Wednesday, December 29, 2010

LVX System launches visible light communication in the US, finally

LVX System launches visible light communication in the US, finally

Ever wonder what happened to LEDs as a WiFi alternative? Well, wonder no more, because visible light communication is here -- in the municipal offices of St. Cloud Minnesota, at least. Starting tomorrow, LVX System, a Minnesota start-up, is installing the first of a series of LED fixtures that will use flashing lights to connect office workers to the internet, while saving big on the electric bill. The fixtures also function as regular overhead lights, using 36 watts of energy where 100 watts were once necessary. The setup consists of clusters of LEDs that switch on and off thousands of times per second at intervals undetectable to the human eye. The flashes emit binary code data -- off equals zero and on equals one -- that is received by special patented modems. Lights on these modems then transmit data back to the fixtures, and voila, you've got internet. According to LVX, light-powered networks are far less crowded and far more secure than their predecessors. Unfortunately, LVX's current incarnation transmits data at about 3Mbps -- a mere pittance compared to standard WiFi or Ethernet. Then again, 3Mbps is certainly fast enough for a city employee to perform really important tasks like keeping track of their favorite gadget blog, so we'll take it.

[Thanks, Andrew]

LVX System launches visible light communication in the US, finally originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 05:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MSI reveals mad Sandy Bridge motherboard with eight PCIe slots, eight USB 3.0 ports, and three BIOS chips

MSI reveals mad Sandy Bridge motherboard with eight PCIe slots, eight USB 3.0 ports, and three BIOS chips

Straighten up and salute the Big Bang Marshal, MSI's attempt at redefining the term "overkill." This XL-ATX board packs a total of eight PCI Express lanes (though it only has the bandwidth to simultaneously feed four x16s or eight x8s -- relevant if you're crazy enough to think about using more than four GPUs), three separate BIOS chips, extra 8-pin and 6-pin 12V power intakes, and a thoroughly excessive set of power regulation components. The less extremely minded among you will appreciate having a full array of eight USB 3.0 ports on the back, though we can't get over the measly four DIMM slots on offer. Word is that features might change before the Marshal goes to market in the first quarter of next year, so let's hope more room for your RAM sticks is among the tweaks between now and then.

Continue reading MSI reveals mad Sandy Bridge motherboard with eight PCIe slots, eight USB 3.0 ports, and three BIOS chips

MSI reveals mad Sandy Bridge motherboard with eight PCIe slots, eight USB 3.0 ports, and three BIOS chips originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 06:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LG's LW6500 Cinema 3D TV is certified flicker-free, launching at CES

LG's LW6500 Cinema 3D TV is certified flicker-free, launching at CES

Oh LG, you infernal tease. Instead of politely revealing its full set of plans for CES 2011, the Korean company keeps gently peeling away the layers of ignorance, with today marking its pre-announcement of a new Cinema 3D TV set. The LW6500 opts for passive 3D glasses, in place of the currently popular active shutter goggles, which has garnered it a couple of industry certifications to say that its 3D is guaranteed, definitely, totally flicker-free. Aside from that, you get a neat brightness booster to ensure that switching on the third dimension doesn't dim the picture unduly, while the rest of the specs and extras on this 200Hz panel seem mostly unremarkable. We'll be casting our eyeballs over it at CES next week, which will be followed, we're told, by a rollout in select markets shortly thereafter.

Continue reading LG's LW6500 Cinema 3D TV is certified flicker-free, launching at CES

LG's LW6500 Cinema 3D TV is certified flicker-free, launching at CES originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 07:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Breaking GSM Security With a $15 Phone [Security]

Breaking GSM Security With a $15 Phone [Security]

Breaking GSM Security With a Phone Whatever assurances have been given about the security of GSM cellphone calls, forget about them now.

Speaking at the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) Congress here today, a pair of researchers demonstrated a start-to-finish means of eavesdropping on encrypted GSM cellphone calls and text messages, using only four sub-$15 telephones as network "sniffers," a laptop computer and a variety of open source software.

While such capabilities have long been available to law enforcement with the resources to buy a powerful network sniffing device for more than $50,000 (remember The Wire?), the pieced-together hack takes advantage of security flaws and short-cuts in the GSM network operators' technology and operations to put the power in the reach of almost any motivated tech-savvy programmer.

"GSM is insecure, the more so as more is known about GSM," said Security Research Labs researcher Karsten Nohl. "It's pretty much like computers on the Net in the 1990s, when people didn't understand security well."

Several of the individual pieces of this GSM hack have been displayed before. The ability to decrypt GSM's 64-bit A5/1 encryption was demonstrated last year at this same event, for instance. However, network operators then responded that the difficulty of finding a specific phone, and of picking the correct encrypted radio signal out of the air, made the theoretical decryption danger minimal at best.

Naturally this sounded like a challenge.

Working the audience through each process step, Nohl and OsmocomBB project programmer Sylvain Munaut demonstrated how the way in which GSM networks exchange subscriber location data, in order to correctly route phone calls and SMSs, allow anyone to determine a subscriber's current location with a simple Internet query, to the level of city or general rural area.

Once a phone is narrowed down to a specific city, a potential attacker can drive through the area, sending the target phone "silent" or "broken" SMS messages that do not show up on the phone. By sniffing to each bay station's traffic, listening for the delivery of the message and the response of the target phone at the correct time, the location of the target phone can be more precisely identified.

To create a network sniffer, the researchers replaced the firmware of a simple Motorola GSM phone with their own alternative, which allowed them to retain the raw data received from the cell network, examine more of the cellphone network space than a single phone ordinarily monitors. Upgrading the USB connection allowed this information to be sent in real time to a computer.

By sniffing the network while sending a target phone an SMS, they were able to determine precisely which random network ID number belonged to the target. This gave them the ability to identify which the myriad streams of information they wanted to record from the network.

All that was left was decrypting the information. Not a trivial problem, but made possible by the way operator networks exchange system information with their phones.

As part of this background communication, GSM networks send out strings of identifying information, as well as essentially empty "Are you there?" messages. Empty space in these messages is filled with buffer bytes. Although a new GSM standard was put in place several years ago to turn these buffers into random bytes, they in fact remain largely identical today, under a much older standard.

This allows the researchers to predict with a high degree of probability the plaintext content of these encrypted system messages. This, combined with a two-terabyte table of precomputed encryption keys (a so-called rainbow table), allows a cracking program to discover the secret key to the session's encryption in about 20 seconds.

This is particularly useful, the researchers said, because many if not most GSM operators reuse these session keys for several successive communications, allowing a key extracted from a test SMS to be used again to record the next telephone call.

"There is one key used for communication between the operators and the SIM card that is very well protected, because that protects their monetary interest," Nohl said. "The other key is less well protected, because it only protects your private data."

The researchers demonstrated this process, using their software to sniff the headers being used by a phone, extract and crack a session encryption key, and then use this to decrypt and record a live GSM call between two phones in no more than a few minutes.

Much of this vulnerability could be relatively easily addressed, Nohl said. Operators could make sure that their network routing information was not so simply available through the Internet. They could implement the randomization of padding bytes in the system information exchange, making the encryption harder to break. They could certainly avoid recycling encryption keys between successive calls and SMSs.

Nor is it enough to imagine that modern phones, using 3G networks, are shielded from these problems. Many operators reserve much of their 3G bandwidth for Internet traffic, while shunting voice and SMS off to the older GSM network.

Nohl elicited a laugh from the audience of hackers when he called the reprogrammed network-sniffing phones "GSM debugging devices." But he was serious, he said.

"This is all a 20 year old infrastructure, with lots of private data and not a lot of security," he said. "We want you to help phones go through the same kind of evolutionary steps that computers did in the 1990s."

Wired.com has been expanding the hive mind with technology, science and geek culture news since 1995.

The Simplest—And Most Common—Cellphones Are Vulnerable To The âSMS Of Deathâ [Security]

The Simplest—And Most Common—Cellphones Are Vulnerable To The "SMS Of Death" [Security]

Despite how obsessed we may be with smartphones, it's the simplest cellphones which are most common—and the most vulnerable. In fact, it seems that many of those phones could be rendered useless by a maliciously crafted SMS.

It's a scene from an as-yet-unmade thriller – across a country, tens of thousands of cell phones all blink white at the same, and turn themselves off. Calls are lost, phones are rendered useless, and the affected mobile operator is forced to pay a ransom or lose customers.

It hasn't happened yet. But speaking at the Chaos Computer Club Congress here, German researchers showed how vulnerabilities in some the simplest, but most common phones in the world could conceivably lead to just such a scenario.

Mobile phone security has been a growing concern due to the increasing popularity of smart phones, whose Web-browsing and app-running capabilities offer attackers similar to those offered by computers. Yet more than 85 percent of the world's cell phones remain so-called feature phones – simple devices with the ability to play MP3s or browse the Web, but without the power of the iPhone or Android-based handsets.

Vulnerabilities have been found in this type of phone before, but new open-source tools allowing individuals to set up their own private GSM networks have allowed researchers to find a host of bugs ranging from pesky to serious in many of the world's most common handsets.

"With the openness in the GSM on the network side, we can look at the closed stuff now," said Collin Mulliner, a researcher at Berlin's Technical University. "And if we're able to look at closed stuff, it usually breaks."

Mulliner and colleague Nico Golde set up their own GSM network in their lab, allowing them to freely test the effects of sending SMS messages containing a variety of potentially damaging payloads.

The result was bugs, and plenty of them. Popular models of phones from Nokia (the S40 and related models, except for the very newest release), Sony Ericsson (w800 and several related models), LG (LG 320), Samsung (S5230 Star and S3250) Motorola (the RAZR, ROKR, and SVLR L7) and India's Micromax (X114) all proved susceptible to what researchers termed an "SMS of death."

The exact results differed for each phone. In the worst cases, including the Nokia and Sony Ericsson, the message would disconnect the phone and force it to reboot, without registering the fact of the message's receipt – in most cases forcing the operator's network to continue sending the message and triggering the shut-down cycle again. Fixing the problem required putting the SIM card into a new, unsusceptible phone.

In the other cases, the payload-laden messages forced the phones' interfaces to shut down, and disconnected the devices from the network. The researchers stressed that other phones likely had similar problems, but their research had focused on these common models.

At first glance, these problems appear to be relatively minor compared to the botnet or trojan susceptibilities of smartphones. But these simple attacks could cause serious problems, potentially for a single well-chosen target, or – more disturbingly – if launched on a large scale.

This could be relatively easily done, Mulliner said. In Germany, for example, mobile phone number prefixes are associated with specific operators, allowing large-scale attacks to be mounted on a single operator's customer base relatively easily. Bulk SMS messages tailored to attack specific common phones by the thousands could be sent using commercial SMS spam services, by activating botnets hiding on mobile phones, or even by an insider at a telephone company.

This kind of large-scale attack potential raises the possibility that a telco itself could be held hostage by an outsider threatening to flood its customers with reboots or even broken phones, researchers said.

Alternately, some police forces around the world rely on cell phones to communicate in areas where their two-way radios function poorly. An attack on a common model used by a police force could disrupt communications at a critical time.

The problem is these problems aren't easy to fix. Inexpensive "feature phones" rarely if ever receive firmware updates today. But the potential for abuse of bugs that are becoming easier to find means this practice might have to change, the researchers said.

"Manufacturers need to find a way to do firmware updates, and make sure to advertise them," Mulliner said.

Wired.com has been expanding the hive mind with technology, science and geek culture news since 1995.

MSI Wind U270 netbook emerges with 1.6GHz AMD Zacate processor

MSI Wind U270 netbook emerges with 1.6GHz AMD Zacate processor

We weren't actually expecting to see any Zacate-based machines until CES 2011 kicked off in earnest, but it looks as if MSI is hoping to snag a little wind from the sails of its competitors. In a small Taipei-based event, the outfit quietly snuck out a machine that we can only assume will become official in the coming days -- the Wind U270 netbook is an 11.6-incher with a 1.6GHz Zacate processor, 4GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive and no optical drive to speak of. Other specs include a VGA output, two USB 2.0 ports, a single USB 3.0 socket, a Kensington lock port, 4-in-1 card reader, Ethernet jack and an overly glossy 1366 x 768 resolution panel. Courtesy of Netbook News' hands-on, we've spotted a traditional chiclet keyboard, a split mouse button (huzzah!) and a trackpad that may very well not exist if it were any smaller. MSI wasn't about to spill any details on a ship date or price, but feel free to get yourself acquainted with the aesthetic in the video just past the break.

Continue reading MSI Wind U270 netbook emerges with 1.6GHz AMD Zacate processor

MSI Wind U270 netbook emerges with 1.6GHz AMD Zacate processor originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Dec 2010 17:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Disney imagineering long lines out of theme parks with military-grade monitoring systems

Disney imagineering long lines out of theme parks with military-grade monitoring systems

They've got a monorail system, IRL Muppets, and a house from the future, so we're not surprised that Disneyland is kicking its line-monitoring system into technological overdrive. Beneath Cinderella's iconic castle, a NORAD-style operation dedicated to eradicating downtime for visitors to the Magic Kingdom has sprung up, with a whole team tracking wait times, average number of rides ridden, and a whole bevy of other visitor-happiness metrics all over the park. From there, they can do things like re-route foot traffic to less-populated areas of the park with a mini-parade, adjust personnel at different attractions, or dispatch Jack Sparrow himself to liven up a Pirates line-waiter's afternoon. Chief Creative Executive Imagineer Bruce E. Vaughan dreams of "a day where there is memory built into these characters - they will know that they've seen you four or five times before and that your name is Bobby." Sounds delightfully frightening to us. But hey, it's all in the name of increasing visitor happiness, which we're sure goes hand in hand with visitor brokeness by the time they leave the park.

Disney imagineering long lines out of theme parks with military-grade monitoring systems originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Dec 2010 18:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HTC Thunderbolt with LTE for Verizon pictured ahead of CES unveiling?

HTC Thunderbolt with LTE for Verizon pictured ahead of CES unveiling?

So, that lovely 4.3-inch LTE smartphone with Android for Verizon we've been calling the Mecha and the Droid Incredible HD? Looks like it might come to market as the Thunderbolt, so says Droid Life -- and we tend to put some weight on the rumor considering that they've just run twelve leaked shots of the thing. As you can see, this is clearly Verizon's head-on answer to the EVO 4G, featuring similar stylings and, in all likelihood, an LTE modem swapped in for the EVO's WiMAX one. Sure looks like that "controlled" leak from a few days back, doesn't it? More on this at Verizon's press conference next week, we presume.

HTC Thunderbolt with LTE for Verizon pictured ahead of CES unveiling? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Dec 2010 18:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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EngKey telepresence robot teaches English to Koreans by way of the Philippines

EngKey telepresence robot teaches English to Koreans by way of the Philippines

You know, for all the hubbub we've been hearing about le robots (the robots), you'd think we'd see them put to better uses than chasing our pets and killing people. Right? Right. Well, the best use we can think of is education, and that's exactly what they're doing at an elementary school in Daegu, South Korea. Developed by the Korea Institute of Science of Technology (KIST), EngKey is just under three-and-a-half feet high, features a video display for a face, and seems hell bent on taking all those "teach English in Korea" jobs away from shiftless American college grads looking to postpone responsibility for one or two more desperate years. There are currently twenty-nine such devices, which -- get this -- are actually operated remotely by teachers in the Philippines. Is this the end result of globalism? Not quite yet: for the time being, the robots are still too cumbersome to operate and expensive to justify putting into production. But who knows? Maybe someday, kids.

EngKey telepresence robot teaches English to Koreans by way of the Philippines originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Dec 2010 22:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Gigantic 1,500-Pound Camera Captures First X-Ray Images of Lightning [Image Cache]

Gigantic 1,500-Pound Camera Captures First X-Ray Images of Lightning [Image Cache]

Some madly brilliant scientists recently used a gigantic 1,500-pound camera to capture x-ray images of lightning—which they triggered artificially using wires and rockets. Crazy? Maybe, but it's definitely a beautiful experiment.

As a result of having a camera which could capture a lightning bolt traveling at one-sixth the speed of light, scientists have been able to discover that there's "a bright ball of x-rays at the head of the bolt, with almost no lingering radiation along the bolt's trail." This means that we now better understand where the radiation carried by lightning bolts comes from—and that we'll soon have some more crazy-looking images to use as desktop wallpapers. [National Geographic]

LG looks set to unveil mobile 3DTV at CES

LG looks set to unveil mobile 3DTV at CES

LG looks set to unveil mobile 3DTV

We don't know much about it yet, but it's looking like we might be getting a taste of 3D on the go after all at CES. We'd hoped it would be with Nintendo's 3DS, but that report turned out to be a bust, and now LG is apparently going to pick up the slack with a new mobile digital TV that has a 3D display. We know virtually nothing about the set at this point, but we're thinking it will be glasses-free and are speculating that, after its appearance in Vegas next week, it'll never be seen in the US again.

LG looks set to unveil mobile 3DTV at CES originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LG Xnote P210 claims 'world's thinnest bezel' title, our undying appreciation

LG Xnote P210 claims 'world's thinnest bezel' title, our undying appreciation

If there's one thing we appreciate more than pixel density, it's slim bezels. LG, a traditional enemy of unsightly frames, is today staking its claim for having the world's thinnest bezel on a laptop with the new Xnote P210. This 12.5-inch machine is said to fit within the footprint of an 11.6-incher, but before you start throwing insults like "netbook" around the place, do take note it has a dual-core Core i5-470UM processor inside -- capable of running between 1.33GHz and 1.86GHz -- 4GB of RAM, and a 320GB HDD. The LED-backlit display's resolution isn't specified beyond a note saying it's "HD," while Windows 7 Home Premium is the predictable OS of choice. Look for the P210 to hit Korea in February for around 1.3 million won (about $1,135), but don't hold your breath on it coming Stateside for anything other than a flying trade show visit.

Continue reading LG Xnote P210 claims 'world's thinnest bezel' title, our undying appreciation

LG Xnote P210 claims 'world's thinnest bezel' title, our undying appreciation originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Dec 2010 03:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ASUS teases Eee Pad and Eee Slate ahead of CES launch

ASUS teases Eee Pad and Eee Slate ahead of CES launch

Seems like all these CES vendors have wised up to the fact that announcing their new products amidst a maelstrom of new product announcements tends to be slightly counterproductive. So, naturally, they're spending their December carefully teasing out little pre-release details. It's ASUS' turn today, who clearly isn't content just telling us about its Eee Pad / Slate / Tablet / Chopping Board and has decided to dish out some candid hardware shots. What we see above is a USB 3.0 port embedded within a very slinky keyboard panel, which itself seems attached to a touchscreen display (with Android buttons!) up top. It's looking more like a tablet PC (presumably with a pivoting screen) than a tablet, which is corroborated by other images at the source link. Two devices are included in this teaser picture set, with the other looking like it has a slider keyboard (see it after the break) -- none of it is definitive just yet, but it makes for a good guessing game to fill the time until the big show kicks off in Vegas next week.

Continue reading ASUS teases Eee Pad and Eee Slate ahead of CES launch

ASUS teases Eee Pad and Eee Slate ahead of CES launch originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Dec 2010 04:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for ! use of f eeds.

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Monday, December 27, 2010

Come Share My Music

Come Share My Music

The very special Hexound is a headset that detaches to become portable speakers. The cool-quotient is brought in by the solar panel fixed in the headband. Specs include Bluetooth connectivity and intuitive controls. I simply love the versatility of becoming a crowd-friendly device from a personal thang.

Designer: Lie Zhong-Fa

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SoundHound Music Recognition App Now Comes With Unlimited Song IDs [Apps]

SoundHound Music Recognition App Now Comes With Unlimited Song IDs [Apps]

The free Android and iOS version of the SoundHound app has been updated, bringing unlimited track IDs to smartphones. It'll make money via ads and a few of you buying songs through linked retailer Amazon, hopefully... [SoundHound via UberGizmo]

New solar machine could generate hydrogen fuel, food for your future vehicle

New solar machine could generate hydrogen fuel, food for your future vehicle

We're hesitant to file this one in the folder marked "Awesome Things That'll Never Happen," but it's definitely on the watch list. A new prototype solar device has been concocted to convert sunlight into fuel, much in the same way a plant does. Eco-minded folks will probably understand that conventional photovoltaic panels "must use the electricity they generate in situ," and thus, cannot deliver energy at night; this here device takes a rather unorthodox approach, using the sun's rays along with ceria (a magical, marvelous metal oxide) to "break down carbon dioxide or water into fuels which can be stored and transported." In theory, at least, the device could be used to create hydrogen and / or carbon monoxide, with the former being obviously useful for fueling up hydrogen-based cars of the future. Sadly, the existing prototype is horribly inefficient -- only around 0.7 percent of the solar energy can be converted into fuel -- but researchers are adamant that they can boost that to nearly 20 percent in time. We'll check back in a decade or so to see how things are progressing.

New solar machine could generate hydrogen fuel, food for your future vehicle originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Dec 2010 02:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Stereoscopic copy-paste finally brings that clone tool into the third dimension (video)

Stereoscopic copy-paste finally brings that clone tool into the third dimension (video)

Stereoscopic copy-paste finally brings that clone tool into the third dimension (video)

With the right software anybody can be photo editing guru, eliminating redeye, removing unsightly blemishes, and maybe adding an image of Godzilla lurking in the background just for fun. However, if you've been unlucky enough to try to do the same in 3D you know just how distinctly unsatisfying that experience can be. Maybe not for long. Thanks to NewScientist we just caught a glimpse of an October presentation made by Swiss engineers Joren van Baar and Wan-Yen Lo called "Stereoscopic 3D Copy & Paste." It is, basically, exactly what it sounds like, tools that let you define various objects and planes on a stereoscopic image, similar to how you might grab a shape with the magic wand tool, and then duplicate it and move that shape around on both parts of the 3D photo. The software handles re-creating shadows, automatically tackling occlusion too, and while the results aren't perfect, particularly if you're trying to change perspective or partially occlude an object behind something that's transparent, it certainly trumps trying to do it by hand. Check out the video below and take a moment to be thankful that you didn't have to buy gifts for all those kids above.

Continue reading Stereoscopic copy-paste finally brings that clone tool into the third dimension (video)

Stereoscopic copy-paste finally brings that clone tool into the third dimension (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Dec 2010 08:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nissan Leaf rates you against other drivers, creates a high score list for hypermilers

Nissan Leaf rates you against other drivers, creates a high score list for hypermilers

Nissan Leaf rates you against other drivers, creates a high score list for hypermilers

Xbox Live and the Achievement system kind of reinvented the high score list, letting you compete against your friends even when you're roaming solo through a stark, barren wasteland. It looks like Nissan is doing much the same with the Leaf -- but minus the bloatflies and the supermutants. As the cars are now rolling out to eager owners we're learning more about just what its Carwings system can do and another neat trick is the "Regional Rankings" page, where one driver's driving efficiency is rated against others in the area. There are bronze, silver, and gold medals up for grabs but, if you cover the thing with speed tape and only commute downhill, you might just be awarded the platinum award. What does that get you? Why, a little picture of a trophy, of course. What were you expecting?

Nissan Leaf rates you against other drivers, creates a high score list for hypermilers originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Dec 2010 15:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AMD Radeon HD 6950 can be turned into an HD 6970 using a BIOS hack

AMD Radeon HD 6950 can be turned into an HD 6970 using a BIOS hack

Ah, the joy of getting something for nothing -- that's what this time of year is all about, right? The techPowerUp! guys seem to think so, and they've got the perfect gift for all you thrifty PC gaming enthusiasts: a BIOS flash for the Radeon HD 6950 that unlocks the full potential of its hardware (in other words, it turns it into an HD 6970). We already knew the two retail SKUs were built on the same Cayman core, but this hack confirms that all the 6950's performance handicaps have been enacted in software rather than hardware, leaving you all to flip a switch, click a few confirmatory dialogs, and get your game on. You should be aware that the retail 6970 card uses an 8-pin and a 6-pin connector for its auxiliary power whereas the 6950 only has a pair of 6-pin intakes, which might cause trouble under extreme loads, and there's also the fact that you'll most likely be hacking your warranty away together with your GPU's limitations. But hey, you can't make eggnog without cracking a few eggs.

AMD Radeon HD 6950 can be turned into an HD 6970 using a BIOS hack originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Dec 2010 04:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Synology DS1511+ does the 3TB-per-drive dance, backs up most of your neighborhood

Synology DS1511+ does the 3TB-per-drive dance, backs up most of your neighborhood

Once one network attached storage manufacturer upgraded to 3TB hard drives, it was only a matter of time before the rest followed suit, and this time it's Synology's turn with the DiskStation DS1511+. In case you haven't done the math already, this particular unit can store up to 15 terabytes of your juiciest secrets across five 3TB hot-swappable drives, and its 1.8GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of memory handles a RAID 5 array capable of speeding that data across a local area network at up to 197 MB / sec read speeds and 165 MB / sec writes. If that capacity isn't enough to house your plan for world domination and monitor all the IP cameras in your underground volcano lair, the unit can scale up to 45TB with a couple of secondary expansion units, each with five more 3TB drives of their own. Yours for roughly $900 -- sans storage -- wherever NAS are sold. PR after the break.

Continue reading Synology DS1511+ does the 3TB-per-drive dance, backs up most of your neighborhood

Synology DS1511+ does the 3TB-per-drive dance, backs up most of your neighborhood originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Dec 2010 08:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LG bringing world's largest LED-backlit 3D LCD HDTV to CES: 72-inch LZ9700

LG bringing world's largest LED-backlit 3D LCD HDTV to CES: 72-inch LZ9700

LG swore up and down that it would be bumping its smart TV investment to kick-start 2011, and lo and behold, it looks as if this is one New Year's resolution that'll be kept. The aforesaid company has just revealed that it'll be bringing the planet's largest LED-backlit 3D LCD HDTV to CES 2011 next week, with the LZ9700 handling both 2D and 3D content and offering TruMotion 400Hz to smooth out Cam Newton's faster-than-fast evasion techniques. As you'd expect, this set is also outfitted with the company's Smart TV functions, giving owners access to TV apps, games, language classes, etc. The company's also talking up its Magic Motion Remote Control -- a diddy we'll definitely be anxious to put to the test once we land in Vegas. There's no mention of an expected price, but it'll be available starting in "early 2011" for those who passed on HDI's 100-incher.

Gallery: LG's LZ9700 72-inch 3D LCD HDTV

Continue reading LG bringing world's largest LED-backlit 3D LCD HDTV to CES: 72-inch LZ9700

LG bringing world's largest LED-backlit 3D LCD HDTV to CES: 72-inch LZ9700 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Dec 2010 10:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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