Tag: flaws

Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless Speednova earbuds review – premium buds with some notable flaws

Post author By lisa nichols
Post date March 31, 2024
No Comments on Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless Speednova earbuds review – premium buds with some notable flaws

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The Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless Speednova earbuds give a fantastic first impression. The eye-catching RGB-on-black aesthetic of both the earbuds and the charging case lend them a premium feel. That goes for overall audio quality, too, where there’s an impressive level of detail that you won’t often find even among the best gaming earbuds. As such, we can highly recommend them as a strong alternative to the likes of the Sony Inzone Buds or the Razer Hammerhead Hyperspeed.

That said, there are some missteps in terms of both design and performance. Despite coming with rubber tips of varying sizes, there’s a lack of comfort that makes the Speednova buds not best suited for longer sessions of play. They’re also not particularly great for multiplayer, with middling directional audio and some rather tinny voice quality. These could admittedly be dealbreakers when considering the earbuds cost $199.99 (and they’re yet to launch in territories beyond the US).

However, if you typically stick to single-player games or just want a rich music-listening experience, you’ll find that the Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless Speednova earbuds seriously excel in these areas.

Design and features

ASUS ROG Cetra

(Image credit: Future)

The Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless Speednova earbuds come packaged in a smart little box that offers all the essentials. You’ve of course got the earbuds housed in their charging case, alongside three different pairs of tips of varying sizes, a USB 2.4GHz dongle, and a USB-C cable for charging.

The charging case itself might just be my favorite among the more premium earbud offerings. The outer shell only bears the ROG logo and a light strip to indicate charging. Opening it up reveals another ROG logo, this time illuminated by some lovely RGB lighting. The buds themselves also share this RGB logo effect, and they, along with the case, are built from sturdy, high-quality plastic.

Unfortunately, the buds don’t feel particularly great in the ears after a long period of time. I tested each of the three tip sizes (small, medium, and large) over extended sessions and there wasn’t much of an improvement to overall comfort. Your mileage may vary here, of course, but I did have to take them out after one to two hours of use and swap back to my wireless gaming headset instead.

There’s quite a lot of touch-based functionality to the earbuds, too. A single tap of either bud will either play or pause audio – but doing this during a call will mute your microphone. Other functions include double-tapping to toggle active noise canceling (ANC) or a quadruple press to adjust volume. There’s a lot here, but it’s all thankfully very responsive.

Performance and battery life

ASUS ROG Cetra

(Image credit: Future)

Unfortunately, the buds’ level of comfort – or lack thereof – is a real shame, because the audio quality presented by the Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless Speednova earbuds is exceptional. The high-quality soundscape is bolstered by the use of Dirac Opteo technology which provides enhanced sound that’s able to really hone in on those finer details. This allows for overall much richer, detailed audio seldom heard in other gaming earbuds.

This was especially clear in busy single-player games like Rise of the Ronin. Here, the buds brought the bustling, winding streets of Yokohama and its various districts to life by enhancing background NPC chatter and ambient sounds, all without drowning out the wider soundscape. The in-depth sound of Tetris Effect: Connected was another highlight here, and I was super impressed with just how well the earbuds were able to catch even the subtlest details of the game’s remarkably layered soundtrack. In short, the Speednova earbuds allowed for an impressively immersive experience.

However, it is worth noting that the heightened audio quality provided by Dirac Opteo is only available via 2.4GHz connection. Over Bluetooth, while audio is still serviceable, noticeably flatter overall. The trade-off here, then, as you might expect, is that Bluetooth connectivity is much easier on the Speednova’s battery life. According to Asus, you’ll get up to 46 hours from the charging case via Bluetooth 5.3 here, and that’s with active noise canceling and RGB effects switched off.

You can expect this number to be roughly halved with these effects enabled, as per the description on the Speednova’s product page. And in my experience, I found this to be largely true if a bit on the generous side. On average, the earbuds themselves carry anywhere between 6-12 hours of charge based on the combinations of features enabled. Though, mostly opting for a 2.4GHz connection, I found a single charge to carry around 4-5 hours with RGB disabled and ANC switched on.

Unfortunately, the buds fall short of being absolutely perfect due to lackluster multiplayer performance. Directional audio isn’t the best here, and certainly not up to the level of some of the best PS5 headsets which are better able to hone in more accurately on footsteps and distant vehicles, for example. The built-in microphone is also lacking, rendering my voice with a pretty tinny register with an overall lower quality than some much cheaper buds on the market like the SteelSeries Tusq.

Should I buy the Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless Speednova earbuds?

asus rog cetra

(Image credit: Future)

Despite some issues with comfort and call quality, the Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless Speednova earbuds are among the most impressive when it comes to sheer audio quality, largely helped by the fantastic Dirac Opteo technology. If you’re after something for immersive single-player experiences or are something of an audiophile, these buds come highly recommended.

Buy them if…

Don’t buy them if…

How we tested the Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless Speednova earbuds

I tested these earbuds for nearly two weeks across many of the best PS5 games, as well as titles on PC and Nintendo Switch. To put the earbuds through their paces, I largely elected to test them with all features enabled, including Dirac Opteo audio via 2.4GHz connection and active noise canceling.

The buds shone in single-player titles, and I found it very hard to pull myself away from titles like Rise of the Ronin, Dragon’s Dogma 2, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom as a result. While I did find the battery life to be rather inconsistent based on the number of features enabled, I eventually chose to disable the RGB effect to squeeze a couple more hours of use out of them before needing to charge them up again.

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Tags ASUS, Buds, Cetra, Earbuds, flaws, notable, Premium, Review, ROG, SpeedNova, True, wireless

Featured

More security flaws found in popular AI chatbots — and they could mean hackers can learn all your secrets

Post author By lisa nichols
Post date March 15, 2024
No Comments on More security flaws found in popular AI chatbots — and they could mean hackers can learn all your secrets

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If a hacker can monitor the internet traffic between their target and the target’s cloud-based AI assistant, they could easily pick up on the conversation. And if that conversation contained sensitive information – that information would end up in the attackers’ hands, as well.

This is according to a new analysis from researchers at the Offensive AI Research Lab from Ben-Gurion University in Israel, who found a way to deploy side channel attacks on targets using all Large Language Model (LLM) assistants, save for Google Gemini.

That includes OpenAI’s powerhouse, Chat-GPT.

The “padding” technique

“Currently, anybody can read private chats sent from ChatGPT and other services,” Yisroel Mirsky, head of the Offensive AI Research Lab told ArsTechnica.

“This includes malicious actors on the same Wi-Fi or LAN as a client (e.g., same coffee shop), or even a malicious actor on the Internet—anyone who can observe the traffic. The attack is passive and can happen without OpenAI or their client’s knowledge. OpenAI encrypts their traffic to prevent these kinds of eavesdropping attacks, but our research shows that the way OpenAI is using encryption is flawed, and thus the content of the messages are exposed.”

Basically, in a bid to make the tool as fast as possible – the developers opened the doors to crooks picking up on the contents. When the chatbot starts sending back its response, it doesn’t send it all at once. It sends small snippets, in the form of tokens, to speed the process up. These tokens may be encrypted, but as they’re being sent one by one, as soon as they’re generated, that allows the attackers to analyze them.

The researchers analyzed the tokens’ size, length, the sequence through which they arrive, and more. The analysis, and subsequent refinement, resulted in decrypted responses which were almost identical to the ones seen by the victim.

The researchers suggested developers do one of two things: either stop sending tokens one at the time, or fix all of them to the length of the largest possible packet, making analysis impossible. This technique, which they dubbed “padding”, was adopted by OpenAI and Cloudflare.

Microsoft just patched a whole load of important security flaws, including two critical issues – so update now

Post author By lisa nichols
Post date March 13, 2024
No Comments on Microsoft just patched a whole load of important security flaws, including two critical issues – so update now

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The March 2024 edition of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday is upon us, fixing dozens of vulnerabilities, including two critical severity issues which could result in remote code execution (RCE) and privilege escalation.

In its advisory, Microsoft announced addressing 61 CVEs, in addition to 17 Edge flaws fixed a few weeks prior. Of those 61 vulnerabilities, two are labeled critical, 58 important, and one low. The company said the flaws were not publicly known, or under active exploitation.

However, six were flagged as “exploitation more likely”, probably suggesting that they are relatively easy to discover and abuse, and that it was only a matter of time before a threat actor finds them.

Hyper-V flaws addressed

That being said, the two critical severity vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2024-21334 and CVE-2024-21400. The former has a severity score of 9.8, and is described as an Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability. The latter, on the other hand, has a severity score of 9.0, and is described as an Azure Kubernetes Service Confidential Container Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability.

Besides the two, other notable mentions include CVE-2024-21407, and CVE-2024-21408, two flaws affecting Hyper-V, and allowing threat actors not only to run RCE, but also denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

This month’s Patch Tuesday also fixes a number of vulnerabilities discovered in products from other vendors, such as Adobe, AMD, Citrix, Chrome, NVIDIA, and many others. The full list of vulnerabilities serviced this month can be found on this link.

Every second Tuesday in a month, Microsoft releases cumulative updates, addressing as many vulnerabilities as it can (aside from critical updates which are released as soon as they’re available, and are usually known as out-of-bands patches). This is a longstanding practice in the IT industry that’s been picked up by many companies, including Adobe, and Oracle, and formalized in late 2003 by Microsoft.