Last week Google announced that they will no longer be accepting ads that feature Flash. This new should really come as no surprise as Flash (and its spirit brother Java) have taken a beating on the security front for years. Abobe and Oracle have been unable to keep the bad guys from running rampant with their code. Of course the change will not take place overnight so everyone has the chance to swap out that old and insecure Flash for the new and (insecure) HTML5.

After three spate 0-day vulnerabilities are found in your product you can pretty much expect the market to call for you go away. This is the situation that Adobe is in right now. After fighting to their little slice of dominance in the computing industry Adobe’s Flash is arguably one of the most commonly used APIs to rendering rich content. This has made them a rather large target for a number of years… well this and the fact that the Flash development team has made some rather poor choices when it comes to their application.

Although it will not come as a surprise, there seems to be yet another bug in Adobe’s flash player that allows for an attacker to potentially take control of a system by forcing a crash of the application. According to TrendMicro, CVE 2015-5123 is a critical bug in the latest version of Flash player for Linux, Windows, and OSX operating systems. Adobe has already released a customer advisory stating they are already aware of this flaw being exploited in the wild.

CES 2015 Las Vegas, NV Patriot Suite Bellagio
Stopping by the Patriot suite at the Bellagio we found Patriot talking about some pretty cool new items in addition to their normal memory products. We kicked off our meeting with a walk through of their flash memory products.

The Flash Memory Summit wound down on Thursday after a four day run at the Santa Clara Convention Center in San Jose. The show floor was fairly crowded with over 5,000 attendees and a sold out exhibition space.

Corsair has introduced a new series of solid state drives called Force LX , which currently consists of two models. Corsair Force LX family is made from 128GB (CSSD-F128GBLX) and 256GB (CSSD-F256GBLX) SSDs, both coming in the same classic 2.5 inch package and 7 millimeters thick. Mentioned models have data read speed of 560 MB/s, while the write speed depends as ever about the capacity of the SSD.

New Toshiba SSDs belong to HG6 Series, have a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface and should appear on the market in March this year with yet unknown prices. During manufacture Toshiba decided to incorporate NAND chips that are created in the 19nm technology of 2nd generation. SSDs will be available in 2.5-inch mSATA and M.2 (single and double) packaging, and in capacities from 60 GB to 512 GB.

“By the time you get this message, I'll be in the dead zone.” – Capa, “Sunshine,” DNA Films, 2007
You have to wonder if this year’s Flash Memory Summit (FMS) didn’t have Al Shugart, a hard drive pioneer, spinning in his grave.
There are a whole lot of silicon engineers hell-bent on moving his technology to a dusty corner of the Computer Museum.
Shugart was a key developer of IBM’s RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) disk system that stored a whopping 5MB of data. Today, no kid would look twice at a smartphone or tablet if it didn’t have at least 32GB (1GB = 1,024MB).

After Samsung  introduced the first "vertical" 3D memory chip earlier this month it did not take long for the first concrete product using this technology to appear. They launched SSDs of 960 and 480 GB, which are designed for enterprise servers and data centers.

In almost every consumer electronics device there is a bottleneck for performance. It is not always the same item for each family (or even different devices within the same family), but it is always there. In the mobile this bottle neck was the CPU followed by memory. Now mobile devices are running into the same problems that desktops hit about 5 years ago. The performance provided by current storage technologies is being out stripped by CPU (SoC), memory, and even usage patterns of mobile device users. They are demanding more space, more speed and all with better power consumption.