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14 May 2025

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Drug trends survey paints clearer picture of gangs' place in the market
One third of methamphetamine buyers reported purchasing from gangs, while more New Zealanders are buying and selling drugs online, the survey found .

Could you make $20 last a week?
The aim of the challenge is to avoid all those things you don't actually need to buy.

Hundreds of millions of dollars lost to online security threats
New Zealanders could have lost $1.6 billion to online security threats in 2024, according to a new estimate.

Star-studded Celebrity Traitors line-up confirmed
Will Sir Stephen Fry, Paloma Faith, Alan Carr and the other contestants be traitors or faithfuls?

One of my favorite gaming keyboards is on sale for a measly $45
You can find a good mechanical keyboard. You can find a cheap mechanical keyboard. You can even find a good, cheap, mechanical keyboard. But finding one from a major gaming PC brand, with the solid software support to match, is a tall order. Today you can manage it with the K70 Core, a refurbished board being sold right on Corsair’s online store for $44.99. This board was already a pretty good deal at $100, considering it’s full-sized, comes with great, pre-lubed switches, a solid construction, and some great internal dampening. That means you get really smooth action for both typing and gaming — I called the K70 Core “the best typing you can get for $100” in my review. The only things I didn’t like were the fixed USB cable and a lack of dedicated media keys, though it does come with a big, chunky volume knob. This refurbished board chops the price in half and then some, though sadly it does mean you only get a 90-day warranty. But considering the excellent parts and Corsair’s pretty-dang-good gaming software, I’d say it’s a fair tradeoff. If you’d prefer a smaller board with hot-swap switches, but notably lacking software options, I’d recommend the G.Skill KM250. For more keyboard recommendations, check out the PCWorld roundup. Note that as a refurbished sale, quantities of the K70 Core are probably limited. We previously highlighted a similar keyboard deal from Corsair’s refurb store, and it doesn’t seem to be available anymore. Get a Corsair K70 Core gaming keyboard for $45View Deal

What went wrong for Flick?
Flick Energy set out to "disrupt Aotearoa's outdated, self-serving" electricity industry, but is now being folded into one of the country's big gentailers. So what went wrong?

Auckland Transport urged to do better in managing unplanned transport disruptions
AT's systems for managing disruptions are largely manual, complex, and have resulted in long delays in telling the public, an Office of the Auditor General report found.

Devastating Spectre CPU bug returns to haunt Intel processors
Intel has spent much of its goodwill with customers chasing down bugs: the Spectre and Meltdown bugs it dealt with years ago, as well as the instability that plagued its Raptor Lake processors last year. Now there are additional chapters in each of those stories. You don’t have to do anything — just make sure your PC is patched and up to date. But there will be a price to pay in performance in fixing the latest issue, and one you can’t really do anything about. On May 1, Intel issued yet another microcode update for the Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh processors. Those processors could degrade over time due to elevated operating voltages, Intel said last July. But the recent update was designed to prevent instability on systems “running multiple days with low-activity and lightly-threaded workloads” — or machines that weren’t working at their full capacity. Mitigating that bug, Intel said, will not only solve the problem, but performance fortunately will not be affected. Instead, any variation after applying the patch would be within normal “run-to-run variation,” Intel said. Unfortunately, researchers at ETH Zurich have discovered another bug that affects a number of Intel processors, dating back to the 2018 Skylake architecture. This time, mitigating it will have a significant effect, although the effects will be most pronounced in the much-maligned 11th-gen “Rocket Lake” chips. As noted by Bleeping Computer, the new bug hearkens all the back to 2018, when the Spectre and Meltdown bugs were discovered, affecting the kernel software at the heart of most X86 chips. Though Intel patched out both bugs, researchers at ETH Zurich have discovered that branch target injection attacks (known as a “branch privilege injection”) can again be used against Intel CPUs to leak otherwise protected information. The affected chips include everything from 2018’s Skylake to Raptor Lake. AMD’s Zen 5 and Zen 4 chips are not affected, the researchers found. More information can be found at the ETH Zurich site. Proper security practices usually call for researchers to privately disclose bugs to the manufacturers before they’re released to the public, and the researchers did just that. Intel released microcode to the research team for testing and to confirm the microcode update works. To avoid being preyed upon by either vulnerability, what you need to do remains the same: simply make sure that your PC is properly patched, either via Windows Update or via the firmware updates your PC maker or motherboard maker provides. However, there will be a performance price to pay, too. ETH Zurich said that it won’t be too bad: just a 2.7 percent drop in performance in Alder Lake and 1.6 percent in the 2018 Skylake (Coffee Lake Refresh) chip. If you still own an 11th-gen “Rocket Lake” chips, however, you’re going to pay a price: an estimated 8.3 percent drop in performance. Knocking almost 10 percent off the performance of what was an already subpar chip may mean that it’s time for an upgrade.