment provided by D-Wave, SavantX hired physicists and people who had experience with D-Wave's machine and coded its own solution by controlling the hardware directly. According to Ostby, the algorithm is immune to errors when a small number of trucks are waiting for cranes, and there is limited impact as that number rises. It was originally coded for an earlier generation of D-Wave hardware and still doesn't need all the features of the current machines, such as a higher qubit count.

 

That control software is embedded in a larger classical control program, which organizes input to be sent to the D-Wave hardware, gets the results, and uses them to create a set of priorities that are then communicated to other systems and converted to something humans can act on.

 

The process of rolling the software out was fairly simple. "You make a copy of the port, and then you run the test against what's really happening, and then you look at the results. And you keep doing that until you're happy," Ostby told Ars. "Then you push the button and make it go. And then you go on vacation, right?"

 

Pushing the button produced some obvious benefits. The D-Wave and classical algorithms were roughly equal, with one or two trucks waiting for slots. But as the numbers climbed, the solutions provided by D-Wave hardware developed an edge that expanded dramatically by the time the truck queue hit the double digits. SavantX has published numbers that indicate that each crane did twice as many deliveries each day while dropping the distance traveled by a third. Cranes were typically productive less than half a day before the switch and cleared 70 percent afterward.

Not general, but useful?

As seen in the very different applications developed by these two companies, optimization problems show up in a huge range of useful applications. And it's clear that D-Wave's quantum system can provide solutions to them. For these specific problems, it's not clear whether an algorithm could be developed on typical computing hardware that could beat the quantum annealer. But even if one could, some companies have found that the annealers provide a compelling solution for the specific problems they face.

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When you open ShowGPT you will see that it has a simple interface that looks a little like the Twitter feed, with each post containing different ChatGPT prompts that users have posted to the site. The feed will offer three options to show prompts from Today, the Top prompts, or New prompts.You don’t need to log in to access the prompts and if you click on them, you’ll see a Try on ChatGPT button and a Copy Prompt button, which shows that it is primarily designed to help users get started on their own ChatGPT journey using the inspiration they get on the site.

You’ll also see that prompts fall into various categories such as Web Development, History, Music, and rather interestingly Jailbreak, among others. Users can also vote for the best prompts and there is a leaderboard for the users who have won the most votes.

If you have signed up to ChatGPT or have been holding off because you have been unsure how you would, ShowGPT could offer you a way to check out the OpenAI tool’s capabilities without having to exert too much mental energy. The prompt library is still very new, however, so there are still limitations to what you’ll find there, and the leaderboard seems to be dominated by the most avid posters rather than anything of particularly high quality.

Something that is interesting, however, is that when users post their prompts to ShowGPT they can also post example responses that ChatGPT has given them back. Although there are no specific times or dates given with these posts, they still offer us a point of reference from the past that shows how the tool was responding to prompts in the past to compare to how it is responding now. When running tests like these, particularly on prompts in the Jailbreak section, many times the chatbot responded that it wasn’t possible to work outside of its programming in the way it had been prompted to do so. This means the OpenAI team is actively working to improve the responses ChatGPT is giving people and to close up the algorithmic loopholes that have been allowing the tool to respond with problematic options.

It seems then, that just over a month after making the tool available to the public in order to receive and respond to feedback, the OpenAI team has already learned a lot.

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A cryptographic watermark is a type of digital watermark that is embedded in a digital file or signal using cryptographic techniques. Digital watermarks are used to identify the ownership or origin of a digital file or signal, and they are often used to protect against unauthorized use or distribution of digital content. You get a lot of these types of watermarks in photos and videos, but OpenAI is talking about developing a cryptographic watermark that is integrated into the text that ChatGPT is outputting.

If you’re thinking about how this would work without affecting the coherence of the text output, you are on the right track, but the reality is that text is so open and infinite that it is very possible to include unnoticeable cryptographic code without it affecting the way the text reads.

In-truth, AI-generated content follows a predictable pattern in the way it uses words, which means that it is fairly easy to recognize it if you know what to look for. However, OpenAI looks set to build in a deliberate element of this predictability in an imperceptible way. As discussed in the Search Engine Journal by OpenAI’s Scott Aaronson, who has been tasked with securing AI Safety and Alignment at the company, this process is called pseudorandom distribution. Pseudorandomness is when a series of words or numbers appear random but is actually not truly random. This allows us to mark AI-generated content without disrupting the appearance of the text. Aaronson has written about the work he is doing o this for OpenAI in his own blog, saying:

“My main project so far has been a tool for statistically watermarking the outputs of a text model like GPT.

Basically, whenever GPT generates some long text, we want there to be an otherwise unnoticeable secret signal in its choices of words, which you can use to prove later that, yes, this came from GPT”

Interestingly, however, it looks as though a simple way to get around this type of watermarking would be to run the text through another generative text AI protocol and ask it to rewrite the text. This might sound silly, but it would offer the user the chance to generate text, removing the need to write it themselves and then sidestep the potential safety feature by having the other protocol write out the cryptographic watermark.

Clearly then, this is still a work in progress, which is likely why for now at least, OpenAI isn’t actively watermarking the text output coming from ChatGPT. However, if you are planning on using ChatGPT to write some important text for you, be careful as, like we mentioned above, if you know what to look for you will be able to spot AI-generated text, even without having a specific watermark to look for.

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How does it feel inside your head? Turn your attention inwards. Maybe you’re daydreaming, allowing your mind to wander. Or maybe it feels sharp and alert. Maybe your thoughts are forging freely ahead, a sign that you have achieved the fabled state of “flow”. More likely, however, your brain feels like a browser with too many tabs open. From the widespread reports of a post-pandemic “brain fog” and the books on “deep work” and “stolen focus” topping bestseller lists, to the soaring diagnoses of ADHD in adults and children, it seems we are increasingly concerned by our ability to pay attention.

Early last year, the Centre for Attention Studies at King’s College London found that 49% of 2,000 adults surveyed felt their attention span was shorter than it used to be. Almost as many (47%) agreed that “‘deep thinking’ has become a thing of the past”. These are generalisations and impossible to quantify – we have no consistent measure of attention or deep thinking, let alone of contrasting those through history with today’s. But the response proves that we at least perceive there’s a problem.

I have been feeling the same myself. Last year, writing – my job for more than a decade – started to feel more laborious. Unrelated to the complexity of the task, I found it hard to manage my time, or structure an argument, or see how one thought followed another. Directing my attention felt outside my grasp. I confessed to a friend that I had been Googling the symptoms of ADHD, increasingly convinced I would receive a diagnosis. Or maybe, he replied, kindly, my struggle had more to do with spending upwards of eight hours a day staring at screens, without real breaks, for weeks at a time. Maybe the mental strain I was feeling was not a sign of executive dysfunction, but an apt response.

“I’ve studied hundreds of people over the decades, and many, many people report feeling distracted and having a loss of control,” says cognitive psychologist Gloria Mark over Zoom. “But not everybody,” she adds. A professor of informatics at the University of California, Mark has been researching human-computer interaction and technology’s effects on our day-to-day lives since the mid 1990s. Now, in her first book Attention Span: Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life, Mark brings together her findings for a lay audience, and the results are startling. It’s not as simple as flow good, screens bad. Most strikingly, it is not even the case that we should necessarily be striving to focus at all.

Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought on attention. The first argues that we haven’t lost our ability to focus, it has been wrested, even “stolen”, from us by technology. In this view we’re little more than lab rats lured by notifications and algorithms, pings and dings in a large-scale social experiment. We may develop strategies for resisting those dopamine dispensers, such as blocking software or switching to a “brick phone”. But the game is rigged against us.

Those in the second camp may scoff at this: they maintain that most of our struggles with focus are more to do with self-control. There is no notification that can distract us unless we are on some level willing to be distracted. Even the notion of a “shorter attention span” may provoke scepticism. Instead, could it be that you’re just not that motivated? Whichever worldview you subscribe to – that our attention has been hijacked by our devices, or by our lack of self-discipline – they share an element of fatalism: there is either little you can do, or you’re just not doing enough.

Mark believes that neither of these views is quite right. In Attention Span she dismantles common misconceptions about our attention, among them that we should always be striving to focus when at work on our computers, and that the mindless scrolling we do on screens is counterproductive. The reality is more nuanced, says Mark – but our digital lives have evolved so fast, we have found ourselves struggling to keep up or safeguard ourselves.

“That’s why I think we’ve got to this point, where we’re having such a hard time controlling our attention, because we haven’t figured out yet how we can integrate this technology in our lives, and use it wisely.”

Mark has been studying distraction since 2004, when she carried out the first of her studies on “knowledge workers” (who work primarily with computers). Shadowing them with a stopwatch, she logged how long they spent on one activity (opening their email) before switching to another (making a call). It was painstaking work – “like watching paint dry”, one of her participants said self-effacingly, of their own routine – but effectively illustrated how our attention roamed about, often with no obvious prompt.

The results showed that people shifted their attention, on average, every three minutes or so (including to interact with colleagues). When restricted to just computer activity, it was about 30 seconds quicker. At the time this seemed unfathomably fast, says Mark, but it was nothing compared to what was to come. With developments in tracking technology in the 2010s, Mark was able to repeat the study with greater precision, amassing thousands of hours of observation. In 2012, the average time spent on any screen before switching was down to 74 seconds. Since then it has declined even further. Research by Mark and others from 2016 to 2021 put it relatively consistently at just 47 seconds – “crazily short”, she says.

“There are so many things in our culture and society that collude to make us distracted – it’s more than just targeted algorithms.”

Photograph: Kellie French/The Observer

The result holds true regardless of job or age (though Mark studied all adults; distraction in developing minds is even less known). “Simply put,” Mark concludes in her book, “our personal use of technologies affects our ability to pay attention.” Those in the first camp might feel validated by this. But, Mark cautions, it’s not a straightforward tradeoff. “There are so many things in our culture and society that collude to make us distracted – it’s more than just targeted algorithms.”

In film and TV, for example, shot lengths have been getting pacier over decades, potentially influencing our own processing and behaviour in ways we may not be aware of. On social media, we consume and produce content in bite-size chunks, at a frenetic pace. “We are creating the culture,” says Mark. “Our attention spans have shaped the media, and the media in turn is shaping our attention.”

Further complicating the issue is that, though the world at large might seek to distract us, we are not equally susceptible. “There’s aspects of our individual natures – it’s more than just a lack of willpower,” she says. Personality plays a part in how we use the internet, and what for. Some people find it easier than others to recover from interruptions, making them more effective multitaskers. Others are innately predisposed towards self-regulation. “If they go to social media, they are pretty good at getting themselves back on track,” says Mark.

For some, individual traits coalesce with context to create a perfect storm of distraction. Mark’s research found the higher a person scores in neuroticism and urgency tests, the shorter their attention span. “It doesn’t mean you can’t change – but you’ll have a harder time than others.” Mark’s own doctor confessed to an extreme strategy for writing a grant application: to book a round-trip plane journey from California to Washington DC, and write on the plane, literally rising above earthly distractions. “I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “He said he has to change his environment. He has to put himself in a place where he can’t get access to the internet – and apparently he’s got the money to do it.”

The very design of the internet mirrors how we think, explaining how we can lose hours down a rabbit hole on YouTube or Wikipedia. “In terms of a semantic network, we think naturally in terms of associations, and the internet just aligns with that so well,” says Mark. Stress and exhaustion further exacerbate the problem, diminishing our ability to resist temptation. It means the line between free will and conditioning has blurred: we might genuinely want to learn more, or we might be impulsively clicking on links. Either way, our curiosity is aroused and – with the next video or webpage – rewarded, perpetuating the cycle.

The many influences Mark identifies on our attention – individual, social, environmental, technological – emphasises not only the scale of the challenge, but the limits of zeroing in on any one of them for a potential solution. Distraction isn’t a tech problem, or a people problem – it’s both, inextricably intertwined. Indeed, one of Mark’s most disquieting findings is that we have become so accustomed to being interrupted, we do it to ourselves. Mark found that email trumped social media as a source of interruptions, with study participants checking their inboxes an average of 77 times daily (one checked 374 times). But most concerning was that 41% were doing so of their own accord, without external triggers. It’s proof that even if we turn off notifications, we can’t escape those internal triggers.

“We have these 47-second attention spans, and we maintain them by interrupting ourselves,” Mark says. “I feel it myself, this tension that builds up so that I have to change my screen – go to a new site, or social media, or whatever.” Accordingly, the salve often proposed for fragmented focus is flow, the psychological state of being so engrossed in your work that you lose track of time, and even the outside world. Mark has extensive experience of flow, though not in her scientific career. Before she did a master’s degree in statistics, paving the way for her to pursue psychology and computer usage, Mark studied fine art, specialising in abstract expressionism. She abandoned her dreams of being an artist in the face of the economic reality – but years later, those hours spent in flow, painting and drawing, and thinking laterally proved valuable in her scientific research. What she discovered is that most knowledge work requires analytical thinking that precludes us from getting swept away.

“You see a lot of people claim that when you’re working on your computers and in your everyday life, you can get into flow, but it’s very much about the nature of the work. Working on a spreadsheet or writing a report – it’s not conducive.” In fact, flow depends on a certain level of challenge, whereby we feel pleasurably engaged and extended, making us happy, but also causing low-level stress. “It’s a myth that we should be continually focused – it’s too stressful,” says Mark.

Equally, though mindless digital diversions like playing Candy Crush or even scrolling social media might seem like exactly the kind of time-wasting that we should be striving to avoid, it actually serves a valuable function, says Mark. That kind of easy, rote activity is not only enjoyable, it replenishes our cognitive resources, necessary for us to be productive later on.

The fact that flow is not only rare, but draining; and that taking a break to scroll a different screen or play a game on your phone can be restorative, is proof of the need for nuance. The moralising over productivity and screentime is unhelpful when it comes to finding solutions – but highly profitable as the boom in (useless) blue-light glasses and “distraction-free” tech goes to show.

Last year, writer Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus, decrying the “huge invasive forces” corroding our concentration and championing flow as a solution, was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Stolen Focus concludes by calling for an urgent societal “movement to reclaim our minds” – and, in the meantime chase that flow state. (Hari himself took a months-long “digital detox” on Cape Cod.)

Like others, Mark has “concerns” about Hari’s “one-sided” argument and research. It is no more possible for us to sustain focus all day than it is for us to lift weights nonstop, she says – yet that is exactly what many of us expect of ourselves, at the expense of our own wellbeing. The problem is felt well beyond the small segment of the population with ADHD, says Mark. “People are saying we have this ‘epidemic of ADHD’, but we should hold back on making that claim.” More research is needed into any relation between ADHD and use of personal devices – but it may be that people are simply exhausted and trying, and failing to focus.

Much advice sidesteps this self-assessment through the use of productivity software that restricts access to social media. But this, says Mark, undermines our autonomy. “Especially the cold-turkey approach, it takes agency away from people – like having training wheels on your bike, and you never learn to ride the bike.”

‘Our digital lives have evolved so fast, we have found ourselves in struggling to keep up or safeguard ourselves.’

Photograph: David Aubrey/Getty Images

In Attention Span, Mark makes the case for a new, evidence-based approach to attention, one that works with our tech-riddled modern world and tendencies towards distraction, instead of trying to squeeze the genie back in the bottle. “We are stuck with technology, we can’t give it up, so let’s not even talk about that – but we can use it in an intelligent way, to find the benefits.” Rather than aspiring towards flow, or always being focused, Mark suggests we should aim for a “balance of attentional states” that reflects our natural circadian rhythms.

Identifying your individual chronotype – whether you work better early, late or are a moderate type; sometimes split into lions, bears, dolphins and wolves – can help you to structure your day for ease, Mark says. “It’s a matter of understanding when you’re at your peak, when you’ve got the capacity to do hard work, to be creative – and to understand when you don’t.”

She and I are both “bears”, so are most productive in daylight, between 10am and 2pm – when lions are winding down, and dolphins and wolves are getting started. By becoming aware of those precious peaks, Mark says, we can protect that window for work requiring creativity or concentration – not “wasting” them on email. She has learned to do it herself. “I used to get totally exhausted. At the end of the day, my brain was just fried… I learned to pull back and take a break.”

Now, for her downtime, Mark will schedule undemanding admin – or revive with a walk around the block, or by playing an online word game. “I realised that I had been under so much stress for a very long time,” she says.

At the societal level, Mark supports “right to disconnect” laws to combat email overload, but says the cultural shift may have to come first. She suggests cultivating “meta-awareness” of our own attention – whether we have resources to burn, or need to refuel – and engagement with tech. “If you end up going to social media, keep yourself in the present by asking: ‘Am I still getting value out of being here?’” If not, and you’re feeling increasingly drained or, conversely, refreshed, “then leave,” Mark says. It is a more pragmatic – and even, dare I say, empowering – outlook on our technological future than many. “I am very optimistic that we can take control, and change the way things are,” agrees Mark. But the first step is accepting that our attention, like our time, is finite – and that we can choose how we spend it.

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Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti leak reveals specs from ‘unlaunched’ RTX 4080

Welcome to the final edition of Microsoft Weekly for this year and what a year it has been. Just like last time though, we have a relatively shorter digest today owing to the holidays season, expect news inflow to pick up again from next week. This time, we recap some news about Windows that might make you feel nostalgic, an interesting feature coming to Notepad, and some app updates. Without further ado, let's dive into our latest digest covering December 24 - December 30!

Windows 95

Let's start with a sip of nostalgia. It turns out that the latest update to Stardock's WindowsBlinds 11 has introduced an all new "Windows Classic Skin", which is basically a Windows 95 theme. Of course, this is only a cosmetic change and is intended for those who either want to take a trip down memory lane or younger readers who just want to take a look at how Windows has evolved over the past couple of decades. The good news is that the Windows 95 skin is available for both Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs.

Another dose of nostalgia we took this week (kind of) involved running Windows 7 on a machine slowed to only 5MHz, using a Pentium-S processor - which is 200 times lower than the official requirement - and 128MB of RAM. Of course, Windows 7 isn't quite as old as Windows 95, it's still over a decade old. Overall, it's a pretty interesting experiment that serves no real-world utility, but it was mostly a success.

Tabs in Notepad

Following the release of tabbed File Explorer in Windows 11, it seems like Microsoft is also preparing a tabbed interface for Notepad, as can be seen in the screenshot above. The image was inadvertently leaked by a Microsoft employee and was promptly deleted, but it's surprising that this problem arose in the first place considering there's a pretty big red banner on top of the app telling employees not to discuss features or take screenshots of this version of Notepad. Either way, now Windows 11 users at least know that Microsoft is considering this capability for Notepad.

Speaking of what to expect next, the Redmond tech giant is reportedly prepping three feature updates (!!!) for Windows 11 in 2023. The first one is set to arrive in February or March, the next will be in May or June, and the final one will be in September or October. For a detailed breakdown of what to expect in each of these updates, check out our piece here.

Teams and other app updates

Right on time, Microsoft shared all the features that it added to Teams in the month of December 2022. The online communication and collaboration tool has received a bunch of improvements including the option to delete chats for better organization, reacting to messages with over 800 emoji, AI-powered suggestion regarding adding people in new chats, and the ability to add new members to a chat directly through the "@" keyword rather than the add-dialog, among many other things.

Meanwhile, WingetUI, which is a third-party GUI utility tool for managing CLI package managers, received a significant update to fix blurry textures on Windows 10 and improve the positioning of the context menu for Taskbar in Windows 11, among other things.

Lastly, Rufus alternative Ventoy also received an update to bypass Windows 11's system requirements and Microsoft Account (MSA) / internet connectivity with version 1.0.86. The utility is used by many to create bootable Windows media.

Git gud

Some recent testing has revealed that Windows 11 is the superior gaming OS when compared against Ubuntu on AMD hardware. Multiple games and software were testing on the two operating systems with Windows 11 emerging as the victor. Although of course, you could argue that Windows 11 is the preferred OS for the gaming community at large anyway because of developers targeting it and the ease of use and install associated with it.

Wrapping this section up with deals, Xbox Games with Gold subscribers are getting Iris Fall and Autonauts next month. Meanwhile, the latest Deals with Gold promotion is headlined by Rainbow Six Siege and Vampyr. And if you're a member of the PC Master Race, check out this weekend's game deals curated by our News Editor Pulasthi Ariyasinghe.

Dev Channel

• Microsoft has ended support for Surface Laptop 2, three years after release
• Windows saw the surfacing of 5000x the malware on macOS and 60x versus Linux - which isn't really surprising considering the OS' marketshare

Under the spotlight

A couple of days ago, I shared my views on why Microsoft 365 is my favorite Microsoft product, ahead of Windows 11, Xbox, Game Pass, Edge, and all the rest. You can read my thoughts here.

Meanwhile, News Reporter Taras Buria made the case for the top 11 Windows 11 apps that he thinks every user should install.

And Neowin's co-founder Steven Parker wrote a guide explaining how to quickly fix blank live tiles in Windows 10's Start menu. Interestingly, this fix is not widely known so if you're being plagued by this issue, check out Steven's write-up here.

On the other hand, News Reporter Hemant Saxena penned a guide detailing the process to change the size of the Taskbar in Windows 11.

And last but not the least, forum member Adam Bottjen described how to log a device off of Facebook in his latest edition of Tech Tip Tuesday.

Logging off

Our most interesting news story of the week is that Amazon has started to deliver orders by drones in California and Texas. The company had already received the greenlight from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration a couple of years ago. During this latest trial period, drones will fly to the designated shipping address, descend to the customer’s backyard, and deliver the package, requiring limited human intervention. The service is currently limited to College Station Prime Air Drone Delivery Center (PADDC) and Lockeford PADDC but will gradually expand to more customers in the future.

Thank you for sticking with us throughout this year and we hope you have a great 2023!

Microsoft Weekly: Windows 95, tabs in Notepad, and Teams updates

A confident bullshitter that can write very convincing nonsense’: not a takedown of an annoying student or a former British prime minister, but a description of an artificial intelligence writing programme that is causing headaches for its makers.

With fears in academia growing about a new AI chatbot that can write convincing essays – even if some facts it uses aren’t strictly true – the Silicon Valley firm behind a chatbot released last month are racing to “fingerprint” its output to head off a wave of “AIgiarism” – or AI-assisted plagiarism.

ChatGPT, an AI-based text generator that was released for public use in early December, has been praised and criticised alike for the quality of its output. Users can ask it questions ranging from simple factual queries (“What is the tallest mountain in Britain?”) to absurd requests (“Write a limerick explaining the offside rule”) and receive clear and coherent responses written in natural English.

Headteachers and university lecturers have expressed concerns that ChatGPT, which can provide convincing human-sounding answers to exam questions, could spark a wave of cheating in homework and exam coursework.

Now, the bot’s makers, San Francisco-based OpenAI, are trying to counter the risk by “watermarking” the bot’s output and making plagiarism easier to spot.

ChatGPT, released in early December, has been praised and criticised alike for the quality of its output.

Photograph: Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock

In a lecture at the University of Texas, OpenAI guest researcher Scott Aaronson said that the company was working on a system for countering cheating by “statistically watermarking the outputs”. The technology would work by subtly tweaking the specific choice of words selected by ChatGPT, Aaronson said, in a way that wouldn’t be noticeable to a reader, but would be statistically predictable to anyone looking for signs of machine-generated text.

“We want it to be much harder to take a GPT output and pass it off as if it came from a human,” Aaronson said. “This could be helpful for preventing academic plagiarism, obviously, but also, for example, mass generation of propaganda – you know, spamming every blog with seemingly on-topic comments supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine without even a building full of trolls in Moscow. Or impersonating someone’s writing style in order to incriminate them.

“We actually have a working prototype of the watermarking scheme,” Aaronson added. “It seems to work pretty well – empirically, a few hundred [words] seem to be enough to get a reasonable signal that, yes, this text came from GPT.”

The bot doesn’t work perfectly. It has a tendency to “hallucinate” facts that aren’t strictly true, which technology analyst Benedict Evans described as “like an undergraduate confidently answering a question for which it didn’t attend any lectures. It looks like a confident bullshitter that can write very convincing nonsense.”

But the technology has been eagerly adopted by exactly that sort of student, who needs to generate a passable essay in a hurry. The output of ChatGPT hasn’t triggered any conventional plagiarism detectors up to this point, since the text it produces hasn’t been written before, leaving assessors struggling to work out how to identify cheaters.

Since the release of ChatGPT, various organisations have instituted specific policies against submitting AI-generated text as one’s own work. Stack Overflow, a Q&A site that specialises in helping programmers solve coding problems, banned users from submitting responses written by ChatGPT. “The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce,” the site’s administrators wrote.

“Overall, because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking or looking for correct answers.”

The use of AI tools to generate writing that can be passed off as one’s own has been dubbed “AIgiarism” by the American venture capitalist Paul Graham, whose wife, Jessica Livingston, is one of the backers of OpenAI. “I think the rules against AIgiarism should be roughly similar to those against plagiarism,” Graham said in December. “The problem with plagiarism is not just that you’re taking credit away from someone else but that you’re falsely claiming it for yourself. The latter is still true in AIgiarism. And in fact, the former is also somewhat true with current AI technology.”

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