All USB Cables Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others

October 17th, 2025 by Elcomsoft R&D

As we outlined in the previous article (Effective Disk Imaging: Ports, Hubs, and Power), it’s better to connect external USB-C devices (such as adapters and especially write-blockers) to a USB-C port that complies with at least the USB 3.2 Gen2 specs (10 Gbit/s). But what if your computer only has USB-A ports, or only a USB-A port is free? Obviously, you’ll need a USB-C to USB-A cable – but you’ll need to choose the right one very carefully, and that’s not the only thing that matters.

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Six-Core Opterons (Istanbul)

April 22nd, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov

According to Tweak Down, AMD will start shipping them next month. We’ll see how do they compare with Intel Gulftown.

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Military Strike Fighter F-35 Materials Hacked

April 21st, 2009 by Olga Koksharova

As posted by Rosalie Marshall in her today’s article, secret F-35 military plane design materials have been stolen presumably by Chinese hackers (?):

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Tesla supercomputer

April 21st, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov

Can you imagine 10,080 processing cores? And how about 40 TFlops? Thanks to NVIDIA Tesla — this is 42 C1060 cards only.

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ATI Radeon HD 4770 expected next month

April 21st, 2009 by Olga Koksharova

The 40nm-wonder ATI Radeon HD 4770 is expected in May at price $99, according to engaget. It seems it’s going to outperform Nvidia 9800GT in terms of speed and price.  As for speed, VR-Zone claims that HD 4770 is not a step behind HD 4850, do you believe it? Look at the benchmarks based on computer games.   

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Password cracking with Apple Mac Pro

April 21st, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov

Nvidia has announced that it will now offer Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 for Apple Mac Pro systems. Good idea! More on CNET.

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Intel Gulftown

April 21st, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov

New member of Core i7 family: six cores, hyper-threading, and some new instructions — including ones for AES encryption. Unfortunately, useless for our password-cracking purposes: most password-checking routines are based on SHA-1. But anyway, an ability to run 12 threads at a time will definitely increase the performance. We’ll see (in Q1’2010). More info at Tom’s Hardware.

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NVIDIA GT300

April 20th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov

According to The Inquirer, Nvidia GT300 promised in October. Should be a good video card for GPU-accelerated password cracking :).

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How to grow your graphics card effectiveness

April 17th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova

Water cooling, liquid nitrogen, and dry ice  – which gets the most of your  ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card? Learn it  from Zac O’Vadka today’s post

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