Daily Tech News 22 December 2023

• ASML has shipped the industry's first high numerical aperture scanner to Intel. (AnandTech)
  
  These machines will be used in future chip production beyond the 3nm node. The huge metal box in the photo is not the machine itself; it's one component of the machine. Despite working on structures too small to be seen even under a microscope, it is itself bigger than a house.
  
  
  

• Benchmark results have leaked for AMD's upcoming 8700G CPU. (WCCFTech)
  
  This is the desktop version of the chip currently used in a range of laptop parts like the 7840U, 7940HS, and the Z1 Extreme found in the Asus ROG Ally mobile gaming device.
  
  Juggling some benchmark numbers it looks like this will be 6% slower than the existing Ryzen 7700 - both being 8 core parts - but much faster for integrated graphics, the 8700G having 12 graphics cores against just 2 on the 7700.
  
  Like the 7700 it's a 65W model; there will also be a 35W version, though it's likely you'll be able to manually configure the power consumption up and down just like existing Ryzen 7000 desktop chips.
  
  
  
• Trust no-one. (SEC Consult)
  
  Did that email really come from Amazon.co.jp? I mean, yes, in this particular case it did, because they were notifying my that my package had arrived and indeed it was sitting right there at my door.
  
  But they are also one of a vast number of domains that appear to be vulnerable to the latest email address spoofing attack.
  
  SMTP - the protocol that has been used to deliver email for more than forty years - is a very simple text-based standard. The problem here is that text is itself not simple. SMTP processes one line of text at a time, but there is no universally accepted way to mark the end of a line of text, and most mail servers accept what are technically invalid lines of text in order to work with broken mail applications.
  
  This new hack exploits that to insert SMTP commands in the middle of an email, in such a way that they are processed as commands instead of just being part of the email body.
  
  Very sneaky.
  
  Time for everyone to switch to JMAP.
  
  
  
• Midjourney has released version 6 of their AI image generation engine. (Venture Beat)
  
  Last time I played with it, they had just announced version 3.
  
  
  
• Intel is making a lot of noise about the AI hardware on its new Meteor Lake laptop chips, because other than that they kind of suck. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And in two out of four of Intel's carefully selected benchmarks, the AI hardware does indeed produce worthwhile speed improvements.
  
  On the other two... AMD wins by a significant margin just using the regular CPU cores. And that's comparing an 8 core AMD chip to a 16 core Intel model.
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Should California ban paraquat? (LA Times) (archive site)
  
  I don't know. Maybe. The link to Parkinson's disease is unproven, but the stuff is toxic as hell, and is presently only made by a single company owned by the CCP.
  
  On the other hand it kills weeds real good and breaks down in the soil so it doesn't accumulate.
  
  Anyway, paraquat sounds like the name of an exotic herbal liqueur only produced in the Canary Islands with the unique property that mixed drinks made from it retain the original 160 proof, no matter what you mix it with.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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