device
1024-bit RSA encryption cracked by carefully starving CPU of electricity
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/09/1024-bit-rsa-encryption-cracked-by-carefully-starving-cpu-of-ele/
Since 1977, RSA public-key encryption has protected privacy and verified authenticity when using computers, gadgets and web browsers around the globe, with only the most brutish of brute force efforts (and 1,500 years of processing time) felling its 768-bit variety earlier this year. Now, three eggheads (or Wolverines, as it were) at the University of Michigan claim they can break it simply by tweaking a device’s power supply. By fluctuating the voltage to the CPU such that it generated a single hardware error per clock cycle, they found that they could cause the server to flip single bits of the private key at a time, allowing them to slowly piece together the password. With a small cluster of 81 Pentium 4 chips and 104 hours of processing time, they were able to successfully hack 1024-bit encryption in OpenSSL on a SPARC-based system, without damaging the computer, leaving a single trace or ending human life as we know it. That’s why they’re presenting a paper at the Design, Automation and Test conference this week in Europe, and that’s why — until RSA hopefully fixes the flaw — you should keep a close eye on your server room’s power supply.
1024-bit RSA encryption cracked by carefully starving CPU of electricity originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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p://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/04/severe_openssl_vulnerability/“>The Register, TechWorld | 
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The iPad Costs Apple As Little As $229.35 to Build
The $500 16GB, Wi-Fi only iPad costs Apple less than half that to build, according to a recent component breakdown from iSuppli. And for the 64GB 3G iPad, Apple clears nearly $500 in profit. Here’s how it breaks down:
Apple iPad Estimated Bill-of-Materials and Manufacturing Cost Analysis:
This will no doubt be updated once iSuppli and others are able to do a teardown of an actual device, but those estimated profit margins are pretty stunning, particularly on the higher-end models. iSuppli also points out that the 32GB versions of the iPad only cost $30 more to make than their 16GB counterparts, yet retail for $100 more—a good indication that that’s where they expect the sweet spot to be in the market.
Goes a long way to explaining why Apple’s so willing to be flexible on the price, no?[iSuppli]
Now that we’ve seen the iPad in the light of day, there’s a lot of chatter about what it can’t do. But Apple is now a massive threat to netbooks and ebook readers. Here’s why:
Generally speaking, the iPad’s goal is not to replace your netbook, assuming you own and love one. It’s not about replacing your Kindle either, assuming you cashed in for that as well. We have reviewed plenty of both, and know there’s plenty to like. If you derive pleasure out of using either, then Apple might have a hard time convincing you to switch to the iPad. But for the millions of people who aren’t on either bandwagon, yet have the money and interest in a “third” device between the phone and the computer, the iPad will have greater appeal.
250 Million iPods Earlier…
When the first iPod came out, its goal was not to grab the customers who Creative and Archos were fighting over, with their dueling 6GB “jukeboxes.” It was to grab everyone else. I remember listening to arguments about why Archos had a better device than Creative or even Apple. Lot of good that early-adopter love got them in the long run. The pocket media player market exploded, with Apple eating over half the pie consistently for almost a decade.
When the iPhone came out, BlackBerry users were like, “No flippin’ way.” And guess what, those people still buy BlackBerries. (And why shouldn’t they? Today’s BlackBerry is still great, and hardly distinguishable from the BB of 2007.) The point is, the iPhone wasn’t designed to win the hearts and minds of people who already knew their way around a smartphone. It came to convince people walking around with Samsung and LG flip phones that there was more to life. And it worked.
iPhones now account for more than half of AT&T’s phone sales. You can bet that WinMo, Palm and BB combined weren’t doing that kind of share pre-iPhone. Globally, the smartphone business grew from a niche thing for people in suits to being a 180-million unit per year business, says Gartner, eclipsing the entire notebook business—about 20% of which, I might add, are netbooks. The iPhone isn’t the sole driver of this growth, of course, but its popularity has opened many new doors for the category. Just ask anyone in the business of developing/marketing/selling Droids or Palm Pres.
You could say, “Those were Apple’s successes, what about their failures?” In the second age of Steve Jobs, there aren’t a whole lot. Apple TV is the standout—quite possibly because Apple discovered, after releasing the product, that there wasn’t a big enough market for it, or any of its competitors. Apple TV may be crowded out by connected Blu-ray players, home-theater PCs and HD video players, but Apple TV’s niche is, to this day, almost frustratingly unique.
So how do you know if a market exists? You ask the “other” Steve, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
It’s Business Time
There’s a famous Ballmerism, one he’s even said to me, that goes something like, “A business isn’t worth entering unless the sales potential is 50 million units or more.” 50 million. That’s why Ballmer is happy to go into the portable media player business and the game console business, but laughs about ebook readers. Microsoft may not sell 50 million Zunes, but it’s worth being a contender.
You can bet Apple thinks this way. You can easily argue that, despite its sheen of innovation, Apple is far more conservative than Microsoft. Apple TV is a bit of an anomaly, but with no major hardware refreshes and a few small-minded software updates, you can hardly accuse Apple of throwing good money after bad. Presumably Apple TV was a learning experience for Jobs & Co., one they’re not likely to repeat.
With that in mind, let’s look particularly at netbooks and ebook readers.
Like Notebooks, Only Littler
Netbooks are cooking, but it’s well known they’re cooking because notebooks are not. A netbook was originally conceived as something miraculously small and simple, running Linux with a warm fuzzy interface that dear old gran could use to bone up on pinochle before Friday’s showdown with the Rosenfelds. But instead of growing outward to this new audience (always with the grandmothers, it seems), it grew inward, cannibalizing real PC sales.
The Linux fell away, mostly because it was ill-conceived, and these simply became tiny, cheap, limited-function Windows PCs. They may have been a 40-million-unit business last year, according to DisplaySearch, but they only got cheaper, and the rest of the business was so depressed nobody was happy. (And just ask Ballmer how much he makes on those XP licenses, or even the “low-powered OS” that is Windows 7 Starter.)
Point is, nerds may love their netbooks, but the market that the netbook originally set out to reach is too far away, running farther away and screaming louder with every blog post about what chipset and graphics processor a netbook is rumored to have, or whether or not it is, indeed, a netbook at all. Clearly the audience is cheap geeks, and while that may be a good market to be in (just read Giz comments), it’s definitively not Steve Jobs’ market.
Easy on the Eyes
Now, about that Kindle. Best ebook reader out there. Every time we say that, we say it with a wink. We totally respect the Kindle (and I for one have hopes for Nook once it pulls itself out of the firmware mess it’s in), but we think e-ink is a limited medium.
Its functionality is ideal for a very specific task—simulating printed words on paper—and for that I have always sung its praise. The Kindle is ideal for delivering and serving up those kinds of books, and as a voracious reader of those kinds of books, I am grateful for its existence. But there are other kinds of books of which I am a consumer: Cookbooks, children’s books and comic books. (Notice, they all end in “book.”) The Kindle can’t do any of those categories well at all, because they are highly graphical. E-ink’s slow-refreshing, difficult-to-resize grayscale images are pretty much hideous. No big deal for the compleat Dickens, but too feeble to take on my dog-eared, saffron-stained Best-Ever Curry Cookbook.
So, e-ink’s known weaknesses aside, let’s talk again about Ballmer’s favorite number, 50 million. Guess how many Kindles are estimated to have been sold ever since the very first one launched? 2.5 million. Nobody knows for sure because Amazon won’t release the actual figures. Guess how many ebook readers are supposedly going to sell this year, according to Forrester? Roughly 6 million. In a year. Compare that to 21 million iPods sold last quarter, along with 9 million iPhones.
I am not suggesting that the iPod or iPhone is a worthwhile replacement for reading, but I am saying that, for better or worse, there are probably at least 2.5 million iPod or iPhone users who read books on those devices.
Are you starting to see the larger picture here? I am not trying to convince you to buy an Apple iPad, I am trying to explain to you why you probably will anyway. As the Kindle fights just to differentiate itself while drowning in a milk-white e-ink sea of God-awful knockoffs, you’ll see that color screen shining in the distance.
Sure the iPad may not be as easy on the eyes as a Kindle. But you will be able to read in bed without an additional light source. You will be able to read things online without banging your head against a wall to get to the right page. And, once the publishers get their acts together, you will be able to enjoy comics, cookbooks, and children’s books, with colorful images. Even before you set them into motion, dancing around the screen, they’ll look way better than they would on e-ink. (I haven’t even mentioned magazines, but once that biz figures out what to do with this thing, they will make it work, because they need color screens, preferably touchscreens.)
Tide Rollin’ In
So we have this new device, carefully planned by a company with a unique ability to reach new markets. And we have two types of products that have effectively failed to reach those markets. And you’re going to bet on the failures? The iPad has shortcomings, but they only betray Apple’s caution, just like what happened with iPhone No. 1. Now every 15-year-old kid asks for an iPhone, and the ones that don’t get them get iPod Touches.
We can sit here in our geeky little dorkosphere arguing about it all day, but as much as Apple clearly enjoys our participation, the people Jobs wants to sell this to don’t read our rants. They can’t even understand them. My step-mother refuses to touch computers, but nowadays checks email, reads newspapers and plays Solitaire on an iPod Touch, after basically picking it up by accident one day. That’s a future iPad user if I ever saw one.
Jobs doesn’t care about the netbook business, or the ebook business. He’s just aiming for the same people they were aiming at. The difference is, he’s going to reach them. And the fight will be with whoever enters into the tablet business with him. Paging Mr. Ballmer…
PS – If I’ve gotten to the end of this lengthy piece without telling you much about the iPad at all, it’s because other Giz staffers have already done such a handsome job of that already. If you missed out, here are the best four links to get you up to speed:
• Apple iPad: Everything You Need To Know
• Apple iPad Just Tried to Assassinate Laptops
• 8 Things That Suck About Apple iPad
Another day, another story about some cheap, plastic Wii motion control accessory finding an application outside of gaming. In this case, it’s the balance board, and not only is this device helping stroke victims recover, it’s saving them money, too.
In fact, doctors at the University of Melbourne found that the balance board, normally used for pseudo Yoga or navigating Mii’s down a virtual ski slope, was so sensitive it could very well replace traditional laboratory-grade “force platforms” doctors use to assess a patient’s balance.
When doctors disassembled the board, they found the accelerometers and strain gauges to be of “excellent” quality. “I was shocked given the price: it was an extremely impressive strain gauge set-up,” said lead researcher Ross Clark, in an interview with New Scientist.
Even better, Clark’s team has already published a paper that verifies the Wii balance board is “clinically comparable” to the nearly $18,000 lab force platform. That’s great news for many smaller physio clinics that would otherwise be unable to afford the traditional rig. [New Scientist]
Behold, the power of a scary-sounding letter from a lawyer! Paul dropped his Kindle 2 and it broke. Amazon wanted $200 to replace it. Instead, they replaced it and gave him an additional $200. Damn, son!
Seriously, how badass is this letter he sent to Amazon?
Paul Gowder
[Address omitted]August 12, 2009
Amazon.com Inc.
Legal Department
1200 12th Avenue South
Suite 1200
Seattle, WA 98144-2734Dear Sir or Madam:
On June 21, 2009, I purchased an Kindle 2 e-book reader from the Amazon.com website. I purchased this device based, in substantial part, on the expectation that it would be reasonably durable. In particular, I expected that it would be approximately as durable as is ordinary in the consumer electronics market.
Amazon.com advertises the Kindle 2 on the basis of its durability. Notably, Amazon.com displays a “drop test” video on the web page for this product. That video displays the device being dropped twice from thirty inches onto what appears to be tile. That video displays a fall with sufficient force that the device visibly bounces, and deliberately creates the impression that the device will function after impacts similar to that sequence of drops.
Despite those representations, the Kindle 2 is far less durable. On July 26, 2009, I dropped a messenger bag containing the device onto the sidewalk, from approximately two feet above the ground. It was dropped only once, and the messenger bag absorbed enough of the shock that nothing else in the bag, including a Macbook laptop, suffered an! y damage whatsoever. (Unlike the drop displayed in Amazon.com’s video, for example, nothing actually bounced.) Moreover, there was no visible damage on the exterior of the Kindle 2. Nonetheless, the Kindle 2 became completely unusable, with over 50% of its screen no longer able to display any text.
I called Amazon.com support and was told that, because of the accidental drop, you would not be willing to supply a replacement device under warranty. You did, however, offer to sell a new device at a discount, for $200.00. I took advantage of that offer under protest, and explicitly reserved my rights to bring a claim against you based on the unreasonable fragility of the device and the misrepresentations in your advertising. It is that claim that forms the subject of this letter.
I am prepared to offer an immediate settlement of my claims against Amazon.com for a payment of $400.00. That sum represents the $200.00 replacement fee I paid plus $200.00 to compensate me for the diminution of utility and value of the device as well as of the e-books I have purchased for that device, in light of the fact that the replacement device, too, can be expected to be far more fragile than advertised and prone to destruction under the slightest stress. This offer expires thirty days from your receipt of this letter. If you do not accept this offer, I intend to bring suit either individually, or, if I decide it is warranted, as representative for a class of similarly situated plaintiffs. At that time, I will seek the amount noted above, plus punitive damages under the California Consumers Legal Remedies Act, Cal. Civil Code §1750 et. seq., costs, fees, and such other monetary damages as provided for by law, including without limitation Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §17200 et. seq., the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, and other relevant law.
Also, you have demanded the return of the broken device as a condition to the unreasonable discounted replacement offer which I accept! ed under protest. Your agent has informed me that you will charge my credit card for the full price if the broken device is not returned to you. I am considering seeking a protective order placing that device in the custody of the Court pending litigation. However, should I instead return the device, you are hereby notified that it is evidence in the anticipated litigation to which this letter refers. Should you modify, destroy, or resell the broken device, I will ask the Court to treat that as deliberate spoliation of evidence and make adverse inferences as appropriate.
Very truly yours,
Paul Gowder
And here’s Amazon’s response:
Pretty awesome. Just goes to show that if you put your somewhat-unreasonable request in an official-looking form and also threaten to sue, big companies will be happy to toss a token amount of money your way to make you go away. [Consumerist]
Your Data’s Probably Gone Forever [Outages]
T-Mobile Sidekick users have been holding out hope that their data might be recovered after T-Mo issued an optimistic message of hope. But the carrier just updated users and admitted the truth: Your shit’s gone. Sorry, guys.
It’s been more than two weeks without data for Sidekick users, and T-Mobile finally bit the bullet and announced that it probably isn’t coming back. The quote:
Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low.
This is pretty crappy of T-Mobile and Danger, and while it’s probably unfair to make this connection, doesn’t give us any new confidence in Project Pink, developed by the remnants of Danger after Microsoft acquired it. (After all, Microsoft bought Danger specifically because of their software services. And now, it just goes kablooey?) Renowned Sidekick user and a-hole Perez Hilton, while normally hysteric about just about everything, has the right tone here:
To add insult to injury, the ONLY thing T-Mobile is offering their customers, whom they obviously don’t value or respect, is one month of free data service.
That’s shit!
One month of free data service (which is not the same thing as one month of free phone use) for SEVEN DAYS of heartache and no access to contacts????
That’s fucked!!!!
Really, that’s kind of putting it lightly. [T-Mobile via Boy Genius Report]
What is Web 3.0? Characteristics of Web 3.0
2009 06 16 What Is Web 3.0 – Presentation Transcript
- What is Web 3.0? Dr. Augustine Fou June 16, 2009. June 16, 2009.
- Evolution of the Internet microprocessor 40 yrs 10 yrs 20 yrs 5 yrs present web internet 2.5 yrs social networks e-commerce 1.5 yrs Web 1.0 Web 2.0 Web 3.0? June 16, 2009.
- Evolution of the “Web” content commerce search social networks social content social search social commerce As each stage reaches critical mass, the next stage is tipped into present June 16, 2009.
- Key Characteristics present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
- Speedy
- more timely information and more efficient tools to find information
- Collaborative
- actions of users amass, police, and prioritize content
- Trust-worthy
- users establish trust networks and hone trust radars
- Content
- content destination sites and personal portals
- Search
- critical mass of content drives need for search engines
- Commerce
- commerce goes mainstream; digital goods rise
- Ubiquitous
- available at any time, anywhere, through any channel or device
- Individualized
- filtered and shared by friends or trust networks
- Efficient
- relevant and contextual information findable instantly
June 16, 2009.
- Illustrative Examples – retail/shopping present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
- what friends bought or want to buy
- drag-to-share items which friends know friends are looking for
- item collections
- value in the aggregation
overstock.com amazon.com FB app: MyFaveThings
-
- contextual reviews
- reviews of reviews
- what others bought
- individualized recommendations
June 16, 2009.
- Illustrative Examples – social networks present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
- aggregates all your online identities
- syndicates all your updates to all social networks
- social actions visible to friends
- trust networks across geography, time, and interests
- collection of personal homepages
geocities.com facebook.com peoplebrowsr.com June 16, 2009.
- Illustrative Examples – restaurant reviews present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
- Yelp content vetted through a user’s trust network and individual recommendations made based on situation and need, in real-time
- user submitted reviews
- related items based on similarity of user preferences
- infrequent publication
- centralized editorial control
zagat‘s yelp need reco for great Italian + GPS + Yelp 5-star Babbo, been there, love it June 16, 2009.
- Illustrative Examples – photos present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
- real-time, contextual “do you like this knit shirt?”
- friends give immediate feedback
- share photos with friends and strangers
- enable visitors to tag and comment
- individual albums
kodakgallery.com flickr.com ? June 16, 2009.
- Illustrative Examples – real estate present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
- information vetted by fellow users, recommended directly an in context
- listings plus relevant information like school zones, comparable sales, alerts
- listings based on parameters
corcoran.com streeteasy.com trulia iphone app June 16, 2009.
- Illustrative Examples – encyclopedia present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
- content is ubiquitous and available through any channel or device
- trust network proactively forwards relevant info to user who needs it
- created, updated, and edited (policed) by user actions
- digitized version of printed encyclopedia
britannica.com wikipedia.com chacha.com June 16, 2009.
- Illustrative Examples – online coupons present web 1.0 web 2.0 web 3.0
- coupons delivered contextually and proactively when user needs it (without the user even asking for it)
- instant feedback
- community action makes it more accurate and useful for others
- collection of online coupons – value in the aggregation
dealcatcher.com retailmenot.com June 16, 2009.
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