Quote:Panda Free Anti-Virus 22.03.00:

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Quote:Two become one.

Here in Berlin, Germany, at IFA 2024, AMD's Jack Huynh, the senior vice president and general manager of the Computing and Graphics Business Group, announced that the company will unify its consumer-focused RDNA and data center-focused CDNA architectures into one microarchitecture, named UDNA, that will set the stage for the company to tackle Nvidia's entrenched CUDA ecosystem more effectively. The announcement comes as AMD has decided to deprioritize high-end gaming graphics cards to accelerate market share gains.

When AMD moved on from its GCN microarchitecture back in 2019, the company decided to split its new graphics microarchitecture into two different designs, with RDNA designed to power gaming graphics products for the consumer market while the CDNA architecture was designed specifically to cater to compute-centric AI and HPC workloads in the data center.

Huynh explained the reasoning behind the split in a Q&A session with the press and the rationale for moving forward with a new unified design. We also followed up for more details about the forthcoming architecture. Here's a lightly edited transcript of the conversations:

Jack Huynh [JH], AMD: So, part of a big change at AMD is today we have a CDNA architecture for our Instinct data center GPUs and RDNA for the consumer stuff. It’s forked. Going forward, we will call it UDNA. There'll be one unified architecture, both Instinct and client [consumer]. We'll unify it so that it will be so much easier for developers versus today, where they have to choose and value is not improving.

We forked it because then you get the sub-optimizations and the micro-optimizations, but then it's very difficult for these developers, especially as we're growing our data center business, so now we need to unify it. That's been a part of it. Because remember what I said earlier? I'm thinking about millions of developers; that’s where we want to get to. Step one is to get to the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and hopefully, one day, millions. That's what I'm telling the team right now. It’s that scale we have to build now.
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Quote:Firefox 115 is the last version of the Firefox web browser that is compatible with several old versions of Windows or macOS. This affects Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, and macOS 10.12 to 10.14.

Any attempt to install Firefox 116 or newer on these devices is unsuccessful.

Support extension announcedMozilla announced plans in July to extend support for these operating systems. Last week, it released the final version of Firefox 115 to the public. Mozilla did not mention a support extension for older systems at the time, which meant that users who used Firefox on these older systems did not know whether they would receive updates in the future.

Good to know:

• The Extended Support Release (ESR) allows users on these older systems to continue using Firefox.
  
• Mozilla's major competitors, Google and Microsoft in particular, have ended support for Windows 7 already.
  

Firefox ESR 115 is now replaced by Firefox ESR 128 for fully supported systems. This would have left users on older systems hanging, as they cannot install Firefox 128.

Now, there is official confirmation that support is extended.

Here are the details:

• Firefox 115 ESR support is extended until at least March 2025.
  
• In versions, it is supported until the release of Firefox ESR 115.21.
  
• Users get security updates for another six months at the very least.
  

Mozilla does not say if the extension is final or if there is a chance that support is going to be extended in March 2025 again for these systems.

The organization said that it is looking at usage numbers to determine whether it is extending support. Right now, about 10% of Firefox users use these older systems. The number goes down over time, as older systems do get replaced by newer ones eventually.

It is possible that Mozilla is going to extend support again in March 2025, if enough users are still using these systems.

Firefox users who run Firefox ESR 115 on devices with unsupported operating systems will receive updates automatically via the browser's built-in updating functionality.
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Quote:Every month, dozens of articles appear online that reveal how much the usage of a particular version of Windows has grown or fallen. Most use Steam data and the data that Statcounter provide to back up the claims. Yes, we have reported on this in the past as well.

This month's reporting saw Windows 11 overtake Windows 10 on Steam. Not by a large margin, but it is closing in on the 50% mark was it is powering 49,17% of all devices that use Steam according to the stats.  Steam sees Windwos 10 at 47,09%, which is not that far behind.

Things do not look that great when you check the stats that Statcounter provides. There, Windows 10 dominates the Windows space. It sits at 64.15%, more than double Windows 11's 31.61%. Still the trend is that Windows 10 is falling while Windows 11 is rising.

How surprising is this developmentWhen you compare stats every month, you will notice that Windows 11 usage is rising. It is best to check the average and not to compare month-on-month changes, as these may show weird fluctuations.

Still, one would expect Windows 11 to rise. It is the newer version of the Windows operating system and most PCs sold today are Windows 11 PCs.

While you can still find Windows 10 PCs if you are looking, the vast majority of PCs are sold with either Windows 11 Home or Windows 11 Pro.

This is the surprise

If one thing is surprising, it is how well Windows is holding up. It launched with mixed reviews back in 2015 and faced a similar situation as Windows 11 back then.

Many Windows users loved Windows 7, which was the dominating version of Windows at the time. There was Windows 8, but Microsoft really messed up the launch of the operating system. Even the release of the -- much better - Windows 8.1 did not change the perception of that version of Windows.

So, Windows 10 faced Windows 7, and it did not grow as quickly as Microsoft had hoped. You may remember the 1 billion devices running Windows 10 claim, which Microsoft dropped when it realized, that it would not make it. Telemetry played a role in this, but not nearly as much as privacy-conscious users would have hoped.

Granted, Windows 10 had the advantage that all devices could be upgraded to the new version. And it was free, even to lure as many users as possible.
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Quote:X TV, a new streaming platform aimed at competing with YouTube through exclusive content and live events, has recently entered its beta phase and is now available for users.

On September 3, Elon Musk announced the release of the beta version of the new streaming app X TV on his platform X (formerly Twitter). The launch is likely to be part of Musk's larger strategy to expand X into a comprehensive "everything service" and thus go beyond social media.

Quote:Malwarebytes 5.1.10.127:

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Quote:If you run extensions in Google Chrome, you may one day find yourself without access to some of them. This is true for third-party extensions, but also some extensions that Google created for Chrome.
 
What is happening?

Google is changing the extensions system for Google Chrome. Old extensions that are not updated to the new system won't work anymore. These will be deactivated and eventually removed from the browser.

This change affects all Chromium-based browsers. Browsers like Microsoft Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, or Opera are affected by the change. While some plan to implement changes that prolong support for the old system by a year, support is ending eventually.

Note: Brave is a bit unique, as its developers promised that Brave will continue to support a few popular Chrome extensions, including uBlock Origin.

Still, most extensions will stop working this year for most Chrome and Chromium-based browser users. All can be configured to extend support by a year, even if the browser developer has no plans to implement this by default.
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Quote:Changes in 2024.9.0.12546:

• Device protection (desktop)
  • Several minor tweaks and fixes.
    
• Management console (web app)
  • Several minor tweaks and fixes.
    

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Quote:The 2024 feature update for Windows 11 is a confusing one. Released already for Copilot+ PCs, it is still unclear when it is going to basically all existing Windows 11 devices.

Only ARM-based PCs are Copilot+ PCs at the time of writing. Intel and AMD have not released their new lines of processors yet.

This changes for Intel in October 2024, when Lunar Lake processors will become available. Intel announced the chips this week saying that the chips "deliver exceptional performance, breakthrough x86 power efficiency, a massive leap in graphics performance, no-compromise application compatibility, enhanced security and unmatched AI compute".

Benchmarks are not yet available and the verdict is still out on the chips. The release of the chips marks the shift from Windows AI features being limited to Arm devices to broader availability.

Arm on Windows has its fair share of limitations, for instance in regards to application compatibility. At least some users interested in AI must have waited for the release of new AMD and Intel processors to expand availability.

As far as Intel is concerned, it says that the company's Core Ultra 200V series of processors is "eligible to receive Copilot+ PC features".  It even says that these will be released as part of a free update that is released in November.

Did Intel just leak the release month of Windows 11, version 24H2? Or is this a different upgrade that is independent of the feature update. Intel does not say and Microsoft is as tight-lipped as ever when it comes to release information.

Here are two likely release scenarios:

1. Microsoft is pushing the update in late September as that month's optional update. The release would then be on the second Tuesday of October.
   
2. Microsoft is releasing the feature update in late October as that month's optional update. It would then become available to all users in November.
   

Intel will launch the processors officially on September 24, 2024. More than 20 manufacturers have devices in the pipeline already according to Intel.
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Quote:A report suggests that a major advertising company has used the microphone of devices to spy on users to deliver targeted ads. A report published by 404 Media spills the beans about the controversy.

The article is behind a paywall, but here's what it talks about.

Are your smart devices listening to you?

Cox Media Group (CMG), which is a partner of Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, claimed that it can deliver targeted adverts based on what users were talking near device microphones. The company does this via something called Active Listening. Apparently, CMG not only openly admitted that it could use its technology to listen to what users say near smart devices, it actually advertised its capabilities on a web page. Do you get it? They were bragging about wiretapping, on their website!

A set of pitch deck slides, obtained by 404 Media, highlights the features of Active Listening. You can access an archive of it here. CMG deleted the web page where it had bragged about Active Listening, the last time this controversy arose. That does seem like an admission of guilt, but that's not enough evidence.

Speaking of which, there was a similar allegation last year, but it had been promptly denied by Google and Amazon. According to Ars Technica, Google pointed out that Android has restrictions in place to prevent apps from capturing audio when they are not used. Android displays an icon when an app accesses the microphone (iOS does this too). Amazon had stated that Echo devices were only engaged when the user speaks the wake word. It had also clarified that users could review their voice history from the Alexa app's settings, and see what kind of data was processed. What else were they going to say?

Techdirt points out that this wasn't the first time Cox tried something like this, the cable giant wanted to embed microphones and cameras in cable boxes in 2009, to monitor people. An article by The Byte linked to an archived version of a blog post from CMG outlining the capabilities of Active Listening. Gizmodo says that Amazon told them it has not worked with CMG on the program, and has no such plans. Meta also denied the allegations. Google has ended its partnership program with CMG after the report by 404 Media was published. Make of that what you will.
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