SanDisk said Monday that Windows Vista is not optimized for solid-state drives, delaying the delivery of optimized drives until next year.

This is due to Vista's design. "The next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls," he said.

Security researcher and author Kris Kaspersky plans to demonstrate how an attacker can target flaws in Intel's microprocessors to remotely attack a computer using JavaScript or TCP/IP packets, regardless of what operating system the computer is running.

The demonstrated attack will be made against fully patched computers running a range of operating systems, including Windows XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Linux and BSD, Kaspersky said, adding that the demonstration of an attack against a Mac is also a possibility.

A lot of things can happen in 200 years, but one thing data storage disc manufacturer Delkin Devices guarantees won't occur is data loss. That's because the firm's launched a Blu-ray Disc reputedly capable of retaining content for two centuries.

Delkin does state that its patented "phase-change" recording materials allow the discs to withstand the effects of UV light, heat and humidity.

The FBI announced Friday that an investigation into counterfeit network components made in China and sold to the U.S. government has recovered about 3,500 fake devices with a value of $3.5 million.

The criminal probe, code-named Operation Cisco Raider, was prompted by concerns that counterfeit network components could give hackers access to government databases.

Components included pirated versions of Cisco Systems routers as well as switches, interface converters and wide area network interface cards, Reuters reported.

Witness the OpenMicroServer, which this week went on sale to North American folk. It's 9 inches by 4 inches by 1.3 inches. The system has built-in Power over Ethernet and can run fanless at up to 122°F over long periods of time. CRAC units need not apply. It also sports a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, a 100Mb port, a pair of USB ports and a pair of serial ports.

Earlier this month, Buffalo dished out the dual drive LinkStation Mini. This baby weighs just 1.1 pounds and measures 1.6 inches by 3.2 inches by 5.3 inches. It will ship in volume next month with a capacity of 1TB.

The new 2.5" 7,200RPM SATA hard disk drive (HDD) incorporates the AES-256 encryption standard at the hardware level without the need for additional software.

The new Fujitsu drive performs its encryption entirely within the BIOS during power on. Encryption performed within the BIOS prevents the keys from being stored in the clear anywhere on the drive.

According to Fujitsu, "the key used to encrypt and decrypt data is cryptographically regenerated at power-on, and is not known even to the HDD when the system is powered off."

Seagate has fired off its first lawsuit at a maker of solid-state drives since CEO Bill Watkins hinted last month that the company might be forced into taking such action.

STEC told the New York Times that Seagate hadn't approached it to discuss resolving the matter out of court, but it's not as if the company didn't have any warning. Watkins told the world last month that lawsuits might be the outcome if Flash drives become too popular.

Tracking dots are the secret marks that many popular color laser printers and photocopiers scatter across every document they touch. The marks, almost invisible to the eye, uniquely identify the printer that produced the document, and, as EFF uncovered, can even automatically encode the time and date it was created.

It turns out that the European Commission, the executive wing of the EU (whose members include many former Eastern Bloc states), shares these concerns.

Given that including tracking systems in printers appears to be a U.S. government policy, how hard does the EU plan to pressure their ally for change in its secret agreements with printer manufacturers? Is the United States sharing its knowledge of how to decode these dots with individual EU nations' governments? And if so, what other governments, authoritarian or not, know the secret of tracking their citizens' publications?

In 2008, almost every sector will continue the battle with data overload. Entertainment powerhouses - from television stations to big-name amusement parks - will struggle to house huge media files or to manage the data necessary to track customer spending trends.

According to Milford, Mass.-based analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group Inc., private-sector archive capacity will hit an eye-popping 27,000 petabytes by 2010. Skyrocketing rates of e-mail growth account for much of this figure.

To combat spiraling data overload, corporate IT leaders will scour the market for ways to centralize storage and they will pursue options such as clustered architectures and unified storage-area networks (SAN). Data-pruning techniques, including the use of thin provisioning and data de-duplication tools, will also be high on 2008 corporate storage wish lists, according to Forrester Research Inc. analyst Andrew Reichman.

This is the most extreme example I've seen yet of tech companies crippling data devices in order to please Hollywood: Western Digital is disabling sharing of any avi, divx, mp3, mpeg, and many other files on its network connected devices; due to unverifiable media license authentication'. Just wondering -- who needs a 1 Terabyte network-connected hard drive that is prohibited from serving most media files? Perhaps somebody with 220 million pages of .txt files they need to share?