The hard drive-maker said it has created the world's smallest disk drive heads -- about 2,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- Multimedia stockpilers need not worry about laptops, digital video recorders or portable music players hitting a storage capacity ceiling any time soon.
Hitachi Ltd. (Charts) says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011.
A terabyte can hold the text of roughly 1 million books, 250 hours of high-definition video, or a quarter million songs.
"It means the industry is making good progress to advance the capacity of disk drives and move to smaller form factors," said John Rydning, an analyst at market research firm IDC.
Need help with your Mac? Contact Victor Orly, (310) 891-6820 x101 or email victor@orly.com
Monday, October 15, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Apple sued for iPhone's anti-hack update
Need help with your iPhone or Mac? Contact Victor Orly, (310) 891-6820 x101 or email victor@orly.com
Customers angry at Apple for breaking their hacked iPhones with the company's latest update now have a class-action lawsuit to call their own.
On Friday, a California lawyer filed suit against the consumer-technology company over the iPhone's September 27 upgrade, which bundled a critical security patch with code that disabled phones which had been hacked to accept third-party applications or modified to use other cellular carriers.
"Cell phone network providers are using various types of software locks in order to control customer access to the 'bootloader' programs on cellphones and the operating system programs embedded inside cell phones," the complaint (PDF) stated, noting that the U.S. Register of Copyrights has specifically allowed users to bypass such locks to use their phones on another provider's network.
In the past, updates have been used to shut down hacked or modified devices on the networks of other service providers. DirecTV used an update to disable cable boxes that had been modified to get the satellite-TV provider's service for free. The countermeasure, however, merely blocked the cable box -- which the company leases to the users -- from using the service, while Apple's update completely disabled consumer electronic devices which belong to its customers.
Hardware hackers worldwide worked over the summer to crack the iPhone's protection to either use the device on carriers besides AT&T or load third-party software onto the system. Apple had warned customers prior to releasing the update, which upgrades the iPhone to version 1.1.1, that the software patch could disable any phone that had been modified.
Customers angry at Apple for breaking their hacked iPhones with the company's latest update now have a class-action lawsuit to call their own.
On Friday, a California lawyer filed suit against the consumer-technology company over the iPhone's September 27 upgrade, which bundled a critical security patch with code that disabled phones which had been hacked to accept third-party applications or modified to use other cellular carriers.
"Cell phone network providers are using various types of software locks in order to control customer access to the 'bootloader' programs on cellphones and the operating system programs embedded inside cell phones," the complaint (PDF) stated, noting that the U.S. Register of Copyrights has specifically allowed users to bypass such locks to use their phones on another provider's network.
In the past, updates have been used to shut down hacked or modified devices on the networks of other service providers. DirecTV used an update to disable cable boxes that had been modified to get the satellite-TV provider's service for free. The countermeasure, however, merely blocked the cable box -- which the company leases to the users -- from using the service, while Apple's update completely disabled consumer electronic devices which belong to its customers.
Hardware hackers worldwide worked over the summer to crack the iPhone's protection to either use the device on carriers besides AT&T or load third-party software onto the system. Apple had warned customers prior to releasing the update, which upgrades the iPhone to version 1.1.1, that the software patch could disable any phone that had been modified.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Third-party apps appear on iPhone 1.1.1
Following the day after a primitive "jailbreak" was developed, hackers are now claiming to have successfully installed applications on Apple's v1.1.1 iPhone firmware. The technique was developed by a coder called "asap18," who says that several applications have been tested and are functioning properly. Critically, these applications can be accessed via normal Home screen buttons, rather than loading them via a command-line terminal.
Applications that appear to be working include the Colloquy IRC chat client and the NES game console emulator. It is reported that under the current scheme, only 15 icons can be added to the Home screen; a final slot may possibly be reserved for iTunes. Hacking efforts have reportedly also discovered "International" options in the SpringBoard interface, which though they may allow for foreign-language applications, are most likely in place for the French and German iPhone launches planned towards the end of the year.
Future hacks are reported to be in the works, but it is cautioned that users with unlocked v1.0.2 iPhones should not yet upgrade to v1.1.1, as this may still "brick" a device.
Need help with your iPhone or Mac? Contact Victor Orly, (310) 891-6820 x101 or email victor@orly.com
Applications that appear to be working include the Colloquy IRC chat client and the NES game console emulator. It is reported that under the current scheme, only 15 icons can be added to the Home screen; a final slot may possibly be reserved for iTunes. Hacking efforts have reportedly also discovered "International" options in the SpringBoard interface, which though they may allow for foreign-language applications, are most likely in place for the French and German iPhone launches planned towards the end of the year.
Future hacks are reported to be in the works, but it is cautioned that users with unlocked v1.0.2 iPhones should not yet upgrade to v1.1.1, as this may still "brick" a device.
Need help with your iPhone or Mac? Contact Victor Orly, (310) 891-6820 x101 or email victor@orly.com
Sunday, October 7, 2007
iPhone Business Model Hits a Snag in France
It seems like the iPhone might not be released in France by this holiday season, since French requires by law that all cell phones sold there must be obtainable in an unlocked version. Apple will not be able to do so, since it has launched with a 5-year exclusivity agreement with AT&T. That deal will probably require exclusivity worldwide to avoid grey-market imports. (In return for this agreement Apple receives a large share of AT&T's monthly revenues from iPhone subscribers.) If the iPhone falls through in France, the country can join Belgium and a potentially long list of other countries with unlocking laws, whose Apple fans will have to make do with other, less Apple-y phones. Note that there is currently no mention of the iPhone on the Apple France page.
Need help with your iPhone or Mac? Contact Victor Orly, (310) 891-6820 x101 or email victor@orly.com
Need help with your iPhone or Mac? Contact Victor Orly, (310) 891-6820 x101 or email victor@orly.com
Apple's stock closes above $160
Shares of Apple Inc. have closed above $160 for the first, gaining 3.33 percent or $5.21 by the close of trading Friday (final trading price: $161.45). The stock is up over $24, or 18 percent in the past month, and has more than doubled in the past year. The reasons for the surge are unclear, though rumors of opening iPhone development and inclusion of HD videos in iTunes could be catalysts. In late August, Apple surprassed Google's market capitalization after going on a rollercoaster ride. During one week, the shares went from about $124 on Wednesday to about $112 on Thursday, then back up to about $122 on Friday. The reason for the dip, and others in the past month, may have been pure profit taking by investors who have seen tremendous gains in the stock this year.
Need help with your Mac? Contact Victor Orly, (310) 891-6820 x101 or email victor@orly.com
Need help with your Mac? Contact Victor Orly, (310) 891-6820 x101 or email victor@orly.com
Apple Probes iMac Lockups
October 05, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Apple Inc. said today it is investigating lockup problems with the newest line of iMac desktop computers after customers flooded the company's support forums with complaints this week.
Introduced two months ago in a lineup refresh, iMacs with the aluminum casing have been freezing under a variety of conditions, but common characteristics include inactive mouse and keyboard; continued background processing, such as music that keeps playing; and the need for a reboot. The screen remains lighted, however.
Introduced two months ago in a lineup refresh, iMacs with the aluminum casing have been freezing under a variety of conditions, but common characteristics include inactive mouse and keyboard; continued background processing, such as music that keeps playing; and the need for a reboot. The screen remains lighted, however.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
iPhone Turned into Pocket-Sized Hacking Platform
One such observation: The iPhone has a potential security pitfall in that its MobileMail application supports Microsoft Office document formats by using the OfficeImporter framework when converting files into viewable form. "This looks like a great target for file-format fuzzing and some late-night reverse engineering," Moore said.
Another potential way for attackers to get into the phone is through the mDNSResponder service, which runs by default, Moore said. The mDNSResponder, used by iTunes for music sharing, is part of the Bonjour application suite, which provides automatic and transparent configuration of network devices.
When the iPhone first syncs with iTunes, its host name is changed, Moore said. The default hostname becomes "User's iPhone," with the Mac OS X user account name filling in for "User." If the iPhone is connected to a Wi-Fi network, the mDNS service exposes the iPhone owner's user name.
That particular security exposure hasn't yet responded to Moore's probes, he said, making active discovery "less likely."
Moore has also been playing with the "vibrate" shellcode released by Miller at Black Hat 2007. By the time the security show rolled around, Independent Security Evaluators had already revealed, shortly after the smart phone's release, that Apple's popular multifunctional device could be exploited for data theft or snooping purposes.
At the time, Miller, Jake Honoroff and Joshua Mason created an exploit for the iPhone's Safari Web browser wherein they used an unmodified device to surf to a maliciously crafted drive-by download site. The site downloaded exploit code that forced the iPhone to make an outbound connection to a server controlled by the security firm.
The researchers showed that a compromised device then could be forced to send out personal data, including SMS text messages, contact information, call history, voice mail information, passwords, e-mail messages and browsing history.
Miller told eWEEK that with Moore's Metasploit work, the time needed to write iPhone exploits has substantially shrunk. "One thing interesting about the work H.D.'s done, if you look at the time frame, is it took us two days to find a vulnerability and write something to where we knew it was legitimate. [It took] seven or eight days after that to having a working exploit. If we had what H.D. has done, it would have taken maybe a day or less. Having this available now will cut what we did from two weeks to two days.
Now that the iPhone has been out for months, is the desire to hack it still at a fever pitch? Miller said that given how much personal information an attacker can shake out of the device, "It probably is something people should worry about."
"[Like H.D. said in his blog,] It's always on, it's always on the Internet, and you can get a lot of personal information. It's a viable target," Miller said.
So now it's time for real fun.
"It's going to be such good times," one blogger wrote after Moore published his findings. "…we have the accessibility/vector. What we need are market saturation (some predict 14M sold by end of 2008,) a mesh networking application (or something to cross-connect the myriad of networking options) and an attractive application to encourage the owners to share amongst each other (say, some funky music sharing application or social networking tie-in, or instant messaging.) That'll lay the ground work for some very effective malware."
For his part, Moore said in his posting that he's added support for iPhone executables to the msfpayload command, allowing users to generate stand-alone bind/reverse shell executables using a syntax supplied in his posting. Next up is an XOR encoder, and then all hell should break loose.
"Once the XOR encoder is done, the only step left is to find the bugs and write the exploits :-)," Moore wrote.
By the time this article posted, Apple had not responded to a request for comment.
Another potential way for attackers to get into the phone is through the mDNSResponder service, which runs by default, Moore said. The mDNSResponder, used by iTunes for music sharing, is part of the Bonjour application suite, which provides automatic and transparent configuration of network devices.
When the iPhone first syncs with iTunes, its host name is changed, Moore said. The default hostname becomes "User's iPhone," with the Mac OS X user account name filling in for "User." If the iPhone is connected to a Wi-Fi network, the mDNS service exposes the iPhone owner's user name.
That particular security exposure hasn't yet responded to Moore's probes, he said, making active discovery "less likely."
Moore has also been playing with the "vibrate" shellcode released by Miller at Black Hat 2007. By the time the security show rolled around, Independent Security Evaluators had already revealed, shortly after the smart phone's release, that Apple's popular multifunctional device could be exploited for data theft or snooping purposes.
At the time, Miller, Jake Honoroff and Joshua Mason created an exploit for the iPhone's Safari Web browser wherein they used an unmodified device to surf to a maliciously crafted drive-by download site. The site downloaded exploit code that forced the iPhone to make an outbound connection to a server controlled by the security firm.
The researchers showed that a compromised device then could be forced to send out personal data, including SMS text messages, contact information, call history, voice mail information, passwords, e-mail messages and browsing history.
Miller told eWEEK that with Moore's Metasploit work, the time needed to write iPhone exploits has substantially shrunk. "One thing interesting about the work H.D.'s done, if you look at the time frame, is it took us two days to find a vulnerability and write something to where we knew it was legitimate. [It took] seven or eight days after that to having a working exploit. If we had what H.D. has done, it would have taken maybe a day or less. Having this available now will cut what we did from two weeks to two days.
Now that the iPhone has been out for months, is the desire to hack it still at a fever pitch? Miller said that given how much personal information an attacker can shake out of the device, "It probably is something people should worry about."
"[Like H.D. said in his blog,] It's always on, it's always on the Internet, and you can get a lot of personal information. It's a viable target," Miller said.
So now it's time for real fun.
"It's going to be such good times," one blogger wrote after Moore published his findings. "…we have the accessibility/vector. What we need are market saturation (some predict 14M sold by end of 2008,) a mesh networking application (or something to cross-connect the myriad of networking options) and an attractive application to encourage the owners to share amongst each other (say, some funky music sharing application or social networking tie-in, or instant messaging.) That'll lay the ground work for some very effective malware."
For his part, Moore said in his posting that he's added support for iPhone executables to the msfpayload command, allowing users to generate stand-alone bind/reverse shell executables using a syntax supplied in his posting. Next up is an XOR encoder, and then all hell should break loose.
"Once the XOR encoder is done, the only step left is to find the bugs and write the exploits :-)," Moore wrote.
By the time this article posted, Apple had not responded to a request for comment.
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