If you've been considering swapping out some of your old HDDs to SSDs, now is a great time to do so, thanks to the convergence of two factors. First is the fact that the manufacturers of SSDs have been making strides in terms of increasing the capacity of the drives they're offering. They are doing this while simultaneously offering other enhancements that reduce data duplication, making their products faster and more efficient than their HDD counterparts. Second is the fact that there is … Read more
SSD Drive Makers Adding Features To Reduce Duplicate Data
Big changes are in the works in the SSD-based storage ecosystem. It includes three different vendors all making similar announcements regarding designs to help companies that rely on SSD-based storage systems to reduce duplication and control data creep. It's not hard to see why they're scrambling. Although the price of SSD-based storage systems are coming down, it's a slow process. Currently, a gigabyte's worth of SSD storage costs about forty cents, versus about five cents per gigabyte of … Read more
Bank Employee Steals Info On Over A Million Customers
Atlanta-based SunTrust Bank is the 12th largest bank in the US. They have a major problem, and so do roughly a million and a half of its customers. According to CEO William Rogers, an unidentified employee of the firm printed a vast amount of private customer information, including their names, addresses, phone numbers and account balance information. Rogers stressed that social security numbers, account numbers, driver's license numbers, user IDs, and passwords were not exposed. In a … Read more
Researchers Find Major Vulnerabilities In Banking Apps
Do you do your banking online? If so, there's bad news in the form of a report recently released by the security firm "Positive Technologies." The company tested a variety of websites using a proprietary tool they developed in-house, which scans websites for security flaws. While flaws were found across a wide range of industries, literally every banking site Positive Technologies tested was found to have serious security flaws. The particulars varied from one bank to the next, but the … Read more
No Spectre Fix For Certain Intel Processors
The bad news just doesn't seem to stop where Intel and the Speectre vulnerability are concerned. The latest bit of news comes directly from Intel, as the company admits that it's just not possible to address the Spectre vulnerability in some of its older hardware. This means that nine families of chips and more than 230 models of computers (mostly manufactured between 2007 and 2011) will remain vulnerable to Spectre forever. The company has stopped Spectre mitigation development on the … Read more
Apple Releases Major iPhone and iOS Device Update 11.3
There's a lot to talk about in Apple's latest update to iOS. Version 11.3 boasts some significant changes and is well worth getting. We'll go over the highlights below. Battery management is the biggest and most significant change. Last year, the company found itself in hot water when they began quietly throttling older phones and slowing down their performance because older phones have batteries that begin to degrade. In the absence of throttling, it's entirely possible that a user's … Read more
New Chips Support Increased Network Speeds To 400Gbps
Marvell Semiconductor has a new product out, and it's a game changer. Their new "Alaska" chip (the Alaska C 88x7120) is the first on the market to support the new 802.3 standard. The 802.3cd is on tap to eventually replace current Ethernet ports running at 25Gbps to 100Gbps with ports that will run at 50Gbps, 200 Gbps, and 400 Gbps. The future is now. Granted, the Alaska chips aren't for sale just yet, but they are sampling to customers ("Sampling" in the chip world is akin to beta … Read more
Traditional Hard Drive Technology Is Evolving
Rumors of the death of HDD technology have been greatly exaggerated. The advancement of solid state technology and its increasing rate of adoption has been largely responsible for this, but don't count old school HDDs out just yet. They still have many important advantages, and recent breakthroughs should add further to the longevity of the tech. Right now, the biggest advantage that HDDs have over their solid-state counterparts is sheer size. While it would be prohibitively expensive to … Read more
40 Percent Of All Login Attempts Are From Bots
Here's a statistic that is as disturbing as it is frustrating. According to the latest "State of the Internet/Security" report for the fourth quarter of 2017, as published by Akamai, bot-traffic accounts for a staggering 43 percent of all login attempts. As bad as that figure is on its face, it's far worse for companies in the hospitality industry, where the figure is an almost unbelievable 82 percent. The reason? Hackers are increasingly using bots to perform "credential stuffing" … Read more
Hard Drives May Double In Speed With New Technology
What's an HDD manufacturer to do when faced with competition by faster, more efficient SSD drives? Go big, and go faster. At least that's the strategy that both Seagate and Western Digital are adopting. SSDs tend to get prohibitively expensive as their size crosses the 1TB threshold, which creates an opportunity for HDD manufacturers. Seagate is currently selling drives with an impressive 14TB of capacity, and has plans on the drawing board to introduce a 40TB drive by 2023, with Western … Read more
