News

According to recent reports The Pirate Bay has suddenly become available in the UK for almost all ISPs. The change happened when the Pirate Bay moved to CloudFlare and turned on HTTPS Strict. Once this was done things turned around for the notorious site. What is interesting is that ISPs that were previously blocking the site do not appear to be scrambling to get it back under control. The exact reason for the sudden reappearance of the site is unclear, but speculation is that using CloudFlare’s HTTPS Strict made all the difference.

Gasp! There has been another published attack on the TOR Project. This time the attack and compromise technique comes from the gang at Princeton. The Princeton team claims that their new methods are around 95% successful and only require traffic in one direction. The information that they have presented is interesting and certainly could be used to grab information from users of the anonymous service, but it is not really new and not surprising to hear about.

As if lose USB drives with the potential for spyware and malware are not bad enough, some mad genius decided to build a USB device that is technically capable of doing damage to the hardware components of most modern computers. The device was custom built by a guy named Dark Purple and consists of a DC to DC converter and a capacitor bank. There is some control logic to this so that the capacitor bank know when to send the death note to the system it is plugged in to.

Some GPU news comes today from the AMD camp where we are hearing rumors that AMD’s Radeon 390X might ship with 8GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Now this sounds great when you take into account the fact that HBM has some serious muscle behind it (128GBps per memory chip). AMD could technically leapfrog nVidia’s new monster the GeForce Titian X with 12GB of memory onboard. The problem is that some of the information that is floating around does not seem to add up.