Archive for May, 2010

An Overview of Exploit Packs

Today’s cybercriminals frequently use “exploit packs” to easily snare victims for their botnets. Users with underprotected computers who visit booby-trapped websites become the latest botnet zombies. I often receive requests asking me which exploit packs are current and which vulnerabilities they use.
To answer these inquiries, I’ve created a table that lists the exploits referenced by [...]

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Please Rob Me: Blippy

Blippy recently had a small data breach which merely underscored the risks of a growing segment of social networks which showcases your toys…
How a burglar or other thief sees Blippy:

Charles Jeter, Securing Our eCity Contributing Writer

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Test Toot Suite: Antivirus Vendors Blowing Own Horn

Of course, most vendors use in-house testing as a tool for monitoring and improving the capabilities of their own products. However, it’s also being used increasingly as a vehicle for showcasing a company’s own AV products in the best possible light.

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Test Toot Suite: Antivirus Vendors Blowing Own Horn

Of course, most vendors use in-house testing as a tool for monitoring and improving the capabilities of their own products. However, it’s also being used increasingly as a vehicle for showcasing a company’s own AV products in the best possible light.

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Facebook Changes… but not yet

Recently Charles Jeter blogged here about some new Facebook privacy controls.
I decided to check and see if the new controls were rolled out. The first thing I noticed was that Facebook noticed I was not logging in from my normal location and wanted to ask me a few “security questions”. Hmmm, ok. The first [...]

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Easy Online Backup

Backup that saves your files off-site is one cloud computing service everyone should consider. Here are a handful of our most recent online backup reviews.

Online backup ranks among the most popular software topics on PCMag.com. It’s no surprise, since all the numbers point to the need for backing up your treasured files: Every year, 43 percent of computer users lose irreplaceable data. Why? Because users don’t perform regular, frequent backups. An Iomega study showed that 69 percent of home users back up once a month or less.

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Easy Online Backup

Backup that saves your files off-site is one cloud computing service everyone should consider. Here are a handful of our most recent online backup reviews.

Online backup ranks among the most popular software topics on PCMag.com. It’s no surprise, since all the numbers point to the need for backing up your treasured files: Every year, 43 percent of computer users lose irreplaceable data. Why? Because users don’t perform regular, frequent backups. An Iomega study showed that 69 percent of home users back up once a month or less.

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Google @ Intel ISEF 2010

“On Monday, several thousand high school students will descend on San Jose for this year’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). A project of the Society for Science & the Public, Intel ISEF brings together more than 1,500 high school students from over 50 countries to showcase and discuss their research and compete for millions of dollars in prizes. We’re particularly excited about this event because this year Google is the Premier Sponsor and Silicon Valley Host of the event.

We’re getting ready to launch an action-packed week of events and activities that celebrate the accomplishments of the Intel ISEF finalists and the role that technology plays in the future of science. Our schedule includes:

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Intel’s Moorestown Atom Opens New Front in Smartphone Competition

Intel yesterday officially announced its Atom Z600 family of processors, along with the platform that supports it, known as Moorestown. It’s a big and long-awaited move, one Intel hopes will help it compete in the high-end smartphone and tablet market. But although Moorestown is a step in the right direction, Intel still faces a lot of challenges in its competition with ARM-based processors for the smartphone market.
The Moorestown platform is based around the Atom Z600 family of processors, which Intel calls a “system-on-chip” (SoC). This processor (known as Lincroft) is a 45nm chip that combines a single CPU core with integrated 3D graphics, video encode and decode, memory, and display controllers. The platform also includes an I/O Controller Hub (MP20, known as Langwell) along with a power management chip called a Mixed Signal IC. Makers of smartphones or tablets would then have to add to it various wireless options, depending on the types and networks they want to support, along with a screen, antennas, memory, and so on.

In other words, Moorestown is more integrated than Intel’s previous Atom-based platforms, but it still involves a number of chips to create a full system. Pretty much every smartphone relies on separate chips for applications processing and for wireless options, but many of today’s chips are more integrated, and some are available with the memory as part of the package. In other words, this still isn’t quite as integrated as some of the competitors, so it’s more suited for larger smartphones and tablets than for smaller units. Intel hopes to address this with the next version, codenamed Medfield, which will integrate the controller hub onto the processor.

Intel says the new platform requires significantly lower power to run than the previous-generation Atom, including a 50-times reduction in idle power, 20-times reduction in audio power, and a 2-to-3-times reduction in browsing and audio. The company says it delivers higher performance, particularly for JavaScript and graphics, and support for 1080p video decoding and 720p video recording. Intel says it provides a ‘PC-like visual experience’ while operating in a smaller power envelope.

The Z600 family is available at a number of frequencies, ranging up to 1.5 GHz for high-end smartphones and 1.9 GHz for tablets and ‘Mobile Internet Devices.’ That high-end part in particular should be faster than the ARM-based designs we’ve seen to date–but even Intel’s own positioning points out that it is destined for larger machines.

Obviously, we’ll have to wait to see final device to really tell battery life and to see how it performs in the real world, but this should be a step in the right direction. However, since I saw the first demonstration of Moorestown a year ago, we’ve seen a number of more powerful ARM-based processors running at up to 1 GHz, including the Qualcomm Snapdragon, Nvidia Tegra 2, and the Apple A4. In addition, a number of chip designers are working on ARM-based processors with two or more cores.

More important may be the question of software, particularly in the smartphone market. Intel has made a big deal of the fact that the Atom is an Intel Architecture (x86) processor, that there are huge numbers of applications designed to work on this architecture, and that indeed virtually every Internet site works on x86. But the vast majority of those applications are designed for Windows or Macintosh computers, not phones. Meanwhile, the phone vendors and the applications makers are all pretty used to writing for ARM-based phones, and this is something different.

Intel says the new platform is designed to work with its Moblin version of Linux, MeeGo OS http://blogs.pcmag.com/miller/2010/02/mwc_smartphone_platform_compet.php (an open source combination of Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo), and Android. But of course, even applications written for Maemo and Android will need to be tested on the new platform.

Now these are indeed big challenges. But Intel has some unique advantages as well, including that huge base of x86 software compatibility, its advanced manufacturing technology, its relationships with many hardware makers, and of course, the performance of the parts.

I can easily imagine Atom Z600-based tablets running Android or even full Windows that could be smaller than today’s tablet PCs but that run faster than the iPad or the other ARM-based tablets we’ve seen. I expect we will see at least a few smartphones, likely fairly large devices, aimed at the very high end of the market. Still, if the software issues are resolved and the battery life really is as good as Intel claims, such machines could be more powerful than today’s smartphones. However, it seems unlikely any large smartphone maker will make a
Moorestown-based the focus of their line this year.

Over the next few months, we should see devices based on the new platform. It’s only then that we’ll be able to judge how well it really works.

Here’s ExtremeTech’s take and a more detailed history from AnandTech.

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Twittelator: Best Twitter app for iPad

Twittelator is a new twitter app for iPad with lots of new features. Twittelator’s iPad version offers support for multiple Twitter accounts, in-line viewing of linked images, conversation view, the ability to view nearby tweets on a map, and auto-splitting of longer tweets, among other features. Also new in this update is a “Channels” area that collects must-follow Twitter accounts into various categories and subcategories like “Business,” “Health,” “Sports,” “Tech,” “Coffee & Tea,” “Cloud Computing,” and, of course, “Apple.” This Channels feature is a killer way to help new Twitter users find good accounts to follow, and it’s built right into the app.

See Also: 59 Twitter Mobile Apps

See Also: 110+ Best Twitter Tools

Features:-

Auto-ReTweet or editable ReTweets

Twitter Lists: create, edit, load – see other’s too

Geotag tweets and get maps of users

Video: record, edit and tweet video

Create and tweet audio clips and photos

Unlimited drafts and offline tweeting

Create lists of friends

Follow lists and see who’s following you in their lists

Post map of your location

Built-in browser to view links, movies, audio

Get details and follow any user

Find nearby tweeters and map their location

Advanced searching (save them too)

Email, ReTweet, and copy tweets

Trending Topics

Stock Portfolio

English, Español, Deutsche and ???

Download Twittelator for iPad here

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