Hardware

A researcher is advising drivers not to use a mobile app for General Motors Co's (GM.N) OnStar vehicle communications system, saying hackers can exploit a security flaw in the product to unlock cars and start engines remotely.

"White-hat" hacker Samy Kamkar posted a video on Thursday saying he had figured out a way to "locate, unlock and remote-start" vehicles by intercepting communications between the OnStar RemoteLink mobile app and the OnStar service.

The issue is simple enough: if we had started with NAND flash - instead of disks - in the late 1950s, would our storage devices and software stack look like they do today? No, of course not.

Over the last year, researchers have been teasing out the problems with making flash look like disks. While these problems are less of an issue for notebook and desktop users, they are a big problem for servers.

Fujitsu is introducing a liquid-cooled server solution that officials say will reducing cooling costs by 50 percent and increase data center density by up to five times for such scale-out environments as high-performance computing.

The company last week unveiled the Primergy CX400 M1 and its cluster nodes that make up the company's Cool-Central Liquid Cooling Solutions, which were developed in conjunction with Asetek, a company based in Denmark that makes liquid-cooling technologies for data centers, servers and PCs.

We're still writing up the results of last weekend's James Randi Educational Foundation audiophile Ethernet challenge, and we should have it finished soon. While that's in progress, we wanted to share some good old-fashioned cable porn with you all. We purchased two 1.5 meter AudioQuest Vodka cables, since you always want to have a spare for any kind of on-stage demonstration.

Raspberry Pi users that are in search of a high-capacity low-power consuming storage device for their Raspberry Pi B+, A+, and B+ v2 mini PC may be interested in the new PiDrive that has been created by Bud Griffin.

The PiDrive expansion card has been created to eliminate the need for external hard drives and additional cables, transforming the Raspberry Pi system into a truly portable large capacity storage option.

Although the A8 system-on-chip incorporated into Apple's latest iPod touch models are clocked at lower speeds compared to other A8-toting devices, the silicon is plenty fast for what is essentially a stripped-down 4-inch version of the iPhone 6. Any perceived loss in speed is likely more than made up for in power savings, as the iPod touch must pack its internals into a chassis 0.6mm thinner than Apple's current iPhone.

Ever since the first quad-core smartphone and tablet designs began to show up in market, we’ve been asking whether or not these devices offered meaningful performance improvements over lower core counts. Not only are there software issues to contend with, since without multi-threading support, adding new cores is literally useless, there are also significant concerns around power consumption. Adding more cores means more heat, and smartphones, with ~2.5W operating envelopes, just aren’t designed for high-speed multi-core operation.

After spending a total of 110 hours researching 25 different Wi-Fi extenders (and testing 10 of them), plus analyzing reviews and owner feedback, we found that the $100 Netgear EX6200 is the best Wi-Fi extender for most people right now.  It costs as much as a great router and it shouldn't be the first thing you try to fix your Wi-Fi range, but it has the best combination of range, speed, flexibility, and physical connections of any extender we tested.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have come up with a clever way to hack into laptops: using a radio receiver and a piece of pita bread.

The researchers published their findings online, showing that many laptop models give off electromagnetic radiation that can be manipulated into revealing the passwords stored on laptops.

Toshiba has developed a new method of utilizing random telegraph noise (RTN) originating from insulating material faults to implement a physical unclonable function (PUF), an important security technology.

The method, which will contribute to the creation of safe and secure cloud services for smart communities, was announced at the VLSI Technology Symposium, a conference on semiconductor devices that was held on June 16 in Kyoto, Japan.