News for Friday, 20 June 2008

Seagate tested the water by announcing its willingness to give up 3.5" hard drives in lieu of 2.5" units. While at first sight this decision may seem shocking, it has its motivations:
-- The explosion of capacity has already brought us 500 GB disks in this format, and this is just the beginning, of course. Moreover, the bulk of sales is currently below capacity.
-- These discs are cheaper to produce, requiring less material.
-- Due to the smaller plates, access times are better and there is less vibration
-- These discs consume less energy and therefore produce less heat.
-- A production shift to exclusively 2.5" will cut costs.
Already Savio drives for servers or the Velociraptor have proven that one can produce very successful 2.5" drives. Of course, if the 3.5" format disappears, it will be very gradually, spread over many years.

Even though the throughput of the busses between a CPU and its memory keeps increasing, this is still the major bottleneck for the performace in most computersystems.
That's why manufactureres invented the cache memory, with L(evel)1, L2 and sometimes L3 cache.
While the size of this L2 cache is still growing, these SRAM modules are requiring more and more transistors (storing a single bit typically requires 6 transistors).
Intel is now looking to replace these SRAM units with DRAM cells. These require only 2 transistors per bit, allowing us to achieve a way higher memory density, and/or even smaller CPU's.
Intel already succeeded in creating this type of cache at 2 GHz, assuring a 128Gb/s throughput, which may get even higher in the future.
The first processors to take advantage of this technology are the Terascale processors. Later on, also lower-end processors are going to be equipped with it.

Quickertek already offers 802.11n products for your Mac, and has now announced a solar energy recharge system for the MacBook Air.
The system comes in 3 versions (18W, 27W and 55W), allowing you to charge your MBA in 14 hours (for the 18W model), or even 5 hours (for the 55W model). The only thing that might keep you away from buying it is that you need quite some space, and... quite some money: the 18W version is a 30" surface, and costs $500. The 55-watt model costs $1000, and requires a surface of 60x42", or about 152cm x 106 cm.
Let's just hope that the capacity of these solar cells will increase soon, making it possible to put such products together with your laptop in the laptop bag.

Intego reports to has identified a new vulnerability in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 which is linked to the application Apple Remote Desktop. According to Intego, the ARD vulnerability would allow malicious programs to execute code as Root without requiring a password:

A vulnerability has been discovered that allows malicious programs to execute code as root when run locally, or via a remote connection, on computers running Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. This vulnerability takes advantage of the fact that ARDAgent, a part of the Remote Management component of Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, has a setuid bit set. Any user running such an executable gains the privileges of the user who owns that executable. In this case, ARDAgent is owned by root, so running code via the ARDAgent executable runs this code as root, without requiring a password. The exploit in question depends on ARDAgent’s ability to run AppleScripts, which may, in turn, include shell script commands.
When an application enables a root privilege escalation of this type, any malicious code that is run may have devastating effects. These may range from deleting all the files on the Mac (regardless of who owns them) to more pernicious attacks such as changing system settings, and even setting up periodic tasks to perform them repeatedly. Any application could use this vulnerability to obtain root privileges without users ever needing to enter passwords. Users could run malicious programs that they download from the Internet or receive from friends or colleagues, and, if the program exploits this vulnerability, simply launching it once would be sufficient for damage to be done.
There are cases where this exploit does not work. If a user has turned on Remote Management in the Sharing pane of System Preferences under Mac OS X 10.5, or if a user has installed Apple Remote Desktop client under Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier and has activated this setting in the Sharing preferences, the exploit will not function. Most users, however, will not have this service turned on; generally only those users who want to observe or control other computers on their network will turn this on to do so. Note that Mac OS X 10.5’s Screen Sharing function has no effect on this vulnerability.
This exploit can be triggered by any type of user account: standard user, administrator, or even a guest account. Therefore, a guest logged in using Mac OS X 10.5’s Guest Account feature has the ability to download an application and unwittingly run malicious code with no security warning.

Thanks to SecureMac we know a bit about this vulnerability. The code was initially mentioned by Slashdot after being reported on a forum. With a simple AppleScript ran on a Mac you can launch any command line with root rights without requiring the administrator password.
Even more dangerous, a Trojan, named AppleScript.THT, has been created, once run by the users (administrator or not), it can take screenshot from your iSight, record your keyboard entries, execute any codes, send password to a remote server, etc. it can even manage to protect itself by deactivating system message recording and opening ports on your firewall.
The file NOT to be launched is currently named ASthtv05 or AStht_v06. This Trojan is currently detected by MacScan and VirusBarrier X5 with their last virus definitions.

In order to strengthen the high-end segment, NVidia announced the future availability of the GeForce 9800 GTX+. This card will also be based on the G92 GPU ( as the GF 8800 GT), engraved at 55 nm but its core and memory frequencies will be boosted to 738/1838 MHz, respectively.
If we are lucky, it should be possible to flash such card with a GF 8800 GT ROM, in order to be able to install it in a Mac and to enjoy such crunching power while we are still waiting for Apple to deliver competitive graphic card and drivers for Mac users... even though with the forthcoming OpenCL in Snow Leopard, this will most likely never happen.

Apple has issued a press release to announce that a total of the 5 billion pieces sold via the iTunes Store had been exceeded in 5 years of existence.
Even though the growth of the online shop of Apple seems without end, at the same time the music industry announces its worse result of the sales since 1985.
If pirating is once again designated as the prime guilty one, Apple proves that one can grow and trade in spite of this, for the little crumb of comfort this gives.

Louis, a reader living in Australia sent these two photographs to us taken at the time of the opening of the "down-under" Apple Store in Sydney.


Far from being buried as that which will open at the Louvre, Paris, it is smack in the town centre with 3 floors.
Of course, there was an enormous queue for the opening, withthe Apple employees applauding the first customers.

We have succeeded to confirm the information that we gave you on May 22.
Just like FNAC, Apple Premium Resellers will have the possibility of selling the 3G iPhone.
To their great regret they will not have it on July 17, but by the end of August/beginning of September. As FNAC, they will have to send salesmen to be trained at Orange/Apple, the iPhones can only be sold with a subscription.
"Open Door" days will be organized to celebrate the event.

Until now, Apple has brought the support of Flash on the iPhone to a dead end, evoking various reasons: too large a consumption of energy, possibilities of a hack by through Flash… and these reasons are more or less valid.
Even if the owners of the iPhone can make do with this absence, Adobe can not.
They thus announced that they have a version of their software functioning satisfactorily on the iPhone in their laboratories, seeking certainly more to tease Apple than anything else.
Indeed, Apple has been very clear here. Software developed via the SDK can only run in an independent way without being able to remain running as a background task. Thus, if Flash is run without support of Apple, it will be necessary to launch a specific reader for reading vidéos or microsoftwares with this format, prohibiting for example, the visualisation of a window directly in Safari.
But Adobe seems to want to oppose this, all at least for the moment, seeking a way to force open the door of the iPhone.

Give Good Food to your Mac returns.
To remind you, this initiative proposes many software with a decreasing price, 30% reduction if you take 3 of them 34.0% for 4 and 50% from 5 onwards.
The principal interest of this offer compared to others proposed by software dedicated sites is to transfer the main part (80%) of the profits to the developers rather than just some crumbs.
The offer will be valid for 4 days.
http://www.givegoodfood.com

Stocks of the iPod Touch are reducing with regularity and a stock shortage is threatened. Even though this beginning of shortage could be explained by promotion for students proposing one of these devices for each portable bought, it is not enough to justify the fall of the high-ends models.
According to certain analysts, Apple could bring out a new model for the back-to-school period, the goal being to reposition the iPod Touch compared to the more interesting 3G iPhone (but needing a subscription).
It is true that Apple must find the means of disassociating these two devices so that each one enjoys strong sales, such sales being an important condition for the success of the AppStore.

During April, it was learned that Hynix encountered production problems with its memory chips engraved in 66 nm, leading them to throw a considerable part of the months production into the dustbin.
Samsung apparently has similar problems and has instabilities in the production of chips engraved in 68 nm. Thus, the equivalent of 80 million chips of 128 MB may have been rejected during the qualification tests.
Even though this is a bad news for Samsung, it should not affect the strong sales of these memory chips, the market is not particularly saturated in this lean period.
This could change with the back-to-school period and in the end of year period if the production problems are not solved by then.

Encouraged by the absence (at least officially) of reaction from Apple, Psystar continues to propose clones of Mac and now attacks the server market with its OpenServe.
Based on one or two 4 cores Xeons running at 2,5 or 2,66 GHz and having 3 hard drive bays, it is presented in the form of a rack 1U mount. It can, by choice, start up Mac OS X 10.5 or the very select Mac OS X server.
The absence of reaction by Apple lets to us think that Snow Leopard will require one to activate new advanced protections that will complicate the work of those which want to use of Hackintosh, and perhaps add a hassle to the life of the legitimate customers too.