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Today’s topics include the Justice Department’s charges against another hacker involved in the 2014 “Celebgate” hack, AMD’s plan to fix power issues in the Radon RX 480 GPUs, Google’s release of its new My Activity tool and Avaya’s new architecture, which was designed to make the Internet of things easier and more secure.
The U.S. Department of Justice has issued charges against another individual in the September 2014 hack of Apple iCloud and Google Gmail accounts owned by Hollywood celebrities.
In a statement issued July 1, the DOJ named 28-year-old Edward Majerczyk as one of the hackers involved in the so-called “Celebgate” breach, gaining unauthorized access to more than 300 Apple iCloud and Gmail accounts.
The DOJ stated that Majerczyk signed a plea agreement, issuing a guilty plea on the charge of a felony violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act on one count of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information.
Advanced Micro Devices engineers are addressing reports from several test sites that its new Radeon RX 480 graphics card, officially launched last week, is drawing more power than advertised.
In tests run by such sites as Tom’s Hardware, TecLab and PC Perspective, it was found that the new GPU, which was rated as a 150-watt graphics card, was drawing an average of 168 watts under load, and that the RX 480 was pulling as much as 90 watts over its PCIe slot, more than the 75 watts maximum for which the slot is rated.
That could cause problems with some motherboards. Power consumption is a key metric for GPUs and other PC and server components, and it’s a point that AMD officials have been prompting as a key differentiator in the company’s ongoing competition with Intel and Nvidia.
Google has a long memory, storing data that oftentimes users aren’t aware is being collected. In a step toward greater transparency and security, Google has introduced a new tool called My Activity, which gives its users the ability to better understand and control the information it stores on them across all of its products and services.
But first, it makes an effort—cute animations included—to make people understand why it collects all the data that it does. “Every day, data makes our services work better for you. That’s why it’s important that we keep it private and safe—and put you in control,” Google explains. To get started, you can go to myaccount.google.com and click on My Activity, or sign in from myactivity.google.com.
Avaya more than a year ago significantly expanded its efforts in the network virtualization space, introducing a network architecture that spans from the data center to the network edge and designed to make it easier to connect devices and people to the network.
The software-defined networking (SDN) Fx architecture works with Avaya’s Fabric Connect technology and includes the vendor’s Open Networking Adapter (ONA), an Internet of things (IoT) gateway based on the open-source Open vSwitch technology that offers a simple and secure network connection for devices that have an Ethernet port.
Avaya officials last week announced the release of ONA 1.0 with an initial focus on the health care industry, a highly regulated space seeing a massive proliferation of connected devices.