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Today’s topics include Apple introducing its new iMac Pro tablets; a leak suggesting a Windows 10 Pro edition for workstations is in the works; Google upping the bounty for critical Android flaws; and Microsoft Bing providing more information in image search results.
At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on June 5, the long-awaited upgraded iPad Pro tablets made their debut, along with a Xeon-powered iMac Pro.
The company also announced new versions of MacOS, watchOS and tvOS, and provided a preview of an intelligent speaker that will show up in December. The iPads, which are available for order immediately, include a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro and an upgraded 12.9-inch tablet.
The new iMac Pro is an Intel Xeon-powered workstation-class computer that’s designed to compete with workstations currently available from HP and Dell. It will be available at the end of the year with a 27-inch 5K display.
A mistake on Microsoft’s part may have revealed the existence of an upcoming edition of Windows 10 Pro aimed at workstations stuffed with high-end components to handle compute-intensive applications.
On June 1, the software giant unintentionally released some internal builds of the Windows 10 operating system to the Windows Insider early access program.
“This happened because [of] an inadvertent deployment to the engineering system that controls which builds/which rings to push out to insiders,” explained Dona Sarkar, a software engineer in Microsoft’s Windows and Devices Group, in a blog post.
“The team was quick to revert the deployment and put blocks in place to stop these builds from going out to more people,” Sarkar added.
Google has sharply increased the cash rewards available to security researchers who find certain categories of vulnerabilities in its products. Starting this week, the company will award $200,000 to any researcher who can demonstrate a successful remote exploit against Google’s TrustZone and Verified Boot technologies.
That number represents a four-fold increase over the $50,000 Google used to offer for the same vulnerabilities. Rewards for remote kernel exploits have been bumped up from $30,000 to $150,000.
The move to increase the reward money appears to be designed to get more security researchers to take a crack at the company’s core technologies.
Microsoft has expanded Bing’s image search capabilities, enabling users to not only find images online that fit their criteria but also learn more about the objects contained in those images.
Bing’s Visual Search feature now includes a new object recognition option called Detailed View that allows users to select and search for items within a photo. The option appears as a magnifying glass icon near the top left of a selected image.
Once clicked, users can zero in on an object by drawing or resizing a selection box around it. In the background, Bing runs a search on the selected item, along with shopping links. Users can also search for similar-looking items by clicking the Related Images option.