Microsoft has revealed some details of a forthcoming service that will allow Windows Mobile users to synchronize information between their phone and the Web.

The service, called My Phone, will provide a place to store data such as photos, videos, text messages and calendar items. Users will then be able to share that data with others or use the service as a way to back up information on their phone.

A description of My Phone appeared earlier Friday at getskybox.com, but Microsoft pulled the site after several blogs wrote stories about it. Getskybox.com now redirects to a new URL that has much of the same description.

Getskybox.com went live earlier than planned, and Microsoft will offer more details about My Phone at the Mobile World Congress trade show in mid-February, said a Microsoft spokesman. The service will be available at that time as a limited, invitation-only beta, he said.

Microsoft already has a service that does something similar to My Phone. Live Mesh lets people upload photos and other information to a Web page and access the data from a mobile phone.

But My Phone may be different because it will automatically synch a wide array of information from phones. In addition, while anyone with a phone and a browser can use Live Mesh, My Phone will be limited to people using phones with Windows Mobile 6. -PC World

Imagine storing 100 movies in glorious high-definition on a card the size of a postage stamp, then calling them up instantaneously for viewing on your cell phone whenever and wherever you like.

That could happen within five years, according to the SD Association, a trade group that brings together more than 1,100 technology companies from SanDisk Corp to Hewlett-Packard Co and sets interoperable memory card standards.

Consumers will be able to store as many as 100 high-definition movies on a stamp-sized memory card and retrieve them with devices such as mobile phones and digital cameras, according to the promoters of the next-generation SD card technology.

The first of a new series of “extended capacity” cards, dubbed “SDXC,” will be available toward the end of this year en route to an eventual 2 terabytes of onboard storage capacity in less than five years, James Taylor, president of the SD Association, said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

A terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes. The SD group also encompasses such powerhouses as Panasonic Corp, Toshiba Corp , Nikon Corp and Canon Inc.

The SDXC specification, developed by the association, “leapfrogs memory card interface speeds” while retaining the popular SD interface, the association said. Specifications for the open standard will be released in the first quarter of 2009.

The first such cards are likely to provide 64 gigabytes of storage, twice the maximum in existing SDHC memory cards, Taylor said in an interview.

Even at early capacity levels, he said the SDXC standard would enhance the operation of digital cameras and camcorders. The association says the cards ultimately will turn mobile phones into full-fledged media centers, thanks to faster transfer speeds and huge capacity.

At its maximum 2 terabyte capacity, an SDXC memory card will store an estimated 100 high-definition movies, 480 hours of professional quality audio recording or 136,000 fine-mode photos, the trade group said.

SD cards account for nearly 80 percent of the memory card market, according to the association, which predicts the so-called “flash” memory markets will grow tremendously in coming years. Such storage devices use no moving parts, curbing the drain on batteries in handheld gizmos.

“The SD interface already has proven itself valuable in mobile phones. Now, SDXC memory card capabilities will spur further handset sophistication and boost consumer content demand,” Taylor said.

Shigeto Kanda, general manager at Canon, said in a statement that the new specification, which retains the existing shape and size of SD memory cards, will help consumers realize the full potential of Canon cameras.

“Improvements in interface speed allow further increases in continuous shooting speed and higher resolution movie recordings,” Kanda said. -Reuters

Western Digital (WD), the world’s leader in external storage solutions, has introduced a simple way for consumers to play their stored digital content on their HDTV in Full-HD 1080p resolution. The WD TV™ Media Player connects to a user’s TV or home theater and plays digital movies, music and photos from WD’s My Passport™ portable drive or other USB mass storage device. The WD TV Media Player is available now at select retailers.

According to research firm IDC, nearly 334 million GB of photos and more than 3.1 billion GB of video will be stored on consumer desktop and laptop computers in 2008. The research firm expects that to increase to 400 million GB and 5.8 billion GB, respectively, by 2010.

These large personal digital libraries are all but trapped on users’ computers. In order to play their content on their TV, consumers have struggled with clumsy solutions such as copying onto multiple CDs and DVDs or connecting their PCs to their TV via wires or complicated home networking solutions. The WD TV HD Media Player enables consumers to easily and elegantly access their high-definition content on the biggest screen in the home.

Users leave the WD TV HD Media Player connected to their TVs and simply plug in up to two My Passport USB drives or other USB mass storage devices loaded with HD media. Using the included remote control, they can navigate and play their content with the media player’s high-definition on-screen menu. With My Passport drives now available in 500 GB capacities, users can build large collections on multiple drives, all playable by WD TV.

Navigating content on USB drives is fast and easy with WD TV HD Media Player’s remote control and on-screen menu. Content can be viewed either by filename or thumbnails of photos, album covers or movie cover art. In addition, automatic media aggregation lets the viewer see all their media by media type in one menu regardless of its location in folders or drives.

“As leaders in external storage, we have become the trusted brand for storing and backing up large media collections for consumers around the world,” said Jim Welsh, senior vice president and general manager for WD’s Branded Products and Consumer Electronics Groups. “Our best-selling My Passport portable drives help customers carry their media library with them anywhere but until now, there has been no easy, affordable way to access and play all that content in their living rooms. The WD TV HD Media Player effectively unlocks all that content from the storage device and lets people enjoy it on their biggest screen and best sound system.”

Features of the WD TV HD Media Player include:

• Designed for WD’s My Passport portable drives, it also plays content from WD My Book® family of drives and most popular USB drives, digital cameras, camcorders, and portable media players that can be recognized as mass storage devices;

• Full HD video playback and navigation – up to 1080p – to experience the spectacular picture quality of HD video and crystal clear sound clarity of digital audio;

• Remote control to navigate through entertainment choices using the crisp, animated HD menus;

• Dock and play convenience: just plug in a My Passport drive or other USB storage device with HD content to play it on a TV or home entertainment system;

• Collect without limits by adding more USB drives for more accessible content;

• Advanced navigation options such as thumbnail and list views; WD’s Media Library™ feature lets users view all media by media type in one menu regardless of its location in folders or drives; ability to search by genre, title, artist, filename and partial filename;

• Photo viewing features to create custom slides shows; ability to zoom and pan; search photos by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date;

• Movie viewing with ability to fast forward, rewind, pause, zoom, and pan, view subtitles and search by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date;

• Music playback with fast forward, rewind, pause, shuffle, repeat and search by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date;

• Two USB ports on the player connects up to two USB mass storage devices and access them simultaneously while the Media Library feature aggregates the content on both drives into one list sorted by media type;

• High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI®) port connects to the highest quality HDTV or home theater; additional composite (RCA) outputs ensure compatibility with virtually all television sets;

• Free ArcSoft MediaConverter™ 2.5 software to easily convert photo, video, and music files into formats optimized for use on the WD TV HD Media Player;

• Ultra-compact design that fits easily into a home entertainment center; and,

• 1-year limited warranty.

Pricing and Availability
The WD TV HD Media Player is available now at select retailers. The recommended retail price for WD TV HD Media Player is RM399.

Solid-state drives are fast becoming popular replacements for hard drives, especially in laptops, but experts caution that SSDs aren’t as secure as commonly thought.

SSDs may offer better data security than traditional hard drives, but they do not completely erase data and are vulnerable to physical hacks from light sources like an ultraviolet laser, experts say.

Despite their relatively high cost and concerns about durability, SSDs are gaining popularity, particularly for use in laptops, because they consume less power and access data more quickly. Securing data on SSDs could become a larger issue when the technology becomes more widely used and reaches other portable devices like smart phones, experts said.

Many SSDs use industry-standard NAND flash chips that were designed for cameras and MP3 players, so they have no physical security hooks that prevent them from being removed from enclosures, said Jim Handy, director of Objective Analysis, a semiconductor research and consulting firm. A hacker could easily unsolder NAND chips from an SSD and read the data using a flash chip programmer.

Once the data is read, the files could be reassembled using data recovery software, Handy said. “There’s really nothing sophisticated about this process,” he said.

Another physical hack involves using an ultraviolet laser to wipe out lock bits — or encryption locks — from fuses on chips that secure SSDs, said a chip hacker who prefers to be called Bunnie and runs the blog site bunnie studios. Data arrays from SSDs can be read using standard means after the lock bits are wiped.

“No fancy equipment is required to read the [data] array once it is unlocked,” Bunnie said. For example, the data arrays can be read using conventional ROM readers, devices typically meant to burn and verify unsecured ROM devices.

To lessen chances of hackers stealing data, encryption keys could be integrated inside the SSD controller device to handle disk encryption at the hardware level, said Craig Rawlings, marketing director at Kilopass. Kilopass sells products using XPM (extra permanent memory) technology that stores keys in system-on-chip devices.

Encryption keys can be hacked, but experts agreed that encryption is the necessary first step to secure data on SSDs. Many companies, including Safend and Encryptx, have products that encrypt data on storage devices including SSDs.

Encryption adds another barrier so that hackers have to bypass encryption layers, the controller and then reassemble raw data for a successful hack, said Sean Barry, senior data recovery engineer at Kroll Ontrack. This takes time, during which data may become invalid or useless.

Encryption also makes files on SSDs a lot easier to erase. Like hard drives, SSDs create multiple file copies, but encryption software can help erase secured files, said Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixIt.

“Every time you write data it might write … to a different part of the disk and then change the directory table around. So it forgets where the data was written before,” Wiens said. Users may delete one file, but a replica could remain untouched in another sector.

The wear-levelling feature of SSDs — based on an algorithm that erases and writes data evenly across all the cells on a memory chip to prevent some from wearing out faster than others — makes files harder to completely erase, Wiens said.

Some encryption software monitors the wear-levelling process to track file remnants, which can then be deleted using the secure erase command, said Knut Grimsrud, an Intel Fellow. Secure erase is a command for secure file deletion that needs to be supported by the encryption software.

“If all the software does is write over the top of the LBAs, I don’t think it’ll be as [effective] on an SSD as it may have missed remnants from the previous wear-levelling or something like that because the software doesn’t know about that,” Grimsrud said. LBA (logical block addressing) specifies the location of data blocks on storage devices.

Overall, it’s easier to delete data from SSDs than from hard drives, which can be a good or bad. Data is stored on electrons in SSDs, and getting rid of electrons flushes out the data, Kroll Ontrack’s Barry said. In hard drives, the data has to be overwritten or physically damaged to prevent it from being read.

The data flush could have its own advantage in terms of quickness, but in the wrong hands data on SSDs could be carelessly and easily lost, Barry said. -Network World

Toshiba lowered its earnings forecast for this fiscal year on Wednesday, blaming the reduction in part on 45 billion yen ($460 million) in costs associated with pulling the plug on its HD DVD next-generation video business.

Toshiba also said it would rack up a 65 billion yen ($666 million) operating loss in its HD DVD business.

Last month, Toshiba acknowledged defeat in the battle to establish an industry standard for high-definition video, handing victory to the competing Blu-ray disc format. Toshiba said it will no longer develop, make or market HD DVD players and recorders.

The Japanese electronics maker lowered its group profit forecast for the fiscal year ending March 31 to 125 billion yen ($1.26 billion), down from the initial forecast for 180 billion yen profit. Toshiba Corp. had earned a 137 billion yen profit the previous fiscal year.

Toshiba also lowered its sales projection for the fiscal year ending March 31 to 7.7 trillion yen ($78 billion) from the earlier 7.8 trillion yen.

A decline in prices for flash memory chips, devices for mobile phones, digital music players and other gadgets, also contributed to the sales drop, the company said.

The move to discontinue its HD DVD business ended the format war over high-definition disc formatting that began several years ago. Blu-ray — backed by Sony Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which makes Panasonic brand products, and five major Hollywood movie studios — emerged the winner.

The decision by Warner Bros. Entertainment to release movie discs only in the Blu-ray format dealt the final blow, although Toshiba executives had repeatedly said they were confident of HD DVD as a technology.

Warner joined Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Co. and News Corp.’s Twentieth Century Fox in adopting Blu-ray as the standard.

Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation had signed on to make HD DVD movies.

Both HD DVD and Blu-ray deliver crisp, clear high-definition pictures and sound, which are more detailed and vivid than existing video technology. They are incompatible with each other, and neither plays on older DVD players. Both formats play on high-definition TVs.

HD DVD was touted as being cheaper because it was more similar to previous video technology, while Blu-ray boasts bigger recording capacity.

Only one video format was expected to emerge as the victor, much like VHS trumped Sony’s Betamax in the video format battle of the 1980s.

Toshiba shares gained 3.3 percent to 690 yen ($6.97) before the earnings revision was announced.-AP

Those who have heard of XDrive before would have remembered it.  In the days before YouSendIt, XDrive was the best free way to share files over the Internet.

Then XDrive began to charge.  Now it belongs to AOL (America On-Line).

Now Microsoft is eyeing to offer a free half-TB (Terabyte) drive on the Internet via their free “Live” space.  It’ll be known as Windows Live Drive or Folders so far.

So far it’s only being made available to selected beta testers, but expect news soon on the Windows Live Space about this free 500GB Internet drive.  With Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft offering Gigabytes of mail storage, the next step would be to offer free Internet storage, and it looks like Microsoft might be the first there.

Source : Yahoo News (Yeah, it’s ironic isn’t it?)