Sony’s new Bravia line, in addition to being chock-full of slick 1080p sets, features access to Audio Description (AD) standard. AD is a system that allows the blind to better follow what’s going on onscreen by using a voice to narrate plot points during gaps in dialogue. With most TVs, you need an additional decoder to listen to AD tracks, but now all Sony Bravia TVs will have Integrated Digital Television (IDTV), and provide access to AD without needing a decoder. There are also some nice stats on how the picture looks, but I don’t want to be a dick, so you folks with working eyes can investigate that yourselves.
More information [Akihabara News]
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If you don’t like sending Google Talk instant messages in the clear, you can encrypt them using a home SSH server. The Security Hacks weblog runs down how using the baked-in SSH utility for Mac OS X or freeware app, Plink, for Windows. (For another take, see our previously-posted how to set up a home SSH server tutorial.) If your IM encryption needs extend beyond GTalk, check out Gina’s guide to encrypting chat sessions using Gaim (now Pidgin).
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Google Talk over SSH [Security Hacks]
Google Gears developer Aaron Boodman put together a simple offline/online web-based notepad application called GearPad. Sign up for a free account at GearPad, which is simply a big text box for you to enter notes, lists and ideas. Since GearPad is Google Gears-enabled, you can edit the text while you’re offline and when you connect to the internet again, your changes automatically sync. Not a lot of bells and whistles here, but if you work in plain text across many computers that come on and off the internet often, GearPad’s for you. You’ll need Google Gears (for Firefox or IE) to get GearPad’s offline capabilities.
GearPad [Aaron Boodman]
As a follow up on our earlier post about Apple’s $300 million iPhone weekend – January estimates guessed that Apple was making 20-50% margins on the iPhone (probably closer to 20%).
New estimates, based on a tear down of a unit by Austin-based Portelligent, put the cost of components at a mere $220. This does not include the cost of final assembly.
The most expensive part is the touch screen, (probably) produced by a German company called Balda. The estimated cost of the screen is around $60. Samsung produced the main microprocessor chip and the NAND-type flash memory.
The production cost of the much less popular 4 GB version of the iPhone is $200.
AFTER A BRIEF drop in spam levels, they’re back up to making 90 per cent of all scanned email, reports the Softscan security team.
June has been up and down with spam levels – with some days reaching a comparitively low figure of 86 per cent of all emails – but also reaching a record high of 96.55 per cent of all the email Softscan saw. The peak for June weekdays was 91.36 per cent.
Top boy at Softscan Diego d’Ambra reckons the fluctuating spam levels don’t signify a change for the better “since the overall trend is so high”.
But while there’s still tons of spam floating about on the net, the number of intercepted emails that were carrying viruses fell in June to just 0.61 per cent.
Over 96 per cent of malicious emails for June were phishing attempts, followed by pesky netsky, stration, bagle and mytop as the next big hitters respectively.
More information [The Inquirer]
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Linux weblog Ubuntu Switch demonstrates how to control an Ubuntu computer from Windows using SSH and VNC. Back in the day Gina wrote a tutorial on how to go headless using VNC. This process is really similar in Linux — the caveat being that there’s no need to install a VNC server since Ubuntu and most Linux distros have some form of a VNC server built in. The tutorial requires SSH, VNC, and port forwarding — all things we’ve covered here in the past. The process is pretty Ubuntu-specific, but should work equally well with any Gnome-based distro.
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Securely Remote Control Your Ubuntu [Ubuntu Switch]
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.
More information [The Inquirer]
