Security for smartphones has not been a big concern for most lately, but Research In Motion's security VP cautioned yesterday that malicious hackers could use today’s smartphone devices to target wireless carriers with distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS). Increasingly popular, smartphones like the Palm Pre, iPhone, Motorola Droid and Research In Motion's BlackBerry Bold 9700 are sure to tempt hackers to crack smartphone security measures for their own gain.Read more

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are now widely used in retail applications as well as application in areas like government processes, industrial processes, manufacturing, logistics and supply-chain operations, and payment administration systems. The ability of hackers to produce counterfeit tags is a growing security concern. Now, researchers at the University of Arkansas have come up with new technology to thwart cloning of passive radio frequency identification tags. The method is based on one or more exclusive physical attributes of individual tags instead of information stored on them, and will augment security and privacy for government agencies, businesses and consumers.Read more

The ATI Radeon HD 5970 announced today is billed as the fastest graphics card ever made. It boasts a score of X12011.1 in 3DMark Vantage Extreme preset, the highest recorded single-card score. The tested system featured a 3.33GHz Intel Core i7 965 processor, Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard, Corsair XMS 6GB memory (1600MHz), Windows 7 RTM x64, ATI Radeon HD 5970 1GB GDDR5. Read more

Adobe has released a pre-release version of Flash Player 10.1 and a beta release of Air 2.0 on it’s pre-release site, Abobe Labs. The two net enabling technologies are closely related. Flash is used by many sites for gaming, streaming video and interactive graphics. AIR, used for offline running of web-based applications, and has Flash built-in, currently runs only on the desktop, but Flash Player is moving into mobile devices.Read more

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Cray XT5 supercomputer called "Jaguar" is now the fastest computer in the world, edging out IBM’s Roadrunner on the semi-annual Top500 Supercomputers list.

Jaguar is made up of 224,256 compute cores, each containing two hex-core AMD Opteron processors, 16GB memory, and a SeaStar 2+ router, in addition to dedicated login/service nodes. It runs on Cray Linux. The Cray XT5 won the title by processing at 1.75 petaflops. A petaflop equals one quadrillion (or one thousand trillion) floating point operations per second. Roadrunner came in second with 1.04 petaflops. Wile E. Coyote came in third. Just kidding. It was actually another Cray XT5.

The Top 10 Fastest: Read more

1. Jaguar, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1.75 petaflop/s)

From Russia with Love: Copies of Modern Warfare 2 have been recalled in Russia, taken off the shelf, censored, and called in for questioning. It seems there is this little scene at the beginning where certain people get massacred. You have to wonder what would have been the reaction in the US if the scene had been set at say, Chicago O’Hare airport and the dead civilians had been Americans. That probably would have been a little too much PR. No, better to stick with the tried and true stereotype Bad Guys.Read more