Seagate 8TB Archive HDD

We create more data every time we snap a picture with our phone, record a video or post something to a social media website. The budding Internet of Things (IoT) means that our thermostats, vehicles and toasters (conceivably) only add to this unending stream of data. The Internet reaches to the far flung corners of the globe and the number of users streaming data, seemingly just into the nether, continues to expand every day.

The only problem is that the data isn't actually disappearing into the nether. We expect to be able to retrieve a family picture in mere milliseconds from Facebook even if we uploaded it (and forgot about it) five years ago. We increasingly (and blindly) trust that our social media services will safely store our data and memories, well, forever.

The picture from your latest snap has to land somewhere, and that "somewhere" is a server that churns away day and night. This influx of data creates a tremendous challenge at the other end of the pipe, and datacenter operators are tasked with keeping this exponentially increasing burden of data under safe keeping; but the key is to do it in a cost-effective manner.

HDD vendors have responded to the need for more storage with clever engineering that increases the amount of storage they can provide per device, as well as per dollar. The newest innovation comes in the form of SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording), which overlays data tracks to increase the amount of available storage capacity.

The Seagate SMR datacenter offering lowers cost to an unheard-of three cents per gigabyte of storage (and that is at retail pricing). This low cost has made the drives increasingly popular with consumers for bulk data storage, which is a use-case the drive excels at.


However, SMR is not without its tradeoffs. For those who aren't familiar with the limitations of SMR technology it can become a frustrating experience. Never fear, we've got it all figured out. Come along as we explore all things SMR in our Seagate 8TB Archive HDD Review at Tom's IT Pro.

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Computer technology: State of the art and future trends

Computer technology and, more broadly, information technology, are bringing about a fundamental transformation in our society from an industrial economy to an information economy. A review of the short history and present state of information technology identifies two major undercurrents: I) the miniaturization of computer components, which has produced a millionfold increase in the complexity possible in a single chip of silicon, and 2) the integration of four previously separate areas of information technology: computation, communication, databases and the user interface. Microelectronics, computer networks, data storage and user amenities are the basic technologies that support these four areas and stimulate their progress. Future trends in speech recognition, voice synthesis, artificial intelligence, expert systems, computational imaging and scientific workstations are also examined.

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Popular Firefox Add-Ons Vulnerable to Cross-Extension Exploit

Here's the bad news: There's a new kind of browser attack that can take advantage of the normally helpful things that some of your extensions can do. It's actually a rather ingenious attack. Rather than trying to infiltrate your browser and having it do something it shouldn't, a malicious extension attempts to get your other extensions—which aren't isolated from one another—to do things on its behalf.

The end result? It's trickier to find the original attacker, since it's basically hiding in plain sight. And this isn't just an issue that affects lesser-known extensions. As researchers from Boston's Northeastern University found, nine of the ten most popular Firefox extensions could be exploited by another extension—one that appears to be totally benign and normal on its face, but is piggybacking off of other extensions to steal a user's personal data or redirect them to malware-filled websites

"These vulnerabilities allow a seemingly innocuous extension to reuse security-critical functionality provided by other legitimate, benign extensions to stealthily launch confused deputy-style attacks. Malicious extensions that utilize this technique would be significantly more difficult to detect by current static or dynamic analysis techniques, or extension vetting procedures," reads a paper from said researchers, presented at Singapore's recent Black Hat Asia security conference.

Just to show how easy it is for an attacker to exploit these vulnerabilities, The Register reports that the researchers were able to upload a blatantly malicious—but harmless—extension to Firefox's big gallery. The extension, dubbed "ValidateThisWebsite," didn't conceal its ambitions in its code whatsoever. And, yet, the extension still managed to make it through Mozilla's security checks, even a more extensive "fully reviewed" analysis, without issue. (That's likely because it's not making any malicious calls to Firefox itself; it's making other extensions do it once it's installed in a user's browser.)

Said researchers provided Firefox with an explanation of the process as well as a new Crossfire application that can assist with finding these sneaky extensions. Firefox vice president of product, Nick Nguyen, also issued a statement that indicates Mozilla is actively working to secure up extensions and eliminate these cross-extension vulnerabilities.

"The way add-ons are implemented in Firefox today allows for the scenario hypothesized and presented at Black Hat Asia. The method described relies on a popular add-on that is vulnerable to be installed, and then for the add-on that takes advantage of that vulnerability to also be installed," it reads.

"Because risks such as this one exist, we are evolving both our core product and our extensions platform to build in greater security. The new set of browser extension APIs that make up WebExtensions, which are available in Firefox today, are inherently more secure than traditional add-ons, and are not vulnerable to the particular attack outlined in the presentation at Black Hat Asia. As part of our electrolysis initiative—our project to introduce multi-process architecture to Firefox later this year—we will start to sandbox Firefox extensions so that they cannot share code."