UPDATED 14:14 EDT / DECEMBER 10 2012

Breaking Analysis: Mac Pro Likely Candidate for U.S. Plants, How Fast Can Your Password Be Hacked?

Last Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple would be investing $100 million to build a line of its Mac computers exclusively in the U.S. next year, but didn’t say which one. SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto discussed the standards that a Mac line would have to meet in order to be a made-in-the-USA candidate. He said that cost would be the first thing to look at. “When you’re looking across the line, which of those products is more likely to be able to absorb that cost compared to its manufacturing and the expected increase in manufacturing.” He went on to say that it would also have to be a platform that’s very easy to build and customize, and keyed in on the $100 million dollar investment, pointing out that sales numbers could be helpful in gauging which product is most likely to predict the best return on that high dollar investment.  Based on those standards, he concluded that the Mac Pro would be the best match to be built in the U.S.

New data shows that based on the number of monthly active users on the Windows Phone Facebook app and the total number of Windows Phone handsets sold, an estimate of four million handsets have been sold since October. Gartner, a technology research and advisory company that measures units actually sold to end users rather than shipments, said the data for this year suggests a number closer to seven million Windows Phones sold so far this quarter, and that Microsoft could be well on its way to a record ten million handset fourth quarter. Casaretto leaned towards the strong indications of the higher number, stating that a ten million plus quarter in sales could indeed be a reality.

Last week at the Passwords^12 conference in Oslo, Norway, password-cracking expert Jeremi Gosney unveiled a computer cluster that can cycle through as many as 350 billion guesses per second. A computer cluster operating at this speed can try every possible eight-character password containing upper and lower-case letters, digits, and symbols in less than six hours. Casaretto commented that the most incredible thing about this is the speed at which this machine is cracking passwords. He thinks there will be an after-effect from this revelation. He said, “A lot of people are going to start to evaluate their security policies and look at boosting their security overall.”

Gosney’s breakthrough in password detection is the result of using VCL virtualization. Casaretto gave a brief summary of VCL and how it works. See the entire segment with Kristin Feledy and John Casaretto on the Morning NewsDesk Show.


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