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On display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from February 24 to May 12 is a nanotechnology-equipped concept mobile device.

The Morph is the result of an ongoing partnership between Nokia and the University of Cambridge, and illustrates their ideas of how future devices will look and function. It’s a multipurpose unit with context-dependent shape; so whatever its intended use may be at the time, it can be structurally modified to fit the user’s needs.

Nokia’s partnership with the University of Cambridge began in 2007 and encompasses different projects in several areas. While these initial developments come from the nanoscience center and electrical division of the engineering department at Cambridge, other groups will be included in upcoming projects.

Nokia, in typically forward-thinking fashion, said it expects certain features shown in the Morph demo to be integrated into handheld devices within seven years.

Source: BetaNews

A critical vulnerability in VMware’s virtualization software for Windows lets attackers escape the “guest” operating system and modify or add files to the underlying “host” operating system, the company has acknowledged. As of Sunday, there was no patch available for the flaw, which affects VMware’s Windows client virtualization programs, including Workstation, Player, and ACE. The company’s virtual machine software for Windows servers and for Mac- and Linux-based hosts are not at risk.
The bug was reported by Core Security Technologies, makers of the penetration-testing framework CORE IMPACT, said VMware in a security alert issued last Friday. “Exploitation of this vulnerability allows attackers to break out of an isolated guest system to compromise the underlying host system that controls it,” claimed Core Security.
According to VMware, the bug is in the shared-folder feature of its Windows client-based virtualization software. Shared folders let users access certain files — typically documents and other application-generated files — from the host operating system and any virtual machine on that physical system.
“On Windows hosts, if you have configured a VMware host-to-guest shared folder, it is possible for a program running in the guest to gain access to the host’s complete file system and create or modify executable files in sensitive locations,” confirmed VMware.
VMware has not posted a fix, but it instead told users to disable shared folders.
 

View: Full Article @ InfoWorld
Link: VMware Security alert

News over the weekend of two Detroit pension funds suing Yahoo for rejecting Microsoft’s $41.2 billion offer, is the first bit of sanity that has come out of this whole story.
The proposed class action, filed by veteran shareholder litigation firm Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossman, takes Yahoo directors to task for spurning the Feb. 1 offer and “pursuing all manner of value-destructive third-party deals.”
These pension funds are the only party who have the investor interests at heart. Regarding both Yahoo and Microsoft, it’s hard to understand what they are thinking. Why would Microsoft pay a 60% premium for the much troubled search engine company? I understand that Microsoft basically wants to replace its own troubled MSN with Yahoo, but why overpay? I am sure that if it invested a fraction of this amount of money to generate more MSN traffic, things would improve.

View: Full Article @ Blogging Stocks

Certain problems with Vista won’t be fixed by service packs or by updates but rather were actually part of the design. Users got used to XP and the way XP did things but Vista does some things differently. To help get your sanity back here are three things you can do to make Vista more amiable.
First, let’s tackle UAC. Vista’s UAC enables account controls which requires you to specify program actions when they need elevated permissions. The problem is that almost every action in Vista will require such. This can be turned off while still leaving the more important virtualization protection in place.
There are two ways to do this, by using native commands in Vista which is a 6-step process and should be avoided by everyone unless you want to create “Local Security Policy” specifically for that. I can’t recommend doing so. Instead, download Tweak UAC which will allow you to painlessly enable quiet mode.

View: Full Article @ Tech Blorge