TechNews

Good news for all you Ubuntu Linux fans out there. Just yesterday (April 29th), Cannonical, the company that makes Ubuntu Linux, launched a new version of of Ubuntu, version 10.04 LTS. The LTS version means Long Term Support and will stay in production with active support available to end users and enterprises for at least three years. Cannonical will also make sure it maintains security and maintainence updates for this version for at-least three years. The latest version was released by Cannonical in London on April 27th and worldwide on April 29th.

Windows Seven is really become much more popular than its predecessor Windows Vista. Its the one operating system from Microsoft that has kept the same "minimum system requirements" from going to one OS to next (Vista to Windows Seven). The one thing that has not gone down, for the new operating system is the price. The charm and temptation of Windows Seven had kept up the piracy levels despite the normal anti-piracy and counter fitting measures in place from Microsoft. Pirates and hackers were simply able to defeat or trick the "Windows Activation" requirement and bypassed the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) check . This all just changed and the anti-piracy bar has just been raised with Microsoft's new patch release

The ship has not sunk yet! Pirate Bay's IPreadtor service has come out of Beta and launched for users yesterday. Back in March of 2009, we wrote an article about Pirate Bay launching a new offensive against law enforcement's prying eyes on netizens. Yesterday Pirate Bay completed its iPreadtor project and is now offering the service to anyone. The iPreadtor essentially is a VPN service which deploys between your machine and the internet, providing completely secure and encrypted transmission of traffic, meaning no one can see or check what you are downloading. A lot of Netizens who were afraid of downloading torrents from Pirate Bay and any other sites can now do so without being paranoid.

Todays news article on computer forensics is about hacking encrypted USB thumb drives. The encryption being talked about is AES 256 hardware encryption, which til date use to be considered a very reputable and safe standard in the world of digital and computer forensics. You must have seen online advertisements about the most secure hardware based AES 256 bit encrypted USB thumb drives from popular brand names such as Kingston and SanDisk, these are the ones that have been found to be completely vulnerable by a computer forensic company based off Germany called SySS. Their tests show a major design vulnerability that can decrypt the present information on the thumb drive.

There is a new standard in the USB world called USB 3.0, in this article we will discuss the difference between USB 2,0 and USB 3.0. Universal Serial Bus or USB, as you all know is the most popular connection standard between devices and a host controller (usually located on a computer). USB has undergone many revisions and the latest USB hardware spec to come out is version 3.0, after version 1 and 2. Everything from your flash drives, mice, keyboard, PDAs, Game Consoles, GPS chargers, cell phone connectors and chargers,  GPS devices and bluetooth head sets all use USB in one form or the other. So lets see whats the differences between the most popular USB 2 and just out USB 3 standard are