News for Friday, 7 November 2008

Officially, Seagate, the world largest HD manufacturer, does not trust in SSD future. However, they announced the availability of Seagate-branded SSDs as early as 2009, even though those models will be dedicated to Pro users based on their specifications and prices. Indeed, they will be using a mix a SLC and MLC chips, the first being faster but low density, while the second offer high capacity at the cost of performance.
As you probably know from our recent news, we disagree with Seagate’s vision about SSD future, and we strongly suspect that SSD will quickly replace and/or be integrated into notebook in near future as a default storage unit, not necessarily as the only one.
However, today’s announcement shows that Seagate is starting to consider the SSD as an alternative, not for all computers, but definitely a field where the company should be present to keep its leadership on the market for computer storage solutions.

Security researchers, Erik Tews and Martin Beck report to have developed a way to partially crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard used many wireless networks.
The attack procedure will be further detailed at the PacSec conference in Tokyo next week. Researchers will demo how they managed to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key used by WPA encryption, within a short time period (12-15 minutes) in order to read data being sent from a router to a laptop computer. However, they did not manage to crack the encryption keys used to secure data being exchanged between the computer and the router.
Researchers are planning to publish their work a dedicated journal in the coming months. More important for users and corporates, part of the code used in the attack was already added Beck's Aircrack-ng Wi-Fi encryption hacking tool two weeks ago.
As WEP and WAP do not look safe anymore, users and corporate relying on wireless network, will have to now adopt WPA2 (or WPA-AES), much more robust encryption protocols; but for how long…