Cell Phone Market
By Admin | July 9, 2007
Mobile telephone maker Sony Ericsson on Thursday reported increased net profits and sales of handsets for second quarter 2007 compared with the corresponding business period in 2006. The joint venture between Japan’s Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Sweden’s Ericsson (Nasdaq: ERICY) said net income for the quarter was 220 million euros (US$300 million), up from 143 million euros ($197 million) for the second quarter 2006.
Group turnover increased 37 percent year-on-year to 3.11 billion euros ($4.28 billion). Sony Ericsson said it sold 24.9 million handsets during second quarter 2007, compared to 15.7 million units in the corresponding business period 2006.
In the first quarter 2007 it sold 21.8 million units. The group said that the average selling price of its mobile devices in the second quarter 2007 was 125 euros ($172), down from 134 euros ($185) in the first quarter 2007 and 145 euros ($200)in the second quarter 2006.
The lower average selling price was “in line with Sony Ericsson expectations,” the group said, noting the increase in its sales of low and mid-tier priced phones in Latin America, Western Europe as well as Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa.
“Sony Ericsson has continued to capture market share in a more competitive market,” Sony Ericsson chief executive Miles Flint said in a statement. Sony Ericsson estimated that its share of the global handset market in the second quarter was 9 percent.
In its outlook, the group said it estimated that global handset sales in 2007 would top 1.1 billion units. The group recently unveiled plans to establish a research and development unit in Chennai, India, later this year. Sony Ericsson was formed in October 2001 in an effort to challenge industry leaders Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Motorola With Apple’s iPhone release things are bound to heat up.
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Zune Heads Toward One Million Units
By Admin | June 5, 2007
Microsoft received a lot of buzz this week after reports broke the software giant had shipped its 1 millionth Zune — putting it ahead of a company goal set shortly after it launched its MP3 player in November. However, those reports apparently were jumping the gun.
Robbie Bach, the president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying the device had already passed the 1 million milestone. However, a podcast of the interview posted on the newspaper’s Web site contradicts that statement, suggesting only that Microsoft is on schedule to meet its goal of 1 million Zune sales by June 30, the end of the fiscal year.
Microsoft spokesperson Kristin Oak confirmed the mistake, telling TechNewsWorld that Bach had been misquoted and that the company has not made any announcements regarding overall sales numbers. However, Microsoft is on target to reach its initial goals, she maintained.
Bach was reported in the newspaper as saying, “We’re still about nine months into having Zune in the marketplace. We’re very pleased with the progress. We’ve sold a little over a million Zunes.”
However, a quick listen to the podcast reveals that he said “When we finish our fiscal year in June, we’ll have sold a little over a million Zunes. So, we feel very good about that.”
While the editorial slip might not seem like a very big deal, the mistake changes the outlook for the device from better than expected sales to the same estimates offered in November, said Zippy Aima, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan .
While conceding that Zune sales didn’t have an “overwhelming start,” Microsoft executive Robbie Bach said he was “very pleased” with the music player’s progress.
Although the Zune has been on the shelves for about nine months, Microsoft has picked up 10 percent market share in the hard disk based music player category, he added. Even without the “better than expected” sales, Microsoft is ahead of Apple’s ubiquitous iPod in sales compared to the same nine month time frame when it was launched six years ago.
The iPod took 14 months to reach 600,000 sold units, although the MP3 player market was still developing. In fact, Aima points out, since Zune debuted, Apple has sold about 25 million iPods, and in April, the company announced it sold its 100 millionth iPod. From what I have heard on the street this product is quite popular but I think iPod will keep ahead of the pack with its’ innovation.
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AMD’s New Chip
By Admin | May 9, 2007
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has unveiled plans to replace its Athlon processor line with a new quad-core chip for desktop PCs in an effort to keep pace with chief rival Intel.
AMD will launch its quad-core desktop processors under the name “Phenom” later this year, shortly after the company unveils its quad-core Opteron processor, dubbed “Barcelona,” for servers.
The Phenom brand will be the name for AMD’s performance chips moving forward, according to the company. The Athlon 64 X2 brand will remain for mainstream chips, and Sempron will continue to bring up the rear. In addition to the new line of quad-core products designed to compete with Intel’s Xeon processors, AMD unveiled a new platform that will offer eight-core technology for gaming and PC enthusiasts, dubbed “FASN8″ (pronounced “fascinate”).
The new octo-core platform includes two quad-core Phenom processors — the DirectX 10 ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT and an upcoming chipset expected to launch in the second half of 2007 — according to the company. Intel expects the introduction of the AMD Phenom processor line to increase its presence in the enthusiast community, said Bob Brewer, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD’s desktop division.
FASN8 marks AMD’s first attempt at delivering its own PC platforms since it bought ATI, an independent producer of graphics processors, in October. The platform will contain two quad-core Phenom processors, an ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card and a new chip set. It is also expected to launch later this year.
Geared for desktop computers and mobile platforms, the new series of graphics processors squarely positions AMD to appeal to a wider range of users including gamers, creative professionals and PC enthusiasts.
“Their high-performance part is designed to be faster — with more caches and a higher benchmark,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld. “The important thing for AMD is putting lot of effort in what is a high-margin segment.”
The new platform also illustrates AMD’s commitment to developing a single solution with increased levels of integration to boost real-world performance, according to Enderle.
AMD is attempting to reverse a trend and shift the market to focus competition on something other than price, suggested Enderle. In recent years, AMD has moved to stabilize its selling prices. I have personally been using AMD chips for quite a few years and have been very happy.
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Spying on Us
By Admin | April 9, 2007
There may be few things as disturbing to Internet users as the thought of someone spying on them and capturing their every keystroke. Unfortunately, this has been happening more frequently as the use of keyloggers, phishing and spoofing grows. In 2006, Keylogging was the fastest-growing type of malware in what Kaspersky Lab calls the “TrojWare” category — and that trend is expected to carry on through 2007, according to Senior Technical Consultant Shane Coursen.
Programs classified by Kaspersky Lab as Trojan-PSWs — the majority of which are intended to steal user account information from online gamers — increased at a 125 percent rate, Kaspersky Lab research analysts wrote in “Malware Evolution 2006: Executive Summary,” a recent report available at Kaspersky’s Viruslist.com Web site.
Keylogging has been growing at a rapid clip recently, an unhealthy trend for computer and network users, recounted Jens Hinrichsen, product marketing manager for the Consumer Solutions Business Unit of RSA, the security solutions division of EMC (NYSE: EMC) .
Here are some stats that put the problem in perspective:
In 2006, Sophos saw more than 41,000 new malware threats;
41 percent of those threats contained spyware characteristics;
Forty-two percent were “downloaders,” designed to turn off the infected PC’s security before downloading crimeware;
Recent RSA analysis of a single Gozi/BankSniff variant showed 30,000 infected users in a single month; and
The prices of crimeware in the digital underworld are also falling, indicating a maturing of the market for such malicious code.
Not All Fun and Games
“Keyloggers, phishing and social engineering are currently the main methods being used in cyberfraud,” according to Kaspersky Lab’s “Computers, Networks and Theft” report.
“Users who are aware of security issues can easily protect themselves against phishing by ignoring phishing e-mails and by not entering any personal information on suspicious Web sites. It is more difficult, however, for users to combat keyloggers; the only possible method is to use an appropriate security solution, as it’s usually impossible for a user to tell that a keylogger has been installed on his/her machine,” Kaspersky’s Coursen said..
“Keyloggers and password-stealing Trojans are among the most significant threat type that exists today. The repair bill goes far beyond simply cleaning the malware from the computer. Keyloggers do their damage by operating discreetly in the background, over time collecting our most confidential information, passing it back to the attacker,” Coursen added.
Keylogging can be better understood by looking at the phenomenon from three different perspectives: Geographical, the impact of a single attack, and financial institution-specific repercussions, according to Hinrichsen.
“From a geographical perspective, certain geographies are already almost exclusively hit by financial Trojans — keyloggers being a subtype therein, with the more rare and sophisticated subclassification being ‘active, session-hijacking’ trojans that take over an account once a user has logged off. For example, in Germany over 90 percent of online banking fraud stems from Trojans,” he explained.
In terms of the impact of a single attack, it is the hardiness, stealth and longevity of keyloggers that make them particularly dangerous, he continued.
To understand how big a threat Trojans are, let’s look at a phishing attack and compare it to a Trojan.
“A phishing attack usually lives between five hours if you are a customer of the RSA FraudAction antiphishing service, to 105 hours — the APWG average. We recently analyzed the logs of a Trojan called Gozi/Banksniff. It was alive for five months before being taken down; it went undetected by [all] major antivirus vendors for the entirety of that period, and it compromised 30,000 new computers on average every month. This compares to several dozen credentials that a typical phishing attack compromises.”
These attributes and the fact that financial institutions have no control over customers’ computers make them a severe threat for banks, brokerages and other financial services businesses, he added.
“Unlike a phishing attack that cannot be hidden — someone will eventually report it — or a brute force attack — someone will eventually go over the logs and see it — Trojans can remain undetected for months, causing financial institutions unattributable fraud losses and general loss of confidence in the online channel,” Hinrichsen said.
Legitimate Uses
Keylogging software is commonly and often legitimately used,” Nikolay Grebennikov, deputy director of Kaspersky Lab’s R&D department, noted.
“Legitimate programs may have a keylogging function which can be used to call certain program functions using hotkeys, or to toggle between keyboard layouts (e.g., Keyboard Ninja). There is a lot of legitimate software which is designed to allow administrators to track what employees do throughout the day, or to allow users to track the activity of third parties on their computers,” he wrote.
“Most modern keyloggers are considered to be legitimate software or hardware and are sold on the open market. However, there is an ethical boundary between justified monitoring and monitoring for the purpose of stealing confidential user information — a boundary marked by a very fine line,” he added.
There is a long list of situations cited by developers and vendors where it is both legal and appropriate to use keyloggers, according to Grebennikov.
These include parental control of children’s Internet usage; jealous spouses or partners tracking the activity of their significant others to catch “virtual cheating”; organizations tracking the use of keywords and phrases associated with proprietary commercial information, as well as computers for non-work-related purposes or the use of workstations after hours; and for law enforcement purposes to analyze and track incidents linked to personal computer use.
In a recent report entitled, “Keyloggers: How they work and how to detect them,” Kaspersky’s Grebennikov reported that keyloggers — used together with phishing and social engineering methods — have become one of the most commonly used methods of cyberfraud.
“Interestingly, keyloggers present no threat to the system itself, but pose a serious threat to users, resulting in stolen PIN codes, account numbers, passwords, e-mail accounts — and ultimately, stolen funds. In fact, researchers predict the total losses in America alone to be an estimated US$24.3 million,” he wrote.
As keyloggers, which come in both software and hardware forms, are the most comprehensive and reliable tool for tracking electronic information, they are the means by which most financial cybercrimes are committed, according to Kaspersky.
The malware literature is filled with examples of how cybercriminals make illegal use of keyloggers to gain access and pilfer bank, brokerage and credit card accounts.
“The main idea behind keyloggers is to get in between any two links in the chain of events between when a key is pressed and when information about that keystroke is displayed on the monitor,” Grebennikov explained.
“Today, keyloggers are mainly used to steal user data relating to various online payment systems, and virus writers are constantly writing new keylogger Trojans for this very purpose,” ESET’s Abrams said, adding he was not sure whether or not the keylogging threat has grown.
“I don’t think we know how widespread the problem has been, but we do know that modern bots and other Trojans often will incorporate logging routines. The discovery of how pervasively successful phishing attacks can be has obviated the need for loggers. A simple Web site will effectively log the information the users have been duped into providing.”
Once a cybercriminal obtains confidential user data, he or she can easily transfer money from users’ financial accounts or access users’ online gaming accounts. “Unfortunately, access to confidential data can sometimes have consequences which are far more serious than an individual’s loss of a few dollars,” Abrams noted.
In addition to being used to perpetrate online fraud and ID theft, “Keyloggers can be used as tools in both industrial and political espionage, accessing data which may include proprietary commercial information and classified government material which could compromise the security of commercial and state-owned organizations (for example, by stealing private encryption keys),” according to the Kaspersky Lab report.
There has been an increase in the number of keylogger files that have been disguised to hide from antivirus and other protective types of software. This new tech way of spying is very unsettling and I myself was personally burned by it.
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Hitting the Wall
By Admin | March 21, 2007
Recently makers of memory chips are looking ahead to a day, not too far off, when technology based on silicon bumps up against the laws of physics and memory can’t be made any smaller, with implications for gadgets like MP3 players and digital cameras.”You get in to the 25-nanometer regime and there may need to be a new structure for nonvolatile memory,” Mike Splinter, chief executive of Applied Materials Inc. the world’s biggest supplier of tools for making microchips.
“I’m quite nervous about this because 25 nanometers is not that far away, and if you have to change a process in a couple generations, then that is really challenging,” Splinter told Reuters in a recent interview.
That would slow the development of things like digital music players and cameras, for which current flash memory — used to store music and images — will not suffice beyond the next couple of years. What will happen then?
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Welcome to Quad-Cores
By Admin | March 15, 2007
Thank you for visiting us, we will feature the most current news, reviews and information on everything quad core. Stop by often and please participate in our community through the commenting system.
Topics: Quad Core Technology, Site News, Hot Quad Core News, AMD Quad Core, Intel Quad Core, Future Quad Core | 1 Comment »