Hasta La Gadget!

Remember the good old days when a gigabyte was considered a lot of space? Improvements in hard disk technology have allowed the humble magnetic drive to reach the dizzying heights of multiple terabytes of storage, but Cisco foresees a future that’s a few orders of magnitude more impressive. Pinpointing 2015 as the commencement of what it calls the zettabyte era, the company has put together a handy infographic to show us just how much data can be fit into one: you can alternatively think of it as the equivalent of 250 billion DVDs, 36 million years of HD video, or the volume of the Great Wall of China if you allow an 11oz cup of coffee to represent a gigabyte of data. So “zetta” must be Greek for one hell of a lot, but what Cisco expects is that we’ll be pushing that much information around the web each year by 2015. Any bets on how many exabytes of it will be to stream videos of cats diving into cardboard boxes?

Visualized: a zettabyte originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’d think that the recent spate of high-profile cyberattacks would’ve deterred the healthcare industry from sending patient records to the cloud — but you’d be wrong. Beginning next month, all data on patients at London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital will be stored in a centralized database, accessible from any computer, smartphone or tablet. Under the National Health Service’s pilot program, known as E-Health Cloud, patients will be able to decide which doctors, nurses or family members can view their records, allowing them to easily share their data with other specialists. Flexiant, the Scottish software company that developed the platform, hopes to eventually expand it to other treatment phases, including assisted living, and insists that its system will help the NHS save money in the long-term. Security, however, will likely prove critical to the program’s success. Users will have to pass multiple ID checkpoints to access the database, but privacy-wary Londoners might demand protection a bit more robust than an automated bouncer. You won’t need to adhere to a dress code to view the full PR, available after the break.

Continue reading London’s E-Health Cloud program will send patient records to the stratosphere next month

London’s E-Health Cloud program will send patient records to the stratosphere next month originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Jun 2011 10:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yesterday’s revelation that Verizon may soon be enforcing usage-based data plans came as a slap in the face to many, but there may be at least one speck of sunlight shining through the dark clouds above. Screenshots appeared today, purportedly from employee communications, that would go a long way toward assuaging our worst nightmares: Verizon is indeed planning to mirror AT&T’s policy of letting current customers hang onto their grandfathered data plans — even when renewing contracts. It’s probably best to keep your fingers crossed, but we understand if your hands are busy clutching those old plans as if your life depended on it.

Verizon’s tiered data plans won’t affect grandfathered customers after all? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 18:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Let’s bid a bitter welcome to Sega, the latest entrant to the newly founded club of hacked online communities. Sega Pass, the company’s web portal, suffered a breach of its defenses on Thursday, which has now been identified to have affected a whopping 1.29 million users. Usernames, real names, birth dates, passwords, email addresses, pretty much everything has been snatched up by the malicious data thieves, with the important exception of credit / debit card numbers. We’d still advise anyone affected to keep a watchful eye on his or her banking transactions — immediately after changing that compromised password, of course. In the meantime, Sega’s keeping the Pass service offline while it rectifies the vulnerability; it’ll be able to call on an unexpected ally in its search for the perpetrators in the form of LulzSec, a hacker group that boasted proudly about infiltrating Sony’s network, but which has much more benevolent intentions with respect to Sega. What a topsy-turvy world we live in!

Sega’s online Pass hacked, 1.3 million user passwords stolen originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Jun 2011 05:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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That cute little bugger above certainly looks innocent enough, but it might have been spreading some pretty detailed gossip behind your back. Leaf-driver Casey Halverson was playing around with the RSS reader in his Carwings system when he discovered that it wasn’t just collecting feeds from RSS servers, it was also telling those servers his car’s current location, speed, heading and even the destination he’d set in the sat nav. Strangely, Halverson’s undercover tattletale appears to have halted its indiscretions after he posted the discovery on his blog, but we’re surmising there’s still hundreds of server logs up and down the country that prove it really happened, not to mention his video after the break. Cue Rockwell, fade to black.

Continue reading Don’t tell us where you’re going, Nissan Leaf driver, we already know (video)

Don’t tell us where you’re going, Nissan Leaf driver, we already know (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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