Gadgets Mobile

A recent firmware update sent out by Dell for the XPS One desktop machine has raised quite a bit of suspicion over its legitimacy.

The firmware was sent out on a black CD via courier and had a Dell letter with it. However, the letter was poorly written and in black and white. One customer who received the disc got a bit suspicious and instead of putting it in his machine decided to check with Dell’s support website and tech support line first. The website had no information and the support line promptly told him the disc had not been sent by Dell and he should throw it away.

The firmware was legitimate and sent out because of an issue with the Samsung hard drives included in some of the XPS One machines. The hard drives themselves are fine, but the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) system is not turned on, meaning the hard drive can become unrecognized by the OS due to an auto-scan feature.

Anne Camden, spokesperson for Dell, said the tech department should have known about the firmware and that the disc had led to at least one other customer checking with them before using it.

Read more at InfoWorld.com

Matthew’s Opinion

As the discs were only being sent out to a subset of the customers of one system, it was probably put together with little coordination and planning. Still, Dell should treat all updates the same and ensure their customers know the information they are receiving is legitimate and safe.

All it would have taken to prevent this was an e-mail to the customer telling them to expect a disc, a better letter included with the CD and an entry on the support website. Not a great deal of extra work there to put minds at ease over the CD they are shoving in their machines is it?

I’m sure Dell has learned from its mistake and will do better next time. Anyone receiving dubious CDs in the mail should check before using them with the relevant company support lines and run a virus scan on them, too.

by Nilay Patel, posted Apr 24th 2008 at 8:33PMDISH Network and News Corp’s satellite subisdiary NDS Group in California have been involved in an industrial espionage lawsuit for years now, but there was some big drama in court today: a hacker by the name of Christopher Tarnovsky (who used the handle “Big Gun,” among others) testified that NDS hired him to create a device called “the stinger” that could reprogram DISH Network access cards. DISH lawyers say the plan was to flood the market with hacked cards, which would cost the satellite company $900M in revenue and repair costs. Unsurprisingly, NDS (which supplies DirecTV, among others), says that it hired Tarovsky only to reverse-engineer DISH’s cards for competitive reasons, and Tarnovsky himself says that he believes “someone is trying to set him up.” Sure, sure — but no one’s explaining why he was mailed mobile electronics from Canada with $20K in cash stashed inside, or why he was officially on the payroll of HarperCollins, a totally different NewCorp subsidiary, for more than 10 years. Sketchy sketchy — and we thought satellite hacking was dead.

Read - Reuters article about Tarnovsky’s testimony
Read - 2002 article about Tarnovsky and NDS

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Filed under: Home Entertainment

by Darren Murph, posted Apr 24th 2008 at 9:37PM
Nothing shows your complete and unwavering devotion to a handset maker like buying an ultra-rare vehicle with its logos on there, wouldn’t you agree? Those vigorously nodding up and down (well, those vigorously nodding up and down in Brazil) can get set to grab a limited edition Renault Sandero, which will come “fully equipped with Nokia’s navigation system and [undisclosed] car add-ons.” The super-special Sandero will come stocked with an N95 and cost around €17,650 ($27,693), but you’d better hurry, as only 1,000 of these niche motorcars are being built. It’s like Nokia heard your cries for letting the chance to nab one of those co-branded Twingos slip through your too-busy-texting thumbs or something.

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Filed under: cellphones, GPS, Transportation

The GPS mail logger tracks itself. The idea is that you slide it into an envelope to discover why your mail is being delayed. The logger can be set to record positioning data at timed intervals or when it detects movement. It looks fairly easy to use, and integrates with Google Earth, but we see problems.

One, it costs $700. Two, what if it gets lost in the mail. There would be a supreme irony in losing a GPS tracker in the post (the data is recorded to a MicroSD card, not beamed directly to the owner). Three, even if your mail is going astray, what do you do? Call up the postal service and complain that the mail van was stuck in traffic for two hours?

No. We think the real reason for shipping a gadget that will fit into an envelope is cheap attempt by Brickhouse Security to cash in on some of the macbook air sexy. Manilla is the new white plastic, baby.

Product page [Brickhouse Security via Crave]

In my personal opinion there are still many questions, but it’s now being reported that Apple is buying PA Semi, makers of a version of IBM’s PowerPC processor (the kind Apple just ditched to switch to Intel in 2006), not for their current chipmaking abilities, but rather for their engineering talent.

The article linked below hints that PA Semi (short for Palo Alto Semiconductor) has been in Apple’s sights for a while now, even before Apple made the switch to Intel’s Core architecture. It’s even suggested that had PA Semi’s PWRficient processor been ready sooner, Apple would’ve used it. It’s worth noting that more than 100 companies currently use PWRficient, including all branches of the U.S. military.

So, we find that Apple bought PA Semi for their engineering talent. That’s great, but it still leaves one big question remaining: Now that they have the fabless semiconductor “chip making” talent, for what purpose will they be using them? I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

Read more at Roughly Drafted.com.

Currently there is a court battle being waged in southern California between News Corp’s NDS Group and DISH Network Corp. EchoStar, which has now divided into EchoStar and DISH, started the corporate spying lawsuit against NDS with claims they were developing software to hack into the DISH network and steal their security codes. The desired outcome being pirated smart cards becoming available and therefore costing DISH an estimated US$900 million in revenue and replacement costs.

In the ongoing case Christopher Tarnovsky has been testifying. He is the hacker who NDS reportedly employed to do the network infiltration for them. Tarnovsky has admitted he was employed to develop a pirating program to make DirectTV more secure, but denies having anything to do with breaking into another network such as DISH. He said:

I never got money for reprogramming Echostar cards … Someone is trying to set me up.

However, he did also admit developing hardware called “the stinger”, which he said could be used with any smart card from any network. His case was not helped by another hacker, called Tony Dionisi, testifying earlier that he heard Tarnovsky bragging about someone using the stinger to re-program 50 EchoStar smart cards.

Other revelations that came out of his Tarnovsky’s testimony were that his first cash payment arrived hidden in electronic goods from Canada. The payment was US$20,000 and after that he was paid regularly by Harper Collins, another arm of News Corp.

NDS are denying the allegations saying the only activity they were engaged in was reverse engineering practices.

Read more at Reuters.com

Matthew’s Opinion

This sounds more like a storyline you’d find in the next series of 24 than real life corporate business tactics.

My initial view of the situation is that the 2 hackers must be bending the truth somewhat to try and stay out of trouble. A News Corp. department paying to hack in and ultimately destroy the security of a rival? It seems a little far fetched and far too risky for a business to attempt in my opinion. NDS paying them for reverse engineering and the hackers taking it one step further without the knowledge of NDS is a more likely possibility.

The trial is meant to finish in under a month, so we won’t have to wait too long to see the outcome. If it turns out NDS were really attempting to do what has been suggested then it will be a proper scandal.

by Nilay Patel, posted Apr 24th 2008 at 3:57PM
We’re not ones to peer too deeply into the Apple crystal ball, but Geeksugar says that spec-bumped iMacs are due on Tuesday, and the timing seems about right. Nothing major, apparently, just a speed bump and some bigger hard drives, but prices should stay the same. It’s still just a rumor, of course, but Geeksugar was right on the money about that MacBook / MacBook Pro bump last time around, apart from saying that multitouch trackpads would hit all of Apple’s portables. Perhaps some Best Buy / Future shop employees will let us take a peek in the database and let us know what’s up, hmmm?

Update: We’ve gotten a couple sketchy reports that entries for new iMacs are in fact popping up in retailers’ systems, but it’s getting hard to focus what with all the grains of salt we’ve taken.

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Filed under: Desktops

The Nokia 2680 is a slider phone offering a VGA resolution camera as well as the following features:

* dual-band GSM (900/1800MHz or 850/1900MHz)
* available in Slate Gray, Night Blue, Orange, or Violet color schemes
* FM radio
* ability to record radio broadcasts directly to handset’s internal memory
* Bluetooth

Via MobileBurn.

by Donald Melanson, posted Apr 24th 2008 at 2:46PM It’s far from the first time a researcher has enlisted the help of his own family or kids, but MIT’s Deb Roy’s latest endeavor looks to be a bit more ambitious than most, as he’s aiming to do nothing short of understand how children learn language. To do that, Roy and his wife installed 11 video cameras and 14 microphones throughout their house to record just about every moment of their son’s first three years. That, obviously, also required a good deal of computing power, which came in the form of a temperature-controlled data-storage room consisting of five Apple Xserves and a 4.4TB Xserve RAID (you can guess why Apple’s profiling ‘em), along with an array of backup tape drives and robotic tape changes (and an amply supply of other Macs, of course). While the project is obviously still a work in progress, they have apparently already developed some new methods for audio and video pattern recognition, among other things, and it seems they’ll have plenty of work to sift through for years to come, with the project expected to churn out some 1.4 petabytes of data by the end of year three.

[Thanks, Jeff]

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Filed under: Misc. gadgets

Cogent Computer Systems has started to ship a SO-DIMM-sized computer module based on Atmel’s AT91SAM9263 processor. Known as the CSB737 “system-on-module” (SOM), it will come with a development kit that comprises of a carrier board and a Windows CE 6.0 BSP (board support package). Based on an ARM926EJ-S core running at 240MHz, with a 100MHz system bus, the CSB737 features 96Kb of on-chip SRAM, 10/100 Ethernet, USB host and device ports, camera interface, LCD controller, and a 2D graphics co-processor. Supported by a separately Windows CE 6.0 BSP (board support package) written by Adeneo, you get display, storage, and bus drivers as well. The CSB737 board is available for approximately $300. Can’t wait to see what people can cook up with this.