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The US Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have removed several “public-facing” apps, citing security concerns over Russian-designed code within their programs. The developer in question is Pushwoosh, which provides software and data processing support to other app makers for marketing purposes. Pushwoosh is headquartered in Novosibirsk, Siberia, with about 40 employees, although its website says it has 150. It has an annual revenue of around 143,270,000 rubles ($2....

A quick check of Verizon’s website shows the new option applies to all devices, regardless of initial cost. The concept isn’t entirely new, as the automotive financing industry has been extending loan periods for years to “counter” rising new vehicle costs. It’s not uncommon to see 84-month loans and with select specialty vehicles, companies are now offering 120-month loans. While you are technically paying less per month with a zero percent interest loan on a longer term, there are risks....

Developer Fatshark is giving away Warhammer: Vermintide 2 to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the game’s release. For those who have never had the pleasure, it builds on the four-player (maximum), co-operative style of gameplay made popular by Left 4 Dead, setting the action in Warhammer’s Fantasy universe during the early days of the End Times. From now until November 7, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is free to download and keep forever via Steam....

When benchmarking, the NAS device in question is connected directly to a Netgear GS108T v2 switch and the test PC is always our most high-end desktop using an SSD to read and write the data. The WD MyCloud EX2 Ultra 8TB is lean when it comes to power consumption – we never saw our 8TB model consume more than 16 watts under load and 11 watts at idle.

Last month, we learned that Kioxia and Western Digital had to halt operations at two of their manufacturing plants after they discovered a contamination issue affecting BiCS 3D NAND lithography equipment. This led to the immediate loss of a staggering 6.5 exabytes of NAND dies that would have otherwise been integrated into hundreds of millions of solid-state storage devices. The two companies now say the contamination issue affecting the Yokkaichi and Kitakami fabs was fixed in late February, but offered no details regarding the specific contaminant that caused all this....

AS SSD Benchmark confirms what we found when testing with CrystalDiskMark. The Black2’s SSD provides relatively strong read performance hitting 393MB/s, which was a fraction faster than the Agility 4. However, the Black2’s sequential write performance is extremely poor, hitting just 139MB/s – mighty close to the 140MB/s delivered by its own disk drive. AS SSD Benchmark’s 4K-64 thread read test went fairly well for the Black2’s SSD, which offered 202....

While CCleaner has certainly grown up since its “crap cleaner” days, it’s certainly gotten more bloated over the years as well. Going from 6MB in February 2016 to around 15MB around its v5.41.x release in March this year. You may recall last summer (two months after being acquired by Avast), it was disclosed that the tool had been infected with Floxif malware. Nevertheless, to be fair, this has happened to many other developers, big and small....

In the 1990s, the internet was growing rapidly, and web browsers could not keep up with the pace of new file types that were designed to be shared over it. That led to the development of plug-ins: small apps that weren’t designed to work independently, but add functions to the browser, like browser extensions do today. The Powerpuff Girls were made with sugar, spice, everything nice and Flash. Video plug-ins such as Apple QuickTime and the Windows Media Player showed video content that was made of individual frames, somewhat similar to how animated GIFs work, but with the added capability of showing some of those frames while the rest were downloading, and adding compression to improve loading speed at the expense of quality....

We recently went searching for data on fab capacity by process nodes, and everyone agreed that the leading expert on the subject is Bill McClane at IC Insights. He maintains one of the most rigorous models out there on the subject, and rightly charges a premium for his reports. This is must-read material for anyone planning out a multi-year semis roadmap. Editor’s Note: Guest author Jonathan Goldberg is the founder of D2D Advisory, a multi-functional consulting firm....

Even if you are using a secure browser and enabling either incognito mode or private browsing, you are probably still getting tracked when you go online. In other words, your internet browser alone is not giving you much privacy. Editor’s Note: Guest author Heinrich Long is the editor behind Restore Privacy, a blog dedicated to inform about best online privacy practices, secure your electronic devices, unblock restricted content and defeat censorship....

Whereas previously Windows 8 with Excel 2013 was 10% faster than Windows 7 using Excel 2010, we found that with lower-end hardware this margin increased, Windows 8/Excel 2013 is now 15% faster. The performance margin in the first pass test has increased from 6% in favor of Windows 8 when using the high-end hardware to 9% using our budget system. The 3Dmark 11 margin remained the same, with Windows 8 trailing behind Windows 7 by a very small margin....

YouTube’s CEO points to Web3 technologies as an inspiration for what’s coming to the video platform in 2022. The letter doesn’t specify how they will use NFTs or mention release dates for these features, but we should have our first look at them this year. “The past year in the world of crypto, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and even decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) has highlighted a previously unimaginable opportunity to grow the connection between creators and their fans,” said Wojcicki....

Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer at YouTube, wrote an extensive post about tackling misinformation on the service. It focuses on three areas, the first of which is stopping these videos before they go viral. It classifies conspiracy theories such as claims 5G caused the spread of the coronavirus as an example of content that violates its guidelines, but some new narratives are too fresh to be caught by the company’s systems....

User Kirbymini has developed a split-screen co-op multiplayer mod for Breath of the Wild that could hold some gamers over until Nintendo’s sequel is ready. A first look video on YouTube shows the couch co-op mod in action, complete with two Links – one at the top and one on bottom. Each player has their own HUD but it appears as though they are sharing attributes / stats. Gameplay seems reasonably smooth although the video’s creator said things can get laggy if the players venture too far away from each other....

Sadly, MSI is tight on samples and we couldn’t get our hands on the P67A-GD80. The P67A-GD65 probably made the most sense for this article given the competition, but that too is unavailable. We didn’t think MSI would be in the roundup, but at the last minute they coughed up the P67A-GD55. It’s admittedly not the competition for the Asrock P67 Extreme6, Asus P8P67 Deluxe and Gigabyte P67A-UD7, but it’s all MSI could provide....

Support for multi-GPU includes Nvidia 3-way SLI and AMD 4-way CrossfireX. There are a total of three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots and two PCIe 2.0 x16 slots. Two of the three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots feature the full x16 bandwidth, while the other is limited to x8. The PCIe 2.0 x16 slots are both physically wired for x8 bandwidth though MSI states that they are each limited to just x1 bandwidth....

DFI has gone with a black and toxic orange color scheme which makes for a pretty cool effect as you will see in our various photos. The cooling design is also a bit more aggressive. The chipset heatsink, located on the bottom right hand corner of the motherboard, measures 7 x 7cm and stands just 1 cm tall. It is connected by a heatpipe to a small array of fins in the middle of the board where the north bridge chip would be traditionally placed....

Fortunately, Mozilla hasn’t deviated from what’s made Firefox the second most used browser in the world: flexibility. We’re going to look at some tweaks you might want to apply if you’re running the current Firefox 4 beta, such as changing the color of the new orange menu button, moving tabs back to the bottom, getting add-ons to work and more. Firefox wouldn’t be where it is without extensions, and we know many of you rely on them for school, work, and entertainment - we do too....

The rollout has been slow and measured: initially, AMC only allowed users to buy gift cards using Dogecoin (through the Bitpay app), but now, it accepts other coins and for more than just gift cards. Using the AMC mobile app, you can purchase actual movie tickets and snacks using a variety of popular cryptocurrencies: Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum, and others. This is big news for those that want to use their cryptocurrencies as actual currencies rather than long-term investments....

Again, we see virtually no speed boost from Piledriver over Bulldozer, as the FX-8350 was just 2.5% faster than the FX-8150, while the FX-6300 had an equal lead over the FX-6100. At the same time, the FX-8350 was 13% faster than the i5-3470 and 23% slower than the i7-3770K. Our Photoshop CS5 test saw the FX-8350 beat the FX-8150 by a slim 3% margin, while the FX-6300 was 4% faster than the FX-6100....