Ars Technica – Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.

Aug 192024
 

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
The TV business isn’t just about selling TVs anymore. Companies are increasingly seeing viewers, not TV sets, as their most lucrative asset.
Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking.
How did we get here? And what implications does an ad- and data-obsessed industry have for the future of TVs and the people watching them?Read 44 remaining paragraphs | Comments…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2027078

 2024-08-19  No Responses »

ASCII by Jason Scott – The Dying Computer Museum

Aug 192024
 

One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather amusing in a Slashdot-baity sort of way: You could apply to get an account on a real, actual ancient Mainframe hooked up to the Internet, which meant you could literally connect into real, actual ancient hardware. I assure you that to a segment of the population, this is an irresistible proposition. It’s also, ultimately, one that even the most ardent fans of “how it was” will leaf away from, because mainframes are their own wacky old world, like using a taffy-pull…

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 2024-08-19  No Responses »

Hackaday – Reverse-Engineering the AMD Secure Processor Inside the CPU

Aug 192024
 

On an x86 system the BIOS is the first part of the system to become active along with the basic CPU core(s) functionality, or so things used to be until Intel introduced its Management Engine (IME) and AMD its AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP). These are low-level, trusted execution environments, which in the case of AMD-SP involves a Cortex-A5 ARM processor that together with the Cryptographic Co-Processor (CCP) block in the CPU perform basic initialization functions that would previously have been associated with the (UEFI) BIOS like DRAM initialization, but also loading of encrypted (AGESA) firmware from external SPI Flash ROM. Only once the AMD-SP environment has run through all the initialization steps will the x86 cores…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/08/18/reverse-engineering-the-amd-secure-processor-inside-the-cpu/

 2024-08-19  No Responses »