Intel is opening up its manufacturing facilities to third parties, as it takes the further tentative steps toward building a chip-to-order foundry business. The microprocessor giant announced last year that it would build FPGAs for Achronix Semiconductor, and on Tuesday a second FPGA designer, Tabula, said that it would have its chips built by Intel.

In its announcement, Tabula emphasized that it would be using Intel’s cutting-edge 22nm process with 3D trigate transistors. Intel’s manufacturing capabilities are world-leading, with none of the established microprocessor foundries—including TSMC, UMC, and AMD spin-off GlobalFoundries—able to match the company’s process.

Compared to the 28 and 32nm processes offered by the competition, Intel’s 22nm process should offer higher speeds with lower power usage, at lower cost. The company will start shipping its first 22nm x86 processors, codenamed Ivy Bridge, in the coming months.

Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy says that the company has had other foundry customers in addition to the two that have gone public.

The foundry business is a double-edge sword for Intel. On the one hand, having additional customers gives the chip-maker the ability to keep the factories churning out processors even if demand for new PC chips is low. This makes it easier to recoup its substantial manufacturing investments.

On the other hand, Intel’s process advantage is a key part of its competitive advantage: it can build complex chips on a process that’s more refined and more advanced than anyone else in the industry. With the company unlikely to want to squander that advantage, it may find its customer base limited.

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Intel ventures further into the foundry business with 22nm customers

As one of the top 100 websites in the world, the free porn video website, YouPorn, has a lot of subscribers. And as of late Tuesday night, at least 6,400 of those subscriber’s passwords were exposed in a data dump on Pastebin that paired email addresses with plain text passwords. The list of YouPorn logins is thought to have been captured from a public-facing server, leaving YouPorn a bigger share of the blame for permitting lazy security.

Naturally, this creates a problem for thousands of people who may want to keep their enthusiasm for erotica secret, and having an e-mail address connected with the site is certainly a breach of privacy on a grand scale. Even if those affected don’t care who knows they frequent X-rated sites, there’s still the danger that someone will use the plain-text password to access other accounts with more important information in them, as people tend to use the same passwords to login to multiple different Websites.

It appears that the dump is the work of an unknown hacker. While YouPorn appears to have shut down the breached server, the damage is largely done. Portions of the list have been published around the Internet, and analysis of the list is taking all kinds of permutations. OZ Dump Centa divvied up the e-mail addresses by provider (the largest portion of YouPorn accounts were linked to Hotmail addresses, followed by Gmail). Technology researcher Ashkan Soltani made a word cloud of the most popular stolen passwords. While YouPorn has not made a public statement about the breach, the data-leak is a reminder that passwords should never be repeated across logins for different sites.

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Exposed: YouPorn passwords in all their plain-text glory

As you probably know, bistable or passive displays like the E-Ink ones in e-readers focus on battery life and readability rather than color and interactivity. The latest devices have been optimized for fast page refreshes and touch operation, but generally you’re still waiting a half a second or so for the screen to flip over to the next page, menu, or what have you.

But that’s not all they’re capable of. We’ve seen hacks before, but this one definitely takes the cake. Check out this video of a Nook Touch from XDA hacker marspeople:

Bear in mind this is strictly a hack and not a full-on release or commercially developed product. Most people wouldn’t want to use the device in this state: it’s not consistent in how fast it responds, there are graphical glitches, and it probably drains the battery like crazy. But the fact is they’ve got a passive display refreshing ~15-20 times per second and responding to touches instantly like a normal tablet.

The possibilities for this generation of readers are limited: few people are going to install a hack like this, and even if they did, not much content is really designed to be consumed this way. Pages are a natural way to read books, and scrolling constantly is kind of a pain. But it’s amazing to see these displays, usually so slow and static, being used so actively. Here’s hoping the next displays from E-Ink (or Bridgestone, or whoever) are capable of even more. Despite what people might say, the passive display still has a lot of potential to grow and evolve.

[via The Digital Reader]

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Hack Makes Nook Touch E-Ink Display Almost As Responsive As LCD

Verizon’s 4G LTE network is experiencing outages across the U.S.

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4G network outage hits Verizon Wireless

VoiceBunny is an online spot-market for professional voiceovers for your videos, podcasts, voicemail systems, etc. I imagine that involving the “In a world where…” movie trailer voice in your threatening Anonymous video would sure leaven things and give them an air of professionalism and polish. They also offer work to voice actors.

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Online spot market for voiceovers