Motorola Buys Psion For $200m

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US firm Motorola Solutions is to buy UK tech icon Psion, the inventor of the personal digital assistant (PDA) and source of the one-time leading mobile operating system Symbian.

via Motorola Buys Psion For $200m | | TechWeekEurope UKTechWeekEurope UK.

However, the Psion brand remains best known for its mobile organisers, which developed from its role writing software for Sinclair ZX81 and ZX Spectrum home computers. These consumer devices are seen as the world’s first hand-held computers and prefigured later handheld devices from Palm Computing, RIM and Apple.

Microsoft’s Surface: Windows for a Cloud World

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As mentioned above, Surface will be available in two flavors. One tablet will run Windows 8 Pro, and rely on a third-generation Intel Core processor. The other will feature Windows RT and run on an ARM processor. Both will feature 10.6-inch screens along with a kickstand and keyboard, but many of the other internal specs vary wildly:

via Microsoft’s Surface: Windows for a Cloud World.

As a result, she added, “Microsoft and its partners need to articulate a compelling strategy for how they will manage consumer expectations in the channel. Consumers aren’t used to thinking about chipsets.”

Much Ado About Nothing: The Truth Behind Netflix’s API Changes

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It’s mainly attempting to stop developers from becoming middlemen that resell its API technology to other companies. So a Fanhattan iPad app sold to consumers is OK, but licensing out its white-label search and discovery platform to a consumer electronics manufacturer is not. That is, unless it doesn’t want to include Netflix titles in the search.

via Much Ado About Nothing: The Truth Behind Netflix’s API Changes | TechCrunch.

Report: Over 24% Of The Web’s Top 10,000 Sites Now Use Facebook’s Official Widgets

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According to a new study by website monitoring service Pingdom, 24.3% of the top 10,000 websites in the world as reported by Alexa now feature some form of official Facebook integration on their homepages

via Report: Over 24% Of The Web’s Top 10,000 Sites Now Use Facebook’s Official Widgets | TechCrunch.

Counting all kinds of links and official widgets, here is Pingdom’s final count:

  1. Facebook: 49.3%
  2. Twitter: 41.7%
  3. Google+: 21.5%
  4. LinkedIn: 3.9%

I would have suspected these numbers would be higher. My local DNS server hijacks all facebook requests so I see every time facebook.com tries to phone home from my browser.

Intro to OpenFlow

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In a classical router or switch, the fast packet forwarding (data path) and the high level routing decisions (control path) occur on the same device. An OpenFlow Switch separates these two functions. The data path portion still resides on the switch, while high-level routing decisions are moved to a separate controller, typically a standard server. The OpenFlow Switch and Controller communicate via the OpenFlow protocol, which defines messages, such as packet-received, send-packet-out, modify-forwarding-table, and get-stats.

via Intro to OpenFlow.

OpenFlow allows you to easily deploy innovative routing and switching protocols in your network. It is used for applications such as virtual machine mobility, high-security networks and next generation ip based mobile networks.

Imagination Technologies

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Over the past two weeks, Imagination Technologies has announced new, higher-end versions of its Power VR Series 6 GPU, claiming that the new Power VR G6230 and G6430 go “‘all out’, adding incremental extra area for maximum performance whilst minimising power consumption.” There’s a new ray-tracing SDK out and a post discussing how PowerVR is utilizing GPU Compute and OpenCL to offload and accelerate CPU-centric tasks.

Via: PowerVR Plans To Make Mobile Graphics, GPU Compute a Three-Way Race — Again

Not as SPDY as You Thought

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Previous benchmarks tout great benefits, ranging from making pages load 2x faster to making mobile sites 23% faster using SPDY and HTTPS than over clear HTTP. However, when testing real world sites I did not see any such gains. In fact, my tests showed SPDY is only marginally faster than HTTPS and is slower than HTTP.

Why? Simply put, SPDY makes HTTP better, but for most websites, HTTP is not the bottleneck.

via Guy’s Pod » Blog Archive » Not as SPDY as You Thought.

If you’re a website owner, the first thing you should do is adjust your expectations. Switching your site to SPDY will move you forward, but it will not make your site much faster. To get the most out of SPDY, you should work to reduce the number of domains on your page, and to address other front-end bottlenecks. Doing so is a good move anyway, so you wouldn’t be wasting your time.

Air Force space vehicle comes in for a landing

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6/16/2012 – WASHNGTON (AFNS) — The Air Force’s unmanned, reusable space plane landed in the early morning of June 16 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., a successful conclusion to a record-setting test-flight mission that began March 5 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, one of two such vehicles, spent 469 days in orbit to conduct on-orbit experiments, primarily checkout of the vehicle itself.

via Air Force space vehicle comes in for a landing.

Congrats Air Force!

US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#649219 – SYSRET 64-bit operating system privilege escalation vulnerability on Intel CPU hardware

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A ring3 attacker may be able to specifically craft a stack frame to be executed by ring0 (kernel) after a general protection exception (#GP). The fault will be handled before the stack switch, which means the exception handler will be run at ring0 with an attacker’s chosen RSP causing a privilege escalation.

via US-CERT Vulnerability Note VU#649219 – SYSRET 64-bit operating system privilege escalation vulnerability on Intel CPU hardware.

Details from Red Hat

RHSA-2012:0720-1 & RHSA-2012:0721-1: It was found that the Xen hypervisor implementation as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 did not properly restrict the syscall return addresses in the sysret return path to canonical addresses. An unprivileged user in a 64-bit para-virtualized guest, that is running on a 64-bit host that has an Intel CPU, could use this flaw to crash the host or, potentially, escalate their privileges, allowing them to execute arbitrary code at the hypervisor level. (CVE-2012-0217, Important)