It looks like The Inquirer has caught NVidia with their collective pants down over materials used in the production of some of their graphics chips. The short version is that high lead content solder used to bond the chips to the board were failing at high temperatures due to cracking. NVidia knew about this problem and rather than recall all the affected parts, they continued to sell them alongside good new parts which made their way into laptops from many of the major vendors including Apple’s new Macbook Pro. The problem is that while they were shipping both parts, they were telling everyone that only the corrected parts were being shipped. The Inquirer went so far as to have a lab disect a retail MBP and saw it’s motherboard up into slices that could be analyzed with an electron microscope and a mass spectrometer. The evidence they found proved NVidia was lying to their customers.
Category Archives: Tech
Sony – still hijacking your machine, now with SecuROM
You’d think after the huge fiasco over Sony’s use of First 4 Internet’s XCP product several years ago, sony would have changed course a bit. Instead Sony decided to bring their DRM efforts in house and out popped SecuROM. Again, they use the same rootkit tactics to secretly install their software. This makes SecuROM difficult to detect and even more difficult to remove. Sony was sued, and settled in the previous case(s). There are several suits pending against EA Games for use of the SecuROM DRM software. I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time before Sony gets served. When will they learn?
New SC law requres mandatory DNA sampling at arrest
I just heard about this on the evening news tonight. Basically the state legislature overrode the Governor’s veto passing a law that requires the police to collect DNA samples from people arrested on a felony charge. It seems like the focus is on getting the information to the lab quickly to run the results for possible matches on other crimes. The one big problem I see with this is that if you’re wrongly arrested, your DNA is in the system. While the government is supposed to purge the DNA records of the falsely accused there’s no guarantee that they actually will. There’s also another problem in that the larger these databases get, the higher the chance of a match between 2 unrelated profiles. I mentioned this before in another post linked to an article in the LA Times.