As many will recall, Zotac's GeForce RTX 5090 Solid graphics card series has had a storied career since launching earlier this year. One example served as the progenitor of "ROPGate"—as rooted out by original TechPowerUp investigations. Despite a ban of non-D variants in the region, Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 Solid OC retail units were reportedly available to purchase—via online auctions—in China. Late last week, a disgruntled Alameda County-based customer highlighted their purchase of a very disappointing package.

Taking to the official Micro Center subreddit, member "JamesFerg650" outlined a so-called "backpack scam," and directed frustrations at the long-running computer retail store. A more measured update was shared online later on: "yesterday after work I went to the new Micro Center in Santa Clara for the soft opening. Almost four hours after clock out time, I was home with my brand new Zotac 5090. I was so happy leaving Micro Center, I went out the door without a second thought and drove home smiling and singing along to my (favorite) music. All that build up became the biggest letdown when I opened my box to find three cross-body backpacks inside rather than my 5090."

Arctic Cooling's various thermal paste products have existed as favorite mainstays for PC builders—be it hobbyists, professionals, or influencers. Unfortunately, the disappointing presence of low-grade knock-off units has soured largely good impressions of modern MX-4 and MX-6 lines. Earlier today, Tom's Hardware put a spotlight on the Swiss-founded firm's brand-new "MX Authenticity Check" system. Worried customers can check the provenance of recently purchased Arctic thermal pastes (with updated packaging); via a QR code-based checker—the real deal will ensure "safety with genuine Arctic quality." The company's latest announcement outlined/reiterated the importance of a truly effective solution: "thermal paste plays a central role in any PC build that relies on effective cooling, as it ensures optimal heat transfer from the processor to the heat sink." In further correspondence—beyond an initial introductory email—an Arctic representative disclosed that this fresh anti-piracy strategy was rolled out in response to an uptick in counterfeit products appearing across markets. Their MX Authenticity checking program is easy to use, and authentication takes "just a few seconds." Tom's Hardware summarized this process: "in brief, when you receive your new thermal paste from Arctic or one of the many retailers that carry these compounds, you first check the seal, scratch it to reveal a QR code, scan it with your mobile, and then verify it online."

NVIDIA is collaborating with Google Cloud to bring agentic AI to enterprises seeking to locally harness the Google Gemini family of AI models using the NVIDIA Blackwell HGX and DGX platforms and NVIDIA Confidential Computing for data safety. With the NVIDIA Blackwell platform on Google Distributed Cloud, on-premises data centers can stay aligned with regulatory requirements and data sovereignty laws by locking down access to sensitive information, such as patient records, financial transactions and classified government information. NVIDIA Confidential Computing also secures sensitive code in the Gemini models from unauthorized access and data leaks.

"By bringing our Gemini models on premises with NVIDIA Blackwell's breakthrough performance and confidential computing capabilities, we're enabling enterprises to unlock the full potential of agentic AI," said Sachin Gupta, vice president and general manager of infrastructure and solutions at Google Cloud. "This collaboration helps ensure customers can innovate securely without compromising on performance or operational ease." Confidential computing with NVIDIA Blackwell provides enterprises with the technical assurance that their user prompts to the Gemini models' application programming interface—as well as the data they used for fine-tuning—remain secure and cannot be viewed or modified. At the same time, model owners can protect against unauthorized access or tampering, providing dual-layer protection that enables enterprises to innovate with Gemini models while maintaining data privacy.

Microsoft launched its Majorana 1 chip—the world's first quantum processor powered by a Topological Core architecture—last month. The company's debuting of its Majorana design was celebrated as a significant milestone—in 2023, an ambitious roadmap was published by Microsoft's research department. At the time, a tall Majorana particle-based task was set: the building of a proprietary quantum supercomputer within a decade. Returning to the present day; outside parties have criticized Microsoft's February announcements. The Register published an investigative piece earlier today, based on quotes from key players specializing in the field of Quantum studies. Many propose a theoretical existence of Majorana particles, while Microsoft R&D employees have claimed detection and utilization. The Register referred back to recent history: "(Microsoft) made big claims about Majorana particles before, but it didn't end well: in 2021 Redmond's researchers retracted a 2018 paper in which they claimed to have detected the particles."

As pointed out by Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak; their latest paper was actually authored last March 2024, but only made public in recent weeks. Further details of progress are expected next week, at the American Physical Society (APS) 2025 Joint March Meeting. The Register has compiled quotes from vocal critics; starting with Henry Legg—a lecturer in theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. The noted scholar believes—as divulged in a scientific online comment—that Microsoft's claimed Quantum breakthrough: "is not reliable and must be revisited." Similarly, collaborators from Germany's Forschungszentrum Jülich institute and the University of Pittsburgh, USA released a joint video statement. (Respectively) Experimental physicist Vincent Mourik and by Professor Sergey Frolov outlined: "distractions caused by unreliable scientific claims from Microsoft Quantum."

Businesses across every industry are rolling out AI services this year. For Microsoft, Oracle, Perplexity, Snap and hundreds of other leading companies, using the NVIDIA AI inference platform—a full stack comprising world-class silicon, systems and software—is the key to delivering high-throughput and low-latency inference and enabling great user experiences while lowering cost. NVIDIA's advancements in inference software optimization and the NVIDIA Hopper platform are helping industries serve the latest generative AI models, delivering excellent user experiences while optimizing total cost of ownership. The Hopper platform also helps deliver up to 15x more energy efficiency for inference workloads compared to previous generations.

AI inference is notoriously difficult, as it requires many steps to strike the right balance between throughput and user experience. But the underlying goal is simple: generate more tokens at a lower cost. Tokens represent words in a large language model (LLM) system—and with AI inference services typically charging for every million tokens generated, this goal offers the most visible return on AI investments and energy used per task. Full-stack software optimization offers the key to improving AI inference performance and achieving this goal.

Companies and organizations are increasingly using AI to protect their customers and thwart the efforts of fraudsters around the world. Voice security company Hiya found that 550 million scam calls were placed per week in 2023, with INTERPOL estimating that scammers stole $1 trillion from victims that same year. In the U.S., one of four noncontact-list calls were flagged as suspected spam, with fraudsters often luring people into Venmo-related or extended warranty scams.

Traditional methods of fraud detection include rules-based systems, statistical modeling and manual reviews. These methods have struggled to scale to the growing volume of fraud in the digital era without sacrificing speed and accuracy. For instance, rules-based systems often have high false-positive rates, statistical modeling can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, and manual reviews can't scale rapidly enough.

MSI is informing the public of a malicious software being disguised as the official MSI Afterburner software. The malicious software is being unlawfully hosted on a suspicious website impersonating as MSI's official website with the domain name https://afterburner-msi.space. MSI has no relation with this website or the aforementioned domain.

The fraudulent website imitates MSI's official webpage appearance and design, and offers downloads for MSI's Afterburner. This webpage is hosting software which may contain virus, trojan, keylogger, or other type of malicious program that have been disguised to look like MSI Afterburner. The Public is warned not to download any software from this website!Update May 14th: TechPowerUp Forums member silentbogo detected the host and CDN behind the malicious Afterburner app, and reported it to them. In response to these reports, the CDN, Hipolink, has deleted the accounts responsible for this, while the host, timeweb.ru, said that they are investigating this. Our Kudos to silentbogo.

Popular PC cooling products maker Zalman filed for bankruptcy, in midst of a huge controversy by its parent company Moneual. Executives of Moneual cooked-up sales and export figures from Zalman to markets like the United States, in a bid to pick up large fraudulent loans for the company, which it could never pay off, pushing it to bankruptcy.

The controversy came to light, when a whistleblower former-employee of Moneual took these details to the press. It's alleged that CEO Harold Park (Hong-seok), Vice President Scott Park (Min-seok) and Vice President Won Duck-yeok committed a fraud, in which subsidiary Zalman would inflate its sales and export data, to qualify for large bank loans. The trio then used it to lift US $2.92 billion in loans, which the company could never pay back. Zalman has since filed for bankruptcy protection, with the Seoul Central District Court; while the three top Moneual executives, and 13 other mid-level ones, were arrested over allegations of export fraud.

US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman sought "smart, practical, voluntary solutions", without mandating his own, for internet service providers (ISPs) to fight online fraud and data theft. Chairman Julius Genachowski estimated that 8.4 million credit-card details are stolen online, each year. "If consumers lose trust in the Internet, this will suppress broadband adoption and online commerce and communication, and all the benefits that come with it," Genachowski said in a speech. The FCC feels ISPs can come up with solutions that prevent client PCs in the US from being forced into malicious botnets by hackers, without having to encroach upon users' privacy.

Genachowski urged ISPs to adopt DNSSEC, a system that ensures people accessing sensitive sites such as their banks' online transaction portals go to the right address, and not redirected to a fraudulent password phishing site. "To be effective, everyone who is a part of the Internet ecosystem must play a meaningful role in ensuring that private and government networks, and personal computers and devices are secured," said Comcast/NBCUniversal President Kyle McSlarrow in a blog posting. Comcast is one of America's biggest ISPs. This is an example of how threats to the sanctity of a productive internet can be defeated with highly-specific solutions that don't threaten privacy and freedoms, instead of broad-scoped legislations that potentially do.

Three days ago, we brought you news of how researchers have made proof-of-concept attacks on HP printers by reprogramming their firmware. Among other things, these attacks could deliberately cause the fuser in a printer to overheat and singe the paper, until shut down by a built-in unoverridable thermal switch, preventing a fire. Now, in light of this, a lawsuit has been filed by David Goldblatt of New York, seeking damages for fraudulent and deceptive business practices and is looking for class action status: "As a result of HP's failure to require the use of digital signatures to authenticate software upgrades, hackers are able to reprogram the HP Printers' software with malicious software without detection," the suit says. "Once the HP printers' software is maliciously reprogrammed, the HP printers can be remotely controlled by computer hackers over the Internet, who can then steal personal information, attack otherwise secure networks, and even cause physical damage to the HP printers, themselves." Note that HP has used digital signatures since 2009 to authenticate the firmware updates, helping to mitigate this potential problem in recent models.

Despite this though, HP still intends to patch the firmware to eliminate threats from this hack, which exploits bugs in the firmware. As these attacks have only actually been demonstrated in the lab and no actual losses have been incurred by Goldblatt, it makes one wonder if he is just using the prevailing American "victim culture" to try and make a quick buck off HP. HP are the top printer brand, mainly because their products are excellent, performing well and lasting a long time, plus other companies' printers and embedded devices have the same problems, so it seems unlikely that he would really not have bought HP printers.