We've been hearing about the eventual shift to solid state storage for years, but now it really seems to be happening. Soon we won't have hard drives in our lap tops; we'll use chips like the ones we use in our cameras for storage. The math is pretty clear: Flash memory like the kind need to create solid state storage devices (SSD's) is coming down in price (because of Moores's Law) at a rate of 60% per year. A Gigabyte of SSD costs between $2 and $3.50 today. A Gigabyte of hard drive costs 38¢ today. In two or three years the cost of the SSD will be less than the hard drive of the same capacity. The fun is that SSD's will deliver speed improvements of that could immediately double or even triple the speed of internal data storage; this will change a lot of things. You lap top will be lighter, faster, and much more rugged... it will also get thinner. It's all good!

As solid-state disk (SSD) technology closes in on hard disk drive (HDD) capacity and price, experts say it may not be long before spinning disks are a thing of the past and a computer's storage resides in flash memory on the motherboard.

By making the drive part of a system's core architecture -- instead of a peripheral device -- data I/O performance could initially double, quadruple or more, according to Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at market research firm In-Stat.

"Instead of using a SATA interface, let's break that and instead of making it look like a disk drive, let's make it look like part of the memory hierarchy," McGregor said. "Obviously, if you break down that interface, you get more performance."

Read the whole article in ComputerWorld

It's been nearly two months since the Downadup worm hit the streets and the number of infected computers is growing rapidly. While there is no way of knowing for sure, some members of the security community are claiming that 9 million computers have been compromised. This is definitely a botnet ploy but no one seems to know what the botnet is for. Once again, this threat only applies to Windows computers, but it infects virtually ALL Windows computers, and it does so by spreading via a wide variety of mechanisms. This is a very nasty threat that should be a concern to all Windows users and to all system administrators.

Downadup is downright nasty. And that's even before it does much more than just spread.

But as analysts argue about how the compromised computers will be used -- to build a massive, new botnet, perhaps -- or how much information hackers will steal from infected machines, users like you have a more immediate concern: "How do I keep my PC from joining the ranks of the hacked?"

That's a simple question. Unfortunately, because of this worm's flexibility, the answers aren't.

What's the worm again? Thanks to the lack of an industry-wide labeling system, the worm goes by more than one name. Some companies dub it "Downadup," others call it "Conficker."

No matter the name, it's the same threat.

Read the whole story at ComputerWorld

Showing their intense awareness of the need to control and leverage the internet presence of the President and the White House, the Obama team took control of Whitehouse.gov within seconds of the swearing in ceremony. Whitehouse.gov will provide information for Americans who are hungry for information about the new administration's plans. And as we might expect, the White House site is already the theme of a multitude of malicious pretender web sites that will take visitors to virtual replicas of the official site where they will be quickly infected with malware.

Obama Quickly Takes Over White House Site

President Barack Obama's transition team wasted little time taking over the White House Web site, switching over from former President Bush's site within seconds of Obama's swearing in. The first post to the site was from Macon Phillips, the director of New Media for the White House, who wrote, "Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov."

Read the whole article at Eweek.com

Visit the official White House web site

Malicious Sites with Fake Obama News Infect Users with Malware

Spammers are luring victims to a malicious site with false reports by President-elect Barack Obama. The spam is being sent out by the Waledac botnet, which security researchers say is a reincarnation of the infamous Storm botnet.
It should come as little surprise that spammers are taking advantage of interest in Barack Obama, who is slated to be officially sworn in as the United State's 44th president today.

In the past few days, security vendors have reported spam with links to malicious Web sites. Clicking on the link will take users to a virtual replica of Obama's official site, except this one tries to infect visitors with variants of the Waledac Trojan.

Read the whole article at Eweek

This is comforting, now we learn that the "Downadup" worm is a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. The people who created this disaster-waiting-to-happen are expert programmers with a great deal of experience writing malware. We can see the detail of their skill in the code they have turned loose on the web, but we still don't know what this thing is supposed to do. And apparently these criminals are looking over their shoulders for other bad guys who would like to steal their wonderful new botnet.

The worm that has infected millions of Windows PCs is a "very well-engineered" piece of malware, according to one security expert. But researchers still have no clear idea what the hackers plan to do with the collection of computers they've compromised with "Downadup."

"This is a very well-engineered piece of software," said Alfred Huger, vice president of development at Symantec Corp.'s security response group. "It's very well thought out. Whoever wrote it, it's not their first time writing malware. It looks as if the author has had a great deal of experience writing software, and is fully versed in writing network-level code."

Read more at Computerworld

Clients generally have an abysmal understanding of what constitutes "usable art" for their various graphic design projects (like web sites and printed brochures). Most people tend to think of digital versions of logos, photos, drawings, and illustrations as an undifferentiated category of 'visual stuff' without a great deal of thought about how different kinds of digital images can be functionally different from each other, or how those differences apply to their particular graphic design projects.

"Why can't we use a logo from my web site on my business card? How can a single graphic look great on the web, and look completely terrible on a printed page? What's going on here? Clients are understandably mystified by things like this.

Designers, on the other hand, know full well that their success in bringing a project to completion will depend critically on their ability to sort through the various image type and quality issues and secure the right digital image type, with sufficient digital resolution, for each application. The catch is that clients are often the gatekeepers to the required image assets, so, for designers, educating clients about fundamental image quality issues will often be a prerequisite to acquiring the 'best' art for the job.

Here's a great little video that explores, in layman's terms, the difference between Pixels and Vectors. You've probably heard of pixels, but what are vectors? This is a major area of public misunderstanding about digital graphics. The bottom line: understanding the difference between Pixels and Vectors will make conversations with your designer a lot easier, and it could easily save you time and money on your next graphic design project.

See the video at MacMerc.com

New York Times regular contributor David Pogue had mixed feelings about the utility of Twitter, until he tried a little experiment. In the middle of a live presentation he was giving at a conference on Web 2.0 in Las Vegas this week, he decided to test Twitter, on the big screen at the front of the ballroom, by asking for some help from his twittering followers. The results are hilarious and fascinating. Twitter is turning out to be a marvelous way to communicate, and not at all as silly and trivial as its name suggests.

Read the whole story at the New York Times