Intel's changing future: Smartphone SoCs Broxton & SoFIA officially cancelled The past two weeks have been a busy – if not tumultuous – period for Intel. Driven by continued challenges in various semiconductor markets, culminating in weaker-than-desired earnings in the most recent quarter, Intel has set out to change their direction and refocus the company towards what they see as more lucrative, higher growth opportunity markets such as data center/server markets and cellular (5G) connectivity. AnandTech

Cisco finds backdoor installed on 12 million PCs The software, which exhibits adware and spyware capabilities, was developed by a French online advertising company called Tuto4PC. The firm, previously known as Eorezo Group and apparently linked to another company called Wizzlabs, has been targeted by French authorities over its questionable practices regarding the installation of unwanted software and harvesting of users' personal details. Security Week

Wikipedia is basically a corporate bureaucracy, according to a new study Wikipedia is a voluntary organization dedicated to the noble goal of decentralized knowledge creation. But as the community has evolved over time, it has wandered further and further from its early egalitarian ideals, according to a new paper published in the journal Future Internet. In fact, such systems usually end up looking a lot like 20th century bureaucracies. Gizmodo

Exploring Nvidia's Pascal architecture Telling you that Nvidia recently announced its first Pascal GPU, the GP100, is probably a bit redundant. It's been the talk of the PC technology space since Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced the GP100-powered Tesla P100 in his inimitable, best-keynote-giver-in-Silicon-Valley style during the first keynote of the company's recent GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in sunny San Jose. The Tech Report (also, PC Perspective pokes and prods the Radeon Pro Duo)

I installed Windows 95 on my Apple Watch With a 520 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage, the Apple Watch packs a lot of computing horsepower into a very small package. On paper, its processor alone is about twenty-five times faster than the average 386, and 512 MB was the size of a hard drive in the mid nineties, not memory. As a result, I was feeling confident that the Apple Watch had the ability to run one of the most revered desktop operating systems Redmond has ever produced. Nick Lee

Your media business will not be saved Video will not save your media business. Nor will bots, newsletters, a "morning briefing" app, a "lean back" iPad experience, Slack integration, a Snapchat channel, or a great partnership with Twitter. All of these things together might help, but even then, you will not be saved by the magical New Thing that everyone else in the media community is convinced will be the answer to The Problem. Medium

Doctor ready to perform first human head transplant One fall day in 1974, when he was 9, Sergio Canavero visited his regular newsstand on a bustling street in Turin, Italy, to buy a comic book. As a bullied schoolboy, the man who now claims he can complete the first human head transplant was dismally aware of his pitiable social status – "cookie-cutter nerd" --and sought fictional escape. His attachment to Spider-Man's Peter Parker, another dweeb, lured him deep into the comic book world of Marvel, with its dose of futuristic medicine. Newsweek

Nobody has beaten Doom's hardest difficulty level Speaking with Doom Executive Producer Marty Stratton and Creative Director Hugo Martin, IGN has learned that no one at developer id Software has yet managed to complete Doom's hardest difficulty mode. The new Ultra-Nightmare setting is Doom's punishing Nightmare mode with a permadeath twist. Screw up once, and you're dead and back at the beginning of the game, leaving only your helmet as a marker of your progress. IGN

A complete guide to the new 'Crypto Wars' Encryption is finally mainstream. Government officials and technologists have been debating since the early 1990s whether to limit the strength of encryption to help the law-enforcement and intelligence communities monitor suspects' communications. But until early 2016, this was a mostly esoteric fight, relegated to academic conferences, security agencies' C-suites, and the back rooms of Capitol Hill. The Daily Dot

Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone Just as spring arrived last month in Iran, Meysam Rahimi sat down at his university computer and immediately ran into a problem: how to get the scientific papers he needed. He had to write up a research proposal for his engineering Ph.D. at Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran. His project straddles both operations management and behavioral economics, so Rahimi had a lot of ground to cover. Science Mag

Uncanny valley - I would say more, but I signed an NDA Morale is down. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can't connect to our VPN. Their corner of the office is loud; their desks are scattered with freebies from other start-ups, stickers and koozies and flash drives. N+1

Former Tor developer created malware for the FBI to hack Tor users How does the U.S. government beat Tor, the anonymity software used by millions of people around the world? By hiring someone with experience on the inside. A former Tor Project developer created malware for the Federal Bureau of Investigation that allowed agents to unmask users of the anonymity software. The Daily Dot

University of Florida brain-drone race The University of Florida has held the world's first brain-drone race. UF researchers hope this competition will inspire others to continue to build upon brain computer interface technology that could be used in our everyday lives. (also, Researchers can identify you by your brain waves with 100 percent accuracy)

The Makerbot obituary MakerBot is not dead, but it is connected to life support waiting for a merciful soul to pull the plug. This week, MakerBot announced it would lay off its entire manufacturing force, outsourcing the manufacturing of all MakerBot printers to China. A few weeks ago, Stratasys, MakerBot's parent company, released their 2015 financial reports, noting MakerBot sales revenues have fallen precipitously. Hackaday

Why is video game lore so awful? There have been times during my career that I've found myself at a press event, listening to the creative director of a role-playing game, talking about their forthcoming release. Very, very often they will say something like, "there is such a rich story behind our game, there is a lot of lore for players to discover if they want to go deep". And, I have to admit, I inwardly groan. Eurogamer

Yahoo's $8 billion black hole Think of Yahoo as a traditional enterprise (with all the assets just mentioned) stuck on top of a small safe deposit box. Inside that box: a huge pile of cash, plus stock certificates of two Asian tech companies. Yahoo owns about 15 percent of Internet giant Alibaba, a stake that would trade on the open market for roughly $29 billion. Bloomberg

What happened to Google Maps? Browsing Google Maps over the past year or so, I've often thought that there are fewer labels than there used to be. Google's cartography was revamped three years ago – but surely this didn't include a reduction in labels? Rather, the sparser maps appear to be a recent development. Justin O'Beirne