News for Friday, 19 March 2010

In the world of computer security, the zero day faults are the worst. They are revealed even before the editor of the software concerned has been informed and are thus exploitable immediately by malevolent people. According to H-Online, Charlie Miller, an IT expert has discovered at least 20 relating to the Mac running OS X. These faults also affect the Open Source components installed in Mac OS X, as well as third party software such as Flash and faults specific to the components specific to Apple.
These 20 faults are vulnerabilities to a process that consists of bombarding the entry channels of the applications with a massive volume of corrupted data until the saturated software allows writing in its memory and to execute the code.
Charlie Miller will not reveal these faults but considers that the attitude of Apple concerning the security breaches is far too off-hand.  Apple are safe just since they have a small market share and are uninteresting to hackers (however even they have joked on the number of security issues under Windows).

AppleInsider announced that that they had received information that Apple would not change anything in its range of Mac Pros before June. On that occasion, and only at that moment, they would replace 4 core Xeon with the 6 core models about which we have spoken to you at length.
They would also take advantage at this time to release a new screen, an Apple LED display 27" using an identical screen to that of the iMac and whose price would be competitive thanks to the effect of volume created by the excellent sales of the iMac. In this case, the price of the 24" would be examined otherwise it will be completely overshadowed if the price is too close to the newcomer.
According to old information that we have, Apple would prepare also a significant update of the design of the case of Mac Pro and a still much larger screen intended for the mounting of HD videos.

Intego has announced the second version of its software "Washing Machine" for washing your machine. This software is dedicated to erase all the traces that you could have left on a computer while surfing on Internet or by using software that reach the internet in some way.
The software is not sold alone, but the update is free for those who have obtained the first version as a supplement of another product of this company.

By refusing to license the technology required for developing controllers/chipset for its Clarkdale and Arrendale CPUs, Intel prevents NVIDIA to access the market where its last product, the GeForce 9400M has been a hit and most likely pushed Intel to react in such a way. While this story will find an end in front of the court, NVIDIA has to find a new market as its chipset can only be found on AMD CPU-based hardware.

So, NVIDIA announced the end of its R&D teams dedicated to chipset development, and the creation of new department dedicated to the design and development of Tegra chips. This is now a team composed of 650 people that will be working on such chips, consider by NVIDIA CEO as more power than the A4 developed by Apple. With such move, NVIDIA will not be in direct competition with Intel, as the founder does not really work hard on developing ARM-based CPU; for the time being...

If though we thought that the standard USB 3.0 would not manage to take off since it did not have the support of Intel and especially since it was not present in its chipsets of 2010.  Today, a good number of PC manufacturers, portables and offices machines, add on the mother board of their products a controller able to add USB 3.0. The leading controller of this adaptation is manufactured by NEC.

NEC announced that they have already sold 2 million since September 2009. The demand is increasing, NEC announced that the monthly production of this chip would be pushed as of the next month to 2 million units monthly. Now when Intel decides to support this standard, there will be already many millions of computers all over the world which will support it and certainly more, since other chipmakers will not miss taking advantage of this hole.

According to Digitimes, Intel is having problem to deliver enough units of mobile Arrendale Core i3/i5/i7 to computer manufacturers. The problem seems to be linked to some companies, such as Acer that placed orders for huge amount of chips, probably betting on a quick economic come-back after the gap. So, Intel would have decided to favor its main/largest customers first, answering other orders later when production would have fully ramped up. It remains unclear if this is the reason why we are still waiting for the update of Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro models based on Core ix. It is possible that Apple and Intel are not as close as it used to be 2 years ago, and the founder decided to deal first with Acer and Co than with Apple... same thing could apply for the delay of the new Mac Pro...

Sony announced to be working with Intel and google in order to improve internet contents on its current and futures TV models. Google would be working on a dedicated OS derived from Android, aka Google TV software. The remote control featuring a keyboard would be designed and manufactured by Logitech. 

Such information could push Apple to (finally) update the Apple TV or bring a true new version in order to boost sales and turn this hobby into a success, as without a fully functional Apple TV Apple and the iTunes Store will be kick out from the emerging and juicy online video market.