The market for IT security is large, but very competitive, especially for WinTel system. Almost everyday, an IT Security Company is trying to promote its solutions by releasing PR claiming heaven while basically they do not report anything new. Today, the company
Bit9 has found a new way to promote its "award-winning solutions" by designing characteristics in order to generate new listing of top applications with known vulnerabilities. Amazing but true... so the following parameters have been selected:
- is well-known in the consumer space and frequently downloaded by individuals;
- is not classified as malicious software by enterprise IT organizations;
- contains at least one critical vulnerability registered in the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) official vulnerability database;
- has a severity rating of between 7.0 - 10.0 (high) on the CVSS scoring system;
- relies on the end user, rather than a central administrator, to manually patch or upgrade the software to eliminate the vulnerability, if such a patch exists.
So of course with such settings, the top 5 applications with critical security vulnerabilities is quite unusual:
1. Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7
2. Apple iTunes 6.02 et Quicktime 7.0.3
3. Skype Internet phone1.4
4. Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.02, 6.03
5. Sun Java Run-Time Environment 5.0 Update 3, JRE 1.4.2_08
All those applications have security updates available and then can be patched, the main reason for them to be listed in the top five, is the last parameters of the settings: "relies on the end user, rather than a central administrator, to manually patch or upgrade the software to eliminate the vulnerability, if such a patch exists"
As a result, such analysis does not pick up any MS applications, even tough it is well known that MSN for example is a real plague for IT security, but MS provides automatic updates...
Oups… they also forgot to take into account that in big Corporate Companies, users do not have administrative rights on their computers, so such applications are either not installed or updated by the local IT group…
In addition, the website reporting this news,
ITNEWS, has its front page covered by ads promoting Microsoft protection and security system against Malwares...
Please, but could companies be serious when talking about serious problems??
Toshiba has launched in Japan the world first HD-DVD standalone player/burner; including HD storage.
From its specifications, it looks really impressive (but you need to be rich):
- HD digital tuner
- HDMI/HDCP output
- DVD player/burner.
- 2 HD providing an overall storage capacity of 1TB.
Its price is of course proportional to its specification: 2750 Euros. But this device is also impressive by its weight... 15kg! Maybe it will give customer a better feeling, making the price/kg of this device more acceptable.
Dauger Research has released a new version of Altivec Fractal Carbon taking advantages of both Altivec (PPC G4 and G5) and SSE and SSE2 instructions sets (Intel CPU); its name: PowerFractal.
To evaluate it, we have run a test on a PMG5 Quad, the result was identical to the one obtained with Altivec Fractal Carbon: 37.7 GFlops.
When running Altivec Fractal Carbon on a MB Core Duo 2.16GHz via Rosetta, we obtained: 3.1 GFlops. Using the same notebook but running PowerFractal, the result was: 6.9 GFlops; rather disappointing for us.
When looking to other published results on the web, it seems that Dauger Research still needs to optimize PowerFractal. It might be a good idea to implement SSE3 support for Intel CPU.
The HDMI format version 1.3 has been finalized yesterday. It will bring a larger bandwidth due to an increase fo the bus frequency (moving from 165 to 340MHz).
It will manage 16-bit color decoding per channel, and support audio Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD...
The first device to sport this new HDMI version will be the Playstation 3 expected to hit the market in November.
This new version is back compatible with the previous one, so no stress if you have already HDMI-enable peripherals, they will be supported.
