Arm unveils chip to make smartphones faster, cooler

Arm Holdings PLC today introduced a processor for smartphones and other devices that it says will be cheaper, and more powerful and energy-efficient than the two ARM processors it will supplant. The new Cortex-A5 processor will come with one to four processor cores running at up to 1GHz. Based on an efficient 40-nanometer design, the Cortex-A5's cores will run up to 3 times faster than each core in the company's low-end ARM9 product, according to the Cambridge, England-based firm. The company expects that the new chip will also help it ward off incursions from Intel Corp's rival Atom chip . ARM announced the chip Wednesday at its annual ARM TechCon3 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

The Cortex-A5 also consumes one-third the power of ARM's mid-range ARM11 processor, meaning that it can extend a device's battery life "by at least double, if not more," said Travis Lanier, a product manager at Arm. The Cortex-A5 is due to be released to ARM's 600-plus manufacturing partners in December, the company said. The manufacturing cost of the new chip is about one-fifth what it costs to make the ARM9, which has been installed in more than 5 billion cellphones and other devices, or the ARM11, which is used in Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. Meanwhile, Intel is readying a 32-nanometer version of the popular Atom netbook processor . The 32nm chip will be the first "low-leakage" version of the Atom, and is expected to be similar to the current Arm CPUs in terms of compactness and power efficiency, making it suitable for mobile phones and tiny devices. The supported software includes Ubuntu Linux, Android and the Firefox browser.

Arm says that the company expects the Cortex-A5 to maintain its edge over the Atom. "This is a very, very tiny processor," Lanier said. "It will be many generations before the Atom can compete with it." The Cortex-A5 will be able to run all of the software that runs on the other Arm Cortex processors - the Cortex-A8 and the Cortex-A9, Lanier said. The Cortex-A5 also supports technology from Neon multimedia technology that can be used to improve video performance. Such devices should begin to appear with Cortex-A5 chips in 2011, Lanier said. Arm expects the Cortex-A5 to be used in low-end to mid-range cellphones, smart appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines and clothes dryers and digital picture frames. At that point, the ARM9 and ARM11 chips will begin phasing out.

The company recently announced that its dual-core Cortex-A9 will be able to run as fast as 2 GHz, enabling it to run in ARM-based netbooks, or smartbooks, laptops and even desktop PCs, says Lanier. The Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 will continue to be Arm's mid-range and high-end processors. Lanier said that the Cortex-A5 will come in two flavors: a general-purpose processor running at 1 GHz that consumes about 80 milliwatts; and a low-power, very efficient chip that runs at 500 MHz. "There's almost no [electrical] leakage," Lanier said. That is more suitable for phones, as battery life tends to be key.

Facebook Captchas broken?

Hackers have apparently found a way to automate the creation of new Facebook profiles by breaking the challenge-response mechanism used by the site to ensure that only humans sign up for the service. The pages are being used to spam links pointing to malicious sites. Security researcher Roger Thompson, of AVG Technologies, today said his company in recent days discovered numerous Facebook pages that were clearly created in an automated fashion using malware programs. Users who click on the link are prompted to install rogue anti-spyware tools on their systems, he said.

All of the pages contain the same profile picture but with different user names. So far, AVG has noticed a "couple of hundred" Facebook pages that appear to have been created by an automated malware program. From a security threat standpoint, the Facebook break-in doesn't appear to be particularly serious, Thompson said in his blog. Simon Axten, a Facebook spokesman, said the company is investigating the report and is working on identifying the fake accounts "so we can disable them en masse." In an e-mail message, Axten said that the URL contained in the profiles has already been blacklisted by major Web browsers and have been blocked from being shared on Facebook. And Facebook is sure to deactivate all the new accounts "as quickly as they find them." Even so, the fact that hackers got past Facebook's Captchas highlights a continuing trend by attackers to try and exploit social networks, he said.

The company is using a third-party Captcha company called reCAPTCHA, which was recently acquired by Google and "is about as well-regarded a Captcha provider as there is," he said. Another possibility is that those responsible for the attack farmed out the Captchas to be solved by humans for a price. "On the education front, we encourage users not to click on strange links and to take appropriate steps if they feel their computer or Facebook account has been compromised," he said. Facebook is trying to understand how the new accounts were created, though it is possible that the sign-up process was manual. In a note posted today , the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), which is a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, warned about the trend. According to the IC3, fraudsters are using spam to promote phishing sites or to entice users to download an application or view a video. Fraudsters are continuing to hijack attacks on social networking sites and are using them to spread malicious software, the IC3 warned.

Users visiting such sites or clicking on the videos and photos then get infected by various pieces of malware. Adjusting Web site privacy settings, being selective about friends and what they are allowed to view and disabling options such as texting and photo sharing when they are not being used are all ways users can protect themselves on social networking sites, it said. Often the spam is disguised to appear as if it were sent from a user's 'friend.' Some attackers also plant malicious ads containing malware downloads on social network sites, the IC3 note warned Users of social networking sites need to be aware of such threats and take measures to address them, the IC3 said.

Missing dot drops Sweden off the Internet

What was essentially a typo last night resulted in the temporary disappearance from the Internet of almost a million Web sites in Sweden - every address with a .se top-level down name. Problems that affect an entire top-level zone have very wide-ranging effects as can be seen by the .se incident. … Imagine the same thing happening to the .com domain, which has over 80 million domain names." The total blackout of .se lasted for about an hour and a half, Pingdom says, although aftershocks are expected to continue. "The .SE registry used an incorrectly configured script to update the .se zone, which introduced an error to every single .se domain name," says Pingdom. "We have spoken to a number of industry insiders and what happened is that when updating the data, the script did not add a terminating '.' to the DNS records in the .se zone. According to Web monitoring company Pingdom, which happens to be based in Sweden, the disablement of an entire top-level domain "is exceptionally rare. … Usually it's a single domain name that has been incorrectly configured or the DNS servers of a single Web host having problems.

That trailing dot is necessary in the settings for DNS to understand that '.se" is the top-level domain. Thanks to well-functioning surveillance system .SE discovered the error immediately and a new file with the DNS data (zone file) was produced and distributed within one hour. … The false information that was sent out affected accessibility to all .se domains for a short time. It is a seemingly small detail, but without it, the whole DNS lookup chain broke down." Sweden's Internet Infrastructure Foundation, which administers .se, issued this statement: "The cause was an incorrect software update, which, despite our testing procedures were not detected. However, there may still be some name servers that have not changed out of misinformation against the real." A spokesperson for .se, Maria Eklund told a Swedish press outlet that the issues may not be completely resolved before Wednesday. "This little mistake is going to affect Internet traffic for two days," she told the newspaper. (Speculation that it's really the fault of newly "internationalized" ICANN begins in 3 … 2 … 1.)

Microsoft defends its anti-malware software after Symantec piles on

Microsoft is defending the merits of its free Security Essentials anti-malware software after a top Symantec engineer badmouthed the new release. "Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection that uses behavior monitoring and reputation services to help identify the malicious software as soon as it emerges in the ecosystem and then uses the Dynamic Signature Service to make the newest definitions available virtually real-time, without having to wait for the next signature download," Microsoft said in a statement. 11 security companies to watch Earlier in the week, Jens Meggers, vice president of engineering for Norton products, claimed the newly released Security Essentials is just an unimpressive recycling of Microsoft's discontinued Live OneCare technology for Windows desktops. "It's just stripped down OneCare," Meggers said, citing a report from Dennis Technology Lab that compared Norton AntiVirus 2009 to Microsoft Security Essentials and deemed Norton stronger in malware defense by about a 2-to-1 margin (the test was sponsored by Symantec). Microsoft expressed disappointment in Symantec's claims but did not rebut each of Meggers' remarks. In its statement Microsoft said it "continues to advocate for a defense in depth strategy that includes the use of anti-malware software, but also includes protections such as firewall and user account controls like those found in Windows, browser security like that in IE8 and continuous updates like those provided through Microsoft Update." Microsoft indicated it is offering Microsoft Security essentials for free because "we still see far too many consumers worldwide that do not have up-to-date protection either because they cannot afford it, are concerned about the impact the suites will have on the performance of their PCs, or because they simply do not realize their AV software is not up to date." Offering its software for free, said Microsoft, "will remove some of the barriers in the way of consumers having quality anti-malware protection today."

Music industry signs online distribution agreement with EU

The European Commission has signed an agreement with the online music industry designed to improve consumers' access to online music across the 27-nation European Union, it said Tuesday. The agreement they reached sets out general principles that will underpin the online distribution of music in the future, leading to "improved online music opportunities for European consumers," the participants said in a joint statement. "European consumers want and deserve better online music offerings," Kroes said in a statement, describing the agreement as evidence of "real progress in this direction." This is the first time players involved in the distribution of music have agreed on "a common roadmap," she said. Online music retailers including Amazon.com and Apple, Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia, royalty rights collecting societies, consumer groups and the record labels EMI and Universal Music Group struck the deal with E.U. Commissioner for competition Neelie Kroes. Apple is optimistic that over the coming year it will be able to make its iTunes online music store available in countries where it doesn't operate at present, the Commission said.

The biggest obstacle to creating a fully functioning online marketplace for music until now has been the reluctance of collecting societies to do away with their traditional approach to the European market, which involved each one maintaining a monopoly over rights collection in its national territory. Meanwhile, EMI expects to sign non-exclusive digital licensing agreements with two of the most obstinate collecting societies in Europe - SACEM of France and Spain's SGAE, the Commission said. The Internet's ability to reach across borders makes it harder for online stores to restrict sales to customers in a particular territory.