New Worm Morto Using RDP to Infect Windows PCs

Threatpost from Kaspersky Lab informs about a new Windows worm based on RDP services. At first site it looks like it is using brute force password attacking but there are not much details yet. Until further notice you should disable remote access if you do not need it and else using a very strong password.

IBM builds 120 petabyte cluster out of 200,000 hard drives

ExtremeTech has the news IBM building a 120 Petabyte cluster of 200.000 hard drives. The unknown customer has probably a very large HPC with a lot data to be generated to need such large storage system. With IBM’s General Parallel File System it is by its parallel nature extremely fast too. I certainly hope it is not a climate change model running all this stuff because the necessary power undoubtly produces a small climate change on it's own!

Mixed decision for Apple: Dutch judge bans Samsung smartphones, not tablets

Ars Technica has the story about the Dutch court decision in the case between Apple and Samsung. At first sight this decision is win for Apple but on second sight it is Samsung who gain the most. To comply to the court order they only have to change the OS functionality of swiping on the picture gallery software. Only this part of the patent case is awarded at the moment the other two patents about the look and design of Apple gear is not. Of course this is a prelimary junction so this case will go on for years to come but hopefully it slows down those stupid patent wars a bit.

Oracle's Sparc T4 chip: Will you pay Larry's premium?

The Register has a item about the new Sparc T4 processor from now Oracle. You almost forget that Oracle bought the hardware section of Sun too. The new chip is a nice piece of shiny hardware with a lot performance measures added. And it pays off: with half the threads and cores it is five times faster then it 's predecessor the Sparc T3 on Specint 2000. There are also some features added which are supposed to speed up Oracle's database transactions. But to succeed the more decisive point will be it's price/performance ratio. Sun has never been cheap and Oracle is not likely to change that either so it will come from the added value, if any.

Canonical ARMs Ubuntu for microserver wars

Canonical has announced an ARM version of it's Ubuntu server edition 11.10 and further on. It is a clear attempt to win a new market based on large scale ARM-servers in big datacenters all over the wordl. So far this ARM-servers do not exists but they will come very soon now, they say. It reminds me of the announcement of smartbooks: ARM mini notebooks at the size of netbook. The ones that do exist are running on Win CE or Android and not on a well known Linux distro. From a environmental viewpoint I surely hope these ARM-servers do come because their power usage will be a lot lower then current Intel based servers.

Apple changed shape of Galaxy Tab in court filing

The Register is one of the many newssites with the news that Apple changed the shape of the Samsung Galaxy Tab to make it look more of the Ipad 2 in a courtfiling in Germany. Of course malice will not be proven, calling it a error of some kind but it shows ones again that patent and modelling/design court fillings get more dirty then ever. There is simply put too much many on stake here.

Intel launching upgradeable i3 Core processors

Intel has ones again made some processors software upgradeable. This time in the i3 core range of processors. Some time ago you just would buy a processor for its features for a certain price but since marketingdroids took over at Intel you see a plethora of processortypes, processorslots and features. You can easily wonder who has some oversight left besides those marketingtypes and probably even they does not have any. For those who want to known which processor is capable of what should put http://ark.intel.com in their favorite bookmarks.

The LinkedIn Blog - Blog Archive Privacy, Advertising, and Putting Members First

LinkedIn has responded in a blog post that they partly change their social ad settings. And although it is a start it is not enough in my opinion. As you look at the example For and After on their blog the only thing they have changed is that your profile photo is not longer visible but you can still click on the number of people in your network following the advertiser. Which effectively does not change anything so it is still advised to change you privacy settings within LinkedIn.

LinkedIn opts 100 million users into sharing private information within advertisements - Yahoo! News

Yahoo! News is one of the many news agencies with the news about Linkedin taking the Facebook tour by changing the privacy settings without notice. One of the effects is the use of your profile photo within advertisements on Linkedin and other ad networks. Especially this misuse is most likely prohibited by European privacy law as stated by the Dutch CBP a governmental privacy agency. Apparently all this social networks target their users for advertisements revenue but some more then others. A real not for profit social network would be nice but probably not able to survive by lack of revenue. At least privacy awareness by more and more users is rising and that's the good news.

Designing diamond circuits for extreme environments

Vanderbilt University has news about creating new computer chips and electronic circuitry for extreme environments: make them out of diamond. At nanometerscale diamond is not that expensive and by packaging the circuits in vacuum tubes they will still function in high radiaton areas and at very high and very low temperatures. It is a very interesting technique and the grant by the US Army may be well spend if it works at a industrial scale.

AntiSec Hackers Steal, Post Police Data

PCWorld has a report about Antisec releasing a huge pile of hacked police data including some data about anonymous informants. This last thing naturally endangers those informants and in my opinion they should do that. PCWorld mentions correctly that this action is about revenge and has nothing to do with justice. The other way round all this arrests show that they are not the only ones: Paypal and attacked creditcard corporations are very eager too to get some of the DOS-attackers. The worldwide arrests in Europe and the USA are likely only possible if they are supported by these multinationals because this level of collaboration between police and/or intelligence agencies simply does not exist in our normal world. It does say something about the power of these multinationals and I really do not like it.

Linus Torvalds dubs GNOME 3 'unholy mess'

The Register has the word that Linus Torvald really do not like Gnome 3 and for certain he is not the only one. Adding new functionality to the desktop is fine of course but deleting much used old functionality is not really a good idea. Linus uses some stronger language then that. He has now XFCE as his main windowmanager which I too installed on my laptop and netbook. For my main system I stay with Gnome 2 because I use Ubuntu 10.04 LTS which will be supported for another two years now. After that we will see what happens maybe Wayland/Unity has matured somewhat more by then.

Malware attack spreads to 5 million pages (and counting)

The Register has the alarming signal that unpatched webshop software named osCommerce is under attack from probably Ukrain crooks. More than 5 million pages have been infected for now and are used for installing malware on the visitors computer. It is a clear example why you should patch your software as soon as it is available.