Summary of the week of February 10, 2020

[cobito]

Ramsonware instala controlador de Gigabyte para burlar antivirus

This is a new technique for file kidnapping. It consists of installing a vulnerable Gigabyte driver to be able to encrypt files without anything being able to interrupt the process.

ARM announces new processors

The first one, the Cortex-M55, has as a novelty that it comes with MVE, an extension similar to Intel's AVX. The other is the Ethos-U55, a coprocessor designed for the Cortex-M intended for computing neural networks.

Mate 1.24 available

The fork and heir of Gnome 2 has released a new version. The novelties come mainly from the hand of the programs and tools that accompany the desktop environment.

oreboot is a Coreboot written in Rust

Coreboot is an alternative BIOS written in C. Someone has decided to remove the C from the name and, by the way, rewrite the program in a different language. At the moment it is not very advanced but just for the name it has put, it deserves a mention.

Backblaze Report 2019

The data from last year has already been published. Once again, Seagate disks are the most prone to failure.

Firefox 73 available

The improvements focus on making reading more comfortable and facilitating the visualization of sites.

Microsoft will not force the use of Bing

It seems that they were going to install a Bing search bar for Office 365 ProPlus users. The company has decided to discard the idea.

The history of Unix folders

One of the first things that clash when one starts in the Linux world is the folder structure that the system has. It seems that some overlap in functions, there are subfolders that, by definition, should be in other folders and the names, in general, are not very descriptive. In this entry they explain how part of this mess is a legacy from the time when Thompson and Ritchie were running out of space on their hard drive.

MWC 2020 canceled due to coronavirus

After some of the big ones canceled their participation, GSMA has decided not to hold the fair this year.

Logitech stops supporting H.264 by hardware

This change affects the C920, C922 and BRIO webcam models that, surprisingly, maintain the same name despite not incorporating H.264 hardware video encoding. The explanation given by the manufacturer is that 8-10 years ago, computers were not powerful enough to do this task but that today, almost any PC can take charge.

About Wifi 6

With the aim of simplifying terms, the Wi-Fi Alliance has changed the name of the last three standards of 802.11n, 802.11ac and 802.11ax to Wi-Fi 4, Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6. In this article from AnandTech they analyze the latest version for its use in home PCs.

The latest Windows 10 update breaks things

It is the KB4532693 that was published last Tuesday. It seems that there are users who are experiencing some problems such as the wrong user profile being loaded or user files being corrupted.