Sun losing $100m a month

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison is urging European Commission anti-trust regulators to expedite their approval of his company's acquisition of Sun, because the struggling enterprise hardware and software outfit is bleeding cash at an alarming rate, says Computing.co.uk.

At one of Silicon Valley's most prominent speaker forums, the Churchill Club, Ellison is on record as saying: "Sun is losing $100 million a month."

The massive $7 billion acquisition was announced in July, and US regulators have already given the deal the “thumbs up”.

Lawyers for Texas Instruments are taking aim at a group of calculator enthusiasts who posted the cryptographic keys used to modify the devices so they run custom-designed software, reports The Register.

Over the past few weeks, TI has sent Webmasters letters invoking the DMCA, or US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and demanding they remove the keys published in blog postings. The private keys are needed to sign operating systems before they work on a wide variety of calculator models designed by the Dallas-based electronics manufacturer.

Because TI generated the keys using extremely weak 512-bit ciphers, the hobbyists were able to crack the vast majority of them in a matter of weeks, using an open source project for distributed computing known as BOINC. The keys make it possible for them to write DIY versions of firmware that in some cases haven't been updated in more than four years.

Mobile providers have said US proposals to ensure all traffic on the Internet is treated equally should not be applied to wireless traffic, says The BBC.

The Federal Communications Commission wants rules to prevent providers blocking or slowing down bandwidth-heavy usage such as streaming video.

Providers claim a two-tiered system is essential for the future vitality of the net.

Scientists at Texas' Rice University have created a Flash-like non-volatile storage chip technology out of the same material used to put lead in your pencil, reports The Register.

Dubbed "graphitic memory", the technique involves placing sheets of graphite between electrodes. Put a specific voltage across the sheet and it cracks. You can use the crack to represent, say, a binary 1, the cracking process, therefore, being a write operation. If a higher voltage is applied to the sheet, the crack vanishes, so the cell enters a state that represents a binary 0.

Applying a lower voltage across the sheet allows users to detect whether it's cracked or not - in other words, to read the memory cell's state.