At the
Black Hat Conference this week, researcher Barnaby Jack successfully hijacked several
ATMs in a presentation provocatively titled: "Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines
Redux."
His two exploits--one
using a remote connection and the second using a USB port on the ATM machine--caused
the compromised ATMs to dispense money without being authorized to do so.
All this
makes for an entertaining read, certainly, but should the insecurity of ATMs concern
IT workers? Unfortunately, the short answer is: Yes. This demonstration does bear
some repercussion for the rest of computing field.
Google
is reportedly in "accelerated" talks to acquire digital publishing rights to thousands
of songs, heralding a major step forward in its efforts to introduce an online music
storefront to rival Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iTunes.
The New York Post reports Google vice president of engineering
Andy Rubin is presently negotiating with executives from the Harry Fox Agency music
industry publishing firm to secure digital rights to roughly 27,000 songs--according
to the
Post, the state and pace of the talks indicate Google has successfully
engaged the major record labels in its plans, and could formally launch its online
music store as soon as November or December of this year. The report notes the Google/Harry
Fox Agency negotiations are focusing on pricing, available rights and Google's proposed
business model, adding the music industry is likely to align with the web services
giant in hopes the deal would give the labels new leverage in their dealings with
Apple. Both Google and the Harry Fox Agency declined comment.
News
of Google's digital music plans first surfaced in late June--citing sources familiar
with Google's talks with the recording industry,
The Wall Street Journal reported the company will introduce premium
music services across its web platform and Android mobile operating system. The
service will connect with Google search results, offering consumers a link to the
store when they query a particular artist or song title. Sources add the store represents
an interim step toward a more ambitious cloud-based service enabling Android smartphone
users to stream music directly from the web.
Google
confirmed plans to launch a streaming music service across the Android platform
in mid-May. Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra demonstrated the solution
during the company's I/O developer conference, declining to supply an expected launch
date but noting "We think users are going to love this feature." Gundotra added
that the music service will leverage technology acquired via Google's purchase of
streaming media firm Simplify Media.
A premium
download service would vault Google into direct competition with Apple, further
fueling the increasingly intense rivalry between the two tech giants. iTunes presently
accounts for 70 percent of all premium music downloads in the
In the
quest to meet the needs of the scientific community, Amazon has announced a new
cloud-based product that promises to bring high-performance computing (HPC) applications
to the masses. Pitched as a mid-level HPC solution, the Cluster Compute Instance
(CCI) was made available as an open beta earlier this week on the EC2 (Elastic Compute
Cloud) platform.
Amazon's
most powerful cloud option yet, the CCI will appeal to a niche of the computing
community with an eye for higher performance, or who need to crunch parallel processing
workloads. To facilitate the latter, each node in a Cluster Instance is connected
via blistering non-blocking 10 Gb/sec Ethernet connection, or 10 times the speed
of standard EC2 instances. In addition, the 64-bit platform also comes with up to
23 GB of memory, and 1,690 GB of instance storage.
Priced
at $1.60 per hour, the Cluster server is also more expensive than anything else
on Amazon's product line; as a comparison, a Small Linux server only costs $0.085
per hour. In terms of raw processing powers though, the computational capability
of a single Cluster server is 33.5 times faster than the 1GHz processor that the
Small Linux server is based on.
For now,
CCI will only be offered on Linux, though you can expect support for additional
operating systems to be available in future. With the added bonus that they are
managed as regular EC2 instances, any EC2 user can self provision up to eight instances
without intervention from Amazon. This equates to a total of 32 processing cores
on current four-core Intel Nehalem CPUs; larger clusters can also be put together
upon request