Smartcard Encryption Crocked by German Scientists

Researchers from the Ruhr University in Germany found a way to get past the encryption that protects the chip cards considered up until recently to be unbreakable, allowing potential villains to replicate and alter them as they please. The Register reveals that the equipment required for the operation costs around $3,000 (€2100), a small amount for someone out to do some damage. So far, these smartcards were used to safeguard almost anything, from homes, office buildings, and credit for all sorts of services and now David Oswald and Christof Paar show the world that the time for an upgrade has arrived. This is not the first successful attempt of crocking such a card, but it comes to prove even further that these security means are...

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Nokia N9 Offers Fast and Easy Internet Connectivity

Nokia N9 is the first and only MeeGo-powered handset that the Finnish mobile phone maker has brought to the market. The smartphone has already started to arrive on shelves in various countries around the world, and should hit even more of them soon. The handset comes with a brand new operating system on board, and with new and appealing features as well, starting with that all-touch design, which eliminated the need of hardware buttons on the front. However, Nokia N9 also arrives with some capabilities that are quite common to smartphones these days, such as Internet connectivity. To learn how you can connect to the Internet on your new Nokia N9 smartphone, simply have a look at the video embedded above. The one thing that is certain is that accessing the Internet on this MeeGo beauty...

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BlackBerry Network Down (almost) Worldwide - 10/10/2011

BlackBerry users have just started to report issues with BlackBerry Messenger and email, which suggest that the network is down. This is not the first time that users complain of BlackBerry outage, but this time seems to be a global issue as we've seen reports from all over the world and BlackBerry owners in our team seem to be affected as well. BBM, Facebook, MSN Messenger and Twitter are not working, as well as any other applications that require data connection, including AppWorld. In addition, sending or receiving emails, regardless of the account, is impossible at the moment. However, the BlackBerry outage does not affect Internet browsing. Although RIM has yet to make any official statements, the issue has been confirmed by Vodafone...

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8-Core AMD FX-8120 Put Through Some Tests

AMD is just about ready to launch its 8-core FX-Series central processing units and, in the meantime, the lucky few who got it early have supplied the web with benchmarks. A certain user from Overclockers.ua, going by the handle of blood_angel, put the soon-to-be launched AMD FX-8120 CPU through some benchmarks. For those that don't know, this item is an 8-core beast with a total of 16 MB of cache memory (8 MB L2 and 8 MB L3). During the tests, it had a clock speed of 4 GHz (4,003 MHz) and a multiplier of 20x. The results were fairly impressive in AIDA64 (see the high-resolution screenshot) and, in Cinebench R11.5, the score was of 6.55. One might look oddly at the 6.55 number (OpenGL score was 46.82), but they should remember that,...

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Asus P9X79 Deluxe Motherboard for LGA 2011 CPUs Gets Pictured

In mid-November Intel will release its first desktop processors based on the high-performance Sandy Bridge-E architecture and Asus' is getting ready for this launch with the P9X79 Deluxe LGA 2011 motherboard based on the Intel X79 chipset. Just as most other Sandy Bridge-E boards, the P9X79 Deluxe will also come as a high-end solution and it sports support for technologies such as SLI and CrossFireX as well as SSD caching. The motherboard also includes no less than four PCI Express x16 slots, two of these featuring 16 lanes of PCIe bandwidth, and these are accompanied by two additional PCI Express x1 slots. As far as storage is concerned, Asus' latest creation comes with four SATA 3Gbps ports and four SATA 6Gbps port, two of the latter...

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ASRock X79 Extreme7 LGA 2011 Motherboard Pictured in Full

ASRock is preparing a new flagship motherboard for the launch of Intel's Sandy Bridge-E processors, the X79 Extreme7, which was just pictured in full by a Chinese website who has received a series of images with the final revision of this board. The most striking feature about the Extreme7 is the inclusion of six memory slots, which is a strange decision when considering that Sandy Bridge-E CPUs includes a quad-channel memory controller. Right to the left of the memory slots, users will find no less than five PCI Express x16 slots, which ASRock states can support 3-way SLI and CrossFireX setups. These are accompanied by a 32-bit PCI slot to provide support for legacy add-on cards. As far as storage is concerned, ASRock decided to provide its...

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CyanogenMod-7.1 Now Available

A new CyanogenMod official release is now available for download for Android users who like installing custom ROMs on their devices, with full support for a number of 24 new devices, and currently in testing for some other handsets.  The team behind CyanogenMod took the time to come up with the new release, but now the new CM 7.1 is out, and it offers support for building ROMs for a number of no less than 68 devices, it seems.  There has been a long time between the last two CM releases, yet the development team is set to speed up the release process a bit, it seems.  “It’s been far too long since our last official release, but I’m happy to present CyanogenMod-7.1! I apologize for the long delay, and I hope to speed up our release...

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HP and Hynix Start Using Memristors for Real

Memristors may still be a work in progress, but Hynix and HP seem to have reached the point where they can give a time frame, of sorts, for when products based on them will appear. Memristor is a shortened form of Memory Resistor, which has two distinct advantages over what is used on today's flash drives and solid state drives. The first advantage is the fairly obvious one, that of reduced power consumption (pretty much every advancement nowadays has energy efficiency factored in somewhere). The second advantage is in how memristors do not lose the information stored on them when power is cut. Granted, SSDs don't have much issue with storing data when not plugged into anything, but this second ability of memristors, coupled with their ability...

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