Samsung had made a solar-powered netbook called the NC215S for the African market in May, and now that very same netbook is featured on Samsung’s Russian site bearing the same model number.
As can be seen in the picture, most of the screen lid is consumed by a solar panel. The addition of the solar panel stretches battery life to 14.5 hours, though of course that must vary depending on lighting conditions.
The machine itself is quite low-power to begin with, packing either an Intel Atom N570 or N55 CPU at 1.6 GHz with GMA 3150 graphics. The NC215S has a 10.1-inch LCD at 1024×600, 1GB of RAM, VGA out, mic in, headphone out, an Ethernet port, three USB, and a 4-in-1 card reader. Storage choices are either a 250 GB or 320 GB HDD.
All of that weighs in at 1.3 kg or 2.9 lbs and will retail for 13,999 rubles (or around $479). Tree huggers rejoice! Farmville will never be the same again!
A report by Sky News in London claims that a 19-year-old male was arrested in Essex under suspicion of spearheading the hacker group LulzSec. The arrest arrives just days after the group openly attacked the CIA’s website last Wednesday, Britain’s Serious Organized Crime Agency on Monday, and numerous other sites in-between.
After the CIA’s website went down last week, the FBI and Scotland Yard reportedly launched an investigation immediately. While the details leading up to his arrest are scarce, Sky News reports that LulzSec’s alleged leader Ryan Cleary was apprehended on Monday after detectives from Scotland Yard’s e-crime unit closed in on his Wickford, Essex home.
Currently Cleary is in custody at a central London police station and being “questioned” under the Computer Misuse Act and Fraud Act. If found guilty, he could be extradited to the United States to face trial. Meanwhile Scotland Yard is conducting an “examination of a significant amount of material.” Read more…
Thanks to a bug introduced by a code update, the entire world had access to Dropbox accounts for just under four hours. This issue was announced by Dropbox CTO Arash Ferdowsi on Monday revealed in his blog that a code update implemented on Sunday at 1:54pm PST introduced a bug that affected the service’s authentication mechanism. The bug was discovered at 5:41pm PST and fixed precisely at 5:46pm. This meant that for nearly four hours, accounts were left wide open for anyone to access without a password.
According to Ferdowski, only 1-percent of its user base actually accessed their accounts during that sensitive window. However, as a precaution, the company ended all logged in sessions until the bug was eradicated.
“We’re conducting a thorough investigation of related activity to understand whether any accounts were improperly accessed,” Ferdowski said. “If we identify any specific instances of unusual activity, we’ll immediately notify the account owner.”
By 10:46pm Monday night, Ferdowski said that the company had been working “around the clock” to gather additional data and continue to review logs for potentially unauthorized activity. Users would thus be notified within the next few hours if login activity was detected during the four-hour “open house” period. By 2:49am Tuesday morning, the accounts that logged in during the period had been emailed with additional activity-related details for review.
Dropbox is one of many cloud storage solution that offers a free 2 GB basic service and additional storage for a monthly fee. Users can automatically upload files to their cloud storage directly from a desktop, laptop or mobile device (iOS, Android) once the media is saved in a specific folder. Files can be kept totally private, shared only with family members, or offered to the public. They’re also kept in sync with other devices authorized with the Dropbox account.
That said, unauthorized access to a Dropbox account means that the “snoop” had access to the account holder’s email address, credit card and/or paypal information, and whatever is stored in the cloud. “This should never have happened,” Ferdowski said. “We are scrutinizing our controls and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again. We are sorry for this and regardless of how many people were ultimately affected; any exposure at all is unacceptable to us.”
And we thought Nokia’s going to die, and has lost its identity when Stephen Elop announced that Nokia’s going to kill off Symbian and going for Windows Phone 7 platform. But well, it looks like ‘better late than never’ is going on again. Nokia’s new N9 with Meego doesn’t have a home button. Just power button, volume rockers, and a lock/unlock button. But how does the new Meego perform on this new N9? Well let Nokia show us the new simplicity design.
Fresh from the Land of the Rising Sun comes news that Sony has updated the original PS3 Slim (CECH-3001B) with a lighter, less power-hungry model. The new Japanese PS3 CECH-3000B weighs in at 5.7 pounds — as opposed to its 6.6 pound elder brother — and even lowers its wattage to 200W from the previous 230W. Based on information handed to us by SCE in February, we’re surmising that you’ll need HDMI / HDCP in order to get 1080p video playback from Blu-ray Discs; otherwise, it’ll be limited to 480i over piracy concerns. Other non-AACS content — games included — should be exempt from the restrictions. The unit will retail at the same ¥34,980 price point (or $435 for the Yanks) as the original Slim, and while a relatively plain 320GB flavor seems to be on tap for now, a 160GB Tales of Xillia bundle will purportedly hit this September. No announcement has been made for its North American counterpart, but with the system already in the FCC’s clutches, you can bet it’ll be making an intercontinental trek in short order.
It’s no big surprise that Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10 has some Android 2.3-filled days to look forward to. At long last, the handset maker is finally delivering its promise and is offering up a few extra details about the inevitable upgrade, now set for early-August. The company has addressed some user concerns regarding changes to functionality that will come with the upgrade, assuring users that new version of the software will keep the phone’s camera UI intact and will feature newer functionality like the company’s Facebook Inside Xperia feature. Catch the Gingerbready video below, which unfortunately makes surviving the summer on a lesser build no less painless.
Racing is racing. Drifting is drifting. The two don’t generally cross over, for one simple reason: drifting is slow, and racing is fast. Unless your name is Gilles Villeneuve, the general rule is that drifting through a corner isn’t as fast as braking on the way in, clipping the apex and powering out.
But at the Skycity Triple Crown this past weekend at Hidden Valley Raceway in Dawin, Australia, one Shane Van Gisbergen celebrated victory by drifting his Ford Falcon V8 Supercar around nearly the entire cool-down lap sideways, the tires lit up and the crowd going wild. It’s a rare sight, and you can watch it for yourself in the video after the jump.
Who would you think would hold the record for the world’s longest drift? Tanner Foust in a Scion? Sam Hubinette in a Dodge? Ken Block in a Subaru or a Ford? Maybe Vaughn Gittin, Jr. in a Mustang? If you guessed the latter, you would be right. Or at least you would have been up until last week.
Over the weekend at Mercedes-Benz World at Brooklands in the UK, one Mauro Calo set a new record by drifting a C63 AMG for a continuous 2,308 meters (7,572 feet) – that’s nearly a mile and a half of uninterrupted sideways driving, or a solid 394 meters (1,292 ft) longer than the unofficial record Gittin set down in December of 2008 at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
What makes the feat – achieved in a showroom-stock production vehicle on dry tarmac – even more impressive is that it was achieved not on a fat band of pavement, but on the narrow strip around M-B World’s handling circuit, beating the previous record by more than the length of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier in the process. Read more…
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