National Geographic shoves every morsel of its collection onto 160GB HDD

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/30/national-geographic-shoves-every-morsel-of-its-collection-onto-1/

Care to get up close and personal with Niihau? How's about an overview of Tuvalu? Surely you need a helicopter shot of Pakatoa Island to get your morning started right, yeah? If so, and you're too lazy to hit up the World Wide Web, there's a better-than-average chance that an older National Geographic magazine has exactly the elixir you're searching for. Problem is, sifting through every single issue since 1888 takes a fair bit of time -- time you'd rather be spending in an obnoxiously long security line as you await your flight to Ushuaia. Thanks to "modern technology" and "storage innovations," said quandary can now be resolved quite simply. Nat Geo is offering every last piece of information it has ever published on a portable 160GB HDD, and amazingly 100GB is free for you to manually add to the collection. Too bad this $199.95 device wasn't available before Christmas, but hey, at least you've now got something to blow those Santa Bucks on.

National Geographic shoves every morsel of its collection onto 160GB HDD originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Download Squad  |  National Geographic  | Email this | Comments

Read More...

Summary only...

GSM call encryption code cracked, published for the whole world to see

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/29/gsm-call-encryption-code-cracked-published-for-the-whole-world/

Did you know that the vast majority of calls carried out on the 3.5 billion GSM connections in the world today are protected by a 21-year old 64-bit encryption algorithm? You should now, given that the A5/1 privacy algorithm, devised in 1988, has been deciphered by German computer engineer Karsten Nohl and published as a torrent for fellow code cracking enthusiasts and less benevolent forces to exploit. Worryingly, Karsten and his crew of merry men obtained the binary codes by simple brute force -- they fed enough random strings of numbers in to effectively guess the password. The GSM Association -- which has had a 128-bit A5/3 key available since 2007, but found little takeup from operators -- has responded by having a whinge about Mr. Nohl's intentions and stating that operators could just modify the existing code to re-secure their networks. Right, only a modified 64-bit code is just as vulnerable to cracking as the one that just got cracked. It's important to note that simply having the code is not in itself enough to eavesdrop on a call, as the cracker would be faced with just a vast stream of digital communications -- but Karsten comes back to reassure us that intercepting software is already available in customizable open source varieties. So don't be like Tiger, keep your truly private conversations off the airwaves, at least for a while.

GSM call encryption code cracked, published for the whole world to see originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 04:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Perma! link  Phone News  |  New York Times  | Email this | Comments

Read More...

Summary only...

Samsung's Pinetrail-boasting N220 netbook spied in France

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/29/samsungs-pinetrail-boasting-n220-netbook-spied-in-france/

We've been seeing a fair amount of netbooks equipped with Intel's Pinetrail processors since they were announced early last week, and it looks like we're going to be seeing at least one from Samsung in the very near future. This one -- the N220 -- was just spotted in France. The 10.1-incher packs (as you'd expect) an Atom N450 CPU, GMA 3150 graphics, 1GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth, plus a webcam and a 6 cell battery which should supposedly get around eleven and a half hours of battery life. It comes with Windows 7 installed, and as you can see from the photo, one of the available colors will be glossy green. It's going for 350 euros in France, so, if the price stays comparable when (and if it) hits North American soil, we can expect it to cost somewhere in the realm of $500.

Samsung's Pinetrail-boasting N220 netbook spied in France originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink I4U  |  Netbooked!  |  Email this | Comments

Read More...

Summary only...

The Apple Tablet's Name: iSlate (At Least, It Sure Looks That Way) [Rumor]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/mSxt1Mg2P7Q/the-apple-tablets-name-islate-at-least-it-sure-looks-that-way

Poking more at the info Apple secretly registered iSlate.com a couple years ago, TechCrunch found Apple's possibly setup a shell company called Slate Computing, which has a trademark on "iSlate." The signatory? Apple's Senior Trademark Specialist, MacRumors discovered.

Regina Porter most recently signed for the "iSlate" trademark for Slate Computing this past August—showing Apple's continued with "slate" beyond its initial registration for iSlate.com and the "iSlate" trademark in 2006. In Europe, a law firm Apple typically uses to register trademarks has also filed for major domains containing "iSlate," while another they use has filed for a trademark on ISlate in the European Union, registered to a corporation in Trinidad & Tobago, a country Apple's used to register European trademarks before, including for the iPhone.

Curiously, another trademark registered by Slate Computing in the US is "Magic Slate," which follows the same naming convention as Magic Mouse, obviously. MacRumors wonders if it might be something like a multitouch trackpad for computers, like with a screen (which we've wanted for a long time).

Whatever's going on, Apple's obviously gone through a lot of work to discreetly register a whole lot of "slate" stuff, which seems like a ton of effort for nothing, or simply a ruse to throw people off. It's funny, actually, that everybody "knew" what the iPhone was going to be called years before Steve Jobs took the stage to anno! unce it, but no one really knows the tablet's name. I've always figured that, whatever it is, it'll have just two syllables. iSlate fits the bill. And for now, it's the only one with any evidence. [MacRumors, TechCrunch]

Read More...

Summary only...

Single Molecule Turned Into a Functional Transistor [Transistors]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/nEVp5nhNAVA/single-molecule-turned-into-a-functional-transistor

Since the first transistor was demonstrated 62 years ago, researchers have tried to make the device smaller and smaller. Now they've finally achieved an extreme point in their quest: A single-molecule transistor. Yes, that's really, really freakin' small.

Apparently this itty bitty transistor "has a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts" and "could behave just like a silicon transistor." This is an incredible achievement because of the potential applications in nanomachines since a few atoms would be enough to "perform complex calculations." What I wonder is how long it'll take for these molecular transistors to go from being demonstrated to being put into research use to being something we see in consumer electronics. How much smaller could some gadgets get? [Wired]

Read More...

Summary only...