Looks Can Lie: Is That Really an NVMe Drive?
March 17th, 2026 by Oleg Afonin
Many storage devices and adapter boards look alike. When holding a module with a connector that looks suspiciously like the M.2, how do you know exactly what you are dealing with? Is that M.2 board a SATA drive, a fast NVMe device or a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo? Will a drive removed from an Apple computer work in a simple mechanical adapter, or will it require the original Apple device to access? A physical connector does not guarantee the underlying technology.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :).
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.
E-Discovery
April 16th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
If you have no idea what E-Discovery is, read Crossing the E-Discovery Border: IT and Legal. But if you do, I’d recommend attending this webinar anyway 🙂
Password cracking with Microsoft cofee
April 16th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
No, it’s no a typo :). COFEE means Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, actually. Never heard about it? Then read Microsoft supplies Interpol with DIY forensics tool. Just don’t ask where to get it. We have not seen it either.
NEW: Rainbow Tables for password-protected Excel spreadsheets
April 16th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
And now…. we have Rainbow Tables for Microsoft Excel docs with 40-bit encryption. So, it became possible to reach near-instant recovery of 97% of spreadsheets created in MS Excel 97-2003. Unfortunately, due to specificity of Excel spreadsheets format it’s unreal to get 100%-recovery, still, you can use brute force to cover the rest 3%.
Electronic records security and encryption
April 16th, 2009 by Vladimir Katalov
Sad information: Hackers grab more than 285M records in 2008. Just curious, how about Sarbanes-Oxley Act, does it really work? 🙂
