Hasta La Gadget!

Yeah, we know that the Prez was once seen rocking a Verizon-branded BlackBerry 8830, but just bend your mind a bit and bear with us. Shortly after lighting up Wall Street with an exceedingly excellent quarterly earnings report, AT&T has announced an Encrypted Mobile Voice service that’ll hit later in the year. Assuming Obama actually does own an AT&T-branded ‘Berry, he’ll soon be able to enjoy what AT&T calls “the first mobile-to-mobile voice encryption solution using two-factor authentication offered by a US operator.” Said service is expected to provide a higher level of security for calls across the AT&T wireless network, and naturally, it’ll be shopped to government agencies, law enforcement organizations, financial services institutions and international businesses, all of which will pay far too much for what’s likely a false sense of security. We mean, haven’t these guys ever seen 24?

AT&T Encrypted Mobile Voice to bring extra security to Obama’s BlackBerry calls originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink GSMA  |  Fierce Mobile IT  | Email this | Comments

Cisco announced this afternoon that in 2011 it will be launching an Android-based tablet, named the Cius, aimed squarely at the business market.

Cisco has always been an enterprise-focused company, and the Cius is its shot at bringing businesses on board the tablet bandwagon. Video conferencing, the product which Cisco is perhaps best known for, is front and center both literally and figuratively – there’s a 720p-capable cameras on the front of the Cius, in addition to the 5 megapixel camera on the back.

In an effort to get the Cius into briefcases and suitcases all over the world, the 7-inch device weighs only 1.15 pounds. The Cius will ship with 3G capability, WiFi, eight-hour battery life, HD audio and video out, and tight integration with all of Cisco’s other business applications as well as the huge Android market.

There’s no word yet on what the device will cost, but it promises to make Android a little more business-friendly and to make getting things done on the road a little easier . Even if it won’t have all the great entertainment of the iPad, maybe that’s a good thing for business users.

(Photo: Courtesy Cisco)

HP isn’t being shy about spending cash and taking big steps to reinvent itself lately: it just spent $1.2b on Palm in order to strengthen its consumer device portfolio, and now it’s announcing another billion-dollar outlay designed to streamline its enterprise services business and fully consolidate its $12.5b acquisition of EDS. Part of the process will involve laying off some 9,000 workers over several years as HP moves to automate more and more of its data centers and integrate more of EDS, but the company is planning to add some 6,000 jobs in different areas over the same period of time, so the hurt isn’t too bad. Taken together with the Palm acquisition, this means that both HP’s enterprise and consumer divisions will undergo some radical changes in the next few months — we’ll see how things pan out.

HP cutting 9,000 jobs during billion dollar enterprise services restructuring originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Wall Street Journal  | Email this | Comments

if you feel like going through the process of typing in your PIN every time you unlock your iPhone is worth it thanks to the unconquerable security it implies, you might want to read this report from Bernd Marienfeldt about the chosen one’s security model. Yes, a PIN will keep casual users from picking up your phone and making a call with it, or firing off an e-mail to your co-workers saying that you’re quitting and becoming an exotic dancer, but it won’t keep someone from accessing all your data. Bernd and fellow security guru Jim Herbeck have discovered that plugging even a fully up-to-date, non-jailbroken iPhone 3GS into a computer running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx allows nearly full read access to the phone’s storage — even when it’s locked. The belief is that they’re just a buffer overflow away from full write access as well, which would surely open the door to making calls. Bernd believes the iPhone’s lack of data encryption for content is a real problem, and also cites the inability to digitally sign e-mails as reasons why the iPhone is still not ready for prime time in the enterprise.

[Thanks, Amit]

iPhone vulnerability leaves your data wide open, even when using a PIN originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 May 2010 06:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Bernd Marienfeldt  | Email this | Comments

We’ve been covering the progression of SandForce for over a year now, creator of smart SSD processors that extend the life of flash storage by better spreading writes across them, boosting performance and reliability along the way. This, according to the company, makes them reliable enough for enterprise use, and IBM has added its vote of support, configuring a 9189 Power 780 server with 56 177GB SSDs (10.5TB in all) sitting behind SandForce’s SF-1500 processor. That combination, when running the TPC-C benchmark, delivered a performance of 150,000 transactions per minute per CPU core. That’s 50 percent higher (per-core) than other entries in the TPC-C benchmark — and considerably cheaper, too. IBM’s configuration is set to be available around October of this year, perhaps ushering in a new era of the platter-free enterprise.

SandForce makes SSDs cheaper, faster, more reliable — just how IBM likes it originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 May 2010 09:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink StorageReview.com, The Wall Street Journal  |  TPC-C Result Highlights  | Email this | Comments