Free Republic

A major political, historical, human and economic fact of the 20th century: the Gulag, the extremely punitive Soviet concentration camp system, remains largely unknown. The history of the Gulag is long, complex and in many ways out of the ordinary. From the Revolution of 1917 to Gorbachev, touching on the civil war, the Great Terror, World War II, the Cold War and the death of Stalin, this series describes the workings of the Gulag. How and why did the USSR create this system of forced- labour camps in which 20 million prisoners were exploited and worked to the bone? Through...

We've been watching GPU prices fall since the start of the year, but the past few weeks suggest things could get a lot worse — for the graphics card manufacturers and GPU vendors, that is — in the near future. GPU prices dropped 15% in May, and we've seen similar 10–15% drops each month for the past several months. We saw the best graphics cards come back into stock (at retail) as GPU mining profitability has plummeted — and that was before Bitcoin and Ethereum crashed again, dropping Bitcoin from around $30,000 to the low $20,000s and Ethereum from around...

Hackers have stolen data from Nvidia, the world’s largest GPU maker, and are holding that data ransom. The as-yet unidentified “threat actors” may be helping the company’s competition in China, according to a research group in Washington D.C. Last week, Nvidia lost proprietary information to a group of hackers. A cybercriminal gang called “Lapsus$” has leaked Nvidia passwords, schematics, drivers and firmware and is threatening to release more information unless its demands are met, according to press reports. Those demands include removing cryptocurrency mining limiters on its gaming cards and making its GPU drivers open source, according to ArsTechnica. Nvidia...

Telling a website to stick its cookies someplace else might not be enough to keep it from tracking you across the web—there are other identifiers that can help narrow down who you are and what you're doing as you travel the silicon superhighway. These techniques rely on tracking the exact configuration of hardware you're running inside your PC, though researchers suggest this form of hardware tracking could be done with even greater accuracy through something known as GPU fingerprinting.Outlined in a research paper [PDF warning] from co-first authors Tomer Laor of Ben-Gurion University and Naif Mehanna from University Lille, CNRS,...

There is a new wave of coders and hackers looking to upend the entire internet, signaling the start of a brand new space race. No, this isn’t an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley, this is actually happening. Currently, the internet is built by large centralized services including server owners, data managers, cloud providers, search engines, telecommunication companies, and social media websites. And these entities are beginning to expand their reach. Internet security and net neutrality are quickly becoming hot topics as more people become aware of the dangers of centralization. And for good reason. Google, Amazon, and Facebook are racing...

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has poured water on the idea of his Rift virtual reality headset supporting the Mac by saying that Apple doesn't make any computers powerful enough to run it. "That is up to Apple and if they ever release a good computer we will do it," Luckey tells ShackNews when asked about Mac support. "It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t prioritize high-end GPUs. You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top of the line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn’t match our recommended spec." Apple's high-end Mac Pro computers come...

At the tail end of the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose this week, graphics chip juggernaut and compute wannabe Nvidia divulged the salient characteristics of the high-end "Kepler2" GK110 GPU chips that are going to be the foundation of the two largest supercomputers in the world and that are no doubt going to make their way into plenty of workstations and clusters in the next several years. If you just want awesome graphics, then the dual-chip GTX 690 graphics card, which is based on the smaller "Kepler1" GK104 GPU chip, which Nvidia previewed back in March, is what you...

With the 6.20 (classic & GPU) and 6.22 (SMP) clients out, we (Dr. Pande and the F@H team) can start looking forward to the next steps in client development. We still have some last bits of work to completely unify the clients, but the hard part is already completed there for the most part. The 6.2x series introduces several new features for donors, but in time, the clients have been getting gradually more and more complex to use. The Win/SMP and multi-gpu setups are examples of very challenging setups. Our primary plans for the future are to make setup much...

An Interview With Andy Hertzfeld (9/20/2000) Andy Hertzfeld was a member of the original Apple Macintosh team back in 1981, at which time he designed and implemented much of the original Macintosh system software. In that light, it's not surprising that he's still on the cusp of GUI development today as cofounder of Eazel. Eazel's first project, Nautilus, is one of the first open source development projects to aim for commercial success; its innovative file and system management model is poised to open up the world of Linux to a much wider audience. At this year's LinuxWorld Conference in San...