Dell Latitude E-Family Refresh
Dell this week launched new enhancements to its Latitude line of business notebooks. The PCs include the latest Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors, fast DDR3 memory, HD displays and new colors. Dell also has bolstered data protection, asset monitoring and remote management to complement the new PCs. Pictured at left is the Latitude e6410 in black.

Mobility, Usability, Technology
The E6410 (left), is a 14-inch model. Dell also introduced the E6510 15-inch version and a semi-rugged version of the E6410, built on Dell’s All-Terrain Grade (ATG) platform, said Patrick Burns, senior manager of Latitude product marketing at Dell.

“Three things were key as we bring these to market. One is mobile collaboration. Customers continue to require full remote capabilities. They need to work on the go. Second, as technology enhances, they want to improve usability for users of all levels. The third is the interior of the machines, the technology architecture, with a few components being refreshed,”

By Edward F. Moltzen, ChannelWeb     Well, it’s here. The big question, though, is whether April 3, 2010 will be a headline or a footnote in the technology industry’s history book. After giving a look over for several hours, the bet here is on headline. A big, 64-point headline.Apple (NSDQ:AAPL)’s iPad will change use patterns, alter expectations and force PC makers that compete with Apple to change their strategies. It’s not a business device but it will start seeping into the corporate world in spite of efforts by CIOs and IT administrators to keep it out.

In fact, it’s not even ludicrous to believe iPhone as an operating system — the OS that powers the iPad and iPhone — will give Windows 7 a run for its money this year in number of devices actually used for business. Here are a few reasons why:

Form factor: Like it or hate it, iPad’s form factor is just easy to carry around and use during the course of a work day. A pound and a half feels like nothing compared to even an ultra-light notebook. It’s smaller than even a legal pad for note-taking and, via its Safari browser, data access over the Web is fast and easy.

Battery life: Apple says iPad provides 10 hours of battery life and, as others have noted, it will likely actually give you more than that. After four hours, our iPad still registered 70 percent battery life with audio running in the background the entire time. It was also used for word processing, its GPS/mapping was tried out, and other testing was performed. Unlike the iPhone, though, iPad tells you what percent of battery life you actually have remaining so you can manage power use easier. Battery life here is a competitive strength not a weakness.

The keyboard: After two minutes, you might hate it. After five minutes, though, you could start loving it. This review is being typed on iPad using Apple’s $9.99 Pages app, which has been optimized for iPad. Once you get the feel of it, even power typers like the one writing this review will find it easy and comfortable to use. (Full disclosure: this is being written in landscape mode, where the keyboard is larger and wider.)

Performance: Apple is using a 1.00 GHz A4 processor for iPad — its own, proprietary CPU. That was a roll of the dice on Apple’s part, but it seems to have paid off. The device boots fast, runs fast, is exceptionally cool to the touch after a couple of hours of use and, as mentioned, gets great battery life. That can’t be an accident. While Intel has done ground-breaking work on developing and engineering the Atom platform, from this vantage point it appears that Apple has either caught Intel or surpassed it on mobile CPU technology. (Extensive, head-to-head benchmarking between A4 and Atom will need to confirm this, though.) For now, just know that Apple is sitting on powerful processing technology that will deeply impact the industry, it seems, for much time to come.

By Kevin McLaughlin, ChannelWeb  Microsoft on Tuesday (today) will issue its second out-of-band security patch of the year to deal with a zero day vulnerability affecting Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 that’s been used in targeted attacks for the past several weeks.Security update MS10-018 will patch the IE 6 and IE 7 vulnerability, which is caused by an invalid pointer reference within IE that can be accessed after an object is deleted, paving the way for hackers to carry out remote code execution attacks.

Update MS10-018 also fixes nine additional vulnerabilities, some of which affect IE 8, Microsoft said in a Monday blog post. Microsoft says these nine flaws “were responsibly disclosed” and that it isn’t aware of any active attacks that are targeting them.

Microsoft first warned users of the zero day on March 9 and said at the time that its impact was limited to “targeted” attacks. But the subsequent appearance of exploit code forced Microsoft’s hand and necessitated the out-of-band patch.

In one attack outlined by McAfee Labs, unsuspecting Web surfers that visited the domain topix21century.com were served up a drive-by download of a Trojan named notes.exe, which would them create two copies of itself in the Windows temp directory and generate a .DLL file that, when injected into IE, would give attackers remote access.

Out-of-band patches are rare, but Microsoft in January released one to deal with a major IE vulnerability that was used by hackers in China in attacks against Google (NSDQ:GOOG) and more than 30 other Silicon Valley firms.

By Rick Whiting The computer hacker who carried out one of the largest computer data thefts in history has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.Albert Gonzalez had led a ring of hackers who stole more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers by breaking into computer systems run by such major retailers as TJX, which operates the TJ Maxx and Marshalls stores, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Barnes & Noble, Office Max and others.

Gonzalez, 28, a college dropout from Miami, pleaded guilty to a string of charges stemming from the attacks during his trial in September 2009. Under the agreement with prosecutors, he faced a possible sentence of between 15 and 25 years in prison.

A story in the Boston Globe stated the sentence was one of the longest ever imposed for computer crime or identity theft. U.S. District Judge Patti Saris imposed the 20-year sentence, weighing Gonzalez’ remorse against the scope of the crime and the amount of damage created by the hackingincidents and data thefts.

Gonzalez and his co-conspirators caused some $200 million in damages to the targeted businesses, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann, quoted in a Reuters news story.

Gonzalez, using the pseudonyms “segvec” and “soupnazi,” used SQL injection attacks to exploit weaknesses in the retailers’ payment systems to access credit card data, according to a BBC News story. The stolen card numbers were either sold on the black market in Eastern Europe or used to withdraw cash from ATMs.

Gonzalez faces the prospect of receiving more jail time when he is sentenced today in a separate case of helping to steal as many as 130 million credit and debit card numbers from Heartland Payment Systems, a credit and debit card payment processing company, the 7-Eleven convenience store chain and supermarket chain Hannaford Brothers. The Boston Globe said he faces a sentence of 17 to 25 years in that case.

Authorities have recovered $1.5 million in assets from Gonzalez, including his home and car and $1.1 million in cash he buried in the backyard of his parents’ house.

Gonzalez has been in jail since his arrest in may 2008.

By Stefanie Hoffman, ChannelWeb Mozilla issued a critical update to its Firefox Web browser a week early, plugging a security hole in version 3.6 that could leave the browser vulnerable to malicious attacks.
The latest version of the browser, Firefox 3.6.2, was released as a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms Tuesday. The update patches an existing zero-day flaw in 3.6 that could enable hackers to execute code remotely to crash a user’s system, run malicious programs or take complete control of users’ computers.

The fix was initially slated for release March 30, however Mozilla was prompted to issue the fix a week early after the German governmental division that deals with cyber threats — BurgerCERT — began to publicly warn users to avoid the Firefox 3.6 browser until Mozilla officially released a patch.

The security flaw, which was first discovered by Evgeny Legerov of Intevydis last month, occurred as the result of an integer overflow vulnerability in the WOFF decoder. The flaw could result in a memory buffer too small to store a downloadable font that could be used by cyber criminals to launch attacks.

Versions of the open source Firefox browser previous to 3.6 are immune to the vulnerability due to the fact that they do not rely on the affected WOFF decoder, Mozilla said.

The early release of the Firefox browser recalls similar actions by France and Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security that advised users to avoid using the Internet Explorer browser following the Google Aurora attacks in January, spurring Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) to release an emergency out-of-band patch repairing the flaw.

While so far there are no active attacks exploiting the vulnerability, Mozilla said in a blog post that it strongly recommended that Firefox 3.6 users update their browser to the latest version 3.6.2 as soon as possible, while encouraging Firefox 3 and 3.5 users to upgrade to 3.6 and then check for updates. Existing Firefox 3.6 users will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. The security update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates” tab from the Help menu.