Samsung has developed low cost SATAII SSD's. Specifically the SSD's Samsung has been sampling are 30% smaller than 2.5 inch SSD's, and are really cost effective. They come in low density sizes, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB and operate at a speed of 90MB/sec to 70MB/sec.

Read the full article at Engadet

This was on Digg before, however I got a screen capture of the entire page. I don't know why.

If you need a 24 core, 48G linux cluster then you might want to build a Helmer.

This is the story of Helmer. A linux cluster in a IKEA Helmer cabinet.

I was recently having issues with my phone not being able to use 3G, and I thought it might have been a firmware or possibly hardware issue. But after troubleshooting for some time, I found that it was in fact applications crashing or firmware bugs. Hearing more and more reports of network issues with 3G and iPhones, Wired Magazine decided to do a survey of 3G coverage across america.

Not too long after releasing and updated PwnageTool and Quickpwn, the iphone-dev.org team has released an update to QuickPwn.

We’ve had some issues with iPod touch devices and the latest version of PwnageTool for the Mac, in certain conditions incorrect permissions will be used and the keychain doesn’t save passwords. So hold on and wait for the next release, we’ll push out the updated version via Sparkle as soon as it is tested (it is being tested right now).

I haven't been keeping up with my submissions as of late so this one squeaked through. But the http://iphone-dev.org team has updated both their PwnageTool and QuickPwn Tool. There is still however no baseband unlock, just support for new jailbreaking of the new firmware.

Microsoft through the Sysinternals team has released Windows Desktops, which provides Mutiple Desktops within Windows XP and Windows Vista. Sysinternals created quite a few applications and utilities for the Windows Operating System that Microsoft evntually acquired them.

I was browsing through my mail spool on my machine, and I noticed that there were some messages in one of my accounts for a vBulletin forum. After further review, it was some bounce backs that had accumulated from users that didn't have a valid email address.

I then started to do some Google searches for a vBulletin module (vBulletin's search is horrendous and practically useless) and found this module.

That's right, hot off the blog presses QuickPwn has been updated by the iphone-dev.org team and now allows you to Jailbreak your iPhones 2.0.2 firmware. The new 2.0.2 firmware that was released on Monday supposedly fixes some "bugs", however the bugs aren't mentioned anywhere.

Here is the updated QuickPwn for Windows, wrapped by Poorlad’s GUI. It contains our new bundles for 2.0.2 and we’ve added support for version 2.0 devices which means you can QuickPwn and jailbreak the device if it is running 2.0, 2.0.1 or 2.0.2. Remember this is still beta software, so usual rules apply, no complaints ifanything goes wrong and use the tool at at your own risk! Download here! SHA1 = 8e1ed2ce9e7e473d38a9dc7824a384a9ac34d7d0

Read the full article at blog.iphone-dev.org
Download the new QuickPwn 1.2.0 with the new 2.0.2 bundle.

Thanks for another successful Jailbreak!

I just saw this article on Slashdot...

Slashdot | Apple's IPhone 3G Firmware Update Bombs

Yahoo posted the news article...

Apple's iPhone 3G Firmware Update Bombs (NewsFactor) by NewsFactor: Yahoo! Tech

Both articles comment on the 2.0.1 firmware. However if you read the original article, it speaks about the new firmware which is 2.0.2 and was released on the 18th.

NewsFactor Network | Apple Reportedly Plans Another Fix for the iPhone

Either way, I don't have problems with my phone aside from MobileChat crashing and other Applications as well.

If you bought the iPhone when it first came out, you had two choices for Instant Messaging. Twenty08's MobileChat and Alex Schaefer's ApolloIM. Twenty08 has now hired Alex Schaefer to work exclusively on MobileChat

twenty08 would like to formally welcome aboard…Alex Schaefer. Many of you may know him as the founder of the world’s first Native iPhone IM Application, ApolloIM.

ApolloIM was an amazing application and during it’s run, MobileChat and Apollo stood head to head and constantly battled to create the better app. (Friendly war of course!) The best part about it was that no one won! Only our respective users benefited from the friendly competition, and you can’t ask for anything better than that as far as I’m concerned.

Now with Alex working on our side, we believe that MobileChat will be able to rise up and regain its glory as the number one iPhone application that we all know it can be. He is a very talented developer (plus a great guy) who has already brought some great ideas to the table and we’re all very excited to see our new-found relationship grow.

Read the full article on Twenty08's site.
MobileChat's website

The first Google Android Phone has been approved by the FCC. The HTC dream will be the first Android phone.

Today, the news broke that the HTC Dream, the first handset to run Android (aka "the Google Phone") has been approved by the FCC. In the documents provided, it appears that we have now a release date for this highly anticipated phone: November 10th, 2008.

Another challenger appears!

Read the full article at readwriteweb.com

The iphone-dev.org has created a new means of Jail Breaking your iPhone that doesn't require the need to create a modified .ipsw and process a full restore through iTunes. Its called QuickPwn.

News is just out of a new way to jailbreak your iPhone, and this time the tool is specifically designed to work "quickly and easily, without requiring a full restore." Quickpwn has been released as a beta, intended to complement the main PwnageTool.

Intel's Atom processor and AMD's 64 2000+ were pitted against each other. And the results were for once in favor of AMD.

In our Munich lab’s duel of the energy-savers, the AMD Athlon 64 2000+ beats the Intel Atom 230 in energy consumption and processing power. Each of the systems was based on a desktop platform. The Achilles heel of the Intel system is its old system platform with the 945GC chipset, while AMD offers a more modern 780G platform. The energy-saving solution from AMD offers more possibilities: it has three times as many SATA ports, possesses better onboard graphics performance, and can also support two monitors. Unlike the Intel solution, an HD resolution (1920x1200) with high picture quality is possible through DVI/HDMI ports. And early information suggests that the AMD Athlon 64 2000+ should cost close to $90.

Read the full article at tomshardware.com

It has only been a few weeks and Apple has already released an updated firmwave for the iPhone. Could this mean Apple isn't going to sit on bugfixes, are more updates going to be released in the same short time span. A couple of weeks is really short, however a couple of months to improve some iPhone features, fix bugs or release new functionality is something that should be embraced.

Ad Bard is a free advertising community for FOSS oriented websites and advertisers. A snippet from their about page

The Ad Bard Network aims to foster a friendly and useful advertising community for FOSS oriented websites and advertisers. As a fellow Ad Bard, you will help to ensure that the advertisements in our network remain useful, relevant, and non-obnoxious. Ad Bard members earn 80% of the price-per-click each time an advertisement is clicked on your website. Our advertising community is entirely built with free and open source software, with all involved algorithms and schemas freely available for public scrutiny.

Definitely a neat and good way for FOSS websites to generate revenue aside from donations. Ad Bard Website

A well written guide on how to upgrade Drupal using SSH commands

This guide is meant to augment the official Upgrade guide. Please read the official upgrade steps in UPGRADE.txt as well as in the Drupal.org Dcoumentation thoroughly to ensure that you understand every aspect of the upgrade process. This guide is for more advanced users with SSH experience.

That's right, this isn't a joke.

The new drive will be very similar to the recently-released VelociRaptor, in that it’ll be a 2.5in drive with a custom 3.5in housing built around it. Details are incredibly light at this stage, given that the product is still in development, and we don’t even have a release timeframe at the moment.

However, our sources said that the drive will be ‘silent’ – that’s the last thing I would have expected from a drive with platters spinning at 20,000 RPM. Western Digital is apparently working on silencing the beast by improving the housing technology, which will now not just act as a heatsink, but also as a noise cancelling device. We’d also hope that the drive enclosure has some vibration dampening technology as well, because that’s also likely to be a problem given the high spindle speeds.

Now they just need push SATA 6.0Gbit/s onto motherboards

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA#SATA_6.0_Gbit.2Fs

Full artile at bit-tech.net

Just a heads up, if you do decide to enable OpenSSL so you can do encrypted MySQL replication. There are two bugs that will affect replication and the mysqldump command. They're as follows:

Bug #24148 regression tests hang with SSL enabled
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=24148
http://lists.mysql.com/commits/17286

Bug #27669 mysqldump: Got error: 2026: SSL connection error when trying to connect
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=27669
http://lists.mysql.com/commits/24329

This may cause lots of problems with MySQL and SSL Replication using OpenSSL.

Cheers!

This nifty little script allows you to monitor log files for instances of brute forcing as well as popular exploits that show up in your server logs files. Anyone that has many servers should check this out.

BFD (Brute Force Detector) Home Page

There is also a nice little write up of how to implement BFD without AFP and some extended rules.

BFD rules for Jag servers

If you're using Exim4 and PHP as a module or as a CGI with suexec. You may have noticed some issues with your mail. Specifically you would have noticed that either the "From:" header was using "nobody@machinename" or "user@machine name, its also possibly that you had an additional header called "Sender:".

There are two things you need to do to fix this. You first need to make sure that your "php.ini" has the following value "sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i". Which is the default, double check this variable as it might be set to something else.

AutoMySQLBackup is a shell script that allows daily, weekly and monthly backups of your local and remote MySQL Databases. It's meant to run on Linux/Unix through a cron job. Its highly configurable, and easy to setup as I will show you today!

First you will need to acquire the shell script and drop it on your server. You can download AutoMySQLBackup on their SourceForge Project Page

I woke up to a very big announcement today. I was browsing digg and found that MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems. You can read more about the acquisition on the MySQL blog of Kaj Arno about the acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems. My take, with Sun releasing Solaris into the Open Source realm, this is just another piece of software that they can put under their belt and package with Solaris. I have included some blurbs from Kaj Arno's blog below.

XCache is an opcode cacher for PHP developed by the Lighttpd team. The full description directly from http://xcache.lighttpd.net/

I always thought there was something really strange about the WHOIS searches done at Registrars. Specifically the searches would have to be done on their website, a normal "whois" lookup through Linux wouldn't show up registered the next day.

A story is developing regarding domain name registrar Network Solutions front running domains. According to multiple sources on DomainState.com, it appears that domains searched via NSI are being purchased by the registrar thereby preventing a registrant from purchasing it at any other registrar other than NSI. As an example, a random domain which DNN searches such as HowDoesThisDomainTasteTaste.com can be seen in this whois search to now be unavailable to register at other registrars but at NSI it can be purchased

Full article at domainnamenews.com

So lets say you have a server with a bunch of users and they all have sites and data and you don't want them to be able to see each others data. A lot of distributions aren't setup to stop users from wandering and reading files within other users directories.

A Goverment Employee used an On Call IT service to perform a "seven level" format on his hard drive that possibly contained federal evidence.

Scott Bloch runs the Office of Special Counsel, an agency charged with protecting government whistleblowers and enforcing a ban on federal employees engaging in partisan political activity.

You can find the list of 100 of the first domain names ever registered at http://www.thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com

Which has the full list, and what rolls in at number one? Well its SYMBOLICS.COM!

You can check out the full list here.

 

I noticed quite a few of my visitors are finding my article about

MySQL Thread Caching and a Busy Site

And looking for the http://www.ftatalk.com mirror.

Heres the mirror http://www.satfix.net most of the articles on http://www.ftatalk.com are located on this site so just load it up, register and go.

Daniel J. Bernstein has stated he is releasing his future and previous work under the public domain. You can watch the video of his announcement here.