Issue 1557 - Tuesday 1st March, 2022

In Today's Issue

The News

Toyota and Nvidia hit by separate "cyberattacks"

Kojima Industries, a major supplier of plastic and electronics components to Toyota has been hit by a cyberattack. This supplier is so critical that Toyota had to shut down a few factories and lose about 13,000 cars of output. Japan's PM said "it is difficult to say whether this has anything to do with Russia before making thorough checks". Meanwhile, Nvidia has also been hit with some sort of cyberattack, causing "outages in Nvidia's email systems and developer tools over the last two days". The Lapsus$ data extortion group is claiming responsibility and says they'll release code to remove the hash rate limitations on the latest Nvidia GPUs designed to ease stock constraints for gamers, if Nvidia doesn't do it themselves soon.

Lenovo's got an ARM based ThinkPad coming soon

Lenovo's announced their first ARM based ThinkPad - the X13s. It'll use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 and run Windows 11. The SoC has four Arm Cortex-X1 cores at up to 3 GHz and four Cortex-A78 cores at 2.4 GHz and the small power consumption allows for a fanless design and a battery can lasts "up to 28 hours, based on local video playback". Lenovo reckons "performance should be in line with an Intel Core i5 CPU". It's got 2x USB-C Gen 2 ports, 5G support, up to 32GB RAM, PCIe 4.0 SSDs and a 1920x1200 display. Pricing starts at US$1,099 and goes on sale in May. There's also updated Intel and AMD based ThinkPads with the latest CPUs from those manufacturers.

The cyberwar has only just begun

Something I Saw On The Internet

Unsurprisingly, Facebook's automated verification of political ads in Australia, sucks

Some think-tank called Reset managed to get misleading ads featuring conspiracy theories live on Facebook and aimed at Australians. The ads featured obvious bullshit like "unvaccinated Australians won't be allowed to vote, that major parties had been caught printing ballots, that voting would be electronic, and that the election would be cancelled due to COVID-19". They were all submitted without needing to disclose that they're about "social issues, elections or politics", but Facebook approved them all anyways. Maybe a human would come along sooner or later and shitcan them. It's gonna be a fun election.

Bargains

The End

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