Category: Computers, Science & Technology

Now, we’re talkin’! More storage, more storage! (Like “mo’ power, mo’ power!”) Can haz?

Seagate Announces World’s First 4-Terabyte External Hard Drive

“Seagate announced the first 4-terabyte external hard drive in the market on Wednesday, paired with a USB 3.0 adapter for speedy data transfers.

The new GoFlex Desk drive costs $249.99, and will be available from ‘select online retailers’ later this month. A GoFlex Desk version for the Mac includes FireWire 800 – not Thunderbolt – as well as a USB 2.0 interface. That version will be on store shelves by the end of the month, Seagate said.

Seagate sells its FireWire 800 / USB 2.0 adapter for $49.99 on its Web site, and a USB 3.0 adapter for $39.99 on the site as well. Each of the GoFlex Desk drives also ships in a ‘drive only’ configuration if a user already has the adapter, although Seagate doesn’t currently list a price for the 4-terabyte model. The 3-TB model only shaves $10 off the price for the ‘drive only’ configuration, however.

The new GoFlex Drive includes a surprisingly elegant industrial design, one that reminds me of a Art Deco-styled skyscraper rather than a desktop hard drive – at least in the press photo that Seagate published. That design will roll out to the other drives in the GoFlex family in the coming weeks, Seagate said.

‘Yet another industry first for Seagate, we have reached a new high-capacity in the 3.5-inch hard drive form factor,’ said Patrick Connolly, vice president and general manager of retail products for Seagate, in a statement. ‘At Seagate, we are committed to pushing the limits for our customers and will continue to adapt and innovate our products based on customer needs. This latest GoFlex Desk drive offering, with its new industry-leading capacity point, is a statement of our continued commitment to meet consumer needs.'”

The sites themselves weren’t hacked, but the DNS entries were mis-directed on some popular web sites, such as: The Register, The Daily Telegraph, and UPS.

DNS hack hits popular websites: Telegraph, Register, UPS, etc

“Popular websites including The Register, The Daily Telegraph, UPS, and others have fallen victim to a DNS hack that has resulted in visitors being redirected to third-party webpages.

Part of the message reads:

TurkGuvengligi – ‘Gel Babana’ – HACKED – ‘h4ck1n9 is not a cr1m3’

‘4 Sept. We TurkGuvenligi declare this day as World Hackes Day – Have fun ;) h4ck y0u’

(In fact, this kind of vandalism IS a crime.)

Further websites which have been affected include National Geographic, BetFair and Acer.

It’s important to note that the websites themselves have *not* been hacked, although to web visitors there is little difference in what they experience – a webpage under the control of hackers.

Instead of managing to breach the website, the hackers have managed to change the DNS records for the various sites affected.

DNS records work like a telephone book, converting human-readable website names like nakedsecurity.sophos.com into a sequence of numbers understandable by the internet. What seems to have happened is that someone changed the lookup, so when you entered telegraph.co.uk or theregister.co.uk into your browser you were instead taken to a website that wasn’t under the control of those websites.

Because of the way that DNS works, it may take some time for corrected DNS entries for the affected websites to propagate worldwide – meaning there could be problems for some hours ahead.

In many ways we have to be grateful that the message displayed appears to be graffiti, rather than an attempt to phish information from users or install malware.”

One common thing appears to be that the affected sites were registered via NetNames… the vendor has had no comment on this as of yet.

Ahem! Well, I suppose there are some uses for it. If you don’t mind the slight illegality of downloading and viewing video off the torrents, that is!

World’s First BitTorrent Certified Digital TV Launches

“The world’s first Digital TV with ‘BitTorrent inside’ will be presented to the public tomorrow at the IFA trade show for consumer electronics in Berlin. The TV is manufactured by Vestel and uses technology from BitTorrent Inc. that allows consumers to find, download and play their favorite digital media directly on their television.

Early 2011 BitTorrent Inc., the company behind the popular file-sharing client uTorrent, launched a new all-in-one ecosystem for BitTorrent-certified products codenamed Chrysalis.

By using a certified application users can search for files that are shared on BitTorrent, download these files, and play them directly on their computers, TV or mobiles devices. Everything is bundled into one system and downloaders don’t have to worry about conversion, codecs or file-formats.

Today BitTorrent Inc. and TV manufacturer Vestel announce the launch of the first digital TV that will come with this built-in BitTorrent support. By embedding BitTorrent technology directly into the the TV hardware the two companies hope to appeal to a wide audience of people who are looking for an even more simple way to enjoy downloaded content in their living room.”

This could finally give the iPad a run for its money, since it costs HALF what an iPad costs! Zowie!

Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It.

“It’s called simply the ‘Amazon Kindle.’ But it’s not like any Kindle you’ve seen before. It displays content in full color. It has a 7-inch capacitive touch screen. And it runs Android.

Rumors of Amazon making a full-fledged tablet device have persisted for a while. I believe we were one of the first to report on the possibility from a credible source — the same person who accurately called Amazon’s Android Appstore. That source was dead-on again, it just took Amazon longer than anticipated to get the device ready to go. They’re now close.

How do I know all of this? Well, not only have I heard about the device, I’ve seen it and used it. And I’m happy to report that it’s going to be a big deal. Huge, potentially.

First of all, before every commenter asks, no, sadly, I don’t have any pictures to share. That was the one condition of me getting this information. So instead you’ll have to rely on my prose to draw a picture of the device in your head. Or you can just look at a BlackBerry PlayBook — because it looks very similar in terms of form-factor.

So here’s what I know and what I saw:

Again, the device is a 7-inch tablet with a capacitive touch screen. It is multi-touch, but from what I saw, I believe the reports that it relies on a two-finger multi-touch (instead of 10-finger, like the iPad uses) are accurate. This will be the first Kindle with a full-color screen. And yes, it is back-lit. There is no e-ink to be found anywhere on this device.

Earlier this week, reports suggested that a 7-inch Amazon tablet could be released in October, with a larger, 10-inch version to follow next year. That’s somewhat accurate. As of right now, Amazon’s only definitive plan is to release this 7-inch Kindle tablet and they’re targeting the end of November to do that. The version I saw was a DVT (Design Verification Testing) unit. These have started floating around the company. It’s ready, they’re just tweaking the software now. If it’s not in production yet, it will be very soon.”

Yep, you read that right… they are actually dropping back to FC Pro 3! Talk about an epic fail of a product in FC Pro X!

Apple quietly puts Final Cut Studio back on sale

“In a move to sell off existing stock, Apple is once again selling Final Cut Studio 3, the professional video-editing software it discontinued earlier this year.

Macrumors noted today that Apple put the software bundle on sale, despite having discontinued it months earlier with the release of Final Cut Pro X. The software is only being made available through Apple’s phone sales, and not its online or retail stores, the blog notes. The price is $999, which is what the bundle cost before the release of Final Cut Pro X.

An Apple spokeswoman told CNET that the software was still retired.

‘As we’ve done before with many end-of-life software products, we have a limited quantity of Final Cut Studio still available through Apple telesales to customers who need them for ongoing projects,’ the spokeswoman said.

Apple released Final Cut Pro X as a $299 Mac App Store exclusive in June. Some longtime users felt like the newer version was too much of a departure from previous versions of the software, and responded with criticisms both online and in their reviews of the software. The software was even the butt of a joke by late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien, whose staff produced a video parody of its new features. Apple responded with a frequently asked questions page that noted additional features would be added in future versions of the software.

Apple faced a similar backlash in the transition from iMovie HD 6 to iMovie ’09, with the newer version of the bundled iLife software undergoing a complete overhaul. As a result, Apple offered a free downloadable copy of iMovie HD 6 to users who wanted to continue to use the older version while upgrading to the rest of the iLife suite.”

We’ll see… but I am, at least, hopeful!

Firefox 8 is 20% faster than Firefox 5, matches Chrome 14

“Firefox 8, which only just appeared on the Nightly channel, is already 20% faster than Firefox 5 in almost every metric: start up, session restore, first paint, JavaScript execution, and even 2D canvas and 3D WebGL rendering. The memory footprint of Firefox Seven (and thus Eight) has also been drastically reduced, along with much-needed improvements to garbage collection.

According to our own benchmarks, start up, session restore, and first paint — how long it takes Firefox to appear after you click its icon, and how long it takes to re-open your previous tabs — have been continuously tackled since Firefox 7 first emerged, about two months ago. There’s a 10% difference between Firefox 5 and 7 — and a further 10% speed-up between FF7 and FF8. This isn’t merely an under-the-hood, synthetic-benchmark, on-paper thing either: the difference between FF5 and FF8 is very, very noticeable.

On the 2D canvas front, the huge 20% speed-up is due to the addition of a new graphics backend in Firefox 7 called Azure, which is a unified 2D graphics API that Firefox can use across every platform. At the moment, Cairo handles the interface between Firefox and the host OS’s 2D rendering libraries. Cairo’s performance on top of Direct2D (Windows 7/Vista) is excellent, but it’s not great on either XP or Mac OS X. Azure removes the Direct2D and Quartz (OS X) go-between and allows Firefox to write directly to the underlying 3D subsystems (Direct3D and OpenGL). At the moment, the performance gains are around 20% on Windows — but on OS X, the gains could be even higher. You can follow the Azure implementation on Bugzilla to keep up with the latest changes.”

A cloud based file storage area? Sounds cool, innovative… well, it would have been if Google had rolled it out in 2006! But wait! They might yet!

Google May Be On The Verge Of Resurrecting “GDrive”

“In 2006, Google was internally testing a project codenamed ‘Platypus,’ an online storage service. When it was accidentally disclosed during an analyst meeting as ‘GDrive,’ it quickly captured the web’s imagination. Google seemed on the verge of transforming their servers into our own personal hard drives in the cloud. Plenty of startups were working on this (and still are), but the presumption was that Google would be able to scale this beyond anyone else and do it for free, or very cheap. Google refused to talk about it, but story after story after story kept coming.

Then something weird happened: GDrive never actually launched.

It wasn’t until earlier this year that we found out what happened, thanks to Steven Levy’s book In The Plex. In 2008, GDrive was about to launch under Bradley Horowitz (now a lead on Google+), but Sundar Pichai (now the SVP of Chrome) convinced Google’s top executives not to launch it. The reason? He felt like the concept of a ‘file’ was outdated (sounds more than a bit Jobsian) in the cloud-based universe that Google was trying to build. After some debate, the powers that be at Google agreed and GDrive was shelved, and the team moved over to the Chrome team.

End of story, right? Not so fast.

Something curious appeared this evening in the Chromium Code Reviews issue list. As first noted by Nick Semenkovich on Twitter, there was a ticket to add the URL drive.google.com to a list in the browser’s code. This URL (which is not yet live) lead to a Hacker News thread wondering: ‘Google Drive coming soon?’

Diving a bit deeper into the code reviews, what’s most striking is that drive.google.com doesn’t appear to be referenced anywhere besides this one exposed ticket. This suggests that it’s either no big deal, or that Google is keeping this very secret.

I don’t think it’s the former because the messaging in the one ticket indicates that drive.google.com has been added to the HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) list alongside other key Google apps like docs.google.com and spreadsheets.google.com. Another bit of code puts it alongside Android Market and Google Analytics.

Google information security engineer, Chris Evans, completed the ticket this evening. And Chrome engineer Adam Langley approved it with the message ‘LGTM’ (Looks Good To Me).

I reached out to Pichai (who again, is now a Google senior executive in charge of Chrome), but he declined to comment. A Google spokesperson would only say, ‘The team is always testing out new features, but we don’t have any details to share at this time.'”

No, really. That is what they are doing at NASA these days. They pulled the plug on manned space exploration, but they are warning about global warming alien destruction. Sigh. “Gort, Klaatu barada nikto.”

Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilizations, say scientists

“It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.

Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.

Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa’s Planetary Science Division and his colleagues compiled a list of plausible outcomes that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter, to help humanity ‘prepare for actual contact.’

In their report, Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis, the researchers divide alien contacts into three broad categories: beneficial, neutral or harmful.

Beneficial encounters ranged from the mere detection of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), for example through the interception of alien broadcasts, to contact with cooperative organisms that help us advance our knowledge and solve global problems such as hunger, poverty and disease.

Another beneficial outcome the authors entertain sees humanity triumph over a more powerful alien aggressor, or even being saved by a second group of ETs. ‘In these scenarios, humanity benefits not only from the major moral victory of having defeated a daunting rival, but also from the opportunity to reverse-engineer ETI technology,’ the authors write.

Other kinds of close encounter may be less rewarding and leave much of human society feeling indifferent towards alien life. The extraterrestrials may be too different from us to communicate with usefully. They might invite humanity to join the ‘Galactic Club’ only for the entry requirements to be too bureaucratic and tedious for humans to bother with. They could even become a nuisance, like the stranded, prawn-like creatures that are kept in a refugee camp in the 2009 South African movie, District 9, the report explains.

The most unappealing outcomes would arise if extraterrestrials caused harm to humanity, even if by accident. While aliens may arrive to eat, enslave or attack us, the report adds that people might also suffer from being physically crushed or by contracting diseases carried by the visitors. In especially unfortunate incidents, humanity could be wiped out when a more advanced civilisation accidentally unleashes an unfriendly artificial intelligence, or performs a catastrophic physics experiment that renders a portion of the galaxy uninhabitable.

To bolster humanity’s chances of survival, the researchers call for caution in sending signals into space, and in particular warn against broadcasting information about our biological make-up, which could be used to manufacture weapons that target humans. Instead, any contact with ETs should be limited to mathematical discourse ‘until we have a better idea of the type of ETI we are dealing with.’

The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth. In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to destroy humanity to protect other civilizations.”

Yeah. Remember this is NOT April 1st. They aren’t kidding.

The organization “Chitika Insights” is the research arm of online advertising network “Chitika.” They use their data to monitor and report on Internet trends – search engines, clickthrough rates, the mobile war, and more. So, when they show Firefox 6 usage IS up… I guess some folks were suitably impressed!

Firefox 6 Takes Off, up to Over 8% of Traffic

“August 16th saw the release of the newest version of Firefox; Firefox 6, and already the browser is taking off with rave reviews. The second version released under Mozilla’s new rapid-release process, Firefox 6 has seen a huge bump in our network since release day.

To quantify the spike of traffic, Chitika took a look at all USA and Canadian traffic from August 16th to August 22nd, and took a look at the hourly growth of Firefox 6 as a function of both overall traffic, and just Firefox traffic.

Clearly, Firefox 6 is growing, already consisting of just over 8% of our total traffic by the end of the day on August 22nd. Also of note, though, is the periodic growth of Firefox 6: peaks tend to occur at the beginning of each day, and valleys occur at the early morning hours when Internet Explorer is primarily in use.”

Maybe. It will be cheaper… cheaper is always good!

Amazon Tablet to undercut iPad price by hundreds

“The long rumored iPad-killer that could be Amazon’s upcoming tablet is expected to launch sometime in September or October. But with the recent $99 fire sales of the discontinued HP TouchPad doing amazingly well, there are new reports that Amazon may introduce their tablets at a similarly low price point to excite the masses.

According to the New York Post, an insider source has revealed that the Amazon tablet will sell for ‘hundreds less’ than the entry-level iPad, which retails for $499. Although that doesn’t mean the tablet will go for $99, it does mean it could be sold at most around $299. This sounds about right if Amazon is going the budget tablet route, as recent contenders in that space, such as the Vizio 8-inch Tablet, have had to drop down to that price point.

Amazon is also known to take loss leaders with extreme discounts made up for by increased volume and distribution of other content and services from the Amazon ecosystem.

The two rumored Amazon tablets include an entry-level 7-inch model codenamed ‘Coyote’ and a higher-end 10-inch model codenamed ‘Hollywood’ that’s also expected to sport a quad-core NVIDIA Kal-El processor. Previous rumors had pegged the retail price for these tablets at $349 and $449, respectively. But with the way the market has been developing with the recent webOS casualty and the iPad still predicted to control the tablet market through 2013, Amazon may just get much more aggressive.”