After a 37-year journey through our solar system, NASA's Voyager I has been hit by a third solar 'tsunami'. These solar tsunamis are coming from our sun, in the form of coronal mass ejections - in other words, shock waves from massive, violent eruptions on our sun.

Since 2012, there have been three of these CMEs, with the third one erupting on Monday. These eruptions have been helping NASA confirm something it proposed late last year: that Voyager is the first craft from Earth to travel into interstellar space. But what is interstellar space? Well, it's an area that is just beyond what is known as our heliosphere.

The heliosphere is an area where solar wind pushes back the dense plasma of space, in something that resembles a protective bubble. This plasma is the result of the death of stars millions of years ago. What should really make your scratch your noggin' is that the plasma found outside of the heliosphere, and in interstellar space, is 40 times denser than the plasma inside of the heliosphere.

Now that we've passed into the second half of 2014, we should expect some new GPUs in the coming months. But what is more exciting, is what is coming in the first half of 2015 according to a new report from SemiAccurate.

We should expect NVIDIA to skip the 20nm process completely, moving directly from 28nm into 16nm. This is just a rumor right now, but if it ends up happening, 2015 is going to be one of the most exciting years for GPUs in a very long time. This would see NVIDIA release the GeForce GTX 990 under the Maxwell architecture, from the GM204B core.

If NVIDIA does skip the 20nm process, we should see some seriously fast GPUs appearing, with much lower than expected power consumption. The core count should also be lower when compared to the GeForce GTX 700 series, as Maxwell is a much more efficient architecture compared to Kepler. So before we have the GTX 800 series, we're already foaming at the mouth about the GTX 900 series. It won't stop there, as we should see NVIDIA unveil the GeForce 1000 series sometime in the next 18-24 months, too.

One of the most important revelations from the Samsung Global SSD Summit 2014 in Seoul was the unveiling of the new 845DC PRO. The 845DC PRO is a V-NAND (3D NAND) SSD that is geared for the SMB and SOHO segment, though we fully expect it to find a home in more intense production environments as well.

The combination of the 6Gb/s SATA 845DC EVO and the 845DC PRO provide a considerable one-two punch for Samsung. These two offerings allow them to address the booming SATA value market with two distinct solutions, much like the M500 and M500DC pairing from Micron. The distinct differentiator is that the two Samsung offerings both offer disruptive new NAND technologies that are not currently offered by other manufacturers.

The 845DC PRO features Samsung's first generation 24-layer V-NAND. V-NAND is 3D NAND that achieves better density, performance, endurance, and power consumption, via vertical stacking of the NAND cells. This runs counter to the established norm of increasing density through NAND shrinks, and with good reason. Shrinks provide more density, but actually reduce endurance.

Security company Kaspersky Lab today announced its updated product lineup for home consumers, including the Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2015, Kaspersky Internet Security 2015 and Kaspersky Internet Security - Multiple-Device 2015. Designed to protect Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X and Google Android devices from current threats in a rather complex security world.

New features include Webcam protection aimed at keeping built-in Web cameras safe and secure from outside hacking. Kaspersky also included a Wi-Fi security notification module that ensures public Wi-Fi hotspots are secure, informing users of vulnerable network connections or unsecured password transmission. Ransomware which encrypts files also is a major threat to PC users, so the Kaspersky Lab System Watcher module verifies all running processes to prevent criminals from encrypting files.

"Today's threat landscape is persistently evolving and at Kaspersky Lab we're continuously staying one step ahead of the cybercriminals," said Justin Priestley, Kaspersky Lab consumer sales SVP, in a statement. "We provide our customers with the most advanced protection tools available, like the innovative Webcam Protection and System Watcher features. Our 2015 suite of products, especially Kaspersky Lab Internet Security, is equipped with technologies that have proven to be effective not only in independent tests, but in the real-world, protection 300 million people across the globe."

A team of researchers at CrowdStrike is claiming China's "Deep Panda" cyber offensive group has begun targeting, and has now compromised, US national security think tanks. In an alarming statement, co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch asserted that the attacks seem to be tied into monitoring activity from the newly founded Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).

In a blog post, CrowdStrike's co-found Dmitri Alperovitch outlined the company's work with human rights groups and security think tanks. Former senior government officials frequently work in organizations like these, and so are a natural target of hostile intelligence services, Alperovitch said, adding that he has "great confidence" the Deep Panda group is affiliated with the Chinese government. It's one of 30 CrowdStrike closely follows in China, but the company points out it is also one of the most sophisticated.

As the armed ISIS faction launched an attack on an oil refinery, Alperovitch claims Deep Panda began a hunt for files from US thinktank employees. He pointed out that China is the top foreign investor in Iraq's oil infrastructure, and so espionage fits in with the country's national interests. "It wouldn't be surprising if the Chinese government is highly interested in getting a better sense of the possibility of deeper US military involvement that could help protect the Chinese oil infrastructure in Iraq," Alperovitch wrote. "In fact, the shift in targeting of Iraq policy individuals occurred on June 18, the day that ISIS began its attack on the Baiji oil refinery."

The 2014 Samsung Global SSD Summit 2014 in Seoul, South Korea, was somewhat of an SSD nirvana. Samsung touted their industry-first 3D NAND (V-NAND), the first 3bit MLC SSDs for the datacenter (the 845DC EVO), the world's first M.2 SSD for the datacenter, and to top it all off we were finally able to take a peek at Samsung's NVMe offerings.

Samsung has the distinct advantage of being the first to receive NVMe interoperability certification from UNH-IOL, but the OEM market has kept the drive hidden from the retail space.

We start with the SM1715 and its unique heat sink that encompasses the entire side of the drive. The SM1715 utilizes the standardized NVMe protocol. NVMe provides numerous advantages with its simplified driver stack, command set, and enhanced queue/pairing mechanisms. For an in-depth view of NVMe, reference our recently released Defining NVMe article.

Samsung is on a roll with V-NAND and 3bit MLC datacenter products making a huge splash at the 2014 Samsung Global SSD Summit in Seoul. The SM953, the world's first M.2 SSD designed for the datacenter, was yet another exciting Samsung-exclusive product on display in the product showcase.

The chains of legacy HDD form factors have been binding SSDs into large bulky cases that are not required for today's dense NAND. M.2 provides a new standardized form factor that limits the device to the size of the NAND, controller, PCB, and other components. This will allow for denser deployments and enable even smaller blade and microserver designs. Storage and performance density are paramount in the datacenter and SSDs provide the ultimate in both respects. It is encouraging to see these new designs finally making their way into the datacenter.

Other than the 1,800 MB /s sequential read performance, there is precious little information publicly available at this point. We do know that the SM953 comes in one capacity of 480GB. M.2 also has standardized designs that are longer, which will allow for even more NAND per device. The inclusion of V-NAND, with its enhanced density, will also provide much more capacity in these 'gumstick' devices. There is no mention of the NAND employed on the SM953.

The 2014 Samsung SSD Global Summit took place last week in Seoul. With tight schedules, long international flights, and a holiday weekend as well, our detailed analysis will begin rolling today. Chris will dive in on coverage on the consumer side, and also post video of the entire Global Summit presentation. I will be weighing in on some of the datacenter storage solutions provided by Samsung.

The majority of the Global Summit presentations focused on the innovative new V-NAND products from Samsung. V-NAND is 3D NAND that achieves better density, performance, endurance, and power consumption, via vertical stacking of the NAND cells. This runs counter to the established norm of increasing density through NAND shrinks, and with good reason. Shrinks provide more density, but actually reduce endurance. V-NAND provides a revolutionary path forward, and Samsung is the first to mass-produce and bring to market 3D NAND-based solutions.

Samsung christened V-NAND with a release of the world's first mass-produced 3D NAND SSD into the datacenter. The benefits of V-NAND align themselves almost perfectly with the common datacenter pain-points, such as power consumption, density, and endurance. The 6Gb/s SATA SV843 brings higher endurance, 3.6 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day), and enterprise-centric features such as power loss protection. The SV843 comes in 480 and 960GB capacities and random read/write performance up to 88K/14K IOPS. Sequential read/write is spec'd up to 530/430 MB/s.

Oculus VR is going full steam ahead as it gets closer to the release (which still hasn't got an ETA) of the consumer edition of the Rift. The VR startup has announced that it is hosting its first developer conference, Oculus Connect, in September.

Oculus Connect is a two-day conference for developers and creators that has the goal of creating some of the "best virtual reality experiences available". Oculus VR explains: "In the last two years, we've seen more virtual reality content built than in the last two decades, and that's a direct result of incredible work by the community. With virtual reality's momentum at an all-time high, this is a unique moment for the developer community to come together to take the virtual reality to the next level".

The two-day conference happens on September 19-20 at the Loews Hollywood Hotel in LA. There are going to be four big speakers at the event, with Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey, id Software founder and now CTO of Oculus VR John Carmack, Oculus VR's CEO Brendan Iribe and Chief Scientist, ex-Valve employee Michael Abrash.

It looks like we can expect the elusive OnePlus One smartphone to receive Android L quickly after Google releases, something that OnePlus might be able to bake onto its phone before most of the other leading Android smartphones on the market.

OnePlus announced the news on Friday, after it was hit with questions as to when it would be pushing Android L to One smartphone. The company said that the One's new CyanogenMod build is based on Android L, and will be available after a couple of months after Google makes its final Android L code available.

The company said in its full statement: "So a lot - I mean, a lot - of people are asking about whether we'll be getting on the Android L train. It was announced while I was asleep and when I got back to work the morning after, there were already a bunch of forum posts and (strangely) customer support requests about it. Well, we're keen to announce today that the OnePlus One will indeed be getting the L treatment. When, you ask? That depends on Google. We promise to have it done within three months of their releasing a final build".