Proving that Japan always has the coolest concept phones, this Fujitsu device shown at CEATEC lets you to separate your screen and touchscreen keypad in whatever configuration you like. Both parts can be used separately or stuck together by magnets, and where you stick the screen on the keypad determines what the touchscreen shows. The screen module contains software functions, including video recording and games, while the keyboard is responsible for communication tasks, such as 3G and radio. No idea whether this will be one of the few CEATEC concepts that make its way into reality, but I sure hope I see it on shelves someday.

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It’s snowing on Mars and winter is icumen in - to misquote the Middle English paean to springtime.

Scientists studying the coded signals from the lander Phoenix on the planet’s arctic surface detected the snow falling lightly from clouds drifting across the sky some 2 1/2 miles above the spacecraft, said James Whiteway, an atmospheric scientist from York University in Canada.

“Nothing like this has ever been seen on Mars before,” he said.

Whiteway, whose team built the weather station aboard Phoenix, said the ice crystals appeared to vaporize before they reached the red Martian ground.

Not that snow was unexpected. Whiteway said his instruments have watched the clouds drifting across the horizon every morning after the sun rises. His Lidar instrument - an acronym for laser detection and ranging - on the spacecraft shoots a green laser beam up into the clouds 100 times a second, and the falling snow reflects brightly in each pulse.

Meanwhile, NASA scientists continue to decipher the signals sent back to Earth from Phoenix, now busy analyzing the soil and ice on the planet’s surface.

In a telephone briefing for reporters Monday, the project’s chief scientist, Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, said that five months of rooting around in the soft and dry soil of the landing site with the spacecraft’s mobile robotic digging arm has confirmed that there’s a “skating rink” of water ice a little more than 2 inches below the red soil.

That surface soil itself seems so dry remains a mystery.

Measurements of the ice indicate it has an alkaline level - known as pH - of 8.3, and is very similar to seawater, said Michael Hecht, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. There also appears to be plenty of calcium carbonate in the tiny particles of the icy soil, he said.

Additionally, there are signs of several clay minerals whose sheeted structures hold molecules of water vapor, said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, whose miniature ovens aboard Phoenix heat the soil and ice to drive off identifying vapors.

“We can now begin rewriting the book of Martian chemistry,” said Hecht.

The scientists must work fast now, for winter is indeed approaching. During the spacecraft’s first three months on Mars, the sun never sank below the horizon, leaving plenty of solar energy for Phoenix to power all its instruments. Now, however, the sun sinks beneath the horizon for more than four hours every Martian night, according to Barry Goldstein, the Phoenix project manager and chief engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It’s also getting colder, and that drains power from the instruments because they must be kept warm in order to operate, he said.

Before the end of October, Goldstein said, there won’t be enough power left to keep the lander’s robotic arm operating, so digging into the soil and scraping ice samples from beneath the soil will have to stop. By November, Phoenix will be standing rigidly in the pitch dark, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will encase it in ice like some otherworldly frozen mummy - at more than 150 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

That should make a weird picture, and Goldstein said the Phoenix team will ask NASA to have the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter high above send images to Earth of what it looks like.

There isn’t much chance that Phoenix will recover once sunlight returns next year, Goldstein said. His engineers have created a “Lazarus mode” software program to wake the spacecraft up.

“But I don’t really believe it’s possible,” he said.

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The iPhone may be the only game in town for serious mobile Web developers right now, but that won’t last long. Next year, the iPhone will see some serious competition from Google’s Android platform. Of course, T-Mobile will start selling the first Android phone, the G1 made by HTC, on October 22. But other cell phone manufacturers are gearing up for a major Android push.

The most significant of these may come from Motorola. One of the original partners in the Open Handset Alliance behind the open-source mobile OS, Motorola already has 50 people on its Android team and is growing that to 350, according to an Android developer approached by a headhunter to join the team. That is a huge commitment that shows how big a bet Motorola is making on Android.

This same source has also seen people from Nokia and Verizon at a recent Android developer conference. The conference was put on by Google last week for developers who had not yet seen the G1 to help prepare them for its launch. In general, in order to be an attendee, you had to have an Android app. Neither Nokia nor Verizon are official members of the Open Handset Alliance.
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Nokia recently acquired the rest of Symbian it didn’t already own, and is determined to keep that OS as long as possible, since it powers all of its S60 phones. But Nokia may have an Android team sniffing around, which is smart even if it is for nothing other than to gain competitive intelligence. And if Android takes off, Nokia could decide to hedge its bets and launch its own Android phone.

There is a certain inexorable logic behind all the interest in Android.

1. It is a more capable mobile Web computer than anything other than the iPhone.

2. It is a very appealing development environment for app creators?and just like on the PC, apps will drive adoption.

3. Most importantly, as an open-source OS, manufacturers don’t have to pay a licensing fee to whoever controls the OS. Given the razor-thin margins in the cell phone business, that alone is reason for manufacturers to embrace Android (with the exception of Nokia, which owns Symbian). But you can see why Motorola might see Android as the key to its recovery.

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Apple and Cisco delivered patches on Wednesday to eliminate a peck of flaws, with Apple releasing a patch to close more than 50 vulnerabilities in Java for Mac OS X and Cisco issuing a dozen security advisories for its products.

Consumer technology maker Apple released an update for the latest version of the Mac OS X to fix 51 vulnerabilities in Sun Microsystem’s Java runtime engine, a few documented at least as early as March 2008. Some of the security flaws could allow an attacker to execute malicious programs using remote exploits, while others allow privilege escalation on the affected system, according to Apple’s advisory. Apple released a smaller update for a subset of the issues for its earlier Mac OS X 10.4.

Cisco released a dozen security advisories to fix serious security issues in its networking hardware. Among the issues fixed by the networking giant are a vulnerability in the processing of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) packets, a flaw in handling Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) requests, and information leakage from some virtual private network (VPN) connections, according to a list of the fixes published on Wednesday.

This is the third major patch for Apple this month. The company released fixes for security problems in QuickTime and iTunes earlier this month, and a patch for almost three dozen flaws in Mac OS X components last week.

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Available from Brando, this Solar Powered Charge Leather Case for both iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G is designed for those who have a tons activity outdoor as well as often travel that needed an extra battery power. Other purported features include :-

* Lithiumion polymer Battery capacity: 3.7V 1500mAh
* Output voltage: 5V (max)
* output current: 600ma (max) + solar battery 100 (max)
* Charge voltage: solar battery 6V USB/DC 5V
* Charge current: 100ma (max) + 500ma (max)
* Charging ime: less than 3hours
* Peak power supplied by photocell: 0.61W
* Dimension : 125mm x 64mm x 25mm
* Weight: 100g

If interested, you can order the Solar Power 3G iPhone Case through Brando for $48.

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Neosploit, the notorious hacker exploit kit that some thought had been retired months ago, has not only returned from the dead, but is responsible for a dramatic increase in attacks, a security researcher claimed today.

“Neosploit’s back,” said Ian Amit, director of security research at Aladdin Knowledge Systems Inc.

The accounts of its demise last summer had been a ruse, he argued. “When you’re feeling that kind of heat,” Amit said, referring to the attention Neosploit had received from both researchers and authorities, “you want to shake those guys off your back. [The talk about quitting] only helped them go under the radar.”

In July, researchers at RSA’s FraudAction Research Lab said that they had evidence that the creators of Neosploit were abandoning the business. For proof, RSA quoted a going-out-of-business message said to have originated with Neosploit’s authors.

Neosploit, which first appeared in 2007, was a follow-on to the earlier MPack and a contemporary to another infamous exploit kit, WebAttacker. Those kits, including Neosploit, were used by cybercriminals to launch attack code aimed at new vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer or third-party software such as Apple Inc.’s QuickTime. But Neosploit also boasted features new to the click-to-attack business, including sophisticated statistical analysis and management tools.

However, even RSA didn’t expect the Neosploit group to disband. “This isn’t necessarily the end of this group,” said Sean Brady, an RSA product marketing manager, in July.

Turns out he was right.

A month ago, researchers at Aladdin started to suspect that the Neosploit developers were back in business. Two days ago, they uncovered hard evidence: A server hosted in Argentina, run by a longtime Neosploit customer, that contained Neosploit 3.1. The build was dated Aug. 9, weeks after Neosploit’s makers supposedly threw in the towel.

According to Amit, other data on the server showed that it was catering to 20 users, seven of whom he characterized as “very high volume,” who were logging thousands of successful exploits every day from their use of Neosploit.

Those 20 criminals, added Amit, had compromised between 200 and 300 Web sites, which in turn were being used to serve up exploits from Neosploit to any visitor running a system that had not been fully patched. He found evidence of more than a quarter-million successful attacks against PCs carried out by those sites.

“Neosploit’s sole purpose is to deliver malicious code to browsers,” Amit said, noting that site hacking isn’t part of the kit’s jobs. Instead, criminals compromise sites through other vulnerabilities or by gaming the site’s administrative password. Only then do they modify the hacked site with attack code from Neosploit.

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A new patent filed by Apple hints at user browser interface changes that could arrive with an upcoming version of the company’s Safari application. Apple aims to improve the common list view in a browsing history and suggests a graphical tree view that shows visited sites and their relationships

The filing published by the US Patent & Trademark Office today describes a new graphical view of the browsing history that could overcome the list view, which is more difficult to read as more sites are added to the history.

“A problem with this linear history is that users can visit a large number of web pages, which are confusing to view in a linear history, and the forward and back buttons are inefficient and cumbersome way to navigate through multiple web pages,” Apple wrote. The company also noted that a linear browsing history is not only confined to web sites, because the list becomes populated with other data types, which increases the complexity of the list.

To solve this problem, Apple is apparently working on a browsing history feature that shows a tree view of visited sites with hierarchically ordered and connected nodes. The tree would be tied to a timeline, enabling users to get a sense of when particular relationship between visited sites occurred. Manually visited sites (those whose URL users manually entered in the address bar) would be displayed as root nodes and sites visited from root nodes would become child nodes connected with lines to signal relationship to each other and the parent node.

Since a typical browsing session would quickly result in a very complex tree, Apple proposes new controls that enable zooming in and out to any particular point in time. Using the controls, a user would be able to show, for example, only nodes associated with pages that have an address with a hierarchical level corresponding to the position of the depth slider.

“When the depth is set at zero compression, all nodes are displayed. When the depth is set at maximum compression, only nodes associated with an address at the first hierarchical level are displayed,” the filing states.

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