What your parents told you about taking candy from strangers applies to iPhone games as well. iPhone owners should be wary of e-mails purporting to feature a free game for the mobile device. What’s attached to that e-mail isn’t a game — it’s a Trojan. However, it won’t infect your iPhone, or even your Mac. The Trojan targets Windows PCs. It does nothing to the iPhone; it only uses the device’s popularity as bait.

Security firm Sophos issued a warning Thursday about e-mails purportedly offering free iPhone games. The missives profess to feature a free game for the smartphone, but the only thing those who download the attachment receive is malware designed to infect PCs running Windows.

In the subject line, the hackers tout the file as “Virtual iPhone games!” or “Apple: The most popular game!”, “Virtual iPhone toys!” and appeal to users to “Take a break!” or to “Beet (sic) my score! (7000 points).” However, the attached file, Troj/Agent-HNY, is a Trojan.

“It’s a regular Trojan horse, spammed out via e-mail attachments. If you run it on your Windows PC it installs itself and tries to download further malware from the Net. Unlike some other Trojans it doesn’t waste time with a celebrity theme or pretending to be a breaking news story — instead it pretends to be a hot game for the Apple  iPhone,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, told MacNewsWorld.

Infection Via iPhone

It’s important to note that the malware does not infect the iPhone itself. Rather, it infects Windows PCs when the user downloads the attachment while checking e-mail on a computer, presumably expecting to load the game onto an iPhone after connecting the handheld to the PC. Sophos is not aware of any versions that will run on the Mac OS X operating system, the iPhone or other mobile devices.

“Why not Mac? Probably because the hackers believe they can be successful just infecting Windows — which is, after all, what most malware authors concentrate on. There’s no technical reason why they couldn’t write a Mac version too — but they clearly don’t think it’s worth the effort,” said Cluley.

“The hackers are using an iPhone-related disguise in the hope that people will be tempted into running the program,” he explained.

Perils of the Web

Although this latest Trojan does not execute on iPhones themselves, it uses the broad familiarity of the iPhone as bait, again underscoring hackers’ proclivity to lure in victims using whatever will attract popular recognition, be it a hot phone or a scandalous fake video of a political candidate.

Popularity also rules when targeting platforms to infect — they regularly set their sites on market-dominant Windows PCs. However, as smartphones become more popular, more sophisticated and more able to surf the “real” Web, the danger of cybercriminals manufacturing malware for them increases.

“The biggest weakness of the cell phone has been the inability to access the ‘real Web,’ cloistered instead in the mobile Web, having little functionality. The second problem has been the fragmentation of the technology, with hundreds of real-time operating systems. Those weaknesses, however, were the very things that made cell phones so unattractive to hackers,” David Chamberlain, an In-Stat analyst told MacNewsWorld.

“There will definitely be more interest by the bad guys, though, as more people use cell phones to access the real Web, and more smartphones — with their common operating systems — will be in use. That weakness, however, has prevented the bad guys from showing much interest in cell phones,” he continued.

In-Stat expects the number of smartphones in use to increase more than 50 percent over the next five years. The research firm calculates that more than 200 million smartphones will be sold in 2012 alone, an increase of over 40 percent from 2008. That will make the devices an appealing target for hackers.

“Viral attacks on operating systems is nothing new. We’ve seen it on other operating systems, whether it be Symbian, Windows Mobile — which gets it all the time — and Blackberry, so this is not new. We are not facing a brand-new threat,” Ramon Llamas, an IDC analyst, told MacNewsWorld.

In some ways, the standardization of phone operating systems is a hacker’s dream, explained Chamberlain.

“Think about it: For years, we’ve been hearing, ‘There are no Apple viruses because there aren’t enough Apple computers to make it worthwhile for the hackers.’ Cell phones have been incredibly fragmented with hundreds of different proprietary real-time operating systems. Somebody would have to write 100 or more variants to infect all of them. You get a big population of a single operating system, and you’ve got a target,” he added.

What’s In It for the Criminal

One possible reward for cybercriminals able to distribute such malware: The e-mail addresses stored on the handsets, according to Chamberlain.

“This malware is largely a way to steal live e-mail addresses and turn the computer into an outlet for spam messages. In that regard, perhaps they’re looking for access to other phone numbers and e-mail addresses to use for spam. The other things might be for personal information such as bank accounts and passwords and other financial rip-offs,” he pointed out.

However, smartphone-targeting criminals may also go after something other than lucre: good, old-fashioned bragging rights. If a hacker developed a viable bit of malware for the iPhone and released it into the wild where it was able to infect many of the devices, that person would also have substantial street cred within the hacker community, according to Llamas.

“A lot of it is the thrill of being able to say ‘I took down or crippled or put a virus out there and it caused mayhem and destruction.’ There really is no financial or monetary gain. There is notoriety, but that doesn’t translate into the dollars. It is the thrill of causing problems for someone else,” he posited.

Beyond that, putting out this sort of malicious software could be an effort to test the support system surrounding a device, Chamberlain noted.

“Perhaps [the] infection is only the opening volley. You make an inconsequential attack and wait to see what the response is. If the good guys spot it and react, you know you need to find another way in. This almost makes you wonder what else might be on your iPhone that hasn’t been detected,” he theorized.

Microsoft’s big-budget effort to battle more than two years of Windows-bashing ads from rival Apple took a new turn Thursday.

After two weeks of three teaser ads “about nothing” featuring Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and comic Jerry Seinfeld, the company launched a new TV ad that directly addresses the long-running Apple campaign that personifies its Mac as a young, hip guy and a Windows PC as a clueless geek.

The commercial opens with a real Microsoft software designer who looks like the PC character — and is dressed to match: “Hello, I’m a PC,” he says, “and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”

The ad then cuts to a series of upbeat “I’m a PC” testimonial clips of PC users doing what they do, including a shark-cage diver, a fishmonger, a fashion designer and celebrities such as actress Eva Longoria.

Microsoft employees and founder Bill Gates also appear to declare themselves “a PC.”

That ad and others to come will showcase the “diversity” of Windows users, says David Webster, Microsoft general manager of brand and marketing strategy.

“Our competition would have you think that PCs aren’t interesting and interesting people don’t use them,” he says. Microsoft had “to take back the PC brand and tell the truth about it.”

Webster says he’s not worried about reinforcing a negative image by mimicking a character and tagline created by its nemesis. “The overwhelming bulk of the ad” showcases a wide range of personalities, he says.

Other elements will include print, outdoor and online ads.

Microsoft also will tap “consumer-generated content.” Starting Thursday night, PC fans could upload “I’m a PC” testimonials, including photos and videos, at Windows.com. Microsoft will use select images on a Times Square video billboard, feature them in online banner ads and post them on Windows.com.

The new ads come two weeks after Microsoft launched the offbeat teasers with the unlikely pairing of Gates with Seinfeld. The TV spots — which have no clear plotline or overt Windows branding — showed them living with a suburban family and shopping at a discount shoe store. Those ads were meant to be an “icebreaker,” Webster says.

But mixed reviews from bloggers and ad pros stoked Web rumors Thursday that the new ads meant Seinfeld had been fired.

That speculation is completely off-base, says Webster. “We needed to move on and start to talk about Windows,” he says. “We’re ready for chapter two.”

They “don’t have any plans” now for more Seinfeld ads, but Webster wouldn’t rule out it out. “Down the road, it wouldn’t surprise me. … He really hit it off with Bill (Gates.)”

Souce: USA Today

WASHINGTON–Electronic waste is still being exported to other nations, a move that has negative environmental consequences and may run afoul of federal law, government auditors told Congress on Wednesday. Environmental Protection Agency regulations over e-waste exports are very limited, according to a new report (PDF) from the Government Accountability Office, and the existing regulations are not well-enforced.

E-waste is “a low priority for EPA,” John Stephenson, director of natural resources and environment for the GAO, told politicians on Wednesday at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs’ subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment.

The EPA’s e-waste regulations cover only old cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions and monitors. Meanwhile, other exported used electronics, such as computers, printers, and cell phones, “flow virtually unrestricted” into other countries, the report said. A substantial amount of exported e-waste ends up in countries like China and India, where it is improperly handled, potentially exposing people to toxins like lead, if the material is disposed of improperly.

Not only are the EPA rules narrow, but they apparently are poorly enforced and easily circumvented. The rules covering CRTs went into effect in January 2007, and since then, only one company has been fined for violating them. However, by posing as foreign CRT buyers, the GAO says it found 43 U.S. companies readily willing to ignore the regulations.

“The EPA told us there were no plans for an enforcement strategy,” Stephenson said.

Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Eni Faleomavaega, a Democrat from American Samoa, said, “These companies essentially trick consumers into thinking they are doing the right thing by recycling their electronics.”

Faleomavaega claimed that the impending switch to digital-television broadcasting, scheduled for February 2009, could render millions of CRT televisions obsolete. (In reality, the DTV converter box works fine with analog televisions. Another option is for a broadcast TV viewer to sign up to receive cable or satellite TV on their old-fashioned CRTs.)

While it’s true that some materials used in manufacturing can be health hazards, the volume of e-waste is relatively small. EPA data show that it represents less than a 10,000th of the more than 30 million tons of solid waste produced by the United States each day.

In addition, the EPA has sometimes been overly pessimistic. One 2003 study performed by researchers Timothy Townsend and Yong-Chul Jang of the University of Florida tested soil from 11 actual landfills that included color TVs, monitors, and circuit boards. They found that concentrations of lead that were less than 1 percent of that which the EPA’s computer models had predicted.

Some politicians argued that exporting toxic e-waste to other countries–including CRT screens, which have a few pounds of lead used for shielding in each–will result in dangerous amounts of lead ending up in childrens’ toys.

“They are getting the raw material from someplace,” Stephenson said. (In reality, the Chinese also mine it. A report on ChinaMining.org says one company alone–not even the largest lead-mining outfit–will produce between 54,300 tons and 70,000 tons of lead this year.)

The GAO made three recommendations to mitigate the problem of exporting hazardous e-waste: the EPA should expand its definition of “hazardous” materials so it encompasses products that pose risk upon disassembly; the U.S. should improve its identification and tracking of imports to identify used electronics; and Congress should implement legislation to ratify the Basel Convention.

Stephenson said the first step is to “make it easier for recyclers to do the right thing, and make it competitive with illicit recyclers taking things overseas.”

There is significant economic incentive for recycling companies to export hazardous e-waste because the need for raw materials in countries like China is driving up the demand for used electronics.

Rep. Diane Watson, D-Ca., also said, “The U.S. fails to hold manufacturers responsible for the end-of-life management of their products that contain toxic materials.”

Not all companies are at fault, said Rep. Donald Manzullo, R-Ill., pointing out that Dell and Hewlett-Packard have programs to safely refurbish and recycle e-waste.

Some relief from the e-waste problem has also come from the United States, said Stephenson, noting that 17 states have landfill bans on e-waste.

Yet the fact remains, Stephenson said, that “we have a serious problem.” Americans dispose of more than 300 million computers and electronics annually, “and this number is growing exponentially,” Stephenson said.

“Nobody knows what to do with these,” he added. “I have three used computers in my basement, and now I’m afraid to give them to a recycler.”

Souce: CNET

With a $25,000 price tag, CX1 marks the first time Cray uses Intel chips

Think of supercomputers and you tend to think of multimillion dollar machines that easily take up a football field — with miles and miles of cabling and cooling systems running beneath the floors.

That’s long been generally true, but not anymore.

Supercomputer maker Cray Inc. today announced that it teamed up with Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. to produce a desktop supercomputer. That’s right. It will sit on a desktop. And maybe just as surprising, it has a starting price of $25,000.

The Cray CX1 supercomputer uses up to eight nodes and 16 Intel Xeon processors — either dual-core or quad-core. It’s the first Cray machine to use Intel processors. The CX1 has up to 4 terabytes of internal storage and 64GB of memory per node. The machine also comes preinstalled with Windows HPC Server 2008 and interoperates with Linux.

“Rather than constantly pushing upwards and out, here’s someone pushing down onto the desktop with a supercomputer,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group. “We could find that existing [Cray supercomputer] customers will buy these to do work on a $25,000 machine to free up space on their $25 million supercomputer. It could help them balance their load.”

According to Cray, studies by the Council on Competitiveness and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) found that many organizations and departments in large firms that could use supercomputers were locked out by the high cost and a lack of in-house experts to run them. According to Cray, the CX1 was designed from the ground-up to tackle these problems.

“IDC research shows that HPC has been one of the highest-growth IT markets during the past five years and the segment for HPC systems priced below $100,000 is headed for continued growth,” said Earl Joseph, IDC’s HPC program vice president, in a statement.

By comparison, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the IBM-built Roadrunner, carries a price tag of approximately $120 million. Run at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the hybrid system runs AMD Opteron processors and Cell chips, and this summer sustained a speed of 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. That’s about twice as fast as the next-fastest supercomputer, IBM’s BlueGene/L, which is based at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Cray did not release performance specs on the CX1.

Source: Computer World

By Michael Garfield - The High Tech Texan ®

Back it up. If you haven’t made a backup of your crucial data, do so now. It’s a good idea to make a second backup that moves your data offsite — either to online storage, or to a secure, physical location. If you are evacuating a coastal home, consider removing the hard drives from your PCs and taking them with you, stored in plastic bags and protected from physical shock.

Write it down. If you don’t have power, but can get online from another location, make sure you have your various passwords so you can check e-mail and e-commerce accounts.

Move it up. Got a desktop computers on the floor under a desk? Move it up onto the desk. Do the same with any electronics, including surge protectors and uninterruptible power supplies.

Unplug it. When lightning starts flashing around you, don’t just turn off your electronics — unplug them. A surge protector won’t do much against a direct lightning strike, and even a UPS isn’t a guarantee against damage. In fact, move the devices’ plugs as far away from the outlets as you can. A direct strike can cause electricity to arc between the outlet and the nearby plug’s prongs.

Disconnect it. In addition to unplugging from electrical outlets, also unplug any phone and cable connections. It’s also not a bad idea to disconnect the cables between computers on a home network.

Charge it. Make sure your notebook computer and cell phone batteries are fully charged, just as you’ll want to keep your car’s gas tank filled. Of course, if you’re without power, you may not have broadband Internet access, either. In that case, make a note now of the nearby public libraries, which might have power while you don’t, and may have Wi-Fi available.

Have an alternative way to charge your cell phone, such as a car charger, a solar charger or a battery powered cell phone charger. Another option is a power inverter which plugs into your car’s cigarette lighter and allows you to plug in an electronic device.

Cover it. In a really bad storm with high winds that could damage roofs and allow water to enter your home, consider covering your electronics in plastic. Move them to a central location of your home and off the floor. This may be good advice even in a tropical storm, which can still spawn tornadoes, even if the storm’s sustained winds aren’t that bad.

After the storm

Dry it out. If your home took in any water during the storm, wait several days before plugging in electronics. Plugging a computer into a wet outlet can be devastating. Test outlets first by plugging something expendable into them, such as a table lamp, before trying your electronics.

Text to get through. Cellular networks will most likely be overloaded and many calls may not be able to go through. Text messages are easier to be sent and delivered as they take up much less data on the network plus you can see if the message has been sent.

Keep unplugged until power is on. Just because the storm has passed does not mean your electronics are safe. If your power is not on keep your gadgets unplugged so when power does return nothing can be damaged due to a potential surge.

Email, post or blog if possible. Letting family and friends know you are safe is important. If you can’t get cell or text service, try to find a friend, library or local business with a computer or Internet connection. Send at least one email to a friend or relative letting them know your status or post a message on a blog or social network like Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.

If your cell phone has a camera, use it to take “before” and “after” pictures of your valuables for inventory and insurance purposes. If your property gets damaged, use your phone or digital camera to document the damage. You could also upload pictures from your cell phone or a digital camera to an online photo site such as Flickr or Snapfish. If your property gets damaged, use your phone or digital camera to document the damage.

For media interviews, please contact Michael Garfield

www.hightechtexan.com

Of all the possible things that can come between spouses, you can now add BlackBerrys — or more precisely — BlackBerry addiction to the list.

A new study reveals BlackBerry’s are becoming — among other things — the 800-pound gorilla in the bedroom.

‘Berry, ‘Berry, addictive?

“I live with it. I can’t live without it,” one New York City resident told CBS 2 HD.

Yeah … there’s a reason some call ‘em … CrackBerrys.

But are you having a love affair with yours?

“I am on my BlackBerry more than I see my boyfriend,” one woman said.

The study of 6,500 traveling executives says 35 percent of them would choose their PDA over their spouse.

“That’s a tough call,” one said.

“Oh you don’t want to go there,” another added.

And apparently that attitude is being seen in the sack. Of those polled, 87 percent said they bring their devices into the bedroom.

Another 84 percent check their e-mails just before they go to sleep. Another 80 percent check them in the morning as soon as they get up.

“It can actually ruin relationships,” said Dr. Susan Bartell, a psychologist and relationship expert. Bartell said couples should be interfacing more, but with each other.

“People are so focused on their PDAs, they’re not focusing on what might be going wrong in their relationships,” Bartell said.

Of those polled, 62 percent said they love their blackberry or PDA, and most of them said it makes their life more productive. However, experts suggest, for the sake of your relationship, you might occasionally …

“Turn it off, spend some time with your partner. Have a real relationship with a living human being,” Bartell said.

The study was done by Sheraton hotels. Among its other findings: More than three quarters of those polled say their gadgets give them more quality time with friends and family… and help them enjoy life more.

Source: WCBS New York

As the Hurricane Ike moves inland over Missouri and Illinois today prompting flood warnings, the lives of over two million people have come to a standstill.

Though, the storm weakened to a tropical depression as it came ashore on Galveston Island, the local authorities said they will take some time to get electricity restored in all the affected areas, said Mike Rodgers, a spokesman for Entergy Texas, the primary electricity provider between Houston and the Louisiana border.

Giant hurricane Ike has left Houston without Internet, phone lines, drinking water and severed power to millions after ripping through the fourth-largest city yesterday,

Rodgers said damage to the electric grid was much more widespread than after Hurricane Rita, which hit the area in 2005.

Ike, the first hurricane to hit a major US metropolitan area since Katrina in 2005, has affected 2.3 million people in two states before making landfall at 2.10 am on Saturday.

With wind gusts approaching 100 miles per hour, the 600-mile-wide Category 2 hurricane peeled sheets of steel off skyscrapers here, smashed bus shelters and blew out windows leaving the Houston and its coastal areas in debris.

In Orange, Tex, near the Louisiana coast, the sea rose so rapidly that people were forced to flee to attics and roofs, and the city used trucks to rescue them, local police said.

There were reports of as many as four people killed, but it could take days to search flooded homes to assess the full impact of the storm, officials said.

Source: Business Standard

Texas Instruments commemorated the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit with the opening Friday of Kilby Labs, honoring Jack Kilby, the Nobel-prize-winning inventor of the seminal electronic device.

As a new TI employee in 1958, Kilby was forced to work during the traditional company summer vacation. During that time, he built the first integrated circuit, now the basic building block of everything from 3G cell phones to supercomputers.

The first IC was crude: a sliver of germanium with protruding wires glued to a glass slide (see image below). When Kilby applied electricity to the circuit, “an unending sine wave undulated across his oscilloscope screen. In that instant…he had successfully integrated all of the parts of an electronic circuit onto a single device made from the same semiconductor material,” according to TI’s Web site.

Robert Noyce, who co-founded Intel, also created an integrated circuit, about six months after Kilby. At that time, Noyce was at Fairchild Semiconductor (which he also co-founded). Noyce’s chip, made of silicon, overcame some practical problems that Kilby’s germanium-based device did not.

Kilby won the inventor’s “Triple Crown”: the Nobel Prize in physics; the National Medal of Science; and the National Medal of Technology. He held more than 60 patents including one for the portable electronic calculator, which TI invented in 1967. He died in 2005 at the age of 81 after a battle with cancer.

Kilby Labs will be located on TI’s Dallas North Campus, where Kilby first designed the chip. The new facility will bring together university researchers and leading TI engineers to discover new ways to use the IC–”from creating new ways to make health care more mobile to harnessing new power sources to enabling more fuel-efficient vehicles,” TI said.

TI has named Ajith Amerasekera as director of the labs. Amerasekera, who is a TI fellow, joined the company in 1991 and holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics.

At TI’s headquarters, the original lab where Kilby worked and made his discovery of the first integrated circuit has been re-created on-site. TI has also made a donation toward Jack Kilby’s memorial statue in his hometown of Great Bend, Kan.

Hurricane Ike barreled into the densely populated Texas coast near Houston early on Saturday, bringing with it a wall of water and ferocious winds and rain that flooded large areas along the Gulf of Mexico and paralyzed the fourth-largest U.S. city.

Ike, which has idled more than a fifth of U.S. oil production, came ashore at the barrier island city of Galveston as a strong Category 2 storm at 2:10 a.m. CDT (3:10 a.m. EDT) with 110 mph winds, the National Hurricane Center said.

Ike barreled through the Gulf of Mexico for days and covered a vast area extending hundreds of miles (km) when it slammed into the Texas coast. It is the biggest storm to hit a U.S. city since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005.

The hurricane drove a wall of water over Galveston and submerged a 17-foot sea wall built to protect the city after a 1900 hurricane killed at least 8,000 people. More than half of its 60,000 residents had fled and emergency operations were suspended through the storm.

About 50 miles inland, Ike lashed downtown Houston’s glass-covered skyscrapers, blowing out windows and sending debris flying through water-clogged city streets.

The storm was downgraded to a Category 1 on the hurricane intensity scale at 8 a.m. CMT (9 a.m. EDT) carrying top sustained winds near 90 mph and moving north, but officials said it was too soon to assess the damage.

Texas officials were waiting for a break in the weather to deploy a search and rescue operation.

“We expected a major storm and our expectations unfortunately came true,” said Mark Miner, a spokesman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry. “The weather needs to clear up a little bit to see just what the devastation was.”

The hurricane has shut down 17 oil refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, the heart of the U.S. oil sector where 22 percent of fuel supplies are processed. Energy experts said it would take at least a week for the refineries to get back to normal.

Houston was dark Saturday morning except for downtown and the Texas Medical Center, which are fed by underground power sources, Floyd LeBlanc of CenterPoint Energy said in an e-mail. Nearly all 2 million customers, or 4.5 million people, in the Houston-Galveston area were without power, he said.

“This is a huge storm that is causing a lot of damage, not only in Texas, but also in parts of Louisiana,” U.S. President George W. Bush on Saturday.

He said the government would monitor gas prices to prevent extraordinary price increases because of Ike.

Source: Reuters