A high mass in cyberspace was celebrated this week, Apple’s developer conference, this time without storms of enthusiasm on site, but purely online. The company plans to switch its Mac computers from Intel to ARM processors within two years. ARM – Advanced Risk Machines, these are the chips that clock in a number of variations in practically all smartphones and tablets.
Supercomputers use mobile phone chips
And not only that, not only in cell phones and in future Apple’s Mac computers, but increasingly also in supercomputers, ARM processors are being installed. The International Supercomputer Conference 2020 was also this week. The current Top500, the list of the most powerful number guzzlers, is always presented. Fugaku is the new number 1 worldwide, is located in Japan, creates 400 PetaFlOPS, so it solves 400 billion difficult arithmetic tasks per second. And this number cruncher does this with ARM processors, with 7,299,072 ARM processor cores, to be precise. At number 13 on the list: the SuperMUC in Garching, the high-performance computer from the Leibniz data center. He works with chips from Intel. But Garching is also testing what could be done with ARM processors.
Cartel Office urges data protection
An interesting verdict was also made this week – again against Facebook due to the lack of data protection. It is remarkable that it is the Bundeskartellamt that demands more data protection from the group. Facebook should not collect data on WhatsApp, Instagram and with its like-it buttons anywhere else on the web and then combine them into comprehensive user profiles. That does not concern the cartel office, says Facebook. This is responsible when a powerful corporation charges prices too high. Facebook doesn’t ask for money. True, the cartel office says, no money but data. And the most powerful social media company demands too much of that. The litigation started at the beginning of last year. Now the Federal Court of Justice has justified the cartel office.
The cyber ways demand security updates
The Annual Report of the Wise Council for Cyber Security has been published. It really does exist, this council of sages, probably because it sounds like the much more well-known economies, was founded last year. There are three renowned professors in each. And they recommend that the manufacturers commit themselves to regular security updates, so not like with Android phones and certainly not like in the Internet of Things. With digitization, with Industry 4.0, IT security must be built in from the start. And anyone who produces something that encrypts has to be prepared for the fact that soon there will be quantum computers that may crack this encryption, so choose a method that is not vulnerable. A pdf worth reading here.
One learns, for example, that there are now over a billion different types of digital vermin in cyberspace.
You will find further issues of Killer’s Security here.
–
