[ home | about | dec'04 | nov'04 | 2004 | 2003 | rss feed ]

news of 2005-02-07

IBM & Sony's Cell

IBM and Sony (and Toshiba) today officially announced the Cell processor, a dual-core processor somewhere inbetween the POWER5 and the G5 processor, roughly ten times as powerful as what's used in today's entertainment market according to IBM. It's made it up to 4.6 GHz in test labs but will be produced at up to 4 GHz. Whether this chip will at any point in time make it into Macintosh hardware is not currently known. However it seems clear that if IBM can make PowerPC dual core chips (and with intel announcing dual core chips for the desktop coming soon) for the entertainment market, Apple's gonna want one, too.

[ written by fryke™ on 2005-02-07 at 23:07 CET ]
[ contact (e-mail) ] - [ story link ] - [ back to top ]

Tiger 8A369 developer reports

Developers around the world had quite a blast with the new Tiger build, it seems. 8A369 seems to be the first beta-quality build of Mac OS X 10.4, although there are still a lot of areas, where work is needed. Some mentioned non-working (or "not everytime working") clipboards, others mentioned StuffIt Deluxe causing the Finder to restart. Other third party applications not behaving well, too. But these will either be fixed by the third party developers or Apple - in the time until Tiger's release, which is still a few weeks (at least!) away.

We will continue to inform you of the progress in Tiger builds, of course. And we'll have one or two developers look into what's really going to lure users into buying the upgrade. (So far, it looks like Spotlight's going to be in the spotlight. ;) As well as the new look and Dashboard, both of which can easily be imitated by third party software in Panther, too, though.)

[ written by fryke™ on 2005-02-07 at 18:29 CET ]
[ contact (e-mail) ] - [ story link ] - [ back to top ]

'Safer Internet Day' tomorrow

Tomorrow (Tuesday), the EU says it's the "safer internet day". Currently, users around the 'net wonder whether that means that no IP-packets of computers running an operating system made by Microsoft will be routed by 'the internet'. Others muse that "the safer internet" is also known as 127.0.0.1 if the computer is virus-free (or again, simply a Mac).

[ written by fryke™ on 2005-02-07 at 18:14 CET ]
[ contact (e-mail) ] - [ story link ] - [ back to top ]

Spoofing Update (DNS issue)

The problem, it seems, is not bugs in the browser software. Rather it's the concept behind newer domain name schemes that allow international characters like ä or é in domain names.
This calls for a conceptual change and might take a while for resolving. Problem is: The fake sites possible with this spoof look so good to users, they won't spot the fake until they dig real deep (for example you have to actually take a look at the security certificate for a secure payment site in order to see that the certificate - which can be true - does not belong to the URL shown in the browser's address field).

[ written by fryke™ on 2005-02-07 at 17:49 CET ]
[ contact (e-mail) ] - [ story link ] - [ back to top ]

DNS spoofing issue in many browsers

According to this article at shmoo.com, you can trick almost any browser (except for IE on Windows, *cough*?!) into displaying false URLs etc. There's a proof of concept available (click on the first paypal link on that page to see) that doesn't do any harm (displays 'meow' as text, whereas the URL shown in the browser lets you think you're on paypal.com). This spoof works on Mac OS X on every newer browser. Older browsers can't find the server, since it involves newer naming schemes.

Theoretically, someone could set up a page which sells you, say, an iPod photo for 299 USD. A fake PayPal site could then be shown and after you give them your account information, well... You see.
So: Please do pay extra attention for a while until the browsers are updated accordingly...

[ written by fryke™ on 2005-02-07 at 16:48 CET ]
[ contact (e-mail) ] - [ story link ] - [ back to top ]