Daily Tech News 1 June 2023

• Silence those annoying little negative voices in your head - by electrocuting the bastards. (The Bulletin)
  
  Interesting first-person account of tDCS - transcranial direct current stimulation - by an avowed skeptic, who found the effects instant and obvious. As soon as the current was turned on she went into a state that programmers call flow, where she was focused on the task at hand to the exclusion of all else, to such a degree that her sense of time was off by a factor of 10 when the experiment concluded.
  
  The literature for tDCS and tMS - transcranial magnetic stimulation - is mixed, and I lean on the skeptical side myself, but it's harder to discount this particular report.

• Adata has showed off its next-generation memory modules for laptops and servers, due later this year. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not just new DIMMs - only one of these is a DIMM - but new module types entirely.
  
  Of particular interest is CAMM, originally designed by Dell and released as an industry standard. This takes the LPDDR memory chips commonly used in laptops and puts them on a module, making laptop memory upgradeable again.
  
  The electrical characteristics of LPDDR make it faster and less power-hungry than regular DDR RAM but also mean it can't work in regular DIMM slots, so right now everyone (except Dell) solders it directly to the motherboard.
  
  And they only put 16GB in, so your shiny new laptop becomes e-waste if you need more than that.
  
  I'm very much looking forward to this seeing widespread adoption.
  
  
  
• There's a potential firmware backdoor in 271 models of Gigabyte motherboard. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not as nasty as it first sounded, though it's not good: The BIOS checks for firmware updates to give you a download alert in Windows, but it doesn't check that the site it connects to is actually Gigabyte's real download site. So if someone can compromise your DNS to point you at a fake download site, it will happily prompt you to download and install a fake BIOS release.
  
  So... Don't take your desktop computer to a cafe and connect it over untrusted wifi. Or just turn off the updater. That works too.
  
  
  
• This is the first x-ray taken of a single atom. (Ars Technica)
  
  The atom is pregnant.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:15 AM

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