Author: Blaze Woodard
Blaze Woodard, an editor at cubox-i.com, is presently working as an intern at a Silicon Valley technology company while majoring in politics at the University of Kansas. Blaze, who identifies as both a policy thinker and a self-described tech geek, offers a viewpoint on hardware and computing coverage that few editors in this field can match: the capacity to relate the workings of a circuit board to the larger political, regulatory, and social forces influencing the technology sector. Even though her academic path led her to political science, her early fascination with technology persisted. She writes about computing, AI, and hardware with the zeal of someone who truly loves the subject, not as someone assigned to cover it. Blaze plays soccer and spends her free time with friends and living her life, which is exactly what a college student should do outside of the office and newsroom.
Getting your hands on the CuBox-i4Pro for the first time is kind of funny. You can hold it in your hand. It doesn’t weigh much. It seems like a matte black paperweight was left on a desk at a new company. Still, that 2.17-inch cube has a quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, eSATA, HDMI 1.4 with 3D support, Bluetooth, and WiFi. There’s a lot to take in. The device was made by the Israeli company SolidRun, which has been making small single-board computers for a while. Their Hummingboard got some good attention from developers and competed quietly but…
A small laugh, a raised eyebrow, or even a quiet “that’s it?” is usually the first thing people do when they see a CuBox-i2eX. It is made of matte black plastic and fits in your hand like a big sugar cube. It doesn’t have any fan vents or a cooling grille. It doesn’t look like it can run a full Linux desktop. Still, it does. Since late 2011, these small computers have been quietly being made by SolidRun, the Israeli hardware company that makes the CuBox line. Reports say that the original CuBox was the first desktop computer that could…
Getting your hands on the CuBox-i2 for the first time is kind of scary. It’s a black, shiny cube that’s about two inches on each side and doesn’t weigh much more than a big smartphone. You can hold it in your palm. It seems less like a useful computer part and more like a fun thing to play with. After you plug it in, your first impression starts to change. It was made by SolidRun and has an NXP i.MX6 DualLite processor, which is made up of two ARM Cortex-It has one GHz A9 core, one GB of DDR3 RAM,…
When you hold the CuBox-i for the first time, it seems almost silly. It’s a perfect little cube, about two inches on each side, and weighs about 91 grams. It fits in your palm like a polished paperweight. It does not hum. It doesn’t get hot. Inside this tiny case, there’s a machine that can stream full 1080p video while using less than three watts of power. There’s no fan, no noise, and nothing else that would suggest it. That’s the kind of thing that makes you look twice and then ask questions. The first CuBox came out in December…
Being able to hold a CuBox for the first time is kind of strange. You can hold it in your hand; it’s a small cube that’s only two inches across and weighs 91 grams. It doesn’t feel like a computer. It looks like something from a toy set for kids. It quickly changes how you feel after you plug it in. SolidRun is an Israeli company that is known for making small, power-efficient computers. They first released the CuBox in December 2011. It began shipping in early 2012 and was first made for embedded system developers who needed something open,…
Some hardware doesn’t make a lot of noise when it’s being used. It doesn’t come in fancy boxes or get a lot of attention at consumer tech events. It just ships, is put in a machine or a gateway enclosure, and leaves to do the work that everything else depends on. The SolidRun HummingBoard is just that kind of hardware, which makes it more interesting. SolidRun is an embedded computing company that has been making improvements to the HummingBoard line for a while now. They have spent years making ARM-based platforms for industrial and IoT uses. The first boards in…
It is a matte black cube, about the size of a bar of soap, and it appears almost comically small as it sits on a desk. Two inches deep, two inches tall, and two inches wide. Not a fan vent. There are no rotating drives. Absolutely no sound. The CuBox is a cube-shaped device that weighs only 91 grams and has dimensions of about 2 by 2 by 2 inches. It was created by the Israeli company SolidRun. When you pick it up, it feels like a prop that was abandoned after a product pitch by an industrial designer. The…
Giancarlo Lelli, an independent Italian researcher, obtained a private encryption key from its public counterpart on April 24 by sitting down at a cloud-accessible quantum computer, the type that anyone can rent by the hour. As a result, he was given the Q-Day Prize—one Bitcoin—by quantum security startup Project Eleven for the most extensive public demonstration of the attack class that poses a threat to Ethereum, Bitcoin, and more than $2.5 trillion in digital assets secured by ECC. No government laboratory. No hardware that is classified. Somewhere in a server farm, just a researcher, an algorithm, and a rented machine.…
In the summer of 2024, Apple made a clear and comforting announcement about Private Cloud Compute. When your data is sent to the cloud for AI processing, Apple’s proprietary hardware—powered by specially designed Apple silicon—runs it. The security architecture is so complex that even Apple employees are unable to access it. It was the kind of claim that typically elicits doubt. However, the architecture held up fairly well under scrutiny, which surprised many people who follow security research closely. Two years later, a big change has occurred, and the plot is becoming much more intricate. Beyond its own data centers,…
Somewhere in a shared apartment in Bangalore or a home office in suburban Texas, someone is running their first workload management exercise, logging into a cloud-based GPU server, and giving serious thought to a career they were unaware existed two years ago. They’re not picking up chatbot coding skills. They are learning how to construct the racks, clusters, interconnects, and cooling architecture that form the computational and physical framework of large-scale AI. Building the model is more glamorous than this. It may be more significant. The need for individuals who truly understand how to implement and run AI infrastructure has…