Dell’s betting that a bunch of businesspeople want to be able to carry their work computer around in their pocket. Not literally , of course, but with the release of the company’s $130 dollar Wyse Cloud Connect dongle (formerly known as Project Ophelia ), you can do just that. It connects to any TV or display with an HDMI or MHL port, and hooks up to mice and keyboards via Bluetooth or mini-USB. There’s also a microSD slot to give you up to 32GB of local storage, should you want it. Plus, you can access your desktop using yours or your company’s choice of virtualization technologies: Citrix, Microsoft or VMWare . Once plugged in, users can access a full Jelly Bean Android experience or their Windows and Mac machines via the aforementioned remote clients, and see them in 1080p resolution (on compatible displays, of course). Dell’s pitching the dongle as primarily an enterprise solution, but the company also thinks it’s well-suited as an educational tool, too. We got to see the Cloud Connect in action today at a launch event in Silicon Valley, and in our limited time with the device, it worked just as Dell said it would. The dongle itself is a bit bigger than your standard flash drive… it’s roughly the size of an Apple TV remote . Installing the thing really is as simple as plugging it into a monitor, which turns said monitor into a fully fledged Android device. That means you have access to any compatible app from Google Play (or at least whatever apps your company’s IT department allows). Speaking of, the Cloud Connect management dashboard allows IT administrators to easily set permissions and access for the dongles with a straightforward and simple interface. As for consumer applications, Dell’s VP and GM of cloud client computing, Steve Lalla, told us that his focus is on b2b for now, but regular folks are certainly on his radar. “It’ll bleed into the consumer space, ” he said. “It’s just that businesses already understand the value proposition of the technology.” When we inquired about the possibility of building the Cloud Connect directly into monitors (essentially creating Android desktop computers ), Lalla said that he has nothing to announce, but we get the feeling we’ll see one from Dell before too long. Filed under: Networking , Internet , Dell Comments Source: Dell
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Dell’s new Android HDMI dongle turns screens into virtualized desktop computers for $130
itwbennett writes “Facebook said last year that it was exploring Blu-ray for its data-center storage needs, and on Tuesday it showed a prototype system at the Open Compute Project summit meeting in San Jose, California. It designed the system to store data that hardly ever needs to be accessed, or for so-called ‘cold storage’ (think duplicates of users’ photos and videos that it keeps for backup). The Blu-ray system reduces costs by 50% and energy use by 80% compared with its current cold-storage system, which uses hard disk drives, said Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering.” It’s a prototype, and they’re also evaluating low power flash as another alternative to keeping seldom accessed data on hard drives. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Naoki Hiroshima had a rare and valuable Twitter handle, @N . It was extorted from him , he claims, by a scammer who figured out that PayPal reveals part of one’s credit card number during security verification—and that GoDaddy accepts the same part of the number during security verification. I asked the attacker how my GoDaddy account was compromised and received this response: From: SOCIAL MEDIA KING To: Naoki Hiroshima Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 19:53:52 -0800 Subject: RE: …hello – I called paypal and used some very simple engineering tactics to obtain the last four of your card (avoid this by calling paypal and asking the agent to add a note to your account to not release any details via phone) – I called godaddy and told them I had lost the card but I remembered the last four, the agent then allowed me to try a range of numbers (00-09 in your case) I have not found a way to heighten godaddy account security, however if you’d like me to recommend a more secure registrar i recommend: NameCheap or eNom (not network solutions but enom.com) GoDaddy outright refused to help him at first, too. It’s shocking how weak account security is there, and at PayPal: “Don’t let companies such as PayPal and GoDaddy store your credit card information,” Hiroshima writes. 
