So Blue-Ray has now been hacked, but you will need a bit of hardware to do it. A few PHD students in Germany have managed to put a few chips together for about €200 and you can now get past the copy protection using a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack to crack the copy protection system used by HDMI ports with relatively little effort.
We seem to be loosing a lot of good people in the computer business, and the Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, has passed away at age 70. I know Steve Jobs helped create the the consumer demand for I.T. products but Dennis Ritchie was one of the inventors or the modern operating system, or what we know as Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Some how I don’t think the worlds news papers will fill the front pages lamenting this loss, Which is sad really, seeing with out Denis Ritchie we may not have had the C programming language. Why is that important, well with out the C programming language, we as software poeople may not be able to write programs, which alot of have formed operating systems.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/father-of-c-and-unix-dennis-ritchie-passes-away-at-age-70/
In America the FCC (the regulator for communications) is looking that all phones will have GPS in them, so that the 999 or 112 emergency call will also send out GPS data also, so that in an emergency The emergency response people can track where you are. While privacy advocats will be up in arms about this, I think this is a good thing for people living in remote areas, but could we do this already, Shouldn’t the phone companies get together with there triangulation data, and add it to there networks so that when a Emergency call is made, the system will pull in the triangulation data, I know that it may be patchy, were you have only one mast receiving the signal, but a lot of areas are now served by two or more masts. So maybe a bit of inovation is required here, hopefully the rest of the world will follow.
More on:
http://www.mobileburn.com/16915/news/fcc-to-require-gps-in-all-phone-by-2018
Amazon are getting in to the tablet game with the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, and it looks like it will be a disruptive product, that will disrupt the market at under $200 or in under €150 Euros aprox. I hope that they will have a strong UI over android. its going to have a 7-inch screen with a Gorilla Glass coating, a 1GHz TI OMAP dual-core CPU, 512MB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage and will weigh 14.6 ounces. So the Speck is ok, its not going to set the world on fire, but for the person that wants a tablet, it should do the job. The worry will be how android or Amazon will it be, I dont see any mention of a USB connector, or sound out, I am prsuming that this will be as standard. It also will default to the Amazon market place, so that your app experience will be limited, This means that you can get access to the Android market. So it looks like we are seen a product with a open OS, but it will have a closed data portal. The 8GB of data will be tight if your watching video, but amazon have Amazon Cloud Storage, where the product could kill the market, is in the realm of video, where with whispernet, you can walk from watching the movie on the subway, and have it pick up where you stopped the movie on the subway to your TV in your front room, with out having to fast forward again to the point. IF it works, then it should be very cool. This could be the IPad killer!
Our friends in RTE are reporting that their has been a major power outage in Southern California and parts of Arizona and northern Mexico
http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0909/california.html
This is why we shouldn’t sell the ESB! Or Board gas!, With all their accountant government reports, they fail to understand, that if one engineer, makes a tiny mistake in their 1’s and 0’s the accountants won’t have the power or the programs to do anything , in two words “respect engineers” as he or she will get the lights on! The Accountant will only tell you how much is going to cost or how much the outage will cost, but you will be still in the dark!
I’m after getting my first android phone, its the vodafone smart or its a huawei 858 in real money. So why did I buy it, well it’s €60 so it’s cheap as chips. So I wouldn’t be an issue if I decided to drop it on a sink or worse. So far it works it dose a job, I’m even using it to write this post. So is android able to run on this phone, well it can stall the odd time so it isn’t the greatest. but it works and the applications work. The GPS works, I’ve had issues with the blue-tooth. (more…)
Looks like HP dipped their to in the water and didn’t like what they saw, going up against Apple and Android (Google) is not a good starting point even if you did buy Palm. It’s a pitty it would have been good for the industry. It’s a bit like OS2 an old operating system on the PC. It tried and failed, it seems the smart phone business is all to similar to the PC business 30 years ago. We’re going to have two main players, One dominant and one not so dominant, and the one will the open architecture will win, Android has the open architecture, so my money is on this at the moment, but I think the patent wars that are stating could put a stop to Androids development.
3D glasses are now to be standardised, well the main players have got together to create a standard for 3D glasses, The “Full HD Glasses Initiative” which should lay down a standard for consumer active shutter glasses to communicate over Blue-tooth or IR. So we should be able to in a few months walk in to a shop and buy what glasses that will work with our new TV’s, Looks like it will be 2012 before they are out.
“August 8, 2011- Panasonic Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Sony Corporation and X6D Limited (XPAND 3D) today announced their intent to collaborate on the development of a new technology standard for consumer 3D active glasses, under the name, “Full HD 3D Glasses Initiative.””
So you got a printer connected to a laptop, but you need the laptop to be free, well the people in IOGEAR thought of you. This device for about $100 makes printers web cams and anything usb, “wireless”, it will still have to be attached to the device, But its a hell of a lot cheaper then going out and buying a wireless printer. More info fron IOGEAR here