First Google Android Phone Approved by the FCC

The first Google Android Phone has been approved by the FCC. The HTC dream will be the first Android phone.

Today, the news broke that the HTC Dream, the first handset to run Android (aka “the Google Phone”) has been approved by the FCC. In the documents provided, it appears that we have now a release date for this highly anticipated phone: November 10th, 2008.

Another challenger appears!

Read the full article at readwriteweb.com

QuickPwn release removes the need to do an iTunes restore!

The iphone-dev.org has created a new means of Jail Breaking your iPhone that doesn’t require the need to create a modified .ipsw and process a full restore through iTunes. Its called QuickPwn.

News is just out of a new way to jailbreak your iPhone, and this time the tool is specifically designed to work “quickly and easily, without requiring a full restore.” Quickpwn has been released as a beta, intended to complement the main PwnageTool.

AMD 64 2000+ vs Intel’s Atom: AMD’s 8-watt processor outperforms Intels Atom

Intel’s Atom processor and AMD’s 64 2000+ were pitted against each other. And the results were for once in favor of AMD.

In our Munich lab’s duel of the energy-savers, the AMD Athlon 64 2000+ beats the Intel Atom 230 in energy consumption and processing power. Each of the systems was based on a desktop platform. The Achilles heel of the Intel system is its old system platform with the 945GC chipset, while AMD offers a more modern 780G platform.

The energy-saving solution from AMD offers more possibilities: it has three times as many SATA ports, possesses better onboard graphics performance, and can also support two monitors. Unlike the Intel solution, an HD resolution (1920×1200) with high picture quality is possible through DVI/HDMI ports. And early information suggests that the AMD Athlon 64 2000+ should cost close to $90.

Read the full article at tomshardware.com

Apple releases iPhone 2.0.2 Firmware/Update

It has only been a few weeks and Apple has already released an updated firmwave for the iPhone. Could this mean Apple isn’t going to sit on bugfixes, are more updates going to be released in the same short time span. A couple of weeks is really short, however a couple of months to improve some iPhone features, fix bugs or release new functionality is something that should be embraced.

FOSS Advertising Network Ad Bard

Ad Bard is a free advertising community for FOSS oriented websites and advertisers. A snippet from their about page

The Ad Bard Network aims to foster a friendly and useful advertising community for FOSS oriented websites and advertisers. As a fellow Ad Bard, you will help to ensure that the advertisements in our network remain useful, relevant, and non-obnoxious. Ad Bard members earn 80% of the price-per-click each time an advertisement is clicked on your website.

Our advertising community is entirely built with free and open source software, with all involved algorithms and schemas freely available for public scrutiny.

Definitely a neat and good way for FOSS websites to generate revenue aside from donations.

Ad Bard Website

Guide to upgrading Drupal using SSH Commands

A well written guide on how to upgrade Drupal using SSH commands

This guide is meant to augment the official Upgrade guide. Please read the official upgrade steps in UPGRADE.txt as well as in the Drupal.org Dcoumentation thoroughly to ensure that you understand every aspect of the upgrade process. This guide is for more advanced users with SSH experience.

Western Digital developing 20,000RPM drives

That’s right, this isn’t a joke.

The new drive will be very similar to the recently-released VelociRaptor, in that it’ll be a 2.5in drive with a custom 3.5in housing built around it. Details are incredibly light at this stage, given that the product is still in development, and we don’t even have a release timeframe at the moment.

However, our sources said that the drive will be ‘silent’ – that’s the last thing I would have expected from a drive with platters spinning at 20,000 RPM. Western Digital is apparently working on silencing the beast by improving the housing technology, which will now not just act as a heatsink, but also as a noise cancelling device. We’d also hope that the drive enclosure has some vibration dampening technology as well, because that’s also likely to be a problem given the high spindle speeds.

Now they just need push SATA 6.0Gbit/s onto motherboards

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA#SATA_6.0_Gbit.2Fs

Full artile at bit-tech.net

MySQL and OpenSSL Replication what a mess!

Just a heads up, if you do decide to enable OpenSSL so you can do encrypted MySQL replication. There are two bugs that will affect replication and the mysqldump command. They’re as follows:

Bug #24148 regression tests hang with SSL enabled
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=24148
http://lists.mysql.com/commits/17286

Bug #27669 mysqldump: Got error: 2026: SSL connection error when trying to connect
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=27669
http://lists.mysql.com/commits/24329

This may cause lots of problems with MySQL and SSL Replication using OpenSSL.

Cheers!

Stop Brute Force logins through SSH/POP3/IMAP with BFD

This nifty little script allows you to monitor log files for instances of brute forcing as well as popular exploits that show up in your server logs files. Anyone that has many servers should check this out.

BFD (Brute Force Detector) Home Page

There is also a nice little write up of how to implement BFD without AFP and some extended rules.

BFD rules for Jag servers

Exim4 and PHP and PHP-CGI mail() function using incorrect From: and applying Sender: headers.

If you’re using Exim4 and PHP as a module or as a CGI with suexec. You may have noticed some issues with your mail. Specifically you would have noticed that either the “From:” header was using “nobody@machinename” or “user@machine name, its also possibly that you had an additional header called “Sender:”.

There are two things you need to do to fix this. You first need to make sure that your “php.ini” has the following value “sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i”. Which is the default, double check this variable as it might be set to something else.