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INSECURITY OUTFIT McAfee has bought its second mobile security company in as many months.

It has bought Tencube, which makes remote location wipe and locking technology, for an undisclosed amount of cash.

In June McAfee bought Trust Digital for that outfit’s mobile management and security tools.

What appears to interest McAfee is Tencube’s Wavesecure service, which includes remote locate, lock, backup and wipe technology that allows users to find and secure lost mobile phones.

Basically it means that the phone will also automatically go into lock-down mode if it is used with an unauthorized wireless account. It will then ring up the user’s emergency contact number and say where it is.

Wavesecure locked phones also show a permanent message on the screen explaining how to return the phone to its owner, at least until the battery runs out.

McAfee has a cunning plan to offer a child locator service using the technology, which means that you will have to take your child’s phone away from them when you try to lose them. µ

IT SEEMS LIKE not a week goes by without the release of another all-singing, all-dancing smartphone that does things you never imagined ever wanting to do before. And that doesn’t show any sign of slowing down, at least not for a while. So how can you know what you’ll want next month?

We’ve got answers to that question, and they’re all in our only moderately speculative roundup of the most anticipated upcoming smartphones. µ

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT is a big thing for IBM, and it spends around billion a year on R&D across the areas of hardware, software and the physical sciences.

Its lab in Hursley, Winchester is one of the sites where the company does some of this work, mainly working on software. Previously it was a hardware and software location, but it has transitioned away from hardware.

IBM has been at Hursley since 1958 but the site has an older link to technology because it was where the Supermarine Spitfire was developed. Now a classic modern campus site, it has 3,000 people working there.

Big Blue invited The INQUIRER to take a tour around the lab’s innovation centre, an area where IBM is working on new technologies that we might see very soon.

IBM’s Hursley lab has a lot of computational power across the whole range of IBM hardware – x series Intel based servers, p and i series mid-range servers, and z series mainframe computers. All of the hardware systems are dedicated to IBM’s business partners’ use rather than production work, at no charge. 

The innovation centre also has a new datacentre area where an integrated racking solution is exhibited, a room within a room.

Brian Innes, IT specialist at IBM said, “Traditional data centres usually have literally hundreds of copper cables under the floor. The idea here is that there is nothing under the floor – all the cabling is within the rack.

“It is also an enclosed box, so all the cold air comes into the centre of the rack. It has to come through a machine to get out, but it also means we can have a much higher temperature in parts of the room than we do in the centre.

“We have more efficiency inside the cooler, if you have a higher temperature gradient.” he added.

The innovation centre has a lab working on RFID technology. Among what was being worked on was passive RFID and near contact cards, which most people would recognise as the Oyster swipe cards that Londoners use to get around the city.

But passive RFID is also being used in other areas such as on clothing in shops, in libraries for automatic check-in and check-out of books, and in tags within the supply chain. IBM is also working on active RFID, real-time tracking which can follow people through an area, detecting whether people are where they should be.

Being a software location, a lot of work is done on how software can work with RFID. One of the more impressive examples of this was a ‘Minority Report’ style demonstration where a person carrying an RFID tag in something like a badge went through an area and it switched on messages catered for them.

Obviously the applications for this are clear to see, such as advertising catered for anybody carrying a mobile phone with a particular RFID chip passing through a certain zone or shop.

IBM is also working with analytical technology to study all the data that can be generated through this RFID environment and make sense out of it.

The innovation centre also has a retail lab, which showcased some of the technology we could see in supermarkets and shopping centres in a few years.

For example the lab was working with E Ink, the technology used in an e-book reader like the Kindle, to change prices on shop labels after being scanned from a barcode reader. LCD and dot matrix displays can also be used in the same way, although those require power.

And there were communication devices shop workers could carry that made them contactable throughout their shift, help them stock check, and also find out any price through its inbuilt barcode scanner.

The lab also ran a system that had a digital playlist with certain adverts played on a monitor. If a customer scanned a DVD with a Near Field Communication tag on the system, it would play the suitable advert on screen. This could be also done with mobile phones.

One of the most recent introductions to the innovation centre was a lab on smart meter technology, which IBM has been making a big push on thanks to the government’s increased focus on trying to get people to waste less energy.

As opposed to ‘dumb’ meters that need to be read, smart meters could be used by people to get more information about how and what energy was being used on a daily basis, and how they were being charged.

James Caffrey, researcher at IBM said, “We’ve got a couple of gas meters that are actually talking to smart meters over what we call a mesh network using technology such as ZigBee.

“We’ve also got in-home displays that the government said has to be put in. This is a way we’ve got of communicating to the consumer how much energy they are using.

“Not only in KwH and calorific values which frankly don’t mean much to the user, but in pounds and pence and 12 months of historic information. We’ve got one here which is wireless and touchscreen.”

These were the labs that showed the more developed areas of research IBM was doing at Hursley, but The INQUIRER was also informed about other work that were not quite at that stage.

These included sign language translation technology that turned spoken words into on-screen avatars, and the ‘Emotive’ headset, which picks up neurons and a molecular signal using sensors. The messages are then analysed and fed through software that can be made to carry out actions.

This could have wide-ranging applications, such as turning on lights without having to press anything, or for use by the disabled to move limbs and even walk.

The perception of IBM as a serious, business orientated company is well deserved. Of course it doesn’t have the wow factor of a consumer gadgets company like Apple, simply because of the types of technologies it focuses on.

But IBM’s technology R&D affects us, whether through retail, financial systems, or even gaming – the Wii is powered by an IBM chip after all. µ

WRITING BAD CHEQUES is back with a criminal gang, thought to be operating out of Russia, using technology to revive this old form of fraud.

The criminals broke into three cheque archiving image sites, which are used to store pictures of all cheques that pass through retailers. The gang downloaded 200,000 examples and used the account numbers, sort codes and signatures to write cheques drawn on over 1,200 legitimate accounts.

A team at Atlanta-based security firm SecureWorks uncovered the fraud, which is thought to have netted the gang at least million (£5.75 million). The company is working with the FBI, but none of the gang have been arrested so far.

Counterfeit cheque writing is a very old form of fraud, but the gang had put a high-tech twist on it, explained Michael Cote, CEO of SecureWorks.

The image sites involved have been notified, but others are no doubt being targeted, he warned.

The gang sent the bogus cheques to money mules around the world using overnight shipping paid for with stolen credit cards. SecureWorks said that six mules had been contacted, all of whom denied sending money to the gang.

The fraud involved 3,285 cheques against 1,280 accounts since June 2009. Most were for less than ,000 (£1,920) in an attempt to evade anti-fraud measures. µ

A BILL OF MATERIALS (BOM) worth precisely 3.35 is Isuppli’s estimate of what HTC’s Droid Incredible phone actually costs in components and assembly.

Its Teardown Analysis Service came to this conclusion largely because the Droid uses an Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode (AMOLED) display, a Qualcomm 1GHz Snapdragon baseband processor and 4Gbit of mobile Double Data Rate (DDR) DRAM.

Qualcomm, Samsung and Hynix lead the BOM parade. The most expensive section of the Droid is the baseband applications processor at a cost of .40, accounting for 19.2 per cent of the smart phone’s total BOM. This section is dominated by Qualcomm’s baseband integrated circuit that has the Snapdragon processor.

Coming in at a close second in terms of expense is the touchscreen display at a cost of .20, or 19.1 per cent of the total. The AMOLED display portion of this subsystem is supplied by Samsung Mobile Display Company.

Next in the ranking is the memory section, at a cost of .80 and accounting for 18.2 per cent of the tab. In the handset torn down by Isuppli, this section consists of NAND flash memory and mobile DDR DRAM from Samsung Electronics and more NAND from Hynix Semiconductor. However, Isuppli believes that HTC is likely using additional sources of supply for these commodity memory parts.

Pricing for components found inside of equipment is determined using Isuppli’s component price tracker service. It provides detailed information on costs for more than 350 components commonly found in electronic equipment, allowing Isuppli to develop its BOM estimates.

The teardown assessment accounts only for hardware and manufacturing costs and does not take into consideration other expenses such as software, licensing, and royalties. µ

A USB STICK holding some standard keys purchased on the Internet was able to override an ATM’s firmware and cause it to spew fake million dollar bills at Black Hat 2010.

Security researcher Barnaby Jacks demonstrated that attack and another on the conference’s first day. Most ATMs use Windows CE or a cut down version of Windows XP but Jacks used a cloned version of the machines’ firmware to carry out the attacks.

With the second attack Jacks used the remote updating capabilities of the ATM to upload code that not only caused it to empty itself but also took a record of the cards used and their PIN numbers.

However these two hacks have now been countered by companies and in the case of the second hack, firmware updates now require a digital signature before they can be installed on ATM machines.

Jacks, the head of research at cybersecurity consultancy IO Active, said, “”Every ATM I’ve looked at I’ve found a game-over vulnerability that allows me to get cash. So far I’ve looked at four and running four for four at the moment.”

Jacks was due to give his presentation at last year’s Black Hat conference but was stopped by legal action because fixes for the problems weren’t available. µ

THE OPEN SOURCE Mozilla Foundation has unwrapped the second beta for version 4.0 of its Firefox web browser.

Firefox 4 will be the next major release of Mozzarella’s web browser and will include a number of improvements, updates and new features for both end users and developers.

Firefox 4 beta 2 includes the new ‘tabs on top’ layout that puts the tabs in the same place as the Chrome and Opera web browsers. It is now available in 23 languages.

Actually Windows users saw the tabs thing in the first Firefox 4 beta earlier this month, but this is the first time the feature has made it to the Mac version.

The developers moved the tabs to “make it easier to focus on the Web content” and note that Linux systems will receive the new tabs on top layout in a future update “when the theme has been modified to support the change”.

Changes affecting developers include support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) transitions, a feature that lets websites animate changes rather than having the changes take effect instantly.

Other changes include the idea of retained layers, allowing for “super-fast scrolling” on complex websites and changes to the XPCOM framework that improve start-up time.

The plan is for developers to release another beta version “every two to three weeks”. A first release candidate (RC) for Firefox 4 is due to to arrive in October. µ