Yahoo Mail in New Form!!.. Yahoo Mail Beta!

How To Make Your Browsing Much FASTER!!...

Try this “power” trick in Firefox to make it browse pages much Faster than before!!....

How to Pick the Perfect iPad

Google begins tablet version of Chrome OS

YouTube Goes Live!

Get Your Own Street Legal Tron Legacy Lightcycle

Now you will be able to get your hands on a street legal exact replica of the Tron Legacy Lightcycle.

Parker Brothers Choppers are now offering five street legal Tron Legacy Lightcycles.

Google is aiming to help stop the spread of malware

Google is aiming to help stop the spread of malware, saying Thursday it plans to add a malware alert feature to prevent the download of malicious applications. The feature is an offshoot of its already popular Safe Browsing feature, which is a Google-maintained list of malicious sites.

Facebook gets technical, announces Open Compute Project

Facebook is using its powers for good and opening up its social-centric data servers and centers.

Sure, it wasn’t Facebook’s take on Groupon it announced today, but its new Open Compute Project definitely deserves a mention. The social network started off its live-streamed event this morning by explaining that no exciting new products or applications were being introduced today, while also reminding us that its data center and servers are how the site is able to create and power these features.

Apple  is rumored to have purchased 12 Petabytes of storage. The exact reason is unknown although we hear it’s to complement the storage space for iTunes video.The information comes from Storage Newsletter who found out from an “inside source” about the purchase of the storage solution.

Rumors of a digital storage service… aka iTunes Cloud , have been going around for a while now and perhaps the purchase of this amount of storage space could be for the service to launch within a few months time.

To give you a quick understanding of what a Petabyte is, we turned to Google to search for it and came up with this explanation from here:

Petabyte: A Petabyte is approximately 1,000 Terabytes or one million Gigabytes. It’s hard to visualize what a Petabyte could hold. 1 Petabyte could hold approximately 20 million 4-door filing cabinets full of text. It could hold 500 billion pages of standard printed text. It would take about 500 million floppy disks to store the same amount of data.

Expect to hear more in the coming months about a possible iTunes cloud launch.

Source: Internet

Android to Take 49% Share of Smartphone Market by 2012

Research company, Gartner, has been looking in to smartphone sales around the world to come up with some very interesting numbers.

The report first hints that smartphone sales will reach 468 million around the

Check Your ISP Plan(Connection speed)

Have you ever wondered what speed your Internet Service Provider should be delivering to be compliant with the contract? Do you get confused regarding the nominal speed of your connection and how it translates into an effective downloading speed? If so this guide should suit you, I will try to clarify the most frequent doubts Internet users face regarding the speed of their connection.

Back to the basics

Remember that a bit (binary digit) is the single piece of information in digital systems, it is either a 0 or a 1. A byte, instead, is a group of 8 bits. When we talk about computer memories or data storage 1 kilobit refers to 1024 (2^10) bits, 1 megabit refers to 1024 kilobits (or 1024 x 1024 bits), 1 kilobyte refers to 1024 bytes and so on.

Hyundai unveils its first sedan-style FCEV in Seoul

Hyundai unveiled its new mid-size hydrogen powered fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) concept this week at the 2011 Seoul Motor Show. Powered by a 90 kW (120 hp) electric motor that delivers fuel economy of 34.9 km/L (82.1 mpg), the Blue² (pronounced "Blue square") is intended as a "blue" print for the automaker's future sedans.

Gnome 3.0, is launched Officillay!

The  Desktop team has sent its latest creation into the wild, officially launching GNOME 3.0 - the biggest redesign the project has enjoyed in around nine years.

Launched today, GNOME 3 is a radical departure from its predecessor - thanks largely to a new creation, GNOME Shell, which sits on top of the desktop and promises a distraction-free environment for getting things done that might come as a surprise to those switching from the team's previous releases.

While the team behind the project has been hard at work on back-end improvements, including display enhancements, a new application programming interface

Panasonic 100GB Rewritable BD-RE XL Disks Start Shipping

Panasonic have now started shipping their 100GB BD-RE XL disks. The new large capacity Blu-ray disks are set to arrive in Japan on the 15th April.

The 100GB BD-RE XL is Panasonic’s first triple layer Blu-ray Disk and provides enough space for 20 standard DVDs, 100 hours of standard definition television, tens of thousands of music recordings on one disc. The disks are already supported by the latest burners from both Pioneer and Buffalo.

Angry Birds Rio Hits 10 Million Downloads In 10 Days

Angry Birds is quickly becoming one of the most popular games of all time, and the latest version of the game, Angry Birds Rio, which is based on the new animated movie Rio looks like it might be their most popular to date.

Rovio Mobile announced on Twitter, that Angry Birds Rio has reached a massive 10 million downloads in just 10 days, they tweeted the following message on Twitter.

iPad And Kinect Hacked To Steer RC Car (video)

Now That's what surely a B.Tech student would like. However the converse isn't true.
Imaginative ways to use Microsofts Kinect keep appearing daily and another worth a mentioning today is the is this hack that uses either an iPad or Kinect to take control of a remote control car.
The project has beed setup to show how hand gestures can be used to control R/C vehicles and one uses a Kinect and the other a HTML5 web application, with use of WebSockets, DeviceMotionEvent, Canvas.  Watch a video of the hack after the jump, to see the iPad and Kinect hacks in action.

Control the mouse with your eyes, Don't touch!

Tobii has announced the released of a stand-alone eye control device for Windows PCs called PCEye, which is mounted to a display and translates eye movement into mouse commands.

Microsoft Windows 8: 10 Reasons It Will Shatter Windows 7

Microsoft’s Windows 8 likely won’t be available until next year, but based on what’s known so far, the operating system could very well be better than Windows 7.

When it comes to operating systems, there’s no more 

 important company than Microsoft. For years now, the software giant has been dominating the OS landscape around the world. And with nearly every release of its operating system, it has been able to improve upon its preceding launches. If nothing else, Microsoft understands the operating system space, and knows how to be successful in that market.

Pneumatic thought-controlled prosthetic arm created by students

Two undergraduate students from Toronto's Ryerson University have created a prosthetic arm that is controlled by its wearer's brain signals, and powered by compressed air. Not only is the Artificial Muscle-Operated (AMO) Arm said to offer a greater range of movement than traditional prostheses, but it also doesn't require the amputee to undergo invasive surgery, is easy to learn to use, and it is relatively inexpensive to make.

The AMO Arm was designed and built by Ryerson biomedical engineering students Thiago Caires and Michal Prywata. While it took them a year to create the custom software, the prototype itself was assembled in just 72 hours.

HP breaks new battery life ground with EliteBook notebook

Apple's new MacBook Pro line-up might be grabbing all the headlines with its new Thunderbolt port, but the claimed battery life pales into insignificance when compared to that offered by HP. When running on the company's new Ultra-Capacity Notebook battery, the HP EliteBook 8460p is said to be capable of running for up to 32 hours between charges. It's one of a number of business notebook releases announced by HP, so let's take a closer look...

The HP EliteBook 8460p is available in 3-, 6- or 9-cell battery options, but is also compatible with new HP Extended Life Notebook Battery and HP Ultra-Capacity Notebook Battery. It's with the latter installed that HP claims an industry-leading battery life of a quite extraordinary 32 hours.

Your Mobile is a Spy.....eyes on YOU!

While most of us know it is theoretically possible for our movements to be tracked by detecting which tower our mobile phone is connected too, it might come as a shock to see just how much of a digital footprint we leave as we go about our daily lives. German Green Party politician Malte Spitz and German newspaper Die Zeit have provided a frightening insight into just how much information can be gleaned from the digital breadcrumbs we drop every day by creating an interactive map showing Spitz's movements and activities over a five month period based on mobile phone data and information freely available on the internet.

To get hold of his mobile phone data, Spitz sued his service provider, German telco giant Deutsche Telekom. He then provided the phone data, which included geolocation and time and date information, to Die Zeit who combined the data with information freely available on the internet – including Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites – that related to his life as a politician to create an interactive map of Spitz's movements and activities.

And before you start thinking a public figure like Spitz is going to generate more data than your average man in the street, you might want to take a moment to consider just how many tweets, blog posts and Facebook updates you fire off on a daily basis.

In the age of ubiquitous computing and technologies such as RFID chips, the ability for corporations and governments to track not only our movements but also our activities is only set to increase and raises questions about the rights of individuals to privacy in the digital age. But as shown by Die Zeit's interactive map, which was based on data collected from August 2009 to February 2010, the information required to form a pretty detailed picture of our lives is already out there.

Google's new CEO....

Larry Page takes over as CEO of Google today, with Eric Schmidt moving into the role of chairman.

The switch has been several months in the making; the company announced plans for the transition in January. Sergey Brin will continue on as co-founder.

Need A Brain Upgrade? Scientists Think They Know How

The human brain is a wonderful thing to taste er, test. That’s why a new paper explores the possibilities of improving memory by manipulating a specific enzyme. Why is this important? For starters, it could potentially open a new frontier of brain-specific medication.

Apple Sells 7.3 Million iPads During The Holiday Shopping Season

Apple yesterday announced their earnings for the last quarter, and as well as announcing a record profit of $6 billion Apple also announced that they sold a total of 7.3 million iPads in the holiday shopping season.

India’s first tidal power plant gets the go ahead

The Asian giant is on course to build a first in its region: a massive tidal power plant capable of producing 50MW. The name of the company tasked with such a grand undertaking is quite ironic too: Atlantis Resources Corporation, a UK engineering firm specializing in underwater turbines.

SanDisk Launches 128GB Flash Card

SanDisk has just launched their new range of Flash Cards with a massive 128GB of storage designed for use within top end DSLR cameras.

The cards are equipped with a Power Core controller that distributes data across the card more rapidly and efficiently and UDMA-7 interface providing a staggering 100 megabyte per second (MB/sec)2 write speed , allowing for longer continuos burst shooting. Its also allows for video recording for Full HD video, recording at a sustained 20MB/sec write speed.

As you can expect these cards dont come cheap and the 128GB SanDisk Extreme Pro CompactFlash card are currently available to pre-order of $1,499.99 and will start shipping later in the first quarter of 2011.

Say Hello To Parrot Asteroid: The Android Car Stereo

The Android powered Parrot Asteroid car stereo. It’s got a ton of juicy specs too. More after the jump.

Ahem! First, as indicated by the pic above, the Parrot Asteroid is a DIN-receiver with a detachable faceplate. See the physical control panel beside the touchscreen? Yup, that’s detachable.

New Samsung ZX310 9 Series Mobile Performance Laptop

Samsung unveiled its latest ZX310 9 Series premium lightweight laptop last week at CES. The new ZX310 9 Series is thinner than the Mac Book Air and is constructed from duralumin that is double the strength of aluminium and is used in the construction of aeroplanes.

At just 16.3mm thick and 1.31kg in weight, the ZX310 is one of the slimmest and lightest (for its size) laptops in the world yet there's still plenty packed inside.

Beneath the duralumin case lyes an Intel i7 processor, up to 8GB memory, a 256GB solid state drive and it has a 13.3 inch display. The Samsung ZX310 9 Series has been specifically designed with power users and mobile professionals in mind.

50,000 of Kerala's Teachers to Get Discounts on Laptops

Teachers in Kerala will soon be able to purchase their own laptops or netbooks at heavily discounted prices, according to a report by IANS.

An IT@School initiative, this scheme will supply around 50,000 notebooks and Netbooks to the educators in “God’s own Country”. It aims to provide schools with the latest tech-enabled education along with bringing in e-governance to the state’s Education department.

Laptops for all!

“A laptop will cost Rs. 17,770 and a netbook Rs. 11,450. The discount comes to as much as 36-37 percent,” said Anwar Sadath, head of IT@School. According to him, they’ve tied up with HCL, Wipro and RP Infosystems to provide the laptops and Netbooks. HCL and RP will be the ones contracted to supply the Netbooks. He also added that the laptops purchased under this scheme will carry a 3-year warranty instead of the standard one year and that the extended warranty will even include the power charger and the battery.

There’s a catch though (there’s always one, isn’t there?), if you can even call it a catch. The teachers who wish to partake in this scheme, according to The Hindu, need to have completed their training in IT and must receive backing from their head of the institute that they do indeed use IT during their classes. Untrained teachers can also apply for this scheme though, under the condition that they complete their IT training before June 2011.

Hey, that’s not too bad! It’s education all around and teachers aren’t exempt from it either because, as the old adage goes, you learn something new everyday.

Google Organizes Science Fair for Young Minds

You heard that right. Your favorite search engine, Google, has thrown its doors open for budding scientists. The company is looking for kids between the age group of 13 to 18, working alone or in groups of two and three to submit interesting and useful projects.

The Google Science Fair site can help you out with various details regarding the project.  The project should be submitted by the 4th of April 2011 and should contain either a two-minute video or a 20-slide presentation on what exactly your project does or what problem will it solve. You can check out a mock project submission on this link which demonstrates using an autonomous robot to transport various medical items.

Judges for the competition include Vint Cerf, Vice President of Google, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of CERN, inventor Dean Kamen and many more. The prizes include a National Geographic Expedition to the Galapagos Islands, a Once in a Lifetime Experience with one of the following partner organizations: CERN, Google, the LEGO Group, or Scientific American and even a scholarship from Google.

So if you have what it takes, you can always give Google Science Fair a try. Check out this neat video of the Google Science Fair below.

Apple's Iphone app store is challenged by rivals

Life is good outside the walled garden 

THE WALLED GARDEN that is Apple's Iphone app store is getting a good kicking by rival app stores run by Google, RIM and Nokia.
According to research company Distimo, the Android Market had the highest rate of overall growth, reaching 130,000 applications by 31 December or more than six times the number at the end of 2009.
Nokia's free applications increased by nine-fold, helping its total applications to more than triple to 25,000. This makes it the third-biggest apps line-up after Apple and Android.

While Apple's Iphone catalog includes almost 300,000 applications it is not growing at the same rate. Most new Iphone apps were for business, while the competitors added media and entertainment applications to counter Apple's dominance of the music and books markets.
Analysts Hendrik Koekkoek and Gert Jan Spriensma wrote that Blackberry's app store more than tripled in size last year to 18,000 apps, according to Distimo. Apple's Iphone offerings doubled.
The market share of free applications rose while the price of paid applications fell, the analysts said. Among the top 100 applications, prices declined by an average of nine per cent at the Android Market and by 61 per cent at Nokia's Ovi Store. The proportion of applications costing more than $5 fell to 15 per cent as of 31 December from 21 per cent a year earlier.

Porsche Unveils Spyder Hybrid, 918 RSR

Yesterday at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Porsche unveiled the 918 RSR hybrid racecar, which boasts peak performance of 767 horsepower.

"With the Porsche 918 RSR, the manufacturer of sporty premium vehicles is presenting a high-end synthesis of 2010's successful hybrid concepts," Porsche said in a statement. "The two-seater mid-engine coupé 918 RSR clearly reveals what happens when the technology fitted in the 911 GT3 R hybrid and the design of the 918 Spyder are transferred to a modern, innovative super sports car."

The Porsche 918 RSR is powered by a V8 engine, providing an output of 563-hp at 10,3000/rpm. Similar to the road-tested 911 GT3 R hybrid, the 918 RSR features a 36,000/rpm electric flywheel power generator positioned inside the cockpit on the passenger side.

Electric motors in the front two axels add 75 kilowatts of energy each. The racecar charges when these front wheels brake, triggering the motors to operate as generators. With the push of a button, the driver can extract this stored energy to supply an extra 150 kilowatts, peaking at 767-hp for eight-second bursts when fully charged.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between the 918 RSR and 2010's concept models is the design: the car is shelled in a new "liquid-metal chrome blue" color with Porsche's traditional orange hybrid stripes across the top. The number 22 painted on the side pays homage to a Porsche milestone: 
when Porsche racers Helmut Marko and Gijs van Lennep set a distance record in their Porsche 917 coupé, 5335.313 kilometres (3315.21 miles) at an average speed of 222.304 km/h (138.13 mph).

  No release date has been set but last year, Porsche publicly said it was "committed" to producing this concept car.

source: pcmag.com

Vodafone's secure customer database has been breached !

Vodafone has confirmed it believes its secure customer database has been breached by an employee or dealer who has shared the access password, revealing the personal details of millions of customers.

Vodafone chief executive, Nigel Dews, says he became aware the password to the online portal had been shared when the company was tipped-off on Saturday by a newspaper reporter.

He says an internal investigation is underway to work out who breached the system and how.

Passwords will also be reset.

Mr Dews says a full report will be delivered to him on Monday, but at this stage, he does not believe it is a widespread problem.

"It appears to have been a one-off incident, but we are investigating that thoroughly now and we will have a much better picture of that in the next 24 to 48 hours," he said.

"We take this data security issue very seriously."

"It's very important that we uphold the highest standards of data integrity for our customers."

Mr Dews says he is not concerned about the future of the brand despite the company also facing a class action over reception and service issues.

"As long as we look after our customers' data, our brand will certainly recover from this," he said.

"I'm not concerned about the brand at the moment, I'm mostly concerned about making sure our customers' records are safe.

"And that's why we're resetting those passwords every 24 hours.

"We want to make sure that our customers can feel as safe and secure while they're on Vodafone."

According to Fairfax newspapers, criminal groups are paying for the private information of some customers including home addresses and credit card details.

Others have also obtained logins to check their spouses' communications.

The details are reportedly accessible from any computer because they are kept on an internet site rather than Vodafone's internal system.

Mobile phone dealers have also admitted that anyone with full access to the system can look up a customer's bills and make changes to accounts.


Source: ABC newsonline 

Android transcends iPhone in the US

It has finally happened: Android has passed the iPhone as the most used mobile OS among US subscribers. Which wasn’t a total surprise: Android is available on hundreds of devices, while Apple only has the iPhone (and the 3G iPad as well). ComScore reports that there are 61.5 million smartphone subscribers in the U.S., 26 percent of those are on the Android platform, while 25 percent use an iPhone. Android apps are offered for free so more developers have turned to ads in order to monetize their work. 

61.5 million people in the US owned smartphones during the three months ending in November 2010, up 10 percent from the preceding three-month period. For the first time, more Americans are using phones running Google's Android operating system than Apple's iPhone, but RIM's BlackBerry is still in first place, according to comScore.

RIM fell from 37.6 percent to 33.5 percent market share of smartphones, Google captured second place among smartphone platforms by moving from 19.6 percent to 26.0 percent of US smartphone subscribers, and Apple slipped to third despite its growth from 24.2 percent to 25.0 percent of the market. Microsoft, in fourth place, fell into single digits from 10.8 percent to 9.0 percent while Palm was still last and further slipped from 4.6 percent to 3.9 percent.

 

                

Google recently acquired AdMob, but the deal is far from done. The FTC is still negotiating with Google, but it looks like our government will try to block the proposed acquisition.

Android highlights from the report include:

•  Two Android devices, the HTC Dream and HTC Magic, collectively represented 96% of Android traffic in September 2009. Seven months later, 11 devices represented 96% of Android traffic in the AdMob network.

• In March 2010, Android traffic share on the AdMob network was divided relatively evenly between the three primary versions of the Android OS: Android 1.5 (38%), Android 2.0 / 2.1 (35%) and Android 1.6 (26%). 

•  Motorola was the leading Android manufacturer with 44% share of traffic in March 2010 due to the success of the Droid and CLIQ. HTC was a close second with 43% of requests, followed by Samsung with 9%.

• The Android platform has experienced significant growth in monthly traffic over the past year. Android traffic has grown at a compounded monthly growth rate of 32% per month, going from 72 million requests in March 2009 to 2.0 billion in March 2010. 

• Two Android devices, the HTC Dream and HTC Magic, collectively represented 96% of Android traffic in September 2009. Seven months later, 11 devices represented 96% of Android traffic in the AdMob network. 

• The Motorola Droid was the leading Android handset in March 2010 and generated 32% of worldwide Android traffic. The Google Nexus One only generated 2% of Android traffic in March 2010. 

• The top Android devices vary by country. The top three devices in the US were the Motorola Droid, HTC Dream and Motorola CLIQ. In comparison, the top three Android devices in the UK were the HTC Hero, HTC Dream and HTC Magic.

source: Internet 

 

Apple's Mac App Store Hits One Million Downloads in First Day

Apple has announced that its recently released Mac App Store—literally, launched on January 6, 2011—racked up more than one million app downloads within a 24-hour time period. The figure's even more impressive given that the store itself only launched with, "more than 1,000 apps," as opposed to, say, 50,000 or something--that's a lot of multiple app downloading.

"We're amazed at the incredible response the Mac App Store is getting," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, in a press release distributed by the company. "Developers have done a great job bringing apps to the store and users are loving how easy and fun the Mac App Store is."

Evernote, makers of the identically named software that helps one keep track of to-do items, would have to agree with Jobs. According to the company, more than twice as many users have been signing up for its software using the Mac App Store than by previous methods, which includes both desktop and mobile downloads.

Richard Gaywood over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog slogged through 2,004 different apps in an attempt to generate deeper analytics as to what, exactly, makes up the core of Apple's app business. According to him, the predominant category in the Mac App Store is games, eating up around 600—or nearly one-third—of all programs present.

Utility-, productivity-, and entertainment-themed apps number around 200 a piece, but even this can be a bit of a misnomer, reports Gaywood. The Mac App Store might be set up into roughly 35 different categories of apps to download, but a number of apps can be found in multiple category listings. 

As far as pricing goes—another eye-opener for those accustomed to paying $1 or so for apps for their various mobile Apple devices—most apps on the Mac App Store live within the category of apps priced at $5 or under. Less than 100 of the apps Gaywood surveyed are free, and slightly over 300 cost anywhere from $10 to $50.

Only a scant few apps, less than 20, push past $100 within Apple's Mac App Store. And of these, the most expensive application is Distribute—"a single user, purchase, inventory and sales manager built exclusively for Mac OS X," reads the app's description. Picking up one copy of this app will set you back $700.

SMS of Death may kill your phone

The phones in many people's pockets today are miniature personal computers, and they are just as vulnerable as PCs to viruses, malware, and other security problems. But research presented at a conference in Germany last week shows that phones don't even have to be smart to be vulnerable to hackers.
 

Using only Short Message Service (SMS) communications—messages that can be sent between mobile phones—a pair of security researchers were able to force low-end phones to shut down abruptly and knock them off a cellular network. As well as text messages, the SMS protocol can be used to transmit small programs, called "binaries" that run on a phone. Network operators use these files to, for example, change the settings on a device remotely. The researchers used the same approach to attack phones. They performed their tricks on handsets made by Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Micromax, a popular Indian cell-phone manufacturer.

A number of largely theoretical attacks aimed at iPhones and Android devices have made headlines over the past few years. But smart phones make up only 16 percent of the devices in use. So-called feature phones—which can do more than make calls but run only software with limited functionality, enabling their users to do such things as send text messages and play games—account for the majority of around 5 billion mobile phones in use worldwide.

Feature phones are harder to attack than smart phones because of their limitations. Their processors are less powerful, and they have less memory capacity, so they must run simpler software, which often cannot be loaded unless the carrier gives permission. Feature phones also have more varied hardware and software idiosyncrasies than smart phones do.

The security researchers who presented their work at last week's conference, Collin Mulliner, a PhD student in the Security in Telecommunications department at the Technische Universitaet Berlin, and Nico Golde, an undergraduate student at the same institution, decided to attack feature phones over the air. They set up a miniature cellular network, using open-source software to create a base station with which to communicate with the phones. In order to broadcast malicious messages to them without putting other devices at risk, they shielded their communications by enclosing their network in a Faraday cage, which blocks radio signals.

Having a private cell network also helped Mulliner and Golde study the software running on low-end phones. By monitoring the way the phones communicated with their base station, they could discern important information about how the phones worked and how SMS messages could affect them.

The researchers were able to create malicious SMS messages for each type of phone they studied. The messages affect the phones without any response from the user. Because feature phones are so common, Mulliner says, such an attack "could take out a large percentage of mobile communications."

To target a specific user, an attacker would need to know what kind of phone he or she uses, since each platform requires a different message. But Mulliner says that attackers could easily knock out large numbers of phones by sending a set of five SMS messages—targeted to the five most popular models—to every device on a specific network. Mulliner notes that there are Internet-based services that send SMS messages en masse either cheaply or free, making it possible for an antagonist with limited resources to carry out such an attack from anywhere in the world.

"The only people who can defend against this attack are the network operators," Mulliner says. To prevent problems, operators would have to update the firmware on existing phones or else filter out potentially disruptive SMS messages traveling across their networks. The latter approach would be difficult, he says, because filtering software, generally used to catch spam, is not optimized to catch binaries.

Mulliner and Golde say they contacted network operators and manufacturers months before their talk but were told it wasn't possible to get fixes ready in time.

Because feature phones are so widespread, the problems found by Mulliner and Golde could affect a lot of people, Miller says. Still, attackers would find it difficult to steal personal information or take control of the phones. In contrast, SMS vulnerabilities in iPhones and Windows Mobile-based HTC devices enable an attacker to take over phones, Miller says, citing research that he and Mulliner conducted a couple of years ago. Defending against mass attacks on feature phones may in practice prove enormously difficult. Aurélien Francillon, a researcher in the system security group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, says, "Most of those phones don't have automated updates, and when they do, patches are not made available quickly."

High-end smart phones are more likely to be configured to automatically install updates to protect against attacks, he says. Francillon believes that the vulnerabilities that Mulliner found on feature phones "may remain open for a very long time before they are corrected on end users' phones—if ever."

Intel promises DirectX11 for Ivy Bridge processors

Intel's latest Core processors feature integrated high-def graphics...but folks will have to wait for the next generation for DirectX11.

Intel’s big technology introduction for CES his year is its latest Core processors with integrated high-definition graphics capabilities designed to give AMD and Nvidia some competition in the performance graphics market. However, AMD has managed to steal some thunder with its low-powered Fusion chips that take on Intel’s Atom line and offer DirectX11 graphics support. Now, Intel is saying its integrated graphics controllers will get DirectX11 support too—but folks will have to wait until the next generation of CPUs, dubbed “Ivy Bridge.”

In an interview with IDG News service, Intel VP and PC Client group general manager Mooly Eden said Intel plans to offer DirectX11 support in the next generation of its processors for notebook and desktop computers, which should start shipping to OEMs and system integrators late in 2011—meaning they aren’t likely to get to consumers until 2012. The current Sandy Bridge chips offer support for DirectX10.1; Eden characterized the decision as timely, noting that it gives times for more applications to integrate support for DirectX11 and comparatively little software supports DirectX11 today. However, popular PC games are already supporting DirectX11…and the fact that AMD’s low-power Fusion chip was able to bring DirectX11 to the table now doesn’t make Intel’s graphics solution seem all that great in comparison.

In addition to providing more advanced graphical capabilities for games and other media-centric tasks, DirectX11 includes methods that enable everyday applications to tap into the parallel computing capabilities of graphics chips for everyday tasks.

Intel says the forthcoming Ivy Bridge chip line will be manufactured using a 22nm process, making them smaller and even more power-efficient than the Sandy Bridge chips, built using a 32nm process.

PHP Bug may crash a Srever

A newly unearthed bug in certain versions of the PHP scripting language could crash servers when the software is given the task of converting a large floating point number, raising the possibility that the glitch could be exploited by hackers.

The bug will cause the PHP processing software to enter an infinite loop when it tries to convert the series of digits "2.2250738585072011e-308" from the string format into the floating point format.

At least one PHP user has commented that a malicious user could crash a server running PHP by feeding this digit to the PHP processor through the language's get function.

The bug only seems to affect version 5.2 and 5.3 of the language, and only when they are run on Intel 32-bit CPUs that use the x87 instruction set.

To fix the problem, users can download patches for those versions or recompile PHP with additional flags for handling floating point digits.

Computer scientist Rick Regan first reported the bug on Monday, and the PHP development team issued patches the following day.

Regan speculated that this particular number is troublesome because it is the "largest subnormal double-precision floating-point number." In general, floating point digits are a challenge for developers to handle correctly, given the complex and differing techniques compilers and hardware instruction sets render such numbers.

What’s Special About 2.2250738585072011e-308?

2.2250738585072011e-308 represents the largest subnormal double-precision floating-point number; written as a hexadecimal floating-point constant, it’s 0x0.fffffffffffffp-1022. 2.2250738585072011e-308 is one of five 17-digit decimal values that convert (correctly) to 0x0.fffffffffffffp-1022:

2.2250738585072007e-308

2.2250738585072008e-308

2.2250738585072009e-308

2.2250738585072010e-308

2.2250738585072011e-308

Only 2.2250738585072011e-308 causes the problem. It happens to be the largest of the five decimal values