Scott Guthrie’s blog reports that a fix is now available for the Padding Oracle attack, which enables successful attackers to break the security of ASP.NET applications. There are a few points of interest.

Blackberry has announced its pitch for the emerging tablet market, the 7” screen PlayBook. It has a new OS base on QNX Neutrino, a webkit-based web browser, Adobe Flash and AIR – offline Flash applications – front and rear cameras for video conferencing as well as taking snaps, and includes a USB port and HDMI out.

The most eye-opening demonstration at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference last week was from Adobe’s David Salesin (Sr. Principal Scientist) and Todor Georgiev (Sr Research Scientist), who showed their Plenoptic Lens along with software for processing the resulting images.

Exhibiting here at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference is a Cambridge-based company called tidepowerd, whose product GPU.NET brings GPU programming to .NET developers.

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsung Huang spoke to the press at the GPU Technology Conference and I took the opportunity to ask some questions.

I’m at NVIDIA’s GPU tech conference in San Jose. The central theme of the conference is that the capabilities of modern GPUs enable substantial performance gains for general computing, not just for graphics, though most of the examples we have seen involve some element of graphical processing. The reason you should care about this is that the gains are huge.

At the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in San Jose CEO Jen-Hsun Huang talked up the company’s progress in GPU computing, showed some example applications, and announced a high-level roadmap for future graphics chip architectures. NVIDIA has three areas of focus, he said: the Quadro line for visualisation, Tesla for parallel computing, and GeForce/Tegra for personal computing. Tegra is a system on a chip aimed at mobile devices. Mobile, says Huang, is “a completely disruptive force to all of computing.”

NVIDIA’s current chip architecture is called Fermi. The company is settling on a two-year product cycle and will deliver Kepler in 2011 with 3 to 4 times the performance (expressed as Gigaflops per watt) of Fermi. Maxwell in 2013 will have around 12 times the performance of Fermi. In between these architecture changes, NVIDIA will do “kicker” updates to refresh its products, with one for Fermi due soon.

The focus of the conference though is not on super-fast graphics cards in themselves, but rather...

Security vulnerabilities are reported constantly, but some have more impact than others. The one that came into prominence last weekend (though it had actually been revealed several months ago) strikes me as potentially high impact. Colourfully named the Padding Oracle attack, it was explained and demonstrated at the ekoparty security conference. In particular, the researchers showed how it can be used to compromise ASP.NET applications:

The most significant new discovery is an universal Padding Oracle affecting every ASP.NET web application. In short, you can decrypt cookies, view states, form authentication tickets, membership password, user data, and anything else encrypted using the framework’s API! … The impact of the attack depends on the applications installed on the server, from information disclosure to total system compromise.

This is alarming simply because of the huge number of ASP.NET applications out there....

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took multiple jabs at Salesforce.com in the welcome keynote at OpenWorld yesterday.

He said it was old, not fault tolerant, not elastic, and built on a bad security model since all customers share the same application. “Elastic” in this context means able to scale on demand.

Ellison was introducing Oracle’s new cloud-in-a-box, the Exalogic Elastic Cloud. This features 30 servers and 360 cores packaged in a single cabinet. It is both a hardware and software product, using Oracle’s infiniband networking internally for fast communication and the Oracle VM for hosting virtual machines running either Oracle Linux or Solaris. Oracle is positioning Exalogic as the ideal machine for Java applications, especially if they use the Oracle WebLogic application server, and...

I’m not able to attend the whole of Oracle OpenWorld / JavaOne, but I have sneaked in to MySQL Sunday, which is a half-day pre-conference event. One of the questions that interests me: is MySQL in safe hands at Oracle, or will it be allowed to wither in order to safeguard Oracle’s closed-source database business?

It is an obvious question, but not necessarily a sensible one. There is some evidence for a change in direction. Prior to the takeover, the MySQL team was working on a database engine called Falcon, intended to lift the product into the realm of enterprise database management. Oracle put Falcon on the shelf; Oracle veteran Edward Screven (who also gave the keynote here) said that the real rationale for Falcon was that InnoDB would be somehow jiggered by Oracle, and that now both MySQL and InnoDB were at Oracle, it made no sense.

Context: InnoDB is the grown-up database engine for...