Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: The spy in your spare room and the Nexus One becomes the Nexus gone.
• Few people give any thought to the blinking router in the corner of the room that speeds their mouse clicks and key presses around the world wide web. Until it threatens to betray them, that is, .
"A presentation due to be shown at the at the end of the month will show that many of the routers used for residential internet connections are vulnerable to attack by hackers. The attacks would allow traffic to be redirected and intercepted, in addition to giving hackers access to victims' local networks."
The presentation is provocatively entitled "How to Hack Millions of Routers" and there is a to which routers are most likely to spill their secrets.
• Farewell then, Nexus One. We hardly knew you. Google has stopped production of its widely trumpeted Nexus One handset that does not reign supreme in the smartphone market.
"The last shipment has arrived at Google HQ, and once those are gone there will be no more Nexus Ones for U.S. consumers."
Those with an unfulfilled craving for the Nexus might still be able to get one via other means, as long as stocks last.
"The handset will still be sold through Vodafone in Europe and some Asian carriers, and developers will still be able to get their hands on one, but it looks like the Droid phones on Verizon will carry the mantle for Google's Android mobile operating system. This is the end of the company's grand experiment with an unlocked consumer handset in the US"
• Better clouds are helping us get at the stars. US space agency Nasa is linking up with more than 25 other companies to create . that this is not a better way to pile up pancakes but an open, in the sense of software, way to swap data centres full of hot, expensive computers for something more serene. Jonathan Bryce from partner Rackspace spells out what it can do.
"With the OpenStack software, any organization will be able to turn physical hardware into massively scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects"
• Finally, the guilty secret that many in the computer world practise at home. Alone. In a darkened room. We'll stop there and let Justin Olivetti take over:
"While I'm not shy about being a gamer, I don't exactly go about broadcasting it, either. For one thing, a lot of people still associate video games with either mindless violence or childish play. For another, it's simply hard to explain the attraction of games to those who have limited or zero experience with them."
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