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Cisco to sell Linksys to Belkin, will exit home networking market

Belkin has struck a deal to buy Linksys from Cisco, bringing Cisco’s 10-year dalliance with the consumer networking market closer to an end. Cisco’s Linksys division sells routers and wireless access points to consumers, which is in line with Cisco’s overall focus on networking gear but diverges from the company’s core focus on selling to big businesses rather than home users. Cisco has been gradually stepping out of the consumer business—for example, by killing off the Flip camera line and  Umi home videoconferencing . Cisco recently engaged Barclays to help sell off the home networking division. Belkin’s purchase of Linksys is expected to close in March 2013, but the companies did not reveal the purchase price. Cisco bought Linksys in 2003 for $500 million. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cisco to sell Linksys to Belkin, will exit home networking market

Grammar badness makes cracking harder the long password

Comparison of the size of password search space when treating the password as a sequence of characters or words, or as words generated by grammatical structure. Rao,et al. When it comes to long phrases used to defeat recent advances in password cracking, bigger isn’t necessarily better, particularly when the phrases adhere to grammatical rules. A team of Ph.D. and grad students at Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an algorithm that targets passcodes with a minimum number of 16 characters and built it into the freely available John the Ripper cracking program. The result: it was much more efficient at cracking passphrases such as “abiggerbetter password” or “thecommunistfairy” because they followed commonly used grammatical rules—in this case, ordering parts of speech in the sequence “determiner, adjective, noun.” When tested against 1,434 passwords containing 16 or more characters, the grammar-aware cracker surpassed other state-of-the-art password crackers when the passcodes had grammatical structures, with 10 percent of the dataset cracked exclusively by the team’s algorithm. The approach is significant because it comes as security experts are revising password policies to combat the growing sophistication of modern cracking techniques which make the average password weaker than ever before . A key strategy in making passwords more resilient is to use phrases that result in longer passcodes. Still, passphrases must remain memorable to the end user, so people often pick phrases or sentences. It turns out that grammatical structures dramatically narrow the possible combinations and sequences of words crackers must guess. One surprising outcome of the research is that the passphrase “Th3r3 can only b3 #1!” (with spaces removed) is one order of magnitude weaker than “Hammered asinine requirements” even though it contains more words. Better still is “My passw0rd is $uper str0ng!” because it requires significantly more tries to correctly guess. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Grammar badness makes cracking harder the long password

MP3 files written as DNA with storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram

The general approach to storing a binary file as DNA, described in detail below. Goldman et al., Nature It’s easy to get excited about the idea of encoding information in single molecules, which seems to be the ultimate end of the miniaturization that has been driving the electronics industry. But it’s also easy to forget that we’ve been beaten there—by a few billion years. The chemical information present in biomolecules was critical to the origin of life and probably dates back to whatever interesting chemical reactions preceded it. It’s only within the past few decades, however, that humans have learned to speak DNA. Even then, it took a while to develop the technology needed to synthesize and determine the sequence of large populations of molecules. But we’re there now, and people have started experimenting with putting binary data in biological form. Now, a new study has confirmed the flexibility of the approach by encoding everything from an MP3 to the decoding algorithm into fragments of DNA. The cost analysis done by the authors suggest that the technology may soon be suitable for decade-scale storage, provided current trends continue. Trinary encoding Computer data is in binary, while each location in a DNA molecule can hold any one of four bases (A, T, C, and G). Rather than using all that extra information capacity, however, the authors used it to avoid a technical problem. Stretches of a single type of base (say, TTTTT) are often not sequenced properly by current techniques—in fact, this was the biggest source of errors in the previous DNA data storage effort. So for this new encoding, they used one of the bases to break up long runs of any of the other three. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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MP3 files written as DNA with storage density of 2.2 petabytes per gram

Wires smaller in diameter than light waves boost solar cell efficiency

Electron micrograph of indium phosphide (InP) nanowires. Each is 180 nanometers in diameter; this diameter allows them to capture more light, making them effective in a photovoltaic solar cell. Wallentin et al. In the continuing quest to create solar cells, researchers seek new materials, use clever techniques, and look for novel physical phenomena to extract the maximum electricity out of sunlight for the lowest cost. One method of extracting more power at a lower cost relies on creating arrays of nanowires that stand vertically on inexpensive substrates. In contrast to the material in ordinary solar cells, nanowires use less material, can potentially be built with less costly materials, and in principle trap more light thanks to the geometry of the arrays. However, most nanowire solar cells are currently outperformed by their conventional counterparts. A new effort used indium phosphide (InP) nanowires with diameters smaller than the wavelength of the light they were trapping. That trick enabled Jesper Wallentin and colleagues to reach comparable efficiencies and slightly higher voltage than a conventional InP solar cell. While the wires only covered 12 percent of the surface area, they exploited a principle known as resonant trapping to extract over half as much current as a full planar cell of InP. This approach could lead to even greater efficiency at lower cost for solar cells. Many candidates for the next generation of photovoltaic (PV) solar cells are being investigated. Research in this area has two goals that don’t always overlap: maximizing the efficiency of converting sunlight into electric current, and reducing cost per unit of electricity. The advantage of nanowire-based cells lies in using a lot less material, since the entire surface need not be covered in PV material. Additionally, the wires themselves can be fabricated from relatively inexpensive semiconductor materials. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Wires smaller in diameter than light waves boost solar cell efficiency

New features, new fixes: OS X Server’s six-month checkup

It has now been roughly half a year since the release of Mountain Lion . If Apple sticks to its new yearly release cadence for new OS X versions, that means we’re probably about halfway to OS X 10.9. That doesn’t mean the OS has stood still, though—two point updates have since tweaked the operating system’s functionality and stability, and this is even more true of OS X’s buttoned-up cousin, OS X Server . While Windows Server rarely picks up major new features outside of service packs, OS X Server is like the client version of OS X in that it sometimes takes a couple of point updates for its features to stabilize. Since July, we’ve received two point updates for OS X Server, and they’ve changed things around enough that it merits revisiting our original guide and pointing out what has changed. We’ll be focusing on the major user-facing changes here, but for a complete list of everything that has been changed and fixed you may also want to look at the complete release notes for OS X Server 2.1.1 and 2.2 . Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New features, new fixes: OS X Server’s six-month checkup

Adobe almost does something amazing by accident

It seemed like an intriguing deal. An old version of Adobe Creative Suite—the 2005 vintage CS2, to be precise—became freely downloadable from Adobe, with nothing more than a free-to-create Adobe ID required from users. Although basically useless for Mac users, as CS2 is only available for PowerPC, for Windows users this is a powerful, if not quite cutting edge, suite of graphics apps. This looked like a clever move from Adobe. Photoshop is widely held to be one of the most routinely pirated applications there is. In making an old but still servicable version of the software it appeared that Adobe was offering a good alternative to piracy: instead of using a knock-off copy of CS6, just use CS2. A free CS2 would also go some way toward starving alternative applications of oxygen. Given the choice between a free copy of CS2 and downloading, say, the GIMP, one imagines that many users would plump for the commercial application. It’s more of a known quantity, with a more polished user interface. And Photoshop is, frankly, the gold standard of bitmap image editing. Even an older version has a prestige that GIMP doesn’t. This is not to say that CS2 is necessarily superior to the GIMP; it may or may not be. It doesn’t really matter; Photoshop has a reputation and respect that the GIMP doesn’t have, and even if some might argue that it was undeserved, it influences the decisions users make. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Adobe almost does something amazing by accident

Lenovo talks up new 27-inch “table PC” at CES

Lenovo’s IdeaCentre Horizon 27 Lenovo Lenovo is just one of the many PC makers bringing new designs to CES this week. Many of these will simply be refreshed or refined versions of the first round of Windows 8 computers—either convertible laptops or more traditional desktops and laptops with integrated touchscreens—but a few particularly interesting designs may yet rise above that fray. One of these PCs is Lenovo’s IdeaCentre Horizon 27, a 27-inch all-in-one desktop PC with an integrated battery and 1080p ten-point touchscreen. Lenovo is marketing the device as a “table PC.” Sure, a kickstand can be unfolded to allow the computer to sit on a desk as would any all-in-one. But this PC can also be laid flat on a table for use by multiple people, or mounted on the pictured roller table for use while standing. (We’ve previously stated  a touchscreen all-in-one makes the most sense ergonomically while positioned at about waist height on a standing person.) Enlarge / A roller table will change the Horizon into a standing workstation, when needed. Lenovo In concept the Horizon is quite similar to Sony’s Tap 20 , a smaller all-in-one that also included an integrated battery and foldable kickstand allowing it to be laid flat on a table. The Horizon’s larger size will mean more people can gather around it at once (and the roller table may make it more useful for people who prefer to stand at their desks), but the two machines are definitely cut from the same cloth. Like the Tap 20, multiplayer touch-enabled games figure heavily into Lenovo’s promotional material for the device. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Lenovo talks up new 27-inch “table PC” at CES