[Link] US Water Utility Pump Destroyed After Hack

PCMag.com
Chloe Albanesius (November 18, 2011)

<Illinois Water Utility Pump Destroyed After Hack>

Zune Bug Source Code

A bug in 30GB Zunes caused them to freeze on December 31st became the <big news of the holidays> (Gizmodo Dec 31 2008). This was dubbed the 'Z2K9' bug while Zune users flooded <Zune support forums> with pleas for help.

It was quickly realized that by disconnecting both the battery and the hard drive that the time/date would be reset unfreezing your Zune. Microsoft's response to the bug was that it is a leap year handling bug and their official fix was to wait until New Years, for the bug to resolve it's self.

Source code of the bug has apparently been been released. A hardware component manufacturer, <Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.>, is apparently the manufacturer of the <RTC (Real Time Clock)> used in these Zunes. Source code for the Freescale RTC driver module has turned up online. This code has an obvious bug related to line #263, in the 'ConvertDays' function.

Multiple source code mirrors for rtc.c:

http://paste.exstatica.net/7 - (Line #'s + Highlighting)

http://pastie.org/349916 - (Line #'s)

http://tinypaste.com/pre.php?id=53c3996 - (Neither)

The problem appears to be with the date December 31st, on leap year, being day 366. You can see on line #263, an if statement testing 'days > 366' inside a while loop testing 'days > 365'. It seems apparent that if days was 366 this would be and endless loop, at least until the next day.

Update: <The official Zune workaround instructions>

[Link] USB 3.0 is Blazing Fast

The Future of Things has put together a great collection of information about USB 3.0, saying,

"Devices employing USB 3.0 specifications are planned to be available to consumers in 2009 or 2010 and would be backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1."

The most mouth-watering is the speed; 25GB should take 70 seconds!

(Nov 11, 2008)

<The Future of Things - 25GB in 70 seconds with USB 3.0>

[Link] Russian researchers achieve 100-fold increase in WPA2 cracking speed

Security and the Net(Oct 12, 2008)
(Distributed cracking with GPUs.)

<Russian researchers achieve 100-fold increase in WPA2 cracking speed>

SoCo Software Releases C++ Yahoo Source Code

  <SoCo Software> has released <XLibrary>, a C++ repository of source code modules. Included are Windows sockets, Yahoo chat, and Yahoo captcha modules. This library is released under a custom license similar to the <OS-CPL> which doesn't force adoption of open source licenses.

  SoCo Software has provided free tools, scripts, and applications with source code, for a few years now. It is one of the few places where you can find a <free proxy tester> with source code. Most free proxy testers are released by proxy list sites, so you can help them find fast proxies, while getting the bottom of the barrel.

  The software site is using this library release as the beginning in a line of additions of source code libraries and snippets, including embedded (ASM and Dynamic C) and web application (JavaScript and PHP) source code.

Solid State Drives Aren't Saving Battery Life

  One of the big hopes for solid state hard drives (SSDs) is that they will reduce power consumption, saving on your battery's life. Tests ran by Tom's Hardware of many SSDs from several vendors showed significantly more power consumption than a standard SATA drive. The tests ran are considered pretty reliable.
  This means solid state drivers aren't quite up to snuff for power consumption alone, although certain types of SSDs already provide significant performance advantages. This let-down paired with the current high price of solid state storage over traditional hard drives, will keep SSDs on the back burner for a bit while the technology is refined.

Tom's Hardware: (Contains many pages of extended details of the tests)
<The SSD Power Consumption Hoax : Flash SSDs Don’t Improve Your Notebook Battery Runtime – they Reduce It> June 27, 2008

CrunchGear: (A single page review containing a graph of the data)
<Shock, horror: Apparently SSDs don’t save you any power> July 1st, 2008

RFID Credit Cards

  RFID is becoming more popular for many things. Credit cards using RFID technology sporting names like 'EZ Pass', 'quick pass', and 'speed pass' are growing. A recent Boing Boing <video netcast episode> is re-raising concerns about the security of such cards.
  An older <The New York Times report> featured tests on 20 cards from Visa, MasterCard and American Express, showed that the data was being broadcast in plain text. This data frequently includes the card holder's full name, sometimes even the card number and expiration date.

  A common misconception is that RFID is totally insecure by nature. This isn't true. RFID's are just a family of inexpensive devices that broadcast via radio frequencies. Other than their price, these devices are most notable for their tiny size and ability to be self-powered. These devices can capture power from the radio frequency of a requesting device, powering it's self, to make a radio frequency reply.
  This misconception comes from frequent news headlines where a poor attempt, or no attempt, was made to protect the data or signals a RFID made. These signals are easily captured, but encryption techniques can be used to protect this data. Designers frequently don't bother.
  In some cases, like this credit card situation, an ideally secure encryption scheme may require more elaborate equipment for legitimate readers, possibly an expensive central payment system. This could defeat the entire purpose of making transactions fast.

  Some effort should be made using one of many encryption techniques to protect this data. Although the card number maybe be useless without the security code, a plain text card holder's name is surely a bad idea.

  A Boing Boing TV <video netcast episode> claims a suitable RFID reader can be purchased for as low as $8 from eBay. Some lady with her hair dyed till its falling out, and a dude who has never washed his hair, demonstrate reading a card through your pocket with a similar device. Their demonstration revealed that the full goods may still be broadcast in plain text by these type of cards.

MetaRAM's MetaSDRAM™ Allows 8GB DDR2 DIMM!

MetaRAM has announced it's production of DDR2 DIMMs that can hold 4GB or 8GB that are still a drop-in replacement for normal DIMMs. They demonstrated working samples back in July 2007 and released it's first chipset into production in November 2007. These DIMMs don't just allow for quadrupled memory size in the same slot, but also sport some fancy features such as WakeOnUse™.

One of MetaRAM's channel partners will soon announce a server with 256GB of main memory for under $50,000, with 500GB boxes on tap for a higher price points.

It seems for now that compatibility is limited to Dual and Quad core platforms based on AMD Opteron™ and Intel® Xeon® (with the 5100 MCH) processors.




<MetaRAM>

<MetaRAM DDR2 Product Page>

<Ars Technica Coverage>

<Fox Business News Coverage>

One Million PS3 Folding@Home

Sony Computer Entertainment announced that since Playstation®3 took part in Stanford University's Folding@home™ project on March 22, 2007, the team has reached over one million users. This equates to roughly 3,000 PS3 users registering per day.

<PRNewswire: One Million PLAYSTATION(R)3 Users Participate in Folding@home Research Project>

Folding@Home
<Folding@Home - Standford University>

YahELite team
<YahELite Folding@Home>