Iphony problems appear

IT APPEARS THAT a few Iphony fans have got their natty devices home only to find that they are broken and have go back.

Some have even dared to complain and even return their phones, if news.com is to be believed.

One of the main complaints is that the call volume levels are far too low. Apple seemed to have forgotten that many of its buyers will have been listening to Ipods for a couple of years now and, with their jelly and sponge ear pieces, might be a trifle deaf.

A couple of people have said that the volume level makes it impossible for them to hear phone calls, which they thought was part of the idea.

The other thing is the much-touted battery life which was supposed to be eight hours talk time, 24 hours of music playback, seven hours of video playback, and six hours of Internet use. Strangely, these estimates are turning out a lot lower than expected. This is particular true if you run the wi-fi at the same time as trying to do other things, apparently.

However other punters are finding their batteries draining faster than a bottle of whisky in the presence of Dr Spinola and this is probably a fault.

Unfortunately, Apple chose to solder the batteries into the phone, which means to get a new one you have to ship the phone to Apple and fork out $85 for a new one.

Others users are reporting screen freezes.

Most customers are finding that Apple is ok about replacing faulty phones and report that their new ones work fine.

More here

Google Makes FeedBurner Pro Services Free

One thing I like about service provided by Google is that they don’t cost you anything. Continuing this culture, FeedBurner (which became a Google service after the recent acquisition) has decided to give two of its paid services for free: TotalStats and MyBrand.

Until now, the TotalStats service which showed unique number of people who view or click your feed content along with item views were only available to members who paid a monthly subscription fee of $5.

Another pro service, MyBrand which lets you keep your domain name while serving your feed has also been made free. Earlier this service used to cost $3 - $14 per month depending upon the number of feeds being served under your account. Once you activate either of these pro (but free) services, you’ll notice a cool “PRO” badge next your feed(s) under your “My Feed” page. This is the first noticeable change after Google acquired FeedBurner

iPhone root password cracked in three days

It's been out just three days, but already the Apple iPhone has been taken apart both literally and figuratively. The latest: inquisitive Apple fans have hacked into the firmware and discovered the master root password to the smart phone.

The information came from an an official Apple iPhone restore image (rename as a zip file and extract). The archive contains two .dmg disk images: a password encrypted system image and an unencrypted user image. By delving into the unencrypted image inquisitive hackers were able to discover that all iPhones ship with predefined passwords to the accounts 'mobile' and 'root', the last of which being the name of the privileged administration account on UNIX based systems.

Hackers used the simple UNIX program 'strings' to extract a list of human readable character strings from the disk image, which contained a list of user accounts and their corresponding encrypted passwords (equivalent to the /etc/passwd file on UNIX and Linux systems). A call was then made out on the Full Disclosure mailing list for someone to run the popular password cracking tool John the Ripper on the encrypted passwords.

It took one replier just sixteen seconds to extract the passwords for both accounts -- both passwords were simple six letter words of lower case letters.

Having the passwords will not do anybody any good for the moment. The iPhone has no console or terminal access, so there is no way to log in as either account. In fact, nobody even seems certain that the accounts access the machine at all, some Internet commentators suggesting that the password file was left over from early development work, or was intentionally included to throw hackers off the scent.

AMD Barcelona performance promises revealed

WHILE ENGINEERS ARE working full throttle at making the K10 (10h family) work, performance figures are becoming integral part of marketing presentations and so on. Recently, we managed to sse the short of performance figures that AMD is promising for Barcelona.

These performance numbers were based on systems using tge Opteron 2356, or known to the world of us regular folk as AMD QuadCore at 2.3GHz. The Price of this processor is currently set at 796 USD in quantities of 1000, so we'll see what can Clovertown at 2.66 GHz (Xeon 5355) do about it…

So, what will Barcelona deliver?

For starters, SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 speak the voice of doom for the 366 MHz faster clocked Xeon - and these are the reasons why Intel was downplaying performance of FP and praising the INT.
The figures we saw were from a few months ago, so things may well have changed since then. But in the Integer test, a Barcelona 2.3GHz yields 21% higher score than Clovertown 2.66 GHz, but Floating Point test leaves a staggering 50% performance deficit for Clovertown, and this is not something 45 nanometre Penryn can solve overnight. Unless, of course the clock deficit for AMD is such that Intel speeds past.

When it comes to comparing Barcelona to Santa Rosa, a 3.0GHz clocked Opteron 2222, Barcelona is in general, around 65-70% faster than the highest-clocked dual-core Opteron. SPECweb99 yields a hefty 67% performance increase, SPECweb99_SSL offers 66%, while SAP-SD offers 70% performance increase.
The highest gain, of over 100% can be seen in SPECweb2005/Ecom benchmark, while smallest gain was in TPC-C SQL2000, where only 42% gain was marked. This was all based on 2P (dual-socket) systems, of course.

In the four-socket arena, Opteron 8222 versus 8356 offers an average of over 60% performance boost, which is not a small thing - given that clock difference is 700MHz. SPECweb99 and SPECweb99_SSL give 68% performance increase, SPECweb2005/Ecom yields another scaling dream (91%), while most modest increase is again, TPC-C SQL2000. Nevertheless, TPC-C Oracle test will yield 75% performance increase while Terminal Services will offer 71%.

Overall, these are very impressive score increase promises. All of the performance increases happened with a processor that has 30% smaller TDP. Opteron x222 is a 120W Max.TDP, while this Barcelona 2356 stays in the 95W range.

The only real question that now remains is whther AMD can execute. Sadly, the company's recent track record does not bode well, with constant delays of products and events. And we'll also wait to see real tests of the Barcelonas rather than paper promises

Iphone can't cope with 64 bits. And it's hackable

APPLE HAS moved to suppress comments on its bulletin boards that point out that its new iPhone cannot handle 64-bit Windows Vista or XP.

That comes as others say the shiny bling phone is hackable.

According to Engadget, punters had been complaining that when ever they tried this they kept getting an error message: "The software required for iPhone is not installed. Run the iTunes installer to remove iTunes, then install iTunes again."

However, this does not work, and if iTune users had looked carefully at Apple's support article 301301 they would have seen that "iTunes is currently not supported in Windows XP Professional x64 Edition or any 64-bit edition of Windows Vista." Now you know.

Also Apple's official minimum system requirements document does say that "64-bit editions of Windows are not supported."

What is a little more surprising is that a thread discussing this topic was pulled from the Apple web site.

One bloke moaned on Slashdot that an Apple support rep told him to downgrade his computer system so he could run his new iPod. He added that a thread he posted on the matter had been taken down by Apple.

Meanwhile, a hole in AT&T/Cingular’s Voicemail system could be set to smash all those bright shiny iPhones which we believe are still sitting in some shops, despite the hype. The vulnerability was first pointed out in February and has been ignored ever since. According to Nitesh Dhanjani who discovered the flaw, the AT&T/Cingular voicemail system is configured by default not to ask for a password when you check your voicemail from the handset.

Part of the problem is that the AT&T/Cingular voicemail system trusts Caller ID to determine if the handset is calling. All it takes is for the Caller ID can be spoofed and anyone can gain access into your voicemail.

To check if you are vulnerable, get a mate to leave you a message on your voice mail. Go you your voice mail box and if it does not ask you for a password you are toast.

Dhanjani gives instructions on how to make your iPhone secure. But it does seem odd that AT&T/Cingular has been unable to get its voicemail act together