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OCAU News |
Sunday Afternoon
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Sunday, 29-August-2010 15:13:54 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Hope your weekend's coming along nicely.. I've had a very pleasant day with my kids at a local cycle track park, watching RC planes whizzing about.
Firstly a reminder from Marcus that there are some dodgy companies ringing Australians, claiming to be on behalf of Microsoft or Dell etc, telling people they have a virus and charging to fix it or arranging long-term support contracts. I doubt most OCAU readers would be suckered in by these scammers, but maybe warn your less tech-savvy friends or relatives etc.
Not too surprisingly, Sony are not happy about the recent "PS3 Jailbreak" development and have gone legal with the Federal Court of Australia imposing a temporary injunction on selling the gadget in question. Court documents indicate the injunction will remain in place until a hearing scheduled for Tuesday that could determine the permanent fate of the modchip in Australia, and have consequences for the device in other countries, as well.
Commodore USA are apparently making a C64 replica PC with modern Atom-powered internals. This also paves the way for the company's newest offering, the Commodore PC64, an Intel Atom-powered PC featuring 4GB DDR3 memory, SATA 1TB HDD, HDMI output, optical drive (either DVD/CD or optional Blu-ray), and more -- all in "an exact replica" of the original beige C64 chassis.
Worryingly, it seems malware on a USB stick may have contributed to a plane crash which killed 154 people in Spain. The report indicates that the computer failed to detect three problems (including one issue with the airplane's wing flaps being in the incorrect position for takeoff) in a fail-safe monitoring system and that those problems were brought on by a malicious program that came from the USB thumb drive.
InformationWeek meanwhile say that 25% of malware is designed for USB propagation. "Not only does it copy itself to these gadgets, but it also runs automatically when a USB device is connected to a computer, infecting the system practically transparently to the user. This has been the case with many infections we have seen this year, such as the distribution of the Mariposa and Vodafone botnets."
Google have a new Realtime Search, which isn't quite as exciting as it sounds, being a search engine for Twitter, Facebook and other social sites. Realtime Search lets you see up-to-the-second social updates, news articles and blog posts about hot topics around the world.
Goose1981 spotted this SSD which fits in a DIMM slot. The company's decided to "borrow" the DIMM form factor for its latest enterprise SSD offering, equipping it with a 240-pin array to draw power from your spare memory slots. Of course, you'll still need to hook up a SATA cable to get data flowing to this SSD -- at a very respectable 260MBps for both read and write -- but we must admit we're in love with the very idea of it. Quite a neat idea for the super-mini modders.
d00dz noticed this study of HDD reliability by a data-recovery firm. The Russian company Storelab, an Eastern European market leader in professional data recovery, is known for analysis and professional guidance published on its website. Storelab recently published the results of a long-term study based on its own operations and the observed failure rates of certain hard drives from leading manufacturers.
Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, is busting out the lawsuits against various technology companies for patent infringement. Through his current firm, Interval Licensing LLC, Allen is suing Apple, Google, AOL, Facebook, ebay, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube (which is a subsidiary of Google). The claims involve four separate patents, most of which cover integral parts of how the companies named do business.
The top secret X-37B shuttle has been doing odd things in orbit lately, including vanishing for two weeks. It took amateur skywatcher Greg Roberts of Cape Town, South Africa, who noticed that it failed to appear as scheduled above his base on August 14, another five days to find it. When he did, he noticed it was some 30km higher and on a different trajectory, according to calculations from other colleagues in Rome and Oklahoma.
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