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Square's New Name 'Block' Highlights Company Focus on Blockchain

Andrew Orr ·

When pondering what Jack Dorsey would do after his departure from Twitter, my first thought was focusing on Square and cryptocurrency. Now, a few days later, the company has changed its name to Block.

We built the Square brand for our Seller business, which is where it belongs. Block is a new name, but our purpose of economic empowerment remains the same. No matter how we grow or change, we will continue to build tools to help increase access to the economy.

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Nvidia Builds 'Earth-2' Supercomputer to Accurately Simulate Climate Change

Andrew Orr ·

Nvidia is building a powerful supercomputer it calls Earth-2. They want to use simulation to make predictions in climate change with meter-scale resolution.

For the first time, we have the technology to do ultra-high-resolution climate modeling, to jump to lightspeed and predict changes in regional extreme weather decades out.

We can achieve million-x speedups by combining three technologies: GPU-accelerated computing; deep learning and breakthroughs in physics-informed neural networks; and AI supercomputers, along with vast quantities of observed and model data to learn from.

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Alphabet Boss Sundar Pichai Prefers 'Ted Lasso' to 'Squid Game'

Charlotte Henry ·

It seems that Ted Lasso has won over everyone, including Apple’s fiercest rivals. In a recent interview, reported on by iMore Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai praised the Apple TV+ hit, saying he preferred it to Netflix offering Squid Game.

The CEO recently sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg. During the interview, Pichai was asked to choose between the Apple TV+ series “Ted Lasso” or the Netflix series “Squid Game. “While Picahi [sic] says he enjoys both shows, he said that “Ted Lasso” was the easy winner.

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Qualcomm's New Snapdragon Chip Aims to Defeat Cops and Robbers

Andrew Orr ·

A report from PCMag today discusses Qualcomm’s latest chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. It has anti-spoofing technology to protect against Stingrays.

Spoof cell sites can now be run on small, widely available boxes that pass bad data and phishing messages, Qualcomm said at its Snapdragon Summit today. Otherwise known as “Stingrays,” these faux cells can be run by criminals, law enforcement, or security agencies to collect your personal data without your permission.

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'EWDoor' Malware Attacks Thousands of AT&T Internet Subscribers

Andrew Orr ·

Hackers are exploiting a bug from 2017 to attack the EdgeMarc Enterprise Session Border Controller. This device is used by businesses to manage phone calls and video calls.

The vulnerability being exploited to infect the devices is tracked as CVE-2017-6079, a command-injection flaw that penetration tester Spencer Davis reported in 2017 after using it to successfully hack a customer’s network. The vulnerability stemmed from an account in the device that, as Davis learned from this document, had the username and password of “root” and “default.”