Medion Erazer X7849

There’s something to be said for aspiring to move away from a full-sized desktop and towards a more portable, low-space notebook. The latest Erazer gaming laptop from Medion is technically portable: at 17 inches on the diagonal, it’d be considered a desktop replacement.

Packing an Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of memory, a 480GB solid-state drive (SSD), an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics chip and a G-Sync enabled, 17.3-inch, IPS 1080p screen, this Erazer isn’t about to rob you of a desktop-grade gaming experience just for shrinking down a bit.

This is a system more than capable of driving any of the latest AAA titles at a full 60 frames per second (fps) at 1080p, in beautifully color accurate detail with little to any worry. Couple that with Nvidia’s G-Sync technology, and watch as screen tearing and frame drops become a thing of the past.

Spec Sheet

Here is the Medion Erazer configuration sent to TechRadar for review:

CPU: 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ (quad-core, 6MB cache, up to 3.5GHz)
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB GDDR5); Intel HD Graphics 530
RAM: 16GB DDR4 (SODIMM; 2 x 8GB)
Screen: 17.3-inch FHD (1,920 x 1,080) IPS LED
Storage: 480GB SSD (SATA 3)
Ports: 3 x USB 3.1, 2 x USB 3.1 Type C, 2 x Mini DisplayPort, HDMI-out, LAN RJ45, SD/SDHC/SDXC memory card reader, mic-in, line-in, S/PDIF
Connectivity: Intel Wireless-AC 8260 (802.11ac); Bluetooth 4.1
Camera: Full HD webcam
Weight: 7.7 pounds (3.5kg)
Size: 16.4 x 11.2 x 1.3 inches (418 x 287 x 34.2mm; W x D x H)

Price, availability and value

But, with an asking price of £1,699 (about $2,199, AU$2,937), is the Erazer worth plunking down that much for a recently-dated processor and an apparent lack of spinning storage? That is a huge chunk of money, regardless of how you look at it, especially for the spec sheet this laptop touts, compared to the desktop competition much less laptops.

Don’t believe us? As of this writing, for £1,706 you could get a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU, Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSD, 1TB Seagate HDD, 32GB of HyperX DDR4 memory, a Gigabyte GTX 1070 and a 27-inch, BenQ 1440p IPS screen – with a solid set of peripherals – for almost exactly the same amount of cash. 

That’s a system with four times as much computational power, three times as much storage, twice as much memory, running on a screen that’s 10 inches larger and at twice the resolution.

Ultimately, you’re paying for that portability. For that same money or less, you could have an HP Omen 17, replete with one of the latest Intel Core i7 processors (Kaby Lake) as well as a 128GB SSD + 1TB hard drive (HDD) combo. Likewise, you can get a custom-built Origin EON17-X laptop for a few more hundred bucks with more recent hardware.

And, honestly, we just don’t see a big portability play here with the Erazer. It’s big, it’s bulky and it’s just too much to cart on a commute. What does that leave you with? A system that you essentially still leave in one place from day to day.

As for availability, Medion serves both the US and UK as well as most of western Europe.

Design

That said, the Erazer is truly a beauty. Although the LED lighting, situated around the trackpad and the back of the screen, may be less than appealing to those looking for a sleeker, more professional device, the soft touch finish wrapping the rest of the system is simply stunning.

And, while it’s certainly not the most portable of notebooks, the sharp angles situated around the design keep it looking sleek. The bezel is a little chunkier than we’d like, and the standard membrane keyboard leaves much to be desired (especially for the price), but there’s a lot to be said for it.

What did impress, however, was the cooling system. No doubt due in part to its large size, but it was rare for us to hear the fans ramp up, if at all. 

That said, unsurprisingly, the fans are somewhat whiney when they do kick in, but they’re nothing that a good pair of headphones can’t drown out. While, frankly, you shouldn’t have to, most of the time you’ll be buried into a good game, so it’s not something we’ll get too hung up on with how rarely it happens.

The I/O, on the other hand – oh boy, what a compliment. With the Erazer, you could effectively run three additional displays attached to this monster.

Memory abound, storage absent

Storage, however, is one area in which the Erazer really comes unglued. In short, you get a single 480GB SSD. Fill that up with your run-of-the-mill OS programs, and you’ll be left with less than 280GB for games – not ideal. Considering the Erazer nears the £1,700 mark, and given it’s humongous dimensions, we have to ask: why no additional HDD?

Fortunately, the situation regarding memory is far merrier. With two out of four available DIMMs taken up with two 8GB RAM modules of DDR4 RAM, meaning you could throw another 16GB in for good measure, to give you a total of 32GB, which useful for media rendering tasks. 

However, in that scenario, a seriously beefy external HDD, or a dedicated NAS, would almost be a necessity.

Benchmarks

Here’s how the Medion Erazer X7849 performed in our suite of benchmark tests:

3DMark Sky Diver: 25,396; Fire Strike: 12,136; Time Spy: 4,997
CineBench R15 CPU: 688 points; GPU: 85.63 fps
GeekBench 4: 3,784 single-core; 13,510 multi-core
PCMark 8 Home: 3,871 points
PCMark 8 Battery Life: 2 Hours and 53 Minutes
Battery Life (Techradar Movie Test): 2 Hours and 37 minutes
Deus Ex Mankind Divided (1080p Ultra): 55 fps; (1080p Low): 107 fps
GTA V (1080p Ultra): 54 fps; (1080p Low): 167 fps

Performance

Computational performance was a little lower than we expected, averaging below 700 on CineBench R15’s multi-threaded performance, as to be expected from the mobile Skylake processor buried at the heart of this wee beastie. 

That last point is a bit of a stickler for us. At this point in time, Skylake is looking positively old in the world of advancing processors. Although Kaby Lake launched early in 2017, the mobile parts have been available since before December. 

On top of that, Kaby Lake X, Intel’s next generation processor, is supposedly right around the corner, meaning we could soon see a slew of new mobile parts hit the mainstream. Couple that with AMD promising Ryzen mobile parts within the next quarter, and the aging Skylake core looks positively decrepit.

Does that mean the Core i7-6700HQ is chump change at this point? Yes and no. It’s still a serious contender, even in its mobile form factor, equalling roughly the same processing power as any keen-eyed Core i5-6600K desktop-side. If you’re looking to dabble in video rendering and editing on the move, it should be more than plenty to whet your appetite.

As for graphics performance, the Erazer is well outclassed by the Origin EON17-X we reviewed last winter and on par with the HP Omen 17 of fall 2016.

A battery bummer

But, the big one is battery, right? In our testing, we found that during intense video playback, the battery lasted 2 hours and 37 minutes. So, enough to get the latest Marvel film done and dusted, and maybe go through some bonus features, but not quite long enough to get a good Peter Jackson ode to New Zealand quite all the way through.

Similarly, the PCMark 8 Home battery test reported a somewhat lackluster 2 hours and 53 minutes. Both of these figures are expectedly a far cry from the 4 hours promised by Medion.

Final verdict

Ultimately, the Erazer is a fine piece of work. Its soft touch finish makes the product feel premium enough, but it doesn’t tout the aluminium stylings we’ve seen from similarly-priced Asus, HP or Dell laptops. 

That said, this laptop should feel like home to any who spend the majority of their free time gaming, its frame resisting sweaty fingerprints and greasy food stains. Performance is solid, dependable even. And, the coupling of that GTX 1070 with a 1080p screen should mean you’re set for any AAA title that launches over the next two to three years at least, without tweaking any major settings.

The price, though, and the lack of portability that comes with it, makes the Erazer less appealing than we’d hoped. If a spinning hard drive was thrown into the mix, we could perhaps forgive it, but for what Medion is asking, well, it’s just a little too much for what’s on the table.

Welcome to TechRadar’s 3rd annual PC Gaming Week, celebrating the almighty gaming PC with in-depth interviews, previews, reviews and features all about one of the TechRadar team’s favorite pastimes. Missed a day? Check out our constantly updated hub article for all of the coverage in one place.

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Microsoft Releases Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16184

New builds are ready for members of the Windows Insider Program’s Fast ring: Preview Build 16184 for PC and Preview Build 15208 for mobile.

Preview Build 16184 features two main updates: My People, a taskbar app that’s supposed to make it easier to communicate with the people in your life, and the expansion of some Windows 10 Mail and Calendar features to Gmail users. The former is all about introducing new features to Microsoft’s communications tools, whereas the latter makes other features available to people who don’t use Outlook and Office 365 to handle all of their email.

Here’s what Microsoft said in its blog post about My People:

Technology is all about making it easier for you to connect with your most important people. Whether you want to share a photo, make plans for dinner, or get an answer from a friend or coworker – My People is here to take it to the next level and bring the people you care about most to the center of your experience.

My People is supposed to achieve that lofty goal by letting you pin up to three people in your taskbar, allowing you to view multiple communications services right next to each other, and remembering your app of choice for the next time you want to chat with that person. Enabling the feature requires you to install Preview Build 16184; make sure you have the latest versions of Skype, Mail, and People; and click the People icon in the taskbar.

This build also kicks off the expansion of some Mail and Calendar features to Gmail users. Microsoft said earlier this month that the apps will now let non-Outlook and Office 365 users to do things “such as easily tracking travel and shipping deliveries, making emails more actionable, helping you easily track your favorite sports events, faster search, and more.” Windows Insiders will, naturally, be the first to use the expanded features.

Preview Build 16184 also brought some improvements to the Start menu, squashed a few bugs, and “fixed an issue resulting in Counter Strike Global Offensive hanging or freezing during game play.” You can find a full list of bug fixes and known issues in Microsoft’s blog post about the build.

The company also released Preview Build 15208 for mobile. It fixed two issues–one pertaining to the Bluetooth Settings page and the other creating a 20-second delay if you try to shut down a phone after switching from one network to another–and has its own batch of known problems. The most important of those bugs is a “small percentage of devices” that “may experience text message backup loss” and “random shutdowns on some devices.”

These updates seem downright bursting with new features (moreso on PC than mobile) when compared to their predecessors. That’s because most of the recent preview builds have focused on improving Windows 10’s core instead of adding new features so close to the Creators Update’s debut. Or, you know, revealing that the Creators Update for mobile devices would be restricted to just a handful of smartphones.

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Cloudflare Wants To Protect The IoT With A Firewall Called 'Orbit'

Companies that don’t want to bother with securing their Internet of Things (IoT) products may want to use Cloudflare’s new service, Orbit, which promises to secure their products for them.

Growing Problem Of IoT-Powered DDoS Attacks

By now, the low security of the IoT is well known. We’ve seen multiple massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks last year that disrupted major online services.

The future isn’t looking too bright, either, with more and more companies big and small hurrying to release their own IoT products. Security is often treated as an afterthought, mainly because a lack of it doesn’t typically affect the people who buy a product, but also because new features and lower prices are prioritized. Something may need to change in the IoT marketplace to incentivize manufacturers to also care about security.

Cloudflare Says IoT Not Like PC Industry

Cloudflare argues that the PC security model, where a flaw is found and patched by Microsoft a month or several months later, can’t scale to tens of billions of IoT devices. The company said that one of the reasons why the two industries are the same is because nobody really wants to update their smart toaster or light bulbs.

The company has a point there — few would want to update every single electronics product in their home. However, a solution that comes to mind would be to use automatic updates similar to the ones used by Chrome, Firefox, and other apps.

Cloudflare also said that the main reason why even enterprise users don’t apply patches to their IoT products is that those products aren’t designed to be patched. The company cited Chrysler Jeep’s remote execution bug, which the car-maker couldn’t patch over-the-air and had to recall 1.4 million cars to resolve, as an example of this problem.

Again, this seems like it would be a solvable issue, if only companies would actually design their products with software security and a robust update system in mind.

Cloudflare’s “Orbit” Solution IoT Security Problems

Cloudflare argues that it could solve many IoT security issues by interposing itself between the device maker and the user by offering a third-party security layer. The company said could have solved the Jeep security issues, for example, by using a firewall to restrict direct access to the car’s vulnerable software.

Cloudflare will also use its own anti-malware system to filter known malware from passing through its network. Additionally, its customers will be able to write their own rules for the Cloudflare firewall affecting their devices, similar to how a Windows user creates their own firewall rules on top of the default ones.

Cloudflare said that it’s already protecting 120 million IoT devices with its Orbit security layer, and that Lockitron, which makes smart door locks, is one of the companies benefiting from this security:

“Keeping our products and customers secure is our primary concern,” said Paul Gerhardt, co-founder of Lockitron.

“Cloudflare provides an extra layer of security that allows us to keep our devices continually updated and ahead of any vulnerabilities,” he added.

An Old Solution To Even Older Security Problems

Although Cloudflare believes that the IoT industry isn’t like the PC industry, the security ecosystem of IoT devices feels much like the ’90s era of Windows security. If IoT devices are like ’90s Windows machines, then Cloudflare’s solution seems to be a 2000s-era security solution.

Firewalls started rising in popularity in the 2000s, but we’ve learned since then that they are far from impenetrable. In fact, companies such as Google and Duo are already moving away from such perimeter defenses in favor of better end-point security and other, more modern security systems.

That doesn’t mean Cloudflare’s solution isn’t a good one in the current wild, wild west of IoT security. Orbit could significantly improve the security of many IoT products on the market. However, it could be only a matter of time before this solution stops being enough, just as it happened in the PC market. Eventually, IoT manufacturers would likely learn that the best security is end-point security coupled with a solid update system.

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Arvixe

California-based Arvixe has been hosting personal and business websites since 2003, and is now owned by Endurance International Group, the company behind tech names like Domain.com, Bluehost, iPage, SiteBuilder.com and more.

Arvixe has a huge number of products, and the website tries to cover them all. That includes personal hosting, business hosting, reseller, VPS, blog hosting, ecommerce, CMS, forums, and just about anything else you might want.

The baseline shared hosting plan, PersonalClass, seems to offer excellent value. $4 (£5) a month gets you unlimited disk space, bandwidth, databases, FTP accounts and email addresses. There’s cPanel access, a free SiteBuilder and Softaculous one-click installations. Daily backups come as standard, and the free domain isn’t just for year one – Arvixe will pay its renewals for as long as you stay with the company.

The only significant limit we could see is that the plan only supports six domains, but that’s hardly unusual. Many starter accounts only allow one.

One concern we had was a ‘priority support’ add-on for $20 (£25) a month. Most hosts claim to offer great support as standard, so the idea that you might find it worth paying $240 (£300) a year to get better help isn’t exactly reassuring. 

So, what do you get for this substantial extra outlay? Clicking the website icon to find out displayed a blank page, unhelpfully. The purchase page told us that priority support gets your tickets answered by more knowledgeable staff, which again makes us wonder who else is dealing with regular queries.

At any rate, we would find out more about Arvixe’s support in our own tests, which we’ll detail later in this review. But if you run into problems yourself, Arvixe’s generous 45-day money-back guarantee gives you more time than usual to find and deal with them.

Account setup

The Arvixe website provides much more detail than many hosts on the low-level specs of its plans. You don’t have to wonder whether the company limits the number of subdomains or FTP accounts you can create, for instance, because the details are right there on the list (they’re both unlimited).

Tapping the Buy button told us that the headline $4 (£5) a month price only applied if we purchased a two-year plan. That’s no great surprise – other hosts often try to push you on to a three-year plan – and shorter terms are reasonable. A one-year plan costs $5 (£6.25) a month, or you can pay a monthly $7 (£8.75) with no ‘setup fee’ or other penalty.

The same page has several other forms for entering all the usual signup information: your target domain name (new, or one you own already), along with your contact and payment details (credit cards and PayPal are supported).

Add-ons include $100 (£125) Bing and Google AdWords credits for free (US and Canadian customers only), $25 (£31) for a one-year AlphaSSL certificate, and the $20 (£25) a month for priority support we mentioned above.

We submitted our order, the website told us it was processing, and within a few seconds… it returned us to a blank order form. We had chosen PayPal, so were expecting Arvixe to open a new browser tab at the PayPal site, but no – nothing.

Had our order been lost? It looked that way, and it’s easy to imagine how some customers might try to submit it again. Fortunately, we waited, checked our email and an acknowledgement message arrived.

This wasn’t the only oddity. Our Arvixe welcome email gave us a link to the ‘client area’, explaining that we could log in using the password we’d just created. We did, successfully, and saw that our order was ‘pending’. Then, a few minutes later, another email arrived saying we wouldn’t be able to access the client area – the one we were exploring at the time – until we’d verified our email.

Useless email verification? This didn’t seem like a company we should trust with our security. To test whether this was due to the fact that we’d logged in too quickly, perhaps, we logged out and tried logging in again, still without verifying our email. It worked, plus we could see and change all our personal information. The email verification step seemed to be broken, or at least the rest of the website wasn’t always checking for it.

Being able to access the website didn’t get us very far while our order was pending, but we waited to see what would happen. 24 hours later the system appeared to realise something was wrong and we received an automated email saying the company couldn’t take payment because, well, it didn’t have our details. It gave us a link to log in and pay the invoice manually, we did so, and the account was set up right away.

Creating a site

The Arvixe welcome email included logon details for our control panel, a better place to start than the usual marketing-packed customer portal. We clicked the link, entered our details and were happy to see an up-to-date version of cPanel using the appealing Paper Lantern theme. (If you’re not a cPanel user, that’s a lighter and less cluttered look than the older style.)

Site construction options start with the excellent Softaculous. If you’re not sure what sort of functionality you need, this might help you find a suitable application: forum software, blogging, e-commerce, whatever. These are well organised, you’re able to read descriptions, look at screenshots, view demos, read user reviews and more.

If you already know what you want to install, there’s a good chance you’ll find it here. WordPress, Joomla, Magento, MyBB, PrestaShop and many more are all available, and you can have the basics set up in a click or two.

Arvixe has a free SiteBuilder, too. This is relatively easy to use, has almost 200 templates and no apparent limits on pages or anything else. But it’s distinctly short on documentation and doesn’t always work as you’d expect. It’s a plus point for Arvixe in general, but we wouldn’t trust it with anything more than a relatively simple personal site.

If you’ve built your site already then the cPanel console provides everything you need to get it uploaded and set up: FTP, File Manager, SSH and more.

Performance

There’s no way a relatively brief review can tell you how a web host will behave over months and years, but we try to get a feel for how the company performs in different situations, especially when it comes to support.

Arvixe offers no support link directly from cPanel, so we opened our customer portal instead. This is far less cluttered than most of the competition, and there’s a Support Centre link available if you need help.

The support link takes you to the regular site, outside your authenticated session. That’s a little clumsy as it means you’re now facing a login prompt again, and you have to click Back to carry on in the customer portal.

We spotted some issues with the support pages immediately. A list of categories includes an apparent duplicate (PHP appears twice), the total number of articles seems low, and some of the more advanced areas have surprisingly few articles (MySQL has five, the PHP categories have six in total).

This weakness was obvious when we tried some searches. Entering ‘import WordPres’ returned three articles, none of them related to migrating a WordPress site. A general search for WordPress gave us a single article describing how to fix a problem with WordPress 3.1, released in 2011. A search for MySQL displayed just four articles, one of them covering an ancient issue, the other three relating to the Plesk control panel – nothing to help shared Linux users.

Other articles carry the same dusty, faded and forgotten feel. Running a search for Outlook gave us instructions for setting up Outlook 2003-2010 and Mac 2011, but nothing later. Many other articles are dated 2009 to 2011.

Arvixe offers live chat support which seems to be implemented using the same system (and people, possibly) as other Endurance companies. As we were testing, Arvixe was just about to change its money-back guarantee from 60 to 45 days, so that seemed to be a good test subject.

We started a chat, an agent appeared within a couple of minutes and we told them we’d seen 60 days flagged in one place on the site, 45 days in another; which was right? They went away, presumably to look it up, and returned with the current 60-day figure only. They told us nothing about the imminent terms of service change, even though it was just days away.

We decided to send a ticket. This was the first time the site recognised that we’d never verified our email address and complained about it. This time we paid attention, clicked the verification link and entered details on the question we’d like to ask… only to be redirected to live chat, again. Despite Arvixe saying it has support tickets, and having links for them, they appear to be just a frontend for the chat system.

We asked another simple product-related query about Arvixe Builder, the drag-and-drop site creator: did it have any restrictions, and were there any links to tutorials or documentation? That’s so basic we would expect anyone with the faintest product knowledge to give us an answer immediately.

Our agent gave us an identical line to the beginning of the last chat, though: “I will review your question and get back to you”. Well, okay. What happened after that was so bizarre we’re going to quote it in full.

Our starting question went as follows…

TechRadar Pro (TRP): Does Arvixe Builder have any limitations, for example a maximum number of pages, and are there any tutorials or help pages around to show me how it all works?

A_ R: Welcome to Arvixe live chat, My name is A_. I will review your question and get back to you. 

TRP: Hi A_, thanks! 

A_ R: I apologize. There is an ongoing issue on the Arvixe Builder. 

TRP: OK. What’s that? 

A_ R: Our admins are working on this issue. 

TRP: Right. What about my question, though?

A_ R: You can upload the files through the FTP.

A_ R: The Arvixe Builder issue will be resolved very soon. 

TRP: OK. What is the issue, or does no one really know yet? 

A_ R: Meanwhile we suggest our customers to make use of FTP. 

A_ R: We are aware of this issue and it is being worked on. 

A_ R: It will be resolved very soon as it is affecting all of our customers.

TRP: OK, thanks for your help.

So our original and inline questions went unanswered, and instead they gave us a solution to another problem, without explaining what the problem was. It was more like having a conversation with a bot than a real person, and maybe explains why Arvixe thinks you might want to spend $20 (£25) a month on support, after all.

As usual, we completed our trials with some performance tests. Our Arvixe server seemed to be located in Texas, and as expected, US connection times were fast from everywhere. Connections from the UK lagged a little, but not enough to be a problem, and overall performance seemed average.

This may not be the end of the story as we sometimes noticed very lengthy login times to our cPanel. Did that mean the server was under load, or was there some other issue? We’re unsure, but it was yet another reason to be concerned about the Arvixe service.

Final verdict

Arvixe gives you plenty of features for very little cash, but it’s so poor at even the most basic tasks – taking payment, email verification, simple product support – that it’s impossible to recommend.

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10 best PC games to play on your living room couch

Google, Facebook Victims Of $100M Phishing Scam

It’s easier to con someone than to take whatever you want from them with brute force. That’s why phishing scams, which rely on trickery instead of technical skill, can be so effective. Convincing someone at Google to pay you tens of millions of dollars is relatively easy compared to compromising the systems used to handle that money. And that’s how someone managed to bilk roughly $100 million from Google and Facebook via email fraud.

This scheme was first revealed in March when the Justice Department said that someone impersonating an “Asian-based manufacturer of computer hardware” managed to steal from a “multinational technology company, specializing in Internet-related services and products” and “a multinational corporation providing online social media and networking services” between 2013 and 2015. Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese manufacturer, said in March that it was the “Asian-based manufacturer of computer hardware” to which the Justice Department referred in its indictment.

Fortune revealed today that Google and Facebook were the other companies affected by the scam. Google confirmed this finding in a statement to Tom’s Hardware. “We detected this fraud against our vendor management team and promptly alerted the authorities,” a spokesperson said. “We recouped the funds and we’re pleased this matter is resolved.” Facebook has not responded to a request for comment. The saga highlights a basic truth: Even some of the world’s largest tech companies are vulnerable to phishing based on falsified emails, documents, and other materials.

Here’s how the scheme was described in the Justice Department’s indictment:

[Evaldas Rimasauskas] registered and incorporated a company in Latvia (“Company-2”) which bore the same name as an Asian-based computer hardware manufacturer (“Company-1”), and opened, maintained, and controlled various accounts at banks located in Latvia and Cyprus in the name of Company-2.  Thereafter, fraudulent phishing emails were sent to employees and agents of the Victim Companies, which regularly conducted multimillion-dollar transactions with Company-1, directing that money the Victim Companies owed Company-1 for legitimate goods and services be sent to Company-2’s bank accounts in Latvia and Cyprus, which were controlled by RIMASAUSKAS.  These emails purported to be from employees and agents of Company-1, and were sent from email accounts that were designed to create the false appearance that they were sent by employees and agents of Company-1, but in truth and in fact, were neither sent nor authorized by Company-1.  This scheme succeeded in deceiving the Victim Companies into complying with the fraudulent wiring instructions.

The primary difference between this and other phishing efforts is the amount of money involved. Others have used similar methods–creating fake email addresses, impersonating someone else, etc.–to get what they want. Sometimes that’s money, sometimes it’s information, and sometimes it’s to get closer to the attacker’s real target. The motivation doesn’t matter. What matters is that these types of attacks are often successful. Do you carefully scrutinize every email you receive from friends, family, or companies with which you’re familiar to make sure they’re legit?

Most people don’t, and one slip-up can have real consequences. Scammers might set up malicious websites masquerading as Netflix’s site, for example, to collect personal information that could be used to commit identity theft. Or they might use compromised LinkedIn passwords to access your Skype account, and then use that access to gather information about the people you know. It’s like knocking over dominoes: All you have to do is flick the first one and hope all the others fall in response, and if it doesn’t work the first time, well, you can always try again.

Acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim said in a press release about Rimasauskas’ arrest:

From half a world away, Evaldas Rimasauskas allegedly targeted multinational internet companies and tricked their agents and employees into wiring over $100 million to overseas bank accounts under his control. This case should serve as a wake-up call to all companies – even the most sophisticated – that they too can be victims of phishing attacks by cyber criminals.

The same holds true for us. It’s easy to swallow a phishing attempt hook, line, and sinker. The only way to avoid that fate is to remain vigilant by carefully examining questionable emails, making sure we know with whom we’re sharing information, and having a backup plan for when things go wrong.

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Your car will eventually live-stream video of your driving to the cloud

As self-driving cars become more advanced with a greater number of onboard computers, sensors, cameras and WiFi, the amount of data is expected to balloon, providing automakers, insurers and others with rich information to harvest.

A single autonomous car could generate as much as 100GB of data every second, said Barclays analyst Brian Johnson, in a note published Wednesday.

If extrapolated out to the entire U.S. fleet of vehicles — 260 million in number — autonomous cars and trucks could potentially produce about 5,800 exabytes, Johnson stated.

In other words, on a daily basis, there would be enough raw data to fill 1.4 million Amazon AWS “Snowmobile” mobile data center tractor-trailer trucks with 100 petabytes of storage each, for a convey reaching 11,000 miles long.

“Even with data compression of 10,000x, that would still be a one-mile long convey,” Johnson stated.

Uber

An Uber autonomous test vehicle on the streets of Pittsburgh.

Big data will be “at the core of change and disruption” in the auto business, and managing massive amounts of data will require new solutions in storage and analysis, the report said.

Security will also be a key area of concern for autonomous car makers. A modern car has 50 to 150 electronic control units (ECUs) – or tiny computers — with as much as 100 million lines of code. And for every 1,000 lines there are as many as 15 bugs that are potential doors for would-be hackers, analysts say.

In today’s vehicles, ECUs are linked by an internal controller area network, infotainment systems and an increasing array of cameras and radars for advanced driver assistance systems that are already creating vast amounts of data that is typically used by automakers, but then discarded.

“Going forward, any or all of this data can be uploaded to the cloud — either in real time via 4G and beyond, someday through home WiFi uploads, or sporadically through service center uploads (as with the original Tesla Roadster,” the report stated.

Cars will produce data related to in-vehicle, environmental, and driver/passenger information. In-vehicle data will consist of historical data, such as vehicle fluid levels, speed and acceleration, GPS positioning and, in the event of an accident, a snapshot of data prior to the crash as well as alerts for first responders.

Otto

Otto’s self-driving semi-trailer truck hauling Budweiser down I-25 in Colorado.

Driver/passenger data will include information about the use of infotainment systems, HVAC and seat preferences, and even driving styles (i.e., whether the car is used in a “sporty” fashion versus economic driving).

“All of this could be recorded, uploaded and used to tailor in-car experiences,” the report stated.

Environmental data will include information from LiDAR scanners, cameras and other sensors.

“The car can become a roving data gathering vacuum,” Johnson said in the report. “Think of millions of Google StreetView vehicles capable of refreshing live views of every street everywhere several times a day. Not only can this data be added as layers on top of traditional HD-maps in near-real time, it can also be potentially mined for a variety of insights.”

For example, video data could be used to determine how full a store parking lot is at any given time of day and what prices are advertised in a store window, according to Johnson.

Intel

“Moreover, installed cameras can displace the aftermarket dash-cam video market and record pre-crash images,” Johnson wrote.

Companies most likely to capitalize on vehicle big data are automakers that are building from scratch, such as Tesla, which offers a “clean sheet in-car architecture with a solid base of data,” and third-party parts suppliers, such as Delphi, which is expected to provide analytics engines for legacy and newly manufactured cars and trucks, Barclays said. Mobileye, a maker of vehicle vision chip technology (called EyeQ), also has a strong lead in the mapping and camera sensing market, the report claimed.

Mobileye, Delphi

Mobileye and Delphi plan to start production in 2019 on their “Central Sensing Localization and Planning” platform for self-driving cars in urban and highway driving conditions.

Intel recently acquired Mobileye for $15.3 billion to help advance an alliance between the two companies and BMW, which plans to ship self-driving cars by 2021.

Last year, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich emphasized how critical the automotive market has become to the company, and said the industry must be prepared for the deluge of data that will require an “unprecedented” level of “computing, intelligence and connectivity.”

Krzanich said there’s a need for the auto industry to be prepared for that data deluge that could amount to 4TB of data being generated from a single car each day.

Intel’s investment arm, Intel Capital, also plans to spend $250 million of additional new capital over the next two years for the development of autonomous driving technology.

Intel has partnered with self-driving technology makers, such as vehicle camera company Mobileye, and carmakers such as BMW, to produce fully-autonomous vehicles by 2021.

Intel

The BMW i3 autonomous car co-developed by BMW, Intel and Mobileye.

While the oft-cited use case for automotive big data is in support of location-based marketing, Barclays believes the mountain of data will be mined for vehicle-related services, such as usage-based insurance plans and predicting required maintenance. The highest-value use case, however, would be to support level 4 and 5 fully autonomous driving through digital maps and sensor data videos, which would provide training data for autonomous algorithms.

“Indeed, within mapping, Auto Big Data could support crowd-sourced live video covering every mile of road in the world,” Johnson wrote. “While currently it is not feasible to stream constant video to the cloud, in the future it would be feasible as bandwidth and storage costs drop exponentially.”

The Society of Automotive Engineers International, a U.S.-based industry standards organization, has established six autonomous driving categories where Level 0 represents no automation and Level 5 is a fully autonomous vehicle that controls all aspects of driving previously performed by humans.

Society of Automotive Engineers International

The exabytes of data expected to come will reside mainly in the cloud, where data analytics and cloud storage platforms will be required to create and store useable information. Those who capitalize on the Auto big data will be able to compress the data and extract key data “events,” Johnson stated.

“Even in a world beyond 5G, the amount of raw data is impractical to process, so… the node and edge analytics engines in the car could become more important than the motors in vehicles,” Johnson wrote.

By 2020, 75% of the world’s cars will be connected to the internet via embedded Wi-Fi, and the growth of internet-connected vehicles will bring in around $2.94 billion in revenue, according to a report by Topology, a division of TrendForce market research.

In addition, autonomous or fully self-driving vehicles will enter mass production by 2020 because more major auto makers in recent years have committed to those vehicles’ R&D, according to Topology.

Automakers are already investing heavily in artificial intelligence technology to control self-driving cars. For example, Ford plans to spend $1 billion over the next five years on A.I. in support of the development of autonomous vehicle technology.

“A common saying in Silicon Valley… is that ‘data is the new oil’ — and enthusiasm for businesses that generate and analyze data is common across the technology space,” Johnson wrote. “Unlike oil, ultimately a finite and diminishing resource, data and uses of data expand exponentially.”

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