Windows 10 received its monthly host of security patches earlier this week, and the latest cumulative updates are causing serious problems with printers -- particularly Ricoh devices, but also other models. TechRadar reports: The so-called 'Patch Tuesday' fixes released earlier in the week which are causing chaos are KB4557957 and KB4560960, which are for the May 2020 Update and the November 2019 Update. (Note that in one case, KB4561608, for the October 2018 Update, is also mentioned). As one Ricoh owner observed on Reddit: "Has anyone had issues today with printing and the latest Windows update [KB4560960]? We're seeing problems with Ricoh printers that were previously stable. Changing the print driver seems to help but that's going to be a pain if I have to roll it out to too many clients." Other folks with Ricoh printers have chimed in on that thread with similar issues in terms of breaking printer functionality completely, or elements of it, such as causing wireless printing to fail.

Further reports of printer failures include Brother and Canon devices, as well as some Kyocera, HP, Toshiba and Panasonic models. A network technician for a mainly Ricoh dealership also contributed to that Reddit thread, and noted: "After an abundance of service calls these last 2 days, I can confidently say PCL5 [driver] does not work at all, regardless of driver age. Installing the newest version of the PCL6 universal driver *does* seem to work. Not a realistic approach to servicing hundreds of clients, but at least new clients setup before the new patch should be okay." Another solution is to simply uninstall the cumulative update. Thankfully, Microsoft is already working on a fix.

Long-time Slashdot reader mrflash818 ("Linux geek since 1999") shared a ZDNet article pointing out that SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has an onboard operating system that's "a stripped-down Linux running on three ordinary dual-core x86 processors. The flight software itself runs separately on each processor and is written in C/C++."

Interestingly, back in 2018 a Slashdot headline asked whether C++ was "a really terrible language," and Elon Musk replied on Twitter with his single-word answer. "Yes."

ZDNet points out that "ordinary" processors are often needed because of the multi-year development time for the spacecraft they power. Their article notes that the International Space Station actually runs on 1988-vintage 20 MHz Intel 80386SX CPUs: Of course, while those ancient chips work for the station's command and control multiplexer/demultiplexer, they're not much good for anything else. For ordinary day-in and day-out work, astronauts use HP ZBook 15s running Debian Linux, Scientific Linux, and Windows 10. The Linux systems act as remote terminals to the control multiplexer/demultiplexer, while the Windows systems are used for email, the web, and fun.

Usually, though, chips that go into space aren't ordinary chips. CPUs that stay in space must be radiation-hardened. Otherwise, they tend to fail due to the effects of ionizing radiation and cosmic rays. These customized processors undergo years of design work and then more years of testing before they are certified for spaceflight. For instance, NASA expects its next-generation, general-purpose processor, an ARM A53 variant you may know from the Raspberry Pi 3, to be ready to run in 2021...

The Dragon spacecraft's touchscreen interface is rendered using Chromium and JavaScript. If something were to go wrong with the interface, the astronauts have physical buttons to control the spacecraft.
Today the SpaceX software team answered questions on Reddit, revealing they use Chromium with a reactive library developed in-house, and that "All of our on-board computers either run Linux (with the PREEMPT_RT patch) or are microcontrollers that run bare-metal code...." Later they emphasized that for the Falcon 9 and Dragon software, "All of the application-level autonomous software is written in C++. We generally use object oriented programming techniques from C++, although we like to keep things as simple as possible.

"We do use open source libraries, primarily the standard C++ library, plus some others. However, we limit our use of open source libraries to only extremely high quality ones, and often will opt to develop our own libraries when it is feasible so that we can control the code quality ourselves."

Canonical has released the newest version of its Ubuntu Linux distribution, Ubuntu 20.04. This long-term-support (LTS) version is more than just the latest version of one of the most popular Linux distributions; it's a major update for desktop, server, and cloud users. From a news story: Called "Focal Fossa," it is an LTS version, meaning "Long Term Support." Just how long is that support? An impressive five years! Ubuntu 20.04 will feature many new visual cues and tweaks too thanks to a refreshed theme. "Ubuntu has become the platform of choice for Linux workstations. Canonical certifies multiple Dell, HP, and Lenovo workstations, and supports enterprise developer desktops. Machine learning and AI tools from a range of vendors are available immediately for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, along with 6,000 applications in the Snapcraft Linux App Store including Slack, Skype, Plex, Spotify, the entire JetBrains portfolio and Visual Studio Code. WireGuard is a new, simplified VPN with modern cryptography defaults. WireGuard is included in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and will be backported to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to support widespread enterprise adoption," says Canonical.

Xeros is pulling the plug on its hostile bid to buy larger rival HP (Warning: paywalled; alternative source) after the coronavirus pandemic undermined the copier maker's ability to pull off the debt-laden merger. The Wall Street Journal reports: Xerox said Tuesday it is ending both its more than $30 billion tender offer and a proxy fight to replace the printer and PC maker's board. Xerox concluded it is no longer prudent to pursue the deal given the public health crisis and resulting market swoon. The move puts the kibosh on one of the biggest mergers in the works and underscores the blow that the coronavirus has dealt to the world of deal making.

It marks the end of a five-month-long offensive by Xerox, kicked off when its offer became public in early November after the two companies had earlier explored a combination quietly but failed to come to an agreement. HP has repeatedly rebuffed its rival since then, rejecting Xerox's latest cash-and-stock offer of $24 a share and an earlier one as insufficient and too risky given the amount of debt involved. Xerox's move to buy a company more than three times its size was always going to be a challenge, but at the outset the company was in a stronger position than it is today. It had cash coming in from the sale of its joint venture with Fujifilm and its stock had been rising as it continued to cut costs.

An anonymous reader writes: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) issued a security advisory last week warning customers about a bug in the firmware of some SAS SSDs (Serial-Attached SCSI solid-state drives) that will fail after reaching 40,000 hours of operation -- which is 4 years, 206 days, and 16 hours after the SSD has been put into operation. HPE says that based on when affected SSDs have been manufactured and sold, the earliest failures are expected to occur starting with October this year. The company has released firmware updates last week to address the issue. HPE warns that if companies fail to install the update, they risk losing both the SSD and the data. "After the SSD failure occurs, neither the SSD nor the data can be recovered," the company explained.

HP is teasing a Reverb G2 VR headset developed in tandem with Microsoft and Valve that should be "more immersive, comfortable and compatible" than previous-generation hardware. Engadget reports: The first Reverb wasn't a revolution in design, but it did stand out with a sharp 2,160 x 2,160 pixels per eye. It won't be surprising if HP pursues bragging rights once again, especially when its Twitter teaser claims the new Reverb is the "next benchmark" in VR gear. We wouldn't count on Valve dramatically influencing the design given that the Index remains its pride and joy, though. The new Reverb may be more gamer-friendly, but this is still likely to be aimed as much at professionals as it is enthusiasts.

ArchieBunker quotes a report from Road & Track: You can always count on Koenigsegg to do things differently. Take the Swedish brand's newest car, the Gemera, a 1700-hp four-seat hybrid grand tourer that can crest 250 mph. In a world filled with more ultra-high-dollar supercars than ever, the Gemera stands out. And perhaps the most interesting thing about the car is its engine. Koenigsegg calls the engine the Tiny Friendly Giant, or TFG for short, and it's an apt name. The TFG is a 2.0-liter twin-turbo three-cylinder that makes 600 horsepower. At 300 horsepower per liter, the TFG's specific output is far higher than anything ever seen in a road car. Koenigsegg says this is 'light-years ahead of any other production three-cylinder today,' and he's not wrong: The next most powerful triple is the 268-hp engine in the Toyota GR Yaris.

What's even more unusual is that the TFG doesn't have a camshaft. Instead, the engine uses technology from Koenigsegg's sister company, Freevalve, with pneumatic actuators opening and closing each valve independently. I called company founder Christian von Koenigsegg to learn exactly how this unconventional engine works. The Tiny Friendly Giant was designed specifically for the Gemera. Koenigsegg wanted something compact and lightweight, with big horsepower. Koenigsegg also decided to reverse the setup found in the hybrid Regera, where internal combustion provides the bulk of the total power output. In the Gemera, the majority of the power comes from electric motors, with the Gemera contributing some driving force as well as charging the hybrid drivetrain's batteries. Given this criteria, Koenigsegg arrived at a 2.0-liter, three-cylinder configuration.

According to 9to5Google, Google is working on a native Chrome OS app for printing and scanning documents. From the report: While there are many ways to start printing on Chrome OS, there's no real way to see what you've currently got queued to print, when not using Cloud Print [which is shutting down at the end of the year]. This is particularly frustrating if you've accidentally printed a long document as there's no way to cancel. [...] Late last month, work began on a new "Print Management app," starting with a Chrome OS specific flag in chrome://flags. Print Management is still in the early stages of development but we know that, like many Chrome OS apps, it'll be a web-based System Web App (SWA), which you can launch from the printers section of the main Settings app. Inside, you'll see a list of your recent printing attempts, including useful information like the job's name, what time it started, whether it succeeded, and which printer it was sent to.

And then, of course, on the flip side of working with paper documents is scanning, which is by no means easy to do on Chrome OS. Thankfully, Print Management will also include a UI for scanning documents and photos. The Chromium team is already working on this behind yet another flag.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: China's Huawei, which for years has denied violating American trade sanctions on Iran, produced internal company records in 2010 that show it was directly involved in sending prohibited U.S. computer equipment to Iran's largest mobile-phone operator. Two Huawei packing lists, dated December 2010, included computer equipment made by Hewlett-Packard Co and destined for the Iranian carrier, internal Huawei documents reviewed by Reuters show. Another Huawei document, dated two months later, stated: "Currently the equipment is delivered to Tehran, and waiting for the custom clearance."

The packing lists and other internal documents, reported here for the first time, provide the strongest documentary evidence to date of Huawei's involvement in alleged trade sanctions violations. They could bolster Washington's multifaceted campaign to check the power of Huawei, the world's leading telecommunications-equipment maker. The newly obtained documents involve a multi-million dollar telecommunications project in Iran that figures prominently in an ongoing criminal case Washington has brought against the Chinese company and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou. The daughter of Huawei's founder, Meng has been fighting extradition from Canada to the United States since her arrest in Vancouver in December 2018. Huawei and Meng have denied the charges, which involve bank fraud, wire fraud and other allegations. The documents, which aren't cited in the criminal case, provide new details about Huawei's role in providing an Iranian telecom carrier with numerous computer servers, switches and other equipment made by HP, as well as software made by other American companies at the time, including Microsoft, Symantec and Novell. "A U.S. indictment alleges that Huawei and Meng participated in a fraudulent scheme to obtain prohibited U.S. goods and technology for Huawei's Iran-based business, and move money out of Iran by deceiving Western banks," the report adds. "The indictment accuses Huawei and Meng of surreptitiously using an "unofficial subsidiary" in Iran called Skycom Tech Co Ltd to obtain the prohibited goods."

The documents also show that Chinese company, Panda International Information Technology Co, was involved in shipping gear to Iran too.

America's onetime innovation icons are wrestling over their biggest remaining piles of money. From a report: The HP 63 Tri-color ink cartridge retails for $28.99 at Staples. Stuffed with foam sponges drenched in a fraction of an ounce of cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes, this bestseller, model No. F6U61AN#140, can spray 36,000 drops per second in the Envy printers made by HP. The 63 Tri-color cartridge may not look like much, but that ink, which needs a refill every 165 pages, is ridiculously valuable. HP's printer supplies business garnered $12.9 billion in sales last year, and the printer division overall represented 63% of the company's profits. Here in the year 2020, proprietary ink cartridges remain important enough to spark a fight worth at least $35 billion.

With backing from Carl Icahn, Xerox has been trying to buy the much larger HP for what the target says is a laughable bid. On Monday, HP Chief Executive Officer Enrique Lores moved to protect his hold on F6U61AN#140 and its toner brethren. During his report on the company's latest quarterly earnings, which met Wall Street's expectations, Lores announced that HP would triple its share buyback program to $15 billion over three years as part of an effort to fend off the hostile takeover. While Lores said he was open to exploring new merger frameworks, he dismissed the size and technology of Xerox Holdings Corp. and stressed that HP already had a winning strategy. "I am pumped up," the CEO tells Bloomberg Businessweek in an interview shortly after the earnings call. "We have a great plan." Lores, who's spent three decades at HP, has survived his share of existential threats. Before he took over as CEO in November, he'd led the printer business to a streak of revenue gains after even his bosses had left it for dead. But last year also saw HP's share price fall by a third from a February high. The company announced thousands of employee layoffs as it struggled to compete with cheaper ink cartridges from Asia. That public floundering has left HP freshly vulnerable to activist investors such as Icahn, who owns 11% of Xerox and 4% of HP.

Icahn snarked in December that HP appears in danger of following "the road to the graveyard." For decades, HP and Xerox ranked among the most powerful forces of invention in Silicon Valley. Now they're arguing over who has the superior vision to acquire competitors, jettison workers, and jealously guard the tech specs of their aging intellectual property. It's unclear whether either company's leaders will be able to repeat the miracle Lores's team managed a few years back. Consumer and office printers still churn out an estimated 3.2 trillion pages a year, according to market researcher IDC, but Toni Sacconaghi, a tech analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, warned in a client note that the "traditional printing and copying business is slowly collapsing." Recalling the image that critics deployed in 2002, when HP tried to acquire its way out of trouble in the PC business by buying Compaq, Sacconaghi wondered if the company is facing another deal that looks an awful lot like "two garbage trucks colliding."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: General Motors is resurrecting the Hummer, best known as a gas-guzzling, military-style SUV, as an all-electric "super truck" with massive horsepower, acceleration and torque. The Detroit automaker confirmed the plans Thursday and released three online teaser videos for the "GMC Hummer EV" pickup ahead of a 30-second Super Bowl ad for the vehicle featuring NBA star LeBron James. The spot is scheduled to air during the second quarter of Sunday's game.

The Hummer EV pickup, according to GM, will feature 1,000 horsepower; 0 to 60 mph acceleration of three seconds; and 11,500 pound feet of torque. It didn't announce a price. The Hummer EV pickup is expected to go into production in the fall of 2021 at a plant in Detroit, followed by sales starting toward the end of the year. The teaser videos detail the specifications and preview the front of the pickup, which features a new iteration of Hummer's well-known slotted grille with "HUMMER" backlit across the front of the truck.

A Twitter user's complaint last week in which he produces photo evidence of HP warning him that his ink cartridges would be disabled until he starts paying for HP Instant Ink monthly subscription service has gone viral on the social media.

Ryan Sullivan, the user who made the complaint, said he only discovered the warning after cancelling a random HP subscription -- which charged him $4.99 a month -- after "over a year" of the billing cycle. "Cartridge cannot be used until printer is enrolled in HP Instant Ink," Sullivan was informed by an error message.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Jeffrey Katzenberg insists that his new video-streaming service Quibi isn't competing against Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, or any of the other streaming services that have launched or are launching soon. Katzenberg and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman, who is best known as the CEO of HP and eBay, are publicly announcing Quibi at CES -- but not quite unveiling it -- after having raised $1 billion on the promise of a roster of Hollywood stars and supposedly revolutionary video-streaming technology that delivers portrait and landscape video at the same time. Everything on Quibi is designed for viewing on a phone, on the go, in 10 minutes or less. These chunks of video are called "quick bites" -- hence, "Quibi."

When Quibi arrives on April 6th of this year, it'll cost $5 a month for an ad-supported version or $8 a month for an ad-free experience. Katzenberg and Whitman formulated this idea nearly two years ago and have been relentlessly signing up the biggest names in Hollywood to be a part of it. And while there have been bumps along the road, including a raft of executive departures, everyone working with Quibi at CES talks about it as though it has already created the future of video -- like it already has millions of users. Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, who is executive producing a show called #Freerayshawn, says Quibi, before it has even launched, has created a "new language of cinema." It's like that.

China has ordered that all foreign computer equipment and software be removed from government offices and public institutions within three years, the Financial Times reports. hackingbear writes: The government directive is likely to be a blow to US multinational companies like HP, Dell and Microsoft and mirrors attempts by Washington to limit the use of Chinese technology, as the trade war between the countries turns into a tech cold war. The Trump administration banned US companies from doing business with Chinese Chinese telecommunications company Huawei earlier this year and in May, Google, Intel and Qualcomm announced they would freeze cooperation with Huawei. By excluding China from western know-how, the Trump administration has made it clear that the real battle is about which of the two economic superpowers has the technological edge for the next two decades. This is the first known public directive from Beijing setting specific targets limiting China's use of foreign technology, though it is part a wider move within China to increase its reliance on domestic technology.

New submitter AllHail writes: HPE SAS solid state drives are affected by a firmware problem which causes these drives to stop working after 32768 power-on hours (3 years and 9 months). If these drives are not flashed with updated firmware before the failure, the drives and the data on them become unrecoverable at that time. If several of these drives are installed and operated together in a RAID, they are going to fail almost simultaneously. Patch or assume the risk of failure, says Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Taiwan's MediaTek has announced a partnership with U.S. chipmaking giant Intel to supply future Intel-powered PCs with fifth-generation networking modems from the start of 2021. From a report: The agreement marks a small step toward a big change in the way computing is done, as 5G promises to revolutionize both the speed and availability of cellular networks, creating dense coverage with bandwidth comparable to current Wi-Fi standards and beyond. Mobile computers stand to benefit greatly from this upgrade, and U.S. PC vendors Dell and HP have both been named by MediaTek among the likely first customers for the 5G-enabled, Intel-powered laptops that are to come. In July, Intel agreed to sell its cellular modem business to Apple for $1 billion, which the Cupertino, California company will use to speed up and improve design efforts around a 5G chip for its 2020 iPhones.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Xerox is considering making a cash-and-stock offer for HP (Source paywalled; alternative source), which has a market value of about $27 billion. From the report: There is no guarantee Xerox will follow through with an offer or that one would succeed. HP, which installed a new chief executive just last week, is more than three times the size of Xerox and any bid would be at a premium to its current stock price, the people said. Working in Xerox's favor: It expects a $2.3 billion windfall from a deal to sell stakes in joint ventures with Fujifilm Holdings Corp., which was announced Tuesday along with the dismissal of a $1 billion-plus lawsuit filed against Xerox by the Japanese technology company. Xerox has also received an informal funding commitment from a major bank, known as a "highly confident letter," the people said.

A deal would join two household names with storied pasts that have been scrambling to retool their businesses as the need for printed documents declines. Both companies are in cost-cutting mode and a union could afford new opportunities to shed expenses -- to the tune of more than $2 billion, the people said.

Microsoft today announced a new initiative to combat threats specifically targeted at the firmware level and data stored in memory: Secured-core PCs. From a report: Microsoft partnered with chip and computer makers to apply "security best practices of isolation and minimal trust to the firmware layer, or the device core, that underpins the Windows operating system." Secured-core PCs will be available from Dell, Dynabook, HP, Lenovo, Panasonic, and Surface. Microsoft hasn't released a full list of Secured-core PCs, but two examples include HP's Elite Dragonfly and Microsoft's Surface Pro X.

Firmware is used to initialize the hardware and other software on the device. The firmware layer runs underneath the OS, where it has more access and privilege than the hypervisor and kernel. Firmware is thus emerging as a top target for attackers since the malicious code can be hard to detect and difficult to remove, persisting even with an OS reinstall or a hard drive replacement. Microsoft points to the National Vulnerability Database, which shows the number of discovered firmware vulnerabilities growing each year. As such, Secured-core PCs are designed for industries like financial services, government, and healthcare. They are also meant for workers who handle highly sensitive IP, customer, or personal data that poses higher-value targets for nationstate attackers.

Microsoft today announced Windows 10X, a new flavor of Windows 10 designed for dual-screen PCs. Windows 10X will power dual-screen PCs from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and of course Microsoft. From a report: But we won't see them until holiday 2020. Microsoft teased the Surface Neo running Windows 10X at its event today. Lenovo unveiled what it called "the world's first foldable PC" earlier this year. Windows 10X will support devices that have either two different panels with a hinge or one foldable piece of glass. The only requirement is that the device's two screens must each measure more than 9 inches diagonally. Windows 10X devices available next year will come with varying screen sizes, but the smallest will be 9 inches. Dual-screen PCs aside, Microsoft has been working to modularize Windows 10 for years. After all, the company's HoloLens, Surface Hub, and Xbox One all run a form of Windows 10. Adding support for the dual-screen PC form factor into Windows 10 has also been a multi-year journey. Further reading: Microsoft Announces the Surface Duo, a Dual-Screen Android Phone.

Consumer VPN specialist ExpressVPN has announced a tie up with HP to have its software pre-installed on the company's consumer PCs. From a report: As part of the deal selected machines will come with ExpressVPN's Windows app pre-installed to help protect customers' privacy and security on public Wi-Fi networks. HP consumer customers will also receive an exclusive free 30-day trial of the VPN service. The Spectre x360 13 will be the first of HP's consumer PCs to have ExpressVPN pre-installed, so customers can encrypt network data and secure their internet browsing experience with a single click.