Aiming notebook computers, Samsung Electronics started mass-producing 1.8-inch solid-state drives (SSD) at 64GB (gigabytes). The new drives are the highest density SSD available today for mobile computing applications.

Offering greater reliability, faster boot times and faster application start-up times than hard disk drives SSDs are growing in popularity. SSDs can also improve battery life by up to twenty percent in notebooks. The 64GB SSD consists of 64 eight Gigabit (Gb) single-level cell flash memory chips. Samsung’s use of 51nm process technology permits fabrication of much smaller components, with each chip having circuitry 1/2500th the width of a human hair.

<-125x125 Button - right->In addition to their new 64GB SSD, Samsung has already introduced 32GB SSDs into ultra-mobile personal computers (UMPCs). Not just for notebooks, SSDs also are being considered for server applications such as in advertising and for Web search engines. On the home front digital consumer products such as camcorders, PDAs and printers can now be equipped with SSDs ranging from 4GB to 64GB.

Samsung also recently released their new N2 Series drives. “The N2 Series drives offer the fastest boot times, lowest power consumption, and quietest operation available in the 1.8 ’form factor’. The new drives, with capacities ranging from 80GB to 120GB, are designed to meet the demands for high-capacity storage in compact mobile consumer devices such as PDAs, MP3 players, cell phones, camcorders, digital cameras and ultra-light notebook PCs.

The N2 Series drives features a 4,200rpm spin rate, PATA/ZIF interface with 8MB cache memory, a 15,0ms seek-time, and a two second Drive Time to Ready. Samsung’s SpinPoint N2 120GB Series is currently shipping with a $249 MSRP.

Less than two weeks after its launch ,Windows Safari browser has been fixed again.
The four security fixes are part of a larger Safari 3.0.2 beta release for Mac OS X and Windows. Both packs contain stability fixes in addition to the security update.

Only one of the four vulnerabilities for the Windows version could allow for remote code execution. The flaw lies in the WebKit component used by Safari.
By sending an user to a specially crafted webpage can cause an application crash and give the attacker the ability to install malware on the victim's computer.
Two of the vulnerabilities could leave users open to cross-site scripting attacks, while the remaining flaw gave attackers the ability to spoof legitimate websites.

Vulnerability number 3 allows attackers to conduct cross-site scripting attacks by using specially-crafted JavaScript code to redirect the user, while another allows cross-site scripting via a malformed HTTP request coded into a web page.

And the last vulnerability allows an attacker arbitrarily to edit the information that appears in the URL bar. An attacker could exploit the vulnerability to make a malicious site appear with the URL of a trusted one.

The updates also contain stability fixes for 16 performance and stability bugs in Windows and nine in OS X.

Apple released Security Update 2007-006 and is available for download from the Web site and from the Software Update system preference. The update can be applied to Mac OS X v10.3.9 and Mac OS X v10.4.9.

The WebCore in the one on focus.Apple’s framework for providing an HTML layout engine for Mac OS X, and WebKit, Apple’s application framework that serves as a basis for the Safari Web browser. Two issues are addressed by this update.

In WebCore, visiting a malicious Web site can allow cross-site requests by exploiting the XMLHttpRequest command. This update performs additional validation of header parameters to avoid that problem.

And in WebKit, a maliciously crafted Web site can cause an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. The update corrects that issue

Apple has put out an update, Mac OS X 10.4.10, that addresses denial-of-service attacks and a security bypass that Type 0 routing headers in IPv6 by disabling support for the headers.

This vulnerability has been left wide open in IPv6 even though it was well-known and shut down in IPv4; by default, all routing engines now turn it off.

This particular type of packet header can be used to crazily bounce network packets back and forth between hops on their route, clogging up bandwidth and potentially causing a DoS.

The ability of users to route their own packets-a procedure optimized automatically in today's IPv4 Internet-allows not only DDoS attacks, but also the ability to bypass security. Researchers say the vulnerability is easy to fix with RH-sensitive filters.

Apple said in its security advisory that the issue doesn't affect systems prior to Mac OS X 10.4.

The update is available for Mac OS X 10.4 through Mac OS X 10.4.9 and Mac OS X Server 10.4 through Mac OS X Server 10.4.9. It can be obtained from Mac OS X's Software Update pane under System Preferences or via Apple's Software Downloads site.

Nvidia launched the stand-alone GPU-centric computer business all by its lonesome, with today's announcement of a kind of computer system specifically designed to mesh graphics processors together to perform rich math functions.

The goal of nVidia's new Tesla computer is over 2,000 gigaflops in a system that meshes together four GPUs in parallel, each of which contains not two, not four, but 128 pipeline processors. By comparison, a 4P dual-core Itanium-based server (eight cores total) registers about 45 gigaflops in recent LINPACK tests.

The secret is that these GPUs aren't working in place of CPUs. They can't, because their instruction sets are not compatible. Applications have to be written in C and compiled the old-fashioned way, for execution through an operating system driver that dispatches math instructions to the GPU cluster's multiple pipelines. NVidia already produces tools for compiling C applications for GPU execution, using what the company calls CUDA architecture.

The first Tesla units are scheduled to go on sale this August. The Tesla will support 32- and 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 3, 4, and 5; 32- and 64-bit SUSE Enterprise Linux versions 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3; and 32-bit Windows XP (curiously not 64-bit yet, and not Vista).