Best computer news

That’s something we don’t see everyday. Victorinox challenges British hackers to crack its Secure Pro – the company’s new biometric USB swiss knife. The competition, as of this writing, is being held at Victorinox’s flagship store in London and will end the same day at 6pm. Contestants, however, are given only two hours to hack their way into the drive’s data. More of interest to us is what makes Victorinox so confident that it’s willing to give away £100,000 to prove that its Secure Pro swiss knife to invulnerable to hacks.

For starter, the Secure Pro employs fingerprint reader with additional thermal and oxygen sensors to confirm that the pattern actually comes from a live finger. The drive also employs a single-chip architecture with 256-bit AES hardware encryption engine to minimize the chance of being intercepted on the circuit. To further improve security, any brute-force attempts will be dealt with by Secure Pro’s self-destruct, which literally speaking, fuses memory chip beyond recovery with USB bus power. All these different layers of defense is designed by MKI, a security chip specialist. This sounds like IronKey has finally met its match.
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Saelig is releasing a USB flash drive adapter, called Mobiadapter, with the sole purpose to connect your flash drive to your cellphone, but the dongle will only be able to connect to a handset equipped with a SD card slot. The matchbook size adapter requires no batteries, but instead uses the power from the PDA or cell phone. It may be challenged by a few things, but could definitely come in handy. The most obvious problem is that the regular Secure Digital (SD) is not showing up on many new devices except cameras and laptops where it does still reign supreme. Brace yourselves, most laptops already come with a USB port or two.

Camera’s and MP3 players are going to be the best market for this handy adapter. Most phones use microSD nowadays, which may limit their market, but they already have a miniSD adapter a microSD adapter may not be far off. The only other setback is the precarious juggling you may have to do to get the whole contraption lined up and usable. That’s assuming that your device can function with the SD card door open and protruding. The Mobiadapter is definitely a life preserver type of device that is probably perfect for a specific set of uses. At only $59, this may be a touch too expensive to have just-in-case but for those of you that have been searching for this little guy your wait is over.
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By the time you figure out what time this watch says, it will be that time tomorrow. Tokyoflash, who makes some very hip trendy watches, has a new e-Paper watch that they are getting a bit crazy with. The sleek concept watch incorporates a slick eInk face that wraps around half of the band. They have modeled four different methods of displaying the time and date that may give you a migraine as you try to learn the system. Some of their watches are binary-ish and some are downright bizarre. Our favorite is the one that shows the numerals in the negative space formed by random numbers.

This sleek watch stands out from many other offerings from Tokyoflash in that it is not overly gaudy. The company also plans to allow it to be charged by USB. The large display will require more than just a simple watch battery to run. The only other major problem is that the binary watch only shows the time with a button press. They are great fashion accessories and can be great for showing off your geek cred but they take effort to read and both hands. They are still feeling out their concepts so guessing on a price range or release would be premature. If you can’t wait to have an e-Ink watch you can find a few here.
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