Moore’s Law is Alive!
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Who said that Moore’s Law was a dead duck as soon as the 35nm chip brought diffraction limits into play to prevent feature creation any smaller than that? Actually, I don’t know and I don’t care, because now somebody else has said it really doesn’t matter. Possibly.
A couple of Berkeley Boffins, Xiang Zhang and David Bogy, seem to have found a method of getting around this light beam limitation and enabling chip features right down to a sub-10nm level. In which case, Moore’s Law is not dead and transistor numbers on a chip can continue to double every 18 months for a while yet.
The key that unlocks this particular problematic padlock would appear to be photolithography. Or at least something very similar to it. By using light waves with a plasmonic metal the electrons are allowed to vibrate and produce, in effect, shorter wavelengths than standard light. Shorter waves means the ability to focus more light in the same area, which in turn means smaller features on a chip. In theory.
According to the Register the researchers have devised a 100nm plasmonic lens with silver material organised into concentric Fresnl screen-alike rings which flies 200nm above the revolving substrate beneath. So far they have only managed to get features down to a width of 80nm, which does little for Moore’s Law survival, but seem to be pretty sure that they can reduce that size down to maybe even 5nm and so enable processors 10 times smaller than those we have today while also being far more powerful.
Come back in five years when they have had the time to get all this working. Until then, maybe the title of this posting should have been Moore’s Law is in suspended animation…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Poke that Facebook code
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Facebook likes to push the mantra that it is making the world a more open and connected place through the medium of dance. Sorry, through the medium of social networking I mean. It also likes to let slip every now and then that the software it uses to build the site and service is pretty much all open source stuff.
Now Facebook has taken that final step into the lovey dovey world of openness and is releasing that code which it has developed into the wild, so that the open source community can do with it what it will. Well, apart from producing a Facebook clone one assumes.
The process gets under way immediately as Facebook releases the Scribe cold. This critical piece of infrastructure is used to collect large amounts of data from a large number of servers, data which is then used to do stuff like track database memory consumption when delivering relationship stories directly into the News Feed. Or, as Facebook puts it “Scribe is a server for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers. It is designed to be scalable, extensible without client-side modification, and robust to failure of the network or any specific machine.”
Facebook ended up building its own system because all the open source, and proprietary ones for that matter, which it tried to perform the same task just could not cope with the massive amounts of data being generated by Facebook members. Massive as in tens of billions of pieces of information being moved around every single day.
The Scribe source can be found here.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Patch Thursday?
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Windows, Security, Microsoft on
We all know that Microsoft issues security updates and fixes on the second Tuesday of the month. That is why it is called Patch Tuesday. So why the heck is Microsoft issuing a security patch today, a Thursday, in-between Patch Tuesday runs?
The twee answer is ‘who cares’ as long as Microsoft is fixing a hole? The slightly longer and serious answer is that we simply do not know. All we do know is that it is that rarest of beasts for a company that has built a reputation for taking a slowly, slowly, catchee monkey approach to bug fixing and security hole filling: the emergency security patch.
Indeed, this will be the first time since April 2007 that Microsoft has made such a move. Back then it was to cover the corporate arse as a well known vulnerability with .ani files was being exploited in the wild and getting a huge amount of publicity.
But this time it is different, this time there is no great media outcry and no great insider whispering campaign either. Which all points to a serious vulnerability that has not yet been made public, which does not mean that the bad guys are unaware of it of course. The very fact that an emergency patch is being rushed out suggests that there is either a real and imminent danger of it being exploited, that it is already being exploited or that if it were exploited it would have wide-ranging and harmful implications for Windows users.
All we know, all the IT security grapevine knows, is that the update will be rated as critical for Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 and is scheduled to appear at 5pm this afternoon.
Rated: 60% (4 votes)
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Mobile Itchy Chin Syndrome!
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Mobile Phones on
The British Association of Dermatologists reckons that people who spend a long time chatting on their mobile phones are getting rashes on the faces, and on their ears. Oh, and even also even on their fingers for the heavy texting brigade.
Apparently, some 30 percent of the UK population have some degree of allergic reaction to nickel. This is most obvious amongst women who often develop jewellery based rashes as a result. However, now it seems that mobile phone handsets which contain nickel are also giving certain users the itchy chin syndrome.
The nickel content of a mobile handset can be found in the casing, and on the buttons, and the more fashionable the model the higher the chance of getting a swift dose of mobile phone dermatitis. The ‘free nickel’ content is most commonly found in such areas as decorative logos, LCD frames and menu buttons.
The skin doctors reckon anyone suffering from earhole scratch should get advice from their doctor.
I reckon they should start using a handsfree kit.
Still, it could make for some interesting pranking next time you are near a Carphone Warehouse. I can just see the look on the sales droids face when the customer asks if they can hold the phone against their face all day to check for an allergic reaction.
Rated: 46.67% (3 votes)
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The
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in phishing, Blog, Security, Internet on
Fake antivirus software is nothing new. Indeed, one South Korean chap called Lee Shin-ja was recently arrested and charged with doing the virtual equivalent of running into a room, shouting fire and then selling fire extinguishers that might or might not work. He was charged with selling a total of 1.26 million licenses for an antivirus product to clean computers of non-existent infections in a three year period. A nice little earner that is said to have netted him around
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Every little helps chip-and-pin thieves
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Data Protection, Blog, e-commerce on
Blimey, just as I was about to leave for the regular weekly family supermarket hike to Tesco I have to go and read this rather disturbing news story from someone whose opinion on matters ITsec related I value very highly indeed.
Graham Cluley first got wind of the fact that there might be something fishy going on at the supermarket checkout a couple of months back, following a number of reports from local newspaper journalists asking if he knew anything about credit card fraud at the supermarket. It seems that readers of local newspapers had been getting in touch to suggest particular supermarket branches had been involved in some kind of chip and pin fraud.
Now the story has exploded into the national newspapers, with the The Telegraph reporting how hundreds of the chip and pin payment machines used in supermarkets across Europe have been tampered with to steal your credit card data.
OK, so nothing new in the old double swipe, or the false front card reader for ATM machines and even the odd bit of WiFi phreakery to do this sort of thing. But this is different, this the reports suggest, involves the terminals you use at the checkout actually having been tampered with before they shipped. Internally, so that there is no way of telling from an external examination that the device is compromised.
The head of the US National Counter Intelligence Executive warns that suspect devices have been shipped to Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, and the Netherlands. All with hidden hardware that can transmit card data via the mobile phone network to the criminal ring behind the scam based in Lahore, Pakistan.
Amongst the supermarkets said to have been affected in the UK are market leaders Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s. Graham Cluley says that supermarkets are now “weighing chip-and-pin devices to determine if they were compromised or not, as affected machines weighed three to four ounces heavier.”
Perhaps the most worrying of all is that this time the thieves have been clever. Patient and clever. They did not cash in on the stolen data immediately, as is the usual pattern of such things, but instead waited a couple of months to make tracking back the root of the data loss that much harder.
Cluley says that buying goods in a respected supermarket should be safe, however he does warn that “Retailers are going to have to do more in future to ensure the integrity of their payment devices is utterly without question, and to guard the supply of such devices from factory to supermarket checkout, or risk losing the confidence of their customers.”
It is also distrubing as it means that although previous news reports have suggested that credit card crime has been driven overseas, that the UK is actually still at risk.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
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Windows XP: the invincible OS
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Windows, Microsoft on
Good news for consumers and business customers alike who would not touch Vista with a slow-running barge pole, bad news for Microsoft which is already touting the wonders of Windows 7. XP simply refuses to die, and Microsoft appears unable or unwilling to turn off the life support…
On April 15th 2007 I penned a story suggesting that the death of Windows XP should be accompanied by an epitaph of good riddance to insecure rubbish. In that same piece I reported how Microsoft had set a date of February 2008 to “kill off XP.”
It seems I may have been premature, as Microsoft really just does not seem to have the stomach to kill XP. This is not all that surprising, especially when you have the likes of Intel flicking the V’s at Vista. Just three short months ago an Intel insider (geddit?) revealed that the company had decided against upgrading to Vista after a “lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff” suggested the costs and potential benefits of making the switch were simply not worth it.
Nonetheless, Microsoft ploughed ahead with the official death to XP strategy and announced it was dead on June 30th when the OS would no longer be available to the likes of Dell and HP, and shrink-wrapped distribution would also cease. Shame then, that at the very start of July I was able to reveal that Dell was introducing a Windows Vista Bonus package for its buyers: the bonus being that your computer came with XP pre-installed instead of Vista.
XP just will not die for one simple reason, well two actually. Firstly there is a genuine demand in the market for an OS which is not as resource hungry as Vista yet is still Windows based. That OS demand is met by XP and not anything else, not even Linux which still frightens off the masses. Secondly, there is the reason for that demand. Which, and I’m sorry about this Microsoft, really does come back to the fact that Vista has just not made a compelling case for itself. It demands too much raw power to perform its magic, and even then you end up feeling like you have paid for Derren Brown and got Paul Daniels.
Which is why Microsoft OEM partners have been able to continue selling XP, with the no doubt begrudging blessing of Microsoft. The get-around is by way of selling a Vista PC with XP in the box and the ability to ‘downgrade’ by way of the supplied recovery disc. Seems quite apt really that you can recover from Vista and end up with XP.
Microsoft apparently had decided that OEMs could continue doing this until the end of January 2009, but under pressure has now caved in and given them an additional six months.
Of course, the fatal bullet could come from Microsoft itself when it releases the much talked about Windows 7 OS. If you cannot wait until the first half of 2010 when Windows 7 is slated for delivery, then you could always try a legit free copy this month as Microsoft is giving away pre-beta builds at PDC and WinHEC if you happen to be attending.
Rated: 73.33% (6 votes)
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