David Adams Archive

Best Buy Tells HP to Take Back Its TouchPads

Wireless 115 Comments
Ars Technica is reporting that US Retailer Best Buy has been able to sell less than 10% of the TouchPad tablets that it ordered from HP, and now wants HP to take them back. Similarly, deal-a-day site Woot offered TouchPads at a very aggressive price, and only managed to sell 612 of them. This is for a site that often sells out goofy tech widgets in hours. When the TouchPad was gearing up for release, there seemed to be a fair amount of interest among geeks. Is it just that it hasn't resonated the same way with the general public, or have people just been disappointed once they've put their hands on one?
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Search Engine Hack Innovation

  Submitted by HAL2001 Privacy, Security No Comments
Hackers armed with a browser and specially crafted search queries are using botnets to generate more than 80,000 daily queries, identify potential attack targets and build an accurate picture of the resources within that server that are potentially exposed. By automating the query and result parsing, the attacker can carry out a large number of search queries, examine the returned results and get a filtered list of potentially exploitable sites in a very short time and with minimal effort. Because searches are conducted using botnets, and not the hacker's IP address, the attacker's identity remains concealed.
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Two Years With Linux BFS

  Submitted by Michael Linux 9 Comments
This month marks the two-year anniversary of the release of BFS, the Brain Fuck Scheduler, for the Linux kernel. While BFS has not been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, the scheduler is still actively maintained by Con Kolivas and patches are updated for new kernel releases. The BFS scheduler has also reached mild success and adoption over the past two years. In this article is a fresh look at the Brain Fuck Scheduler along with a fresh round of benchmarks from the Linux 3.0 kernel.
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IE 9 Best Option Against Web-Based Malware Attacks

  Submitted by HAL2001 Internet Explorer 9 Comments
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 has proved once again to be the best choice when it comes to catching attacks aimed at making the user download Web-based malware. This claim was made by NSS Labs in the recently released results of a test conducted globally from May 27 through June 10 of the current year, which saw five of the most popular Web browsers pitted against each other. Windows Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), Google Chrome 12, Mozilla Firefox 4, Apple Safari 5 and Opera 11 were tested with 1,188 malicious URLs - links that lead to a download that delivers a malicious payload or to a website hosting malware links.
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Integrated Circuit That Doesn’t Require a Battery

  Submitted by sawboss Hardware 2 Comments
Researchers at the Virginia Commonwleth University have come up with . . . a circuit that requires such little power all it needs is the ambient energy in an environment to run. In other words, it can run without need of a power lead or battery, relying instead on some energy constant in the environment in which it functions e.g. the human body. In order to create something that can run on such low, ambient energy, you need to use electronics that require next to no power to function. So instead of the typical charge-based electronic switches used today, the researchers turned to spin transport electronics, more commonly known as spintronics.
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AMD Eschews Smartphones, Tiptoes Towards Tablets

Hardware 5 Comments
Last week, Rick Bergman, general manager of AMD's Product Group, noted that while AMD was excited about the growth opportunities it saw within the tablet market, it had no plans to enter the smartphone space. Bergman's comments are a reassuring indication that the company hasn't concocted a harebrained scheme to charge off into a market it can't currently compete in. The emerging tablet market is a different matter.
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Chrome 14 Brings Native Code to the Web

Google 14 Comments
Google has released Chrome 14 to the Chrome beta testing channel, which includes, among other new features, the initial beta release of Google's "Native Client" technology, first announced in 2010 . . . Native Client is a set of open source tools that allow Chrome to run compiled C and C++ code the same way the browser currently runs JavaScript or other common web programming languages. Native Code offers both a security sandbox and a set of interfaces that provide C and C++ bindings to the capabilities of HTML5. That means web application developers will be able to tap into desktop libraries to create faster, more powerful web apps.
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A Look Into Black Hat’s Wireless Network

  Submitted by HAL2001 Privacy, Security 7 Comments
Aruba Networks, which provided and maintained the wireless network for last week's Black Hat USA 2011 conference, today provided some interesting statistics around the network's use. Apple devices were most prevalent at 43.3 percent of all devices (28.4 percent alone for iOS iPad and iPhone, with another 14.9 percent running OS X). Linux users composed 35 percent of the total, while Windows users represented 21.8 percent. While the majority of attendees used the Black Hat PSK network, almost 200 attendees utilized the PEAP/EAP-TLS "secured" network. Aruba captured a huge amount of security events, the most interesting of which were IP spoofing, AP spoofing, Power save DoS attacks and Block ACK attacks. Talk about a hostile environment.
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Nokia’s Drastic U.S. Steps: No N9, No Symbian, No Low-End Devices

  Submitted by glarepate Wireless 31 Comments
The beleaguered handset maker Nokia is setting itself up for what it hopes will be a lean and mean relaunch in the U.S. later this year: it has finally admitted that it will not launch its newest N9 device--the first and possibly only one based on the MeeGo platform--and that it plans to end sales of its Symbian-based devices as well as low-end Series 40 handsets, as it prepares for a generation of devices it is developing using Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform.
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