Category Archives: Technical

General Technical information

Symantec ‘fesses up: ‘Code theft worse than we thought’

Posted on by

A hacker calling himself “Yama Tough”, acting as a spokesperson for the group, claims the source code had been pulled from insecure Indian government servers, implying that Symantec was required to supply their source code to Indian authorities. In a series of Twitter updates, Yama Tough talked about various plans to release the source code before committing to release the secret sauce of pcAnywhere.

via Symantec ‘fesses up: ‘Code theft worse than we thought’ • Channel Register.

Even so the whole Symantec hack soap opera/pantomime (‘You’ve been hacked!”, “Oh no we haven’t”… “Oh maybe we have”) raises serious questions about the security of Symantec’s ecosystem as well as turning the security giant into the punchline for jokes. For example, famed Apple hacker Charlie Miller quipped: “How could Symantec have gotten hacked? Don’t they use AV?” ®

CPU Startup Combines CPU+DRAM

Posted on by

There are three limiting factors, or walls, that limit the scaling of modern microprocessors. First, there’s the memory wall, defined as the gap between the CPU and DRAM clock speed. Second, there’s the ILP (Instruction Level Parallelism) wall, which refers to the difficulty of decoding enough instructions per clock cycle to keep a core completely busy. Finally, there’s the power wall–the faster a CPU is and the more cores it has, the more power it consumes.

via CPU Startup Combines CPU+DRAM – HotHardware.

When your CPU has fewer transistors than an architecture that debuted in 1986, it’s a good chance that you left a few things out–like an FPU, branch prediction, pipelining, or any form of speculative execution. Venray may have created a chip with power consumption an order of magnitude lower than anything ARM builds and more memory bandwidth than Intel’s highest-end Xeons, but it’s an ultra-specialized, ultra-lightweight core that trades 25 years of flexibility and performance for scads of memory bandwidth.

WiFi Antennas | Selecting a WiFi antenna

Posted on by

Parabolic or dish antennas

This is where the real power is! Parabolic dish antennas put out tremendous gain but are a little hard to point and make a connection with. As the gain of an antenna increases, the antenna’s radiation pattern decreases until you have a very little window to point or aim your dish correctly. Dish antennas are almost always used for a point to point system for long haul systems. The Parabolic Dish antennas work by focusing the power to a central point and beaming the radio’s signal to a specific area, kind of like the adjustable reflector on a flashlight. These antennas are highly focused and are the perfect tool if you want to send your signal a very long distance.

via WiFi Antennas | Selecting a WiFi antenna.

Online Reputation Manager Hacked Websites To ‘inject’ Illegal Code

Posted on by

But Meade said Rexxfield owner and operator Michael Roberts was preparing to purchase a coding hack he called “injection source code” that lets the user manipulate the metadata behind a website, adding a “noindex” tag that drops the results on search engines like Google and Bing — hiding them completely.

Meade said Roberts showed him the code injector’s effectiveness by hacking into Ripoff Report, a complaint board site.

via EXCLUSIVE: Online Reputation Manager Hacked Websites To ‘inject’ Illegal Code | Fox News.

Zeus returns: FBI warns of ‘Gameover’ ID-theft malware

Posted on by

The FBI said the phishing lures typically includes a link in the e-mail that goes to a phony website. ”Once you’re there, you inadvertently download the Gameover malware, which promptly infects your computer and steals your banking information,” it warned.

via Zeus returns: FBI warns of ‘Gameover’ ID-theft malware | ZDNet.

Hmmm.  You must have to do something to “inadvertently” download the malware.  I’d like to see this website and how they do it but no link or no example.  This story sounds fishy.

How Samsung Just Screwed Over About 10 Million Of Its Android Phone Customers

Posted on by

That means ~10 million people who bought the phone are going to be stuck on the outdated version 2.3 Gingerbread (or 2.2 Froyo in many cases) until they decide to drop more cash on a new phone.

via How Samsung Just Screwed Over About 10 Million Of Its Android Phone Customers – Business Insider.

It’s pointless to support old hardware on phones.  I wonder why this is even an issue?

This is an interesting point I didn’t know and relates to computer architecture.

It also demonstrates the inherent problem in Android phone manufacturers customizing the OS to the point where you can barely recognize Google’s original intentions for design and functionality. Those skins are such a tax on a phone’s hardware that it cripples functionality and makes it so all but the newest phones miss out on updates. So far, Samsung only guarantees Ice Cream Sandwich for its Galaxy S II phones. The Nexus S, which is also made by Samsung and shares similar hardware specs as many Galaxy S phones, will get the Ice Cream Sandwich update, but only because it uses a pure version of Android without the TouchWiz skin. Motorola only guarantees it for its latest Droid Razr. And HTC will issue Ice Cream Sandwich for the Rezoundsome time next year.