As expected, Ubuntu Linux remained unhacked at CanSecWest. Windows Vista and Ubuntu machines survived the second day while the Mac was hacked in less than two minutes. Windows Vista was hacked after the latest version of Adobe Flash was installed during the third day after the organizers allowed popular third party softwares to be installed, making the possibility of Vista and Ubuntu to get hacked more easier for the participants. No one managed to hack the Ubuntu even with the incentive of $5,000 and a free Sony notebook.

Popularity: 2% [?]

A MacBook Air running fully-patched version of Leopard Operating System has been hacked in less than two minutes by security researcher Charlie Miller using a flaw in Safari at CanSecWest hacking security conference being held in Vancouver. The conference pitted hackers against three laptops running Vista Ultimate SP1, Leopard OS X 10.5.2 and Ubuntu 7.10 to discover which is the most vulnerable.

Miller used a technique similar to a phishing attack, which involved clicking a link to a website containing a malicious code, which allowed him to remotely access the MacBook Air running Leopard in less than two minutes. Miller, who has made a name for himself after hacking the iPhone gets to keep the MacBook Air and a £5,000 prize from Tipping Point, the contest sponsor who notified Apple of the flaw.

As of posting time, Vista and Ubuntu continue to stand firm and have yet to be compromised.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The Grandstream GXE502x is a SIP based IP PBX which offers an integrated solution for unified voice, data, fax and video communications for SMBs.  It supports many features like a “SIP Server” that supports up to 100 extensions and more than 50 simultaneous calls, it can also act as a data router with dual 10/100 MBps LAN ports and integrated PoE (802.3af), 4 or 8-port FXO ports, 2 FXS ports, SIP trunking accounts, fax server that automatically converts incoming faxes into PDF files for email delivery or secure storage, unified messaging for voice mail (up to 120 hours), fax mail (up to 10,000 fax pages), and video mail (up to 4 hours), session border controller for automated NAT traversal, and up to 4 conference bridges that allows up to 20 concurrent participants.

The GXE502x also offers many advanced features including voicemail-to-email, fax-to-email, video-mail-to-email, print-to-fax, auto-attendant that allows virtually unlimited customizable interactive voice applications, call queues, hunt/ring groups, call transfer/forward/park/retrieve, personalized music-on-hold, paging & broadcasting, dial plan, dynamic DNS, SRTP, TLS, peer systems, Audio-In & Audio-Out port and a USB port. The GXE502x supports most of the popular voice/video codec including G.711 a/u-law, G.726, G.723.1, G.729A/B/E, iLBC, T.38 fax relay, carrier grade G.168 line echo canceller with 128-ms tail length, H.264 baseline, H.263/H.263+.Furthermore, the GXE502x has a call center support with support for skills-based routing and busy level features. The most important thing about the GXE502x is its price which is under $550.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Intel has introduced two new quad-core Xeon CPUs, they are low-voltage 45 nanometer (nm) processors for servers and workstations that run at 50 watts, or just 12.5 watts per core and frequencies as high as 2.50 GigaHertz (GHz).

The new Xeon L5420 runs at 2.5GHz, and the L5410 runs at 2.33GHz, both feature a 12MB cache and a front side bus of 1333MHz. The two new Xeons are expected to compete with AMD’s Opteron Processors.

“Using Intel’s hafnium-infused high-k metal gate transistors has allowed our quad-core 45nm low-voltage server chips to attain new heights in power-efficient performance,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Server Platforms Group. “These chips deliver the speed needed while using meager amounts of energy.”

The Intel Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor L5420 2.50GHz 1333MHz 50W is priced at $380 while the Intel Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor L5410 2.33GHz 1333MHz 50W is priced at $320.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Microsoft Response Point is an advanced phone system from Microsoft designed to be used in PABX systems targeting small businesses with less than 50 employees. Response Point is VoIP-based, and uses the SIP protocol, it also supports voicemail and multi-party calling, in addition to regular VoIP calls.

Microsoft announced the Response Point Service Pack 1 (SP1) which adds SIP trunking support for the Response Point phone system. The Response Point SP1 will be released this summer and can be downloaded for free.

“Small businesses rely heavily on the phone to communicate with customers and want a solution that allows them to reliably reach as many customers as possible at a low cost,” said Xuedong Huang, general manager for Response Point at Microsoft. “Response Point SP1 will make it easy to transition from traditional analog service to the promise of digital voice services.”

Response Point SP1 will enable small businesses to easily add VoIP services to their existing phone service without needing telephony expertise. Response Point SP1 also supports Direct Inward Dialing (DID) numbers. A small business can configure Response Point to route known inbound callers directly to a particular extension or pool of extensions to ensure that someone is available to receive calls from important customers.

Response Point hardware vendors Aastra Technologies Ltd., D-Link Corp. and Quanta Computer Inc. will ship Response Point phone systems pre-loaded with SP1 this summer.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Fujitsu has announced their new MHZ2 BJ series of 2.5″ hard disk drives that feature a rotational speed of 7200 RPM, capacities up to 320 GB, 1.9-watt power consumption for both read and write operations and a trasfer rate of up to 300MB per second.

MHZ2 BJ drives can be connected to the computer via a Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s interface. The new MHZ2 BJ series is designed for use in high-performance PCs, such as high-end notebook computers and compact desktops.

Popularity: 2% [?]