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

Car Theft by ANTENNAs?

Car thieves of the future might be able to get into a car and drive away without forced entry and without needing a physical key, according to new research that will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium next month in San Diego, California. The researchers successfully attacked eight car manufacturers' passive keyless entry and start systems—wireless key fobs that open a car's doors and start the engine by proximity alone. Srdjan Capkun, an assistant professor of computer science in the system security group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, who led the work, says he was inspired to investigate the security of keyless entry and start systems after buying a car that had one. Capkun and Aurélien Francillon and Boris Danev, both researchers in the same institution, examined 10 car models from the eight manufacturers. They were able to access all 10 and drive them away by intercepting and relaying signals from the cars to their wireless keys. While they could relay the signals from the key back to the car as well, usually they did not need to because the key transmits its signals up to around 100 meters. The attack works no matter what cryptography and protocols the key and car use to communicate with each other. Normally, when a wireless key is within a few meters of the right car, it detects a low-powered signal that causes it to issue a command that opens the car enable the ignition. The researchers used a pair of antennas to transmit these signals from the car to the key when the key was farther away, tricking the car into opening without the ordinary authorization. One antenna needs to be very close to the car, and one needs to be within eight meters of the key. The researchers came up with two versions of the attack. In one, they ran a cable from near the car to near the key and used it to transmit the signals. They conducted the other wirelessly. Francillon says that the materials for the wired attack cost about $50, and those for the wireless attack cost between $100 and $1,000, depending on the electronic components used. The researchers tested a few scenarios. An attacker could watch a parking lot and have an accomplice watch as car owners as entered a nearby store. The accomplice would only need to be within eight meters of the targeted owner's key fob, making it easy to avoid arousing suspicion. In another scenario, a car owner might leave a car key on a table near a window. An antenna placed outside the house was able to communicate with the key, allowing the researchers then to start the car parked out front and drive away. A car won't open or start if the signal from its key takes too long to arrive, so the researchers devised a way to speed communication between their antennas. Most relay attacks require the signals to be converted from analog to digital and back, which takes time. The researchers were able to keep the signals in analog format, which reduced their delay from microseconds to nanoseconds and made their attack more difficult to detect. The researchers suggest things that car owners and manufacturers can do to protect themselves. Car owners can shield their keys when they're not in use, to prevent attackers from communicating with them. Alternatively, manufacturers could add a button to fobs that would allow owners to deactivate and reactivate them. Capkun worries, however, that these types of solutions detract from the convenience that makes passive keyless entry systems worthwhile. Ultimately, he says, manufacturers will need to add secure technology that allows the car to confirm that the key is in fact nearby. "I don't see a way around it," Capkun says. His group is actively working on protocols that would accomplish this. David Wagner, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied the cryptographic systems used in keyless entry systems, says the research "should help car manufacturers improve auto security systems in the future." Wagner doesn't think the research ought to make car owners anxious. "There are probably easier ways to steal cars," he says. But, he adds, a "nasty aspect of high-tech car theft" is that "it doesn't leave any sign of forced entry," so if a thief did use this method to steal a car, he says, it might be hard for police and insurance companies to get sufficient evidence of what happened. Wagner believes that manufacturers, police, and insurance companies all need to prepare for this eventuality. "Automobiles are a key example of a system that is pervasively computerized," so they need to be thoroughly examined to ensure they are secure, says Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Washington. Kohno helped form the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security, which is dedicated to identifying and solving security problems with car security systems before they cause problems in the real world.

Hackers find a new way to cheat on WALL STREET!

High-frequency trading networks, which complete stock market transactions in microseconds, are vulnerable to manipulation by hackers who can inject tiny amounts of latency into them. By doing so, they can subtly change the course of trading and pocket profits of millions of dollars in just a few seconds, says Rony Kay, a former IBM research fellow and founder of cPacket Networks, a Silicon Valley firm that develops chips and technologies for network monitoring and traffic analysis.

Kay, an Israeli-born computer scientist and one-time Intel engineering manager, says the root of the problem is the increasing speed of networks; as they get faster and faster, our ability to actually understand events taking place within them isn't keeping up. Network monitoring technology can detect perturbations in network traffic happening in milliseconds, but when changes occur in microseconds, they're not visible, he says.

cPacket has developed a proof of concept showing that these side-channel attacks can be used to create tiny delays in the transmission of market data and trades. By manipulating specific trading activities by several microseconds, an attacker could gain unfair trading advantage. And because the operation occurs outside the range of monitoring technology, it would remain invisible. "We believe that such techniques pose a substantial risk of creating unfair trading, if used by the wrong people," Kay says.

Latency threatens other applications as well

The lack of visibility into high-speed networks is of concern to more than the financial community. Managing traffic on today's 10Gbps and faster networks is becoming difficult, resulting in degradations of performance, particularly to virtualized systems. "It's difficult to take corrective actions when you can't really see what's taking place," Kay says. "If you cannot measure network latency, you cannot control it and cannot improve it."

In a PDF whitepaper on latency, Kay wrote, "Traditionally, applications that have latency requirements include: VoIP and interactive video conferencing, network gaming, high-performance computing, cloud computing, and automatic algorithmic trading. For example, one-way latency for VoIP telephony should generally not exceed 150 milliseconds (0.15 seconds) to enable good conversation quality, while interactive games typically require latencies between 100 and 1,000 milliseconds. However, the requirements for automated algorithmic trading are much more strict. A few extra milliseconds, or even a few extra microseconds, can enable trades to execute ahead of the competition, thereby increasing profits."

Indeed, latency, even at the very highest speeds, is so concerning that researchers at MIT recommended any organization dealing in complicated time-sensitive global interactions should take a hard look at where they locate their data centers.

The MIT researchers even suggested that financial firms could gain some advantage by taking advantage of limitations posed by the speed of light. For example, it typically takes about 50 milliseconds to send a message from New York to London. Placing a server between the two could cut the speed of communication in half, they said, which may be enough time to take advantage of some momentary pricing discrepancy. Trading on that discrepancy is known as arbitrage, and it's becoming increasingly common.

A side-channel attack on a high-frequency trading network is analogous to a denial-of-service attack. In a typical DoS attack, bots flood a target website with enormous numbers of hits, often causing a crash. A side-channel attack would be infinitely more subtle, but it would still function by adding extraneous packets to a legitimate data stream. Those extra packets slow the data just enough to give someone else a chance to move first in the market.