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October 2019

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AMD Ryzen Pro 3000 series desktop CPUs will offer full RAM encryption
by Peter Reutemann 02 Oct '19

02 Oct '19

'Monday, AMD announced Ryzen Pro 3000 desktop CPUs would be available in Q4 2019. This of course raises the question, "What's a Ryzen Pro?" The business answer: Ryzen Pro 3000 is a line of CPUs specifically intended to power business-class desktop machines. The Pro line ranges from the humble dual-core Athlon Pro 300GE all the way through to Ryzen 9 Pro 3900, a 12-core/24-thread monster. The new parts will not be available for end-user retail purchase and are only available to OEMs seeking to build systems around them. >From a more technical perspective, the answer is that the Ryzen Pro line includes AMD Memory Guard, a transparent system memory encryption feature that appears to be equivalent to the AMD SME (Secure Memory Encryption) in Epyc server CPUs. Although AMD's own press materials don't directly relate the two technologies, their description of Memory Guard—"a transparent memory encryption (OS and application independent DRAM encryption) providing a cryptographic AES encryption of system memory"—matches Epyc's SME exactly. AMD Memory Guard is not, unfortunately, available in standard Ryzen 3000 desktop CPUs. If you want to build your own Ryzen PC with full memory encryption from scratch, you're out of luck for now.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/amd-ryzen-pro-3000-series-desktop-c… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Most mobile browsers display the Web, that’s it—Vivaldi Mobile can change that
by Peter Reutemann 01 Oct '19

01 Oct '19

'Vivaldi—makers of the power user's favorite Web browser—has finally released a mobile version. Vivaldi for Android (sorry iOS users, it's Android-only for now) brings most of what's great about Vivaldi to your phone, and thanks to Vivaldi's sync service, you can even have all your desktop data on your mobile device. Web browsers are perhaps the most important piece of software we use in 2019. Our devices are often little more than small windows onto the Web, and the browser is what we use to see and explore what's in that window. For all its importance though, the modern browser, especially the mobile Web browser, offers precious little in the way of features. It displays the Web and... that's about it. Want to interact with what you see? You're mostly out of luck. Most people probably like their browser this way. Google, maker of the most widely used mobile browser, rarely does anything without extensive user testing. If Chrome is minimalist, it's safe to assume it's that way because Google has determined that's what its users want. And since most other browsers copy whatever Google Chrome does, most mobile Web browsers end up as minimalistic pieces of software. On the desktop, of course, there has long been an exception to the uniformly dumbed-down offerings of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari—Vivaldi. Led by CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and former CEO of Opera, Vivaldi's primary goal is to build a useful browser, a tool you can bend to your will rather than the other way around. You can customize Vivaldi the way you like. Its preferences may be overwhelming at first glance, but if you dig in, you can make Vivaldi do just about whatever you want it to do. For this reason, Vivaldi is often called a "power user's browser" (as opposed to, I guess, the powerless user's browser). For all that, there was always one big problem with Vivaldi: it was desktop only. The company said it was working on a mobile version from the beginning, and von Tetzchner told me several times he was already using it. But there was nothing for the rest of us. Now Vivaldi Mobile is here (again, for Android users at least). Technically, it's a beta release and all the common cautions regarding beta software apply, but I've been using it for over a month now and have had no problems. Or, I should say, I have had problems, but updates prior to the public release eliminated all of them. And even if there were still bugs, Vivaldi would still be more useful than any other browser on my phone based on this recent testing—and yes, I've tried nearly all of today's mobile browsers, even the small, cottage efforts.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/vivaldi-mobile-revie… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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