Technology Info

When the power fails, no individual component gets a clean shutdown command; power is just removed. When this happens, some parts of the machine may last longer than other parts. One of the first things that will happen, is that the memory DIMMs will no longer be refreshed properly (DRAM needs to be refreshed constantly otherwise it will lose its data) and very rapidly, the memory will contain only garbage. The hard drives and DMA controller however, will run a bit longer; so if data is being written to disk, the DMA controller will keep reading data from memory, but it has no idea that this data is corrupted. Some file systems are more sensitive to this kind of failure, because of the different kinds of journaling they do.

There are certain machines which are protected against this type of data corruption, by having the power supply send an interrupt to the operating system when power fails, but ordinary class PC hardware does not. (link)

Toshiba Launches 400GB 2.5-Inch HDD Introduces New Line-up Of 7,200rpm Drives

400GB Drive Cuts Acoustic Noise During Data Seek By 2dB(1) For near Silent Operation
Toshiba Corporation today announced a new line-up of high performance 2.5-inch HDDs, including a low-noise flagship model that boosts areal density to 477Mbit/mm2 (308Gbpsi) to achieve a capacity of 400GB on just two platters, plus five drives that bring new levels of performance and 7,200rpm rotational speeds to the company’s full range of storage capacities.

Mass production of the 400GB MK4058GSX will start from September, targeting notebook PC and consumer electronic applications. Mass production of the 7,200rpm drives will start in August. The line-up includes the 320GB MK3254GSY and models with 80, 120, 160 and 250GB capacities. (link)

SanDisk Corporation today introduced the SanDisk® SD™ WORM card, a Write Once Read Many (WORM) digital memory card intended for professional uses such as police investigations, court testimony, electronic voting and other applications where data files must be protected from alteration or deletion.

Analog recording media such as film and audio tape are rapidly becoming obsolete, driving demand for a solution suitable for today’s digital devices. But conventional rewritable memory cards do not meet legal requirements to prevent data tampering.

Digital data written to SanDisk SD WORM cards is effectively locked as soon as it is recorded; there is no physical way to alter or delete individual recorded files. Yet viewing the data is simple, because the cards are readable in any standard SD slot attached to a computer or other SD-compatible device.

SanDisk SD WORM cards also offer 100-year archive life1, when kept under appropriate storage conditions. (link)

The second generation terabyte hard drive is here. Wondering whats different from the “first-generation”? Well, according to Hitachi, its second generation Deskstar drive is much more energy efficient than the earlier version. Touted as the “world’s most energy efficient” hard drive, the Deskstar 7K1000.B is the first product of the new “Tera Era”. It comes with 1 terabyte storage capacity and provides 7,200rpm rational speed. Hitachi said, its new three-disk design improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent over its 1TB predecessor, which was already among the industry’s most energy efficient hard drives. Also, it provides increased protection against data loss and piracy via Bulk Data Encryption.

Hitachi’s vision is that three elements – rich media content, culture, and increasing capacity – are uniting to create an entirely new landscape for enterprise and consumer data storage. It is against this exciting backdrop that Hitachi is announcing the Deskstar 7K1000.B, the world’s most energy-efficient 7,200 RPM one terabyte (1TB) hard drive. (link)

You and I may have taken the 4th of July off, but the folks over at TrueCrypt didn’t. Instead, they pushed out version 6.0 of their on-the-fly encryption utility, with more options than ever for protecting - and hiding - the critical data on your hard drives. Available for Linux, OS X, and Windows, the software is licensed under its own TrueCrypt license, which is not OSI-approved.

The basic idea behind TrueCrypt is “plausible deniability” - that someone who examines your hard drive, even someone who demands and gets your password, shouldn’t be able to find all of the encrypted data. They employ a variety of strategies to achieve this, starting with the fact that you can hide a TrueCrypt-encrypted file system inside of any file. You can also put a “hidden volume” on the drive - a TrueCrypt volume inside another TrueCrypt volume, which is statistically indistinguishable from random noise.

TrueCrypt can use a variety of algorithms for its encryption, including AES, TwoFish, Serpent, and combinations of these. The developers have been good about dropping support for algorithms that have been significantly weakened over the software’s lifetime. (link)

After raising the ire of its customers with what are believed to be overly expensive iPhone 3G plans, Canadian provider Rogers Wireless is allegedly being punished by Apple with fewer shipments.

Blogger Daniel Smith claims multiple sources, including a senior Rogers representative, claim that Apple has diverted a significant amount of its initial iPhone 3G Canadian deliveries to Europe in retribution for the carrier’s steep rate plans, which at similar prices offer a third fewer minutes and limited data compared to AT&T.

Stores may be getting just 10 to 20 iPhones each and are being told to “exercise caution” not to promise ample stock on launch day, according to the rumors.

At the same time, Rogers is also claimed to be promptly firing the part-time staff that had been hired to handle an expected deluge of customers at some stores.

With the story breaking on the weekend, neither Apple nor Rogers officials have commented on the allegations. However, the provider in recent days has faced a steadily mounting backlash against its planned rates with approximately 42,000 would-be iPhone buyers signing a highly-publicized petition for lower rates that they plan to deliver to Rogers in person. (link)

Back in April, McAfee launched an experiment designed as a tribute to Morgan Spurlock’s Super-Size Me documentary on eating nothing but McDonald’s food for 30 days. Instead of fast food, however, McAfee gathered a group of some 50 volunteers from Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Spain, the US, and the UK. Once this elite group of brave souls had been assembled, McAfee put them on a diet of pure spam.

No, we’re not referring to the creamy mounds of whipped pig nestled inside a pop-top container—although 30 days of eating it might make an interesting experiment in and of itself—but the kind of spam that arrives via your inbox and tempts you with online degrees, job offers, free XBox 360s, and magnanimous gifts from your great-uncle Dmitri back in Russia. (link)

MySpace made good on a promise today to let users take their data with them to other websites and even competing social networks. The social network will offer a rich set tools for third-party developers and enforce strict standards to protect users’ data and privacy.

Last month, MySpace surprised the industry by announcing its Data Availability Initiative, a plan that MySpace’s CEO Chris DeWolfe summed up as “the walls around the garden are coming down.” Until recently, most social networking sites, including Facebook and MySpace, haven’t offered easy methods for users to move or share their data with other sites, let alone competing networks. Aside from some kind of hacked backdoor method or a third-party scraping utility, you couldn’t easily port the photos or all the personal information you’ve added to MySpace over to Facebook or Google’s Orkut. You would have to sign up at those other sites and reupload those photos all over again manually. (link)

Here we have it, iPhone 3G pricing for our better mannered, gun-toting friends up north. All the plans from Rogers Wireless require that lovely, three-year contract and include visual voicemail, free evenings and weekends, and unlimited WiFi at all Rogers and Fido hotspots. The plans start at $60/month for 150 minutes of voice and just 400MB of data before topping out at $115/month for 800 minutes voice and up to 2GB of data. None of these plans offer unlimited data as previously rumored. See the details after the break. (link)

Nokia Corp. is buying the consortium that makes the software for its phones and making it available for free to other manufacturers, in hopes of blunting the influence of competing software providers.

Nokia said Tuesday that it is offering to buy the 52 per cent of Britain’s Symbian Ltd. that it doesn’t already own for about US$410 million. Symbian’s software is the most widely used on high-end phones.

Nokia will then establish a foundation with handset makers Sony Ericsson and Motorola Inc. and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo to make the software available royalty-free. They will combine their three different versions of the Symbian software for advanced, data-enabled phones into one open platform. (link)