NEWS,
Apple's Ginormous Data Center Nears Completion
Monday, March 01, 2010 @ 10:27 AM by Kalieb in iPhone/iPod/iPad.
A local real estate agent [posted a video to YouTube this week showing the massive data center that Apple has been building in the woods outside Malden, North Carolina in the southeastern US. At 500,000 square feet, the facility is the size of a shopping mall, nearly five times the size of the company's existing data center in the San Francisco Bay Area. All Apple has said is that the facility will serve as its East Coast hub, but hasn't explained why it needs such a large data center, which will cost the company $1 billion US over the next nine years.
Most observers have concluded that the facility is being build to support a serious move by Apple into the cloud computing space. While Apple's online presence is quite modest now, some moves that it's made in recent years indicate possible directions the company may be headed in. The acquisition of Lala.com last year suggested that Apple was bringing their engineering talent in-house to move iTunes to a cloud-based model. And Apple's "Grab & Go" patent, dated in 2008 and revealed last November, described an ambitious scheme to allow seamless sync of different devices - iPhones, iPads and Macs - over the network.
Lala's technology would allow users to store their iTunes music libraries on Apple's cloud servers, which would provide on the go access to more music than can fit on an iPhone or iPod. Presumably the same system would allow iBookstore content to be saved on the cloud as well, so that iPad owners could carry their entire collections with them. Since the Lala app saves the last few hundred songs in a cache, users will still have access to some of their media even when they're not connected to the internet.
Apple's Grab&Go system would provide much the same functionality for a user's documents. In addition to saving data, Grab&Go can also store program states, so that - for example - a game could be started on your desktop Mac, synced with Grab&Go, and continued on an iPhone or iPad right where you left off. Essentially MobileMe on steroids, Grab&Go would also provide security methods and hard encryption to protect data transferred over public networks in places like hotspots.
Obviously, these types of applications would require huge amounts of storage, fat pipes and a lot of power. Apple is keeping the purpose of the facility secret, but it's right down US 321 from Google's Lenoir data center, and both facilities will benefit from cheap electricity: cost per kilowatt/hour is about half what it costs in California.
| | | 0 views
GeoHot and DevTeam Discuss Exploits for New Baseband
Monday, February 22, 2010 @ 09:25 AM by Kalieb in iPhone/iPod/iPad.
Well folks, we're almost there. In the very near future, baseband 05.12.01 could be unlockable for those of us unfortunate enough to be stuck in this position. Now it doesn't necessarily mean 3.1.3 will be worked on, but its good news none the less for those unfortunate users, and for the possibility of a group effort for the next unlock between GeoHot and the DevTeam. Discussed in an IRC channel, GeoHot and the DevTeam's MuscleNerd, share some thoughts on the exploits they have found, and by the looks of things, might actually team up to dish out an ultimate serving of Jailbreaking goodness.
GeoHot explains that there is an exploit that he had previously discovered and wanted to use with the release of blacksn0w, which has now found to still exist in 3.1.3. He goes on to discuss how he had originally wanted to implement this exploit in blacksn0w but opted to go with an open source route, which makes sense to keep things slightly on the downlow.
It sounds as though GeoHot and MuscleNerd (Dev Team) may possibly be working on the same exploit, and if that's the case, it would be incredibly logical for them to team up rather than releasing two different exploits, which in the end could just cause more greif when upgrading in the future.
Here is the excerpt posted by @visnet's twitter that is going around from the IRC Channel.
Quote:
<%geohot> its my bb exploit for safekeeping
<%Par4doX> geohot: did you turn that over to the dev team or are you doing something with it?
<%geohot> my days of turning things over are done
<%geohot> i hope its different from the one they have
<%geohot> but they prob already have it
<%geohot> its the one i orig wanted to release blacksn0w with
<%Par4doX> it’s still there in the new bb
<%geohot> yep, just checked
<%geohot> but then opted to use xemn since it was public
<%geohot> why wouldn’t it, apple doesn’t fix things proactivly
<@MuscleNerd> geohot we prob should figure out a way to know if we have same exploit double blind, otherwise we may release 2 different ones at same time
<%geohot> any suggestions?
<@MuscleNerd> not sure how to do that without making it easy to brute force tho
<%geohot> yea, i salted the hash
<@MuscleNerd> yeah
<@MuscleNerd> hmm maybe if we both hash the stack dump
<@Confucious> Can you two take this out of public sight?
<@MuscleNerd> the stack itself, not the header before it or the registers after it
<%geohot> we are working on it
<%geohot> cryptography, perfect for people who don’t trust each other
So take it as you will and share your thoughts. Again, we don't expect much for 3.1.3 (Rumor has it OS 3.2 will drop mid March), but this is good news for those of you in an utterly awful situation if your phone has become more like an really expensive iPod Touch.
| | | 0 views
Next >>>