JohnTyra.com

Apple’s famous iPhone has GPS, syncs your iTunes, connects at 3G speeds and will give away your personal data! Who wants one? The flaw allows anyone to access the personal data on the iPhone even if it is locked with a passcode.

What is required to bypass the security, according to Macworld: “hit the ‘emergency calls’ button, and then hit the Home button rapidly twice when they will be automatically transported to a users ‘Favorites’ folder (by default).” From here you can get to a user’s email, contacts and their web browser even though you have not entered the passcode. Apple is working on a patch, but until then there is a ‘fix’ that involves changing the home button to pull up something other than your favorites.

Is W32.TGammima.AG the first virus (well, worm, technically) to become intergalatic? Maybe, thanks to NASA, who admitted to Wired that a laptop aboard the international space station was infected with W32.TGammima.AG. To make matters worse, it appears that the infection was spread across multiple laptops on the station. Perhaps it’s time for NASA to invest in some AV software?

NASA did say, however, that it did not affect critical systems and was instead on laptops used for email. The space station can’t exactly access the internet, but they do have a KU band data link for email, data and video transfer according to Wired.

Over at Apple Insider there was a quick article about a three-alarm fire that went for about three hours Tuesday evening. According to the article, it started around 10PM and took over 60 firefighter personnel to extinguish the blaze.

Apple is not stating what was or was not damanged…no suprise there. Some are saying that the building (Valley Green Six) was used for R&D while others are saying it’s just an IT data center.

OH! There is also a link to a video from a local news station that covered the story.

Which is greater? Well, for Dr. Gaurav Khanna, the eight PS3(s) would be the answer. In this Wired magazine article submitted by our viewer ’stone cold’, it speaks about using eight PS3 gaming consoles for a “gravity grid”. Sure, these are just mear gaming consoles, but according to the article ” his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on”.

At first, this sounded odd, but remember: Sony made the PS3 an open platform, so you can do anything you want with it if you can write the code for it. Another quote about the hardware that makes you think twice about such abilities…

It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time

Regardless of how powerful these are for parallel computing, it is funny to see these PS3(s) in a server rack.

Best Buy is trying to cure the bordem of airport flight delays and layovers by providing vending machines. Odd, perhaps, but we’re not talking about dispensing sodas and candy here folks. According to PC World’s article the macines will have “everything from cell phones, digital cameras, flash drives, MP3 players, headphones, travel adapters and chargers”.

There’s also an article from Business Wire stating that there will initially be twelve of the ‘Best Buy Express’ kiosks available at launch. A quote from Chris Stidman, Best Buy VP of Strategic Planning says, “The launch of Best Buy Express is another way for Best Buy to provide consumers with the products they need from a brand they trust, even while they’re on-the-go”.

Good thing they take credit cards!

The “Mojave Experiment” is part of Microsoft’s marketing campaign that is geared towards changing the preconceived notion that Vista is crap. Good luck! (They’ll need it!). Not a bad idea on their part, I must give credit, but it’s a bit too late in my opinion. Vista has been out for, what, almost two years now? Even if this marketing is successful, by the time it reaches full market saturation it’ll be time for the next new OS by Microsoft.

Ah, Microsoft — the lack of marketing (prior to this) surrounding Vista in conjunction with a lack of response to Apple’s ‘PC’ commercials have really given Vista a negative impression. The key word here is “impression”; there are so many people who have said “OMG Vista is crap” and have never used it. If someone actually tries something and does not like it, then hey, they don’t like it but they tried it and can form an opinion. On the other hand, how can someone form an opinion about something they have never tried? Answer: they can’t!

There are some blogs that are comparing this with the Milgram experiment…WOW! That’s a bit of a stretch: comparing Microsoft’s marketing campaign with a Yale psychological experiment that “measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure”. Are you serious? If Apple did this, it would be the next ‘big thing’ in marketing people for one OS over another, but with Microsoft it means they are just out of control. (Insert sarcasm here).

What do you think?

The DNS flaw problem has been floating around in the news for months now, but has been kept ’secret’ while Dan Kaminsky has been working with vendors to develop a fix. Many articles have been posted on this; we’re using one from ChannelWeb and from Network World. Kaminsky, directory of ISActive, is the individual who found this DNS flaw which he presented at the Black Hat conference yesterday (8/6/08). I haven’t been following this too closely, since the details have been kept under wraps for so long, but yesterday’s presentation got my attention. Chew on this:

“The question is not how many things can you break with DNS, but how many things can’t you break,” Kaminsky said. “We’re barely keeping hold of the secrets of why it’s so important to patch.”

There is, quite literally, a grocery list of items affected when your DNS has been compromised:

• Taking over .com/.net/.org domains
• Sniffing emails
• Modification/infection of emails to/from sender or receiver
• IPSec VPN redirection
• SSL certification
• Auto software updates
• Spam filters
• Etc

If you’d like to check your DNS server, or the DNS server you’re using, check out Kaminsky’s site:

http://doxpara.com/

However, at the moment of this posting, his site is ‘down’ which is probably due to the flood of hits from people checking their DNS.

Did you mean, OpenGL? Well, no, my friend! We’re speaking about the new ‘Open Computing Language’ which, quoting PC World’s article:

lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications.

Apple is pushing for OpenCL to be the next open standard, following up from OpenGL/OpenGL ES, via the Khronos Group, which is the group that regulates standards in this industry.

Digging deeper into the article, it appears that this is not exactly ‘happy’ news for gamers. Instead of trying to get the computer and CPU to push faster frame rates and higher resolutions for games, this seems to only be beneficial to non-gaming tasks, such as encoding video or AutoCAD rendering. That’s ok, I suppose; using the graphics card to perform other tasks but it would be nice if it also helped out on gaming. That is the whole point of a graphics card, right Apple? For gaming?

Yet another release from Microsoft: SQL Server 2008, the latest and greatest for all of your database needs. While I’m a big fan of Windows Server 08, if not just for tinkering around, I can’t say that the Enterprise and big business partners will be as eager as I am. Why not?

It’s the same reason that most large businesses and enterprise environments don’t have ‘Auto Updates’ enabled for patching. Intead, it’s a controlled internal process that allows for testing before it’s pushed to the entire business. This keeps those accidental problems from occurring when an unknown conflict or issue occurs because of a patch.

The same holds true for new operating systems and services that are used in very large, controlled environments. Things are usually tested and validated before being deployed, and in many cases (such as with XP -> Vista) unless the update does not until the next hardware update. Not that I can blame them, why would a business take the time to test and verify such critical database information when it’s currently working just fine?

What are your thoughts?

This version of SQL Server provides powerful new capabilities such as support for policy-based management, auditing, large-scale data warehousing, geospatial data, and advanced reporting and analysis services. SQL Server 2008 provides the trusted, productive and intelligent platform necessary for business-critical applications.

Competition is good; it encourages companies and manufacturers to make their products better so that consumers will chose their product instead. Consumers love it, businesses hate it, because we (as consumers) get more product for less money. It makes me smile. =)

So, when there are rumors of Intel’s new (CPU) chip code-named ‘Larrabee’ that has multiple cores that directly supports both OpenGL and DirectX, it makes me smile. When I hear that it will go into a graphics card first before going into a CPU and that it’s geared towards ‘high-end gaming’ it makes me put on that evil grin. This story comes from computerworld’s article about the Larrabee chip if you’d like to read more. One of the more notable items is that this will be the first time Intel has made a separate graphics card, since all of their other graphic solutions have been on-board video.