Author: kenmay

SSD Prices Continue 3-Year Plunge

Lucas123 writes “After dropping 20% in the second quarter of 2012 alone, SSD prices fell another 10% in the second half of the year. The better deals for SSDs are now around 80- to 90-cents-per-gigabyte of capacity, though some sale prices have been even lower, according IHS and other research firms. For some models, the prices have dropped 300% over the past three years. At the same time, hard disk drive prices have remained “inflated” — about 47% higher than they were prior to the 2011 Thai floods, according to DRAMeXchange.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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SSD Prices Continue 3-Year Plunge

Amazon Replacement Order Scam: anatomy of a social engineering con in action

Social engineering scams involve a mix of technical skills and psychological manipulation. Chris Cardinal discovered someone running such a scam on Amazon using his account: the scammer contacted Amazon pretending to be Chris, supplying his billing address (this is often easy to guess by digging into things like public phone books, credit reports, or domain registration records). Then the scammer secured the order numbers of items Chris recently bought on Amazon. In a separate transaction, the scammer reported that the items were never delivered and requested replacement items to be sent to a remailer/freight forwarder in Portland. The scam hinged on the fact that Gmail addresses are “dot-blind” (foo@gmail.com is the same as f.oo@gmail.com), but Amazon treats them as separate addresses. This let the scammer run support chats and other Amazon transactions that weren’t immediately apparent to Chris. Others have reported on this scam, but word hasn’t gotten around at Amazon yet, and when Chris talked to Amazon reps to alert them to the con, they kept insisting that his computer or email had been hacked, not understanding that the con artist was attacking a vulnerability in Amazon’s own systems. A little bit of sniffing finds this thread where users at a social engineering forum are offering to buy order numbers. Why? Because as it turns out, once you have the order number, everything else is apparently simple. If you’ve used Amazon.com at all, you’ll notice something very quickly: they require your password. For pretty much anything. Want to change an address? Password. Add a billing method? Password. Check your order history? Password. Amazon is essentially very secure as a web property. But as you can see from my chat transcript above, the CSR team falls like dominoes with just a few simple data points and a little bit of authoritative prying. Two-for-one: Amazon.com’s Socially Engineered Replacement Order Scam ( via Hacker News )

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Amazon Replacement Order Scam: anatomy of a social engineering con in action

Deformed skulls discovered in 1,000-year-old Mexican cemetery

Archaeologists digging in a 1,000-year-old pre-Hispanic cemetery in Mexico’s South Sonora have uncovered a series of skeletons featuring signs of cranial deformation. The practice, which is well documented among Mesoamerican peoples, has never been seen this far north before — a strong indication that their cultural influence was far more prominent than previously assumed. More »

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Deformed skulls discovered in 1,000-year-old Mexican cemetery

NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor details leaked: 4-plus-1 cores, 28nm, six times the power of Tegra 3

NVIDIA’s next superhero-themed mobile chipset has possibly made an early appearance in a leaked side in China, and it looks like it wants to go toe-to-toe with the latest processors from Samsung and Qualcomm. The Tegra 4 (codenamed Wayne) will apparently offer the same power-efficient 28nm process found on its Snapdragon rival and according to the slide from Chip Hell , there’s a dizzying 72-core graphics setup. That’s apparently 20 times the power found the Tegra 2 and six times that in the last-generation Tegra 3, which powered, among other devices, the Nexus 7 . Those graphics cores will be able to power screens up to 2,560 x 1600, with 1080p output at 120Hz, while the leak also mentions 4K — if only in passing. We won’t see any increase in CPU cores this time, with the same 4-plus-1 setup , but we are likely seeing a move to ARM’s latest design, the Cortex-A15 . It’ll also catch up with USB 3.0, being NVIDIA’s first mobile chip to do so, alongside dual-channel DDR3L memory. We’ve reached out to chipmaker and we’ll let you know when we hear more, but it’s highly likely we’ll be seeing this next-generation processor early next year — say, at a mobile trade show . Filed under: Cellphones , Tablets , Mobile , NVIDIA Comments Via: Mobile Geeks Source: Chip Hell

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NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor details leaked: 4-plus-1 cores, 28nm, six times the power of Tegra 3

Russian site shows off 5-inch Sony ‘Yuga’ with 1080p display, S4 Pro CPU, 12MP camera

The folks at Mobile-review have been dropping hints that they have an unannounced Sony handset in their possession, and now they’ve released a gabble of specs and images to prove it. Sony’s “Yuga C6603” bears all the potential hallmarks of a flagship, sporting a 5-inch screen running at full HD resolution (1,920 x 1,080), although some of that real estate is occupied by on-screen buttons. The display is loaded with an impressive 440 ppi, just like HTC’s Droid DNA , and Sony’s Mobile Bravia Engine has been employed for color reproduction. Under that screen we find a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU with Adreno 320 graphics, and 2 gigs of RAM for Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean to take advantage of. In terms of connectivity, it’s got USB host and micro-HDMI ports, Bluetooth 4.0, standard WiFi, NFC and a Qualcomm modem of the LTE variety. A 12-megapixel shooter can be found on the back (perhaps using the same HDR sensor as the Oppo Find 5 ), a microSD slot supporting up to 128GB cards on the side, and a non-removable battery of unknown capacity hiding within. That’s pretty much it for now — but judging by how final this hardware looks, there’s a chance we might see more of it at CES . Filed under: Cellphones , Mobile , Sony Comments Source: Mobile-review

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Russian site shows off 5-inch Sony ‘Yuga’ with 1080p display, S4 Pro CPU, 12MP camera

Gmail Drops Support for Connecting To Pop3 Servers With Self -Signed Certs

DECula writes “In a move not communicated to its users before hand, Google’s Gmail servers were reconfigured to not connect to remote pop3 servers that have self-signed certificates, leaving folks with unencrypted connections, or no service when getting email from other services. Not good for the small folks. One suggestion was to allow placing the public keys on Google’s side in the user configuration. That would be a heck of a lot better than just dropping users into never never land.” Apparently, “valid” now means “paid someone Google approves to sign the certificate.” It’s not like commercial CAs have the best security track record either. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Gmail Drops Support for Connecting To Pop3 Servers With Self -Signed Certs

Code prints out randomly-generated cartoon faces

Mattias ” Mokafolio ” Dörfelt wrote a program that generates convincingly hand-drawn but randomly-assembled cartoon faces . [via Creative Applications ] Computer generated images have a certain aesthetics to them that make them immediately recognizable as such by the trained eye. Weird Faces Study is an attempt to combine my old interest in illustration with programing, to create something procedural that has a truly individual artistic touch to it and is not instantly recognizable as a generative art piece. Even though, the faces look hand-drawn, they are entirely expressed by algorithmic rules. Each face is random, each face is unique. Still, they look similar to my actual hand drawn faces.

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Code prints out randomly-generated cartoon faces