TechVirtuoso

Google Sync now supports push mail sync

September 22nd, 2009 at 9:49 PM 1 Comment Frank Owen

One of the problems that Google has faced with the fight to pull users from their Exchange environment to Google Apps was the ability to Sync Email, Contacts and Calendar appointments to a user’s Windows Mobile Phone.

Google released Google Sync (http://www.google.com/mobile/products/sync.html) earlier in the year but it only supported Calendar and Contacts. They have now released an update that will also support pushing Email to any device that supports the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol. With this addition to their arsenal of features the Google Apps solution may turn into more of a threat to other well established enterprise email solutions.

Yahoo Webmail Security Vulnerability

September 22nd, 2009 at 2:12 PM 1 Comment Don Smith

Users of Yahoo’s mail service are warned that a vulnerability in the service could be allowing hackers to easily access their accounts and steal their information.

Director of application security research at Breach Security Corp, Ryan Barnett, said that the problem starts with a web application that is designed to automate the login process for the service. Unfortunately the application does not adhere to the same security checks that the login page itself uses creating what Barnett describes as “some sort of water tunnel that the bad guys are walking right through.”

Hackers are using the application to carry out brute force attacks on user accounts, which is not being registered and blocked as most pages would do so.

Backend applications are a key factor in the increasing success of account hijacking cases targeting social networks and portal sites. Once hacked, the accounts can be used to send out spam and malware, or hackers may also choose to use the account details to try to access banking accounts, as many people use the same or similar passwords on multiple accounts.

Yahoo is said to be investigating.

IBM announces industry’s densest, fastest on-chip 32 nanometer dynamic memory

September 20th, 2009 at 6:17 PM 2 Comments Shane Pitman

IBM has developed a prototype of what could become the industry’s smallest, densest, and fastest on-chip dynamic memory device, in the form of 32 nanometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, promising improvements in speed, power savings, and reliability for a wide range of products.

By insulating transistors against electrical leakage, IBM’s SOI technology is able to boast performance increases of up to 30 percent while reducing power consumption by 40 percent over conventional silicon technologies. This has allowed them to produce sample embedded dynamic random access memory (eDRAM) chips that have the smallest memory cell in the industry, while offering density, speed, and capacity surpassing that of conventional on-chip static random access memory (SRAM) in either 32 nanometer or 22 nanometer technologies, and closer to that of 15 nanometer SRAM technology. With latency and cycle times of less than 2 nanoseconds, IBM’s 32 nanometer SOI eDRAM is the fastest embedded memory announced to date.

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MIT team finds a way to combine two chips in to one

September 20th, 2009 at 5:12 PM 5 Comments Shane Pitman

Silicon has been the standard material for semiconductor construction for decades, but that could soon change. While producing ever faster technologies, the physical dimensions of chips have decreased over the years, and engineers have known that they would eventually reach physical limitations in trying to make ever smaller and faster chips based on silicon. “We won’t be able to continue improving silicon by scaling it down for long,” says Tomas Palacios, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. “It’s very difficult to make them a lot smaller.”

Of course silicon isn’t the end-all-be-all of transistor material when it comes to speed. “There are several semiconductor materials that offer better performance than silicon,” Palacios says. “The problem is, even though they allow for very fast transistors, they cannot compete with silicon in terms of integration and scalability.” Companies have spent decades and billions of dollars developing technologies based on silicon, and to make a total jump to another material would be neither practical nor profitable.

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Palm drops Windows Mobile in favor of webOS

September 18th, 2009 at 11:29 AM 6 Comments Michael Stanclift

palm-pre-webos-lg Palm has announced that they will no longer be incorporating Microsoft Windows Mobile onto new devices, stating a commitment to the future of their new webOS platform, present on the recently released Palm Pre. Windows Mobile was first released on a Palm device back in 2006 with the Palm Treo 700w, later followed up by the 700Wx, 750 and Treo Pro. 8xkqt5hwir

“We’re making significant process with Palm’s transformation, and our culture of innovation is stronger than ever. We’re launching more great Palm webOS products with more carriers and turning our sights toward growth,” said Jon Rubinstein, chairman and CEO.

This move comes as a blow to Microsoft, which is struggling against up and coming smartphone OS providers in the business sector like Palm webOS, Google Android, Apple iPhone and the continued fight against Research in Motion’s Blackberry.

According to Garner, at the end of 2008, the estimated market share for Windows Mobile, worldwide, in the smartphone market was 12.4% — currently many of the those phones are made by Taiwan based HTC, however they’ve began releasing many of their new phones with Google’s Android platform, so it remains to be seen what their continued commitment to Windows Mobile will be.

However, the move could backfire on Palm, as some businesses continue to see devices like the Pre as more of a consumer oriented device and will opt for Windows Mobile and Blackberry which provide better support for Exchange and more enhanced and native device security.

Yesterday Palm, together with Sprint, revealed they’d only sold around 810,000 Pre devices in the last quarter. (In comparison the iPhone 3GS sold over 1 million units in the first week and over 5 million in the quarter.) Palm also announced yesterday losses for the quarter reached $164.5 million, compared to a loss of only $41.9 million last year. However, this did beat industry expectations for the company. Palm says they expect revenues for the next quarter to be even lower than their last.

Qwest rolling out new fiber for cellular providers

September 18th, 2009 at 11:06 AM No Comments Michael Stanclift

quest_logo Qwest Communications has announced the launch of its new fiber-based, Ethernet backhaul service designed for wireless service providers, allowing providers to run fiber directly to cellular tower sites to accommodate for increasing bandwidth demands being places on them by more advanced smartphones, netbooks and other bandwidth-demanding systems.

“Wireless users seem to have an insatiable appetite for bandwidth, whether they’re watching videos, sending pictures to friends, playing games online – you name it,” said Roland Thorton, executive vice president for Qwest Wholesale.

Qwest says this new infrastructure is ideal for providers looking to migrate from existing SONET based services due to greater flexibility.

The new service will allow scalable bandwidth, enabling providers to increase capacity to sites on an incremental and as-needed basis. The bandwidth is managed by software, rather than hardware so the time required to perform provisioning of increased speed is reduced and operations are simplified.

Microsoft to drop support for Windows 2000 next July

September 17th, 2009 at 11:01 PM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

Windows_2000_logo Windows administrators, mark your calendar for the drop dead date to get those old servers upgraded. Microsoft has outlined July 13, 2010 as the date Windows 2000 will no longer be supported by Microsoft. There are already a variety of security threats in the wild where Microsoft has said they will not be releasing updates to protect Windows 2000 because they say it is not feasible. After next July, no support or new updates (except for online self-help) will be available.

These changes were posted by Crissy House, the Windows Server operations manager, on their team’s blog.

House also announced that there would be no more service packs for Windows 2003 or Windows 2003 R2. Both 2003 releases will move to extended-support on July 13, 2010, which means only security updates will be published for these operating systems. Non-security hotfixes developed during this phase will be provided only to customers who enroll in Extended Hotfix Support (EHS).

Microsoft released Windows Server 2000 in February 2000, Windows Server 2003 was released in April 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 was released in February 2006. In February 2008, Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 which was developed along side Windows Vista, but will quickly supplant it with Windows Server 2008 R2 which was developed along side Windows 7 and will be released along side the client OS on October 22, 2009.

Windows Server 2008 R2 will only be avaliable in x86-64 and Itanium editions, so administrators needing to run 32-bit implementations of 2008 will need to use the original 2008 release.

Snow Leopard lacks security features present in Windows Vista/7

September 17th, 2009 at 10:23 PM 2 Comments Michael Stanclift

Random_Access_Memory Noted Apple security analyst Charlie Miller, author of The Mac Hackers Handbook and two-time winner of the Pwn2Own hacking contest has said, in an interview with TechWorld, that the latest version of Apple OS X (10.6 AKA Snow Leopard) lacks full and proper implementation of memory address space layout randomization (ASLR). ALSR is a technology, present in Windows Vista and Windows 7, that randomly assigns data to memory to make it difficult for attackers to determine the address of critical operating system functions being stored in memory, and therefore making it harder for them to create exploits.

“It’s the exact same ASLR as in Leopard, which means it’s not very good,” Miller said, “Apple didn’t change anything. I don’t understand why they didn’t. But Apple missed an opportunity with Snow Leopard.”

When OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was released, Miller and others were critical of Apple not fully implementing ASLR. While there is ASLR present in both Leopard and Snow Leopard, they fail to the heap, the stack and the dynamic linker, the parts of the operating system that are most open to attack. Linux also has what many consider a weak implementation of ASLR since kernel version 2.6.12, although some distributions include better ASLR then the stock kernel based on third party code.

Miller did say that there are elements of Snow Leopard that show Apple did do some things to improve security, most notably the inclusion of data execution prevention or DEP, which utilizes both processor-hardware and software based security programming to help prevent buffer overflow attacks by blocking code from running in memory spaces that’s supposed to contain only data.

However, Apple may be late to the game with implementation of DEP, as it has been present in Windows operating systems since Windows XP Service Pack 2, with further refinements made in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

By incorporating both technologies, Miller says it becomes extremely difficult to craft memory attack exploits. “If you don’t have either, or just one of the two [ASLR or DEP], you can still exploit bugs, but with both, it’s much, much harder. Snow Leopard’s more secure than Leopard, but it’s not as secure as Vista or Windows 7.”

AT&T, Intel collaborate to strengthen remote PC support for SMB

September 17th, 2009 at 9:53 PM No Comments Don Smith

Intel_logo AT&T and Intel have announced a collaboration which will see the former introduce AT&T Tech Support 360SM, an affordable IT virtual helpdesk that provides live, permission-based remote technical service for small and midsize businesses.

The upcoming option will enable them to simply enter a keystroke sequence on a failed computer – even if its operating system is down – to directly connect the system with technicians over the Internet via an encrypted connection. The Tech Support 360 technicians will then address the PC remotely, even when it has become inoperable due to problems such as hardware or operating system failure, or corruption by a virus or malware. This is made possible by the use of the Intel Remote PC Assist Technology (Intel RPAT), a feature of Intel’s vPro.

“As a result of the current economic conditions, small businesses are even more focused on controlling costs,” said David Tuhy, a general manager in the Intel Business Client Group. “AT&T’s Tech Support 360 in conjunction with Intel vPro technology opens the door for new managed services to address these concerns. By adding support for Intel Remote PC Assist Technology, AT&T will be able to deliver a higher level of service to customers by improving PC troubleshooting and reducing support costs using an encrypted connection over the Internet.”

Those interested can get more info about AT&T’s Tech Support 360 service via tech360.att.com.

Canon extends partnership with Adobe

September 17th, 2009 at 9:30 PM 1 Comment Don Smith

Canon_logo Canon told the press today that they will be extending the partnership with Adobe with a new software agreement designed to boost security and usability of the company’s products.

Canon and Adobe formed said partnership back in 2005 for various projects, with the printing giant now planning to offer integration with the Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management ES system into all of its new imageRunner Advance series of products, allowing users to apply security policies to scanned documents on the fly.

Canon’s European marketing manager, Paul Rowntree, gave a demonstration of how the system works, and showed how certain policies will do things such as prevent unauthorised users printing a certain document.

“This type of security is unique to Canon and shows how our printers fit with a secure document management system,” Rowntree said.

Users will also be able to assemble documents with material from multiple sources using easy drag-and-drop functionality, according to the firm. Now that Canon holds a niche feature set with combined document security and compilation software, it will be interesting to see if this helps them recover from the economic struggles of the first two quarters of this year.

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