The News, Always The News

Just to get the ball rolling, it's all over the place: Vodafone is launching the Blackberry 7230 this month on the major territories. Neat.

Xmas is Coming...

And Apple has its new Gift Guide online. Dear Santa Claus, make mine a G5, but only if new Studio Displays come out - the current ones look funky next to brushed aluminum...

Mapping and GPS for the Series 60

If you keep getting lost and have 2.5MB free on your Series 60 phone, then check out TomTom CityMaps. The concept is interesting, but I have some doubts against the practicality of the thing - this should be a server-side app...

Bluetooth pranks seem to be the order of the day. The new fad is called bluejacking, and I can't help but wonder why people haven't started doing this earlier - only the other day I was fiddling with my 7650 and found no less than eight different Bluetooth devices in range - at a café (doing so in the office generates a ludricously long list)

WPA has Flaws, Too

No kidding? Well, it was bound to happen anyway - a few people raised questions in the past about the new WLAN security standard, but now there is a credible demonstration of the flaw. And guess what, it's a human interface issue. Glenn Fleishman, as usual, has the details: 1, 2, 3

SSL-based VPNs seem to be all the rage these days. Which is a plain stupid approach, since if you want to tunnel things through TCP, SSH would be a much better base protocol to build upon.

Trust vendors to almost get the point - and miss it just enough to add cruft to their solutions and call it "added value"...

Xbox 2 with PowerPC CPU?

I initially thought this just had to be a mistake. Not even Microsoft would be so daft as to break binary compatibility between Xbox versions. IBM has some of the best chip technology in the world, and it is well within their know-how to make an Intel clone for the next Xbox.

But then, the Xbox kernel, being an NT derivative, will definetly run on anything, and the FT article specifically mentions PowerPC, Virtual PC emulation tech and other things that make it look feasible.

So, aren't you just glad that all your current Xbox games will most likely not run on your next console at full speed? Better still, how would you feel having a Mac under your TV?